Official Publication of the STL!/unix/usr/group

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Online version: http://www.sluug.org/cronicle/

Table of Contents

• Next Meeting Details
• Presentation: "Resource Manager" by Chad Bersche, Sun
• Tutorial: Running the Satan Security Tool under Linux by Stan Reichardt
• Book Special(s):
• Upcoming Meetings
• Meeting Directions
• Article(s)
  • ITEC 99We need YOU!
  • Election Results!
  • All the news that's fit to Print
  • Subscribe to our New LISTSERVER discussions!
  • Home Directories on Michelob
  • 1999 USENIX Tech Conference
• Special Interest Groups (SIGS)
  • Linux SIG (SLUUGLS)
  • Computer Telephony Integration SIG (SLUUG CiTI)
  • Digital Alpha SIG
• Steering Committee
• Sponsors
• SLUUG on the World Wide Web
• SLUUG Administration is volunteer based.
• /usr/groups/other
• Contacts
• Submitting Articles to the SLUUG CRONicle
• SLUUG PO Box

Wednesday, March 10, 1999 at 6:30 PM
Sunnen Products, 7910 Manchester

Abstract:
There is an open source network security auditing package called SATAN. The Security Administrator's Tool for Analyzing Networks (SATAN) was released onto the Internet in April 1995 along with as much media hype as was received by the notorious Michelangelo Virus. It was the first network security tool to get real attention in a world that was ignoring security.

As a freely available GUI tool it's arrival scared everyone out of denial. Security by obscurity was no longer safe. The bad guys already knew all the holes; so, why shouldn't the good guys have a tool to show them what to fix on their networks and how to fix it?

The SATAN package is old and not the best; but, it makes an excellent starting point for those new to network security. It is hopefully a "useful" tool, and one that's even fun to use. It runs on UNIX type OSs and will probably never be ported to NT (but, who cares). It does not compete with newer commercial and open source packages; but, for the price you might want to run it on your network at least once. If you don't, somebody else might.

The SATAN package has the following features:

* WWW browser Graphical User Interface

* identifies well known weaknesses and misconfigurations

* provides solutions to what if finds

* modular structure allows for extensions and improvements

* a repair tool for system administrators - not system crackers

This introductory tutorial discusses loading the infamous SATAN network security package on a Linux platform from the perspective of those new to the subject of network security.

This tutorial will provide an overview of the SATAN package, an introduction to Linux installation specifics and support materials. This tutorial will NOT be for the security experts, but an introduction for those just beginning their journey into the vastly intricate territory of network security.

Biography:
Stan Reichardt has been using Linux for several years. He started out years ago coding COBOL on a national WANG VS-100 network. Over the years he has been known to administer various Unix/Novell/LAN systems and support desktop users. He tolerates main frames and would like to avoid Micro$oft in all forms. He provides 24/7 PC and Internet support to family and friends. Contributing his point of view to the SLUUG steering committee and to the SLUUG CRONicle newsletter are secondary to his fascination with books and Linux. He loves his wife and son. He tolerates their dog.

Title of the Month The title(s) will be 25% off at the 10 March 1999 meeting.

All regularly priced titles are 10% off retail cost at meeting. Excludes specially priced items or promotional items

The O'Reilly and Associates line of books is available at each monthly meeting as a convenience to our members.

Each month features a book related to that month's presentation topic.

The STL!/unix/usr/group meets the 2nd Wednesday of every month at Sunnen Products, 7910 Manchester Blvd, just east of Hanley on Manchester.

Directions From Downtown

1. Take 40 West to the Hanley exit.
2. Turn left (south) onto Hanley.
3. Turn left (east) onto Manchester, then turn right ASAP into the Sunnen Products driveway.

(NOTE: A security guard from Sunnen is scheduled to be at the door from 6:20 PM to 7:20 PM to allow entry. After 7:20, the door will be unattended and attendees may not be able to enter.)

The SLUUG Steering Committee meets the Tuesday following the general 2nd Wednesday meeting at 6:00 PM in the 2nd floor training room of Daugherty Systems, One City Place in Creve Coeur.

The SLUUG Linux SIG (SLUUGLS) meets the 3rd Thursday of every month at the Indian Trails Public Library.

TEC (Information Technology Expositions and Conferences) Expo 1999:

Do you want to come out and play for awhile?

For the past seven (?) years SLUUG has had a presence at the annual St. Louis ITEC Expo. (Formerly the Cervantes Computer & Office Systems Show) Free tickets should be available at our 12 May SLUUG general meeting. This year's ITEC Expo will be at the America's Center downtown on Wed & Thurs 19 and 20 May.

Many SLUUG members were introduced to our group by this event.

We need volunteers to provide a 1/2 day of their time. If we get enuff volunteers maybe we could make shifts as short as a couple hours. This event is a lot of hard work, a lot of fun, and a lot of planning. Time in the booth is busy, exciting, hectic and satisfying. Give yourself a chance to introduce someone else to UNIX (all flavors), our projects, our Special Interest Groups (SIGs) and our group.

