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This weekend I went to the Ballarat install-fest, mini-conf, and inaugural meeting of the Ballarat Linux Users’ Group (BLUG). This was the second install-fest, the first one was quite successful so it was decided that there was demand for a second. I suggested that what we should do is get some of the more experience […] One thing that has always surprised me is how few people talk to speakers after they have finished their lecture. A lecture might have many questions and the questions may be cut off, but when the speaker leaves the room they will usually do so alone. When I give lectures at conferences I’m always happy […] echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/block_dump The above command sets a sysctl to cause the kernel to log all disk writes. Below is a sample of the output from it. Beware that there is a lot of data. Jan 10 09:05:53 aeon kernel: kjournald(1048): WRITE block XXX152 on dm-6 Jan 10 09:05:53 aeon kernel: kjournald(1048): WRITE […] In a comment on a previous blog entry I was described as an active Fedora advocate, I don’t think that is an accurate description. I advocate it to appropriate people, which is mostly non-programmers – but as I mentioned that means a larger proportion of the population than to whom I can advocate Debian. It’s […] Today I discovered a bug in one of my programs, it called system() and didn’t correctly escape shell eta-characters. Fortunately I had written custom SE Linux policy for it which did domain_auto_trans(foo_t, shell_exec_t, very_restricted_t) so there was no possibility of damage. The log files (which were not writable by the daemon by both SE Linux […] The dunc-tank project was established to raise money to compensate some Debian developers who are essential to producing a timely release of Debian. There has been a lot of acrimoneous debate about whether this is a good or bad thing. The positive side of it is that the release managers will get to spend more […] This weekend I was in Sydney for Ruxcon. Ruxcon is a computer security conference with a focus on penetration testing and related skills. The presentation on Unusual Bugs by Ilya van Sprudel was particularly interesting. He spoke about a number of issues that could do with some improvement in Linux, I will file some bug […] A common problem with Linux systems is when Windows users press CTRL-ALT-DEL at the login prompt and reboot the machine. To fix this some people change the ^ca line in /etc/inittab to just disable the reboot function. However this is not desirable because sometimes you want to reboot a machine with a simple keypress. Another […] Today I was doing some network tracing and figured out how to track the start and end of TCP connections. The following tcpdump command will get all SYN, FIN, and RST packets on port 80 and all ICMP packets: tcpdump -i bond0 -n “port 80 and tcp[tcpflags] & (tcp-syn|tcp-fin|tcp-rst) != 0 or icmp” Also recently […] Bonding is one of the terms used to describe multiple Ethernet cables used to form a single virtual network link. This can be done for performance or reliability. Bonding for performance used to be common when 100baseT was the fastest network technology that was commonly available. In 1999 servers could usually sustain considerably more than […] |
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