Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Secure design and threat modeling
  https://blog.raymond.burkholder.net/index.php?/archives/1208-Principles-of-Secure-System-Design.html
  https://blog.raymond.burkholder.net/index.php?/archives/1207-Laws-of-Secure-System-Design.html
  https://www.malgregator.com/post/notes-on-threat-modeling/

  A few thrown ideas that you can use to mix in your security framework. See also "Threat modeling for developers" in 184.

• Linux in aviation
  https://tldp.org/HOWTO/Aviation-HOWTO/index.html
  https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/36853/do-safety-critical-avionics-systems-run-linux
  https://www.avilution.com/

  Some resources for anything related to aviation and Linux, from airlines, to pilots.

• Data Analysis Using AWK
  https://awk.dev/eda.html

  This is similar to "Unix for data scientists" in issue 206 and "Command line for the data scientists" in 72.

• Modern tools vs classic ones
  https://meetryanflowers.com/modern-linux-tools-vs-unix-classics-which-would-i-choose/

  This is a discussion we often have, should we embracing all the new gadgets with bells, whistles and colors, or should we stick with classic tools that are omnipresent. Personally, jq is one of the extremely few novel tools I've included in my arsenal, it has become a new classic for me. Kudos to the authors of it!

• Making a micro Linux distro
  https://popovicu.com/posts/making-a-micro-linux-distro/

  While the intro keeps asserting that this is a simplified view of distributions, it still covers a lot of ground and there's a lot to learn.

• A distro to run containers
  https://bottlerocket.dev/

  This distro focuses on running containers on top of it, it doesn't have a shell but is instead API driven. Currently it only supports installing over AWS, which is a pain.

• Re-imagining the CLI
  https://youtu.be/NxsaHxON350?si=e178BNvF7N8zUuiF

  While it has a slow start, the actual video content starts at the 5min mark. Somehow this reminds me a bit of fish shell but with more emojis and security features.

• Mastering curl
  https://antonz.org/mastering-curl/

  A massively well-written tutorial/guide on cURL, highly recommended to peruse.

• Up your networking knowledge
  https://freebsdfoundation.org/resource/an-introduction-to-packet-filter-pf/
  https://www.theregister.com/2023/09/24/tcp_congestion_control_internet/
  https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2018/10/22/introduction-to-linux-interfaces-for-virtual-networking

  A lot of links related to networking, from FreeBSD's PF, to TCP congestion control, to an explanation of different Linux virtual networking options.

• Use the right location for confs, pls!
  https://dotfiles-matter.click/

  A story retold again and again, see also "Not everyone likes standardization" in 188.

Life & Other

• Active imagination
  https://eternalisedofficial.com/2022/05/09/active-imagination/

  A great description of the Jungian method of active imagination which has been of tremendous help to so many. Let me know if you enjoy this type of topic.

• Walled gardens mean online writing is dead. Long live online writing!
  https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/walled-gardens-mean-online-writing

  Isn't it ironic that this was posted on substack, the author makes a difference between federated networks? Also, why is it assumed that the only value in writing is found in it going "viral" or writing in public?

• Digital pollution
  https://sive.rs/polut

  ...and just like littering on the street, it's not an easy problem to solve.

• Shanzhai
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanzhai

  A lot of cultures ridicule them probably because of insecurities, yet they're a source of innovation and creativity and of quick adaptation.

Thoughts

"If you don’t understand the basics of a subject, it’s easy to form conclusions that seem logical, but these same conclusions seem silly to those who have a deeper understanding of a subject." — Peter Lipson

Or said another way: https://m.xkcd.com/675/

Archive

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https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

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Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• GNU Readline tricks
  https://blog.peramid.es/posts/2023-06-10-readline.html

  We've seen a few of these in previous issues such as "Powerup your GNU Readline skills" in issue 174 and "Terminal tips" in the previous issue (212).

• Shell ancestry
  https://egopontem.com/blog/shell-ancestry

  A pretty clean graph showing the genealogy of shells.

• Linux process creation
  https://blog.yelinaung.com/posts/behind-hello-world-on-linux-notes/
  https://iq.thc.org/how-does-linux-start-a-process

  A run down of what the kernel do when doing execve. The interesting part for me is that last paragraph about how their tool, zapper, hides the process arguments from the process tree. As for the first link, we start even earlier than that, from the shell, terminal to the kernel.

• Upgrading your shell
  https://blog.tjll.net/load-bearing-shell-history/
  https://blog.tjll.net/practical-linux-pipelining/
  https://blog.tjll.net/ssh-kung-fu/

  I'm also a strong proponent of this statement "The notion of a command or shell history in our profession is a profoundly under-appreciated mechanism. Consider the fact that – if you retain all history and express all of your operational tasks in the form of terminal commands – you may have the entire history of your work (apart from coding artifacts) within a few seconds’ reach." Combined with the tip from last week to add a comment next to command, if you actually remember to, it's quite powerful. This blog has a lot of good stuff too, so check it out.

• Running your own CA
  https://wejn.org/2023/09/running-ones-own-root-certificate-authority-in-2023/

  For anyone who has to deal with internal PKI and certs, this is relevant.

• Libreoffice summer of code
  https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2023/09/15/libreoffice-and-google-summer-of-code-2023-the-results/

  It's nice to see these improvements every year during summer.

• 3D printing on OpenBSD
  https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20230914075444

  OpenBSD might not seem like the first OS you'd pick to perform 3D printing jobs, but it does support it!

• Modifying a memory allocator to rely on CHERI
  https://tratt.net/laurie/blog/2023/how_hard_is_it_to_adapt_a_memory_allocator_to_cheri.html

  This is a follow up on "A better explanation of CHERI" in issue 202. It's also a good idea to check back the entries "sbrk and malloc" in issue 53, "Malloc source" in 42.

Life & Other

• Getting used to microservices
  https://two-wrongs.com/getting-used-to-microservices.html

  This is a tale of microservices from the point of view of someone that has a lot of experience with monoliths services.

Thoughts

"Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards." — Kierkegaard

Archive

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https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
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3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Recover a rm'd file that's still open on Linux
  https://blog.raymond.burkholder.net/index.php?/archives/1234-Linux-recover-a-rmd-file-still-open.html

  This is probably a trick that should be aliased into a rescue command, what do you think?

• Decoded: GNU coreutils
  https://maizure.org/projects/decoded-gnu-coreutils/

  An amazing project that explains the algorithms, with flow-chart and all, of all gnu coreutils. This is extraordinary as a way to demystify and learn.

• how does linux NAT a ping?
  https://devnonsense.com/posts/how-does-linux-nat-a-ping/

  Let's continue our networking series, let's learn something every week. This time we see how Linux forwards a ping (ICMP) packet through NAT.

• Plan 9 that runs Linux apps
  https://liam-on-linux.dreamwidth.org/89039.html
  https://9p.io/wiki/plan9/Linux_emulation/index.html

  While this idea already exists, the conceptual easier method displayed doesn't. Would you give it a try if it was simpler to setup and keep your current software running?

• A discussion we've had multiple times on IRC
  https://evanhahn.com/how-big-is-a-kilobyte/
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octet_(computing)

  So basically marketers and sales people are going to abuse the notation, unless we rely on Kio, kibioctet, or KiB.

• Linux on Android phones
  https://dvdkon.ggu.cz/articles/linux-on-android-phones/

  A collection of notes and guide on how to run Linux on an Android phone. It's weird that we don't see more of these around, old phones repurposed to run a full-fledge lightweight linux distro, along with keyboard and peripherals. If you find someone who wrote on that topic, please link me.

• Terminal tips
  https://omartinez.co/useful-terminal-tips/

  For the first part you're better off reading "Powerup your GNU Readline skills" in issue 174, yet there's still some reminders that are nice in there. I like the idea of search tags using comments.

• Original homepage of the development of the C language
  http://cm.bell-labs.co/who/dmr/chist.html

  We've seen last week the homepage of dmr, now we go one page in, and check the page about the dev of C.

• Talking of homepages
  https://dustinbrett.com/
  https://github.com/DustinBrett/daedalOS
  https://davidbuckley.ca/?bashrc=ls%20blog
  https://l-o-o-s-e-d.net/

  Since we're on the topic of homepages, here's a few blogs that have cool designs.

• Keyboard mapping on Linux
  https://pulsar17.me/2023/09/keymapping

  Yet another article about keyboard mapping.

Life & Other

• Performance is not only Big O notation
  https://jmmv.dev/2023/09/performance-is-not-big-o.html

  This goes in sync with "A book on Algorithms For Modern Hardware" in issue 144.

• TIL
  https://nectarine.sh/posts/wifi-card-troubles/
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferrite_bead

  Well, now I can say I know what these blocks are for.

• Detox
  https://ednevsky.substack.com/p/i-went-offline-for-a-week-3-times

  It's the computer detox season, probably because people can afford to do that while on vacations/traveling, hashtag "productivity". Ironic isn't it?

• Thirty
  https://omartinez.co/thirty/

  We put so much emphasis on milestones like age number these days. Probably because we don't have "coming of age" ceremonies or important events anymore, many societies have eradicated them.

Thoughts

If we, the Web's users, allow these and other trends to proceed unchecked, the Web could be broken into fragmented islands — Tim Lee (13 years ago)

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Creating a custom keyboard layout on Linux
  http://alexey.shpakovsky.ru/en/i-accidentally-the-runes.html

  Technically this applies to X11 and not Linux. See also "Change your keyboard layout" in issue 11.

