Outages

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I’m migrating this web server to a more modern Fedora from Fedora 14 and there have been problems.  Had to ditch the new MariaDB for community mysql because the former cannot read in a common SQL file describing this simple WordPress database without marking it corrupt.  See:

MySQL to MariaDB migration: handling privilege table differences when using mysqldump

Community mysql works well and all databases read in like SQL should.  There have been memory leak problems bringing down services at random times which might be an OS problem or httpd problem so I’m getting ready to rebuild on a modern CentOS distro which should be more stable.  I don’t feel like debugging this since it should just work when installed.  The latest crash was SELinux which activated itself after a reboot and it doesn’t like anything running on its system.

The Fedora 14 VM has been rock solid since 2010 and I’ll still use it as a backup.  I wanted to create a VM in VirtualBox and Fedora 14 is too old to build from scratch.  This modern Fedora seems very unreliable.

tl;dr This site will be under construction and may fall over every now and then.

Overcoming Intuition in Programming

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 I get a lot of questions from aspiring programmers on what’s the best tool or languages to learn. It’s almost always a premature question to ask. I used to come up with answers like “depending on what you’re building” or “pick a beginner friendly community” or “invest in a growing language”. I think all of these are good answers, but it doesn’t really matter that early on in a programmer’s learning journey. It’s all the same when you’re essentially learning how to compute. Furthermore, these sort of answers enable the culture of tooling obsession.

Source: Overcoming Intuition in Programming

What’s the best way to check if a volume is mounted in a Bash script?

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What’s the best way to check if a volume is mounted in a Bash script? What I’d really like is a method that I can use like this: if <something is mounted at /mnt/foo> then <Do some

Source: What’s the best way to check if a volume is mounted in a Bash script?

Avoid using /etc/mtab because it may be inconsistent.

Avoid piping mount because it needn’t be that complicated.

Simply:

if grep -qs '/mnt/foo' /proc/mounts; then
    echo "It's mounted."
else
    echo "It's not mounted."
fi

On the Juniper backdoor

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To sum up, some hacker or group of hackers noticed an existing backdoor in the Juniper software, which may have been intentional or unintentional — you be the judge! They then piggybacked on top of it to build a backdoor of their own, something they were able to do because all of the hard work had already been done for them. The end result was a period in which someone — maybe a foreign government — was able to decrypt Juniper traffic in the U.S. and around the world.

And all because Juniper had already paved the road.

Source: A Few Thoughts on Cryptographic Engineering: On the Juniper backdoor

One of the most serious concerns we raise during these meetings is the possibility that encryption backdoors could be subverted. Specifically, that a backdoor intended for law enforcement could somehow become a backdoor for people who we don’t trust to read our messages. Normally when we talk about this, we’re concerned about failures in storage of things like escrow keys. What this Juniper vulnerability illustrates is that the danger is much broader and more serious than that.

SpaceX Falcon 9 Returns to Flight, Sticks Landing at Cape Canaveral

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Employees at SpaceX’s Hawthorne, California headquarters cheered emphatically as a bright orange speck blazed into view on video screens tracking the landing. Just before touchdown, the first stage deployed its landing legs and came into view against the darkened Cape Canaveral sky. The rocket settled onto the landing pad and the single center engine shut down, marking a giant leap forward in SpaceX’s quest for reusable rocketry.

Source: SpaceX Falcon 9 Returns to Flight, Sticks Landing at Cape Canaveral

“Unauthorized code” in Juniper firewalls decrypts encrypted VPN traffic

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As involved as that process was, getting unauthorized code covertly installed into an official operating system and keeping it there for years would appear to be an even more complicated—and brazen—undertaking. This 2013 article published by Der Spiegel reported that an NSA operation known as FEEDTHROUGH worked against Juniper firewalls and gave the agency persistent backdoor access.

Source: “Unauthorized code” in Juniper firewalls decrypts encrypted VPN traffic | Ars Technica

Brazil court orders WhatsApp messaging to be suspended

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The move against WhatsApp comes as Brazilian phone companies have urged the government to restrict the use of free voice-over-internet services offered through WhatsApp.

The phone companies argue that the rise of WhatsApp has damaged their businesses.

Source: Brazil court orders WhatsApp messaging to be suspended – BBC News