Meeting Royalty

Ah… this is not really what the title makes it seem, but here is the story…

Tonight I drove about an hour to a little town called Seneca Falls. I was meeting someone at the Hotel Clarence. The person at the hotel front desk had followed this person via twitter as they journeyed to the hotel and gave them VIP treatment as royalty.

Who is this mysterious person you ask?

It is none other than Princess Leia! You may know her as Pleia2 in IRC. Pleia is an extraordinary person who is very active in the world of FOSS and Ubuntu who just happens to own the domain princessleia.com. You can read more about Pleia on her Ubuntu wiki page. While she is not really from Alderaan she is as close to the meeting a member of the Jedi Council as one can get due to her recent election to the Ubuntu Community Council this past October.

Pleia is in the area to give a presentation at the NY State Team’s launch party and Ubuntu awareness event. This event was organized by Jeremy Austin-Bardo and is being held at the Holiday Inn in Waterloo, NY on Sunday November 8th from 1pm to 5pm. It will feature two presentations, several demo machines and a pizza party afterwards.

In short, the front desk saw Pleia as a representative from Alderaan and I saw her as one of the key people in the Ubuntu community. Either way it was good to meet her in person and get to talk a bit about Linux, Ubuntu and stuff in general.

Karmic: IPv6 Woes – Long as I Can See the Light

I did a great deal of searching in regards to the slowness issues and the IPv6 DNS issues in Ubuntu 9.10. As with any issues in Ubuntu I am always happy as Long as I Can See the Light and Lucky for me JoeHacker left a candle in the window.

Using yout favorite editor using sudo, edit /etc/default/grub and change:
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=”quiet splash”
to
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=”ipv6.disable=1 quiet splash”
then
sudo update-grub

This worked wonders for me in my test VM and I will soon test this on my main machine. Despite the fact that I was not born with a silver spoon in hand Joe’s advice has made me feel like a Fortunate Son. One important note is that this may not be an issue with Ubuntu, but an issue with how IPv6 DNS requests are being handled by my router.

Karmic experience: Its been a hard days night

On Friday I updated my main machine to Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) and the experience was a Hard Days Night. Perhaps if there was a little bit more cowbell I would have overlooked the current warts; either way this is not a Hello, Goodbye post, but a We Can Work It Out post.

Issues encountered:

• Evolution backup would not restore. The Karmic version (2.28.1) did not like the backup file from Jaunty (2.26.1). I booted up Fedora 11 which used (2.26.3) and restored the backup with success. I then did a backup from Fedora (2.26.3) and successfully restored the backup in Karmic (2.28.1). I guess some times it good to Come Together with other distros
• Evolution and Firefox were ’slow’ resolving DNS names. I found several posts, launchpad questions and launchpad bugs about this one. One that was reported back in August. There are people blaming this on lack of IPv6 support in certain home routers and diverting any blame from Ubuntu. Let It Be they say. I am not The Fool on the Hill, but I realize that in the large scheme of people adopting Ubuntu this is an issue that should be dealt with in the OS, not by having end users told to replace their routers or hold a Internet protest
• Using WYSIWYG rich text editors like found in WordPress on Firefox 3.5 still involves a delay while trying to Get Back by using backspace while the same process on OS X or Windows does not suffer this issue

The good things:

• I like the new icon theme – it is the best default look Ubuntu has had since I started down the Long and Winding Road with Ubuntu
• Firefox 3.5 appears to be much faster in general usage and In My Life having tabs enabled by default is a great thing
• Intel graphics are finally good enough that it does not make me think of using an Old Brown Shoe; I have a Ticket to Ride now

In short there are some small warts, but I am in love with Karmic and I Feel Fine.

Educational Technology and Equity in Today’s Schools

I am scheduled to give a presentation for NYSCATE next month and I am starting to piece together the pieces and bits. Tonight I worked on my slide background. I always try to do a different custom background for my presentations. This is the product of about an hour of work.

Getting feedback on the this presentation background would be much appreciated. Thanks.

[SID: 21802] SMB Server Transaction Name BO Detected

Today was an interesting day. The UPS on the HP EVA and Blade rack decided to have an issue and Mac clients were unable to connect to SMB shares. I spent the morning engaged in trying to figure out why certain Macs were unable to connect. They would get prompted for a password… then fail to connect. After that they could not ping or do a traceroute to the SMB server. I asked the folks supporting our network switches to take a look.

Then while checking to ensure we did not have any issues with the switches from a physical standpoint (visual inspection) I noticed that the UPS supporting our blade servers and HP San was showing an error light. Reporting that issue took two and a half hours, and took me away from the Mac issue.

Upon finally being able to get my messages from the several phone calls that were missed while I was on the phone with HP. In my first message I found out that the network guys had done some packet tracing and found that the server was not responding to the Mac clients that were having the issue. This prompted me to start looking at SEP 11 to see if Symantec was causing an issue.

“Traffic from IP Address 000.00.0.000 is blocked from 10/22/2009 3:09:553 pm to 10/22/2009 3:19:53 pm.  [SID: 21802] SMB Server Transaction Name BO Detected”

1800+ messages like the one above littered the log files. The 000.00.0.000 is what it actually read; there are no protected innocent IP addresses. Did we find a Mac virus that caused problems with SMB? We did a Google search and found only and explantion of this ‘detection’.

“Severity: High
This attack could pose a serious security threat. You should take immediate action to stop any damage or prevent further damage from happening.

Microsoft Windows is prone to a remote denial-of-service vulnerability because the operating system fails to properly handle network traffic.

This issue is triggered by specially crafted TCP network packets with destination ports set to 445 or 139. This occurs when SMV_COM_TRANSACTION messages with a non-NULL-terminated are sent to vulnerable computers. The malformed SMB PIPE traffic causes a NULL-pointer dereference in the ’srv.sys’ server driver, resulting in denial-of-service conditions.