• Bypassing TPM and others
  https://pulsesecurity.co.nz/advisories/tpm-luks-bypass

  Implementing anything secure can always lead to unexpected consequences. Here a company has implemented a systemd password agent which misbehaves and conflicts with the normal one, then falls back to root shell when being spammed with the enter key.

• Implementing a transport protocol in the Linux kernel
  https://www.micahlerner.com/2021/08/15/a-linux-kernel-implementation-of-the-homa-transport-protocol.html
  https://www.micahlerner.com/2021/08/29/a-linux-kernel-implementation-of-the-homa-transport-protocol.html
  https://github.com/PlatformLab/HomaModule

  In sync with our series on networking, this week we take a deep dive into the Homa protocol, which aims to replace TCP for data center communication and how to implement it in the Linux kernel.

• Network performance tuning on Linux
  https://github.com/leandromoreira/linux-network-performance-parameters

  This is similar to what we've seen in "Tuning TCP" in issue 191, but with better explanation and details.

• Kernighan software tools in rust
  https://dannas.name/2022/09/08/Kernighan-tools-in-rust

  For all those that are trying to learn rust and also love Unix, this is a great series of exercises.

• dmr homepage
  http://cm.bell-labs.co/who/dmr/

  Aside from the legendary researcher, it's inspiring to see someone's blog long after they are gone, a little piece of internet left. It's also frightening...

• Making screen savers work across waylands
  https://www.jwz.org/blog/2023/09/wayland-and-screen-savers/

  Discussions around wayland attracts quite a lot of people, and has created rifts and fragmentation. Some of these discussions are lead by experts and others by armchair experts. In the above link we have one of the authority on the matter of screen savers.

• Everything about floppy disks
  https://thejpster.org.uk/blog/blog-2023-08-28/
  https://www.patreon.com/posts/78074244

  Ever wanted to learn more about storage tech, better start somewhere, and floppy disks are a good start.

• An exercise of bash scripting
  https://muhammadraza.me/2023/webscraping-in-bash/

  Just a bit of curl-ing and grep-ing and it works.

• The advantages of FreeBSD
  https://www.javacodegeeks.com/2023/09/adopting-freebsd-as-your-open-source-operating-system-benefits-considerations.html

  We often see these types of articles from the point of view of developers and technical team, but this one is more business oriented.

• Manually editing a PDF
  https://gist.github.com/senderle/8ad6aae251c4ddf9424f8a05dd0e8c18

  It's a painful job to perform all of this, scrubbing the pieces out from a PDF. Yet, it's great at getting us started with the PDF specifications and format, peering under the cover.

• ZFS for Dummies
  https://ikrima.dev/dev-notes/homelab/zfs-for-dummies/

  A swift explanation of ZFS concepts and how to use it.

Life & Other

• "The worst programmer…
  https://dannorth.net/2023/09/02/the-worst-programmer/

  …In the eyes of poor management metrics.

Thoughts

Nobody comes here anymore, its too crowded.

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Multiboot-compliant NetBSD
  https://jmmv.dev/2007/03/making-netbsd-multiboot-compatible.html

  NetBSD is now compliant with GRUB multiboot standard, I always thought it already was, but it seems I was wrong. See also "What you need to know about GRUB" in 190 and a lot of other entries about booting and multiboot.

• Using mainline Linux kernel builds
  https://stgraber.org/2023/08/24/stable-linux-mainline-builds/

  A case for building your own kernel with the features and fixes you need.

• Lots of Ubuntu
  https://ubuntu.com//blog/ubuntu-desktop-charting-a-course-for-the-future
  https://popey.com/blog/2023/08/i386-in-ubuntu-wont-die/

  The management came back from their beach vacations with a couple of ideas and are willing to write about it in pretty words.

• Ghostty
  https://mitchellh.com/ghostty

  It's a good exercise to write a shell to learn some Unix things, another good idea is to write your own terminal emulator like the above post. The code isn't public yet but it'll probably be shared soon.

• Finally terminated
  https://worldwidemann.com/finally-terminated/
  https://worldwidemann.com/final-term-a-modern-terminal-emulator/

  Another terminal emulator project, like above, this one has a couple of interesting features, like PID semantic menus, completion, etc.. However, like a lot of hobby project the author is discontinuing it.

• hello desktop
  https://hellosystem.github.io/docs/

  A desktop environment specifically targeted at FreeBSD users.

• Linux on Commodore C64
  https://github.com/onnokort/semu-c64

  While you might not run such system, the challenge to make it work is impressive and it's always nice to know you can still port Unix-like systems.

• Keep it running NetBSD
  https://it-notes.dragas.net/2023/08/27/that-old-netbsd-server-running-since-2010/

  Let's reflect on the conclusion related to planned-obsolescence and how to get rich from it...

Life & Other

• CVEs are sometimes overblown
  https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2023/08/26/cve-2020-19909-is-everything-that-is-wrong-with-cves/

  If you're like me, you might follow CVE for projects and their dependencies, and you probably have a software bill of material too. However, what happens afterward requires reading what the vulnerabilities actually are, and if you skip that you might be misled.

Thoughts

"citizen journalism" is what we used to call rumour, gossip, and hearsay. It still is. — bregma a user on HN

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Turning a Keyboard into a Mouse
  https://suricrasia.online/blog/turning-a-keyboard-into/
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdgULBpRoXk

  One of the neat thing about having hardware event openly available and interfaceable is to be able to do whatever we want with them, be it for educational purpose or others.

• How to disarm a bomb
  https://evanhahn.com/mnemonic-to-remember-tar-commands/

  The mnemonic is straight forward, at least you'll remember caf and xaf flags.

• Do one thing and well
  https://medium.com/source-and-buggy/do-one-thing-and-do-it-well-886b11a5d21
  https://scribe.rip/source-and-buggy/do-one-thing-and-do-it-well-886b11a5d21
  https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-ification-of-everything

  The usual article about the "UNIX philosophy". I'm not sure why but it seems everyone is using the term "enshittification" these days. What's up with that? It even has a wiktionary entry but isn't yet on google trends.

• UNIX Edition Zero
  http://doc.cat-v.org/unix/v0/

  A very early draft document written by Dennis Ritchie of UNIX "v0", one that had run on PDP-11 for a few months already.

• Quick DBUS fix
  https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2023/08/19/quick-dbus-fix/

  just symlink it, it'll work. A simple fix.

• Quick vim project-wide swap
  https://elliotec.com/how-to-find-and-replace-in-project-with-vim/

  Such a common problem that is simply solved in modern IDEs but that requires a bit of a twist with vim.

• Error messages are important
  https://alexwlchan.net/2020/the-importance-of-good-error-messages/

  It's something we often dismiss but that has a huge impact.

• Thoughts on pkg management
  https://mckayla.blog/talks/zig-package-manager.html
  https://antonz.org/writing-package-manager/

  Package management is tough and there are so many things to keep in mind when designing it from the upstream, downstream, the backend storage, etc.. We've had a couple of entries in the past about this, you get a cookie for finding them.

• Throwing money at a problem doesn't fix it
  https://blog.merzlabs.com/posts/help-oss-projects/

  ...But it can help. Yet this isn't enough most of the time, as said, direct contribution from people deeply involved is better.

• OOM selection using BPF
  https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/941614/f873a0ec485e01c5/
  https://github.com/hakavlad/nohang

  If you're like me and get bug reports related to processes suddenly stopping, then you know that the OOM killer isn't lenient. What is proposed in this article is a good-enough solution, though it didn't pass yet. Afterward, to be useable, we'd need some user tools and services to manage the feature, maybe incorporated in something like nohang.

Life & Other

• Treating life as a game
  https://commoncog.com/dangers-treating-life-as-game/

  I'd use "gamification" but now that I know the "-ification" of everything linked in "Do one thing and well" above, I will restrain from it.

• The Doorbell in the Jungle
  https://medium.com/@komorama/the-doorbell-in-the-jungle-cca22fbd78d0
  https://scribe.rip/@komorama/the-doorbell-in-the-jungle-cca22fbd78d0

  Basically a business tale about looking at things in new lights, reuse, new doors, etc..

Thoughts

Don't allow anyone to feel humiliated in front of you.

Sometimes it's hard to do because we aren't aware of how people feel about things, most often we are wrong.

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Chrome OS Boot Design
  https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/chromiumos-design-docs/boot-design/

  As part of our series on init systems and service managers, let's look at another lesser-known one, the one of Chrome OS.

• Bazel and fzf
  https://blog.jez.io/fzf-bazel/

  I've never used the Bazel build system, but this article shows more of a great case of fzf usage.

• ioctl to detect memory writes on Linux
  https://lwn.net/Articles/941272/

  This sort of reminds me of OpenBSD's "systrace — if you haven't heard, it's not the same as strace" in issue 159. The parent message is missing here but it's still fun to read only the critique.

• Linux v0.01 internals
  https://seiya.me/blog/reading-linux-v0.01

  A quick dip into the internals of the first official Linux version.

• 20 years of vim
  https://www.contextualize.ai/mpereira/20-years-of-vim-ef9acae9

  A straight forward chart showing the evolution of vim over the years.

• An mDNS primer
  https://fabiensanglard.net/mdns/index.html

  Kind of in sync with our series on networking, a topic we've glanced at in issue "Multicast Networking" issue 143.

• Ytree another curses file manager
  https://www.han.de/~werner/ytree.html

  This specific one tries to mimic DOS Xtree.

Life & Other

• The retreat from reality
  https://brinklindsey.substack.com/p/the-retreat-from-reality

  Somewhat related to "Hyperstition, luxury beliefs, and hyperreality" in issue 204.

