Simplicity is a form of art...

Documentation updates for initramfs needed?
by Sven Vermeulen, post on Thu 12 April 2012

A quick help request from the community: if you know of any Gentoo documents that need updates in order for end users to know when and how to use initramfs, please file bugreports and have them block bug #407959. Currently, we have updated the Gentoo Handbook, Gentoo Quickinstall guides and …

Get your devtmpfs ready
by Sven Vermeulen, post on Sat 07 April 2012

If you are using stable profiles, you might want to verify if you are already running a kernel with devtmpfs support enabled. Why? Well, currently you might not need it, but the upcoming openrc/udev packages require it and they currently do not fail at install time if you have …

More on initramfs and SELinux
by Sven Vermeulen, post on Sun 25 March 2012

With the upcoming udev version not supporting separate /usr locations unless you boot with an initramfs, we are now starting to document how to create an initramfs to boot with. After all, systems with a separate /usr are not that uncommon.

As I've blogged about before, getting an initramfs to …

Hunting fuser
by Sven Vermeulen, post on Mon 12 March 2012

I am able to work on Gentoo and SELinux about one hour per day. It's more in total time, but being a bit exhausted makes me act a bit more slowly which boils down to about one hour per day. And one hour per day isn't bad, you're able to …

Introducing 2.20120215 policies
by Sven Vermeulen, post on Sun 26 February 2012

A few weeks after being released, we now have the 20120215-based policies available for our users (and also the newer userspace utilities). The packages currently reside in the hardened-dev overlay as they will need to see sufficient testing before we merge those to the main tree. For most users, nothing …

Transitioning to MCS policies
by Sven Vermeulen, post on Fri 24 February 2012

Since I started maintaining the SELinux policies for Gentoo Hardened, the policy types we supported were primarily strict and targeted. About half a year ago, we also started supported mcs and offered the possibility for using mls as well (but didn't really support that one).

With the recent release of …

This months' stabilization done, more to come
by Sven Vermeulen, post on Sun 29 January 2012

A small notification to tell you that the SELinux policies that were pushed to the main tree 30 days (or more) ago have now been stabilized (none of them introduced problems, although some of them have other bugs still open which are either fixed in \~arch or will be fixed …

Trying out initramfs with selinux and grsec
by Sven Vermeulen, post on Sun 15 January 2012

I'm no fan of initramfs. All my systems boot up just fine without it, so I often see it as an additional layer of obfuscation. But there are definitely cases where initramfs is needed, and from the looks of it, we might be needing to push out some documentation and …

Unix domain sockets are files
by Sven Vermeulen, post on Sat 31 December 2011

Probably not a first for many seasoned Linux administrators, and probably not correct accordingly to more advanced users than myself, but I just found out that Unix domain sockets are files. Even when they're not.

I have been looking at a weird SELinux denial I had occuring on my system …

Gentoo WiKi & Knowledge Base
by Sven Vermeulen, post on Mon 26 December 2011

I have been playing with the Gentoo Wiki the last few days and am very impressed with the work that both the wiki teams as well as existing contributors have already done to the place. The look and feel is very slick and editing works just as expected. One of …