Google dumps on Windows

Google is phasing out its use of Microsoft's Windows on desktops, citing security concerns stemming from the recent Chinese hacking incident

It must be nice to be a Google employee. You get to work with the smartest engineers out there. You get gourmet cafeteria food and all kinds of amenities. But best of all, you aren't given some generic, locked-down PC that you aren't familiar with. You get to pick what platform you want to be on: Mac, Windows, or Linux.

Getting Samba Software

Getting Samba Software On your Samba server, you’re going to need your distribution’s packages for Samba’s libraries; the Samba dæmons smbd, nmbd and winbindd; the Samba client commands smbclient, smbmount and so forth (which are useful even on servers for testing Samba configurations); and also the Web-based configuration tool SWAT (Figure 1). Naturally, nearly all these things are contained in packages whose names don’t correspond neatly with the names of their component dæmons, libraries and so forth, but I give some pointers on those shortly.

First, a word about SWAT, which requires a modest security trade-off for Ubuntu users. Although normally in Ubuntu the user root can’t log in directly, Samba requires this to be possible, so you need to set a root password on any Ubuntu box that runs SWAT. Like so much else about Samba, this is not something I recommend doing on any Internetfacing Ubuntu box. However, SWAT is such a useful and educational tool, I feel pretty confident in stating that in non-Internet-facing environments, the mistakes SWAT will help you avoid probably constitute a bigger threat to system security than SWAT does.

As I mentioned, Samba packages are included in all major Linux distributions. In Debian and its derivatives, such as Ubuntu, you’ll want to install the following deb packages: samba, samba-common, samba-doc, smbclient and swat (plus whatever packages you need to satisfy dependencies in any of these).

In SUSE, you’ll want to install samba, samba-client, samba-winbind and samba-doc. (SWAT is included with one of these, probably samba.)
In Red Hat Enterprise Linux and its derivatives, you need samba, samba-client, samba-common and samba-swat.

Installing these binary packages should involve installation scripts that put startup scripts, symbolic links and so forth in the correct places for everything to work (at least, after you configure Samba to serve something). Using SWAT is the best way to get up and running quickly—not because it does very much work for you, but because its excellent help system makes it super-convenient to summon the pertinent parts of Samba’s various man pages.

There are two SWAT quirks I should mention. First, SWAT must be run by an Internet super-server, such as the old Berkeley inetd or the newer xinetd. Ubuntu configures inetd automatically when you install the swat package, but if your distribution of choice does not, you need a line like this in /etc/inetd.conf:

swat stream tcp nowait.400 root /usr/sbin/tcpd /usr/sbin/swat

Second, to get SWAT’s help links to work under SUSE 11.0, you may need to create the following symbolic links while logged in to a terminal window as root:

ln -s /usr/share/doc/packages/samba/htmldocs/manpages
-> /usr/share/samba/swat/help
ln -s /usr/share/doc/packages/samba/htmldocs/using_samba
-> /usr/share/samba/swat/help
ln -s /usr/share/doc/packages/samba/htmldocs/index.html
-> /usr/share/samba/swat/help
ln -s /usr/share/doc/packages/samba/htmldocs/manpages.html
-> /usr/share/samba/swat/help

Samba over the Internet?

If Samba is so very convenient, you may wonder, why not use IPsec or some other VPN/encryption tool to secure its use on the Internet? This is actually possible. As it’s been a while since I covered IPsec in this space, and in the intervening years, IPsec support has been added to the Linux kernel, I just may end this series with a quick tutorial on doing Samba over IPsec.

However, Samba is a very “chatty” protocol—it generates a lot of packets even if you’re using it only for small files or shares. This causes problems not so much for your Internet link as for Samba performance:
Samba can be very sensitive to dropped or delayed packets, which is more likely in your modestly sized Internet uplink than over your exponentially bigger Local Area Network (LAN) fabric.

So, trying to get Samba working over IPsec may or may not be worth your time, and it may or may not warrant my covering it in this series of columns. Have no fear, one way or another, you can expect me to provide a tutorial on using the Linux kernel’s IPsec functionality in a future Paranoid Penguin column.

CharTr - Mind Mapping Tool

CharTr is an artistic piece of software made for fun to give mind mappers good usability. For those unfamiliar with mind mapping, Wikipedia says the following:

A mind map is a diagram used to represent words, ideas, tasks or other items linked to and arranged radially around a central key word or idea. It is used to generate, visualize, structure and classify ideas, and as an aid in study, organization, problem solving, decision making and writing. Currently, its stated features are as follows:

Basic mind map with curved links.

Link folding.

Colors.

Outline box of several selected nodes.

Audio/text/images embedded as notes.

Automatic saving.

SVG, PNG, PDF and PS export.

Numerous keyboard shortcuts (with an eased keyboard navigation, vim-like).

Idea bookmarking.

Search for text in nodes.

Math equations.

Installation:
CharTr does have a few obscure requirements, so you should look through your repositories. You need Python, PyGTK, Cairo, GStreamer, Numpy and python-plastex for mathematical equations. Once you have these sorted out, head to the Web site where you have a choice of a source tarball or Debian package. If you grab the .deb package, install it by entering the following in a terminal from whichever directory contains the file:

$ sudo dpkg -i chartr_0.16_i386.deb

Now, run CharTr by entering:

$ chartr

If you get the source version, download and extract the tarball, and then open a terminal in the new CharTr directory. You need to invoke Python manually, by entering the following:

$ python chartr.py

Usage Once inside, click that big shiny New button, and a new window appears, called a Map. In the big expanse of white, left-clicking brings up a text cursor allowing you to type in some text. Press Enter, and the text is placed inside a box. The first of these is yellow, allowing for a central idea from
which others ideas can flow. If you click on the original box and add some text somewhere else on the map, it is placed in a blue box, and a black line
links to it. Right-clicking lets you move the map around, and if you look at the toolbar at the top, you can zoom in and out, as well as add images. If you check the drop-down box toward the right, you also can add bits of audio, notes or some already-provided icons—very handy! Once you’ve finished making a mind map, you can export it to a picture file.

Check the documentation page at code.google.com/p/chartr/wiki/CharTrDocumentationEn for more information on general usage. All in all, this is a nice and simple application with some great aesthetics that will find favor with students and teachers alike. It’s still buggy for the moment, but I hope to see it included in major distros, especially educational ones.

If you would like to install CharTr on Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron), you can execute the following steps here from this site.

On-Line Backup Utility for Linux

European companies often get the jump on their North American counterparts regarding the addition of Linux compatibility. A fine example is Italy’s Memopal, which now offers a Linux version of its on-line backup utility. Memopal offers automatic and continuous backup to a remote server via a secure Internet connection, a service that has been lacking in the Linux space.

The company claims that its Memopal Global File System archiving technology provides a distributed filesystem that supports up to 100 million terabytes of storage, transparent read-write compression, hot-add scalability and more. In beta at the time of this writing, Memopal for Linux supports Ubuntu 8.04 and Debian Etch.

This software provided by Memopal Corporate. More features about this Utility you can find @ www.memopal.com