This issue may cause affected computers to crash, denying service to legitimate users. Code execution is reportedly not possible, but this has not been confirmed.

Reports indicate that this issue may be currently exploited in the wild, but this has not been confirmed.”

What was odd is that not all of our Macs were affected, just the ones running 10.5.8. I have a machine running 10.6.2 and there was no issue with it. The pattern of hits on the intrusion detection started with a small number and grew throughout the day. It looked like a malware pattern, but it could have been just more users trying to connect. We decided to submit the packet captures to Symantec. While one of us were on hold with Symantec I found the following information:

“This is a known false positive. Symantec Support is asking users that are seeing this issue to open a case ASAP.”

We waited for confirmation from Symantec that it was indeed a false positive and with it confirmed took steps to mitigate the issue. I just have to love anti-virus/malware companies that have products that actually cause a denial of service attack while claiming to prevent one.

Some questions still linger:

1. Why would a OS X connection match this ’signature’?
2. Why would OS X 10.5.8 be different from 10.6.2?

Joy!

That, my friends, is why I use Ubuntu at home.

SmartBean Article Well Received!

I wrote an article for an on-line magazine, SmartBean (thesmartbean.com), which was posted just five days ago. I just received an update on the article from the magazine.

“Charles, I wanted to give you an update on the article. Clearly your posting the link on your blog did wonders since it got picked up by all kinds of linux/ubuntu interest groups and that has resulted in a huge number of hits and tweets. It is now the most “popular” article on Smartbean (in terms of the # of views – 700+ already) You can see that ranking in the “popular” tab on the landing page as well as the Magazine page.”

The most popular article; wow! I am glad to know that people are reading the article and that it has been well received. Perhaps in some small way this can influence people to give Ubuntu a look. I am working on another article for them on programming and hope that it is as well received.

I stumbled upon Sexism this week.

I made a post this week that linked to an old Linux animation because it struck a cord with me about how far Linux has come in regards to ease of use. I was then blasted for it being sexist.

“Fembots? So you are supporting the raging sexism in open source software development? Shame on you!”

I then posted an apology to anyone that might have been offended by the animation. No, I did not make it. I realized though that the word “fembots” might have been taken as offensive and that is why I offered an apology. That post got another response claiming I was just a clueless white male.

“Of course you would think this. You’re a white male. You don’t understand because you lack the perspective of those oppressed or otherwise negatively affected by your kind. Matt Zimmerman had a great quote on his blog about white males and how clueless they are. He at least gets it.”

While this response is very harsh I am always willing to try and find out, as best I can, what their perspective is. So I used Google and found Matt Zimmerman’s blog. It turns out Mark Shuttleworth gave a keynote speech at LinuxCon that was sexist. While it has been claimed that is was unintentional the speech was flawed and I now understand the reason why I have received these comments. So, in a way, I opened my door and walked out in to a combat zone without realizing it. I will not make a claim that my ignorance to what was going on excuses my post nor invalidates people being upset by it. It is just what happened.

I have read quite a bit about what happened and I understand that most people do not think that Mark is sexist. They think that he spoke based on what surrounds him. His thought process is formed from the same era as mine; an era in which ‘he’ was default in the English language. Despite that he should know better than to let those things slip. When they do slip he should offer an apology.

What is worse than what Mark said however is the responses that some of the people got who were complaining about the keynote. I will not even do them justice by quoting them here. They were unbelieveable. I am ashamed at some of things that people said.

I certainly do not want to exclude women, marginalize the contributions of women or do anything that makes them feel unwelcomed in the FOSS community. I have two girls and I want them to be comfortable with technology, science, math and computer science. If they decide to go in to programming I do not want them to face the undercurrents of sexism that I have seen in the blogs and respones concering Mark’s keynote address. I also have a son and I do not want him to face ridcule if he chooses to go in to a traditionally female vocation. I know I will make mistakes like Mark. I hope that I won’t and I strive to be more concious of making such errors, but when I do I will apologize.

As unfortuante as my timing was I am glad that I made the fembot post… it has exposed me to a side of the community I had not seen. It will help me to better understand some of the undercurrents I have seen, but not understood. In short it will make me more aware of doing what I can to eliminate sexism.

Qimo – An Ubuntu Offshoot

I wrote an article for thesmartbean.com about introducing your child to Linux. It was an article that was based on questions given to me by one of the contributors to the site. One of the comments mentioned another child friendly distribution based on Ubuntu and I want to share it with you. The name of the distribution is Qimo and it looks to be an interesting distribution. I will likely load it up in a VM and give it a test run.

“Fembots” causes offense?

A recent post about a cartoon that I posted drew the ire of a person going by the name of Sweetshark.

“Fembots? So you are supporting the raging sexism in open source software development? Shame on you!”

The animation that I linked to is this one. I guess if a person was looking for a reason to complain they could find fault with the animation, but I really never looked at the animation that way. I saw it as funny. Certainly the goats, brains and henchmen could also find fault with the animation upon second review. I just looked at it as a pro-Linux Apple spoof ad that showed how easy running Linux has become. There is no more need to patch your Kernel or check your version dependencies – you can do that, but you do not have too.

Perhaps, because I am not a developer, I am not aware of the issue; is this issue really this much of an issue in Open Source development? If it is I certainly do not want to accidentally support ’sexism’. If I offended anyone by linking to what I thought simply a humorous spoof ad I apologize.

Ubergeek – Linux Supervillain.

I love this animation… just love it.

Fembots, Atomic Supermen and Henchmen with bad teeth – FTW!

It is amazing to think how ‘easy’ running Linux has become. Ubuntu is easier to install than Windows in my honest opinion.