Entries tagged coding

A while back I posted about a couple of my irritations with GNU Screen.

One of my irritations was the failure to reattach to sessions by name, if common prefixes were in use. For example with the following two (detached) sessions:

There are screens on:
        24419.abc       (Detached)
        24395.abcd      (Detached)
2 Sockets in /var/run/screen/S-skx.

The naive "screen -R abc" fails.

Yesterday whilst looking over the screen bug list I came up with a patch. It isn't ideal as it introduces a new failure case, but I believe it is a step in the right direction and better than the current situation. See attachment to #361274 for the code.

Also I patched screen so that #330036 is now fixed, and the blankerprg primitive works as expected.

Finally I closed #317450 (with a version) as it has been fixed since Etch.

Fun stuff.

In the spirit of completeness I should say I had a stab at #447210 which is tilde (~) expansion in the chdir primitive, but gave up after a while as the code got too messy even for me.

The trivial s/~/getenv("HOME")/ approach works fine for the simple case, but dealing with the expansion of strings such as ~foo/bar/ gets messy quickly. I can offer my patch if there is any interest though as a stop-gap measure.

Now I'm almost tempted to look over another package's bugs, but I think I'd rather eat pie & drink beer...

must. stop. talking. about. pies.

Update: Patch for tilde expansion submitted to #447210 - tested and seemed to cover all cases. Now time for beer!

Tags: bts, bugs, coding, gnu screen, screen | No comments

So via hackernews I recently learned about fight code, and my efforts have been fun. Currently my little robot is ranked ~400, but it seems to jump around a fair bit.

Otherwise I've done little coding recently:

• slaughter has had its code moved to github.
• The bookmark code got one patch and has had some interest

I'm pondering libpcap a little, for work purposes. There is a plan to write a deamon which will count incoming SYN packets, per-IP, and drop access to clients that make "too many" requests "too quickly".

This plan is a simple anti-DoS tool which might or might not work in the real world. We do have a couple of clients that seem to be DoS magnets and this is better than using grep + sort against apache access logs.

For cases where a small number of source IPs make many-many requests it will help. For the class of attacks where a huge botnet has members making only a couple of requests each it won't do anything useful.

We'll see how it turns out.

Tags: bookmarks, coding, github | 2 comments