An Internet worm cobbled together from generally available hacking tools has compromised hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Linux servers by using two well-known security flaws in applications set up during the default installation of Red Hat Linux software.

Linux is apparently starting to inch its way into the realm of enterprise computing in the Philippines as more large companies put their faith in open-source technology.

From the investor’s point of view, the Linux picture has been nothing short of disastrous. For example, share value in the once-mighty Red Hat has plummeted from its 52-week high of $148 to around $7 per share. Similarly, VALinux share price has fallen from a 52-week high of $179.25 to about $7 per share. Meanwhile, Linuxcare has postponed its anticipated IPO indefinitely citing market conditions.

The NCSA announced plans to install two IBM Linux clusters to create the world’s fastest Linux supercomputers. NCSA’s clusters, which will be housed at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, will have 2 teraflops of computing power. They will be used by researchers in many scientific fields, including those studying the nature of gravitational waves, computational biology and computational chemistry.

Linux software and support company VA Linux Systems today more than halved its expected revenues for its 2001 fiscal year, boding of tough times ahead and showing how tough it is to make money off open source software.

This is the twenty-third release of IBM's Enterprise JFS technology port to Linux. The twenty-third drop on January 12, 2001 (jfs-0.1.3.tar.gz) includes fixes to the file system. Fsck now supports fifo correctly. Drop 23 has the temporary restriction that the block size must be 4K. MKFS.jfs defaults the block size to 4K.

CC Communications went looking for answers for its clustering problems and found the right solution at a trade show. In this case study, CC Comm and PolyServe are a match made on an exhibit floor.

VA Linux Systems today announced that it expects revenue for the second fiscal quarter, ended January 27, 2001, to be $43 million to $50 million, an increase of 115% to 150% from the second quarter of fiscal 2000. It expects the loss for the quarter, excluding non-cash charges, to be in the range of $0.28 to $0.24 per share.

Intended for ISPs, ASPs, and larger corporate accounts, Volution is a directory-centered program that allows administrators to conduct asset management, hardware and software inventorying, health monitoring of Linux-based systems, and software distribution.

Westhaven sailmaker Doyle Sails has taken a technological leap forward by developing a program which calculates the way air will flow around sails. To do the task within a limited budget, the team built a Linux supercomputer by clustering eight PCs, each with two Celeron processors running at just under 500MHz.