• OPP — Other people's problems
  https://skamille.medium.com/opp-other-peoples-problems-d7eb174724ee

  There are so many issues that it's hard to pick your battles properly.

Thoughts

A place that looks like any place is no place at all.

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Avoiding which
  https://mrkaran.dev/posts/dont-use-which/

  If a program hasn't been standardized it can have inconsistencies, instead use command -v, that's the gist of the article.

• Evaluating Plan 9
  https://liam-on-linux.dreamwidth.org/88538.html

  A piece about Unix-like OSes and evolution of time, Plan 9 and Inferno being noticeable.

• Android init language
  https://android.googlesource.com/platform/system/core/+/master/init/README.md

  In continuation with the series on init/service manager, we take a look at a lesser-known init system, the one for android (which might have changed since the doc, but it's still relevant to the discussion). The syntax is very particular, probably the first time I encounter an init system like this.

• Specfs, Devfs, Tmpfs, and Others
  https://www.linux.org/threads/specfs-devfs-tmpfs-and-others.9382/

  A description of a couple different virtual fs on Linux, nothing spectacular, but worth re-reading.

• IPv6 in the zeitgeist
  https://anisse.astier.eu/ipv6.html
  https://matduggan.com/ipv6-is-a-disaster-and-its-our-fault/
  http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/ipv6mess.html

  In continuation with the networking series, this week it seems that everyone has something to say about IPv6, so let's listen. Since everything is exposed, read up on "Getting ready for war zone" in issue 195.

• unix69 keyboard layout
  https://dotat.at/@/2023-08-04-unix69.html
  https://donatstudios.com/UNIX-Keyboards

  A keyboard layout inspired by unix and older keyboards layouts pre-IBM PC.

• Behing hello world on Linux
  https://jvns.ca/blog/2023/08/03/behind--hello-world/

  A classic deep dive puzzle, an exercise in how far you can go in debugging and understanding something.

• vim one liners
  https://muhammadraza.me/2023/vim-onliners/

  In relation with "One liners again..." in 69, "One liners" in 20, "AWK, a better understanding of field manipulation" in 164.

• A taxonomy of access control
  https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/08/a-taxonomy-of-access-control.html

  See also the full series we did on access control on unix and "A Compendium of Access Control on Unix-like Systems" in 184.

• Whitespace in shell (continue)
  https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/RcShellWhitespaceHandling

  A continuation of last's issue 206 "Messy whitespaces".

Life & Other

• Normal web thing
  https://heather-buchel.com/blog/2023/07/just-normal-web-things/

  A listicle of things that break the normal usage of the web but that are becoming more prominent these days.

• More about blogging and finding inspo
  https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/search-query

  A tale of how the internet allows to find niche communities to regroup around a particular topic, sometimes human-cured. However "if you pursue them too far you will end up obsessed with things that no one else around you cares about". This article also deals with other topics such as what it means to write in public, what to write about, how to write about it, how it spreads, etc..

Thoughts

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. — Goodhart's Law

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Unix for data scientists
  https://gregreda.com/2013/07/15/unix-commands-for-data-science/

  These types of articles never get old, they're the gospel of Unix. See also "Command line for the data scientists" in 72 and "File manip" in 130.

• Standardization of embedded dev
  https://sourceware.org/elix/

  This is an extension to POSIX for embedded systems.

• sudo in rust
  https://ferrous-systems.com/blog/testing-sudo-rs/
  https://jdebp.uk/FGA/dont-abuse-su-for-dropping-privileges.html

  A bunch of testing against sudo-rs to make sure it's compatible with the OG sudo, or to catch bug in sudo.

• ruptime
  https://wedonthaveaprivacyproblem.com/ruptime/
  https://github.com/alexmyczko/ruptime#never-heard-of-ruptime-what-does-it-look-like

  Basically a remote uptime to get a list of hosts, hardware, and some benchmark results.

• Messy whitespaces
  https://blog.plover.com/Unix/whitespace.html

  We've all had these moments where we were pissed of at shell's handling of whitespaces, and we swore we'd never use spaces again, and we also swore we'd always run our script with shellcheck, however we keep forgetting.

• QubesOS neat isolation
  https://www.sevarg.net/2023/07/29/qubes-os-silos-of-isolation/

  An praise of Qubes OS. Once upon a time people would have to run USB-bootable OS to achieve this, but now it's possible out of the box with meta-OS like Qubes OS which is basically a VMM of a sort. It's the first time I see a good review of actual day-to-day use and its challenges.

• GNU/Hurd strikes back
  https://mhatta.medium.com/gnu-hurd-strikes-back-4021433d506d

  "The GNU/Hurd is the Sagrada Família of the Software World", now that's the best comparison I've read about it!

Life & Other

• Encyclopedia of life
  https://eol.org/

  A truly impressive encyclopedia, regrouping geographic information, attributes, pictures, predator/competitor/prey, and so much information. Bookmark it!

• On the Loss and Preservation of Knowledge
  https://samoburja.com/on-the-loss-and-preservation-of-knowledge/

  We've talked about the digital dark age before, this topic is intertwined with the above: how do we preserve and transfer information and knowledge across generations. This is an excellent piece about exactly that.

Thoughts

• Without great solitude, no serious work is possible — Pablo Picasso
• Perhaps the primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone. — James Baldwin
• To be creative you've got to be unsociable and tight-assed. — Bob Dylan

But what is solitude in a world that's always connected, or are we even connected?

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Straight forward problem
  https://brett.coulstock.id.au/word-count-of-a-subtitle-file.html

  Let's say you have a subtitle file (srt), how would you go about counting actual words in it. I hear someone in the background shouting awk.

• Linux for power users
  https://xnacly.me/posts/2022/linux-for-powerusers/

  A pretty good rundown on desktop Linux.

• Writing to disk on Linux
  https://www.cyberdemon.org/2023/06/27/file-writes.html
  https://www.cyberdemon.org/2023/04/06/whats-writing-to-my-disk.html

  An approachable article that explains the write abstraction on Linux, buffer, and the layers above the disk.

• CLI Best Practices
  https://seirdy.one/posts/2022/06/10/cli-best-practices/

  How to make CLI accessible, what are some good practices.

• An OpenBSD sales pitch
  https://nxdomain.no/~peter/what_every_it_person_needs_to_know_about_openbsd.html

  While the article has a catchy title, it doesn't remove value from it, on the contrary, this is a good run down on a lot of features and aspects of OpenBSD.

• Why are things not working as advertised
  https://matduggan.com/why-are-containers-insecure-by-default/

  The churning is real, the tech cycle moves fast, the waves can easily takes you away and makes you dream of new lands. Eventually, you'll wake up and reality will set in. This is the premise of this post, mosty about docker and its insecurity and drawbacks.

• Better than Google fu
  https://gwern.net/search

  Searching online is tough, Google is dying when it comes to real search.

• Network and format
  https://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/994-Unconventional-Wisdom.html
  https://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/980-An-Itty-Midi-Mystery.html

  Two articles of the same blog that covers two of our series. The first is about a few best practices for hosting public servers that might possibly get attacked, but first would need to be discovered. The second one is about MIDI.

• Understanding NAT
  https://www.roxlu.com/2021/070/nat-types
  https://tailscale.com/blog/how-nat-traversal-works/

  There are many kinds of NAT and different ways to configure them. Someone has mentioned that the first article in this list has an oldschool description of the types available, while the second article does a better job at explaining what's really in use today, see the section "Naming our NATs".

Life & Other

• Deepfake
  https://futurism.com/the-byte/experts-90-online-content-ai-generated
  https://www.europol.europa.eu/cms/sites/default/files/documents/Europol_Innovation_Lab_Facing_Reality_Law_Enforcement_And_The_Challenge_Of_Deepfakes.pdf

  This is a follow up on the dead internet theory which I'm sure I've probably link here before.

• Counter-Culture
  https://www.documentjournal.com/2021/01/the-internet-didnt-kill-counterculture-you-just-wont-find-it-on-instagram/

  What does it mean to be counter-cultural, and can you really be in the age of social media?

• Manipulation
  https://youtu.be/p6aF5ma7BiM
  https://youtu.be/1JQE4YZS1Cg

  The second vieo is in French but fortunately it has subs in English, Spanish, and German.

Thoughts

The head that will become a skull is already empty. Madness is the déjà-là of death. — Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• On fonts
  https://notes.billmill.org/programming/text_shaping/harfbuzz.html
  https://zachbayl.in/blog/font-fallback-revery.html

  Harfbuzz is the logical brain, the text shaping layer, on top of fontconfig (selection and configuration) and freetype (actually using the font file glyphs) and rasterizers such as Xft/Cairo/Qt that rely on X RENDER or others graphic extensions. The second link shows a good example of a text rendering pipeline in practice.

• Immune to bruteforce
  https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/01/12/password-strength/

  Entropy is often hard to grasp, "a measure of how many configurations could yield the same macrostate, and thus how probable the macrostate is". It's nicer to say "if your password is more improbable then it's harder to bruteforce".

• A look at YAML
  https://www.arp242.net/yaml-config.html

  In relation to our series on formats, why not take a look at config formats too.

• Syncing files
  https://blog.rymcg.tech/blog/linux/rclone_sync/

  I'm sure I had previously shared similar content about file syncing, but it doesn't seem like I can find a past link on that. Maybe it's "The rsync series" in 150, or "Deduplication" in 57, or "Transferring files for non-tech users" in 127, or "What to do when it's too large" 136, etc.. Ok, it seems it was indeed covered!

