Vienna just moved 1,000 PCs to Linux. Munich was a bit more ambitious, but they also have only managed to roll out 1,000 Linux machines so far. Considering that they made this decision five years ago, this is kind of disappointing in my view. If you only count the working days, then this corresponds to about 1 Linux installation per day. If they continue at this pace, they will be able to finish the project in 65 years. Okay, maybe they won’t, but their grandchildren might have a fair chance of finishing it.

Yeah, I know, such a large project needs a lot of advance planning. However, in Munich there are 12 independent departments which are supposed to manage this transition. This means that each department has only approximately 1,000 PCs, which makes the task much easier.

I suppose, how you perceive the progress they made in Munich depends on your personal attitude about Linux. Glyn Moody from Computerworld UK seems to think that this project is a success. Perhaps, I see this a bit differently because this transition is financed with my taxes.

The reason why I think that both projects will fail is very simple. If you want to manage such a large number of Linux boxes, you also need a large number of Linux geeks. The problem is that those guys are needed in large computer centers and their number is growing faster than ever. This means that you only can get Linux experts if you are willing to pay a high salary. Since I work for the government, I know very well how much they can pay them. And since I also live in Munich, I know how difficult it is to get Linux professionals here. I think, the situation in Vienna is more or less the same.

Both cities wanted to move to Linux to be independent from Microsoft. They just exchanged this dependency for another one, one that is far more expensive. But who knows, maybe in two generations it will be easier to find Linux geeks. It is just a pity that chances are low that I will live long enough to see these projects finished.

Just for the record, I like Linux. We have a couple of Linux servers in my department and they are doing their job just fine. But Linux on the desktop is just too expensive. If I had an emotional problem with Microsoft (which I can understand), I would prefer to move to OS X. At least, it is cheaper than Linux.

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These are certainly interesting numbers. The article also explains why the downtime of Windows Server 2003 went up. It seems as if there were more Windows updates in 2007 requiring reboots. Hence, one cannot conclude that Windows Server 2003 systems are crashing more often than Linux systems.

However, downtime is downtime. These results match more or less with my own experience. Most of our servers don’t reboot, automatically. So I am quite aware of the downtimes of our Windows servers. I am even a little surprised that the average downtime was only increased by 25%. I’d say that the number of reboots was much higher than in 2006.

With every new operating system version, Microsoft promised to reduce the number of required reboots. Thus far, it seems to me that they were unable to keep this promise. Let’s see if it will be better with Windows Server 2008.

However, I am not sure if these results really speak for Linux. I think, the main reason why the number of reboots increased is because Microsoft is more serious about security than before. So the patches come faster and therefore reboots are more frequent. There have been quite a few studies that show that Microsoft is patching faster than Linux distros. Usually, Linux vendors reject those statistics. I never found their arguments convincing though.

One thing is for sure. The number of patches will go down with Windows Server 2008, simply because Microsoft’s developers value security more than ever. There is already a significant difference between Vista and Windows XP. The number of security updates in the first year after Vista’s release was almost twice as high for Windows XP. This does not only mean that Vista is more secure than XP, it also implies that the costs for patch management are higher with XP.

Since Vista and Server 2008 share about 70% of their code, it is quite probable that we will see a similar development in the server field. I even expect that the difference between Windows Server 2003 and Server 2008 is bigger than with XP and Vista. Many of the teething troubles of Vista RTM were fixed in Vista SP1. Thus, the reliability of Server 2008 should benefit from these improvements, too.

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You might say, it is Linux.com, so what else should they write? However, the author, Joe Barr, did some research that makes the eWEEK article seem to be questionable. He contacted IDC and they told him that “Galli hacked that article pretty badly“. Unfortunately, Barr doesn’t have concrete numbers concerning the IDC study. Instead he presented some data that showed that the revenues of major Linux vendors are growing.

He obviously has a point here. But his reasoning that the data presented in the eWEEK article is wrong is not convincing. The fact that Red Hat and company are doing fine recently, could just indicate that many are moving away from free Linux distributions to the subscription-based versions of big Linux vendors. The overall number of Linux installations might still go down. I think you can read this into the data from NET applications. It is just a pity that they categorize Linux only under “other operating systems”.

Other Linux proponents have put forward doubts that IDC’s counting is accurate. Some say that it failed to take into account virtualization’s impact, others claim the Linux installations on Mainframes have not been considered, and yet others state that it is simply impossible to count the number of Linux systems.

