Linux Dictionary Version 0.12 Author: Binh Nguyen Editor: Sam Varghese Database Creator: Martin Wheeler Maintainer: Dale Rogers 2003-12-19 This document is designed to be a resource for those Linux users wishing to seek clarification on Linux/UNIX/POSIX related terms and jargon. At approximately 9000 definitions and one thousand pages it is one of the largest Linux related dictionaries currently available. Due to the rapid rate at which new terms are being created it has been decided that this will be an active project. We welcome input into the content of this document. At this moment in time half yearly updates are being envisaged. The Linux Dictionary online database may be accessed from its home page at [http://startext.demon.co.uk/Linux-Dictionary/] http://startext.demon.co.uk/ Linux-Dictionary/ Readers may query the dictionary database by keyword, generate a complete listing of all terms and definitions marked up in HTML, or contribute to the Linux Dictionary wiki at [http://startext.demon.co.uk/distwiki/index.php? LinuxDictionary] http://startext.demon.co.uk/distwiki/index.php? LinuxDictionary Copyright 2003 Binh Nguyen Trademarks are owned by their owners. Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2; with no Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled "GNU Free Documentation License". ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Table of Contents Source and pre-formatted versions available 1. Linux Dictionary Punctuation A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A. About the Author B. Contributors C. Disclaimer D. Feedback E. References F. GNU Free Documentation License F.1. PREAMBLE F.2. APPLICABILITY AND DEFINITIONS F.3. VERBATIM COPYING F.4. COPYING IN QUANTITY F.5. MODIFICATIONS F.6. COMBINING DOCUMENTS F.7. COLLECTIONS OF DOCUMENTS F.8. AGGREGATION WITH INDEPENDENT WORKS F.9. TRANSLATION F.10. TERMINATION F.11. FUTURE REVISIONS OF THIS LICENSE F.12. ADDENDUM: How to use this License for your documents ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Source and pre-formatted versions available The source code and other machine readable formats of this book can be found on the Internet at the Linux Documentation Project home page [http:// www.tldp.org/] http://www.tldp.org/ ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Chapter 1. Linux Dictionary Punctuation $BASH environment variable Expands to the full pathname used to invoke this instance of bash. From Rute-Users-Guide $BASH_VERSION environment variable Expands to the version number of this instance of bash. From Rute-Users-Guide $CDPATH environment variable The search path for the cd command. This is a colon-separated list of directories in which the shell looks for destination directories specified by the cd command. A sample value is ``.:~:/usr''. From Rute-Users-Guide $ENV environment variable If this parameter is set when bash is executing a shell script, its value is interpreted as a filename containing commands to initialize the shell, as in .bashrc. The value of ENV is subjected to parameter expansion, command substitution, and arithmetic expansion before being interpreted as a pathname. PATH is not used to search for the resultant pathname. From Rute-Users-Guide $FIGNORE environment variable A colon-separated list of suffixes to ignore when performing filename completion (see READLINE below). A filename whose suffix matches one of the entries in FIGNORE is excluded from the list of matched filenames. A sample value is ``.o:~''. From Rute-Users-Guide $HISTCMD environment variable The history number, or index in the history list, of the current command. If HISTCMD is unset, it loses its special properties, even if it is subsequently reset. From Rute-Users-Guide $HISTCONTROL environment variable If set to a value of ignorespace, lines which begin with a space character are not entered on the history list. If set to a value of ignoredups, lines matching the last history line are not entered. A value of ignoreboth combines the two options. If unset, or if set to any other value than those above, all lines read by the parser are saved on the history list. From Rute-Users-Guide $HISTFILE environment variable The name of the file in which command history is saved. (See HISTORY below.) The default value is ~/.bash_history. If unset, the command history is not saved when an interactive shell exits. From Rute-Users-Guide $HISTFILESIZE environment variable The maximum number of lines contained in the history file. When this variable is assigned a value, the history file is truncated, if necessary, to contain no more than that number of lines. The default value is 500. From Rute-Users-Guide $HISTSIZE environment variable The number of commands to remember in the command history (see HISTORY below). The default value is 500. From Rute-Users-Guide $HOME environment variable The home directory of the current user; the default argument for the cd builtin command. From Rute-Users-Guide $HOSTFILE Contains the name of a file in the same format as /etc/hosts that should be read when the shell needs to complete a hostname. The file may be changed interactively; the next time hostname completion is attempted bash adds the contents of the new file to the already existing database. From Rute-Users-Guide $HOSTTYPE Automatically set to a string that uniquely describes the type of machine on which bash is executing. The default is system-dependent. From Rute-Users-Guide $IFS In UNIX, the $IFS variable separates commands. It is usually conigured to be the semicolon (;) and newline characters. However, it can be reconfigured to be other characters as well. Data-driven attacks will sometimes seek to reset the IFS variable (e.g. IFS=x), then cause execution within the data field wihtout having to insert shell metacharacters. Tidbit: On Linux, the $FF variable may also be used like $IFS. From Hacking-Lexicon $IFS The Internal Field Separator that is used for word splitting after expansion and to split lines into words with the read builtin command. The default value is ``''. From Rute-Users-Guide $IGNOREEOF Controls the action of the shell on receipt of an EOF character as the sole input. If set, the value is the number of consecutive EOF characters typed as the first characters on an input line before bash exits. If the variable exists but does not have a numeric value, or has no value, the default value is 10. If it does not exist, EOF signifies the end of input to the shell. This is only in effect for interactive shells. From Rute-Users-Guide $INPUTRC environment variable The filename for the readline startup file, overriding the default of ~ /.inputrc (see READLINE below). From Rute-Users-Guide $LINENO Each time this parameter is referenced, the shell substitutes a decimal number representing the current sequential line number (starting with 1) within a script or function. When not in a script or function, the value substituted is not guaranteed to be meaningful. When in a function, the value is not the number of the source line that the command appears on (that information has been lost by the time the function is executed), but is an approximation of the number of simple commands executed in the current function. If LINENO is unset, it loses its special properties, even if it is subsequently reset. From Rute-Users-Guide $MAIL If this parameter is set to a filename and the MAILPATH variable is not set, bash informs the user of the arrival of mail in the specified file. From Rute-Users-Guide $MAILCHECK Specifies how often (in seconds) bash checks for mail. The default is 60 seconds. When it is time to check for mail, the shell does so before prompting. If this variable is unset, the shell disables mail checking. From Rute-Users-Guide $MAILPATH A colon-separated list of pathnames to be checked for mail. The message to be printed may be specified by separating the pathname from the message with a `?'. $_ stands for the name of the current mailfile. Example: MAILPATH='/usr/spool/mail/bfox?"You have mail":~/shell-mail?"$_ has mail!"' Bash supplies a default value for this variable, but the location of the user mail files that it uses is system dependent (e.g., / usr/spool/mail/$USER). From Rute-Users-Guide $MAIL_WARNING If set, and a file that bash is checking for mail has been accessed since the last time it was checked, the message ``The mail in mailfile has been read'' is printed. From Rute-Users-Guide $OLDPWD The previous working directory as set by the cd command. From Rute-Users-Guide $OSTYPE Automatically set to a string that describes the operating system on which bash is executing. The default is system-dependent. From Rute-Users-Guide $PATH The search path for commands. It is a colon-separated list of directories in which the shell looks for commands (see COMMAND EXECUTION below). The default path is system-dependent, and is set by the administrator who installs bash. A common value is ``/usr/gnu/bin:/usr/ local/bin:/usr/ucb:/bin:/usr/bin:.''. From Rute-Users-Guide $PATH The shell looks for commands and programs in a list of file paths stored in the PATH environment variable. An environment variable stores information in a place where other programs and commands can access it. Environment variables store information such as the shell that you are using, your login name, and your current working directory. To see a list of all the environment variables currently defined; type 'set' at the prompt. When you type a command at the shell prompt, the shell will look for that command's program file in each directory listed in the PATH variable, in order. The first program found matching the command you typed will be run. If the command's program file is not in a directory listed in you PATH environment variable, the shell returns a "commands not found" error. By default, the shell does not look in your current working directory or your home directory for commands This is really a security mechanism so that you don't execute programs by accident. What if a malicious user put a harmful program called ls in your home directory? If you typed ls and the shell looked for the fake program in your home directory before the real program in the /bin directory, what do you think woul dhappen? If you thought bad things, you are on the right track. Since your PATH doesn't have the current directory as one of its search locations, programs in your current directory must be called with an absolute path of a relative path specified as './program-name'. To see what directories are part of your PATH enter this command: # echo $PATH /usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/ bin/X11 From Complete-Idiot's Guide to Linux $PROMPT_COMMAND If set, the value is executed as a command prior to issuing each primary prompt. From Rute-Users-Guide $PS1 The value of this parameter is expanded (see PROMPTING below) and used as the primary prompt string. The default value is ``bash\$ ''. From Rute-Users-Guide $PS2 The value of this parameter is expanded and used as the secondary prompt string. The default is ``> ''. From Rute-Users-Guide $PS3 The value of this parameter is used as the prompt for the select command (see SHELL GRAMMAR above). From Rute-Users-Guide $PS4 The value of this parameter is expanded and the value is printed before each command bash displays during an execution trace. The first character of PS4 is replicated multiple times, as necessary, to indicate multiple levels of indirection. The default is ``+ ''. From Rute-Users-Guide $PWD The current working directory as set by the cd command. From Rute-Users-Guide $RANDOM Each time this parameter is referenced, a random integer is generated. The sequence of random numbers may be initialized by assigning a value to RANDOM. If RANDOM is unset, it loses its special properties, even if it is subsequently reset. From Rute-Users-Guide $SECONDS Each time this parameter is referenced, the number of seconds since shell invocation is returned. If a value is assigned to SECONDS. the value returned upon subsequent references is the number of seconds since the assignment plus the value assigned. If SECONDS is unset, it loses its special properties, even if it is subsequently reset. From Rute-Users-Guide $SHLVL Incremented by one each time an instance of bash is started. From Rute-Users-Guide .Z File compressed with the compress compression program. From Rute-Users-Guide Can be deflated using the 'uncompress' utility. .a Archive. lib*.a is a static library. From Rute-Users-Guide .alias X Window System font alias catalog. From Rute-Users-Guide .au Audio format (original Sun Microsystems generic sound file). From Rute-Users-Guide .avi Video format. From Rute-Users-Guide .awk awk program source file. From Rute-Users-Guide .bib bibtex LATEX bibliography source file. From Rute-Users-Guide .bmp Microsoft Bitmap file image format. From Rute-Users-Guide .bz File compressed with the bzip compression algorithm/program. These files are mostly redundant now. The vast majority of files are compressed using the superior bzip2 program. From Rute-Users-Guide .bz2 File compressed with the bzip2 compression program. From Rute-Users-Guide .c C program source code. From Rute-Users-Guide .cc, .cxx, .C, .cpp C++ program source code. From Rute-Users-Guide .cf, .cfg Configuration file or script. From Rute-Users-Guide .cgi Executable script that produces web page output. From Rute-Users-Guide .conf, .config Configuration file. From Rute-Users-Guide .csh csh shell script. From Rute-Users-Guide .db Database file. From Rute-Users-Guide .deb Debian package for the Debian distribution. From Rute-Users-Guide .diff Output of the diff program indicating the difference between files or source trees. From Rute-Users-Guide .dir X Window System font/other database directory. From Rute-Users-Guide .dvi Device-independent file. Formatted output of .tex LATEX file. From Rute-Users-Guide .el Lisp program source. From Rute-Users-Guide .forward On UNIX, a user can place an e-mail address in his ".forward" file. This will cause all e-mail sent to his account to be forwarded to that e-mail address. This file a is prime target of attackers. If they can overwrite this file, they can subtly start capturing the user's e-mail. This is especially dangerous if the the account in question is the root account. Note that the user doesn't have to know any about this file or have one on his system. The mere creation of this file by the intruder will activate this feature. Furthermore, since this file starts with a 'dot', it is normally hidden from the user, so they won't even be ware that this feature exists. From Hacking-Lexicon .g3 G3 fax format image file. From Rute-Users-Guide .gif, .giff GIF image file. From Rute-Users-Guide .gz File compressed with the gzip compression program. From Rute-Users-Guide .h C/C++ program header file. From Rute-Users-Guide .htm, .html, .shtm, .html Hypertext Markup Language. A web page of some sort. From Rute-Users-Guide .i SWIG source, or C preprocessor output. From Rute-Users-Guide .in configure