Does CR LF as a line ending cause extra problems with buffers?
In reaction to my entry about why having CR LF as your line endingis a mistake , Aristotle Pagaltzis raised the issue of CR LF's consequencesfor buffers in a comment:
When you said “state machine” in the context of network protocols,I thought you were going to talk about buffers. That’s an evenmore painful consequence than just the complexity of scanning for asequence. [...]
My first reaction was that I didn't think a multi-byte line endingsequence causes
What file types we see inside singleton nested zipfiles in email
Earlier, I wrote about how email attachments of a single .zipinside another zip are suspicious . Giventhat the .doc malware using them has come back ,today I feel like reporting on what file types we've seen in suchcases over the past nine weeks.
(I'm picking nine weeks because we rotate this particular logfileonce a week and it's thus easy to grep through just nine weeksworth.)
So here are the raw numbers:
2292 inner zip exts: .
I'm too much of a perfectionist about contributing to open source projects
I find it hard to contribute changes to open source projects, andin fact even the thought of trying to do so usually makes me shyaway. There are a tangled bunch of reasons for why, but I've cometo realize that a part of it is that I'm nervous about my work beingperfect, or at least very good. Take a documentation change, forexample.
If I'm going to make any public contribution of this nature, forexample to make a correction to a manpage
Different ways you can initialize a RAID-[567+] array
I was installing a machine today where we're using Linux softwareRAID to build a RAID-6 array of SATA HDs, and naturally one of theparts of the installation is creating and thus initializing theRAID-6 array. This is not something that goes very fast, and whenI wandered past the server itself I noticed that the drive activitylights were generally blinking, not on solid. This got me thinkingabout various different ways that you might initialize a newlycreated RAID-N array.
It's
Python won't (and can't) import native modules from zip archives
I've written before about running Python programs from zip files , and in general you can package up Python modulesin zip files. Recently I was grumbling on Twitter about the hasslesof copying multi-file Python things around , and JouniSeppänen mentioned using zip files for this but wasn't surewhether they supported native modules (that is, compiled code, asopposed to Python code). It turns out that the answer is straightforwardand unambiguous; Python doesn't support importing native modulesfrom zip
Malware strains may go away sometimes, but they generally come back
I have a little confession. Last Tuesday I wrote about how we'dstarted rejecting .doc files in nested zipfiles .Although I didn't mention it in the entry, we did this because we'dseen them dominate our detected malware attempts over the weekend(with everything being identified by Sophos PureMessage as'Mal/DrodZp-A'). Well, guess what? The moment we added that newrejection rule, all of those .docs in .zips in zipfiles vanished,with not one to
How to see and flush the Linux kernel NFS server's authentication cache
We're going to be running some Linux NFS (v3) servers soon (forreasons beyond the scope of this entry), and we want to controlaccess to the filesystems that those servers will export by netgroup,because we have a number of machines that should have access. Linuxmakes this a generally very easy process, because unlike many systemsyou don't need YP NIS in order to use netgroups. All you need to do is change /etc/nsswitch.conf to say ' netgroup:
Systemd's slowly but steadily increased idealism about the world
When it started out, systemd was in many ways relentlessly pragmatic.My shining example of this is that the developers went to fairlygreat lengths to integrate both System V init scripts and /etc/fstab into systemd in a fairly deep and thus quite convenient way. Theeasy way would have been to just run things and mount filesystemsthrough some compatibility shims and programs. Systemd went the extradistance to make them more or less real units, which means that you cando things like add extra dependencies to System V init
Our advantage in reliable backups is that we get restore requests
Recently Gitlab had a data loss incident where part of the problem was that, to quote their incident report:
- So in other words, out of five backup/replication techniquesdeployed none are working reliably or set up in the first place.[...]
Like many people, this set me to thinking about the perennial issue of quietlybroken backups and how we're doing onthat score (since there's nothing like someone else's catastropheto make you wonder how you'd do in a
Systemd should be better than it is, but it is still our best init system
It all started on Twitter:
@hirojin :unpopular opinion: systemd is the epitome of worse is better, and assuch fits right into the unix philosophy.
@thatcks :Systemd has turned into the X Windows of init systems.
Some people will see my tweet as a slam on systemd, whichis fair, because it is. Some people will see it as sort ofpraise for systemd, which is also fair, because it is thattoo. Just like X , systemd is a goodillustration of Rob Pike