Well, I think it is normal that people who come off badly in a survey try to find their own interpretation of the data. One thing is for sure, though. Windows Server is on the rise. Marc Wilcox from Microsoft Watch sums up the view I had ever since the Linux-Windows debate started:

Bottom line: Linux has never been much of a threat to Windows Server, which has had fairly consistent growth for many years. But Linux’s gains against Unix are diminishing.

It always was only Linux against UNIX. People who predicted the decline of Windows year after year simply forgot to look at Microsoft’s steady growth in this market. The fact that Linux growth lost its momentum, has probably something to do with the UNIX market, and is not really due to Microsoft. The Microsoft world is too distinct from the Linux/UNIX domain.

However, I do think that in the future there might be a more direct competition between Linux and Windows. Microsoft has continuously tried to add “UNIX like” features to Windows. In Windows Server 2008 this is more obvious than ever (increased modularity, PowerShell, Server Core etc.).

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Of course, such studies where companies compare themselves with competitors are always a suspect. There are so many ways to manipulate objective data in statistics just to get the results you want. (I am currently writing my annual report, so I know what I am talking about.) But the results of this vulnerability report are quite impressive, anyway.

In the first 90 days after its release, Vista had 5 vulns which is not much if you compare it to Windows XP which had 17 in its first 90 days. It is also interesting to compare this data with the vulns of other operating systems during the same period. MAC OS X 10.4 had 20, Ubuntu 71, for example.

There is a hearty discussion going on his blog. One commentator remarked that these results are not so convincing since the installed base of Vista is too small. This also was my first thought. Jeff Jones replied that the install base of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 Workstation is much lower than Vista’s and RHEL4WS had more than 180 vulns in this period.

Joe Wilcox from Microsoft Watch also has some convincing arguments. He accuses Jeff Jones of having fallen into the “counting trap“. Joe Wilcox refers to the data from the Department of Homeland Security National Vulnerability Database. According to them there were another 11 vulns in the past three weeks. And this data is more telling because of Vista’s limited availability before March. He adds that one also should include alerts mentioning IE since it is part of the operating system. And there were about two dozen of them, some related to third party ActiveX controls.

The question now is it is reasonable to consider third party software? Well, most Linux distributions mostly consist of “third party software”. Does it make sense at all to compare vulnerabilities? Joe Wilcox correctly concludes that “alerts are not a measure of security”.

I’d like to add that the number of vulns is only one factor (and a minor one at that) when it comes to security. Many other factors have to be taken into account, too (how often is an OS targeted by the bad guys, malware in the wild, know-how of its users, etc.)

However, I think that Joe Wilcox is wrong when he asserts that Vista didn’t improve in respect to security. It is obvious that Microsoft invested a lot of money in Vista’s security. Thus, it would be a big surprise if all this money was just spent for nothing. Besides, there is no doubt about it that Vista has many new security features. If you argue that Vista didn’t improve, then you have to explain why all these new security features are useless.

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For one, Symantec is one of Microsoft’s competitors, so you wouldn’t expect them to court the Redmond guys. Secondly, Symantec is a company selling mostly security-related products for Windows. It is simply not in their interest to proclaim that Windows is a secure operating system. Why do you think are they so nervous about Vista?

This study, however, is not about Vista since it used data from the second half of 2006. Symantec’s researchers found that Windows had less vulnerabilities and was patched the fastest among the competing operating systems. The average patch development time of the 39 Windows vulnerabilities was 21 days. Second was Red Hat Linux with an average of 58 days for a sample set of 208 vulnerabilities. The third place goes to Apple with 66 days for a sample set of 43 vulnerabilities. It is interesting to note that the average patch development time was increased for all software vendors. Please, check page 40 in this PDF for further information.

Of course, you’ll find lots of refutations in the coming weeks about this study. (internetnews.com has already some of them.) One weak point certainly is that the Windows vulnerabilities were often more severe. The other question is can such data be used at all to decide which operating is more secure? It is a matter of fact that there is much more malware for Windows than for any other OS, for example. When it comes to security, the only interesting figure is, how often organization registered security breaks for the different operating systems.

Nevertheless, the Symantec data is interesting since it is another proof that Microsoft is making progress with respect to security. I’m already curious about the next study that will include Vista. Do you remember the times before Windows NT? All IT professionals made jokes about the stability of Microsoft’s operating systems. These critics are either quite now or started to bash MS because of security. What’s next? Microsoft’s Internet execution sucks?

