SCOM agent on Linux - does it really need root and is it a problem?
Hi, Has anyone here got any experience with running SCOM (Microsoft's System Center Operations Manager) agent on (RHEL) Linux? Our admins are used to monitoring Windows servers with SCOM. In particular, they monitor CPU usage, memory usage, disk usage, and all sorts of other stuff. We also have Linux servers, and SCOM has a linux agent. I can understand the admins' desire to use the same - and familiar - tool across the board, even if it is from Microsoft. Let's not discuss this particular issue, OK? However, it looks like the thing requires root permissions not just to install (that would be OK) but also for operation. All I've seen (I admit I have not done a really deep research into the subject) is a bunch of excuses that look rather dodgy (need to access privileged kernel data structures - what's not exposed via /proc or similar?) or downright suspicious (need to spawn processes as other users - what?!?). At the same time, there are enough websites, blogs, whatever by 3rd parties that describe how to run SCOM without root, while our official support say root is mandatory. My only problem is security. It just does not seem reasonable that one needs root privileges to monitor a dedicated server running software that does not itself require root privileges to run. It may not even be acceptable (in cases when the SW is deployed at a customer's data center - this is why we took special care not to require root access for operation of our own system). Can anyone shed the light on the following questions: 1) Is the official deployment mode of SCOM (with root, etc.) a security problem (e.g., for a bank where I keep my money and am a very unimportant customer)? I mean, beyond M$ know zilch about security statements? 2) If it is deployed without root privileges (can you confirm that this is possible?), what functionality will not work? 3) My understanding is that what it does not like about sudo is passwords - can anyone assess the effect of putting it into sudoers with NOPASSWD for what it needs? Thanks a lot, -- Oleg Goldshmidt | p...@goldshmidt.org ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Somewhat OT: MythTV / DVB in Israel
2012/1/14 Udi Finkelstein linux...@udif.com On Fri, Jan 13, 2012 at 11:50 AM, Shachar Shemesh shac...@shemesh.bizwrote: On 01/12/2012 02:27 PM, Udi Finkelstein wrote: yielding about 30% higher bitrate for the same bandwidth Complete and utter nitpicking. If you nitpick, make sure your are correct first... Bitrate is the number of bits per second (usually measured in kilo bits per second, or kbps, or sometimes mbps). This means that bit rate and bandwidth are, for all practical purposes, one and the same. I meant every word I said. And your assumption that bitrate and bandwidth is the same is definitely wrong! Every heard the of the distinctions between baud and bit/s? Just look at the evolution on modems from the 110bps half duplex to the 53600 full duplex (57600 is cheating because it relies on a digital line, so its not fail to compare it with earlier standards). As for DVB-T2, I will not go into the technical details , but feel free to look at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVB-T2#System_differences_with_DVB-T What you (probably) meant to say was that the new encoding allows transferring the same video quality for 30% less bit rate. Sorry, wrong again... Unlike earlier DVB-T efforts in the world (e.g. UK's Freeview) that used MPEg2, The Israeli standard already used H.264 over the DVB-T physical layer from day one. The new transmissions will keep H.264 but will use the new DVB-T2 encoding for the HD channels. Udi ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il In general. the maximum bit rate which can go through a channel is its analog bandwidth, multiplied by log2 of the ratio of signal to noise (plus one, but usually that's negligible). i.e if you have 1Mhz analog bandwidth and your signal energy is 128 times your noise energy (what we call 7x3=21 DB), you get to a maximum theoretical of 1Mhz x 7 = 7 Mbps. why is that: if you take a signal and change it 1 million times a second - you will be transferring 1 million symbols a second, and will be using 1MHZ bandwidth. now lets say a symbol can be any amplitude between 0 and 127 (because the difference between levels must be bigger then the noise), then we can encode 7 bits per symbol, for a total of 7Mbit per second. i do not know of DVB-T. but if i compare DVB-S (2 bit per symbol) and DVB-S2 (usually 3 bits per symbol) - you see that DVB-S2 is more sensitive to noise but have x1.5 bitrate. there are other considerations: we need error correction. for that we pay, a simple example: we can send every bit three times, so if we have error, we still can take a majority vote and know the right value for the bit. this is of course a very not effective error correction scheme, it is a rate 1/3 (we use triple bandwidth). btw DVB-S2 has also a better error correction scheme. another consideration is the gap, either time domain, or frequency domain. for example: i have two channels. as analog filters has a transition region, between what they let pass and what they block, we need a gap which takes some analog bandwidth. just my 2c ( and 1$ experience ;-)) erez. ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Somewhat OT: MythTV / DVB in Israel
On Jan 15, 2012, at 2:13 PM, Erez D wrote: Unlike earlier DVB-T efforts in the world (e.g. UK's Freeview) that used MPEg2, The Israeli standard already used H.264 over the DVB-T physical layer from day one. The new transmissions will keep H.264 but will use the new DVB-T2 encoding for the HD channels. The real question is which tuner cards/USB sticks will have DVB-T2 standard modems in them and which will only decode the DVB-T standard? Will any of them be supported by Linux? Geoff. -- Geoffrey S. Mendelson, N3OWJ/4X1GM My high blood pressure medicine reduces my midichlorian count. :-( ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: [OUT?] Help with Android?