• diet libc
  http://www.fefe.de/dietlibc/

  There's a few libc implementations out there, diet libc is on the smaller side.

• Following landlock development
  https://blog.gnoack.org/post/landlock-best-effort/
  https://blog.gnoack.org/post/landlock-truncate/

  On Linux landlock is the equivalent of OpenBSD's unveil, see also issue 161 "Landlock". It's currently experiencing a couple of changes, so you better follow them if you want to use this tech.

• Shell script compiler
  https://github.com/neurobin/shc/

  I had no idea such a thing existed. It's more like an obfuscator that encodes and encrypts the shell script and wraps it in a binary. Not sure if that's worth using in practice.

Life & Other

• Hyperstition, luxury beliefs, and hyperreality
  https://www.robkhenderson.com/p/status-symbols-and-the-struggle-for
  https://www.thecollector.com/baudrillard-philosophy-21st-century/
  https://www.orphandriftarchive.com/articles/hyperstition-an-introduction/

  A couple of ideas that, once understood, are enlightening. This is somewhat related to "Attention economy" in the previous issue,

  203. Let me know if you enjoy these philosophical topics.

• Eight O'Clock in the Morning
  https://pvto.weebly.com/uploads/9/1/5/0/91508780/eight_o%E2%80%99clock_in_the_morning-nelson.pdf

  A Plato's Allegoric tale that probably will remind you of a couple of memes involving a lizard at the top of a social media company and people sitting with virtual headsets on.

• That Deep Romantic Chasm
  https://www.uvm.edu/~tstreete/romantic_chasm.html

  Tech utopia in computer culture has influenced society just like so many other dreams and ideals.

Thoughts

A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving. — Lao Tzu wisely

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Troubleshooting on Linux
  https://tanelpoder.com/2013/02/21/peeking-into-linux-kernel-land-using-proc-filesystem-for-quickndirty-troubleshooting/

  I've been thinking, usually we train and study for generic knowledge and certain practical applicable ones. However, it's kind of rare to actually train in debugging and troubleshooting, yet the author of this website offers a seminar on this. I'm thinking it's actually a great idea. However debugging is often a case-by-case based on intuition, or is it, and can it be empirical?. Aside: I really like the blog formatting and style.

• Rethinking file systems
  https://one.mikro2nd.net/pages/rethinking-file-systems/

  A few thoughts about how file systems could, mainly, manage metadata and organization of files in a better way.

• Wayland and X11
  https://xenocara.org/Wayland_on_OpenBSD.html
  https://maxleiter.com/blog/X11

  Trying to make something work on systems where they haven't really been tested properly on. On one side making Wayland work on OpenBSD, and on the other X11 on iOS via Xvnc.

• Confiuring the touchpad on Linux
  https://cookie.engineer/weblog/articles/synaptics-touchpad-on-linux.html

  It's a topic we've covered multiple times. See also "Gestures Related Stuff" in 145, "Gestures Related Stuff" in 120, and "Libinput and Synaptics driver" in 119. On that: I've never understood the appeal of having a touchpad corner as something that activates an event. I even see certain touchpads with a corner containing a "web" logo, to launch the browser, is anyone ever using that? Let me know on IRC.

• Stream audio from one machine to another
  https://blog.kaetemi.be/2020/01/06/looking-for-a-way-to-stream-linux-laptop-audio-to-windows-desktop/

  This is similar to "Streaming audio on OpenBSD" in issue 201, however this time it's from Linux towards Windows.

• Fighting Back
  https://defn.io/2019/04/12/ssh-forwarding/
  https://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/974-What-doesnt-kill-you.html

  Following our network series, this week we take a look at how certain attacks take place, and what to do when they happen.

• The opposite of the previous link
  https://soupault.app/blog/mistaken-for-malware/
  https://susam.net/blog/sinkholed.html
  https://medium.com/thisiscala/the-duct-tape-holding-the-internet-together-12118be60ff1

  Basically, we're at the mercy of big entities that are the core of the internet, or private companies that can nuke us on whim or false-positive flagging.

• Is there a better way
  https://phili.pe/posts/is-there-a-better-way/

  A general tip of always seeking self-improvement, with an emphasis on macOS.

• systemd as tragedy
  https://lwn.net/Articles/777595/
  https://judecnelson.blogspot.com/2014/09/systemd-biggest-fallacies.html

  That first article is one of the few that actually does a good job at explaining part of the systemd ordeal/battle.

• GCC Frontends
  https://briancallahan.net/blog/20230626.html

  This is similar to llvm IR, GCC also offers different frontends to compile multiple languages.

• Demo hardware and art
  https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2023/07/stupidly-small-eink-font/
  https://www.amygoodchild.com/blog/computer-art-50s-and-60s

  Want to enjoy a good demo or look at old artwork to get inspired, then these are for you.

Life & Other

• Hobbies
  https://jamie.ideasasylum.com/2023/07/02/hobbies

  What's a hobby? Once upon a time this question might not have meant much, but today, with so much time on our hands, we can ponder about it.

• Attention economy
  https://www.visakanv.com/blog/attention/
  https://kortina.nyc/essays/kinky-labor-supply-and-the-attention-tax/
  https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2017/08/17/the-premium-mediocre-life-of-maya-millennial/

  This has become a cliché of a cliché at this point, and everyone tries to rationalize and understand it. Weirdly, now it can even apply to personal relationships too, everything seems to be capitalized and improved upon, yet economists are always like that... Indirectly, this is somewhat related to the previous link on hobbies.

• Half-life of knowledge
  https://parallelthoughts.xyz/2019/02/the-ever-increasing-knowledge-base/

  In this field everything always moves, either in circles or forward, but it's ever changing and the knowledge base growing.

• Interviews
  https://aphyr.com/posts/353-rewriting-the-technical-interview
  https://xeiaso.net/blog/sleeping-the-technical-interview
  https://joelgrus.com/2016/05/23/fizz-buzz-in-tensorflow/

  Somehow I always find these entertaining. It points out the absurdity in certain types of interviews.

Thoughts

"The existence of a nation (you will pardon me this metaphor) is a daily plebiscite, just as the continuing existence of an individual is a perpetual affirmation of life." — Ernest Renan in What is a Nation

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Don't run ldd on any binary
  https://jmmv.dev/2023/07/ldd-untrusted-binaries.html

  I learned quite a lot from this post, and while the vulnerability is mostly gone, you should still pay attention to the advice.

• Best way to learn is rewriting
  https://jjacky.com/anopa/
  https://github.com/jjk-jacky/anopa
  https://github.com/dnaeon/async-service-mgr

  Continuing our init/service/supervision manager series, we take a look at two different implementations. anopa is based on s6, a pretty good wrapper suite, while async-service-mgr is a truly innovative ømq socket communication system.

• Early Phrack
  http://www.phrack.com/issues/18/6.html#article
  http://www.phrack.com/issues/23/10.html#article

  Some of the early phrack articles related to Unix were full of lore and sometimes even misinformation, but still some nice tricks. Obviously, at the time it was probably harder to publish something and share it with a wide audience, or get it refuted, so that's understandable. Also added a "Big Brother" post, just for the lulz that online tracking started much earlier than we usually think of. Should we add the disclaimer everywhere?

• A better explanation of CHERI
  https://tratt.net/laurie/blog/2023/two_stories_for_what_is_cheri.html

  CHERI or "Capability Hardware Enhanced RISC Instructions" is a fascinating evolution in security tech that everyone should be closely following. See also "Going Further Into Attack Surface Reduction" in issue 184, "Ownership and capability, in language and hardware" in 171, and "A Compendium of Access Control on Unix-like Systems" in 184 also.

• New Grumpy
  https://serebit.com/posts/wayland-is-pretty-good/
  https://lobste.rs/s/acepul/wayland_is_pretty_good_actually#c_bzr8nr

  A follow up on "The Grumpy" in last issue (201). This time it's more novel and from someone that truly knows their craft, the author of Arcan. Take what you want from this online discussion.

• Another one about trying out nixOS
  https://ersei.net/en/blog/its-nixin-time

  This one is juicier than others as the author launches themselves without prior knowledge.

• File Format recommendation for long term storage
  https://www.dpconline.org/blog/file-format-recommendations
  https://openpreservation.org/resources/member-groups/international-comparison-of-recommended-file-formats/
  https://wiki.alopex.li/LossyImageFormats

  Somewhat related to last week deep time, we think about actual formats and what is recommended for preservation. This is a review of certain policies enacted by preservation institutes. I also added a link to a list of lossy image formats with a comparison.

• Integrated information theory
  http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Integrated_information_theory

  Extra content for the file format series. A deep philosophical article on the concept of integrated information theory. While not really about computer science per-se, it is still a good read to think about how to represent information or think about conceptualization in general if you ever wanted to store it. Can we store a full experience anyway?

• Network bridge
  https://developers.redhat.com/articles/2022/04/06/introduction-linux-bridging-commands-and-features
  https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/setting-up-a-network-bridge-in-openbsd/
  https://www.linux.com/training-tutorials/how-bridge-networks-openvpn/

  This is part of our networking series. There are many ways to create bridge networks on different systems and for different uses.

• Learning more about BGP
  https://bgp.tools/

  Additional content for the network series. Ever wanted to know more info about these autonomous systems that show up when you do traceroute, we'll this can help.

• A nice find
  https://eklitzke.org/lobotomizing-gnome
  https://eklitzke.org/binding-on-port-zero

  A great blog that suddenly got some online attention and that I felt is worth sharing.

