Simplicity is a form of art...

Slowly converting from GuideXML to HTML

Gentoo has removed its support of the older GuideXML format in favor of using the Gentoo Wiki and a new content management system for the main site (or is it static pages, I don't have the faintest idea to be honest). I do still have a few GuideXML pages in my development space, which I am going to move to HTML pretty soon.

In order to do so, I make use of the guidexml2wiki stylesheet I developed. But instead of migrating it to wiki syntax, I want to end with HTML.

Switching OpenSSH to ed25519 keys

With Mike's news item on OpenSSH's deprecation of the DSA algorithm for the public key authentication, I started switching the few keys I still had using DSA to the suggested ED25519 algorithm. Of course, I wouldn't be a security-interested party if I did not do some additional investigation into the DSA versus Ed25519 discussion.

Finding a good compression utility

I recently came across a wiki page written by Herman Brule which gives a quick benchmark on a couple of compression methods / algorithms. It gave me the idea of writing a quick script that tests out a wide number of compression utilities available in Gentoo (usually through the app-arch category), with also a number of options (in case multiple options are possible).

Why we do confine Firefox

If you're a bit following the SELinux development community you will know Dan Walsh, a Red Hat security engineer. Today he blogged about CVE-2015-4495 and SELinux, or why doesn't SELinux confine Firefox. He should've asked why the reference policy or Red Hat/Fedora policy does not confine Firefox, because SELinux is, as I've mentioned before, not the same as its policy.

In effect, Gentoo's SELinux policy does confine Firefox by default. One of the principles we focus on in Gentoo Hardened is to develop desktop policies in order to reduce exposure and information leakage of user documents. We might not have the manpower to confine all desktop applications, but I do think it is worthwhile to at least attempt to do this, even though what Dan Walsh mentioned is also correct: desktops are notoriously difficult to use a mandatory access control system on.

Live SELinux userspace ebuilds

In between courses, I pushed out live ebuilds for the SELinux userspace applications: libselinux, policycoreutils, libsemanage, libsepol, sepolgen, checkpolicy and secilc. These live ebuilds (with Gentoo version 9999) pull in the current development code of the SELinux userspace so that developers and contributors can already work with in-progress code developments as well as see how they work on a Gentoo platform.

Moving closer to 2.4 stabilization

The SELinux userspace project has released version 2.4 in february this year, after release candidates have been tested for half a year. After its release, we at the Gentoo Hardened project have been working hard to integrate it within Gentoo. This effort has been made a bit more difficult …

Trying out Pelican, part one

One of the goals I've set myself to do this year (not as a new year resolution though, I *really* want to accomplish this ;-) is to move my blog from Wordpress to a statically built website. And Pelican looks to be a good solution to do so. It's based on …

Have dhcpcd wait before backgrounding

Many of my systems use DHCP for obtaining IP addresses. Even though they all receive a static IP address, it allows me to have them moved over (migrations), use TFTP boot, cloning (in case of quick testing), etc. But one of the things that was making my efforts somewhat more …

Old Gentoo system? Not a problem...

If you have a very old Gentoo system that you want to upgrade, you might have some issues with too old software and Portage which can't just upgrade to a recent state. Although many methods exist to work around it, one that I have found to be very useful is …

Gentoo Wiki is growing

Perhaps it is because of the winter holidays, but the last weeks I've noticed a lot of updates and edits on the Gentoo wiki.

The move to the Tyrian layout, whose purpose is to eventually become the unified layout for all Gentoo resources, happened first. Then, three common templates (Code …