Last week was a va­ca­tion week for the mem­bers of MùPùF.​org. This is why we had time to work on the web­site and to push more than 80 com­mits.

Here is a list of the changes we made!

As I pointed out in pre­vi­ous blog en­tries, I have been run­ning short on time in the last few months. The rea­son is that I put quite a lot of time into a pro­ject that was as­signed to me as part of my stud­ies. The goal of the pro­ject was to cre­ate an ap­pli­ca­tion al­low­ing graph­i­cal mon­i­tor­ing of var­i­ous sys­tem and net­work se­cu­rity tools, such as SELinux, PIGA (cur­rently un­der de­vel­op­ment in my school, ENSI of Bourges), Osiris, Snort, etc.

SYstem and NEtwork se­cu­rity Mon­i­tor­ing Appli­ca­tion

This ap­pli­ca­tion, named Synema, was meant to be de­vel­oped as a first-time pro­ject for first year stu­dents in com­puter sci­ence and se­cu­rity, so there were no big ex­pec­ta­tions about it when it was started. My coworker and I have been charged of writ­ing a plu­gin frame­work that would al­low other stu­dents to com­pute text re­ports into im­ages, with the help of lib­ploti­cus, and to dis­play those im­ages in a pro­vided area, us­ing the Cairo li­brary. As the other stu­dents were be­gin­ners, the API had to be sim­ple and con­tain as few func­tions as pos­si­ble, and it had to be avail­able in C.

These con­straints, and the short dead­line (three months to write the API and an ap­pli­ca­tion that would use the plu­g­ins to dis­play data about real ma­chines) lim­ited the range of pos­si­bil­i­ties, and I am not ex­tremely sat­is­fied with the re­sult (the first rea­son be­ing that only one group of stu­dents man­aged to write a plu­gin whose code I con­sider clean enough for in­clu­sion). The pro­ject is still go­ing on, and it may be pur­sued in a dif­fer­ent form (fo­cus­ing on cer­tain se­cu­rity tools and do­ing deeper data vi­su­al­i­sa­tion, and data cor­re­la­tion) in the next months, but this is not what I wanted to blog about ; and even if I wanted to, I could not since I’m not very bril­liant at fore­see­ing the fu­ture. In­stead, I am just go­ing to speak a bit about the de­vel­op­ment of Synema, with the hope that it can be help­ful to any­one (es­pe­cially, hints things that I could not find any­where else on the In­ter­net – but it is vast and I’ve not vis­ited all of it yet!).

Let’s be­gin with screen­shots so that you know what I’m speak­ing about:

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.

Well, I’ll start this blog post with a big thank to my re­gion. In­deed, stud­ies in France are al­most free of charges. But, in my re­gion, they even have de­cided to of­fer lap­tops to their mas­ter stu­dents to at­tract more stu­dents.

I have re­ceived mine last year. It is a won­der­ful (yet, quite heavy) Lenovo Thinkpad R61i. It fea­tures a Core Duo (not a core 2 duo), 2 GB of RAM, 120GB on the hard disk drive and an NVIDIA Quadro NVS 140M.

I was re­ally un­pleased to dis­cover it was an NVIDA video card, but I’ve come to like it over the last few months, when I dis­cov­ered 3D sup­port fi­nally ap­peared us­ing gal­lium 3D and the lat­est mesa bits.

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 acpid dae­mon and I have made a sim­ple bash script to de­tect im­ple­ment the logic of the switch.

Early this month I haven’t been very pro­duc­tive in the open source world, mostly be­cause of the uni­ver­sity pro­jects and the ex­ams that fol­lowed. Now it’s over I’ve de­cided to take the time to fix that, and it’s a plea­sure to be fi­nally able to get back to FOSS de­vel­op­ment, and my elec­tron­ics hobby ;)

So to­day I’m proud to an­nounce the fruit of my ef­forts, and a new pro­ject. As many Linux users, I love to make my com­puter work­space as ef­fi­cient as pos­si­ble, even if it rep­re­sents more work than just do­ing it :)

While I was be­gin­ning to starve tonight, I no­ticed I had no idea what I’d cook. I was get­ting a bit fed up of noo­dles, and didn’t eat veg­eta­bles for a while. I can al­ready hear you say­ing (ac­tu­ally, I can’t, un­less I’m hooked to your mi­cro, but that’s very un­likely, isn’t it?) “Hey wait, veg­eta­bles are dull”… No, they’re not! Not when you cook them prop­erly, and it kind of ac­ci­den­tally hap­pened to me just about an hour and a half ago.

You may also be won­der­ing what the hell a kesäkurpit­sapais­tos can be. Well, it’s the Finnish name of gratin de cour­gettes. My Finnish friend Pasi took some time to find out what a cour­gette is, and he blamed me for not telling him in Finnish (well, now at least I know a word of that weird won­der­ful lan­guage).

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

This post is just a quick tu­to­r­ial on how to mod­ify No­ti­fyOsd’s dis­play colours, font size, and bub­ble po­si­tion. It in­cludes source code edi­tion, and thus is not ad­vised for be­gin­ner users.

MùPùF.​org has been down for 16 hours, we want to apol­o­gize for this down­time.

What ac­tu­ally hap­pened?

There have been a prob­lem on the SAN of the server and the main par­ti­tion has been in­ac­ces­si­ble for quite a long time. Then, the server has been re­booted by OVH but the e2f­sck failed and I had to re­boot in the re­cover mode to get it back on­line again.

Once again, sorry for the in­con­ve­nience.

Lately I have been try­ing to use Log­ger­head, a sim­ple Bazaar repos­i­tory viewer which is de­vel­oped at Launch­pad. Bazaar it­self is the source code man­ager be­hind all the Launch­pad pro­jects.