The Week in Linux News: Feb. 28, 2000

Red Hat's Big Deals

In a move to position itself among the top ranks of software companies, Red Hat has teamed up with Oracle, Computer Associates, and other companies to provide the Red Hat Enterprise Product Line. Last Tuesday, (Feb. 22), Red Hat unveiled the Red Hat Linux Enterprise Edition Product Line, to provide "integrated and tested Linux solutions" for enterprise environments.

As part of the program, Red Hat released Enterprise Editions for Oracle 8i, Computer Associates systems, and SAP R/3. Future editions will target other key application segments critical to enterprise computing and e-business, including directory services, messaging and ERP.

Red Hat also announced a deal with RealNetworks to bundle RealPlayer 7 with the Red Hat distribution.

How secure are you?

Recently there has been a lot of attention to security, partly because of the increase in Denial of Service (DoS) attacks. Everybody wants to know: what can be done?

Linux Security has an interesting article on an Open Source project called RSBAC, which attempts to bring a significantly higher level of security to the Linux kernel and operating environment. The article also includes an interview with the project founder, Amon Ott.

Firewall is the biggest buzzword in security. Everybody with a dedicated line should be going through a firewall. Here's an excellent article in Linux Journal about Using Linux as a Multipurpose Firewall by Jeff Regan.

Ken Coar's Security and Apache: An Essential Primer is a must read for anyone running the Apache web server. Coar covers many aspects of securing your Apache server, such as

• mandatory vs. discretionary access control,
• areas of controlled access (realms)
• security processing phases, and
• restricting by IP address.

One of the best thing you can do is to shut down all the ports that are not needed. Open up /etc/inetd.conf and comment out the services which are running but aren't being used.

New Releases

A lot of new releases came out the past week. Here's some of the more popular ones.

• PHP 4 Beta 4
  The fourth beta of PHP 4.0 has built-in XML support and a load of new features and bug fixes. Beta is expected to be the last on the beta cycle of PHP 4.0.
• Apache 1.3.12
  This release addresses vulnerabilities found by a recent CERT advisory, and fixes a few minor bugs.
• Kernel 2.3.48
  The latest version of the developement Linux kernel (2.3.48) is mostly dedicated to a major merge of MIPS and MIPS64 support.
• BRU v.16
  The latest version of BRU Backup & Restore Utility for Linux Systems was released.

Thanks for reading,

Baiju Thakkar
O'Reilly Network Linux Bureau Chief