Category Archives: Gentoo

Topics about Gentoo

Upgrading GCC, revisited

Gentoo has, since long, had a GCC Upgrading guide. A long time ago, upgrading GCC required quite a lot of side activities and was often considered a risky upgrade. But times change, and so do the GCC upgrade cycles. Improved … Continue reading

Posted in Gentoo | 7 Comments

Quickly setup a Gentoo system

In order to verify if the installation instructions in the Gentoo Handbook are still valid, and to allow me to quickly seed new Gentoo installations in a virtual environment, I wrote a very ugly (really) script to automatically “stage” a … Continue reading

Posted in Gentoo, Hardened | 7 Comments

Power management guide updated

The Gentoo Power Management Guide is now updated. It is a full rewrite, focusing currently on two main toolsets: Laptop Mode Tools and cpufreqd. I was pleasantly surprised by the number of features that the laptop mode tools package provided. … Continue reading

Posted in Gentoo | 1 Comment

Mitigating risks, part 4 – Mandatory Access Control

I’ve talked about service isolation earlier and the risks that it helps to mitigate. However, many applications still run as highly privileged accounts, or can be abused to execute more functions than intended. Service isolation doesn’t help there, and system … Continue reading

Posted in Architecture, Hardened, Security, SELinux | 1 Comment

Catching up

As mentioned on the gentoo-doc mailinglist, all documentation bugs (that we know of) related to openrc have been fixed. It was already a week like so, but the last dependency on our “tracker” bug was an open one (asking if … Continue reading

Posted in Gentoo | 1 Comment

Now using refpolicy 2.20110726

A few days ago, I committed the SELinux policy modules that are based on the 2.20110726 set released upstream. For those that are using Gentoo Hardened with SELinux, you’ll find them if you use the ~arch set for the sec-policy … Continue reading

Posted in Hardened, SELinux | Leave a comment

Use parted for large partitions

A few bugs that were sitting in Gentoo’s bugzilla for the documentation were related to large partitions (2 TB and higher). Previously, this wasn’t as much as an issue since the number of users that have 2+ TB partitions are … Continue reading

Posted in Gentoo | 2 Comments

Easy documentation updates thanks to the many contributions

As mentioned previously, I took a stab at the Gentoo Guide to OpenLDAP Authentication, updating its configuration settings as well as give an introduction to its replication mechanism. Although I am no OpenLDAP guru at all, I set up a … Continue reading

Posted in Gentoo, Hardened, SELinux | Leave a comment

Ready, set, commit!

Yesterday, I have entered the realms of Gentoo Development again. But as it was getting late then, I had to wait before the first commits happened. So this evening, things were done. The first couple of documentation bugs (mostly related … Continue reading

Posted in Hardened | 2 Comments

checksec kernel security

I have blogged about checksec.sh earlier before. Jono, one of the #gentoo-hardened IRC-members, kindly pointed me to its –kernel option. So I feel obliged to give its options a stab as well. So, here goes the next batch of OPE-style … Continue reading

Posted in Gentoo, Hardened, Security | 1 Comment