input file. From Rute-Users-Guide .info Info pages read with the info command. From Rute-Users-Guide .jpg, .jpeg JPEG image file. From Rute-Users-Guide .lj LaserJet file. Suitable input to a HP LaserJet printer. From Rute-Users-Guide .log Log file of a system service. This file grows with status messages of some system program. From Rute-Users-Guide .lsm LINUX Software Map entry. From Rute-Users-Guide .lyx LyX word processor document. From Rute-Users-Guide .man Man page. From Rute-Users-Guide .mf Meta-Font font program source file. From Rute-Users-Guide .pbm PBM image file format. From Rute-Users-Guide .pcf PCF image file--intermediate representation for fonts. X Window System font. From Rute-Users-Guide .pcx PCX image file. From Rute-Users-Guide .pdf Formatted document similar to PostScript or dvi. From Rute-Users-Guide .pfb X Window System font file. From Rute-Users-Guide .php PHP program source code (used for web page design). From Rute-Users-Guide .pl Perl or Prolog program source code. From Rute-Users-Guide .ps PostScript file, for printing or viewing. From Rute-Users-Guide .py Python program source code. From Rute-Users-Guide .rpm RedHat Package Manager rpm file. From Rute-Users-Guide .sgml Standard Generalized Markup Language. Used to create documents to be converted to many different formats. From Rute-Users-Guide .sh sh shell script. From Rute-Users-Guide It can be interpreted by any Bourne compatible shell. .so Shared object file. lib*.so is a Dynamically Linked Library. [Executable program code shared by more than one program to save disk space and memory.] From Rute-Users-Guide .spd Speedo X Window System font file. From Rute-Users-Guide .src.rpm Source RPM file. A 'tarball' that can be recompiled and installed which also allows RPM based systems to manage them. From Binh .tar tarred directory tree. From Rute-Users-Guide .tar.gz See tarball. From Binh .tcl Tcl/Tk source code (programming language). From Rute-Users-Guide .tex TEX or LATEX document. LATEX is for document processing and typesetting. From Rute-Users-Guide .texi, .texinfo Texinfo source. Info pages are compiled from these. From Rute-Users-Guide .tfm LATEX font metric file. From Rute-Users-Guide .tga TARGA image file. From Rute-Users-Guide .tgz Directory tree that has been archived with tar, and then compressed with gzip. Also a package for the Slackware distribution. From Rute-Users-Guide .tiff TIFF image file. From Rute-Users-Guide .ttf Truetype font. From Rute-Users-Guide .txt Plain English text file. From Rute-Users-Guide .voc Audio format (Soundblaster's own format). From Rute-Users-Guide .wav Audio format (sound files common to Microsoft Windows). From Rute-Users-Guide .xml XML source file. See XML. From Binh .xpm XPM image file. From Rute-Users-Guide .y yacc source file. From Rute-Users-Guide .zip File compressed with the pkzip (or PKZIP.EXE for DOS) compression program. From Rute-Users-Guide /bin A directory containing executable programs, primarily binary files. From I-gloss /bin A directory that contains executable programs, the majority of which are stored in binary files. Most programs are found in directories /bin and / usr/bin; however, users often keep additional programs in private bin directories, such as /home/linux/bin. From Linux Guide @FirstLinux /dev/null On UNIX, this is a virtual-file that can be written to. Data written to this file gets discarded. It is similar to the file call NUL on Windows machines. Key point: When rooting a machine, intruders will often redirect logging to /dev/null For example, the command ln -s /dev/null .bash_history will cause the system to stop logging bash commands. Culture: In the vernacular, means much the same thing as black hole. Typical usage: if you don't like what I have to say, please direct your comments to /dev/null. From Hacking-Lexicon /etc The directory on UNIX where the majority of the configuration information is kept. It is roughly analogous to the Windows registry. Of particular interest is /etc/passwd file that stores all the passwords. Key point: If an intruder can read files from this directory, then they can likely use the information to attack the machine. From Hacking-Lexicon /etc/hosts The file that contains a list of hostname to IP address mappings. In the old days of the Internet, this is how machines contacted each other. A master hosts file was maintained and downloaded to machines on a regular basis. Then DNS came along. Like the vestigial appendix. On Windows, this file is stored in %SystemRoot%\system32\drivers\etc. Hack: If you can write files to a user's machine, then you can add entries to his/her hosts files to point to your own machine instead. For example, put an entry for www.microsoft.com to point to your machine, then proxy all the connections for the user. This will allow you to perform a man in the middle attack. From Hacking-Lexicon /etc/hosts.equiv On UNIX, the "hosts.equiv" file lists other hosts that can be thought of as "equivalent" to this one. This machine will therefore "trust" these other machines. Users connecting to this machine from the listed machines will not have to present a password, it is assumed that these other machines have already verified the password. Analogy: The European Union (EU) doesn't have passport control between countries. You only have to present your passport when entering the first European country, then you can roam freely once inside the union. The "hosts.equiv" file creates a similar union of machines. Hack: Hackers will target this file. If their target is machine A, they may instead find that A trusts B, and B may be easier to break into first. At that point, the hacker can hop back to A using an account on B. Likewise, if a hacker can write to this file, they can tell the system to trust any other system on the network (including the hackers own machine). Hack: Older software would do a reverse DNS lookup on a connecting IP address. If the hacker controlled the DNS server, s/he could return a trusted domain name, and therefore be allowed into the system. Another older hack is the default "+" entry. From Hacking-Lexicon /etc/passwd The UNIX file that contains the account information, such as username, password, login directory, and default shell. All normal users on the system can read this file. Key point: The passwords are encrypted, so even though everyone can read the file, it doesn't automatically guarantee access to the system. However, programs like crack are very effective at decrypting the passwords. On any system with many accounts, there is a good chance the hacker will be able to crack some of the accounts if they get hold of this file. Key point: Modern UNIX systems allow for shadowed password files, stored in locations like /etc/shadow that only root has access to. The normal password file still exists, minus the password information. This provides backwards compatibility for programs that still must access the password file for account information, but which have no interest in the passwords themselves. Key point: The chief goal of most hacks against UNIX systems is to retrieve the password file. Many attacks do not compromise the machine directly, but are able to read files from the machine, such as this file. From Hacking-Lexicon /etc/services On UNIX, the configuration file /etc/services maps port numbers to named services. Key point: Its role in life is so that programs can do a getportbyname() sockets call in their code in order to get what port they should use. For example, a POP3 email daemon would do a getportbyname ("pop3") in order to retrieve the number 110 that pop3 runs at. The idea is that if all POP3 daemons use getportbyname(), then no matter what POP3 daemon you run, you can always reconfigure its port number by editing / etc/services. Misunderstanding: This file is bad in order to figure out what port numbers mean. If you want to find out what ports programs are using, you should instead use the program lsof to find out exactly which ports are bound to which processes. If running lsof is not appropriate, then you should lookup the ports in a more generic reference. From Hacking-Lexicon 0-day (zero-day) The term 0-day exploit describes an exploit that is not publicly known. It describe tools by elite hackers who have discovered a new bug and shared it only with close friends. It also describes some new exploit for compromising popular services (the usual suspects: BIND, FTP services, Linux distros, Microsoft IIS, Solaris servers). Many 0-day exploits are discovered by the victims when hackers use them, or by honeypots. The term "0-day" describes the fact that the value of exploits quickly goes down as soon as they are announced. The next day they are half as valuable. The 2nd day they are a 1/4 as valuable. Ten days later they are 1/1000 as valuable as on day 0. This is because script-kiddies quickly use the exploits on computers throughout the Internet, compromising systems before anybody else can get to them. Contrast: The term 0-day exploit describe the hard-to-use exploits by the discoverer himself (or close friends), in contrast to the easy-to-use scripts employed by script kiddies. For example, a buffer-overflow script will go through many phases as people try to find the right offsets for the target platforms, but will eventually end up as a broad-spectrum aim-and-shoot script that anybody could use. Key point: One of the dangers of 0-day exploits is BUGTRAQ camping. A hacker discovers all the services running on the target victim and waits for day-0 when the exploit is announced. At that time, the hacker attacks the systems with the new exploit. Key point: The term "0-day" describes any bit of information in the community, whether it is serial numbers, lists of proxies, or passwords to porn sites. As soon as such information becomes well-known and exploited by large numbers of people, it is then fixed by the victim. Information has a "half-life": the older it is, the less value it has. From Hacking-Lexicon 2-Disk Xwindow embedded Linux Mungkie Associates Inc. provides 2-Disk Xwindow embedded Linux. The distribution is intended to be a demonstration of Mungkie Associates' embedded appliance development environment, showing the sort of environment that can be created for small appliance GUI systems. It is further intended to give a minimal Linux base system on 1 disk and a fully expandable X system implementation on a second disk. The two disks can be used together for a minimal system or the X disk can be used seperately on any libc2.1 linux system. The source tree is compiled on Debian and the /lib/ files taken directly from the Debian-2.2.3 distribution. The 2-disk system is free for personal use, but restrictions apply to commercial usage. Version 1.4rc802 was released November 6, 2002. Version 1disk1.0 final was released January 18, 2003. A 1disk 1.0 update was released February 5, 2003. Version 1.0.8 (Source code) was released May 30, 2003. From LWN Distribution List 3dchess 3D chess for X11 3 dimensional Chess for X11R6. Three boards, 96 pieces and 26 directions. From Debian 3.0r0 APT 3Dwm is a 3D window manager for Linux From Binh 3dwm The 3dwm project is working with the creation of a three-dimensional worspace manager that can run in the 3D Cube as well as on desktop computers. Note that wm does not stnad for the term window manager. It is a bit misleading; 3dwm is not a window manager in the true sense of the word, but rather more of a gerneral user environment. The window manager functionality of the system is merely the tip of the iceberg; 3Dwm contains general primitives for building applications with three-dimensional interfaces. From 3dwm 3dwm-clock A 3Dwm apps The 3Dwm clock application (tdwm-clock) is the first real application that is even remotely useful. It makes use of the 3Dwm Nobel API, including the new solid modeling support, to create a three-dimensional analog clock displaying the current time. From Debian 3.0r0 APT 3dwm-csgclient A 3Dwm client A simple client which is builded using new libsolid. This is only an example on how libsolid work. From Debian 3.0r0 APT 3dwm-geoclient A 3Dwm client This is a very simple 3Dwm client that connects to the exported GeometryKit in the server, creates a Geometry, loads a 3D file from the local system (in this case a simple model of an office, which also happens to be Rob's room), and passes it to the 3Dwm server. The 3Dwm server will happily render any geometry that is created, so running geoclient several times will add more geometries to the graphical output. Please note that you may need to zoom out (using the 'X' key) to see graphical output. The geoclient is able to open native .raw files as well as standard 3ds files (using MeshIO). In other words, you may experiment by loading other files than the supplied office model to the 3Dwm server. From Debian 3.0r0 APT 3dwm-pickclient A 3Dwm client This is an example showing how libzorn work. From Debian 3.0r0 APT 3dwm-server Binary server daemon This package contains display binary server daemon. From Debian 3.0r0 APT 3dwm-texclient A 3Dwm client This is a simple client used for testing the 3Dwm texture capabilities. From Debian 3.0r0 APT 3dwm-vncclient A 3Dwm client This will open a connection to the VNC server from the 3Dwm server, and the graphical output will be displayed on a single quad in the 3Dwm world (you may need to zoom out to see it). Currently, vncclient supports no interaction with the VNC window (the bindings and the actual communication code has been implemented, only the 3Dwm side is missing). From Debian 3.0r0 APT 4.2 /for' poynt too'/ n. Without a prefix, this almost invariably refers to BSD Unix release 4.2. Note that it is an indication of cluelessness to say "version 4.2", and "release 4.2" is rare; the number stands on its own, or is used in the more explicit forms 4.2BSD or (less commonly) BSD 4.2. Similar remarks apply to "4.3", "4.4" and to earlier, less-widespread releases 4.1 and 2.9. From Jargon Dictionary 44bsd-rdist 4.4BSD rdist. This is the traditional rdist from 4.4BSD Lite with FreeBSD fixes. It is provided for compatibility with third-party rdist implementations. This is the binary package for 4.4BSD rdist. From Debian 3.0r0 APT 4Suite The 4Suite package contains XML-related tools and libraries for Python, including 4DOM, 4XSLT, 4XPath, 4RDF, and 4XPointer. 4DOM is animplementation of the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) standard DOMAPI for HTML and XML content manipulation. 4DOM provides full distributed-object support based on the IDL used in the formal DOM specification. 4XSLT is an XSLT processor, which can be used to renderXML documents as customized and stylized HTML for current Web browsers. 4XSLT also provides a powerful programming API forapplications to use for low-level, customized transformations of XML documents. 4XPath is a library implementating the W3C's XPath language for indicating and selecting portions of an XML document. 4RDF is a toolkit and library for RDF processing. 