Entries posted in July 2012

I got a few emails about the status panel I'd both toyed with and posted. The end result is that the live load graphs now have documentation, look prettier, and contain a link to the source code.

Apart from that this week has mostly involved photographing cute cats, hairy dogs, and women in corsets.

In Debian-related news njam: Insecure usage of environmental variable was closed after about 7 months, and I reported a failure of omega-rpg to drop group(games) privileges prior to saving game-state. That leads to things like this:

skx@precious:~$ ls -l | grep games
-rw-r--r--   1 skx games   14506 Jul  8 15:20 Omega1000

Not the end of the world, but it does mean you can write to directories owned by root.games, and potentially over-write level/high-score files in other packages leading to compromises.

ObQuote: "Your suffering will be legendary, even in hell! " - Hellraiser II (Did you know there were eight HellRaiser sequels?)

Tags: njam, node.js, omega-rpg, photography, security | No comments

Tonight I upgraded my personal machine to run the recently released 3.5[.0] kernel.

On my personal machine(s) I'm usually loathe to change a running kernel, but this one was a good step forward because it allows me to experiment with seccomp filters.

I've tested the trivial "no new privileges" pctl and I followed along with the nice seccomp tutorial which gave me simple working code which I married to my javascript interpreter.

On top of that I upgraded node.js, which meant I had to clean up a little depreciated code in my node reverse proxy - which is the public face of the websites I run upon my box. (The proxy tunnels to about 10 different thttpd instances, each running upon 127.0.0.1:xx).

Happily however my weekend was not full of code, it was brightened by the opportunity to take pictures of Aurora and her long hair - more to come as I've still got about 350 images to wade through..

ObQuote: "Don't you think I make a remarkable queen? " - St. Trinian's (2007)

Tags: kernels, kvm, kvm-hosting, seccomp | No comments

Earlier this year, in March, I switched to the bluetile tiling window, and it has been a great success.

So I was interested in seeing Vincent Bernats post about switching to Awesome, I myself intend to do that "eventually", now I've successfully dipped my toes into tiling-land, via bluetiles simple config and gnome-friendly setup.

One thing that puts me off is the length of my sessions:

skx@precious:~/hg/blog$ ps -ef | grep skx
skx       2237     1  0 Mar12 ?        00:00:01 /usr/bin/gnome-keyring-daemon ...

As you can see I've been logged into my desktop session for four months. I lock the screen when I wander away, but generally login once when the computer boots and never again for half a year or so. FWIW:

skx@precious:~/hg/blog$ uptime
 23:01:19 up 138 days,  4:44,  4 users,  load average: 0.02, 0.06, 0.02

ObQuote: "I'm 30 years old. I'm almost a grown man. " - Rocketman

Tags: bluetile, tiling windows, window managers | No comments