Last updated on:
Sunday, July 06, 2008
Software
- Linux/390 Distributions
- Linux/390 Patches
- Hercules - An S/390 Hardware Emulator
Information
- Large numbers of links
- Linux/390 HOWTOs
- IBM's Linux/390 pages
- Distribution Contents
- IBM VM and Linux Resources
- Linux man pages
- Notes & Observations
- Top 10 reasons to run Linux on VM
- Linux/390 at Princeton University
- i/370 Port, aka Bigfoot
- linuxvm.org Archives
Community
- Community Members
- Linux-390 Listserv
- Linux/390 Presentations
- Linux/390 Subscribers
- Linux/390 Survey Results
News
Fun
Credits
Archives of linuxvm.org
12/05/2002 - Dougie Lawson contributed
the URL to an rxsock extension for Rexx in response to a problem someone
was having porting a VM Rexx program to Linux/390. Mark Post took a look
at the source and reported that "It looks like this extension was
specifically designed for Regina and Winrexx running on Windows® systems only.
I'm sure it could be ported easily enough, but not by me." Hopefully
someone will make the effort since a number of people have expressed a
desire to be able to write Rexx/Regina code that uses sockets.
http://fly.hiwaay.net/~abbott/regina/
12/10/2002 - Rob van der Heij documented
a neat technique to figure out what device address a Linux/390 was last
IPLed from. The complete technique is documented in his email, but Mark
Post thought it would be worth turning into a bash script, which he did.
The script is available at the URL below.
http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvtype?LINUX-VM.32293
http://linuxvm.org/Patches/S390/iplvol.sh
12/10/2002 - In response to a question about
keeping passwords in synch between Linux and Windows® NT, Vince Re
of Computer Associates replied "If you are an ACF2 (or CA-Top Secret)
customer, then we have an open-source PAM plug-in that lets you authenticate
directly against ACF2 or Top Secret. The client side (the part that runs on
Linux) is available in source code or pre-built RPM form (both Intel and
mainframe Linux). The server is simply a built-in integrated part of ACF2.
With our plug-in installed, you need no user definition on Linux - your
existing mainframe security rules and passwords are all that's needed."
When questioned if this facility will be available for CA's VM:Secure
product, Vince replied that it is "in the works." He also
commented that CA was "committed to including PAM server components
in all of our security products." There was other discussion about
multiple systems using the same database, etc., that would make it worth
reading the whole thread.
http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvtype?LINUX-VM.32311
http://www3.ca.com/Files/ProductAnnouncements/etrust_acf2_pd_rel65.pdf
12/10/2002 - In response to the same question,
Jeremy Warren recommended checking out ad4UNIX, which is a Windows® NT/2000
Active Directory extension that allows Linux/UNIX authentication and user
information to be stored in Active Directory.
http://www.css-solutions.ca/ad4unix/
http://online.securityfocus.com/infocus/1563/
12/10/2002 - Wesley Parish recommended these
web sites in response to a request for pointers to Linux security information.
http://www.linuxsecurity.com/
http://lsm.immunix.org/
http://www.nsa.gov/selinux/
http://selinux.sourceforge.net/
http://www.grsecurity.net/
http://www.snort.org/
http://www.chkrootkit.org/
http://www.wiretapped.net/
http://www.cert.org/
12/11/2002 - A thread that started out by discussing
using kernel modules versus compiling everything into the kernel, branched out into
the old "monolithic verus microkernel" debate. Ross Patterson provided
an online reference to the email debate that occured between Linus Torvalds and his
professor, Andrew Tanenbaum, on this topic back in 1992 that has become part of
the Linux "lore.".
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/appa.html
12/14/2002 - Karsten Hopp of Red Hat announced that he had uploaded a new Rawhide version of their 31-bit Linux/390 distribution. He recited the usual warnings about how unstable a Rawhide release can be and how it is only for developers, and enclosed the contents of the README.Rawhide file from the FTP server. Some of the more interesting parts of that file are:
- The main purpose of this Rawhide release is to test the RPM packages and the network setup part of the installer.
- The syntax of the .parm file has changed and should be much easier now. The options are documented in the file README.
- This rawhide version uses
gcc 3.2.1-1
glibc 2.3.1-6
binutils 2.13.90.0.16-3
http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvtype?LINUX-VM.32441
ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/rawhide/s390
12/17/2002 - Paul Landay pointed out that IBM
has an SNA for Linux PRPQ, (CS/Linux = Communications Server for Linux), but
currently only for Intel-32bit. He also referred to an Open Source project,
which is supposed to work on Linux/390, linux-sna.org, but it appears that the
project has lost it's web host, screamingdaemon.com. In any case, the DNS servers
for linux-sna don't appear to be responding.
http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvtype?LINUX-VM.32469
http://www.ibm.com/software/network/commserver/
http://www.ibm.com/software/network/commserver/about/cslinux.html
http://www.linux-sna.org/
12/18/2002 - Mark Pace warned everyone with
anonymous FTP servers to "be sure that your lost+found directory in
/pub has attributes set to 700. There is an exploit that allows evil hackers
to create their own directories as an anonymous user."
http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvtype?LINUX-VM.32552
12/18/2002 - A thread that started out asking
what software people were using for high-availability clustering on Linux/390
ranged from recommending the built-in VM Cross System Extensions, to openMosix.