Life & Other

• Flocks of humans
  https://www.psychologytoday.com/au/blog/the-athletes-way/201901/big-crowds-flow-water-in-amazing-and-terrifying-ways
  https://www.csail.mit.edu/news/improving-traffic-tailgating-less
  https://www.cbc.ca/radio/spark/380-phantom-traffic-jams-catfishing-scams-and-smart-speakers-1.4482967/sick-of-traffic-jams-stop-tailgating-1.4482984

  We're an interesting species, and we lack so much self-reflection as a whole.

• Selling your kids for social credits
  https://www.theprivacywhisperer.com/p/your-childs-privacy-is-worth-more
  https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-37858639

  It's the first time I hear the term "sharenting", but I'll definitely use it from now on.

Thoughts

"My Mama always said life was like a box of chocolates; you never know what you’re gonna get."

Good quote from a good movie. On that, have a wonderful week.

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Getting IP information on Linux from procfs
  https://medium.com/bash-tips-and-tricks/getting-the-linux-ip-address-without-any-package-ifconfig-ip-address-etc-7b1363077964
  https://labs.ripe.net/author/stephane_bortzmeyer/all-ip-addresses-are-equal-dot-zero-addresses-are-less-equal/

  It's something I've faced recently, maybe you'll find it useful too. The second link is a weird scenario in which zero ending addresses seem to be handled differently in CPEs.

• SysV init must die.
  https://busybox.net/~vda/init_vs_runsv.html

  Sneaky click-baity title, but full of insightful information.

• Easily find confs
  https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/sysadmin/ReportConfigFileLocations
  https://dot-config.github.io/

  It's something that somehow should be more obvious but that often isn't. Programs should report where the configuration file that is read was located and also report it's running configuration right afterward.

• CentOS Stream and internet open source drama
  https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/furthering-evolution-centos-stream
  https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2023/im-done-red-hat-enterprise-linux
  https://medium.com/@gordon.messmer/in-favor-of-centos-stream-e5a8a43bdcf8
  https://rockylinux.org/news/brave-new-world-path-forward/
  https://almalinux.org/blog/impact-of-rhel-changes/
  https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/red-hats-commitment-open-source-response-gitcentosorg-changes

  Basically RHEL source won't be shared freely anymore, only the stuff of CentOS Stream, which sits between the former and Fedora. So basically forget having a free RHEL, either pay to have it maintained the way it is, or switch to something else. Or simply said: open source != free lunch.

• Streaming audio on OpenBSD
  https://dataswamp.org/%7Esolene/2023-05-05-openbsd-sound-streaming.html

  A list of solutions to be able to stream audio from OpenBSD, especially to allow bluetooth.

• The Gnome and Its "Secret Place"
  https://www.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2023-May/028363.html

  There's a little gnome gathering your characters.

• The Grumpy
  https://lwn.net/Articles/433409/

  Well, if you needed a frank review, you'll get one. See also "Why windows registry sucks" in 156, unrelated, but if you know you know.

• An upgraded shell history
  https://atuin.sh/

  Command history is very precious if you don't want to remember everything or have to note it down. The above is one solution to that.

• Deep time clock and digital storage
  https://agilescientific.com/blog/2020/5/18/the-deep-time-clock
  https://gametyrant.com/news/whats-the-future-of-digital-storage

  For the format series, this week we'll only ponder about deep time and what it would imply for storage. See also "Preserving content for the future" in 171.

• FreeBSD VNET jails
  https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2023/06/28/freebsd-jails-containers/

  Apparently, this is a barely documented feature of jails, yet it's one that is essential.

Life & Other

• Nostalgia
  https://ravenmagazine.org/magazine/the-paradoxes-of-nostalgia/

  Isn't it a peculiar feeling, this piece beautifully expresses it.

• Implicit Biases
  https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/selectatest.html

  While some of these tests are very USA centric, most aren't and instead are very relevant. I encourage everyone to partake in a few tests to learn about themselves, it's by being aware of ourselves that we can act better.

• Anthropomorphism and anthropocentric
  https://www.jstor.org/stable/41208721
  https://sci-hub.se/https://www.jstor.org/stable/41208721
  http://www.philosopher.eu/others-writings/nagel-what-is-it-like-to-be-a-bat/

  Cross-species interaction is fascinating, here are two of the most popular essays on the topic, a must-read.

• Why Write
  https://bastian.rieck.me/blog/posts/2023/writing_why/

  See also 'Probably yet another follow up on "WRITE MORE"', 'Write more more', 'Selfish Writing', '100 days to offload', and many more.

Thoughts

It's always your own ass you sit on.

I'll leave you hanging with this.

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• A secure and accessible desktop
  https://arcan-fe.com/2023/06/15/the-quest-for-a-secure-and-accessible-desktop/

  Last week we had a link about accessibility, "A user describes the evolution they felt regarding accessibility on Linux GUI" in issue 199. This is a follow up but from the perspective of someone working on building a new desktop engine. Some of the philosophical aspects reminds me of a book called Sentient by Jackie Higgins.

• Escape sequence on terminal
  https://susam.net/blog/control-escape-meta-tricks.html

  This is nothing new to anyone who has spend time on a terminal, but for those that didn't, never too late to learn.

• WPS is it this or that
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi_positioning_system
  https://www.howtogeek.com/778832/what-is-wi-fi-protected-setup-wps/
  https://www.lifewire.com/disable-wps-on-router-4137379

  In continuation with our series on networking, we take a look at an AP feature that has double meaning, WPS, either Wi-Fi positioning system or WiFi protected setup.

• Pragmatic notes on ZFS on Linux
  https://wiki.alopex.li/ZfsNotes

  Nothing too fancy, only a few notes and practicalities from using ZFS.

• Another attempt at trying out nix
  https://mtlynch.io/notes/nix-first-impressions/

  I never really thought of infrastructure as code as a replacement for nix, think puppet and ansible, but that's a very good point. This review of the first try at nix is way more genuine than many others I've seen so far.

• Dependency management
  https://cpojer.net/posts/dependency-managers-dont-manage-your-dependencies

  I'm reading that article from the perspective of generic package management and how relevant it is to it. It is also related the often talked about supply-chain attack. The solution offered is a checklist of things to perform on dependencies: static analysis, cleaning of unused ones (often lots of package managers fail at that), etc..

• Basic information theory
  https://towardsdatascience.com/an-intuitive-look-at-the-basics-of-information-theory-2bf0d2fff85e?gi=91724a02cb57
  https://www.princeton.edu/~cuff/ele201/kulkarni_text/information.pdf

  To continue with our adventure with formats, this week we focus on information theory, the base of a lot of formats and a lot of things in computer communication.

• The init wars
  https://www.vitavonni.de/blog/201401/2014012201-the-init-wars.html
  http://www.troubleshooters.com/linux/init/features_and_benefits.htm

  2014 seems like a short while ago, but now it's been almost 10 years.

Life & Other

• The map is not the territory
  https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/maps-distort-how-we-see-the-world

  A redundant topic in this newsletter as of now, see also "Rituals, Consciousness, and Modern Mind Monoculture" in 187, "Culture Shock" in 184, and a lot of other links which I can't remember. Yet, it's definitely nothing of a surprise to anyone who took a geography course...

• Adapt and overcome
  https://jordankaye.dev/posts/flexible-systems/

  A cliché idea but that needs to be reformatted so that we pay attention to it.

Thoughts

I'm a big believer that what is easy to produce is generally less valuable than what is hard to produce. — internet randos

While this applies to most things in our current type of economic society, do you think it also applies to sentimental and knowledge value too. Comparing daily news articles, let's say, to books or journal articles.

Archive

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https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• TCP-Based VPNs
  https://blog.carldong.me/2023/05/03/why-do-vpns.html
  https://web.archive.org/web/20230310043036/http://sites.inka.de/bigred/devel/tcp-tcp.html
  https://www.ripe.net/publications/ipv6-info-centre/deployment-planning/transition-mechanisms

  In continuation with our series on networking. There's multiple ways to tunnel a connection, here a tcp-tunnel would put tcp segments within tcp segments, with all that it implies: congestion control, slow start, 3-w handshake, retransmission, checksum, etc.. "It turns out that the exact mechanisms that ensures delivery for TCP is what makes it such a terrible tunneling protocol." aka TCP-over-TCP meltdown. See also "IKEv2 and VPNs" in issue 159. This also reminds me of some IPv6 transition mechanisms that allow tunneling v6 within v4, see last link above.

• Interview with Fred van Kempen
  https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/2772

  A dated interview with one of the contributor to the Linux networking stack, in which the most interesting part are the two last questions regarding the evolution of Linux toward a more business-centric.

• A critique of D-Bus activation
  https://web.archive.org/web/20200526072921/https://jdebp.eu/Softwares/nosh/avoid-dbus-bus-activation.html

  Another series continuation, we're digging in the init/service manager series. In this one we see an argument against using D-Bus for services activation: when a dependency service is missing for a service, it launches it immediately. I'm not sure I buy the critique though.

• SoX
  https://sox.sourceforge.net/
  https://opensource.com/article/20/2/linux-sox
  https://linux.die.net/man/1/play

  Sox is in between ffmpeg, nc, and others, it's the Swiss army knife of audio files.

• Developers are lazy, thus Flatpak
  https://blog.brixit.nl/developers-are-lazy-thus-flatpak/

  This post is directly in contrast with last week's (198) "The distribution model is changing".

• Deco
  https://github.com/Enhex/Deco

  Following up with our series on formats, let's take a look at Delimiter Collision Free Format. It's a very simple format, but it should whet your appetite for more complex ones.

