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Mental Benchmarking

One thing that seems overlooked by most people who discuss productive work habits is the varying mental capacity for performing different types of work. While it’s well known that alcohol and other substances decrease mental ability and it’s slightly less well known that sleep deprivation has a similar affect to being drunk [1], the reference […]

Installing SE Linux on Lenny

Currently Debian/Lenny contains all packages needed to run SE Linux apart from the policy. The policy package is missing because it needs to sit in unstable for a while before migrating to testing (Lenny), and I keep fixing bugs and uploading new versions.

I have set up my own APT repository for SE Linux packages […]

Variable Names

For a long time I have opposed single letter variable names. Often I see code which has a variable for a fixed purpose with a single letter name, EG “FILE *f;“, the problem with this is that unless you choose a letter such as ‘z‘ which has a high scrabble score (and probably no relation […]

SE Linux in Lenny Status

SE Linux is almost ready to use in Lenny. Currently I am waiting on the packages libsepol1 version 2.0.30-2, policycoreutils 2.0.49-3, and selinux-policy-default version 0.0.20080702-4 to make their way to testing. The first two should get there soon, the policy will take a little longer as I just made a new upload today (to make […]

Biba and BLP for Network Services

Michael Janke has written an interesting article about data flows in networks [1], he describes how data from the Internet should be considered to have low integrity (he refers to it as “untrusted”) and that as you get closer to the more important parts of the system it needs to be of higher integrity.

It […]

New Net Connections

On Thursday my new InterNode ADSL2+ service was connected [1]. I needed to get a connection with a larger download cap and a better upload speed because one of my clients wants me to transfer some significant amounts of data as well as hosting some Xen DomU’s for him. Strangely InterNode couldn’t offer a regular […]

Links July 2008

Steven Levitt gave an interesting talk for TED about the economics of a crack-dealing gang [1]. He makes some interesting comparisons with the way that corporations work.

Top 10 strangest terrorism patents [2]. Items 1 and 4 have been implemented many years ago, item 5 was probably implemented by the CIA decades ago (they did […]

SE Linux Policy Loading

One of the most significant tasks performed by a SE Linux system is loading the “policy“. The policy is the set of rules which determine what actions are permitted by each domain.

When I first started using SE Linux (in 2001) the kernel knew where to find the policy file and would just read the […]

Bad Telstra

77020 packets transmitted, 18029 received, 76% packet loss, time 77049435ms rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 20.026/130.848/2245.752/287.550 ms, pipe 3

Above are the ping results from pinging my server (hosted on a business DSL connection). Telstra stuffed up and appear to have entirely disconnected DSL for a few suburbs (based on reports from a client who has several […]

Review of the EeePC 701

I have just bought a EeePC 701 [1], I chose the old model because it’s significantly smaller than the 90x series and a bit lighter too and it had Linux pre-loaded. Also it was going cheap, while I am not paying for it I give the same attention to saving my clients’ money as to […]