So... Will there be a notification on this list when the new Android list goes online? I for one am an amateur Android tinkerer and would love to learn from others as well as share my thoughts and experiences. 2012/1/14 Lior Kaplan kaplanl...@gmail.com On Sat, Jan 14, 2012 at 1:08 PM, Nadav Har'El n...@math.technion.ac.ilwrote: On Sat, Jan 14, 2012, Amichai Rotman wrote about Re: [OUT?] Help with Android?: Can we host it on HUJI servers? Eli? (or is someone else running the list now?) If for some reason that doesn't work, there are also Hamakor's servers which I assume could be used for this purpose. Is the person running Hamakor mailing lists reading this and can confirm? (as you can see below, I hope this mailing list *will* be relevant to Hamakor's charter). Don't see any reason why not to use Hamakor's servers for this... I guess most of the stuff will be open source related at some point. Kaplan ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: [OUT?] Help with Android?
On 01/13/2012 10:24 AM, Amichai Rotman wrote: Well, why don't we start one of our own. I bet most of you developers on this list are also Android users / developers I am no developer, but I am tinker and I like to help, so I can try to help as I can. In the mean time, can I ask. Android related questions here? Yes. -- Michael Vasiliev Linux-IL Moderator ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Video Tape encoding
As promised, here is my write-up of the steps I did to capture a video tape under Linux: http://www.wikihow.com/index.php?title=Encode-a-Video-Tape-to-Mpeg4-%28Divx%29-Under-Linuxaction=history Feel free to edit and discuss on the wikipage. This is the first time I'm using wikihow, and I'm not really sure it is an appropriate place for hosting such explanations. If someone has a better suggestion, please let me know. Regards, Dov ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Wikis (Was: Re: Video Tape encoding)
On Sun, Jan 15, 2012 at 10:36:57PM +0200, Dov Grobgeld wrote: As promised, here is my write-up of the steps I did to capture a video tape under Linux: http://www.wikihow.com/index.php?title=Encode-a-Video-Tape-to-Mpeg4-%28Divx%29-Under-Linuxaction=history Feel free to edit and discuss on the wikipage. This is the first time I'm using wikihow, and I'm not really sure it is an appropriate place for hosting such explanations. If someone has a better suggestion, please let me know. Never stumbled upon it. It might be interesting, I don't know. I saw several significant FOSS projects, including vim and requesttracker, that moved their own self-maintained wikis to wikia.com, founded by the founders of wikipedia. Both of them are (obviously?) powered by mediawiki, so for simple uses there might not be a big difference. -- Didi ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: [OUT?] Help with Android?
