Lazy Reading for 2013/02/17

This week I will both post this on the correct day AND get the date in the title correct.

Your unrelated tea link of the week: Epic Tea House Server.  Interesting just because of what he does and because I’ve never encountered tea from a samovar, though I’ve read of it.  (via)

Wait, this is better!  That previous link led to this film from an English chemistry professor about tea chemistry.  At first I was just entertained by his hair and his accent, but when he put tea in a NMR spectrometer, I decided this was the best tea thing ever.  Even better than Elemental!

Pulling authorized_keys from LDAP

Michael W. Lucas has put together a script for pulling a user’s authorized_keys file for SSH out of LDAP.  It’s a very good idea, though he hints pretty clearly that he could use feedback/feedback – there’s already some in the comments.

Updates: from discussion in IRC about this sort of distributed authentication (maybe ‘authentication distribution’ is a better phrase): Tools like puppet or FreeIPA may also be useful.  From seeing other conversations about this, it looks like there’s a lot of solutions to pick from, of varying difficulty, and none canonical.  That’s both good and bad.

Dealing with problematic git upgrades

If you have git installed, and you are trying to upgrade it, you may have problems.  The scmgit-docs package dependency requires some DocBook files that aren’t always accessible.  If you do run into this problem, there’s 3 separate options:

 

New book forthcoming on DNSSec

Michael W. Lucas announced his next book will be about DNSSec, which is good.  It’s also self-published, which I like to see.  I don’t know if it necessarily makes him more money, but I like to see more exploration of this new way of publishing.

If you look at his announcement, there’s a link to something else: vendor-free SSL certificates.  These are possible?  That’s one of those things I didn’t even realize I wanted; having to deal with a certification authority is annoying.

Holiday Buying Guide

Shopping!  This is the big holiday shopping weekend in the US, and I usually put together something here.

If you have suggestions, please comment!

SMBIOS access now possible

Sascha Wildner has added system management BIOS (SMBIOS) support, visible with kenv, from FreeBSD.  Use it for getting things like the BIOS revision, system manufacturer, and so on.  For example:

smbios.bios.reldate="12/04/2006"
smbios.bios.vendor="Dell Inc. "
smbios.bios.version="2.1.0 "

This may seem minor, but this can be very helpful when dealing with hardware you aren’t physically able to access.

Lazy Reading for 2012/11/11

The 3.2 release seems to have gone well.  Who has tried the new USB support?  I’m curious to see how it’s going.

Your unrelated link of the week: This roundup of ultrarealist human sculpture.  You’ve probably seen Ron Mueck‘s art before, at least.

Lazy Reading for 2012/09/09

Whee!

  • deadweight, “Find unused CSS selectors by scraping your HTML”.  I’ve needed something like this for years.  (via)
  • The same sort of thing for pkgsrc: pkg_leaves.  Worth running at least yearly, or at least before any significant pkgsrc upgrade.  There’s no point in updating a package you don’t use or need.
  • GNU Coreutils cheat sheet, plus the instructions to make it.  There’s other cheatsheets linked in the article that may be useful.
  • Compiler benchmarks, comparing gcc and clang versions.  For a complete benchmark, I’d want to compare what number of programs build with each, too.  (via ftigeot on #dragonflybsd)
  • When ‘your mom’ and Unix jokes collide.
  • Distraction-free writing with Vim.  (via)
  • Also, there’s a “Modern Vim” book on the way.  Will it be good?  I have no idea; I don’t know of any prior books by the author or who the publisher is.  Those facts might help.
  • For a known author and publisher, here’s a status report on Absolute OpenBSD, 2nd Edition.  If you don’t know what a BOFH is from his last sentence, read the original stories.
  • Quadrilateral Cowboy, a cyberpunk hacking game that actually involves non-boring programming and not just a pipe-matching game under the guise of hacking.
  • While I’m linking to games, GUTS, sorta like Diablo but more… roguey?  It’s turn-based.  Also, an excuse to use the roguelike tag.
  • 4 UNIX commands I abuse every day.  Having done a fair amount of Perl programming, I am entertained by having side effects being the intended goal.  Also, the author pays attention to what runs on BSD.  (via)
  • Disks lie. And the controllers that run them are partners in crime.”  Marshall Kirk McKusick describes just how hard it is to know when your data has really made it from memory to disk.  (via)

Your unrelated link of the week.  Dubgif.  Random animated gifs and dubstep clips.  Sometimes it doesn’t work, and sometimes it’s perfect.  (via)  If that’s too random, there’s also this .

Lazy Reading for 2012/06/17

I have such a surplus of links these days that I started this Lazy Reading two weeks ago.

Your unrelated comics link of the week: Elfquest, every issue ever.  The dialogue is cheesy but the original art is fun, in a way that grabbed me when I read it at 10 years of age.

Secure your MySQL setup

This was going to go into a Lazy Reading post, but then I realized it shouldn’t.  Here’s the source: “A Tragically Comedic Security Flaw in MySQL” (via)

The short version: MySQL, compiled a certain way, will allow 1 out of 256 root login attempts to work no matter what.  I was going to link to this for the startlingly large number of MySQL installations found allowing connections from the public Internet, which means breaking into any affected servers would be easy.  Then I thought about it…  I don’t see a my.cnf installed by pkgsrc for at least MySQL 5.1 by default.

To fix this for your own installation, put

[mysqld]
bind-address=127.0.0.1

in /usr/pkg/etc/my.cnf to disallow remote connections.  I don’t know if MySQL on DragonFly from pkgsrc is vulnerable to the issue, but it’s a good idea to not allow remote connections to the database, and ought to be on by default.

Or just use Postgres, if possible.

 

Lazy Reading for 2012/06/10

I got to use the ‘roguelike’ tag again this week, which always makes me happy.  Surprisingly, it’s not about… that roguelike.

Your unrelated link of the week: I happen to work at a salt mining operation, which leads to some unique problems (more).  Mining in the US is regulated by MSHA, which has been cracking down since the Upper Big Branch incident. MSHA issues  ‘fatalgrams‘ every time a miner dies.  MSHA also shows up on site as soon as possible, which means they are there taking pictures within a few minutes, with equipment still running.  It’s essentially crime scene photos, and a little worrying; many of the deaths are of people around my age with similar experience.

Lazy Reading for 2012/06/03

So many links this week I’m already working on next week’s entry.  Enjoy!

Your unrelated comic link of the week: Make Good Art.  (via)  The comic version of Neil Gaiman’s recent commencement speech, cause comics are more fun than video.