Archive for July, 2004

French Ministry chooses Mandrake

Published
by
Tom and Pilar
on 30/7/2004
in Technology
. 0 Comments

Mandrakesoft issued an announcement recently that the French Ministry of Equipment is to use Mandrake as their distro of choice in their project to move their servers away from proprietary software (Windows).

1500 Mandrake servers are being rolled out to replace 2000 NT servers and to serve 60,000 client PCs. There is no news yet what OS the desktop PCs will be migrated to.

In response to the announcement Kevin Buckley MD of Mandrakesoft Ireland said “The French Government’s decision to move from Microsoft NT to the Mandrakelinux Corporate Server is great news. This proves the point that Mandrakelinux is a Secure, Reliable and Robust operating system. Hopefully the Irish Government will now see that Mandrakelinux is a excellent alternative, which will save the Irish people a great amount of money in the near future.”

Co-incidentally, Mandrake was my Linux distro of choice after reviewing several Linux distributions - great minds, eh?!

Microsoft Money users ‘locked out’

Published
by
Tom and Pilar
on 30/7/2004
in Technology
. 2 Comments

While Microsoft Money is an application that resides on a computer’s hard drive, the service also integrates online access to information and services. Users can upload their personal finance files onto the Web and access the information over the ‘net while away from home.

However, some users of the service found themselves locked out of their accounts on Monday afternoon and the lock out persisted until late last night.

According to Russ Paul Jones of Microsoft the problem occurred because “one of our servers was updated and inadvertently pointed to the wrong location to verify authentication”.

Microsoft posted directions on how to log in again for affected users last night at 10:30pm.

This should serve as a salutory reminder to people not to rely completely on remote IT services without some kind of local backup.

Critical Internet Explorer patch release imminent

Published
by
Tom and Pilar
on 29/7/2004
in Technology
. 0 Comments

According to an article in eWeek Dean Hachamovitch, who heads the Microsoft IE development team, said in a weekly security-focused Webcast, that a fix for the vulnerability exploited by the Download.Ject attacks in June will arrive sometime next week.

The release is due next week a couple of weeks ahead of the next scheduled Microsoft patch release date.

Now if they would just fix all the other bugs in Internet Explorer!

CA to release Open Source version of Ingres

Published
by
Tom and Pilar
on 28/7/2004
in Technology
. 0 Comments

I read in InfoWorld today where CA have announced that they intend to release a version of ingres at LinuxWorld in San Francisco under its own CA Trusted Open Source License (CA-TOSL) next Wednesday.

Tony Gaughan, senior vice president, CA said that this iteration of Ingres, dubbed r3, will outperform Microsoft’s SQL Server database, and is more attractive price-wise because it is open source.

Microsoft have not run any tests against Ingres as they don’t currently see it as a competitor. In any case, migrating from one rdbms to another is not a trivial undertaking so CA’s initial customer base will have to be people starting out on the rdbms route.

Downloadable web security classification

Published
by
Tom and Pilar
on 28/7/2004
in Technology
. 0 Comments

I came across a downloadable pdf document while browsing the Net-Security site today.

The document has 50 pages of attack classifications as well as an appendix on HTTP Response Splitting and another on Web Server/Application Fingerprinting.

Yet another document to be read and added to your web security library!

OS X maintenance and troubleshooting

Published
by
Tom and Pilar
on 27/7/2004
in Technology
. 0 Comments

I found a really good article on OS X maintenance and troubleshooting today. The article is for the maintenance of OS X 10.2 and 10.3 and the tools recommended, if they don’t already come with OS X, are freely downloadable!

You can’t say better than that!

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