• Wide monitor argument
  https://lkml.org/lkml/2020/5/29/1038

  It's a long standing argument on both line length, and monitor size.

• A user describes the evolution they felt regarding accessibility on Linux GUI
  https://tech.lgbt/@xogium/110507457689374019
  https://samthursfield.wordpress.com/2023/06/07/state-of-screen-reading-reading-on-desktop-linux/

  We don't often get first-hand experience described like this, it puts things in perspectives.

• History and effective use of Vim
  https://begriffs.com/posts/2019-07-19-history-use-vim.html

  Rediscover vim from all angles. It's mostly about an explanation of configs location, loading behavior, backup, diffs, etc..

• Desktop Linux Hardening
  https://privsec.dev/posts/linux/desktop-linux-hardening/

  A big checklist that could be helpful to harden your machine.

• Doing whatever it takes to fix the bug
  https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2023/06/14/i-booted-linux-292612-times/

  ...and it only took 21h.

Life & Other

• Breaking Hegemony
  https://www.nthbrock.com/posts/americaless-internet/

  We tend to make a lot of assumptions based on many things. One of them is language, and because English is used a lot on the web, it creates a bias towards what we see. What if we could filter the origin of the websites instead, either by language or geolocation. I wrote a piece about this once (shameful plug).

• Reflections on Ten Years Past The Snowden Revelations
  https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-farrell-tenyearsafter-00

  A memo on the events that happened during and after the revelation of USA's NSA international tapping of communication (spying).

• Self-healing Code is the future
  https://stackoverflow.blog/2023/06/07/self-healing-code-is-the-future-of-software-development/

  I've heard that people post anything about LLMs these days to get upboots on social mediators websites. Get ready for the integration of these within software pipelines.

Thoughts

The first grand discovery was time, the landscape of experience — Daniel Boorstin

In view of all you have to do, when you waste an hour it seems to me a thousand... For I deem naught so precious to you, both for body and soul, as time, and methinks you value it too little — Letter to Francesco di Marco Datini

Memory's vices are also its virtues, elements of a bridge across time which allows us to link the mind with the world — Daniel Schacter

These days it seems we're always running for something, wanting to fill all gaps, not wasting anything. But aren't we wasting something precious while at it?

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• The distribution model is changing
  https://www.ypsidanger.com/the-distribution-model-is-changing/

  Should distros push the maintenance of graphical packages toward flathub/flatpak and focus on other "more important" stuff instead?

• The Eternal Mainframe
  http://www.winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Eternal_Mainframe.html

  We're diving into this classic blog post about cyclical history in computing. Are we bound to make the same mistake over and over again?

• Who does that server really serve?
  https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-serve.en.html

  A software freedom piece on internet Service as a Software Substitute.

• GNU Grep versus the (Linux) open source ecology
  https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/linux/GNUGrepVersusEcology

  Such change has a snowball effect everywhere. Why do it then, why not keep wrapper scripts instead?

• OpenDaylight and ONOS
  https://www.opendaylight.org/about/platform-overview
  https://opennetworking.org/onos/

  Two now widely used SDN controller and framework.

• PNG Glitches
  https://github.com/corkami/pics/blob/master/binary/PNG.png
  https://killscreen.com/previously/articles/vast-lurid-possibilities-png-glitches/
  https://ucnv.github.io/pnglitch/

  PNG is a solid image format, supposedly resistant to glitches and bit rot. However, some people found a way around it, maybe these shouldn't be called glitches though, as they're manually engineered.

• NixOS for the impatient
  https://borretti.me/article/nixos-for-the-impatient

  "I just want something that works." Then goes on to mingle with config files. Yet, this is a much simpler tutorial than a lot of the previous ones I've seen.

• fq is jq for binary data
  https://github.com/wader/fq/

  A new tool to add to your arsenal, and it's easy to install on most systems!

• eBPF for Cybersecurity
  https://blog.cloudnativefolks.org/ebpf-for-cybersecurity-part-1
  https://blog.cloudnativefolks.org/ebpf-for-cybersecurity-part-2
  https://blog.cloudnativefolks.org/ebpf-for-cybersecurity-part-3
  https://blog.cloudnativefolks.org/ebpf-for-cybersecurity-part-4

  A tour of eBPF but with an emphasis on security.

Life & Other

• I'm sure I had linked something similar before
  https://blog.qartis.com/decoding-small-qr-codes-by-hand/

  Every few months there someone that posts a similar blog post, and I've never added any of these to the newsletter, so here's one.

• Intelligent brains take longer to solve difficult problems
  https://www.bihealth.org/en/notices/intelligent-brains-take-longer-to-solve-difficult-problems
  https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-38626-y

  But how do they define intelligence, got to find the less sexier paper to find out "Intelligence is here defined as the performance in psychometric tests in cognitive domains like verbal comprehension, perceptual reasoning or working memory".

Thoughts

"Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you’re as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?" — Brian Kernighan, The Elements of Programming Style

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• su and sudo quirks
  https://dxuuu.xyz/sudo.html
  https://jdebp.uk/FGA/dont-abuse-su-for-dropping-privileges.html

  sudo has a lot of edge cases and special scenarios, the first post shows one change made to sudo that affects signal propagation. The second post is about how su now relies on libpam to perform certain operation, which might lead to privilege escalation and is a bad idea for privilege dropping. Instead it argues for a usage of the raw mechanism as a script such as setuidgid from daemontools.

• Linux Networking Shallow Dive
  https://im.salty.fish/index.php/archives/linux-networking-shallow-dive.html

  More networking series this week. This long form article touches a lot of things on most network layers. It starts with a simple task: giving access from a NAT server to a gateway so that it gets public internet access, to then dive into issues after issues, learning along the way.

• Apple's recommendation for writing daemons and agents
  https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/technotes/tn2083/_index.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/DTS10003794-CH1-SECTION31

  In this long documents you'll find a lot of fallback to avoid when writing daemons on macOS. One of them linked is to prefer UNIX domain sockets for local IPC.

• Jails on FreeBSD
  https://ogris.de/howtos/freebsd-jails.html

  A straight forward article about setting up jails from scratch on FreeBSD. These days it's much easier with wrappers such as bastille, iocage, pot, cbsd, and others.

• Back to the basics, let's talk about reliability and Linux desktops
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hn5xNLH-5eA

  A quite long rant about why reliable distros, image-based distros, are important to have.

• Modern storage is fast enough, it's the API that doesn't let us use it properly
  https://stackoverflow.com/questions/75697877/why-is-liburing-write-performance-lower-than-expected
  https://itnext.io/modern-storage-is-plenty-fast-it-is-the-apis-that-are-bad-6a68319fbc1a

  Two links that rotate around the title I've added. I've been trying to wrap my head around the io_uring for a while now, the concept is fine, however practically applying it properly in a program seems harder than it seems.

• I Didn’t Learn Unix By Reading All The Manpages
  https://www.owlfolio.org/research/i-didnt-learn-unix-by-reading-all-the-manpages/

  RTFM, how many times have your head this? I agree that manpages aren't the best way to learn, especially at first. They're good for the nitty-gritty details and as reference doc for when you need it.

• Style and Diction (the GNU version)
  https://www.gnu.org/software/diction/

  Just a link to two old Unix commands (readapted). Will these types of tools be deprecated with the rise of LLM or will these get a new life.

• Your personal VoIP
  https://www.sacredheartsc.com/blog/building-a-personal-voip-system/

  See also "Your own IM and VOIP" in issue 175.

• Where does my computer get the time from?
  https://dotat.at/@/2023-05-26-whence-time.html

  The slides from a presentation on where computer fetch time from NTP and its truthful sources of time, going back step by step. See also my old presentation see also "NTP" in 127.

• Azure Linux
  https://www.theregister.com/2023/05/26/microsoft_azure_linux_container/

  It's yet another "container" distro. I'm not sure what's the point to have all these new container distros, maybe it's more about the last point "Kubernetes Apps for sale at the Marketplace".

Life & Other

• Build your own anycast network
  https://labs.ripe.net/author/samir_jafferali/build-your-own-anycast-network-in-nine-steps/

  Somehow in sync with the series on networking, however I'm putting it in the "other" section 'cause why not. There are "only" 9 steps, but they're tough ones!

• A review of the Gemini protocol
  https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2023/05/28/the-gemini-protocol-seen-by-this-http-client-person/

  Some of the arguments put forward are great, however most of them are about how the protocol is overly simple, to an ambiguous degree, doesn't leave room for extensibility and only plain-text content.

• Some AI/LLM thoughts
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0962biiZa4
  https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/chatgpt-is-a-blurry-jpeg-of-the-web

  I'll let you digest this in any way you prefer, since the topic has probably been rehashed to much the past few months.

Thoughts

The purity means you have to sacrifice everything. Everything that makes it worth it. — Nile Blue YT Channel making the World's Purest Cookie

I truly enjoyed that video, search for it!

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Ubuntu's past tinkering with init system
  https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ReplacementInit
  https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FasterBootProcess?action=show&redirect=FasterBoot

  These two documents from 2005-2006 trace back the work Ubuntu planned and prioritized for the init system. The first doc list the design and what was prioritized in the design of a new init system.

• 20 years of gentoo
  https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2023/May/20-years-of-gentoo/

  A blog post about a user's history with gentoo and Linux in general, and most importantly, what they learned along the way and why they preferred gentoo.

• coLinux
  http://www.colinux.org/

  This allows running Linux on Windows natively. It doesn't make much sense now with WSL, yet it's still worth a look.

