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Logging Shell Commands

In response to my previous post about logging in directly as root [1] it was suggested that using sudo is the only way to log the commands that are entered as root. One reason for doing this is if you don’t trust the people who are granted root access and you want to log all […]

Mailing List Meta-Discussions

It seems that most mailing lists occasionally have meta-discussions about what is on-topic, the few that don’t are the ones that have very strong moderation – authoritarian moderators who jump on the first infraction and clearly specify the rules.

I don’t recall the list of acceptable topics for any mailing list including “also discussions about […]

Does Every Serious Mailing List need a Non-Serious Counterpart?

One practice that seems relatively common is for an organisation to have two main mailing lists, one for serious discussions that are expected to be relatively topical and another for anything that’s not overly offensive. Humans are inherently incapable of avoiding social chatter when doing serious work. The people who don’t want certain social interactions […]

Is the PC Dying?

I just read an interesting article about the dispute between Microsoft and Apple about types of PC [1]. Steve Jobs predicted a switch from desktop PCs to portable devices, while Steve Ballmer of Microsoft claimed that the iPad is just a new PC.

Defining a PC

I think that the defining characteristic of the IBM […]

Bugs in Google Chrome

I’m currently running google-chrome-beta version 5.0.375.55-r47796 on Debian/Unstable. It’s the fastest web browser I’ve used in recent times – it’s the first time that I’ve run a browser that feels faster than my recollection of running IBM WebExplorer for OS/2 on a 486-66 system! It has a good feature set, and it’s the only browser […]

Securely Killing Processes

Joey Hess wrote on Debian-devel about the problem of init scripts not doing adequate checks before using the data from a PID file under /var/run to determine which process to kill [1]. Unfortunately that still doesn’t quite solve the problem, there is still the issue of a race condition causing a process to die while […]

Can SE Linux Implement Traditional Unix Users and Groups?

I was asked by email whether SE Linux could implement traditional Unix users and groups.

The Strictly Literal Answer to that Question

The core of the SE Linux access control is the domain-type model where every process has a domain and every object that a process can access (including other processes) has a type. Domains […]

Logging in as Root

Martin Meredith wrote a blog post about logging in as root and the people who so strongly advocate against it [1]. The question is whether you should ssh directly to the root account on a remote server or whether you should ssh to a non-root account and use sudo or su to gain administrative privileges.

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Brother MFC-9120CN Color LASER Printer

I have just bought a Brother MFC-9120CN Multi-Function Color LED LASER Printer for a relative. It was a replacement for the Lexmark printer which turned out not to support Linux properly [1].

This printer cost about $545. I bought it from OfficeWorks [2] under their price-matching deal. If you find a better price anywhere else […]

UBAC and SE Linux in Debian

A recent development in SE Linux policy is the concept of UBAC (User Based Access Control) which prevents SE Linux users (identitied) from accessing each other’s files.

SE Linux user identities may map 1:1 to Unix users (as was required in the early versions of SE Linux), you might have unique identities for special users […]