cvechecker in development mode
by Sven Vermeulen, post on Mon 12 July 2010A while ago I had the idea to create a simple tool that checks the CVE database against my current system. It would allow me to check if my system is somewhat up to date (no pending security vulnerabilities), but also to get an automated overview of the various software …
OVAL, SCAP, CVE, CPE, ...
by Sven Vermeulen, post on Sat 05 June 2010For a personal POC I wanted to see if it is possible to generate, based on the collection of CVE entries publicly available, a report informing a system administrator about possible vulnerabilities. Nothing fancy, just based upon versions.
A simple example: tool detects Perl, acquires installed Perl version, then matches …
Listing files of (not) installed software
by Sven Vermeulen, post on Sat 05 June 2010Everyone that has been using Gentoo for a while now knows about tools such as qlist that show you the list of files installed by an (installed) package, or qfile that allows you to find which package provided a particular file on your system.
One thing lacking is to be …
GSE TWS BeLux 2010
by Sven Vermeulen, post on Thu 03 June 2010Today, IBM generously hosted the GSE TWS BeLux 2010 conference. Although it was organized together with the GSE DB2 conference (which I would also have loved to attend) I must say I was pretty impressed with the topics given, especially those after the lunch.
For me, personally, the topic on …
Question yourself v3
by Sven Vermeulen, post on Wed 19 May 2010Another update to Quizzer, now at version 3. But more importantly, updates to the Linux Sea related chapters are made available online - get a taste for it at the online quizzer set.
Feedback is, as always, very much appreciated.
Question yourself v2
by Sven Vermeulen, post on Tue 11 May 2010A new version of the Quizzer webscript is available. The demo has also been updated with quick tests on the first few chapters of Linux Sea.
More exercises on the following chapters will follow soon.
Updates to the script include visual accept/reject of single-choice and multiple choice answers and …
Question yourself
by Sven Vermeulen, post on Sun 02 May 2010Do you ever write down things in the hope you never forget them, but still think it would be better if you could somehow take a test of that subject from time to time to make sure you don't forget?
I do, and I found it quite difficult to keep …
SAI and N-O-SQL
by Sven Vermeulen, post on Thu 22 April 2010Yesterday (argh, the day before yesterday) I went to a SAI conference on nosql. In Belgium, SAI is a non-profit organization for IT people which focuses on knowledge sharing.
The conference that day was on nosql. The presentation given by OuterThought was very good and offered a nice introduction to …
A dozen pages added
by Sven Vermeulen, post on Thu 22 April 2010Just a quick heads-up that a dozen pages in the Linux Sea book have been added. Nothing spectacular, just a few more paragraphs on services/runlevels, a few updates on software management and on boot failure resolutions.
License support in Gentoo
by Sven Vermeulen, post on Tue 16 February 2010It's a bit sad that Gentoo didn't promote this more, but Gentoo users now have support for license-based masking.
What does this mean? Well, previously, Gentoo already supported various masking reasons (like stable versus staging - the x86 versus \~x86 saga, package.mask'ing - for security reasons or critical bugs, ...). Now, a …