Tonight I will be moving my system from the mirrored 200GB drives to the RAID5+HotSpare array. I’ve been kinda holding out on doing a bunch of work until this is completed, since I don’t want to have to do anything twice :-).

Hopefully it’ll be pretty easy.

ISlack is a security focused distro. Most of the numerous security-related software is suited for penetration testing of your network. There are also security tools for testing your local security and IDSs for monitoring. The configuration of ISlack is hardened by default: (listening for connection) services are turned off, and incoming ports are closed.

Changes:
The main higlights of this release: Tripwire, Nessus, Wifiscanner, Yersinia, Zebra, Kerberos, KDE 3.4.2, XOrg 6.8.2, Dsniff, Ettercap, Fakeconnect, Tor, Slapt-get, Ngrep, Discover - Hardware Recognition, Open Office 1.1.3, kernel 2.4.31, and kernel 2.6.12.5. There are many updates and many other changes.

http://freshmeat.net/projects/islack/?branch_id=57650&release_id=207849

Sshdfilter automatically blocks ssh brute force attacks by reading sshd log output in real time and adding iptables rules based on authentication failures. Block rules are created by logging on with an invalid user name, or wrongly guessing the password for an existing account. Block rules are removed after a week to maintain a small list of blocks. It also comes with a LogWatch filter.

http://freshmeat.net/projects/sshdfilter

Summary: NAJAX 0.4.0.0 released

NAJAX is a package that can be used to call PHP classes on the Web server side from Javascript code in Web pages. It uses AJAX technology to submit HTTP requests from Javascript to pass call parameters and collect and process the responses.

http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?forum_id=496736

Also - the current version of the news module has a bug in it that the authors are blaming on the current version of Xoops (sigh). If you post news, please go through the additional pain of clicking the “List” button and choosing the correct username so we can tell who posted it. Hopefully this will be fixed in the future - along with making XoopsGallery a: current, b: work with PHP5.

You never quite know when those wild buffalo might come right for you.

An interesting/quick article on bullet penetration testing.

http://www.theboxotruth.com/docs/bot4.htm

From the newest version of Bruce Schnier’s CRYPTO-GRAM (a really excellent newsletter that I highly recommend):
” A fun, and ultimately tragic, story about a bad game-show random-number
generator.
“

Q: What’s George Bush’s position on Roe v. Wade?
A: He really doesn’t care how people get out of New Orleans.

We were in motor boats all day ferrying people back and forth approximately a mile and a half each way (from Carrolton down Airline Hwy to the Causeway overpass). Early in the day, we witnessed a black man in a boat with no motor paddling with a piece of lumber. He rescued people in the boat and paddled them to safety (a mile and a half). He then, amidst all of the boats with motors, turned around and paddled back out across the mile and a half stretch to do his part in getting more people out. He refused to give up or occupy any of the motored boat resources because he did not want to slow us down in our efforts. I saw him at about 5:00 p.m., paddling away from the rescue point back out into the neighborhoods with about a half mile until he got to the neighborhood, just two hours before nightfall. I am sure that his trip took at least an hour and a half each trip, and he was going back to get more people knowing that he’d run out of daylight. He did all of this with a two-by-four.

http://www.livejournal.com/users/interdictor/

Mr Garrison Keillor has decided (according to some attorney) to sue a person making t-shirts with less then flattering statements about his show on them. Boooooo.

” If utopia is supposed to be the ideal and perfect place, where everyone lives in harmony, then why do so many of them turn out to suck? To get an answer, let’s go to the source: Thomas More, whose 1516 travelogue Utopia gave us the word, a pun meaning “no place” and “perfect place.” More’s Utopia describes an island where everyone is happy and smiling and living in divinely inspired synchronization. Told with verve and a sly wit, Utopia is one of the foundational texts of contemporary science fiction as well as utopian thought.

But More wasn’t just a writer of fantastic tales. He was also a politician and one-time Undersheriff of London. As such, More was not only an enthusiastic upholder of a radically unequal and oppressive social order, but also an advocate for burning 16th century heretics. Live by the sword, die by the sword: in 1535 Henry VIII beheaded More and anyone else who didn’t support his accession to Supreme Head of the Church of England. The violence of More’s historical period is never far from the surface of More’s island Utopia, where a single act of adultery is punishable by slavery and serial adulterers are punished with death. If More’s narrator had looked past the happy smiling faces of Utopia, what fear and violence might he have seen? ”

http://www.strangehorizons.com/2005/20050905/stupid-utopias-a.shtml