• A list of books on the topic of Linux categorized by purpose and level
  https://linuxstans.com/linux-books/

  There's a lot of these book reviews online, but this one is well made and compiles together a good list.

• The Linux Audio Drivers For MIDI 2.0
  https://www.phoronix.com/news/MIDI-2.0-Linux-Kernel-Patches

  For audio folks out there, this is big, the MIDI 2.0 interface is coming to the Linux kernel.

• A series of tubes
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_of_tubes
  https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/improving-performance-with-http-streaming-ba9e72c66408

  The first link is about the classic USA senator quote comparing the internet to a series of tubes, meanwhile the metaphor is extended with the second link, with the concept of streaming and pipelining.

• Fixing a FUSE bug
  https://netflixtechblog.com/debugging-a-fuse-deadlock-in-the-linux-kernel-c75cd7989b6d

  This is the sort of rabbit hole bug that never ends. Some of it is beyond my knowledge, but it's still a fascinating read.

• A great guide to memory allocation
  https://samwho.dev/memory-allocation/

  And it has visual helpers for those who enjoy explorable explanations.

• Awk but for tracing
  https://blog.lambda.cx/posts/openbsd-dynamic-tracing/

  It's the equivalent bpftrace but for OpenBSD.

• 50 years in filesystems (series continue)
  https://blog.koehntopp.info/2023/05/15/50-years-in-filesystems-vnodes.html
  https://blog.koehntopp.info/2023/05/17/50-years-in-filesystems-towards-2004-lfs.html

  A follow up on the filesystems blog posts series we've posted about in previous issues.

• A new look at XML
  https://www.sitepoint.com/really-good-introduction-xml/
  https://www.rojotek.com/blog/2009/05/06/choosing-a-data-storage-format/
  https://pythonspeed.com/articles/best-file-format-for-pandas/

  XML is often seen as old-corp tech, and also one that lacks proper and clean parsing tech. However, it can also be a great format in some cases. Bonus: extra link on picking a Panda format and comparing csv/json and parquet.

Life & Other

• American Self-Made Big Persona Clichés Incoming
  https://tim.blog/2020/02/02/reasons-to-not-become-famous/

  While the title I put on that link can put you off, the content is true to the heart, and honest. It can shift your outlook on what it means to be under the public eye, even to a low degree, and what it means when a community around a topic of discussion grows.

Thoughts

The first grand discovery was time, the landscape of experience. — Daniel Boorstin

Computer scientists were confused by such statement.

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Knuth and McIlroy Approach a Problem
  https://matt-rickard.com/instinct-and-culture

  A tale you've probably read about before. Yet, in hindsight, I keep wondering the clash in what these two persons were optimizing for: readability or efficiency.

• find as a programming language
  https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~pmaydell/find/

  Is it Turing complete? Then you can do whatever you want in it (but it might be complex).

• GStreamer Updates
  https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/news-and-events/gstreamer-122-bigger-better.html

  GStreamer is a must-have tool and library in your multimedia arsenal. I'm also impressed by how much collabora is contributing to the multimedia stack on Linux.

• Distros Updates
  https://archlinux.org/news/git-migration-announcement/
  https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2023/05/msg00001.html

  Arch is fully moving from svn to git, and Debian is fixing/improving for their new release of their installer.

• Process supervision is a solved problem
  https://web.archive.org/web/20200721180714/http://jtimberman.housepub.org/blog/2012/12/29/process-supervision-solved-problem/

  The first point and the rest are relevant to our series on init system and service manager. Process supervision isn't service management, but it can be part of it.

• Multi-homing
  https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/what-is-multihoming-and-what-do-you-need-to-set-it-up/
  https://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/linux-how-to-setup-multi-homing-networking.html

  I know these aren't great links, but they're still good at explaining. The comments are also insightful in pushing aside some language confusion.

• Human readable vs machine readable Format
  https://stackoverflow.com/questions/568671/why-should-i-use-a-human-readable-file-format/568782#568782
  https://control.com/technical-articles/machine-readable-vs-human-readable-data/
  https://web.archive.org/web/20100305045500/http://plone.org/products/plone/features/3.0/existing-features/human-readable-urls

  In sync with our series on formats. This is one of the most frequent question that comes up when deciding on a new format. The third link takes a whole different approach to what "human-readable" means. It's also somewhat related to a change I did on the forums a few years ago to make the URLs human readable.

• Getting ready for war zone
  https://events.ccc.de/camp/2019/wiki/How_To_Survive
  https://security.googleblog.com/2023/04/securely-hosting-user-data-in-modern.html

  A great guide from the CCC team to survive at the camp, along with one from Google security team to protect your web services.

Life & Other

• Megastructures
  https://yarchive.net/space/exotic/bubbleworld.html
  https://larryniven.fandom.com/wiki/Ringworld

  I've been fascinated by big constructions lately, do you enjoy that too?

Thoughts

"We must not allow the clock and the calendar to blind us to the fact that each moment of life is a miracle and mystery" — H.G. Wells

I've finished reading the Time Machine, and kept wondering about this, especially in the context of the writing.

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• The plumbing layer as the new kernel
  https://lwn.net/Articles/495516/

  In continuation with our series on init/service manager, we ponder and take a step back, imagining the layering of what composes a system and a standard base. (The comment section is explosive)

• macOS Internals
  https://gist.github.com/kconner/cff08fe3e0bb857ea33b47d965b3e19f

  A bunch of links and info (not all very deep, but breadth of knowledge) to better understand macOS different blocks, from display tech, compositing, memory management, init system, sandboxing/security, and more.

• Internet hourglass
  https://phys.org/news/2011-08-internet-architecture-hourglass-future.html
  https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1958

  The internet architecture is fascinating, there is so many discussion around the organic process that gives rise to it. The first link takes this matter seriously and uses evolutionary algorithm to show that the hourglass shape is something inevitable.

• Linux Network Namespaces
  https://blog.sigma-star.at/post/2023/05/sandbox-netns/

  Another networking-related link! It's good that there are more articles on the topic of namespaces too, as it's a topic that's tough to grasp properly. I've also written on this too.

• Save-state
  https://fantasyanime.com/game-saves-tutorial
  https://github.com/OpenEmu/OpenEmu/wiki/User-guide:-Save-states
  https://web.archive.org/web/20211117084748/https://dspace.library.uu.nl/bitstream/handle/1874/351188/Dissertation_Final_FLGEERTS_2017_Final.pdf
  https://mytechnologyblog532.wordpress.com/2016/11/13/reverse-engineering-save-game-files/

  In sync with our series on formats, this week we dive into game "save-state", how to store it, the difference with saved-ram, etc.. Most of the links aren't technical, but about the importance of save states.

• A kernel without buffer heads
  https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/930173/c1a1f68dc4e20191/

  When the cruft of past decision is still lingering, refactoring is hard!

• Unix Koans
  https://prirai.github.io/books/unix-koans.html

  For some, these little koans might be worthless, but to others they might carry much value.

• A blog on the web
  https://www.devever.net/~hl/pics
  https://quii.dev/HTMX_is_the_Future

  This first article is on IE and its content rating system. While the other is about the evolution of application development toward hypermedia.

• 50 years in filesystems: 1984
  https://blog.koehntopp.info/2023/05/05/50-years-in-filesystems-1974.html
  https://blog.koehntopp.info/2023/05/06/50-years-in-filesystems-1984.html

  A series of posts on the historical evolution of file systems, focusing on the multiple improvements over the years.

Life & Other

• On God, Turtles, Balloons, and Sandboxes
  https://xtclang.blogspot.com/2019/04/on-god-turtles-balloons-and-sandboxes.html

  Sometimes a good metaphor helps picture things.

• Monoliths are not dinosaurs
  https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2023/05/monoliths-are-not-dinosaurs.html

  If you've been following tech aggregators and news, then monoliths might seem like something nobody uses, yet this couldn't be further from the truth. "There is not one architectural pattern to rule them all."

• Learning DNS
  https://jvns.ca/blog/2023/05/08/new-talk-learning-dns-in-10-years/

  The most practical and pragmatic way to learn.

Thoughts

"He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it." — Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Phantom disk reads
  https://questdb.io/blog/investigating-linux-phantom-disk-reads/
  https://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2021-05-09/poor-disk-performance.html

  While on one side this article is an ad for questdb, it's also has a great story about debugging disk IO performance, which has some truly insightful techniques (at least for me). I've added a link to Brendan Gregg's blog on that too.

• How the Linux sysfs is organized
  https://mjmwired.net/kernel/Documentation/sysfs-rules.txt
  https://gitlab.inria.fr/blare/kblare/-/blob/master/Documentation/sysfs-rules.txt

  "But hey it's just a link to official docs", and so what, it's extremely useful and I just learned about it!

• RIFF
  https://wiki.videolan.org/RIFF/
  https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/win32/blob/docs/desktop-src/Multimedia/resource-interchange-file-format-services.md
  https://exiftool.org/TagNames/RIFF.html

  The Resource Interchange Format (container) was developed by IBM and Microsoft and is used by multimedia formats such as AVI, WAV, WEBP. It's a simple format consisting of TLV chunks, sub-chunks can be created under "RIFF" or "LIST". THe formatting of each chunk is up to them, there's a list in the last link.

• Linux Software Defined Networking
  https://opensource.com/article/18/11/intro-software-defined-networking

  This basically shows CNI as a way to implement a type of SDN on Linux.

