Attempted attack on Linux kernel foiled

[Louie]

23 days isn't too long for any OS, I have had XP run for 60 days + (until I do updates), I have had some linux servers that have been in service with uptimes of 385+ days...(even with updates) keep aiming for higher uptimes.

[jeffs72]

Yeah, ditto that on the uptime Louie. A while back my domain controllers and Exchange server had an uptime of almost a year (like 340 days), then we 'had' to re-org all our friggin rack space to put all the sparc boxes together. So much for breaking the 1 year mark on a windows server for me.

[spurious_inode]

callisto : ~ % uname -a
SunOS callisto 5.8 Generic_105181-31 sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-1

callisto : ~ % uptime
1:04am up 477 day(s), 13:52, 7 users, load average: 0.29, 0.34, 0.44

phobos : ~ $ uname -a
AIX phobos 3 4 000CD9BD4C00

phobos : ~ $ uptime
01:06AM up 903 days, 20:38, 2 users, load average: 5.57, 5.81, 3.91



I'd personally make him run an old version of VMS, that would teach him....

[jeffs72]

Hehe nice,

I curious, what do you use AIX for? I haven't personally run across an AIX system in the field yet. Was curious what sort of application or whatnot it's designed for.

[phishphreek]

[OFFTOPIC]

Yeah, ditto that on the uptime Louie. A while back my domain controllers and Exchange server had an uptime of almost a year (like 340 days), then we 'had' to re-org all our friggin rack space to put all the sparc boxes together. So much for breaking the 1 year mark on a windows server for me.

jeffs72: Just curious... how in the h3ll do you get a m$ box to run for so long?

They practically MAKE you reboot after any serious patch/SP/upgrade...

[/OFFTOPIC]

[jeffs72]

[OFFTOPIC]Well, those were NT 4.0 machinss, back then you didn't get nearly as many updates as you do now. You might find a hotfix or two that warranted installing in production, but really you waited between service packs back then, and after the NT 4.0 service pack 2 fiasco you waited until everyone else had installed a service pack before you did the same . Also in production I try not to install anything 'wacky' on my boxes. Domain controllers would run DNS (or bind, depending) and wins/dhcp, but no 3rd party non-ms produced product. A lot of microsoft OS instability is due to poorly written code that gets installed whilly nilly. If you keep it simple, it is a lot more stable, much like a unix or linux host I would imagine. Im just starting to get my feet wet on the *nix side of the fence. It's overwhelming and facinating. I can't wait until my 1st test system breaks so I can troubleshoot it. NT/windows troubleshooting is old hat now, I suspect my redhat 9 box will be a different story altogether.

Windows update is good and bad I guess. It definately makes fixes between service packs a lot more accessible. But I wonder sometimes if they aren't too accessible at times.

But, I didn't mean to hijack the thread, after all, it's on a unix board. My apologies to the easily offended and board mods in advance.
[/OFFTOPIC]

[Lord Viczerez]

[ "The first thing we did was fix the difference," he said. "It took me five minutes to find the change."]

[what ever idiot[s] that did this could not have been the britest bulb in the box on so many levels.]

[Dhej]

The linux community is lucky this bastard got greedy and didn't go through the proper channels to insert his code, apparently he was pretty clever in masking his maliciousness in the the difference between a = and a == [hmm www.theregister.co.uk gave more techy details, but what do you expect?]

How many times have you accidently dropped an equals sign when coding? And how annoying is it to track down those pesky little single character mistakes?

Fortunately because of the many many eyes that scour linux code, even if the diff hadn't pointed out those naughty changes, eventually someone would have caught it as a programming error.

I agree with the Windows ME punishment, just make sure that it isn't a clean install, upgrade a dos machine to 3.1, then to 95 then to 98, 98 SE and finally ME, and make it so that he can only upgrade in that order.

Unfortunately it is a sign that the nasty jerks are getting smarter, kernel hacking is a much higher scare factor than those stupid skiddies writing VB!

Peace,
Dhej

[monkeylover]

I say stick em in the CD mines at microsoft and have em work without pay along with the other million or so sweatshop goons on an assembly line. with papercut.

[spurious_inode]

Originally posted here by jeffs72
Hehe nice,

I curious, what do you use AIX for? I haven't personally run across an AIX system in the field yet. Was curious what sort of application or whatnot it's designed for.

Hi jeffs72,

We use AIX for our TSM (Tivoli backup systems), Sybase SQL servers, and our NFS hosts. The AIX machine from
my post is the primary NFS and distributed apps ( tkabber, mozilla, emacs, cc, etc.) machine.

One of our clients runs a bunch of big iron AIX machines for their SAP environment. SAP and other real-time
financial applications, as well as heavy-duty SQL servers are where we see AIX the most.

-- spurious