Blogging is futile

Fedora Legacy useless?

abe+blog@deuxchevaux.org (Axel Beckert) — Mon, 09 Oct 2006 15:16:51 +0200

For a (much too long) time, we ran our three AMD 64 bit virus scanners and spam filter boxes with Fedora Core 4. Since the the official support ended a few months ago when Fedora Core 6 Test 2 came out, so we decided to switch them over to support through the Fedora Legacy Project.

For testing purposes we first switched over one of the three boxes. But the test failed: Although the changes (as documented on the Fedora Legacy home page) seemed to work fine, not a single update came until the end of last week, even though there were partially remotely exploitable security issues in OpenSSL, OpenSSH, gzip, etc. during that time. There were also no announcements on the list since FC4 switched over to the Fedora Legacy Project, not for FC4 nor for any other distribution maintained by the Fedora Legacy Project.

So what the heck does the Fedora Legacy Project if not security updates?

I would be very happy if I could switch over those boxes to Debian or even Ubuntu, but there’s no BiArch support (running 32 bit applications on 64 bit operating systems transparently) in Debian (and therefore neither in Ubuntu) yet without a lot of manual fiddling and chroots, so we can’t run our 32 bit virus scanners on those 64 bit boxes with a debianesk operating system yet.

Today we’ve upgraded the last of those three boxes to Fedora Core 5.

Dynamic vs Static Network Configuration

abe+blog@deuxchevaux.org (Axel Beckert) — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 16:03:49 +0200

A guest researcher today called us, because his laptop with Fedora Core 4 didn’t get any working IP address. That problem was solved quite quickly: The “Internet Connection Wizard” didn’t allow him to choose a dynamic configuration via DHCP. It was greyed out and the static configuration was one for a private 192.168.* network.

I quickly found out, that “Network Device Control” allowed us to switch to DHCP. After deleting /etc/resolv.conf, it also got the right DNS servers.

But whatever I restarted, it didn’t set a default route although it did get one by DHCP and had it documented in its lease file.

After about one and a half hour of debugging configurations and network configuration scripts I found out, that if the environment variable $GATEWAY is set, it ignores the one given by DHCP. Then I grepped for GATEWAY in the config file. But I just found the default gateway configured for the old, now greyed out static IP configuration.

Although I told myself “No, it can’t be!” I commented out the default gateway of the now unused static configuration. And yes, I wasn’t mistrustful enough about Fedora: It worked. You really have to change parts of the not selected static IP configuration to make the selected dynamic one to work.

Thanks, Fedora! *bangingtheheadontothetable*