4XPointer is a toolkit for processing fragment identifiers for URI references which locateresources of Internet media type text/xml. From Redhat 8.0 RPM 6tunnel TCP proxy for non-IPv6 applications 6tunnel allows you to use services provided by IPv6 hosts with IPv4-only applications and vice versa. It can bind to any of your IPv4 or IPv6 addresses and forward all data to IPv4 or IPv6 host. It can be used for example as an IPv6-capable IRC proxy. From Debian 3.0r0 APT 8-character password Some systems, like Win9x and Solaris, limit the user to 8 characters in the password. Key point: Security conscious users of such systems need to make sure they use a more random mix of characters because they cannot create long passwords. Key point: Password cracking such systems is a little easier. From Hacking-Lexicon 8.3 filename A filename corresponding to the standard MS-DOS gleaming conventions, which restrict filenames to 8 characters and optional extensions to 3 characters. From QUECID Such restictions can prove to be an infuriating problem like when transfering files across a heterogenous network such as between Windows and Linux machines. Since older versions of Windows only support 8.3 style filenames files transferred to it will be truncated. For example, "C:\Program Files" may appear to be "C:\Progra~1" From Binh 822-date Command to print date and time in RFC822 format From whatis 9menu Creates X menus from the shell. This is 9menu, a simple program that allows you to create X menus from the shell, where each menu item will run a command. 9menu is intended for use with 9wm, but can be used with any other window manager. From Debian 3.0r0 APT 9wm An emulation of the Plan 9 window manager 8-1/2. 9wm is an X window manager which attempts to emulate the Plan 9 window manager 8-1/2 as far as possible within the constraints imposed by X. It provides a simple yet comfortable user interface, without garish decorations or title-bars. Or icons. And it's click-to-type. From Debian 3.0r0 APT [ check file types and compare values From whatis ~user On UNIX, a home directory can be referenced by using a tilde (~) followed by their login name. For example, "ls ~rob" on my computer will list all the files in "/home/rob". Key point: Web-servers often allow access to user's directories this way. An example would be http:// www.robertgraham.com/~rob. Key point: A big hole on the Internet is that people unexpectedly open up information. For example, the file .bash_history is a hidden file in a person's directory that contains the complete text of all commands they've entered into the shell (assuming their shell is bash, which is the most popular one on Linux). From Hacking-Lexicon A ABI Application Binary Interface: details the machine language of the CPU family as well as the calls between the application and the operating system. From Linux Guide @FirstLinux ACK /ak/ interj. 1. [common; from the ASCII mnemonic for 0000110] Acknowledge. Used to register one's presence (compare mainstream Yo!). An appropriate response to ping or ENQ. 2. [from the comic strip "Bloom County"] An exclamation of surprised disgust, esp. in "Ack pffft!" Semi-humorous. Generally this sense is not spelled in caps (ACK) and is distinguished by a following exclamation point. 3. Used to politely interrupt someone to tell them you understand their point (see NAK). Thus, for example, you might cut off an overly long explanation with "Ack. Ack. Ack. I get it now". 4. An affirmative. "Think we ought to ditch that damn NT server for a Linux box?" "ACK!" There is also a usage "ACK?" (from sense 1) meaning "Are you there?", often used in email when earlier mail has produced no reply, or during a lull in talk mode to see if the person has gone away (the standard humorous response is of course NAK (sense 1), i.e., "I'm not here"). From Jargon Dictionary ACPI (Advanced configuration and Power Interface) is an open industry specification co-developed by Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Microsoft, and Toshiba. ACPI establishes industry-standard interfaces for OS-directed configuration and power management on laptops, desktops, and servers. ACPI evolves the existing collection of power management BIOS code, Advanced Power Management (APM) application programming interfaces (APIs, PNPBIOS APIs, Multiprocessor Specification (MPS) tables and so on into a well-defined power management and configuration interface specification. The specification enables new power management technology to evolve independantly in operating systems and hardware while ensuring that they continue to work together. From ACPI ADN (Advanced Digital Network) Usually refers to a 56Kbps leased-line. From Matisse ADSL Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Loop is a high-speed Internet access technology that uses a commonly available telephone copper loop. ADSL provides data speeds from 384kbps to 1.5 Mbps, normally using different speeds for the upstream and downstream channel (hence the " Asymmetric" ). ADSL provides a direct, dedicated pipe to an ISP. From Linux Guide @FirstLinux ADVENT /ad'vent/ n. The prototypical computer adventure game, first designed by Will Crowther on the PDP-10 in the mid-1970s as an attempt at computer-refereed fantasy gaming, and expanded into a puzzle-oriented game by Don Woods at Stanford in 1976. (Woods had been one of the authors of INTERCAL.) Now better known as Adventure or Colossal Cave Adventure, but the TOPS-10 operating system permitted only six-letter filenames. See also vadding, Zork, and Infocom. This game defined the terse, dryly humorous style since expected in text adventure games, and popularized several tag lines that have become fixtures of hacker-speak: "A huge green fierce snake bars the way!" "I see no X here" (for some noun X). "You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike." "You are in a little maze of twisty passages, all different." The `magic words' xyzzy and plugh also derive from this game. Crowther, by the way, participated in the exploration of the Mammoth & Flint Ridge cave system; it actually has a `Colossal Cave' and a `Bedquilt' as in the game, and the `Y2' that also turns up is cavers' jargon for a map reference to a secondary entrance. ADVENT sources are available for FTP at ftp://ftp.wustl.edu/doc /misc/if-archive/games/source/advent.tar.Z. There is a Colossal Cave Adventure page. From Jargon Dictionary AES (Advanced Encryption Standard, Rijndael) The United States encryption standard that replaces the older/weaker DES standard. Contrast: The main impetus behind AES to replace DES is the support for larger key sizes. DES uses 56-bit keys, which can be cracked in just a few minutes (in the year 2001). In contrast, AES supports 128-bit keys (as well as 192-bit and 256-bit). Whereas both DES and AES are fundamentally block-ciphers, AES is also designed to be an efficient stream-cipher and hash algorithm. Whereas DES was designed to be hardware based (software implementations are much slower), AES has been designed to be efficient in both software and hardware. In particular, implementations in ANSI C, Java, and x86 assembly language were important. Another important criteria was the ability for the algorithm to work within smart-cards with slow CPUs and limited memory. Key point: The NIST director in charge of selecting the AES algorithm says: "If Moore's law continues and quantum computing doesn't manifest itself, then I think this system will have a good 30 year run". Misconception: AES does not replace DES. In the 1980s, DES was the most used encryption algorithm. However, due to length of time it took the government to come up with a replacement standard, other encryption algorithms became widely used, such as RC2, RC4, Blowfish, IDEA, and Triple DES. Moreover, crypto has became very "pluggable", with many products supporting numerous simultaneous encryption algorithms. From Hacking-Lexicon AI /A-I/ n. Abbreviation for `Artificial Intelligence', so common that the full form is almost never written or spoken among hackers. From Jargon Dictionary ALSA The ALSA sound driver was originally written as a replacement for the Linux kernel sound for Gravis UltraSound (GUS) cards. As this GUS replacement proved to be a success, the author started the ALSA project for a generic driver for several sound chips, with fully modularized design. It is compatible with the OSS/Free and OSS/Linux sound drivers (the drivers in the kernel), but has its own interface that is even better than the OSS drivers. A list of features can be found at http:// www.alsa-project.org/intro.html. The main page of the ALSA project is http://www.alsa-project.org/ From ALSA-HOWTO The ALSA sound drivers have proven to be such a success that they have replaced the OSS drivers in the Linux kernel. From Binh ALT Linux LWN distribution survey completed May 3, 2002. ALT Linux got its start as a Linux-Mandrake Russian Edition Spring 2001. Designed to be a universal distribution, suitable for server organization, for user workstations and for software development, ALT Linux has diverged from its roots and split into several projects, all with the same code base. For example, there's Castle, a secured, RSBAC-enabled, server distribution; and ALT Linux Junior, a single-disk distribution for home computers, designed especially for beginners, easy to install and use. The unstable Sisyphus branch changes daily. ALT Linux Master 2.2 was released March 7, 2003. ALT Linux Junior 2.2 (Plum) was released March 26, 2003. From LWN Distribution List ANSI (American National Standards Institute) A standards body made up of industry representatives. For infosec purposes, the two interesting areas are the X9 standards for financial/ banking, and the X12 standards for EDI (also governing health-care transactions). Contrast: ANSI is the American representative to the ISO. ANSI is made up of industry, whereas NIST specifies standards only for use within government. From Hacking-Lexicon ANSI /an'see/ 1. n. [techspeak] The American National Standards Institute. ANSI, along with the International Organization for Standards (ISO), standardized the C programming language (see K&R, Classic C), and promulgates many other important software standards. 2. n. [techspeak] A terminal may be said to be `ANSI' if it meets the ANSI X3.64 standard for terminal control. Unfortunately, this standard was both over-complicated and too permissive. It has been retired and replaced by the ECMA-48 standard, which shares both flaws. 3. n. [BBS jargon] The set of screen-painting codes that most MS-DOS and Amiga computers accept. This comes from the ANSI.SYS device driver that must be loaded on an MS-DOS computer to view such codes. Unfortunately, neither DOS ANSI nor the BBS ANSIs derived from it exactly match the ANSI X3.64 terminal standard. For example, the ESC-[1m code turns on the bold highlight on large machines, but in IBM PC /MS-DOS ANSI, it turns on `intense' (bright) colors. Also, in BBS-land, the term `ANSI' is often used to imply that a particular computer uses or can emulate the IBM high-half character set from MS-DOS. Particular use depends on context. Occasionally, the vanilla ASCII character set is used with the color codes, but on BBSs, ANSI and `IBM characters' tend to go together. From Jargon Dictionary ANSI C a revision of C, adding function prototypes, structure passing, structure assignment and standardised library functions. From Linux Guide @FirstLinux ANSI standard /an'see stan'd*rd/ The ANSI standard usage of `ANSI standard' refers to any practice which is typical or broadly done. It can also be applied in a jovial context in which everyone does something in the same way but it is not quite regulation. For example: ANSI standard shaking of a laser printer cartridge to get extra life from it, or the ANSI standard word tripling in names of usenet alt groups. From Jargon Dictionary APM (Advanced Power Management) An industry standard for allowing the system processor and various components to enter power-saving modes, including suspend, sleep and off. APM software is especially important for mobile devices, because it saves battery power. From I-gloss ARJ A popular file compression/archival tool, available for UNIX/Linux, DOS/ Windows, and other operating systems. Files compressed in this manner typically have .arj or .ar extensions. From I-gloss ARM Linux ARM Linux is a port of the Linux Operating System to ARM processor based machines mainly by Russell King with contributions from others. From LWN Distribution List ARMM n. [acronym, `Automated Retroactive Minimal Moderation'] A Usenet cancelbot created by Dick Depew of Munroe Falls, Ohio. ARMM was intended to automatically cancel posts from anonymous-posting sites. Unfortunately, the robot's recognizer for anonymous postings triggered on its own automatically-generated control messages! Transformed by this stroke of programming ineptitude into a monster of Frankensteinian proportions, it broke loose on the night of March 31, 1993 and proceeded to spam news.admin.policy with a recursive explosion of over 200 messages. ARMM's bug produced a recursive cascade of messages each of which mechanically added text to the ID and Subject and some other headers of its parent. This produced a flood of messages in which each header took up several screens and each message ID and subject line got longer and longer and longer. Reactions varied from amusement to outrage. The pathological messages crashed at least one mail system, and upset people paying line charges for their Usenet feeds. One poster described the ARMM debacle as "instant Usenet history" (also establishing the term despew), and it has since been widely cited as a cautionary example of the havoc the combination of good intentions and incompetence can wreak on a network. Compare Great Worm; sorcerer's apprentice mode. See also software laser, network meltdown. From Jargon Dictionary ARP ARP is a protocol used with TCP/IP to resolve addresses. The TCP/IP stack used to transmit data across the Internet is independent from the Ethernet used to shuttle data between local machines. Thus, when machine needs to send an IP packet to a nearby machine, it broadcasts the IP address on the local Ethernet asking for the corresponding Ethernet address. The machine who owns the address responds, at which point the IP packet in question is sent to that Ethernet address. Key point: By sniffing ARP packets off the wire, you can discover a lot of stuff going on. This is especially true of cable-modem and DSL segments. Since ARP packets are broadcasts, you aren't technically breaking your user's agreement by sniffing. Key point: You can spoof ARP requests and/or responses in order to redirect traffic through your machine. From Hacking-Lexicon ARP a TCP/IP protocol used to obtain a station's physical address from its logical IP address. ARP requests are broadcast onto the network. From Linux Guide @FirstLinux ARP redirect A tool that is part of the standard hacker's toolkit, ARP