On 01/14/2012 01:08 PM, Nadav Har'El wrote: On Sat, Jan 14, 2012, Amichai Rotman wrote about Re: [OUT?] Help with Android?: Can we host it on HUJI servers? Eli? (or is someone else running the list now?) That would be me. If for some reason that doesn't work, there are also Hamakor's servers which I assume could be used for this purpose. Is the person running Hamakor mailing lists reading this and can confirm? (as you can see below, I hope this mailing list *will* be relevant to Hamakor's charter). I am reluctant of using those public list servers (like Yahoo! Groups) - is there a way to start an Israeli specific list on Google Groups? Of course Google Groups is also possible, but I do think a non-commercial host is better. Wait, Google Groups are not Usenet in disguise? :) I propose the following focus for the mailing list. Do people agree, or do other people prefer a different focus? * The mailing list's official language will be English (like in Linux-il). I don't know how popular this suggestion will be... * The intended audience are (would be) advanced users and (aspiring) developers, i.e., Android users who are interested in understanding better how their device works, and even improving it - not users who never plan to do more than installing games. The subscribers *can* be newbies, but newbies of the type that aspire to learn, not newbies who plan to remain newbies forever. * The list should focus on free software and open-source. While specific hardware devices and some non-free software can be mentioned, compared, etc., they should not become the focus of this list, just like the focus of linux-il isn't to compare PC manufacturers and non-free Linux software (although the occasional thread on these topics are acceptable). * The list is for high-level discussions - it won't be a mailing list for cooperating closely on the development of a particular piece of software. * The intended audience is Israeli, in case we ever want to meet in person or discuss Israel-specific questions (hadware sold in Israel, Hebrew-related questions, etc.). But for all other intents and purposes, non-Israelis are just as welcome. In fact I hesitate if/how we should even mention that this is an Israeli list. Any other thoughts? I think you're describing Linux-IL here, so why not post it there anyway? I for one do not have a problem with Android questions appearing here. And I since I sense that Android's ubiquity is yet to be seen, I don't feel that I waste time reading these discussions. We could have a poll, of course. -- MV ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
libhdate release announcement (version 1.6)
libhdate release announcement (version 1.6) === http://libhdate.sourceforge.net LibHdate is a small library for the Hebrew calendar, dates, holidays, and reading sequence. It is written in C and includes bindings for pascal, perl, python, php, ruby. hcal and hdate are small example command line programs, written in C. This release brings many new options, features, and bug fixes to the two example programs hcal and hdate. The changes to the underlying function library include a few minor bug fixes, deprecation of a series of string functions in favor of a single new one with better memory allocation, and hard-coding of core elements of the Hebrew localization so that Hebrew can be displayed in all locales. Some selected highlights: * config files for storing defaults * user-defined menus (defined in config file) * sunset awareness, based on coordinates given or system timezone and guesswork * optional easier entry of coordinates (N, S, E, W, dd:mm:ss) * minhag customization for Shabbat times * Hebrew information in Hebrew characters (for all locales) * hcal can display in 3-month mode, in color, with footnotes and Shabbat information * hdate can output data in csv format, suitable for spreadsheets, awk, etc. * hdate has many format enhancements Here's the LibHdate project page: http://libhdate.sourceforge.net or you could just go directly to the download page: https://sourceforge.net/projects/libhdate/files/latest/download boruch-b...@users.sourceforge.net keyserver: hkp://keys.gnupg.net fingerprint: B625 CAEF 715D 400D E0F0 2017 ACD4 FFAC 4F94 ADB8___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: [OUT?] Help with Android?
On Sun, Jan 15, 2012 at 4:39 PM, Mordechai Behar mordecha.be...@mail.huji.ac.il wrote: So... Will there be a notification on this list when the new Android list goes online? I for one am an amateur Android tinkerer and would love to learn from others as well as share my thoughts and experiences. I'll create it tomorrow and update this list. Kaplan ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: [OUT?] Help with Android?
Not that I care, but aren't there enough android communities? such as http://www.androidil.net/forum/content/ ? BTW this is the reason why I don't find the list so interesting. There are some people here who keep sending everything a bit interesting with more than 2 emails a day to a different list. oh well, Ely 2012/1/15 Lior Kaplan kaplanl...@gmail.com On Sun, Jan 15, 2012 at 4:39 PM, Mordechai Behar mordecha.be...@mail.huji.ac.il wrote: So... Will there be a notification on this list when the new Android list goes online? I for one am an amateur Android tinkerer and would love to learn from others as well as share my thoughts and experiences. I'll create it tomorrow and update this list. Kaplan ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: [OUT?] Help with Android?
Hi Michael, On Sun, Jan 15, 2012, Michael Vasiliev wrote about Re: [OUT?] Help with Android?: Of course Google Groups is also possible, but I do think a non-commercial host is better. Wait, Google Groups are not Usenet in disguise? :) As far as I am concerned, Usenet died, unfortunately, about 15 years ago. I think you are insulting Google to say they are Usenet in disguise ;-) I think you're describing Linux-IL here, so why not post it there anyway? Well, more or less - yes - I was thinking of a sister mailing list to Linux-IL, which will have a similar collection of people, but a different topic of discussion. I'm not sure how people feel about the linux-il list being overtaken by Android-specific discussions. In my opinion, as long as the discussion continues to be about development, about free software, and so on, it is fine, and I'm not opposed to Linux-il being official declared Linux and Android. But I wonder if that's what everyone thinks. I'm also not sure what's the downside of opening a second list for Android. I for one do not have a problem with Android questions appearing here. And I since I sense that Android's ubiquity is yet to be seen, I don't feel that I waste time reading these discussions. We could have a poll, of course. If I remember correctly, linux-il was founded in 1994. At the time, Linux's ubiquity was also yet to be seen ;-) -- Nadav Har'El|Monday, Jan 16 2012, n...@math.technion.ac.il |- Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |I used to work in a pickle factory, until http://nadav.harel.org.il |I got canned. ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
