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New SE Linux Policy for Wheezy

I’ve just uploaded a new SE Linux policy for Debian/Wheezy. It now works correctly with systemd and Chromium, two significant features that I wanted for Wheezy. Now it turns out that we have until the end of the month for Wheezy updates, so I may get another version of the policy uploaded before then. If […]

SASL Authentication and Debian/Wheezy

After upgrading a mail server to Debian/Unstable (which will soon be released as Wheezy) I started getting SASL errors.

535 5.7.8 Error: authentication failed: no mechanism available

The SMTP protocol gave the above error for both LOGIN and PLAIN methods.

SASL LOGIN authentication failed: no mechanism available

The postfix/smtpd process logged messages like the above […]

Debian SE Linux Status June 2012

It’s almost the Wheezy freeze time and I’ve been working frantically to get things working properly.

Policy Status

At the moment I’m preparing an upload of the policy which will support KDE (and probably most desktop environment) logins and many little fixes related to server operations (particularly MTAs). I would like to get another version […]

New Version of Memlockd

I’ve just released a new version of Memlockd, a daemon to lock essential files in RAM to increase the probability of recovering a system that is paging excessively [1].

The new features are: Using Debian/Wheezy paths for shared objects on i386 and amd64.

Added a new config file option to not log file not found […]

The Financial Value of a University Degree

I’ve read quite a few articles about the value of a degree. Most of them come from the US where the combination of increasing tuition fees and uncertain job market makes a degree seem like a risky investment. I think that most analysis of the value of a degree are missing some important points.

The […]

Take Off that Stupid Helmet

Recently I was walking through a park and heard a women call out “Take off that stupid helmet”. Usually I ignore what other people are saying but that seemed noteworthy. It turned out that a young boy (maybe 4yo) was being taught to ride a bike and his parents seemed to think that wearing a […]

Links May 2012

Vijay Kumar gave an interesting TED talk about autonomous UAVs [1]. His research is based on helicopters with 4 sets of blades and his group has developed software to allow them to develop maps, fly in formation, and more.

Hadiyah wrote an interesting post about networking at TED 2012 [2]. It seems that giving every […]

Another USB Flash Failure

I previously wrote about a failure of a USB flash device in my Internet gateway [1]. I have since had another failure in the same system, so both the original 4G devices are now dead. That’s two dead devices in 10 weeks. It could be that the USB devices that I got for free at […]

What I REALLY Want from the NBN

Generally I haven’t had a positive attitude towards the NBN. It doesn’t seem likely to fulfill the claims of commercial success and would be a really bad thing to privatise anyway. Also it hasn’t seemed to offer any great benefits either. The claim that it will enable lots of new technical developments which we can’t […]

A Quick Review of the Mac Mini with OS/X Lion compared to Linux

A client just lent me a new Mac Mini with OS/X Lion to play with. I think it’s interesting to compare it with regular PCs running Linux.

Hardware

The Mac Mini is tiny. It’s volume can be compared to that of a laptop. The entire outside apart from the base is made from aluminium which […]