redirect will redirect Internet traffic from a local neighbor through your own machine allowing you to sniff it. From Hacking-Lexicon ARPAnet A wide area network (WAN), created in 1969 with funding from the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). Undergoing constant research and development in the earls to mid-l970s, ARPAnet served as the testbed for the development of TCP/IP (the protocols that make the Internet possible). A major goal of the ARPAnet project was to increase the military's command and control capability enabling communication across a variety of physically dissimilar media, including satellites. An allied goal was to create a robust network capable of withstanding outages, such as those that might result from a nuclear exchange. ARPAnet met these objectives, but it also surprised its creators: It was found in short order that most ARPAnet users preferred to use the network for communication, such as electronic mail and discussion groups. Initially, the ARPAnet was available only to government research institutes and to universities holding Department of Defense (DoD) research contracts. In 1983, ARPAnet was divided into a high-security military network (Milnet) and an ARPAanet that was recast as a research and development network. From QUECID ARSIG ARSIG is a GNU Linux distribution designed especially for diskless routers, where the main (primary) boot-up device is compact-flash card. The goal is to make the "static" part of the operating system lay on the CF card, mounted as readonly. All other parts of the OS that need read-write access are mounted in RAM. ARSIG is based on Openwall GNU/*/ Linux (Owl). Initial Freshmeat announcement, version 1.0_pre01 (PHDS), was released January 4, 2003. From LWN Distribution List ASCII /as'kee/ n. [originally an acronym (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) but now merely conventional] The predominant character set encoding of present-day computers. The standard version uses 7 bits for each character, whereas most earlier codes (including early drafts of ASCII prior to June 1961) used fewer. This change allowed the inclusion of lowercase letters -- a major win -- but it did not provide for accented letters or any other letterforms not used in English (such as the German sharp-S or the ae-ligature which is a letter in, for example, Norwegian). It could be worse, though. It could be much worse. See EBCDIC to understand how. A history of ASCII and its ancestors is at http://www.wps.com/texts/codes/index.html. Computers are much pickier and less flexible about spelling than humans; thus, hackers need to be very precise when talking about characters, and have developed a considerable amount of verbal shorthand for them. Every character has one or more names -- some formal, some concise, some silly. Common jargon names for ASCII characters are collected here. See also individual entries for bang, excl, open, ques, semi, shriek, splat, twiddle, and Yu-Shiang Whole Fish. This list derives from revision 2.3 of the Usenet ASCII pronunciation guide. Single characters are listed in ASCII order; character pairs are sorted in by first member. For each character, common names are given in rough order of popularity, followed by names that are reported but rarely seen; official ANSI/CCITT names are surrounded by brokets: <>. Square brackets mark the particularly silly names introduced by INTERCAL. The abbreviations "l/r" and "o/c" stand for left/right and "open/close" respectively. Ordinary parentheticals provide some usage information. ! Common: bang; pling; excl; not; shriek; ball-bat; < exclamation mark>. Rare: factorial; exclam; smash; cuss; boing; yell; wow; hey; wham; eureka; [spark-spot]; soldier, control. " Common: double quote; quote. Rare: literal mark; double-glitch; ; < dieresis>; dirk; [rabbit-ears]; double prime. # Common: number sign; pound; pound sign; hash; sharp; crunch; hex; [mesh]. Rare: grid; crosshatch; octothorpe; flash; , pig-pen; tictactoe; scratchmark; thud; thump; splat. $ Common: dollar; . Rare: currency symbol; buck; cash; string (from BASIC); escape (when used as the echo of ASCII ESC); ding; cache; [big money]. % Common: percent; ; mod; grapes. Rare: [double-oh-seven]. & Common: ; amp; amper; and, and sign. Rare: address (from C); reference (from C++); andpersand; bitand; background (from sh(1)); pretzel. [INTERCAL called this `ampersand'; what could be sillier?] ' Common: single quote; quote; < apostrophe>. Rare: prime; glitch; tick; irk; pop; [spark]; ; . ( ) Common: l/r paren; l/r parenthesis; left/right; open/close; paren/thesis; o/c paren; o/c parenthesis; l/r parenthesis; l/r banana. Rare: so/already; lparen/ rparen; ; o/c round bracket, l/r round bracket, [wax/wane]; parenthisey/unparenthisey; l/r ear. * Common: star; [splat]; . Rare: wildcard; gear; dingle; mult; spider; aster; times; twinkle; glob (see glob); Nathan Hale. + Common: ; add. Rare: cross; [intersection]. , Common: . Rare: ; [tail]. - Common: dash; ; . Rare: [worm]; option; dak; bithorpe. Common: dot; point; ; . Rare: radix point; full stop; [spot]. / Common: slash; stroke; ; forward slash. Rare: diagonal; solidus; over; slak; virgule; [slat]. : Common: . Rare: dots; [two-spot]. ; Common: ; semi. Rare: weenie; [hybrid], pit-thwong. < > Common: ; bra/ket; l/r angle; l/r angle bracket; l/r broket. Rare: from/{into, towards}; read from/write to; suck/blow; comes-from/gozinta; in/out; crunch/zap (all from UNIX); tic/tac; [angle/right angle]. = Common: ; gets; takes. Rare: quadrathorpe; [half-mesh]. ? Common: query; ; ques. Rare: quiz; whatmark; [what]; wildchar; huh; hook; buttonhook; hunchback. @ Common: at sign; at; strudel. Rare: each; vortex; whorl; [whirlpool]; cyclone; snail; ape; cat; rose; cabbage; . V Rare: [book]. [ ] Common: l/r square bracket; l/r bracket; ; bracket/unbracket. Rare: square/unsquare; [U turn/U turn back]. \ Common: backslash, hack, whack; escape (from C/UNIX); reverse slash; slosh; backslant; backwhack. Rare: bash; ; reversed virgule; [backslat]. ^ Common: hat; control; uparrow; caret; . Rare: xor sign, chevron; [shark (or shark-fin)]; to the (`to the power of'); fang; pointer (in Pascal). _ Common: ; underscore; underbar; under. Rare: score; backarrow; skid; [flatworm]. ` Common: backquote; left quote; left single quote; open quote; ; grave. Rare: backprime; [backspark]; unapostrophe; birk; blugle; back tick; back glitch; push; ; quasiquote. { } Common: o/ c brace; l/r brace; l/r squiggly; l/r squiggly bracket/brace; l/r curly bracket/brace; . Rare: brace/unbrace; curly/ uncurly; leftit/rytit; l/r squirrelly; [embrace/bracelet]. A balanced pair of these may be called `curlies'. | Common: bar; or; or-bar; v-bar; pipe; vertical bar. Rare: ; gozinta; thru; pipesinta (last three from UNIX); [spike]. ~ Common: ; squiggle; twiddle; not. Rare: approx; wiggle; swung dash; enyay; [sqiggle (sic)]. The pronunciation of # as `pound' is common in the U.S. but a bad idea; Commonwealth Hackish has its own, rather more apposite use of `pound sign' (confusingly, on British keyboards the pound graphic happens to replace #; thus Britishers sometimes call # on a U.S.-ASCII keyboard `pound', compounding the American error). The U.S. usage derives from an old-fashioned commercial practice of using a # suffix to tag pound weights on bills of lading. The character is usually pronounced `hash' outside the U.S. There are more culture wars over the correct pronunciation of this character than any other, which has led to the ha ha only serious suggestion that it be pronounced `shibboleth' (see Judges 12:6 in an Old Testament or Tanakh). The `uparrow' name for circumflex and `leftarrow' name for underline are historical relics from archaic ASCII (the 1963 version), which had these graphics in those character positions rather than the modern punctuation characters. The `swung dash' or `approximation' sign is not quite the same as tilde in typeset material but the ASCII tilde serves for both (compare angle brackets). Some other common usages cause odd overlaps. The #, $, >, and & characters, for example, are all pronounced "hex" in different communities because various assemblers use them as a prefix tag for hexadecimal constants (in particular, # in many assembler-programming cultures, $ in the 6502 world, > at Texas Instruments, and & on the BBC Micro, Sinclair, and some Z80 machines). See also splat. The inability of ASCII text to correctly represent any of the world's other major languages makes the designers' choice of 7 bits look more and more like a serious misfeature as the use of international networks continues to increase (see software rot). Hardware and software from the U.S. still tends to embody the assumption that ASCII is the universal character set and that characters have 7 bits; this is a major irritant to people who want to use a character set suited to their own languages. Perversely, though, efforts to solve this problem by proliferating `national' character sets produce an evolutionary pressure to use a smaller subset common to all those in use. From Jargon Dictionary ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) This is the defacto world-wide standard for the code numbers used by computers to represent all the upper and lower-case Latin letters, numbers, punctuation, etc. There are 128 standard ASCII codes each of which can be represented by a 7 digit binary number: 0000000 through 1111111. From Matisse ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) a standard code used for representing information on computer systems and networks. It uses the printing and non-printing characters that can be generated by the keyboard. Since 7 bits are available to represent each character it is possible to represent a total of 128 different characters. From Linux Guide @FirstLinux ASPLinux ASPLinux is a Russian distribution from a multi-national company based in Singapore. The Red Hat based ASPLinux GNU/Linux distribution, includes all components for creation of a high perfomance Internet/Intranet server or powerful multimedia workstation. ASP 7.3 (vostok) was released August 13, 2002. From LWN Distribution List AT command set (Hayes command set) Today's modems are controlled by the old Hayes "AT" command set. In order to dial the phone number 555-1212 using a modem, you simply send the string "ATDT555-1212" to the modem. The "D" following the "AT" means to "Dial", and the "T" means to use "Tone" dialing (rather than "P" for "Pulse" dialing). The command "ATH0" means to hang up the modem. Key point: One of the juvenile tricks people play is to cause people to hang up their own modem. Once the modem connects, it goes into a different mode where it no longer accepts AT commands. However, a user can switch back to the command mode by sending the characters "+++" to the modem. Therefore, if somebody can remotely trick your PC into sending "+++ATH0", then your modem will hang up. One way of doing this is with the ping program that sends and ICMP echo to the victim, which then replies with the same contents. E.g.: ping -p 2b2b2b415448300d victim The most popular exploits for this are spoofed ICMP pings, but it can be exploited in any number of ways. For example, one may include the following in an HTML webpage: From Hacking-Lexicon ATAPI AT Attachment Packet Interface - a standard that allows people to connect tape drives and CD-ROMs to Enhanced IDE controllers. From Linux Guide @FirstLinux ATM Asynchronous Transfer Mode. High Speed (up to 155 Mbps), high bandwidth, low-delay, transport technology, integrating multiple data types (voice, video, and data), International Telecommunications Union (ITU) has selected ATM as the basis for the future broadband network because of its flexibility and suitability for both transmission and switching. It may be used in the phone and computer networks of the future. It is also a multiplexed information transfer technique of sending data in irregular time intervals using a code such as ASCII. ATM allows most modern computers to communicate with one another easily. From Glossary of Distance Education and Internet Terminology AUTHORS List of people who contributed to or wrote a package or document. From Rute-Users-Guide AVI Audio Video Interleaved: a proprietary video format developed by Microsoft. It interleaves standard waveform audio and digital video frames (bitmaps) and is a popular format. Popular Linux programs such as xanim support AVI. From Linux Guide @FirstLinux AX.25 a Packet Radio Protocol that offers both connected and connectionless modes of operation, and is used either by itself for point-point links, or to carry other protocols such as TCP/IP and NetRom. From Linux Guide @FirstLinux AbulEdu AbulEdu is a Mandrake-based distribution for primary schools. It is currently in French but most of the tools can be translated. An AbulEdu server can handle Mac (netatalk), Windows (samba), GNU/Linux and X terminal (with LTSP) clients. The server acts as a central gateway for Web, mail, and printing, and facilitates the management of classes, pupils, and teachers. Everybody can publish Web pages on an intranet using Apache and all administration tasks are performed using a browser. The result is that a teacher who is not a computer specialist can install and manage a school network. Stable version 1.0.7-II was released May 26, 2003. Development version 1.0.11 beta 4 was released October 7, 2002. From LWN Distribution List Access Control List (access, ACL) Controlling access not only the system in general, but also resources within the system. For example, firewalls can be configured to allow access to different portions of the network for different users. Likewise, even after you log onto a file server, the server may still block access to certain files. Key point: An Access Control List (ACL) is used to list those accounts that have access to the resource that the list applies to. When talking about firewalls, the ACL implies the list of IP addresses that have access to which ports and systems through the firewall. When talking about WinNT, the ACL implies the list of users that can access a specific file or directory on NTFS. Contrast: Discretionary Access Control is the ability to have fine grained control over who has access to what resources. Misconception: Many people believe that firewall IP address rules or IEEE 802.11 MAC address rules form robust ACLs. However, since neither IP addresses or MAC addresses provide robust authentication, such ACLs provide only a weak form of security. When these so-called ACLs are relied upon for security, they frequently lead to compromises as people spoof their IP or forge their MAC address. From Hacking-Lexicon Account Name Same as Login ID, User ID, or User Name. The name assigned to a user on a UNIX/Linux system. Multiple users can be set up on a system with unique account names, each with varying access (permission) levels. After Linux installation, account names are assigned by the Superuser, or root operator. From I-gloss Ada