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Complexity .....and Chess
by Gary 10 Nov '23

10 Nov '23

IMHO for a variety of reasons, a lot of people left the work force. This caused the labor pool to reach further down the bell shaped curve to find willing participants. Unfortunately, the complexity of the world, which in my opinion is too complex or perhaps overly complex or perhaps more complex than it needs to be, remained the same. As a result, many even moderately complex things are breaking. Like for example chess on Linux. I just spent most of my afternoon installing various chess programs, they don't really work. Some don't work at all. Some sort of work, but have various sort of major features that don't work. Gnome-chess works. But I can beat it easily. I haven't played for a while, and I'm not that good. It says I can install another engine. But it fails to tell me how and if I go out to Google, the features that it documents don't actually exit on the actual app. Actually brutalchess might work too. It has no man page and no menu of any kind. There is no documentation of any kind on the web page, but there is a forum and a mailing lists. You just move and it starts playing. It seems like it makes pretty good moves, but the display is hard for me to see and I can't change it. 10 years ago, this was easy and worked just fine. Granted, enthusiasm for chess has wained somewhat. Sigh. I'm just glad I don't have any brain surgery scheduled in the near future. I doubt if people are going to get smarter or perhaps less careless, overnight. But perhaps the world will simplify a bid. Eventually. That would be a good thing IMHO. -Gary

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resurrected my 24 year old computer that I intended to get rid of
by Brian E. Lavender 01 Nov '23

01 Nov '23

I restored a Dell Optiplex GX1 (built in 1999) with Debian 12 32 bit. I am impressed at how well it runs! It has 640 Megabytes of RAM, the Pentium II 350 MHz processor. I believe it has a Cirrus Logic CS4281 sound card. I have to log back into the machine and check! I used sox to play some ogg files and it barely touched the CPU. I would think this should be expected because it's a discrete card. I think the nice thing about having a physical machine is actually connecting to hardware like a sound card. I know you can pass through the sound card to a VM, yet I have not done that yet. :-O I installed Java and LibreOffice dev package and hacked some automated LibreOffice stuff using the Java API. I have found getting the LibreOffice SDK a little bit challenging. This is sort of an unfortunate development, because I will probably keep this server around for a while. I tend to accumulate "stuff" and my resolution for 2023 has been to clear out some of the accumulation. Well, maybe I will sell it or probably turn it into the recycling yard soon. Brian -- Brian Lavender http://www.brie.com/brian/ "There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies." Professor C. A. R. Hoare The 1980 Turing award lecture

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Re: Complexity .....and Chess
by Gary 31 Oct '23

31 Oct '23

Fedora 38 and Fedora 25. I also saw chess.org has online chess, but I didn't take the plunge because I figured there would be ads. Maye I'll look into it, but I hate supporting the whole IoT nickel and dime philosophy that seems to be prevalent. I need a subscription to use my wireless camera. Really? -Gary On Tue, Oct 31, 2023 at 05:22:02AM +0000, Allan Heim wrote: > Apologies, I'm not a chess guy, but have you looked at https://lichess.org/ ? I hear it's pretty slick, and completely free, but it's online only, of course. > And I have to ask, what distro and version are you running?

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loony toons
by Brian E. Lavender 05 Oct '23

05 Oct '23

Check this exploit out! "In our exploit, we simply fill our 6MB of environment strings with 0xfffffffffffffff8 (-8), because at an offset of -8B below the string table of most SUID-root programs, the string "\x08" appears: this forces ld.so to trust a relative directory named "\x08" (in our current working directory), and therefore allows us to load and execute our own libc.so.6 or LD_PRELOAD library from this directory, as root." Is that wild or what? I was checking the changelog.txt for Slackware 32 bit. l/glibc-2.37-i586-3.txz: Rebuilt. Patched to fix the "Looney Tunables" vulnerability, a local privilege escalation in ld.so. This vulnerability was introduced in April 2021 (glibc 2.34) by commit 2ed18c. Thanks to Qualys Research Labs for reporting this issue. For more information, see: https://www.qualys.com/2023/10/03/cve-2023-4911/looney-tunables-local-privi… https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2023-4911 (* Security fix *) Brian -- Brian Lavender http://www.brie.com/brian/ "There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies." Professor C. A. R. Hoare The 1980 Turing award lecture

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Auto Mounting with Systemd
by Linus Sphinx 05 Oct '23

05 Oct '23

They seem to have changed the hierarchy of autofs config files or something and it just stopped working for me. Looking for what changed and ran into systemd.mount on stack exchange. Short form: write an entry in /etc/fstab like this: nas:/data/directory /home/me/nas nfs nfsvers=4,nofail,x-systemd.automount 0 0 To activate this entry immediately, you would need two commands: # systemctl daemon-reload # trigger systemd-fstab-generator to re-make *.mount and *.automount units # systemctl start home-me-nas.automount #start the newly created automount unit or just reboot. $ man systemd.mount $ man systemd-fstab-generator Reveal much about units created, still playing with it. The above lines clipped from: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/671486/rhel-8-3-autofs-not-mountin…

