Author: Jude Pereira
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playing with grsecurity | a brief tutorial
This howto is intended for those looking for better means to secure the Linux kernel, and the userland by the means of a powerful and simple role based access control policy. Contents What is grsecurity? Setting up grsecurity + gentoo in a VM The real thing: Grsecurity Getting familiar with gradm Generating the policy Fixing…
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chname: change the hostname for a given command
Run a command in a utsname namespace with a new hostname. You can essentially chroot with a desired hostname and fool a user. I’ve simply built RPM packages for this neat little utility. The source and package are found below. RPM Package: chname-1.0-0.2.x86_64.rpm SRPM Package: chname-1.0-0.2.src.rpm Visit the project’s home page for further clarifications.
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the one thing bing.com is useful for : backgrounds
714 wonderful backgrounds! Yes, in my personal opinion, bing.com is only useful in supplying fresh backgrounds, which are breath taking. These breath taking set of wallpapers, when set to change randomly on your desktop, makes the look and feel more exquisite. Download the file(see below). The script and the images are inside the tar file.…
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[howto] grsecurity + NOUVEAU + Compiz + Seg Fault
Assuming that you have a grsec + PaX enabled kernel, you would realise that the nvidia-drivers are a bad choice. Quite a few applications will fail(the ones that use libGLcore.so). Use the nouveau driver for your card, as it’s pretty much stable and works with good 3D acceleration. To get compiz working NOUVEAU under hardened…
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creating unique environments – chroot snapshots – using aufs2
What if you decided that you wanted to experiment and test within a chroot(ed) environment? And then something went wrong and you had to start all over again from scratch? Big headache, too much pain, especially with RPM based distributions. Well don’t do that then, here’s an interesting approach. Use aufs2, a stackable filesystem. An…
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bootstrap CentOS from Gentoo (or any linux distribution)
To bootstrap CentOS in Gentoo, I did the following. It basically installs the essential CentOS components into the specified directory, and from there on, chroot into that directory and perform tests, etc. First off, you’ll need to unmask a few packages(replace ~amd64 with ~x86 if your on the x86 architecture), and enable the flag sqlite…
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what compiz does to your desktop
Have a great screenshot like this one? Post a comment with the link and I’ll display it here.
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binpkg: a Gentoo Masterpiece
If you were running a cluster of Gentoo driven machines, would you actually compile source for each of them? Or rather use binary packages? Gentoo’s masterpiece is binpkg, when you compile for one machine, you don’t have to recompile throughout, use quickpkg to build binary packages. Such packages can be hosted over a central server…
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/usr/local/bin/waitpid
A quick script to wait for a certain pid, then once that quits, execute a command. You may ask, why not just do command1 && command2 ? Well, if command1 exits with a non-zero exit status value, command2 will not get executed. Hence, I’ve brewed a quick script for this purpose. File: /usr/local/bin/waitpid #!/bin/sh #…
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Lazy System Admins – Bash Completion
Let’s admit it, we’re all lazy system admins. The bash completion in any other distribution is incomplete, and not as powerful as the one in Gentoo. It just does not work the way it works so brilliantly in Gentoo Linux. Ofcourse, you can port that same source to other distributions. To enable bash completion in…
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QEMU | Quick Networking for TCP/UDP
Networking with a guest in QEMU is often a headache, TUN/TAP, seriously? Too hectic, let’s stick to the basics, TCP/UDP based. Instead of setting up a really complex set of configuration files, wouldn’t it be easy to just emulate the network card, DHCP the guest, and let it work right out of the box? Well…
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visual basic 6 revisited – linux – wine
Earlier this year, I had written an article on running Visual Basic 6 on linux under wine, this is an update for it, the prior one is deprecated Getting Visual Basic 6 to work on linux is pretty easy, not much trouble, all the basic things work, as of what I’ve tested. Here’s how you…
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CPU scaling governors and you
What is your CPU being governed by? Should it be governed by it? Why? How? Here’s an outlook on the various CPU frequency governors, namely conservative, ondemand, powersave, userspace, and performance, that steps up and steps down the CPU: conservative Pros: very much alike the ondemand governor gracefully increases the stepping, unlike ondemand which sets…