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Mailbag

This month's answers created by:

[ Ben Okopnik, Faber Fedor, Joey Prestia, Kapil Hari Paranjape, René Pfeiffer, Neil Youngman, Rick Moen, Thomas Adam ]
...and you, our readers!

Our Mailbag


Interactive map of Linux kernel source

Constantine Shulyupin [const at linuxdriver.co.il]


Thu, 11 Sep 2008 21:00:37 +0300

The Linux kernel is one of most complex open source project. There is a lot of books, however it is still a difficult subject to comprehend. The Interactive map of Linux kernel (http://www.makelinux.net/kernel_map) gives you top-down view to the kernel. You could see most important layers, functionalities, modules, functions and calls. You can zoom in and drag around to see details. Each item on the map is hypertext link to source code or documentation.

-- 
Constantine Shulyupin
Freelance Embedded Linux Engineer
http://www.linuxdriver.co.il/


Linux (sendmail/imap) and Mobile Phone access

Rick Moen [rick at linuxmafia.com]


Sun, 21 Sep 2008 17:22:40 -0700

Thread was about software options for "syncing" smartphones with calendar/mail servers (more or less).

----- Forwarded message from Rick Moen <rick@linuxmafia.com> -----

Date: Sun, 21 Sep 2008 17:20:36 -0700
From: Rick Moen <rick@linuxmafia.com>
To: luv-main@luv.asn.au
Subject: Re: Linux (sendmail/imap) and Mobile Phone access
Quoting James Harper (james.harper@bendigoit.com.au):

> According to Slashdot, Zarafa has just been open sourced.

Rules of thumb:

1. Be skeptical of any claim that a Web 2.0 application is open source until you've carefully examined the actual licence. There's been an extremely large amount of cheating, deception, and outright lying about licensing in this market.

2. Be doubly, super-skeptical of those claims when you go through the project's Web front page and find three claims of open sourcing but nothing whatsosever about the licence.

In this case, a great deal of digging, one finally, on a subpage, finds a Sept. 18 press release saying that the "full core" of the Zarafa platform will be at some unspecified time be available under Affero GPLv3. Affero GPLv3 is indeed a genuinely open source licence targeted at the Web 2.0 / SaaS / hosted-software / ASP market -- even though it isn't yet OSI-certified.

The real remaining question, then, is whether the "full core" -- whatever that means -- will be turn out to be a viable, useful piece of software. Another scam that's extremely common in Web 2.0 space is to have a deliberately buggy, undocumented, incomplete "community" version under open source licensing, functioning strictly as a sales come-on to upsell users to a "commercial" (proprietary) version.

I'm trying to remember the leading example. Hmm, Sug[censored for reasons of legal self-defence]

If you want to know without doing a pilot installation of your own, wait for comments on the Debian package. ;->

----- End forwarded message -----

[ Thread continues here (4 messages/6.73kB) ]


an address book/ diary programme ...

Jim Jackson [jj at franjam.org.uk]


Sat, 6 Sep 2008 01:12:19 +0100 (BST)

Hi, all

A friend is looking for recommendations for cross platform software, ideally linux, MacOS-X, Microsoft - "an address book/ diary programme that can be synchronised with other computers. Ideally this would work like the old Psion one, where it can be synchronised automatically with Lotus Organizer or Microsoft Outlook on an office computer."

Any sage advice?