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AutoFS
by Linus Sphinx 01 Oct '23

01 Oct '23

Anybody else using autofs on NFSv4 mounts. Ever heard of doing it with systemd? https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/671486/rhel-8-3-autofs-not-mountin…

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Meet this coming Tuesday?
by Brian E. Lavender 20 Sep '23

20 Sep '23

Anybody interested meeting this coming Tuesday? Kupros? -- Brian Lavender http://www.brie.com/brian/ "There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies." Professor C. A. R. Hoare The 1980 Turing award lecture

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testing the list again!
by Brian E. Lavender 14 Sep '23

14 Sep '23

I am still checking out the list. Brian -- Brian Lavender http://www.brie.com/brian/ "There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies." Professor C. A. R. Hoare The 1980 Turing award lecture

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[gary@garymcglinn.com: Re: Re: Snort]
by saclug＠garymcglinn.com 14 Sep '23

14 Sep '23

Again sent earlier. Thanks for the intervening comments about vulnerabiliteis and versions. A lot of issues and suggestions have been made and raised. My brief response is that yes, according to nmap and my intention I had port 23, for ssh (I moved it) and port 5900 open and the rpc port, I think. I'm going by memory. Theoretically the only pinhole in the ISP router firewall was port 23. To use port 5900, you had to use an ssh tunnel. My web server is on another machine. Since I only use it for development, I don't leave it up. My actual web pages are hosted externally on a vendor's box. My experience with the upgrade treadmill is that it is a waste of time. By its own admission (if a concept can have that) the new versions will have issues and you need to upgrade. If the issues with an older version don't affect you, then it is perfectly fine to use it. Why upgrade and risk the fact that the new issues will affect your use case. The developers for Fedora 13 were no smarter or dumber than the developers who are writing Fedora 36. Or pick your distro of choice. The issue with an older release is that nifty new things come out and you can't really use them. But, if you run a VM with a recent version of the distro, you can use them just fine. The other issues is that if you are getting vendor support, they can only reasonably commit to supporting a limited number of versions. This is AMD hardware from '06. -Gary On Fri, Aug 05, 2022 at 06:19:54PM -0700, Rick Moen wrote: > Quoting Brian E. Lavender (brian(a)brie.com): > > > Gary, > > > > You were running Fedora 13? > > If so, _that_ is likely a big problem. Fedora 13's initial release was > May 25, 2010, and it was EOLed on June 24, 2011. > > Because Fedora. If you don't want to keep moving to newer versions, > it's about the worst possible distro. (But it's possible Gary meant > that he did _original_ installation 15 years ago, but has been following > the recommended upgrade treadmill^W path. > > Linus Sphinx wrote: > > > https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/new-linux-malware-brute-forc… > > You know, I have a _lot_ of things to be grateful for, and somewhere on > the list is the glad tidings that I don't need to rely on > Bleepingcomputer.com for IT information. > > Over the past 1.5 months since its discovery, the new botnet used > over 3,500 unique IPs worldwide to scan and attempt brute-forcing Linux > SSH servers. > [...] > The SSH brute-forcing relies on a list of credentials downloaded from > the [command and control server]. [...] > > *snore* > > So, doorknob-twisting for "joe accounts", like user=service > password=manager and like that. > > Guestimate the math, and measure the lengthly setup and teardown times > for remote connections to an sshd, and you'll find that > dictionary-attacking an sshd with any reasonable rules set about > password quality and length is going to take an appreciable fraction of > the time to the heat death of the universe, to succeed. > > I mentioned upthread that a lot of IT device comes from gadget freaks. > The _other_ common problem is that most security _articles_ are > copied-pasted press releases from security/antimalware firms. > So, they're big on shockhorror, and small on conveying understanding. > > I've only quick-glanced at this article about enforcing password policy > via PAM, so won't swear to it being a good one: > https://www.techrepublic.com/article/controlling-passwords-with-pam/ > Of course, if you're the -only- user, you ought to stick to decent > passwords without PAM forcing you to. (Also, a user who can su to > root has the power to overrule PAM. But if you do that, you have only > yourself to blame for consequences.) > > _______________________________________________ > Lug-nuts mailing list -- lug-nuts(a)bigbrie.com > To unsubscribe send an email to lug-nuts-leave(a)bigbrie.com ----- End forwarded message -----

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test test
by Brian Lavender 13 Sep '23

13 Sep '23

Is this thing working?

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