Over on Twitter, I said something related to Ubuntu 22.04 switchinghow they distribute Firefox that may sound surprising :

On the other hand: Firefox gives Ubuntu LTS heartburn, becausebuilding the current Firefox from source requires a current Rust(Firefox releases are tied tightly to Rust releases, don't ask). Thismostly forces Ubuntu LTS to keep ratcheting Rust versions up despite'stable'.

As of today, this is true of the past few years of Firefox releases;a particular Firefox release is

I recently read Clayton Craft's -h --help -help help --? -? ???? ( via ). In part of it,Craft mentions '--? / -?' as help options, and says about them:

???? I have no idea where these came from, but my guess is that theyare migrants from the wild west Windows-land, where Iassume the shell won't try to expand ? into anything. [...

Over on Twitter I admitted to something :

I just trolled myself by installing an apt sources.list for 'focal'(Ubuntu 20.04) on my Ubuntu 22.04 beta scratch install ('jammy'). Iwish apt had symbolic names for 'the current distro release'.

Apt is the Debian package management system (and also used by Ubuntuand other Debian-derived distributions), and so of course it has asystem for configuring where it gets packages from ('

The Linux kernel has a number of fs.* sysctls to restrict theability to do various traditionally allowed things that have provento (sometimes) be exploitable to create security vulnerabilities,as covered in sysctl/fs.txt . The kernelhas had fs.protected_hardlinks and fs.protected_symlinksfor some time, and Linux 4.19 added fs.protected_fifos andfs.protected_regular (see the details in the commit , and somevendors back-ported these new sysctls to their

Suppose, not hypothetically, that you have a Linux system whereSSH logins are authenticated with passwords and then a MFA challenge . This is implemented the onlysensible way , with a PAMmodule to do MFA, such as the one from Duo ; you add this PAM module to yoursetup along side the existing PAM stuff used for SSH logins. Thisis all easy to set up and there's plenty of documentation on it,but now you'd like to go the extra distance so that the loginfails immediately

To simplify, PAM is the standard system on Linux (and often other Unixes) forconfiguring how applications such as SSH handle various aspects ofauthenticating and logging people in. PAM splits this work up intoa collection of PAM modules (sometimes 'PAMs', since PAM istheoretically short for 'Pluggable Authentication Modules'), whichare then configured in per application (or 'service') stacks .Each individual PAM module can succeed, fail, or signal otherconditions, and the PAM stack for a given application

Suppose that you have a system where to log in or authenticate,people must both have a password and pass a MFA challenge. In somesuch systems, you can choose whether the MFA challenge or thepassword comes first (for example, this is generally the casewith SSH because both passwords and MFA are usually done in PAM ). When this came up for us in ourmove from Yubikeys to MFA , I thought aboutit a bit and decided that passwords should come first.

SSH logins are a somewhat unusual environment

Most people who deal with X resources , me included, generallydeal with them at a relatively superficial level. At this level,you can say that X resources are a text based key/value database,with the name (key) of every resource being a composite name thatspecifies both its program and some program specific name (althoughthere are conventions for the name portion). But if you start to lookat the actual names for X resources, things start looking a little moreodd.

For example, all

The news of the time interval is that Fedora is consideringdeprecating legacy BIOS booting ( via ). This gave me feelings partlybecause back in 2018, I wrote an entry about what turned out to be an unfortunate decision Fedora made about how to use UEFI , where Fedora put your main Grub2 configurationfile into your EFI system partition. This is a terrible thing foranyone who uses mirrored disks because it makes keeping two EFIsystem partitions in sync much more difficult; at the time, Fedoraupdated your