Jim

[ Thread continues here (2 messages/1.46kB) ]


Vector Linux how to question

Vesna [greemlimusine at chariot.net.au]


Fri, 19 Sep 2008 06:07:44 +1000

Hi I a, new to Linux I have installed Vector Linux on my machine but unfortunately where I live only dial up internet is available and I can only dial up the internet if I am signed in as root, if I sign in with the other account, chestnut dialer will not dial up at all it keeps telling me it cannot open the modem, is there a way to be able to use the other account to dial up the internet since I keep getting the warning message that I shouldn't run the computer in root?Thanks Vesna

[ Thread continues here (3 messages/4.62kB) ]


Privileged Port Access for Users

Britto I [britto_can at yahoo.com]


Wed, 10 Sep 2008 07:12:53 -0700 (PDT)

Folks

For some reason i want one my service should use the port < 1024

It says access denied for the users other than root. Can we have any workaround for this

-- 
Britto

[ Thread continues here (6 messages/4.86kB) ]


remote backup commnand

saikiran gundeti [saikirangundeti at gmail.com]


Thu, 11 Sep 2008 21:31:15 +0530

Hi,

Could you please provide for remote tape backups with cpio or tar.

---------------------- saikirangundeti

[ Thread continues here (2 messages/1.05kB) ]


bad sector removing

M.Rashid Shahzad [donsmooker at yahoo.com]


Thu, 18 Sep 2008 20:25:27 -0700 (PDT)

Please Reply the bad sector removing method and bad sector removing the software name or this software use for the procedure.All method reply the easy words. Please help this working.Thanks.Bye

[ Thread continues here (6 messages/5.55kB) ]


License Question

Martin [martin at marcher.name]


Sun, 21 Sep 2008 01:45:08 +0200

Hello,

according to your author FAQ[0] under "Copyright Issues" you state that you will publish the works sent to you under the Open Publication License. The Wikipedia article states that the author of the OPL recommends using a Createive Commons License as a replacement. I understand that there are issues with the existing articles which may prevent relicencing them but for new articles would it be OK if I'd like to articles to be published under a Creative Commons License - personally I prefer "by-nc-sa" for written works and "by-sa" for code works.

Given that efforts to keep the OPL updated seem to have stopped (actually never made it beyond a version 1.0) at 1999-07-08 I think switching to a CC license should be considered, maybe even let authors choose between

 * default (stay with OPL)
 * the CC options

any thoughts on that?

regards martin

PS: no I don't think you can't google but I guess it's a lot easier to just click the link of my sources, we all got enough work to do.

[0] http://linuxgazette.net/faq/author.html#policy

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Open_Publication_License&oldid=230659639

[2] http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/

-- 
http://www.xing.com/profile/Martin_Marcher
 
You are not free to read this message,
by doing so, you have violated my licence
and are required to urinate publicly. Thank you.

[ Thread continues here (11 messages/51.39kB) ]


Using DNS blacklists to reject mail.

Joey Prestia [joey at linuxamd.com]


Fri, 19 Sep 2008 19:09:22 -0700

Hi all,

I am wanting to gather some information about using DNSBL on mail servers. I have been reading the information on most of the more popular used blacklists like Spamcop and Spamhaus. Now I have come up with all kinds of questions on the subject.

I would like to hear from any mail server administrators of their experiences with these methods of rejecting spam at the "gate". It seems apparent that one must gage what type of spam and what type of lists to use very carefully because of the possibility of refusing valid mail?

Is the implementation of using a DNSBL definitely something mail server administrators should consider?

Is it common practice to use spamassassin and DNSBL together to reduce bombardment of spam?

Although I have been using spamassassin for some time and see that it does a very good job of filtering and correctly labeling mail. Also the majority seems it could be prevented altogether by implementing the correct DNSBL or DNSBL's at the mail server level as I can see by spamassassin headers.

One thing I have heard is that it is not a good practice to put into effect something like this because many bigger institutions can and periodically do get put on blacklists, through no fault of their own. One example I have seen: http://www.stanford.edu/services/email/antispam/blacklist.html is this an accurate representation of some of the possible effects of this being put into practice?

Any recommendations as to suggested best practices in using these measures?

Thanks,

-- 
Joey Prestia
L. G. Mirror Coordinator
http://linuxamd.com
Main Site http://linuxgazette.net

[ Thread continues here (9 messages/19.08kB) ]



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Published in Issue 155 of Linux Gazette, October 2008

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