After yet another supply chain issue ( npm this time, but it doesn t really matter that much), Shai-hulud, 500 packages affected and millions of downloads later, I finally wrapped up the protection system for my dev environment. I really don t want to be the next one exploited. The package …
The meme Python package management / installation is famously difficult… or so the story goes. This keeps getting reinforced by forum comments, quoting that one xkcd page, and people who aren’t actually running into the issues repeating the meme. In practice, it will take just a few minutes to understand …
Home server so far For quite a while I’ve been using docker for my home server (and some other servers). It’s there for a number of reasons: software isolation, data isolation, security, network setup. The software isolation is the common reason for using docker. If you want to …
The murder mystery Recently I ran into an issue with pulseeffects getting killed without a clear reason. While the bug itself doesn’t seem super interesting, the deep dive into debugging it is blog-worthy. Pulseeffects is a good app for adding filters to your audio streams and fixing some noise …
What s security by obscurity I end up taking about the security by obscurity with other engineers and it s sometimes not easy to classify what solution is or isn t of that kind. Recently the conversation online was restarted with a post . I d like to propose a different …
Some experiences on finding remote work.
How to create a minimal Alpine container from scratch. With some comments about what the containers actually are.
Are all exits real? I wrote previously about monitoring a fragment of the tor network traffic without actually being a real exit (and therefore limitting the potential of legal trouble). Since the way to do this is rather simple, I decided to check if anyone else is using the same …
The announcement Many news services reported already on the SpaceX plan to launch a number of satellites to provide internet access; for example Ars , or more specific discussion at reddit . In short, SpaceX is planning to set up a constellation of over 4k satellites that provide two directional internet access …
Getting own malware lists Many extensions like uBlock will provide you with curated lists of malicious URLs and domains. This is easy to use and will stop most bad things from happening. But what if you wanted to have your own updates that do not have to take time to …
The challenge A few days ago I saw a tweet from my friend saying: That feeling when you process 5,275,521 records from # JSON to #MySQL in 43 minutes thanks to celeryproject and sqlalchemy! #Python — ProfFalken My first thought was: great! The second one was that doesn t sound …
I wanted to create a website for a personal project. This is usually the great opportunity to learn - no time pressure, no external requirements, etc. That meant I could choose the language I wanted to try out in anger (Rust) and take it for a spin. Here s a short …
Usually we experience two types of remote execution in practice: You log in to some remote machine and run the application there (ssh), and You get remote application copied locally and run it (mounting remote filesystems, javascript download, etc.) There are other ideas too of course, but less popular in …
Many people may already know that all your devices try to broadcast your previous connections. I expect that many more have no idea that s happening. There have been articles published about it before, but without specific examples. WiFi probes In order to connect to known networks which don t …
As explained in the previous post , seccomp can be used for protecting the system and users from misbehaving and exploited applications. But there has to be some work done to actually enable the protection it offers. That s where the programming part starts and possibly some exploration of the application …
Many programs running for a long time on some server do not do random, unpredictable things. They actually have a pretty well defined set of behaviours and anything that is outside of that set could be automatically treated as a bug, or a hack. For example databases do a lot …
There s been a number of issues lately found by fuzzing input files ( strings , lesspipe , various image issues, etc.), but these are all stateless apps / libraries. It s much easier to fuzz input for strings for example, than client input to mysql server. The fuzzing project is actually concentrating on …
Here s a list of things that currently fail when trying to run vagrant under Arch. Hopefully I hit most of the keywords from errors and you re reading this because you ran into one of those. Vagrant is not an official Arch package. It s in AUR though - https …
There are many ways to turn on the unattended upgrades in Ubuntu. Creating files in /etc/apt/apt.conf.d, reconfiguring the package by hand, reinstalling after debconf, etc. Here s a simple way to do it with salt without breaking the Ubuntu / debconf integration: unattended - upgrades : debconf . set : - data …
Any long-term data archives you keep - backups, copies of logs, code repositories, audit entries, etc. Are they append-only? I don t mean from the perspective of the account owner. Of course the operator is able to do whatever he wants with those files, including deleting them. But what about your …
There s an interesting side effect to way Debian-like systems handle the database configuration for various packages. Instead of each package setting the connection parameters on their own, they reuse the abstraction provided by package dbconfig-common . This is all fine in theory, but unfortunately dbconfig doesn t seem to behave …
I ve got a couple of Linux machines that need a transparent backup solution at home. Transparent as in - they should happen all the time, without asking, without notification, without any interaction. Ideally it shouldn t run on the client either just to avoid issues with system updates. Making it …
Just a popular stackoverflow question & answer which was deleted as not constructive even with 10+ score and thousands of views (by a mod, so can t vote to revert - thanks!) Keep in mind that it s from 2009 without later reviews. Question: I am searching for a tool that tests …
If you follow the latest versions of everything and tried to install flashcache you probably noticed that none of the current guides are correct regarding how to install it. Or they are mostly correct but with some bits missing. So here s an attempt to do a refreshed guide. I …
Some time ago I ran into a production issue where the init process ( upstart ) stopped behaving properly. Specifically, instead of spawning new processes, it deadlocked in a transitional state. To be precise, the init process itself was responsive, but the critical services were stuck in one of the pre- or …
I started playing some flash-based MMORPG for fun lately. The limited options available to the characters in RPGs are not as entertaining as programming, so this didn t last long; but it definitely gave me an idea Can I get the event stream and decode it without knowing anything about …