n. A Pascal-descended language that was at one time made mandatory for Department of Defense software projects by the Pentagon. Hackers are nearly unanimous in observing that, technically, it is precisely what one might expect given that kind of endorsement by fiat; designed by committee, crockish, difficult to use, and overall a disastrous, multi-billion-dollar boondoggle (one common description wss "The PL/I of the 1980s"). Hackers find Ada's exception-handling and inter-process communication features particularly hilarious. Ada Lovelace (the daughter of Lord Byron who became the world's first programmer while cooperating with Charles Babbage on the design of his mechanical computing engines in the mid-1800s) would almost certainly blanch at the use to which her name has latterly been put; the kindest thing that has been said about it is that there is probably a good small language screaming to get out from inside its vast, elephantine bulk. From Jargon Dictionary Adamantix Adamantix, formerly known as TrustedDebian, aims to create a highly secure but usable Linux platform. To accomplish this, the project will use currently available security solutions for Linux (like kernel patches, compiler patches, security related programs and techniques) and knit these together to a highly secure Linux platform. The initial release, version 0.9, became available March 18, 2003. Version 1.0.1 was released June 12, 2003. A 'secured' distribution. From LWN Distribution List AfterStep One of several user interfaces (window managers), AfterStep makes Linux look and feel much like NeXTSTEP, with enhancements. For more on AfterStep, go to www.afterstep.org. (Also, see Enlightenment, GNOME, KDE, and X Window System.) From I-gloss Agenda-VR there are two versions of the VR3d. One was released in December 2000 in the U.S., and the "Second Edition" was released in January 2001 in the U.S. and in Germany. Agenda Computing was scheduled to complete development in the spring of 2002, but their website seems to have disappeared [July 22, 2002]. Handhelds/PDA based distribution. From LWN Distribution List Akkerman, Wichert one of the key developers of the Debian distribution. Wichert has also written important Linux programs such as strace and APT. From Linux Guide @FirstLinux Alcolix alcolix is a minimal Linux rescue distribution with the goals of being small, compatible, and very usable. It has a cozy shell and a multitude of partition rescue/editing tools, all based on up-to-date releases (e.g., 2.4.x kernel with USB support). It uses cpio.bz2 data disks and has a full GRUB bootloader, memtest86, and more. Version 2.4.20 BETA3 was released June 16, 2003. A 'special purpose/mini' distribution. From LWN Distribution List Aleph ARMlinux Aleph One provides well-documented Linux distributions for various ARM-based systems. LWN distribution survey results for February 6, 2000. From LWN Distribution List Alias A secondary or symbolic name for a file, a collection of data, or a computer device. In a spreadsheet, a range name, such as Income, is an alias for a range, such as A3..K3. In networks, group aliases provide a handy way to send electronic mailed two or more people simultaneously. From QUECID Alindis A comprehensive guide to building a GNU/Linux distribution. Initial version 0.0.1 was released January 2, 2002. Version 0.1.0 was released July 18, 2002. From LWN Distribution List Allison, Jeremy one of the lead developers of the Samba Windows file-and-print-sharing software. From Linux Guide @FirstLinux Allman, Eric the creator of sendmail -- one of the most important pieces of software ever created by the OpenSource community. Eric has established Sendmail, Inc., which produces both open-sourced and proprietary versions of sendmail. From Linux Guide @FirstLinux Alpha a family of advanced RISC-based, 64-bit CPUs from Digital (now Compaq). Alpha's were introduced back in 1992. From Linux Guide @FirstLinux Anti-Aliasing a method used to better define higher resolution objects in lower resolution. It is a term often used for fonts. From Linux Guide @FirstLinux Apache Apache is the leading internet web server, with over 60% market share, according to the Netcraft survey. Several key factors have contributed to Apache's success: The Apache license. It is an open source, BSD-like license that allows for both commercial and non-commercial uses of Apache. Talented community of developers with a variety of backgrounds and an open development process based on technical merits. Modular architecture. Apache users can easily add functionality or tailor Apache to their specific enviroment. Portable: Apache runs on nearly all flavors of Unix (and Linux), Windows, BeOs, mainframes... Robustness and security. Many commercial vendors have adopted Apache-based solutions for their products, including Oracle, Red Hat and IBM. In addition, Covalent provides add-on modules and 24x7 support for Apache. The following websites use Apache or derivatives. Chances are that if Apache is good enough for them, it is also good enough for you. Amazon.com Yahoo! W3 Consortium Financial Times Network solutions MP3.com Stanford From the Apache website: The Apache Project is a collaborative software development effort aimed at creating a robust, commercial-grade, featureful, and freely-available source code implementation of an HTTP (Web) server. The Apache project has grown beyond building just a web server into other critical server side technologies like Java or XML. The Apache Software Foundation, described in the next section, serves as an umbrella for these projects. From Apache Overview HOWTO Append Symbol The > keyboard character, repeated (i.e., >>). It is often used to send the output from a command to a text file, appending the data to the end of the file, rather than replacing the existing content. For example, ls -a >> output.txt sends the current directory list to a file called output.txt, and adds it to the end of the file. Repeating the command will continue to add new data to the end of the file. (Also, see Piping Symbol and Redirection Symbol.) From I-gloss Applet A small Java program that can be embedded in an HTML page. Applets differ from full-fledged Java applications in that they are not allowed to access certain resources on the local computer, such as files and serial devices (modems, printers, etc.), and are prohibited from communicating with most other computers across a network. The common rule is that an applet can only make an Internet connection to the computer from which the applet was sent. From Matisse Application Program Interface (API) System software that provides a complete set of functions and resources on which programmers can draw to create interface features, such as pull down menus, command names, dialog boxes, keyboard commands, and windows. In network systems, an API establishes how programes use various network features. From QUECID Arabeyes Project Arabeyes is a Meta project that is aimed at fully supporting the Arabic language in the Unix/Linux environment. It is designed to be a central location to standardize the Arabization process. Arabeyes relies on voluntary contributions by computer professionals and enthusiasts all over the world. From LWN Distribution List Arcangeli, Andrea employed by SuSE as a kernel developer, Andrea has created the IKD kernel debugging tool and the workaround for a famous TCP incompatibility between Solaris and Linux. From Linux Guide @FirstLinux Arch Linux Arch Linux is an i686-optimized Linux distribution. It is lightweight and contains the latest stable versions of software. Packages are in .tar.gz format and are tracked by a package manager that is designed to allow easy package upgrades. Arch is designed to be streamlined while allowing for a customized configuration, with newer features such as reiserfs/ext3 and devfs. The inital version, 0.1, was released March 11, 2002. Arch 0.4 (Dragon) was released December 18, 2002. Arch Linux released Pacman 2.1 (package manager) on August 22, 2002. From LWN Distribution List Archie A tool (software) for finding files stored on anonymous FTP sites. You need to know the exact file name or a substring of it. By 1999 Archie had been almost completely replaced by web-based search engines. Back when FTP was the main way people moved files over the Internet archie was quite popular. From Matisse Archive A single large file containing multiple files, usually compressed to save storage space. Often created to facilitate transferring between computers. Popular archival formats include ARJ, TAR, ZIP and ZOO. Also, to create such an archive file. From I-gloss Argument Words, phrases or numbers that you enter on the same command line as a command or a statement to expand or modify how that command or statement operates. From QUECID Ark Linux Ark Linux is a Linux distribution designed especially for desktop use, primarily for people without prior Linux experience. Its main goal is ease of use, and the inclusion of many tools end users will need. Ark Linux is based on Red Hat 7.3 / 8.0, with KDE. Initial Freshmeat version 1.0-0.alpha7.1 was released March 14, 2003. From LWN Distribution List Assembler A program that transforms assembly language program into machine language so the computer can execute the program. From QUECID Astaro Security Linux A firewall and VPN product based on the 2.4 Linux kernel. Available for free download but not completely open source. There are several branches. Version 3.200 (beta) was released June 4, 2002. A stable 3.217 (for i386) was released April 8, 2003. Beta version 3.391 was released January 30, 2003. The stable 2.x tree is at version 2.031, released November 15, 2002. There is also a version 2.027 for Sun Cobalt was released July 3, 2002. Stable version 4.008 was released June 12, 2003. A 'secured' distribution. From LWN Distribution List Asynchronous A lack of synchronization. A method of transmitting data over a network using a start bit at the beginning of a character and a stop bit at the end. The time intervak between characters may be varying lengths. In video, a signal is asynchronous when its timing differs from that of the system reference signal. From Glossary of Distance Education and Internet Terminology At Run a command once at some future time. From Rute-Users-Guide Audio Bookshelf Including the Enigma Audio Bookshelf could be stretching the definition of a Linux distribution more than a little. But this is a bootable CD product, which contains enough of a Linux operating system to turn a PC into a book reader. Any PC meeting the requirements can be turned into a Linux based book reader, regardless of the OS installed on the hard drive. Read the book yourself, or have the computer read to you. A 'special purpose/mini' distribution. From LWN Distribution List Aurora Sparc Project This Sparc Linux distribution is based on Red Hat 7.3. Build 0.2 was announced on December 4, 2001. Build 0.4 (Titanium) was released September 26, 2002. Build 0.42 (Douglas) was released October 4, 2002. From LWN Distribution List Aurox Linux Aurox Linux is an international distribution, hailing from Poland. It is available in several european countries, in different language versions, including Polish, Czech, German, French and Spanish. Aurox is based on Red Hat, with Aurox 9.0 the most recent offering. Added to list June 11, 2003. From LWN Distribution List Authoritative for a Domain I have emphasized that name servers only hold information for their own domains. Any other information they may have about another domain is cached, temporary data that has an expiration date attached to it. The domain that a name server has information about is said to be the domain that a name server is authoritative for. Alternatively we say: ``a name server is authoritative for the domain.'' For instance, the server ns2.cranzgot.co.za is authoritative for the domain cranzgot.co.za. Hence, lookups from anywhere on the Internet having the domain cranzgot.co.za ultimately are the responsibility of ns2.cranzgot.co.za, and originate (albeit through a long series of caches) from the host ns2.cranzgot.co.za. From Rute-Users-Guide Awk (Aho, Weinberger, and Kernighan) A programming language useful for its patternmatching syntax, and often used for data retrieval and data transformation. A GNU version is called Gawk. From I-gloss a-Linux a-Linux is an x86 floppy-based mini-distribution, where assembly code meets Linux kernel. It contains only programs written in assembly language. It is extemely small, yet functional, and provides HTTP and FTP services out-of-the-box. Initial version 0.17 was released August 17, 2002. A floppy-based distribution. From LWN Distribution List a2p Awk to Perl translator From whatis a2ps GNU a2ps 'Anything to PostScript' converter and pretty-printer a2ps converts files into PostScript for printing or viewing. It uses a nice default format, usually two pages on each physical page, borders surrounding pages, headers with useful information (page number, printing date, file name or supplied header), line numbering, symbol substitution as well as pretty printing for a wide range of programming languages. Historically, a2ps started as a text to PostScript converter, but thanks to powerful delegations it is able to let you use it for any kind of files, ie it can also digest manual pages, dvi files, texinfo, .... Among the other most noticeable features of a2ps are: - various encodings (all the Latins and others), - various fonts (automatic font down loading), - various medias, - various printer interfaces, - various output styles, - various programming languages, - various helping applications, - and various spoken languages. From Debian 3.0r0 APT a2ps The a2ps filter converts text and other types of files to PostScript format. A2ps has pretty-printing capabilities and includes support for a wide number of programming languages, encodings (ISO Latins, Cyrillic, etc.), and media. From Redhat 8.0 RPM a52dec Utilities to extract and decode ATCS A/52 streams Utilities to extract and decode ATCS A/52 streams. The A/52 standard is used in a variety of applications, including digital television and DVD. It is also known as AC-3. From Debian 3.0r0 APT aa3d An ASCII art stereogram generator This program generates the well known and popular random dot stereograms in ASCII art. From Debian 3.0r0 APT aalib-bin sample programs using aalib AAlib is a portable ascii art graphics library. Internally, it works like a graphics display, but the output is rendered into gorgeous platform independent ascii graphics. This package contains a few sample programs that use aalib. From Debian 3.0r0 APT aatv A program to watch TV in a text-based console aatv is a program which allows you to watch TV in a text-based console, i.e. in a virtual console or in an xterm. From Debian 3.0r0 APT abc2ps Translates ABC music description files to PostScript This is the Debian port of the abc2ps program by Michael Methfessel. The program translates tunes written in the ABC