InformationWeek.com

Join Kevin Mitnick - the "most wanted computer criminal in the world" - as he shares his secrets on the security threats facing corporate America.

Welcome Guest. | Log In| Register | Membership Benefits

November 16, 1998

Red Hat Linux: Almost Free, And Full Of Functions

Open source code leads to easy modifications

By Sean Gallagher

First Look

f you believe the leaks, Microsoft is becoming concerned about the Linux operating system. Based on Red Hat Linux 5.2, Red Hat Software Inc.'s the latest distribution of the Linux operating system--and the host of commercial software becoming available for the platform--there's plenty of reason for Microsoft to be concerned.

One major advantage of Red Hat 5.2--and all Linux distributions--over Windows NT is that it comes with its own source code. That makes it ideally suited for organizations with a do-it-yourself IT culture to gain maximum control over the operating system. Organizations with specialized needs and programming expertise modify the operating system as required. Application developers can also integrate their software with the operating system at a very low level. Modifications to the Linux operating system such as the Beowulf CPU clustering technology and the Los Alamos National Lab's Avalon Linux-based supercomputer use off-the-shelf hardware and modifications to the Linux operating system to create highly scalable systems. The Beowulf cluster technology is available from Red Hat.

Any developer can derive benefits from Linux's open source. That openness also makes it possible to rapidly patch bugs or security holes found in the operating system, and to add features incrementally as they become available. When a vulnerability to a certain type of malicious TCP/IP attack was found in the Linux operating system last year, a patch was available within 24 hours; similar security patches for Windows NT often take much longer to become generally available, and the source code of the fixes (and of NT itself) is hardly ever available for user review.

There's no way to cover all of the features of Red Hat 5.2 here--even most books on Linux fall short of that goal. So I set out to evaluate the operating system through the eyes of a Windows NT administrator.

There are many things about Red Hat 5.2 that are reminiscent of NT. For one thing, there's the default X Windows interface, which includes a task bar with a start button just like NT 4.0's--except for the Red Hat logo. In some ways, I found Red Hat 5.2 even easier to deal with than NT--particularly when it came to the install.

Those used to setting up Windows NT servers will find that some aspects of Red Hat 5.2's install require a bit more advance manual reading and preparation, but overall, the installation is faster than the average NT 4.0 installation process by several orders of magnitude.

The installation program for Red Hat 5.2 offers three ways to install the operating system--a workstation and a server installation, which are highly automated, and a custom installation, which provides greater flexibility but requires greater preparation and interaction. I set up two Red Hat 5.2 systems: a workstation, using the workstation installation, and a server system using the custom one.

The Red Hat 5.2 install CD is bootable, so systems that support booting from a CD-ROM can be set up without a boot diskette. The Red Hat 5.2 distribution media also come with a boot diskette for systems that don't support a CD boot.

The workstation installation, the most automated of the procedures, took all of 10 minutes. It was easier than installing Windows 98, and occupied 400 Mbytes of the Jaz drive on my Hewlett-Packard Vectra XW workstation--leaving another 500 Mbytes for other software, including a demonstration version of Corel WordPerfect 7, which I used to write this review. The base install includes Netscape's Communicator. It took me less than a half-hour to perform a complete installation of Red Hat 5.2--including all of the bundled software packages, network hardware and software configuration, and display configuration--to configure an NFS share and user accounts, and to get Windows NFS clients connected to it. With one reboot, the server was operational.

Adding and managing software packages was a snap. Red Hat's Graphical Linux Install Tool offers a folder-based view of installed and available software packages. Glint makes Windows' Add/Remove Programs control panel applet look anemic, providing both an easy-to-use interface and much of the querying and package-management capability of the RPM command line tool.

One of the beauties of Linux is that you don't need to be at the console to handle most post-install configuration tasks. Once I got the Linux server up and configured an administrative user, I was able to handle most other tasks from a remote X Windows console or through the Web interface to Linuxconfig, Linux's answer to Microsoft Management Console.

Most of the networking and system administration configuration of a Red Hat 5.2 system can be set from an X Windows graphical Windows-like tool called gnome or from the Web interface. Administrators can navigate through settings with gnome's Explorer-like configuration tree, and edit selected settings in a multitabbed panel.

Getting the server itself set up was a breeze. But configuring the server to integrate directly with native Windows networking proved more of a challenge. Ironically, one thing that can't be configured from the Windows-like management interface is the Samba Windows networking service.

Samba is an SMB (Server Message Block) networking service developed independently of Linux. Samba allows systems to connect to shared drives on Windows, OS/2, and LAN Manager systems, and lets them act as file servers for Windows and other clients.

To configure Samba, you'll have to edit a couple of configuration files and run a command-line script or two at the minimum. If you are using Samba as your only servers for Windows 95 clients, it's fairly easy to successfully complete these tasks--the configuration file for Samba looks remarkably like a Windows for Workgroups WIN.INI configuration file in its format and syntax, so Windows networking veterans will feel at home.

However, if you've got a Windows NT domain and have installed Service Pack 3 on your NT clients and servers (required for most of the latest software for NT 4.0), you'll have problems connecting to Samba servers. SP3 eliminated NT 4's support for clear-text passwords--it set encrypted passwords as the default for logins. Those who want to include Red Hat 5.2 servers with Samba in their NT domains are faced with two choices: They can either set the default password type for NT back to clear text with a change to an NT registry setting, or they can use Samba's encrypted password capability, based on the encryption key used by NT. You may just want to stick to NFS.

Red Hat 5.2's application services match up favorably with those that come with Windows NT 4.0. Out of the box, Red Hat 5.2 is a full-featured application server, in some cases surpassing what NT provides (such as integrated E-mail and a bundled database server), and falling short in others (there's no counterpart to Microsoft's Transaction Server in Linux, for example).

Linux's answer to Internet Information Server is the Apache Web server, an open-source server with a great deal of application support--even Microsoft supports Apache through its FrontPage Web tool, providing server hooks for it.

There are some applications included in Red Hat 5.2 but not with NT, including POP and IMAP mail services and NNTP discussion group services--and that's just scratching the surface. Though Windows NT's Option Pack includes NNTP and SMTP services, they don't go to the depth of the features in Red Hat 5.2. Red Hat even includes an open-source SQL database known as PostgreSQL DBMS, based on the Postgres and Postgres95 databases originally developed at the University of California at Berkeley. There's a freely downloadable ODBC driver for PostgreSQL at www.insightdist.com/psqlodbc/psqlodbc_download.html, which will let Windows applications access the server, and a host of other tools as well.

There's also an assortment of scripting and development tools. There's everything from C and C++ compilers to a Basic compiler to Perl script; there's also Python, a high-level scripting language that includes an interface builder for X Windows. Commercial development tools such as Kai C++ are also available for Linux; Metrowerks Inc. will release a version of its CodeWarrior tool for C++ and Java early next year.

In the end, it comes down to barriers to entry. Linux has essentially no capital investment barrier to entry--at $49.95 for what amounts to a site license, it's not the software investment that's at issue. Instead, Linux has a mental and guts barrier to entry; you have to be willing to invest intellectual capital in adapting it to the needs of your organization. And you also must have the courage to deploy technology that has noncommercial roots and an alternative upgrade model.