MùPùF.org

You may know our server is hosted by OVH and is SAN-based. This means that the / of our server is not stored on a local hard disk drive but it is instead stored in a distant SAN. We already encountered "little" uptime problems because of some OVH service down-times. Well, last week has been the most horrible week ever[fr].

We had terrible throughput down to 70KBit/s, latencies up to 2 seconds and several down time that could have been as long as 8hours in a row.

On top of that, we had updates for the website that we could only apply by crossing our finger because some of them require the website to be rebooted. But, when rebooted, the django-based website touches a lot of files and with such a terrible latency, it could take up to 10 minutes to launch.

The problem was that cherokee was trying to spawn too many processes which in turn slowed down the website's boot sequence and this often lead the server to lack of RAM just as a bomb fork would operate.
I have fixed this problem by putting a lock on the beginning of the boot sequence.

A few hours ago, OVH switched our server to a new SAN which delivers close-to-normal performances. We are using this time to fix as many problems as we can. If you spot any problem, please send us a message.

Anyway, we are sorry for the inconvenience it may have caused.

Well this is a really short bookmark article. You'll be warned.

Would you like to get rid of some setuid on your binaries ? Well, Linux 2.2 introduced capacities to get rid of them. Linux Journal's Making-root-unprivileged is an attempt to have a setuid free Linux distribution, have fun !

If you're using Spencer's GRSecurity, you can use the GRSecurity Capability Names and Descriptions.

If you're not using GRSecurity, I'll soon send the capabilities currently available.

Another simpler article about this subject has been made by brain0, using-posix-capabilities-in-linux-part-one and using-posix-capabilities-in-linux-part-two.

Today, after my exams, I went to the project room my school has, plugged my laptop on the 24" screen and typed the usual :

$ xrandr --output VGA-1 --auto
$ xrandr --output LVDS-1 --off

This is way better than using NVIDIA's utilities (it is portable) but yet, it is so boring to write the same thing on and on...

As I had a couple of hours to spare, I have decided to use the laptop hotkeys to switch between the screens (LVDS --> VGA and VGA--> LVDS).

To fulfill this goal, I have used the daemon acpid and made a bash script to detect implement the logic of the switch.

After one year and more than 300 commits, PPassKeeper 1.0 beta 2 has finally been released !

What is PPassKeeper ?

PPasskeeper is my main personal project. It is a library that intends to create a portable way of storing sensitive information, such as passwords or private keys, into a safe place. In order to be portable and flexible, the library allows third-party developers to improve it by creating more plugins that can be free (as in freedom) or proprietary.

The goals of this project is to :

• Provide a common interface for desktops and operating systems to access secure password storages
• Be modular
• Allow third-party developers to easily create new modules
• Be backwards compatible

This project is developed under the LGPL v2.0 or later license.

What has changed since the beta 1 ?

Well, a lot of things have changed. As a summary, I can tell that it is way more mature, it is now thread-safe, has a better API/ABI, supports blobs, has support for the Gnome-Keyring, initial support for modules parameters, created unit tests, switched to CMake and fixes a lot of bugs !

The title says pretty much all what I wanted to say, but, whatever, let's say it again !

The research category is now up !

OK, now I hear your comments : "What the heck is this category all about ?!?".

(Nice announcement in the end of the article !)

I know only a few days have passed since my previous update but today, I'm gonna talk about this week mesa's improvement and the Kernel Mode Setting with the r7xx radeon family.

Roughly one month have passed since I first tried the 3D support on my radeon HD4770 (R740), it is time for a little update :)