format to PostScript, which can then be viewed using Ghostview et al. or printed on a PostScript printer or through Ghostscript. It supports various semi-standard extensions to the ABC standard, such as multiple voices and staves. From Debian 3.0r0 APT abcde A Better CD Encoder A frontend program to cdparanoia, wget, cd-discid, id3, and your favorite Ogg or MP3 encoder (defaults to oggenc). Grabs an entire CD and converts each track to Ogg or MP3, then comments or ID3-tags each file, with one command. From Debian 3.0r0 APT abcmidi A converter from ABC to MIDI format and back This package contains the programs `abc2midi' and `midi2abc', which convert from the abc musical notation format to standard MIDI format and vice-versa. They can generate accompaniment from guitar chords in the abc file, as well as insert various MIDI events; the MIDI-to-abc translation tries to figure out bars, triplets and accidentals on its own. The package also contains `abc2abc' (an abc prettyprinter/transposer) and `mftext' (a program that will dump a MIDI file as text). The programs in this package are based on the `midifilelib' distribution available from http:// www.harmony-central.com/MIDI/. From Debian 3.0r0 APT abcmidi-yaps Yet another ABC to PostScript converter This program translates tunes written in the ABC format to PostScript, which can then be viewed on screen or printed. It is essentially a (non-exclusive) alternative to abc2ps, being based on the abc2ps PostScript code together with the ABC parser from the abcmidi package. From Debian 3.0r0 APT abicheck binary compatibility checking tool ABIcheck is a tool for checking an application's compliance with a library's defined Application Binary Interface (ABI). It relies on ABI definition information contained in the library. Example definitions are given for GNOME and glibc. From Debian 3.0r0 APT abiword WYSIWYG word processor AbiWord is the first application of a complete, open source office suite. The upstream source includes cross-platform support for Win32, BeOS, and QNX as well as GTK+ on Unix. AbiWord is still being developed. It's quite usable but not yet full- featured or polished. For many applications, however, it should prove effective and efficient. This program includes support for reading Microsoft Word files, RTF files, and many other foreign file formats. Natively, it uses a custom XML-based file format. From Debian 3.0r0 APT abook A text-based ncurses address book application. abook is a text-based ncurses address book application. It provides many different fields of user info. abook is designed for use with mutt, but can be used independently. From Debian 3.0r0 APT absolute pathname A pathname that explicitly identifies all directories from the root directory to an individual file. For example, pathname /home/linus/kernel /test refers to a file named test in directory kernel, which belongs to directory linus, which belongs to directory home, which belongs to the root directory /. From Linux Guide @FirstLinux abuse Crack dot Com's Abuse action game. Abuse is a side scrolling shoot-em-up action game from Crack dot Com. This package contains the Abuse game engine, in X and full screen svga versions. It requires a mouse. This package is obsolete and will be removed later (if you still need it, contact the maintainer). Please use abuse-sdl instead. From Debian 3.0r0 APT access check user's permissions for a file From whatis access determine whether a file can be accessed From whatis access control (access) Access control refers to controlling access by a user to a computer system, or data on that system. In formal terms, a "subject" (e.g. a user) attempts to access the "object" (e.g. system or data). An access control system will evaluate the security levels of the subject and object in order to see if access is permitted. Example: A simple example is the case where you enter a username and password in order to log onto the computer. Contrast: mandatory access control The system gives users "clearance levels", and assigns sensitivity levels to information. Therefore, if you only have "secret" clearance level, you cannot access "top-secret" information, but you can access "secret" or "confidential" information. See: Bell-LaPadula Model for more information. discretionary access control This system assigns subjects (users) to one or more groups. An object (system or file) contains a DACL (discretionary access control list) enumeration which users and groups may access the object. See: Access Control List for more information. Key point: There are different kinds of access. Read access means that somebody can read information, whereas write access implies that that somebody can change the data. For example, you can get a copy of your credit report and read it, but you can't necessarily change the data. From Hacking-Lexicon access permissions a set of permissions associated with every file and directory that determine who can read it, write to it, or execute it. Only the owner of the file (or the super-user) can change these permissions. From Linux Guide @FirstLinux accessdb dumps the content of a man-db database in a human readable format. From whatis account a cominbation of login and password which is normally created by the system administrator. The creation of an account includes the assignment of a home directory. From Linux Guide @FirstLinux acct The GNU Accounting utilities. The GNU Accounting utilities `ac', `accton', `last', `lastcomm', and `sa' add login and process accounting support to Debian Linux. "Login accounting" provides summaries of system resource usage based on connect time, and "process accounting" provides summaries based on the commands executed on the system. The 'last' command is provided by the Debian sysvinit package and not included here. From Debian 3.0r0 APT ace-of-penguins Solitaire-games with penguin-look. From the author's intro.html: "The Ace of Penguins is a set of Unix/X solitaire games based on the ones available for Windows(tm) but with a number of enhancements that make my wife like my versions better :-)" The package consists of the games Pegged, Minesweeper, Solitaire, Taipei (together with a level editor), Golf, Mastermind, Merlin and Freecell. From Debian 3.0r0 APT acfax Receive faxes using your radio and sound card acfax allows you to receive faxes using your sound card. Typically you might use it to decode faxes sent over HF radio or from satellites. From Debian 3.0r0 APT achilles An artificial life and evolution simulator Achilles is an artificial life and evolution simulator that uses Hebbian neural networks and OpenGL /SDL to simulate life in a simplified environment. It is based on Larry Yaeger's PolyWorld. From Debian 3.0r0 APT acidlab Analysis Console for Intrusion Databases The Analysis Console for Intrusion Databases (ACID) is a PHP-based analysis engine to search and process a database of security events generated by various IDSes, firewalls, and network monitoring tools. The features currently include: o Query-builder and search interface for finding alerts matching on alert meta information (e.g. signature, detection time) as well as the underlying network evidence (e.g. source/destination address, ports, payload, or flags). o Packet viewer (decoder) will graphically display the layer-3 and layer-4 packet information of logged alerts o Alert management by providing constructs to logically group alerts to create incidents (alert groups), deleting the handled alerts or false positives, exporting to email for collaboration, or archiving of alerts to transfer them between alert databases. o Chart and statistic generation based on time, sensor, signature, protocol, IP address, TCP/UDP ports, or classification ACID has the ability to analyze a wide variety of events which are post-processed into its database. Tools exist for the following formats: o using Snort (www.snort.org) - Snort alerts - tcpdump binary logs o using logsnorter (www.snort.org/downloads/logsnorter-0.2.tar.gz) - Cisco PIX - ipchains - iptables - ipfw From Debian 3.0r0 APT acidwarp This is a linux port of the popular dos program Acidwarp. Acidwarp is a program that makes neat looking pictures and rotates the palette. Its only use is for entertainment, but it is neat. I stumbled upon source code for Acidwarp on the net one day, and decided that it was high time someone ported it to linux. So, here it is. From Debian 3.0r0 APT ack Kanji code converter ACK is a highly versatile Kanji code converter. ACK can do reciprocal conversion among Japanese EUC, Shift-JIS and 7bit JIS. JIS Kata-kana(SJIS Han-kaku Kana) is also supported. Kanji code can be automatically detected even if the input stream contains Kata-kana characters. Besides, ACK can be used as a Kanji code checker with very high detection rate. From Debian 3.0r0 APT acl Access control list utilities This package contains the getfacl and setfacl utilities needed for manipulating access control lists. From Debian 3.0r0 APT aclocal automatically generate aclocal.m4 from configure.in From whatis acm4 A multi-player aerial combat simulation. acm is an air combat simulator that runs under the X window system. Up to eight players can engage in simultaneous air combat. From Debian 3.0r0 APT acorn-fdisk Partition editor for Acorn/RISC OS machines Acorn-fdisk allows you to edit disk partitions on Acorn machines. It understands a variety of the partition tables formats used under RISC OS, including Filecore, ICS-IDE, EESOX and Powertec. From Debian 3.0r0 APT acpid Utilities for using ACPI Modern computers support the Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) to allow intelligent power management on your system and to query battery and configuration status. This package contains acpid, which is the user-space daemon needed in order to make the Linux ACPI support completely functional. In order to use this package you need a recent Kernel (=>2.4.7). This can be one including the patches on http://acpid.sourceforge.net or a non patched one. From Debian 3.0r0 APT acronym an abbreviation. Examples of Linux related acronyms are KDE, ELF and GNU. From Linux Guide @FirstLinux acs Al's Circuit Simulator -- dummy package acs, Al's Circuit Simulator, has been renamed GNUCAP. This is a dummy package to force an upgrade to the new package name. From Debian 3.0r0 APT activate read/write flags marking active boot partition From whatis adacgi Ada CGI interface This package lets you build CGI applications in Ada. From Debian 3.0r0 APT adapter a device that allows one system to connect to and work with another. From Linux Guide @FirstLinux adaptive compression a data compression technique that dynamically adjusts the algorithm used based on the content of the data being compressed. From Linux Guide @FirstLinux adbbs ad! BBS. A perl based bbs or easy menu system. aD! BBS was basically written to provide a nice, easy to use menu / bbs interface, currently it doesn't handle special permissions, group permissions, etc. but they are in the 'todo' list. Supports ANSI Color. From Debian 3.0r0 APT addgroup add a user or group to the system From whatis addr2line convert addresses into file names and line numbers. From whatis addressbook Tk personal address manager Addressbook is an address manager meant to replace your old paper rolodex. It stores addresses, phone and fax numbers and can interact with some additional programs (i.e., for dialing) It has a nice user interface written in Tcl/Tk. The additional suggested software will enable additional functionality, such as automatic dialing, faxing, printing, etc. The program is still fully functional without any of the suggested software. Author: Clemens Durka < clemens@dagobah.de> Homepage: http://home.pages.de/~addressbook/ From Debian 3.0r0 APT adduser Add and remove users and groups This package includes the adduser and deluser commands for creating and removing users. o Adduser can create new users and groups and add existing users to existing groups. o Deluser can remove users and groups and remove users from a given group. Adding users with adduser is much easier than adding them by hand. Adduser will choose appropriate UID and GID values, create a home directory, copy skeletal user configuration, allow you to set an initial password and the GECOS field. Deluser can optionally remove and backup the user's home directory and mail spool or all files on the system owned by him. Optionally a custom script can be executed after each of the commands. From Debian 3.0r0 APT adjtimex Utility to display or set the kernel time variables This program gives you raw access to the kernel time variables. For a machine connected to the Internet, or equipped with a precision oscillator or radio clock, the best way to keep the system clock correct is with xntpd. However, for a standalone or intermittently connected machine, you may use adjtimex instead to at least correct for systematic drift. adjtimex can optionally adjust the system clock using the CMOS clock as a reference, and can log times for long-term estimation of drift rates. From Debian 3.0r0 APT admesh processing triangulated solid meshes Currently, ADMesh only reads the STL file format that is used for rapid prototyping applications, although it can write STL, VRML, OFF, and DXF files. Some features of admesh are: Fill holes in the mesh by adding facets. Repair facets by connecting nearby facets. Repair normal directions (i.e. facets should be CCW) Remove degenerate facets (i.e. facets with 2 or more vertices equal) Web site: http://www.varlog.com/products/admesh/ From Debian 3.0r0 APT admin /ad-min'/ n. Short for `administrator'; very commonly used in speech or on-line to refer to the systems person in charge on a computer. Common constructions on this include `sysadmin' and `site admin' (emphasizing the administrator's role as a site contact for email and news) or `newsadmin' (focusing specifically on news). Compare postmaster, sysop, system mangler. From Jargon Dictionary admin short for administrator, referring to the systems person responsible for the maintenance of a computer. From Linux Guide @FirstLinux admwebuser Manage Squid or Web users using a Web browser This utility allows you to manage Squid or Web users using only a simple Web browser. All the management tasks, including creating, changing, removing, enabling and disabling users can be performed through an easy-to-use Web interface. This package is also know as admuser but it was agreed that admwebuser would be a better package name to be used instead. From Debian 3.0r0 APT advi a DVI previewer and presenter written in Objective Caml Active-DVI is a DVI previewer and presenter written in Objective Caml (http:// caml.inria.fr/ocaml/) with some eye candy effects for presentation, support for interactive demonstrations, and embedding of arbitrary applications within the presentation (hence the Active adjective of the presenter :). Active-DVI does not (yet) support postscript fonts (see the README.Debian for more details). Active-DVI also has the