Steven Adams called openMosix "the open source product of choice since
Beowulf, and others, decided to start selling the product." He also mentioned
that he didn't see a Linux/390 port of openMosix. A quick look at the source
code seemed to verify that it was for IA32 and IA64 systems only.
David Boyes gave a pretty extensive analysis of the problems inherent to clustering,
and how to make the best of the current state of the art. Well worth reading.
http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvtype?LINUX-VM.32575
http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvtype?LINUX-VM.32578
http://www2.marist.edu/htbin/wlvtype?LINUX-VM.32752
12/19/2002 - A question was asked about support
for Guest LANs in the SuSE SLES7 ramdisk. Earlier versions, particularly the
publicly available Beta code, did not have it. Later versions, probably after late
May of 2002, did. Rob van der Heij said that the first version of the IBM OCO
modules that worked with Guest LAN was qeth-2.4.7-s390-8.o, and at that time,
additional maintenance for VM was still required. Other people who responded
said that they were able to have Guest LAN support during the install phase.
According to Vic Cross, "if your z/VM is 4.3 and you are using the
so-called QDIO Guest LAN (DEFINE LAN xxx QDIO), you will define your
connection to the LAN as if it was an OSA-Express. If your using z/VM 4.2,
or you have defined a HiperSockets Guest LAN on z/VM 4.3 (DEFINE LAN xxx
HIPER), the option you will use is" option 8, HIPERSOCKETS, on the
network setup menu.
http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvtype?LINUX-VM.32571
http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvtype?LINUX-VM.32573
http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvtype?LINUX-VM.32580
12/19/2002 - Mark Post forwarded the URL of
an InfoWorld article about a town in Germany to build its entire IT infrastructure
on Open Source software, including Linux, and eliminate Microsoft Windows®.
http://www.infoworld.com/articles/hn/xml/02/12/17/021217hngermany.xml
12/20/2002 - A list subscriber reported a problem
with their RAMAC virtual array being full. They'd tried various things, but usage
kept creeping up. Holger Smolinksi recommended running these commands against all
the Linux/390 file systems they had:
dd if=/dev/zero of=<file> bs=1M; rm <file>; sync;
Where
<file> was some arbitrary name, since it was just going to be deleted anyway.
Holger also commented "That will at least grant a maximum RVA compression
ratio of 1:25 for unused storage." Scott Ledbetter of StorageTek gave a detailed
explanation of what was happening, and why Holger's solution, and a shell script that
Jim Sibley wrote would help the situation. He also re-posted Jim's script, which is
actually just one (continued) line of code:
#!/bin/bash
# sample script to write zeroes on the end of all
# mounted ext2 volumes then remove file to compress RVA
# volumes. jlsibley@us.ibm.com
#
# No warranty given or implied by the author or IBM.
# Use at your own risk
#
# 1) display the local ext2 files df -l -t ext2
# 2) remove the heading and root | tail +3
# 3) squeeze out unwanted blanks | tr -s ' '
# 4) use gawk to generate a line for each mounted
# file system of the form
#
# dd bs=1k count="$4" if=/dev/zero of="$6"/zeroes;rm "$6"/zeroes"
#
# where $4 is the fourth column (available space)
# $6 is the sixth column (mount point)
#
# | gawk -F ' ' '{print "dd bs=1k count="$4" if=/dev/zero of="$6"/zeroes;rm "$6"/zeroes"}'
#
# 5) execute the script | /bin/bash
# you could delete this command if you just want to see the script generated
# or write it to a file
#
# the actual command is a single line of code!
df -l -t ext2 | tail +3 | tr -s ' ' | gawk -F ' ' '{print \
"dd bs=1k count="$4" if=/dev/zero of="$6"/zeroes;rm "$6"/zeroes"}' | \
/bin/bash
Jim was questioned as to why his script excluded the root file system (tail +3
versus tail+2), and he replied that he doesn't fill up his root file system. For
Those of us that don't have that luxury, simply changing the command to tail+2
will also include the root file system.http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvtype?LINUX-VM.32614
http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvtype?LINUX-VM.32616
12/20/2002 - Gerhard Hiller of IBM reported the following updates to the DeveloperWorks web site:
- New OCO modules for both kernel 2.4 "streams", Red Hat and SuSE
- Experimental modutils 2.4.22 biarch patch for the "May 2002 stream"
- Performance Hints & Tips on the HowTo page
12/23/2002 - David Boyes gave the update he
promised on the discussions with IBM's software group with respect to getting
their middleware "officially" OKed for use on Debian for 390.
"At this point, the discussions have not moved very far. After several
meetings, the IBM position is that they do not see a business case for
supporting the major IBM middleware (WAS, DB/2, etc) on any distributions other
than Red Hat or SuSE." He also stated "In all fairness to IBM, I can
see their point -- software testing is expensive and time-consuming -- but it
is somewhat disappointing to encounter this as CA, BEA, and Oracle have all
been considerably more flexible and cooperative. We'll continue discussing it
after the holidays, but I don't see a lot of motion happening at this point,
even given the substantial advantage that a lower cost entry point would
provide them. I'd be interested in talking to anyone who has turned down a
Linux/390-based solution using the IBM middleware products due to
implementation costs -- it would greatly help in discussing the business case
with IBM to address the entry cost issue. No names will be named (unless you
give permission) but other voices are always appreciated...8-)"
http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvtype?LINUX-VM.32648