One of the things that SCO keeps bringing up is how IBM did nasty things to them on Project Monterey. Thing is that Linux actually ran on one of the target architectures of Project Monterey, Intel’s Itanium (aka Merced, IA-64), 8 months prior to Monterey and the people who did this were not IBM, but HP!

When Monterey first booted on IA-64 in September 1999 HP
had already
had the
Linux kernel running in native 64-bit mode on the platform
according to this
technical report from HP, (direct link to PDF here).

There is also a paper
(PDF here)
& slides
(PDF here)
that David Mosberger from HP presented at Linux Expo ’99
documenting their work that includes a
very
interesting timeline that shows that they first got the
kernel to successfully boot and run Hello World on the 20th
January 1999, and they had that with CERNs glibc for IA64
running by the 9th April 1999.

So, if Linux was running on IA-64 8 months *before*
Monterey, could
we claim that they copied from Linux using SCO’s bent
logic ? 😉

Congratulations to the NFSv4 team who have seen their code pass the fsstress NFS stress testing and is reported to be stable. This was announced on the NFSv4 list yesterday.

Caveat: This is only the core functionality of NFS, and it’s not (yet) in the mainline kernel!

There is more on the Linux NFSv4 testing effort over at OSDL.

Here’s an interesting turn up for the books. SCO, who started the lawsuit and who’s lawyers created their side of the documents, apparently have been been ripping off the scans of legal documents from the cases done by Tuxrocks and Groklaw and putting them up on their new “IP” website, without any credit to the original source.

Ironic, isn’t it ?

Frank Sorenson is quoted on Groklaw as writing:

For example, compare SCO’s #156 with the copy from my site. Note (using pdfinfo) that they were both scanned with “AXIS 700 Scan Server” (the scanner/copier at my office), they were both scanned at the same identical time (“Fri May 28 16:51:21 2004”), and that they both have the sme size (85387 bytes). Also note that they both have the same md5sum (3c1064ecedb19073e2194cd88507c349).

Another example is the Declaration of Ira Kistenberg (compare with the copy I obtained, scanned, and posted). In the upper right-hand corner of the page, you can see my handwriting where I noted which particular document this one was (236-G) so that I could remember when I got home from making copies at the courthouse.

There is a new SCO SEC 8-K Current Report filing which reveals that SCO’s first quarter report (10Q) is now “delinquent”, along with their annual report (10K) and that the NASDAQ has noticed it and is going to take that into its deliberations about whether to remove SCOXE from the NASDAQ Small Caps market.

My good friend Alec Muffett has blogged an article from SecurityFocus about the vulnerability of default Linux system installs to, what he neatly call, "The triumphant return of: main(){while(1)fork();}".

It’s sad to see that many Linux distros (Debian being the notable exception) still ship with bad defaults that don’t prevent a non-privileged user fork-bombing a box. Certainly something that needs to be addressed as it’s all part of the “defence in depth” that any system needs.

Thanks to those nice folks at Planet Linux Australia for adding my blog to the many that they aggregate there.

Nice work guys. Keep the penguin flying! 🙂