ability to run embedded commands, which may cause security problems when viewing untrusted DVI files. make sure to read the README.Debian for more information From Debian 3.0r0 APT aee An easy to use screen-based editor aee (advanced easy editor) is intended to be an easy to use screen-based editor that requires no instruction to use. Its interface is highlighted by simple pop-up menus, which makes it easy for the users to carry out tasks without remembering the commands. From Debian 3.0r0 APT aegis Advanced software management tool. Aegis integrates standard software tools such as gcc and cvs into an easy to use, extensible software management system. Aegis simplifies the problems associated with multiple developers and development trees using a transaction-based approach to version control, along with a web-browsable repository and an integrated testing mechanism. See aegis-doc for documentation, aegis-tk for a TK based user interface, and aegis-web for a web based user interface. From Debian 3.0r0 APT aeromail Web-based e-mail client. AeroMail is a web-based e-mail client noted for its elegant interface. Other highlights include: - attachments - images - cookie-free http authentication. It is written in PHP using PHP's built in IMAP functions. Details at http://cushman.net/projects/aeromail/ index.php From Debian 3.0r0 APT aethera Email and PIM application for KDE Aethera is a pim application, i.e. it handles all kinds of personal information: email, contacts, notes, tasks, todos, journals. From Debian 3.0r0 APT aewm a minimalist window manager for X11 aewm is a minimalist window manager for X11. It has no nifty features, but is light on resources and extremely simple in appearance. It should eventually make a good reference implementation of the ICCCM. A few separate programs are included to handle running programs, switching between windows, etc. From Debian 3.0r0 APT aewm++ minimal window manager written in C++ aewm++ is a minimal window manager for X11, based on aewm. It keeps aewm's minimalist look and feel but is written in C++, and adds some modern features like virtual desktops and partial GNOME support. Also included with this package: * appbar: a small application launcher * aewm++_fspanel: a very small panel * setrootimage: draws a gradient on the X root window * aewm++_xsession: keeps an X session alive From Debian 3.0r0 APT af An Emacs-like mail reader and composer. Af is a standalone mail reader which has an Emacs-like interface by default. It has good facilities for handling folders, and commands for handling groups of messages in a single operation. Af is aimed primarily at Emacs users and people who deal with large amounts of mail daily, but other people have found it useful too. From Debian 3.0r0 APT afbackup Client-Server Backup System (Server side) This is a client-server backup system offering several workstations a centralized backup to a special backup server. Backing up only one computer is easily possible, too. Any streaming device can be used for writing the data to it, usually this will be a tape device. Writing backups is normally done sequentially: The next writing to tape goes to the end of the previous write no matter where you have restored from in the meantime. Features: - Authentication of the client is performed before it can take over control - Access restriction for the streamer device -> security - Client-side per-file compression -> reliability - Data stream is written to tape in pieces -> fast finding of files - Tape position logging for each file - Tape capacity is fully used - Full / incremental backups - Raw partitions can be backed up - Client and Server buffering for maximal throughput is done Note: Tk is required if you want to use the graphical configuration tool instead of the text configuration tool. From Debian 3.0r0 APT affiche application to "stick" little notes on the desktop. Affiche is a little application that allows people to "stick" little notes on their computer desktop. It was made for the GNUstep environment. From Debian 3.0r0 APT afio Archive file manipulation program. Afio manipulates groups of files, copying them within or between filesystems and an afio archive. Afio archives are portable as they contain only ASCII-formatted header information. Afio makes cpio-format archives. Afio deals somewhat gracefully with input data corruption. Afio supports multi-volume archives during interactive operation. Afio can make compressed archives that are much safer than compressed tar or cpio archives. Afio is best used as an `archive engine' in a backup script. From Debian 3.0r0 APT afm2tfm convert Adobe font metrics to TeX font metrics From whatis afterstep A window manager with the NEXTSTEP look and feel. AfterStep is a window manager based on FVWM which attempts to emulate the NEXTSTEP look and feel, while retaining the configurability of its predecessor. Note that this window manager makes extensive use of the color palette. If you have only an 8-bit color display, it will run as packaged, but you may want to modify the configuration to use fewer colors. AfterStep is a continuation of the BowMan window manager project, but the name was changed to reflect the desire that it do more than simply emulate and become a valuable window manager in its own right. From Debian 3.0r0 APT agbrowser The KDE2 frontend to the AudioGalaxy Linux client. AGBrowser is a program to complement the official satellite program for Linux from AudioGalaxy. By using AGBrowser, every dependency on another program to search for, download, share, and manage mp3s has been satisfied. AGBrowser requires the use of the non-open, non-free AudioGalaxy Satellite software. The installer is available as a Debian package, agsatellite. From Debian 3.0r0 APT aggregate CIDR network aggregation and filtering aggregate is a tool for aggregating CIDR networks. Input is read from stdin and output is written to stdout. It understands IPv4 networks represented as network/prefix, network/netmask and start_address - end_address. It is able to read input in any one of these formats and output in the same or a different format. It is also able to limit the maximum and minimum prefix length that will be output. This can be used to filter, for instance ignoring all networks with a prefix longer than 24 bits. That is all networks smaller than a traditional Class C. From Debian 3.0r0 APT agsatellite Audiogalaxy Satellite (installer) The Audiogalaxy Satellite is a small and simple program that allows you to share your music with friends and other users on Audiogalaxy. Audiogalaxy does not allow redistribution of their software. Therefore, this package requires the user to fetch the Audiogalaxy Satellite separately from their web site. When you install this package you will be guided through that process. This package installs the file AGSatellite0520-glibc21.tar.gz from the www.audiogalaxy.com website (look for "Download Satellite"). From Debian 3.0r0 APT aide Advanced Intrusion Detection Environment AIDE creates a database from the regular expression rules that it finds from the config file. Once this database is initialized it can be used to verify the integrity of the files. It has several message digest algorithms (md5,sha1,rmd160,tiger,haval,etc.) that are used to check the integrity of the file. More algorithms can be added with relative ease. All of the usual file attributes can also be checked for inconsistencies. You will almost certainly want to tweak the configuration file in /etc/aide/ aide.conf. See manual.html for information on this file. From Debian 3.0r0 APT aime Advanced Interactive Mudding Environment A MUD/Multi-user participatory environment server with a built-in builder port for straight-forward world creation, an online interpreted scripting engine for game logic, and an extremely flexible track-based level/quest/profession system. From Debian 3.0r0 APT airsnort WLAN sniffer A wireless LAN (WLAN) tool which cracks encryption keys on 802.11b WEP networks. AirSnort operates by passively monitoring transmissions, computing the encryption key when enough packets have been gathered. From Debian 3.0r0 APT aish ish/base64/uuencoded_file converter Aish is a file converter, which can encode binary files to ascii text as ish/base64/uuencoded_file. Aish can also decode them. From Debian 3.0r0 APT alamin-client Alamin GSM SMS Gateway client Client part of the Alamin GSM SMS Gateway. Used to send commands local or remotely to the gateway server (send a message, query a queue status, etc.). From Debian 3.0r0 APT alamin-server Alamin GSM SMS Gateway server Server part of the Alamin GSM SMS Gateway. This gateway allows you to send SMS messages over a GSM network, and receive SMS messages and run a program (called input message processor, IMP) to process the incoming message. From Debian 3.0r0 APT alarmd KDE Alarm daemon. From whatis alchemist The alchemist is a back-end configuration architecture. Alchemist provides multi-sourced configuration at the data level, postponing translation to native format until the last stage. It uses XML for intermediary data encoding, and can be extended to arbitrarily large configuration scenarios. From Redhat 8.0 RPM alcovebook-sgml Alcove customisation of the DocBook DTD and stylesheets This includes the AlcoveBook DTD (generic, still to be refined into several other DTDs), and the Alcove DSSSL stylesheets, which currently include: - a generic extension over Norman Walsh's modular stylesheets - a book-like style for article - an improved article style (still somewhat experimental) It integrates smoothly within the sgml2x framework. From Debian 3.0r0 APT aleph The Aleph programming language - runtime Aleph is a multi-threaded functional programming language with dynamic symbol bindings that support the object oriented paradigm. Aleph has a rich set of features providing runtime compatibility with C++. The engine runs on both 32 bits and 64 bits platforms. It is designed to be portable across platforms. This package contains the runtime binaries & libraries. From Debian 3.0r0 APT alevt X11 Teletext/Videotext browser AleVT is an X11 program for browsing and searching Teletext/Videotext pages received by a compatible decoder (at the moment, bttv). Features include: * Multiple windows * Page cache * Regular expression searching * Built-in manual Additional command line utilities can * receive the time from Teletext/Videotext * capture pages and write them to disk Teletext/Videotext is used by TV channels to transmit textual information pages (it's transmitted via non-visible scan lines). Bttv is a driver for frame grabber cards using the Bt848 family of video decoder chips. It is included in the Linux kernel starting with version 2.2 or available separately from http://bytesex.org/bttv/ Homepage: http://www.goron.de/~froese/ From Debian 3.0r0 APT algorithm A series of rules/procedures for solving a mathematical or logical problem. From an infosec point of few, the most interesting mathematical problems are those of cryptography. Cryptographic algorithms of interest are those for encrypting messages or generating unique hashes. Analogy: An cookbook recipe is an algorithm. Key point: Different algorithms have different levels of complexity. For example, consider the ancient parable (Babylonian?) about a king and a wise subject who did a favor for him. The subject asked for one piece of grain to be placed on the first square of a chess board, two grains on the second, four grains on the third, and so on, doubling the amount of grain for each successive square. This problem demonstrates an algorithm of exponential complexity. For the first 10 squares of the chess board, the series is: 1 2 4 8 16 32 64 128 256 512. Thus, for the first 10 squares, roughly a thousand grains must be paid out. However, the series continues (using K=1024): 1k 2k 4k 8k 32k 64k 128k 256k 512k. Thus, for the first 20 squares, roughly a million grains must be paid out. After 30 squares, roughly a billion grains must be paid out. For 40 squares, roughly a trillion grains must be paid out. This is directly related to such things as key size. A 41-bit key is twice as hard to crack as a 40-bit key. A 50-bit key is a thousand times harder. A 60-bit key is a million times harder. This is why the 128-bit vs. 40-bit encryption debate is so important: 128-bit keys are a trillion trillion times harder to crack (via brute force) than 40-bit keys. Key point: Most algorithms are public, meaning that somebody trying to decrypt your message knows all the details of the algorithm. Consequently, the message is protected solely by the key. Many people try to add additional protection by making the details of the algorithm secret as well. Experience so far has led to the belief that this actually leads to weaker security for two reasons. First, such secrets always get discovered eventually, so if security depends upon this secret, it will eventually be broken. Secondly, human intelligence is such that someone cannot create a secure algorithm on his/her own. Therefore, only by working with a community of experts over many years can humans create a secure algorithm. To date, only two such communities exist: the entire world of cryptography experts publishing the details of their work and trying to break other people's work, and the tightly knit community of cryptography experts working in secret for the NSA. From Hacking-Lexicon alias An alternate name, or abbreviation, used in place of a command or a sequence of commands in the C shell and the Korn shell. From Linux Guide @FirstLinux alias The word alias is used for many different things within infosec. In all its definitions, it generally means somesort of alternate name for something. Some definitions used for alias are: e-mail alias alicq Flexible ICQ client in pure Tcl/Tk Alicq is pure Tcl/Tk implementation of ICQ client with flexible modularized architecture, support for ICQ2000 /Oscar protocol, and ability to pick up Licq configuration files and user database. Why would you use it? It is small, about 2500 lines as of release 0.6. It is modular and extendable in best tradition of the Tcl scripting language. New modules are easy to write, and dozen lines Tcl module can do a lot. It is crossplatfrom: works on Unix, Windows, Macintosh, and on any other system supported by Tcl/Tk. From Debian 3.0r0 APT alien install non-native packages with dpkg Alien allows you to convert LSB, Red Hat, Stampede and Slackware Packages into Debian packages, which can be installed with dpkg. It can also generate packages of any of the other formats. This is a tool only suitable for binary packages. From Debian 3.0r0 APT allcm force the most important Computer-Modern-fonts to be calculated From whatis allec force the most important Computer-Modern-fonts to be calculated From whatis allegro-demo cool game, demonstrating power of the Allegro library This game is distributed with the Allegro library and shows a new Allegro programmer the power of this lib. But it is more than an usual feature demo, it is fully playable and may make some fun... From Debian 3.0r0 APT allneeded force the calculation of all fonts now needed From whatis allow_null_glob_expansion If set, bash allows pathname patterns which match no files (see Pathname Expansion below) to expand to a null string, rather than themselves. From Rute-Users-Guide alml This package provides a SGML typesetting system. Alml is a SGML typesetting system developed for a big italian document: "Appunti di informatica libera". Alml is made for very big documentation projects, and can generate PDF, PostScript, HTML and pure text output. From Debian 3.0r0 APT alpha software The term used to describe an early release of software that will have many bugs and features missing. See beta software. From Linux Guide @FirstLinux alsaconf ALSA configurator This is configurator for ALSA driver. Run it, if you need configure your sound card. From Debian 3.0r0 APT alsaplayer PCM player designed for ALSA Alsaplayer is a PCM player designed specifically for use with ALSA, but works great with OSS or EsounD. It's heavily threaded which cuts down on skipping, offers optional and even simultaneous visual scopes, plays mp3, mp2, ogg, cdda, audiofs, and lots more. This empty package provides an easy transition to either the gtk or text frontends; it may be safely removed once all its dependencies are installed. From Debian 3.0r0 APT alt /awlt/ 1. n. The alt shift key on an IBM PC or clone keyboard; see bucky bits, sense 2 (though typical PC usage does not simply set the 0200 bit). 