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4sysops runs on a tiny dedicated Linux server that is powerful enough to manage normal traffic, but gets overloaded as soon as these attacks start. Usually this lasts from 30 to 60 minutes. There are numerous accesses per second from different IPs during this time. Sometimes, even Apache crashes, i.e. 4sysops is unreachable even after the attack. The server runs with the default configuration of SuSE 10.0.

I don’t have much time at the moment to deal with this problem. I could only take some simple steps against the DDOS attacks. It improved the situation a little. At least, Apache won’t crash anymore.

I reduced the KeepAliveTimeout and installed the mod_evasive module for Apache. Mod_evasive helps in some cases with DOS attacks. I also installed the Bad Behavior plugin and the WP-cache plugin for WordPress. The latter just improves the performance.

I considered working with packet string-matching of iptables to block the attacks at the firewall before Apache gets involved. However, it seems that SuSE forgot to include this extension in the 10.0 version. This worked fine with SuSE 9. I guess, I have to compile a new kernel to get this working.

Please, let me know if you have better ideas. I am not a Linux geek. I suppose, there are plenty of other countermeasures possible. I apologize to those who can’t access the site during the attacks for the inconvenience. Please just come back later. Usually, it works again, at least after an hour or so

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The basic functions of both tools are quite similar. You specify the network address of the SSH server, the drive letter, and the credentials. You can configure them to launch and reconnect to the Linux server at logon. Both tools allow you to simultaneously work with multiple connections to different servers.

You can access the Linux files the same way as in Windows, i.e., a double click will open its associated application. Saving the file will copy the changes to the Linux machine and you can drag and drop files from your desktop to the Linux folder.

A problem with both tools is that if you copy a file from a server folder to another, it will be downloaded to your local machine first and then uploaded again. This isn’t a big deal if you have a high-speed connection to your server or if you only work with small text files. If you move files rather than copy them, this problem doesn’t exist at all, because SftpDrive and WebDrive won’t download them then.

This is where their common features end. WebDrive certainly is the more sophisticated tool. It not only supports SFTP, but also FTP, WebDAV, FrontPage, and GroupDrive. I only tested SFTP since it is the one most often used by system administrators.

Another interesting feature of WebDrive is its caching function. WebDrive automatically copies the files you edit to a local cache. If the network connection isn’t available, you can still access the files from the cache. This feature is useful if you have a slow network connection to your server. WebDrive is definitely the better choice, especially if you want to open files with applications that create temporary files like Word. However, if you work with large files, then this feature might cause problems.

In my test, I opened a 300 MB .pst file with Outlook. Even if you have a very fast connection, you will have to wait a while before you can start working. SftpDrive doesn’t have this caching feature. Therefore, I was able to work almost immediately with the database since Outlook doesn’t have to load the complete .pst file. I didn’t realize any delays with a 100 Mbps connection. However, with 3 Mbps, Outlook was a bit sluggish.

WebDrive offers several settings to configure the caching feature. Unfortunately, I didn’t find a way to disable caching completely. Hence, I can’t recommend WebDrive if you want to access large database files on your Linux server.

WebDrive has a couple of other features that I don’t need for my work, but which might be of interest to you. I suggest taking a look at it if the problem discussed here isn’t an issue for you.

Unfortunately, neither tool is free. SftpDrive costs $39 and WebDrive is $54.95. In my view, they are worth their money. I always used WinSCP to edit files on a Linux box, but working with SftpDrive and WebDrive is much more convenient for me. I’ll probably purchase WebDrive since it is faster with low bandwidth connections.

Of course, there are other ways to map a network drive to a folder on a Linux host. One option is Samba. However, you won’t have an encrypted communication and you have to first set up Samba on every Linux server.

Another option is to use the free tool NetDrive. It supports FTP and WebDAV but not SFTP. I can’t recommend using FTP since the communication is not encrypted. If you use it together with a VPN solution, for example with Poptop, it might be an option. However, I found that NetDrive is a bit slow sometimes.

Yet another option is FTP Drive. It also uses FTP, but you can encrypt the communication with SSL/TLS. I didn’t try this tool. I am always a bit cautious if someone uses a black ground for his Web site. FTP Drive is also available at Download.com. I don’t know if this means anything, though.

