Simplicity is a form of art...

Switched to Lineage OS
by Sven Vermeulen, post on Sun 09 April 2017

I have been a long time user of Cyanogenmod, which discontinued its services end of 2016. Due to lack of (continuous) time, I was not able to switch over toward a different ROM. Also, I wasn't sure if LineageOS would remain the best choice for me or not. I wanted to review other ROMs for my Samsung Galaxy SIII (the i9300 model) phone.

Today, I made my choice and installed LineageOS.

cvechecker 3.8 released
by Sven Vermeulen, post on Mon 27 March 2017

A new release is now available for the cvechecker application. This is a stupid yet important bugfix release: the 3.7 release saw all newly released CVEs as being already known, so it did not take them up to the database. As a result, systems would never check for the new CVEs.

Handling certificates in Gentoo Linux
by Sven Vermeulen, post on Mon 06 March 2017

I recently created a new article on the Gentoo Wiki titled Certificates which talks about how to handle certificate stores on Gentoo Linux. The write-up of the article (which might still change name later, because it does not handle everything about certificates, mostly how to handle certificate stores) was inspired by the observation that I had to adjust the certificate stores of both Chromium and Firefox separately, even though they both use NSS.

cvechecker 3.7 released
by Sven Vermeulen, post on Thu 02 March 2017

After a long time of getting too little attention from me, I decided to make a new cvechecker release. There are few changes in it, but I am planning on making a new release soon with lots of clean-ups.

I missed FOSDEM
by Sven Vermeulen, post on Tue 07 February 2017

I sadly had to miss out on the FOSDEM event. The entire weekend was filled with me being apathetic, feverish and overall zombie-like. Yes, sickness can be cruel. It wasn't until today that I had the energy back to fire up my laptop.

Sorry for the crew that I promised to meet at FOSDEM. I'll make it up, somehow.

SELinux System Administration, 2nd Edition
by Sven Vermeulen, post on Thu 22 December 2016

While still working on a few other projects, one of the time consumers of the past half year (haven't you noticed? my blog was quite silent) has come to an end: the SELinux System Administration - Second Edition book is now available. With almost double the amount of pages and a serious update of the content, the book can now be bought either through Packt Publishing itself, or the various online bookstores such as Amazon.

With the holidays now approaching, I hope to be able to execute a few tasks within the Gentoo community (and of the Gentoo Foundation) and get back on track. Luckily, my absence was not jeopardizing the state of SELinux in Gentoo thanks to the efforts of Jason Zaman.

GnuPG: private key suddenly missing?
by Sven Vermeulen, post on Wed 12 October 2016

After updating my workstation, I noticed that keychain reported that it could not load one of the GnuPG keys I passed it on.

 * keychain 2.8.1 ~ http://www.funtoo.org
 * Found existing ssh-agent: 2167
 * Found existing gpg-agent: 2194
 * Warning: can't find 0xB7BD4B0DE76AC6A4; skipping
 * Known ssh key: /home/swift/.ssh/id_dsa
 * Known ssh key: /home/swift/.ssh/id_ed25519
 * Known gpg key: 0x22899E947878B0CE

I did not modify my key store at all, so what happened?

We do not ship SELinux sandbox
by Sven Vermeulen, post on Tue 27 September 2016

A few days ago a vulnerability was reported in the SELinux sandbox user space utility. The utility is part of the policycoreutils package. Luckily, Gentoo's sys-apps/policycoreutils package is not vulnerable - and not because we were clairvoyant about this issue, but because we don't ship this utility.

Mounting QEMU images
by Sven Vermeulen, post on Mon 26 September 2016

While working on the second edition of my first book, SELinux System Administration - Second Edition I had to test out a few commands on different Linux distributions to make sure that I don't create instructions that only work on Gentoo Linux. After all, as awesome as Gentoo might be, the Linux world is a bit bigger. So I downloaded a few live systems to run in Qemu/KVM.

Some of these systems however use cloud-init which, while interesting to use, is not set up on my system yet. And without support for cloud-init, how can I get access to the system?

Comparing Hadoop with mainframe
by Sven Vermeulen, post on Wed 15 June 2016

At my work, I have the pleasure of being involved in a big data project that uses Hadoop as the primary platform for several services. As an architect, I try to get to know the platform's capabilities, its potential use cases, its surrounding ecosystem, etc. And although the implementation at work is not in its final form (yay agile infrastructure releases) I do start to get a grasp of where we might be going.

For many analysts and architects, this Hadoop platform is a new kid on the block so I have some work explaining what it is and what it is capable of. Not for the fun of it, but to help the company make the right decisions, to support management and operations, to lift the fear of new environments. One thing I've once said is that "Hadoop is the poor man's mainframe", because I notice some high-level similarities between the two.