We met Tuesday 5 February 2002 at the Hamilton Township Public Library. The meeting started at approximately 6:30 pm.
We set up five computers on an impromptu network. (One of the computers was actually an Internet appliance that operates off of a Linux bootable CD-ROM. More about it later.) Wayne Hardy went over the basic agenda items. A quick survey of people's experiences at the recent LinuxWorld expo in New York City. Most people said that it was nice but much smaller than the previous LinuxWorld expos. Trenton Computer Festival (TCF): Wayne noted the need to get a reservation for a table soon and for people to volunteer to be at the table. HamLUG Web site: At the January meeting, we had decided to examine using PHP-Nuke to set a "portal" for the Web site. We are waiting to hear from Jeff Yepp regarding the availability of mySQL and PHP on the HamLUG Web server. (Jeff was not at the meeting but later indicated via email that these resources are available on the server.) It was suggested that as we are going to use PHP-Nuke, future meetings could cover Linux resources related to it: Apache Web server, PHP, and mySQL. -- We had a brief Question & Answer session. The main question was about tracing back probes upon one's system to find out from where cracking attempts are coming. One person suggested the Snort utility. -- Wayne Hardy gave a mini-presentation on the Linux directories and their uses. Many Linux newbies run into trouble figuring out where to place programs and other files. Sometimes they might place program files under /var or /tmp. He recommended the http://www.Pathname.com Web site for future information on the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard concepts. -- In the main presentation, Gerry Ely continued with his examination of Ethereal and network analysis he started last month. Gerry gave a handout showing different log entries and explained how to interpret them. Excellent! -- After the main presentation, the people who had set up computers on the network tried several network utilities and techniques. Several people tried EtherApe, a graphical network analysis tool from http://etherape.sourceforge.net/. Gerry Ely demonstrated Nessus security vulnerability analysis tool (from http://www.nessus.org). I offer my Internet appliance as the test subject. Nessus discovered a major vulnerability: the system was allowing anybody to set up an X-Windows session remotely. The good news is that I had deliberately set up the Internet appliance to do that for this session only; it was no the normal operating configuration. Gerry Ely handed out a sample bootable CD that allows one to run Linux without changing the PC's hard disk. He uses such a CD for diagnostics at his job. I tired the CD in the Internet appliance device and, with a bit of adjustment for the net card drivers, it worked well. This was a pleasant discovery expanding the usefulness of the New Internet Computer (http://www.thinknic.com) device. Jon "J.D" Abolins