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But let me say a word about security first. PPTP has many critics. Crypto experts have shown that it is possible to crack this protocol under certain circumstances, especially MSCHAPv2 which is used for authentication, has its weaknesses. MPPE (Microsoft Point-to-Point Encryption) “only” uses a 128-bit-key. However, I think for most scenarios PPTP is secure enough. If you want to hide your communication from curious system administrators, PPTP will do the job quite well, but if you think that the NSA or Mr. Super Hacker will be interested in your data, better use a more secure VPN protocol like IPSec. The disadvantage is that things will usually become more complicated.

Installing Poptop is not difficult, if you are a Linux admin. The documentation is a bit poor, though. I think most Linux distributions already come with the necessary packages. I installed it with YaST on a SuSE 9.0 machine. The name of the package is “pptpd”. If some other packages are missing, YaST will tell you which ones. I had a problem getting the pptpd service running in the beginning. After a while it turned out that my 2.4.29 kernel didn’t like Poptop, somehow. I tried several other kernel versions, and it always worked fine with them.

These are four configuration files:

• /etc/modules.conf
• /etc/pptpd.conf
• /etc/ppp/options.pptpd
• /etc/ppp/chap-secrets

If you have an older Linux distribution, check your modules.conf for these entries:

alias char-major-108 ppp_generic alias tty-ldisc-3 ppp_async alias tty-ldisc-14 ppp_synctty alias ppp-compress-18 ppp_mppe alias ppp-comress-21 bsd_comp alias ppp-compress-24 ppp_deflate alias ppp-compress-26 ppp_deflate

In pptpd.conf, I only uncommented the localip and the remoteip variables. I used private IPs for both variables. In options.pptpd, I enabled mppe-128. Most important is chap-secrets. Here you set the user name and the password. You can reduce the weakness of MSCHAPv2 by setting a strong password here. Use a random password, with a mixed of small and capital letters. Ten characters should be the minimum length. Don’t use a password which you can remember easily. It is safer to let your VPN client store a strong password, instead of entering a weak and an easy-to-remember password whenever you connect to the VPN Server.

Then I configured the firewall to allow the PPTP protocol. With iptables, it looks like this:

iptables -A INPUT -p tcp –dport 1723 -j ACCEPT iptables -A INPUT -p 47 -j ACCEPT iptables -A OUTPUT -p tcp –sport 1723 -j ACCEPT iptables -A OUTPUT -p 47 -j ACCEPT

If you want to work with NAT (Network Address Translation), you have to add these lines to your iptables shell script:

iptables -A FORWARD -i ppp0 -o eth0 -s 192.168.10.0/24 -m state –state NEW -j ACCEPT

iptables -A FORWARD -m state –state ESTABLISHED,RELATED -j ACCEPT

iptables -A POSTROUTING -t nat -j MASQUERADE

The IP range here is the one you configured in pptpd.conf. You also have to enable IP forwarding which is disabled by default. On a SuSE box the easiest way to do this is by using YaST. You’ll find it under network services/routing. If you don’t use SuSE please check out Marius’ post about IP Forwarding.

Then you have to setup the VPN client on your Windows machine. Please go to this site for more information. The default PPTP setting of Windows should work.

With this configuration, you can already access the internet thru your Linux server using NAT. To make sure that you always use the VPN connection to access applications on the server, you can change C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\hosts. Add the IP address to hosts which you set before for localip in pptpd.conf for the domain names that you are hosting on your Linux server. You have to reboot after changing the hosts file.

This way, your communication with the Linux host will always be encrypted regardless what application you use to access it. If you ever forget to establish the VPN connection first, you even won’t be able to access the Linux machine.

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In my view, Windows is still less secure than Linux because of the reasons I discussed recently. Considering how things developed with Firefox and Internet Explorer this might change in the future. In the beginning, security was the most often mentioned argument for Firefox, but with its rising popularity, more and more vulnerabilities were being detected.

Many anti-virus vendors offer products for Linux now, too. Softwin (BitDefender Antivirus Scanner for Unices), Avira (Antivir Linux Workstation), Sophos (Antivirus for Linux) and Kaspersky (Anti-Virus for Linux File Server & Workstation) are already prepared for this new market. There are open source solutions as well. Clam Antivirus (ClamAV) and OpenAntiVirus are well known meanwhile. The scan engine for ClamAV is also used by Kaspersky. Although the OpenAntiVirus project is already running since 2000, its tools can not yet be recommended for productive environments.

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Security experts regularly confuse vulnerability with security issues. Often, they are developers or former hackers. Thus, their main concern is the theoretical possibility of breaking into a system. However, in practice this is more or less irrelevant. When it comes to security, the only thing that counts is the probability of someone or some malware breaking into a system.