2. n. The `option' key on a Macintosh; use of this term usually reveals that the speaker hacked PCs before coming to the Mac (see also feature key, which is sometimes incorrectly called `alt'). 3. n.,obs. [PDP-10; often capitalized to ALT] Alternate name for the ASCII ESC character (ASCII 0011011), after the keycap labeling on some older terminals; also `altmode' (/awlt'mohd/). This character was almost never pronounced `escape' on an ITS system, in TECO, or under TOPS-10 -- always alt, as in "Type alt alt to end a TECO command" or "alt-U onto the system" (for "log onto the [ITS] system"). This usage probably arose because alt is more convenient to say than `escape', especially when followed by another alt or a character (or another alt and a character, for that matter). 4. The alt hierarchy on Usenet, the tree of newsgroups created by users without a formal vote and approval procedure. There is a myth, not entirely implausible, that alt is acronymic for "anarchists, lunatics, and terrorists"; but in fact it is simply short for "alternative". From Jargon Dictionary alt bit /awlt bit/ [from alternate] adj. See meta bit. From Jargon Dictionary altgcc Alternate gcc package for the libc5 environment. This special gcc package works with the libc5-altdev package to build binaries for the old libc5/ld-linux.so.1 environment. It can coexist with the standard libc6 development packages. From Debian 3.0r0 APT althea IMAP email client for GTK+ The designers of Althea felt that there wasn't a stable, easy to use, GUI, IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) e-mail client for X Windows. The design goal was a stable e-mail client with the richness of usability of Microsoft's Outlook, Qualcomm's Eudora, and Cyrusoft's Mulberry. This package was built without SSL support. If you want SSL support, use the althea-ssl package, which is available in non-US, instead. Check the documentation at /usr/ share/doc/althea/help.html before filing a bug report. From Debian 3.0r0 APT am-utils The 4.4BSD automounter. Amd is an automounter--it mounts file systems "on demand" when they are first referenced and unmounts them after a period of inactivity. From Debian 3.0r0 APT amanda-client Advanced Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver (Client) Amanda is a backup system designed to archive many computers on a network to a single large-capacity tape drive. This package is suitable for large amounts of data to backup. For smaller solutions take a look at afbackup, tob, taper, ... Features: * will back up multiple machines in parallel to a holding disk, blasting finished dumps one by one to tape as fast as we can write files to tape. For example, a ~2 Gb 8mm tape on a ~240K/s interface to a host with a large holding disk can be filled by Amanda in under 4 hours. * built on top of standard backup software: Unix dump/ restore, and later GNU Tar and others. * does simple tape management: will not overwrite the wrong tape. * supports tape changers via a generic interface. Easily customizable to any type of tape carousel, robot, or stacker that can be controlled via the unix command line. * for a restore, tells you what tapes you need, and finds the proper backup image on the tape for you. * recovers gracefully from errors, including down or hung machines. * reports results, including all errors in detail, in email to operators. * will dynamically adjust backup schedule to keep within constraints: no more juggling by hand when adding disks and computers to network. * includes a pre-run checker program, that conducts sanity checks on both the tape server host and all the client hosts (in parallel), and will send an e-mail report of any problems that could cause the backups to fail. * can compress dumps before sending or after sending over the net, with either compress or gzip. * can optionally synchronize with external backups, for those large timesharing computers where you want to do full dumps when the system is down in single-user mode (since BSD dump is not reliable on active filesystems): Amanda will still do your daily dumps. * lots of other options; Amanda is very configurable. THIS PACKAGE RELIES ON A RUNNING AMANDA SERVER IN YOUR NETWORK. For a quick start read the README.client.debian in /usr/share/ doc/amanda-client. Explanation of suggested programs: - awk and gnuplot are needed for plotting statistics of backups From Debian 3.0r0 APT amanda-common Advanced Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver (Libs) This package contains libraries required by the amanda client and server packages. From Debian 3.0r0 APT amanda-server Advanced Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver (Server) Amanda is a backup system designed to archive many computers on a network to a single large-capacity tape drive. This package is suitable for large amounts of data to backup. For smaller solutions take a look at afbackup, tob, taper, ... Features: * will back up multiple machines in parallel to a holding disk, blasting finished dumps one by one to tape as fast as we can write files to tape. For example, a ~2 Gb 8mm tape on a ~240K/s interface to a host with a large holding disk can be filled by Amanda in under 4 hours. * built on top of standard backup software: Unix dump/ restore, and later GNU Tar and others. * does simple tape management: will not overwrite the wrong tape. * supports tape changers via a generic interface. Easily customizable to any type of tape carousel, robot, or stacker that can be controlled via the unix command line. * for a restore, tells you what tapes you need, and finds the proper backup image on the tape for you. * recovers gracefully from errors, including down or hung machines. * reports results, including all errors in detail, in email to operators. * will dynamically adjust backup schedule to keep within constraints: no more juggling by hand when adding disks and computers to network. * includes a pre-run checker program, that conducts sanity checks on both the tape server host and all the client hosts (in parallel), and will send an e-mail report of any problems that could cause the backups to fail. * can compress dumps before sending or after sending over the net, with either compress or gzip. * can optionally synchronize with external backups, for those large timesharing computers where you want to do full dumps when the system is down in single-user mode (since BSD dump is not reliable on active filesystems): Amanda will still do your daily dumps. * lots of other options; Amanda is very configurable. For a quick start read the README.server.debian in /usr/ share/doc/amanda. Explanation of suggested programs: - perl is needed for some non essential server utilities - awk and gnuplot are needed for plotting statistics of backups - to backup the tape server, you need to install the client too - /usr/bin/Mail from mailx is used by amcheck to mail info about which tape is needed next, etc From Debian 3.0r0 APT amap Networt protocol probing tool Amap allows you to probe IP ports for running protocols, ignoring the port number. It does this by sending probe packets to the port and analyzing the responses. This will allow you to find services running on non-standard ports. Having nmap installed is suggested, since amap cannot scan for open ports (but there is an option to import nmap's output). From Debian 3.0r0 APT amaterus GTK+ based window manager AMATERUS is a GTK+ based Window Manager. It has some interesting features like: * It is written with GTK * You can make "window group" and manipulate windows which belong to the group together. * You can edit the title bar strings. * Configuration file has an XML syntax (implementation is not so stable nor complete, though). * You can apply the GTK+ theme to the window manager. From Debian 3.0r0 APT amavis-postfix Interface between MTA and virus scanner. AMaViS is a script that interfaces a mail transport agent (MTA) with one or more virus scanners. AMaViS supports MTAs are exim, qmail, postfix, and sendmail, although this version has been built with only postfix support. From Debian 3.0r0 APT amaya Graphical HTML Editor from w3.org Amaya is a WYSIWYG HTML Editor, based on the thot toolkit developed at INRIA. From Debian 3.0r0 APT ame hosts. These tools will provide you with the IP addresses for given host names, as well as other information about registered domains and network addresses.You should install bind-utils if you need to get information from DNS nameservers. From Redhat 8.0 RPM ami An X input method server for Korean text input Ami is an X input method server for Korean text input. Hangul or Hanja Korean text can be input with Ami, which responds the requests from XIM compliant applications. In this package, Ami has been built as a standalone version and a WindowMaker dock. From Debian 3.0r0 APT amor a KDE creature for your desktop AMOR stands for Amusing Misuse Of Resources. It provides several different characters who prance around your X screen doing tricks and giving you tips. This package is part of the official KDE toys module. From Debian 3.0r0 APT amphetamine jump'n run game that offers some unique visual effects Amphetamine is an exciting Jump'n run game that offers some unique visual effects like colored lighting, fogging and coronas. You must fight eleven evil monsters with your magic weapons. From Debian 3.0r0 APT amplifier Any type of system on the network that can be used to amplify (increase) the the size of traffic is known as an amplifier. Example: The classic example is the smurf amplifier. An attacker spoofs the address of a victim and sends directed broadcasts to the amplifier, which then sends hundreds of replies back to the victim. Thus, it only costs the attacker a single packet to send many packets to the victim. Example: A more subtle attack is the use of DNS. The DNS response packet can be much larger than the request. This allows an attacker to flood the victim with large packets at the cost of small packets. From Hacking-Lexicon amstex structured text formatting and typesetting From whatis an Very fast anagram generator. Generates anagrams for a phrase supplied by the user, the words used in the anagram are taken from a specified dictionary which should contain one word per line (default:/usr/share/ dict/words). Appears to be up to 10 times faster than wordplay, especially for longer phrases. From Debian 3.0r0 APT anacron Anacron (like `anac(h)ronistic') is a periodic command scheduler. It executes commands at intervals specified in days. Unlike cron, it does not assume that the system is running continuously. It can therefore be used to control the execution of daily, weekly, and monthly jobs (or anything with a period of n days), on systems that do not run 24 hours a day. When installed and configured properly, Anacron will make sure that the commands are run at the specifiedintervals as closely as machine-uptime permits. This package is pre-configured to execute the daily jobs of the RedHat Linux system. You should install this program if your system is not powered on 24 hours a day to make sure the maintenance jobs ofother Red Hat Linux packages are executed periodically. From Redhat 8.0 RPM anacron a cron-like program that doesn't go by time Anacron (like `anac(h) ronistic') is a periodic command scheduler. It executes commands at intervals specified in days. Unlike cron, it does not assume that the system is running continuously. It can therefore be used to control the execution of daily, weekly and monthly jobs (or anything with a period of n days), on systems that don't run 24 hours a day. When installed and configured properly, Anacron will make sure that the commands are run at the specified intervals as closely as machine-uptime permits. This package is pre-configured to execute the daily jobs of the Debian system. You should install this program if your system isn't powered on 24 hours a day to make sure the maintenance jobs of other Debian packages are executed each day. From Debian 3.0r0 APT analog analyzes logfiles from web servers Analog is a fast logfile processor that generates usage statistic reports for your web server. Features: * It's fast. Very fast. It can process millions of lines per minute. * It's very scalable. * It's very flexible. The default output will be satisfactory for most people, but there are hundreds of options producing 32 different reports for those who want to do things differently. * It can output in many different languages, and 4 output formats. * It produces attractive output that complies with the HTML spec (and so can be read on any browser). * It can read logfiles in almost any format. * It can be run at the command line or from a web form interface. From Debian 3.0r0 APT anarchism An exhaustive exploration of Anarchist theory and practice. The Anarchist FAQ is an excellent source of information regarding Anarchist (libertarian socialist) theory and practice. It covers all major topics, from the basics of Anarchism to very specific discussions of politics, social organization, and economics. From Debian 3.0r0 APT and Auto Nice Daemon The auto nice daemon activates itself in certain intervals and renices jobs according to their priority and CPU usage. Jobs owned by root are left alone. Jobs are never increased in their priority. The renice intervals can be adjusted as well as the default nice level and the activation intervals. A priority database stores user/ group/job tuples along with their renice values for th