So I was messing around with Salix (x86, Xfce) in a VM for penetration testing purposes, and perchance ran 'netstat -apntl'. I saw this: tcp 1 0 192.168.0.116:46644 107.21.1.61:443 CLOSE_WAIT 15234/chfn chfn is used to change user information - name, office, etc. It is a setuid binary. It's also a s...

I actually was rather pleased with systemd, in terms of the whole idea of "integrating the Linux base system under one umbrella"... Implementation aside. And then today I fired up my Debian netbook, noticed it was very sluggish, looked at top, and saw systemd hogging one of the cores entir...

So: just FYI I've removed the script from the post above, as it consistently missed files - particularly stuff in /usr/bin, due to mtime/ctime not being accurate for those binaries. Hopefully nobody else made extensive use of the script. If anyone did, be warned that your incremental backups are inc...

You've all probably seen cases where Firefox goes bananas on a poorly designed website, spilling over into swap space and bringing your computer to its proverbial knees... Here is a simple script for those situations. #!/bin/bash - [ $# -ne 2 ] && { echo "Usage: $(basename $0) <scan_int...

EDIT: this script did not work as advertised, due to mtime and ctime not being accurate. As such I've deleted it. Figured I should put this up on the forums. It handles full and differential backups. Also incremental if you want, but I don't think the pain is worthwhile for that. It uses the "...

I'm glad you people (i.e. the Salix maintainers) are still keeping this distro alive! a) It is one of the very few full desktop distros that still fits on a CD-ROM. If you don't have an 8+ Mb/s broadband connection, or have old computers with no DVD support, that's invaluable. b) It is also one of t...

You know the story: you have a hulking workstation with a dozen GB of RAM, but you still have to wait for the hard disk to do its thing when you start a new program. This vexes me a bit, so I wrote a Python script to solve it: #!/usr/bin/env python2 import mmap, os, sys import os.path for paths in s...

Detailed here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Sudo#Permissive_Umask One workaround is to put Defaults umask = 0022 Defaults umask_override in sudoers. The problem is that this disables a security feature - the point of unioning the umasks is to prevent users from creating files with more open ...

Found the problem, it is indeed a conflict between sudo and 0077 umask. I will continue the discussion about that elsewhere.

I'll also unhelpfully note here that the ease of doing things like transparent folder sharing between arbitrary Windows desktops is part of the reason for Windows' poor security reputation. There are some interesting exploits that rely on such conveniences.