Linux Format August 2021

Jonni Bidwell Speaking from experience, it’s a good idea to change your bash prompt or use tmux decorations – anything to embellish the fact that the machine you’re working on is remote. It’s no fun when you think you’re dd-ing a USB stick, but it’s actually your server’s hard drive. Les Pounder A few years ago, the 4TB drive in my server died and it took the best part of a weekend to rescue all the data from a rapidly failing drive. My advice is to have backups of your important data – a second drive and a cloud service is the ideal solution. Michael Reed If you have the room, consider separating your home directory, your root (installation) directory and your data directory. You can do this by making…

I suspect that many readers, whenever Linux is mentioned, imagine their personal computer sat in their homes. That’s great: it shows how far the GNU/Linux world has come. It’s clearly functional enough, easy enough and widespread enough to be used as a desktop system by your normal home user. This does mean that much of our focus these days is on desktop systems – even if some of this is development or home-server applications. Perhaps we forget that most systems running Linux are servers, be that real or virtual. So with Red Hat pulling the server rug from under the CentOS community, we’re taking the chance to look at how you can put together “better” servers using one of the most stable, reputable and well-regarded code-bases, whether that’s with CentOS…

A series of vulnerabilities, dubbed FragAttacks, has been uncovered in the Wi-Fi specification that could potentially affect billions of devices around the world. Wi-Fi networks transmit data using a process of frame fragmentation or frame aggregation. FragAttacks, short for fragmentation and aggregation attacks, abuse this process and enable malicious users to insert data into Wi-Fi traffic. It was security researcher Mathy Vanhoe who first brought these vulnerabilities to light. Thankfully, the vulnerabilities, some of which appear to have been present since the creation of the Wi-Fi specification in 1997, can’t be used to extract data, so there’s no risk of passwords or other data being stolen. However, the idea that people could access your Wi-Fi network and the devices connected to it isn’t a pleasant one. Furthermore, these vulnerabilities could…

There’s been some drama in the open source world recently following what some people claim is a hostile takeover of the Freenode IRC chat network (https://freenode.net), which was used by many communities and open source projects. Freenode was sold to US developer and entrepreneur Andrew Lee in 2017, but according to a blog post by a former staff member (see www.kline.sh), Freenode staff had not been informed about the terms of the sale: “It turns out that this contract did indeed intend to sell the entire network and it’s holdings.” The post says that Lee had at the time promised that he would “never exercise any operational control over Freenode”, but that this has now changed, with Lee asserting “total legal control over the network, including user data.” Things came…

The audio-editing program Audacity is one of the most popular open-source software in the world. However, recent developments have threatened to tarnish Audacity’s reputation. In April, Audacity was acquired by Muse Group, which is made up of a number of music brands, including Ultimate Guitar and MuseScore (read about the acquisition at http://bit.ly/LXF278MuseGroup). This worried long-term users, even though Muse Group promised that “the software will remain forever free and open source.” While this may have allayed some people’s fears, things took another concerning turn when a pull request appeared on GitHub (http://bit.ly/LXF278AudacityGit) for “Basic telemetry.” While the pull request was updated to ensure that “Telemetry is strictly optional and disabled by default. No data is shared unless you choose to opt-in and enable telemetry,” the idea that collecting user…

“For us techies, the cloud has made a lot of things easier. Much of it is built on open source technology. Linux is the most common operating system for public cloud services with a 90 per cent share. Open source databases make it easier to host and manage data. But do public cloud providers support open source enough, and do they provide the right kind of support? It’s no surprise that everyone who responded to our latest survey thought public cloud providers could do more. However, 58 per cent of respondents said competition from public cloud companies who use open source projects but don’t contribute back was one of the top challenges currently faced by open source companies. So, how should public cloud providers contribute to open source? The top…