Getting volunteers is just the first step. Christine Wanta will direct our effort again this year. However, in order to participate this year, we need NOT less than 8 other volunteers lined up by 15 March. The event itself is entirely during the workday but we may need help to deliver tables, books, etc the nite before (i.e. Tue 18 May).

Along with these efforts Steering Committee volunteers are needed to step up planning and finding tutorials and presentations for the monthly general meetings that follow. That is what we must do to keep new and old members coming back month after month.

Volunteers should email Christine at cfw1@mail.sluug.org for details. Refer to http://itec.asmcorp.com/ for general show info. If you pre-register indicate "SLUUG member" in remarks.

SLUUG holds officer advisory elections at every February meeting. There was also a 5 year Board of Governor's position up for election.

Nominations were opened to the floor and the voting was nearly instantaneous. The elections were held in communist-block fashion even though all nominees were present.

Gary Meyer, an incumbent member of the Board of Governors, and the only announced candidate for this position, was re-elected.

All announced officer candidates were elected without opposition:

President - Gary Meyer

Vice President - Ed Wehner

Secretary - Rich Seibel

Treasurer - Christine Wanta

Any SLUUG member in good standing that attends at least two meetings in the previous year is eligible to hold office. Attendance at the general meetings and all SIG meetings are counted. Anyone that would like more information about the administrative duties for the organization, please visit our web site at http://www.sluug.org/~cfw1/help.html, or contact Chris Wanta at cfw1@mail.sluug.org

http://www.slashdot.org- news for nerds - stuff that matters!
http://www.freshmeat.net- daily updates of Internet software releases.
(check out the "Appindix" button).
http://www.linuxtoday.com- daily news of mostly (but not only) Linux events.
http://www.jerrypournelle.com- for detailed follow-up on the demise of BYTE.

We have 3 e-mail lists ready to play. They are called: discuss (for general discussion of UNIX), steercom (to discuss the running of our organization), and announce (for general announcements).

You can subscribe by sending an e-mail message to {x}-request@mail.sluug.org. where {x} is one of the above list names. When mailing into {x}-request just put the single word 'subscribe' as the body of your message.

We encourage anyone and everyone to participate. To limit spam, "announce" will only be posted to by the management. The "discuss" list is intended for the general discussion of any UNIX topic that tickles your fancy.

As stated in the Message Of The Day (motd) on Michelob:

...the /home directories & files on "michelob" and "dark" are NOT the same. Changes to your WWW ~home pages in /home/public_html were affected!

(note: this effect occured over 3 weeks ago)

...on 26 February we will rename the "dark" /home to /oldhome and we will NFS mount the "michelob" /home onto "dark". You will then have until 12 March to copy any //dark:/oldhome files to your //michelob:/home

What does this mean to you?

Put simply..

Make sure that you have your MOST CURRENT version of all files in you home directory ON MICHELOB.

Compare files in your dark home dir to files in your michelob home dir. And be careful to catch changes in either since mid December.

The times of saves and restores were mid December, mid Jan, and early Feb.

After we make that michelob home directory the NFS mounted home dir on dark (as well as simultaneously on michelob) on 26 Feb....

IF YOU HAVE FILES THAT HAVE BEEN UPDATED by your web page (ex. home page stats) or other changes to the current dark home dirs, you should copy those changes to the new common home dir after Feb 26.

In detail..

There are two versions of the home directories, one on Michelob and another on Dark, each from different backups, and each covering different time periods. (This happened during the recovery attempts following a recent hard drive crash, and can be best explained as a freak accident involving a tar command and a time machine)

In order to bring a bit of order back to the SLUUG "production environment", the home directories are going to be shared, off of Michelob, to its sister production box (and web server) Dark. The home directories as they currently exist on Dark will become /oldhome in order to make way for the NFS mounted /home from Michelob.

Then, on the 12th of March, granting everybody enough time to retrieve any valuable files from the "old" home directories on Dark, /oldhome will be permanently removed.

To summarize..

on dark.sluug.org

============================

Fri Feb 26 1999 ----------------------------

# mv /home /oldhome

# mount michelob:/home /home

----------------------------

Fri Mar 12 1999

----------------------------

# rm -rf /oldhome

----------------------------

If there are any questions, special requests, etc., please feel free to mail me.

--- Benson Schliesser benson@mail.sluug.org

-----Original Message-----

From: Cynthia Deno [SMTP:cynthia@usenix.org]

Sent: Thursday, February 25, 1999 12:24 AM

Subject: 1999 USENIX Technical Conference, June 6-11, Monterey CA

USENIX's well known annual conference--the UNIX insider conference--is coming soon. This is a favorite for UNIX gurus and newbies alike and we believe your members will be interested to learn of it. We would appreciate your help in informing your members via print, email or on your web site. Please feel free to link to the URL below.