The number and the severity of vulnerabilities is only one aspect. However, there are factors which by far are more important: the number of other, similar systems (important for worms and viruses), the number of people who are able to write exploits for a system, the number of hacker/crackers specialized on a certain system, the average expertise of the people managing/using a system (administrators, home users), their average concern about security, the average number of installed security tools, etc.

Consider this analogy. Your own body has some apparent vulnerabilities. Someone can harm you very easily using a simple knife. It would reduce your vulnerability considerably if you wear armour all the time. Would you feel more secure , then? Do you think that you would live longer because you reduced your vulnerability? If you are currently in South Lebanon, you would indeed be seriously worried about the vulnerability of your body. Wearing armour certainly improves security in this situation. The point is that you can only say something about the security of a certain system if you consider the whole environment.

I am certainly not one of these fanatic Linux advocates. However, for me it is quite obvious that Linux or any other non-Windows system is more secure, simply because they are lesser in number and also because of the other factors I mentioned above. Any Windows environment is still a battle field. Obviously, this has nothing to do with the often stated claim that Open Source is superior to Closed Source when it comes to security.

The only thing you can infer from Jeff’s impressive vulnerability summary is that Microsoft’s programmers have been doing a good job lately. But, if you are a system administrator you won’t feel more secure, especially after you counted the malware that the virus scanner caught on your Windows systems during the last hour.

Via Steve Lamb’s Blog

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iptables is a tool for packet filtering and NAT. You can use it to setup a firewall with shell scripts. A shell script with just a few lines is enough to block an IP address attempting to establish too many connection within a certain time frame.

PAM (Pluggable Authentication Modules) is an API used by many Unix systems for authentication. Marius described how to use PAM to block the IP address of an attacker after three failed logon attempts on a ssh server.

fail2ban can be used to update firewall rules based on log files scans. Marius demonstrated how to secure an ssh server with fail2ban using iptables.

The last two options are certainly more sophisticated than the mere iptables solution. Unfortunately, it takes more time to configure them as you might have to install the tools first.

My favorite solution is fail2ban since you can use it with almost any application, plus there are packages for most Linux distributions. PAM is more difficult to setup as you probably will have to install it from sources.

Marius described the installation and configuration of all three options in detail:

Using iptables to Block Brute Force Attacks Using PAM to Block Brute Force Attacks Using fail2ban to Block Brute Force Attacks

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Sounds too good to be true? Well, it is not really true. Likewise only supports a few Linux apps. However, they are probably the most popular Linux applications. From a Windows server you can manage Apache, Samba (including Active Directory integration), Linux log files and network printers. Not too bad for version 1.0.

The bad news is, for you, my dear Windows admin, that you have to install an agent first on the Linux machines. This can be done from the Likewise console running on the Windows server. The problematic part is that the agent relies on several Open Source packages. If they are not yet on your Linux server, it will install them for you. However, Linux is not Linux. Depending on your distribution you can’t avoid touching, sometimes, the Linux system to install the missing packages yourself. Some Linux distributions like Mandrake or Debian are not supported at all.

I find this concept of Likewise interesting. It not only allows the integration of Linux machines in a Windows network but also helps typical Windows admins to get started with Linux. On the other hand, I am sure that many Linux purists will turn up their nose if you take away their configuration files. They will complain that not all settings are available with a GUI. Considering how many configuration options Apache supports, you probably have to agree with them if you take a look at this screenshot.

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 Midnight Commander has two panes that show the contents of two folders. To move the cursor to the other pane you press CTRL-I. To change a folder in a pane you can use the cursor keys or the mouse. The function keys are for managing files. For example you use F5 to copy a file from one pane (folder) to another. Editing files is as easy as it with notepad. No vi expertise is needed. There are many key-shortcuts. Press F9 to access the menu of Midnight Commander to learn more about them. There you will see that this tool has all important features of a modern file manager.

I suppose that all Linux distributions come with an installation package for Midnight Commander. For instance on a SuSE box you would use yast to install it. To start Midnight Command you just type mc on the command line. At the beginning I always typed nc, as I was used to do it under DOS. Yeah, I am really not good at typing. I was really surprised that I remembered all the shortcuts of Norton Commander after so many years. If you are also a DOS veteran, you should have this tool just for nostalgia’s sake.

GNU Midnight Commander – File Manager and User Shell

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