As a followup to yesterday's thought on phishing, I thought a quick review of how to check if a message is phishing or not might be useful.

1. What is "phishing"? The best answer I found was this google link
2. What to look for? Well links that ask for updates to personal information, accounts or memberships et cetera.
3. Check any links offered to see if they actually belong to the company perportedly asking for the information. In yesterday's email example the link to developer.bellmobility.ca turned out to be in other IP space.

For the second time in two days I have received a phishing email. It is puportedly from Bell.ca but a little research shows that it is really out of the IP space of Speedware.com a Montreal based company that develops and sells business intelligence solutions. Most annoying especially after reporting to abuse@bell.ca yesterday and getting no response.

So what to do? I found no Canadian sites collecting data on phihing exercises but I did find a couple elsewhere:
http://www.antiphishing.org/index.html and
http://wiki.castlecops.com/PIRT
I reported to both.

So be warned, the attempts are getting more and more sohistcated. By way of example, here's an excerpt from the messages I received:

The tar backup program is an archiving program designed to store and extract files from an archive file known as a tarfile. A tarfile may be made on a tape drive; however, it is also common to write a tarfile to a normal file.

Read Full article here

SHARE is the North American user group for users of IBM mainframe (aka System z) servers. SHARE (not an acronym, it is what we do) has a very active Linux program covering Linux in general and Linux on mainframes. SHARE has two meetings per year and I made two presentations at SHARE this week in Seattle.

Open Computing and Linux provides an overview of Open Computing and Linux from the "IBM point of view".

Linux on IBM System z provides an overview of virtualization and server consolidation and how Linux on System z can be used in this environment.

Munin the tool surveys all your computers and remembers what it saw. It presents all the information in in graphs through a web interface. Its emphasis is on plug and play capabilities. After completing a installation a high number of monitoring plugins will be playing with no more effort. Using Munin you can easily monitor the performance of your computers, networks, SANs, and quite possibly applications as well. It makes it easy to determine "what's different today" when a performance problem crops up. It makes it easy to see how you're doing capacity wise on all limited resources.

Let me introduce myself to the CLUE community. My name is Jim Elliott and I am the advocate for Open Computing (including Linux and Open Source) at IBM Canada Ltd. (which covers Canada and the Caribbean). I have been working pretty much full-time on Linux since mid-1998. First as the launch manager for Linux on IBM mainframes for the Americas and then since January of 2002 in my current role.

My web site is at ibm.com/vm/devpages/jelliott where you will find copies of presentations I have made at public events recently on Linux and Open Source.

Laptop Magazine is a good example of the mainstream IT media's approach to FOSS. It's neither hostile or friendly and generally responds to what its readers are doing.

Until recently the magazine hasn't done much on FOSS, but a couple of articles have indicates one more example of FOSS perception moving from curiosity to gadget to mainstream.

In an article published online, last month OpenOffice.org was named the magazine's top download of the month and received an editor's choice award:

This is atep by step tutorials how to setup Debian server this includes

Debian Installation
FTP Server Setup in debian
Webserver Setup in Debian
Samba Server Setup in Debian
Database Server Setup in Debian
Time clock sync for debian server
Mail Server Configuration in Debian
VNC Server setup in Debian
Proxy Server Setup in Debian
SSH Server Setup in Debian
tftp Server Setup in Debian
DHCP Server Setup in Debian
IPtables Configuration in Debian
DNS Server Setup in debian

Complete Debian Server Setup tutoria

Interview: Dru Lavigne, BSD Certification Group - The BSD Certification Group (BSDCG) is a non-profit organization established to create and maintain a global certification standard for system administration on BSD-based operating systems. After a year of work, the group behind the BSD Certification project plans to complete the process for the first certification (BSD Associate) in the first half of this year, with the first exam to be available by the second quarter. We interviewed Dru Lavigne, BSD advocate and creator of the initiative. [Newsforge]