Here are some details of the conference:

A renown conference by and for programmers, developers, and system administrators working in advanced systems and software--

1999 USENIX ANNUAL TECHNICAL CONFERENCE June 6-11, 1999 Monterey, California Includes FREENIX Track, devoted to Open Source Software

------------------------------------------------------------

Save. Register by May 3, 1999. See the program at: http://www.usenix.org/events/usenix99 ------------------------------------------------------------

FREENIX Track--Quality Technical Forum Devoted To Open Source Software Peer-refereed papers, expert talks, and evening sessions will be led by the likes of Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman, Kirk McKusick, Theodore Ts'o, Theo de Raadt, and other leading developers.

Tutorials--Superior Instruction You'll Put to Use Immediately Choose from 24 tutorials over three days. Eric Allman, Tom Christiansen, Peter Galvin, Evi Nemeth, and Marcus Ranum are just a few of the superb instructors..

Refereed Papers-Cutting-Edge, Technically Excellent Research 23 quality papers have been refereed and selected by the program committee. Papers are on topics of especially high interest: management of resource systems, file systems, virtual memory systems, storage systems, security, web server performance and O/S performance.

Share Ideas, Solutions, and a Beer John Ousterhout, creator of Tcl/Tk, will focus his keynote on a fundamental shift in software development to integration applications. Invited Talks offer stimulating, highly practical expert presentations. Enjoy lively discussion during evening Birds-of-a-Feather sessions. Test drive a variety of useful products in the comfortably-sized exhibit hall. Mingle with attendees and presenters at the dessert reception inside the wonderful Monterey Bay Aquarium.

=============================================================

The USENIX Association's international membership includes computer scientists, engineers, and system administrators working on the cutting edge of systems and software. Our conferences are recognized for their technical excellence and pragmatic emphasis.

=============================================================

As our membership grows, we have had some inquiries about the possibility of having Special Interest Groups in several areas. If you are interested in starting or participating in a SIG for System Administration, Networking, C, Object Oriented Programming, a specific vendor, etc., please call Dave Mills at 230-5151, extension 103, or contact any officer of the group.

Visit the Linux SIG home page (http://www.stllinux.org/) for the latest meeting details.

Indian Trails Public Library
8400 Delport Drive
(at Midland)
(314)-428-5424

For more information on SLUUGLS refer to the WWW home page for the group at http://linux.feldt.com or contact Matthew Feldt at linux@www.feldt.com.

The CTI SIG is no longer having regular meetings and is currently using a webboard format.

The Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) Users Group is a non-profit organization open to developers, end-users, sales people, and others who share the common interest of melding the telecommunications and computing worlds.

For more information on SLUUG CiTI contact Tony Zafiropoulos at tonyz@ctitek.com or (314)878-9855.

The Digital Alpha SIG is for those interested in Digital UNIX and the DEC Alpha architecture. Visit the Digital Alpha SIG's home at http://www.sluug.org/~newton/asighome.html for more information.

The SLUUG Steering Committee meets the Tuesday following the general 2nd Wednesday meeting at 6:00 PM in the 2nd floor training room of Daugherty Systems, One City Place in Creve Coeur. The guard can direct you to the meeting location. Anyone is welcome to attend. If you would like to become more involved in the planning of SLUUG, feel free to join us at the next Steering Committee meeting. Meetings usually last 1.5 to 2 hours.

• Analysts International
• Andersen Consulting
• Arbor Consulting
• CIBER, Inc.
• Computer Task Group
• Cypress Systems, Ltd.
• Daugherty Systems
• Ferguson Consulting, Inc.
• Hewlett-Packard
• IBM
• Informix Corporation
• Lindenberg & Associates
• The Law Offices of Rich McIennan
• Maryville Data Systems, Inc.
• O'Reilly & Associates
• Renaissance Worldwide, Inc.
• Sun Microsystems
• Sunnen Products
• Sykes Enterprises, Inc.
• Unisys
• Venmar Systems, Inc.
• WTI Systems, Ltd.

For more information about sponsoring the St. Louis UNIX Users Group, contact Ed Wehner wehner@mail.sluug.org.

The St. Louis UNIX Users Group maintains a WWW page at http://www.sluug.org/. Visit us to learn more about who we are and what we do, visit other UNIX user groups' WWW pages, sign up for a SIG, or just to browse.

SLUUG is looking for volunteers to help with presentations, web page development, managing corporate sponsorships, and many other tasks. If you would like to help out, contact Chris Wanta at cfw1@mail.sluug.org or visit http://www.sluug.org/~cfw1/help.html.

We publish other user group meeting schedules on a reciprocal basis. If you are a member of another non-profit group, please inform them of our policy and invite them to exchange meeting information with editor@mail.sluug.org, or call any of the SLUUG officers.

If you would like to submit an article to the CRONicle of general interest to the members of the St. Louis UNIX Users Group, email it to editor@mail.sluug.org The deadline for article submissions is two weeks before the next main meeting.

The St. Louis UNIX Users Group has a P.O. box. All official correspondence with SLUUG should now be sent to:

    St. Louis UNIX Users Group
    P.O. Box 1184
    Fenton, MO  63026-1184