This weeks’s techmail was Use Live USB Creator to install Fedora 12 from a USB stick which looks at using the Live USB Creator tool to build a bootable USB stick that can be used to run or install Fedora (or any other Live CD Linux distro). Very slick stuff. Worked great for me to get Fedora 12 installed on my MSI Wind (the old hackintosh that I thought was acting up due to me bungling something with OS X). Sadly, it appears the MSI Wind is truly hooped, as the same hanging issues I had on OS X I am also getting on Fedora 12. Swapping the harddrive made no difference, so I think the Wind is a paper weight. =(
Category Archives: Red Hat
Fedora 12 boasts enhanced performance, improved reporting, better graphics
This week’s TechMail is Fedora 12 boasts enhanced performance, improved reporting, better graphics which is a great big gushy welcome to Constantine! The tip highlights some of my favourite new features in Fedora 12. I’ve been running the beta on my new HP machine for about a month now and I love it. Can’t wait to update my laptop to F12 (probably on the weekend… if I behave and can hold out that long).
Congrats Fedora developers, users, testers, QA guys, and the many many many other people I’m forgetting. I don’t mind saying that I used to hate Fedora, but I think I was biased with years of Mandriva and just plain old not being used to it. Now that I’ve used Fedora 10, 11, and now 12, I can honestly say that I’m a great big Fedora fan now (and, seriously, if you’re still reading my gushing and haven’t started downloading, get cracking because it’s worth it!)
Save time on downloads with delta RPMs in Fedora 11
This week’s TechMail is Save time on downloads with delta RPMs in Fedora 11 which discusses the delta RPM feature in Fedora, how to set it up and use it, and why you would want to. Delta RPMs don’t make sense for everyone, but they will for quite a few people (i.e. low bandwidth situations with decent processor speeds as opposed to high bandwidth and possibly lower processor speeds). Regardless, delta RPMs are quite cool and I know at Mandriva we had wanted to do this years ago and it just never panned out, so it’s cool to see it working now.
rsec, msec, sectool.. hmmm… I smell opportunities
So I was approached by Eugeni, one of my former fellows at Mandriva, today about some collaboration in regards to Mandriva’s msec and my way-back-when fork for Annvix, rsec. He wrote a blog post about msec’s future and plans detailing the things he wants to do with msec in the future. So he dropped me a line to see how I’d feel about making msec and rsec play nice together so there wouldn’t necessarily be a need for both (since there is obviously some duplication of functionality, one being a fork of the other after all).
So I think this might be a good move. rsec is essentially a complete tool, but if we can swap in msec’s plugin functionality for the reports and make it so that is can be a standalone component separate from msec (be it that msec drops the reporting capabilities and adopts a refreshed rsec as a dependency, or whether msec permits building just the reporting capabilities separate from the msec stuff), then I’m definitely game. What might be interesting, however, is to see how msec and rsec can be merged with sectool in some way. To be honest, I’d never heard of sectool until Eugeni mentioned it… it’s a Fedora project so it might have a lot of Red Hat/Fedora-specific stuff in there, but if it is or could be more generalized to do what msec does as well as what rsec does, then maybe there’s a place for one tool to take the place of three tools and have a broader usage base and become a better tool.
The opportunity here to build a better tool out of two, or maybe even three, tools is quite interesting and one of the things I love about open source. Merging msec and rsec should be quite easy I think. Merging with sectool might be more difficult, but I see a lot of crossover in what msec and sectool both do already — there really is no reason to have a Mandriva-specific tool and a Fedora-specific tool that do the same thing. I suspect sectool might be good at creating decent reports which may even obsolete the need for rsec. Taking a closer look at sectool will help me determine if that is the case (and then it remains to be seen if there is a sectool build for EPEL or if it can be done since I’m currently using rsec on some Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and CentOS 5 systems).
Either way, I smell some possibilities here.
Monitor your system for threats with rsec alerts
This week’s TechMail is Monitor your system for threats with rsec alerts which discusses the rsec tool I forked from Mandriva’s msec years ago (for Annvix). It’s been updated and is available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (and CentOS 5) as I think it’s still a pretty good tool and complements stuff like logwatch quite nicely. rsec essentially reports on various bits of your system… it lets you know if there are changes to suid/sgid files, points out unowned files, changes to firewall rules, indicates if there are new packages to install, if there are changes to listening services, etc. Basically it took all the best bits (reporting) of msec and got rid of all the crappy bits (that change things).
I have heard that msec now is much better, but have not had a chance to try it although I do try to keep up with the changes to msec related to reporting and fold those back into rsec.
How to use Virtual Machine Manager on Fedora 11
This week’s TechMail is How to use Virtual Machine Manager on Fedora 11 which discusses my first foray into using Virtual Machine Manager and KVM. It’s no surprise that I’m a big virtualization fan, but this is the first time I’ve used something baked directly into the Linux kernel. I’ve played with qemu, vmware workstation/server/fusion, and openvz, but never KVM. It’s definitely different, but quite good. I’ve got a test F11 setup in KVM on my F11 laptop to use for breaking things that I don’t want to break on the “real” system. Extremely useful and quite light-weight.
