Simplicity is a form of art...

cvechecker 1.0 released
by Sven Vermeulen, post on Fri 01 October 2010

With only a few small bugfixes between this release and the previous one, cvechecker 1.0 has finally been released. It runs fine on my few systems and I have not gotten any bugreports from other users anymore. It can definitely need more rules to identify installed software (those rules …

SELinux quicky
by Sven Vermeulen, post on Tue 14 September 2010

I've been using SELinux for a few days now (in permissive mode, just to get to know things) and have learned a few interesting commands (or other nice-to-know's) for using SELinux. Since I'm going to forget those the moment all is running well, I'll "document" them here ;-) I'm not going …

Switching to hardened
by Sven Vermeulen, post on Sun 12 September 2010

Yesterday (and this night) I successfully converted my system to a Gentoo Hardened system. In my case, this currently means that PaX has been enabled and I am currently running the system (which is an x86_64 laptop) with SELinux in permissive mode (so it won't enforce the policies yet …

prezi presentations
by Sven Vermeulen, post on Fri 10 September 2010

While doing some research on current rich internet applications / web application platforms, I discovered an online presentation site/tool called Prezi. This online application allows you to make dynamic presentations differently from the standard presentation software like OpenOffice.org's Impress. A nice example can be found online as well of …

cvechecker 0.6 released
by Sven Vermeulen, post on Wed 08 September 2010

This release makes me quite happy, because it resolves one major PITA I had (performance), but you know how things go. If it works fine for the developer, it's probably an abomination for the rest of the world. Anyhow, cvechecker version 0.6 is now available. It improves reporting performance …

Linux Sea last content chapter
by Sven Vermeulen, post on Sat 04 September 2010

The last chapter in Linux Sea focuses on Using A Shell. This seems to me like a nice last chapter, as it confronts the user with the exciting world of shell scripts. I hope that the chapters in the book are sufficiently stuffed so that beginners (who are not afraid …

devops - how hard can it/it can be
by Sven Vermeulen, post on Sat 04 September 2010

Dieter made a good reference to devops and the open source community and (correctly) points out that, even in a more collaborative scene such as the free software communities', there is still distinction between development and operations. And it isn't hard to see commonalities between enterprise organizations and free software …

Linux Sea: log file management and backups
by Sven Vermeulen, post on Thu 02 September 2010

I've added two more chapters to the Linux Sea book. The first one is about Log file management, the second one about Taking Backups. They're far from finished, but I thought that those two topics are important for day-to-day Gentoo usage and shouldn't be left out of the Linux Sea …

cvechecker 0.5 released
by Sven Vermeulen, post on Thu 02 September 2010

A new intermediate release of cvechecker is now released. The tool is reported to build properly on NetBSD and FreeBSD as well (although much user experience there is still welcome), introduces a cvereport command (example output), has lowered its initial dependency requirements and pullcves now only loads the CVE XML …

qemu monitor cd change
by Sven Vermeulen, post on Mon 30 August 2010

I've been playing around with kvm (which uses qemu) to try out other operating systems and Linux distributions. Up until now, little progress on that part (not because it is difficult, just little time) but there are a few things worth mentioning. For this post, let's start with a quicky …