• There is no "linux" platform
  https://blogs.gnome.org/tbernard/2019/12/04/there-is-no-linux-platform-1/
  https://blogs.gnome.org/tbernard/2020/03/25/there-is-no-linux-platform-2/
  https://gitlab.com/freedesktop-sdk/freedesktop-sdk

  In continuation with our init/service manager series, this time we look at a classic blog post arguing around the idea of "platform".

• Types of C programmers
  https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/programming/CProgrammersTwoTypes

  Are you using a programming language because it's your only option (or forced option), or are you picking it for its virtues. Why does this feel like an emotional question?

• Krita software updates
  https://krita.org/en/item/krita-in-2022-and-2023/

  I enjoy reading these software updates from small team, that are personal and at the same time technical. Krita is simply a wonderful software too. Let me know if you like that type of content.

• Because freem keeps reminding us of this
  https://tecadmin.net/understand-mebibytes/
  https://tecadmin.net/difference-between-megabyte-megabit-and-mebibyte/
  https://gist.github.com/jboner/2841832

  While this is extremely basic to some, it still nice to re-read on such topic. As a bonus, there's also a link to the visualization of such units scale.

Life & Other

• Imperative vs declarative
  https://zwischenzugs.com/2023/04/27/is-it-imperative-to-be-declarative/

  You might learn a thing or two, it's a great argument on reality of declarative languages and the pure pedantic definition.

• Intended Use
  https://chipflip.wordpress.com/2018/03/18/who-decides-what-intended-uses-are/

  Seing things under a different angle, extending their usage beyond what was thought was possible. Often, the limitation is only that someone told you there were limitations.

Thoughts

In relation to the previous link, and probably more.

"What really matters is what you do with what you have." — H.G. Wells

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Traffic Control on Linux
  https://netbeez.net/blog/how-to-use-the-linux-traffic-control/

  In sync with our series on networking, this week we take a look at some advanced traffic control on Linux, mostly by showing a few tc examples.

• XDP
  https://nick-black.com/dankwiki/index.php/XDP
  https://nick-black.com/dankwiki/index.php/Extended_disquisitions_pertaining_to_eXpress_data_paths_(XDP)

  Both of these articles explain stuff around DPDK and XDP. I'm pretty new to both tech, so these were insightful.

• Running Windows on btrfs
  https://www.lilysthings.org/blog/windows-on-btrfs/
  https://github.com/maharmstone/quibble

  The experiment is based on quibble, which allows booting Winows on another filesystem.

• 10 years of systemd
  https://blog.darknedgy.net/technology/2020/05/02/0/index.html

  As part of our series on init/service manager, we venture into the darnedgy land, an opiniated but well-researched blog. A big chunk of the post is about init/service manager history, and not only systemd. It's also one of the most in-depth look at how systemd evolved and how it actually works.

• PAM modules for a poor person's 2fa
  https://github.com/braindef/pam-usb-serial
  https://github.com/ColumPaget/pam_usbkey

  In sum, it's about having a whitelisted USB serial number, used as a method of 2FA aka only login when the USB is plugged in.

• A course on information storage
  https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs245/slides/04-Storage-Formats-p1.pdf

  Things start to be related to formatting at around slide 16. It's more of a basic info encoding than anything else.

• Who likes ads
  https://github.com/gonzalo-/ads-fuck-off

  Another blacklist of ads websites, which can be used with Pi-hole or with any other DNS blocking software like adsucks.

• A call for better SSH host certs support
  https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/65874.html

  Plainly said, the author argues that ssh should have support for cert authority TOFU and an easier way to do revocation.

• FUC
  https://alexsaveau.dev/blog/projects/performance/files/fuc/fast-unix-commands
  https://github.com/SUPERCILEX/fuc

  This is an interesting project, aiming at finding/creating the fastest alternative to all core utils.

Life & Other

• The Last Question
  http://users.ece.cmu.edu/~gamvrosi/thelastq.html

  A piece that is relevant today.

Thoughts

"Debugging Is Like Being The Detective When You’re Also The Murderer" — Filipe Fortes

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Basic components of the Linux operating system architecture
  https://net2.com/understanding-the-basic-components-of-the-linux-operating-system-architecture/

  A refresher on your OS university course (or if you haven't taken one, then a great link). I quite like the novel way that it's explained.

• Searchable Linux sycalls
  https://filippo.io/linux-syscall-table/

  Somewhat related to "Syscall reference" in 87. I've slowly been learning eBPF these days, and while at it you're bound to have such reference at hand.

• The early days of Linux
  https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/928581/841b747332791ac4/

  It's always interesting to hear technical stories but from a human perspective, not as something that came down from the sky on a flying chameleon (Sorry for the subs only content)

• USB topology
  http://dtrace.org/blogs/rm/2019/09/27/usb-topology/

  How would you go about displaying the list of physical USB ports, it's not a simple task, they're advertised differently in different places.

• init system declarative language
  https://mgdm.net/weblog/systemd/
  https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd.directives.html
  https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd.syntax.html

  There's a debate around whether declarative languages are good for init/service managers. For sure, it gives rise to countless directives! That's in sync with our init/service manager series.

• "ISO" format
  https://www.iso.org/iso-9660-images-for-computer-files.html
  http://www.brankin.com/main/technotes/Notes_ISO9660.htm
  https://web.archive.org/web/20110717142714/http://alumnus.caltech.edu/~pje/iso9660.html

  As part of our series on formats we're taking a look at the classic ISO 9660. See also "Why the ISO format has to die" in 171.

• Bare Metal Programming
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHUGY05ImWU
  https://libopencm3.org/

  A video series on bare metal programming. This episode looks at PWM and timers and how to configure them.

• Tuning TCP
  https://klarasystems.com/articles/freebsd-tcp-performance-system-controls/
  https://tldp.org/HOWTO/TCP-Keepalive-HOWTO/usingkeepalive.html
  https://www.slashroot.in/linux-network-tcp-performance-tuning-sysctl
  https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/networking/ip-sysctl.html
  https://medium.com/@nic.kong/long-fat-network-lfn-and-tcp-7df4654b7c21
  https://web.archive.org/web/20151107132003/http://www.psc.edu/index.php/networking/641-tcp-tune#Linux

  In continuation with our network series, let's have a look at TCP parameter tuning on Linux and FreeBSD. Since I'm reading a book chapter on it, the congestion control algorithm names and flow control now make sense (and they do actually make a huge difference on my crappy slow connection, aka LFN, long fat network)!

• fork pitfalls in RT context
  https://offlinemark.com/2023/04/07/pitfalls-with-fork-in-real-time-contexts/

  Mixing real-time with non-real-time is bound to create some issues.

Life & Other

• What we hope we know
  https://apenwarr.ca/log/20230415

  A article pondering on system design, science, engineering, and insight. "The article is a fascinating exploration of the interconnectedness of magic, emergent complexity, systems design, and engineering, and how they all play a role in shaping the future of technology and society."

Thoughts

"Make it work, make it good, make it faster."

... But everyone can have their own priorities too!

I'll be busy tomorrow, and thus I'm sending the newsletter early this week.

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• On disk failure
  http://dtrace.org/blogs/wesolows/2014/02/20/on-disk-failure/

  Real world hardware is messy. In this post we see an argument against a theoretical calculation that used to focus on dismissing disk failure.

• Hardware failure at the moment you least need it
  https://sthbrx.github.io/blog/2023/04/04/dumb-bugs-the-pci-device-that-wasnt/

  Kernel debugging is next-level, one rabbit-hole to the next. In this particular one a VIO device get registered for events of PCI devices, mixed up.

• Computer Hardware Notes
  http://www.cap-lore.com/Hardware/

  A medley of interesting notes. It's hosted by the same author that dived to much into capability security theory.

• What does ctrl-d do?
  https://owengage.com/writing/2023-04-08-getting-the-ctrl-d/

  I like the approach of gradually adding details and being more pedantic, along with the non-pretentious approach to explain everything. See also "Writing a terminal emulator" in issue 64 and "A refresher on TTY tech' in issue 158.

• Max command length and xargs
  https://askubuntu.com/questions/14081/what-is-the-maximum-length-of-command-line-arguments-in-gnome-terminal
  https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/xargs.html

  There are many ways to check the maximum command line length, one of them is through a non standard flag in xargs. xargs is also used to split the input into multiple invocations, thus allowing to expand beyond this limit.

• miller
  https://miller.readthedocs.io/en/latest/10min/
  https://github.com/johnkerl/miller

  A tool similar to AWK specifically for CSV-like structure and interoperability between them.

• Searching and saving with Plumber
  https://halfwit.github.io/searching.html

  A project a few years old, it can probably be swapped today with fzf.

• Parsing IPv4 faster
  http://0x80.pl/notesen/2023-04-09-faster-parse-ipv4.html

  Somewhat in sync with the networking series, we're checking how to improve IPv4 parsing, something you might not think is worth it but that's interesting to think about.

• Format, Steganography, and others
  https://www.jjtc.com/Steganography/
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7FBPgQDX5o
  https://www.petitcolas.net/steganography/image_downgrading/
  http://www.spy-hunter.com/Steganography_V7.0_DefCon_V3_S.pdf
  https://corkami.github.io/

  The study of file formats is intimately connected to the world of steganography. We've already shared the corkami website before, but let's stop and revisit steganography too.

• Another take on init history
  https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/InitDaemonManagerHistory
  https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/InitSystemsBootingSimple

  Why do we care so much about init systems, how did we end up in the current situation with PID1 as init, and what's important in them (is it service management or system booting). As with most things, it wasn't designed but patched together to solve a real issue. It's only in retrospective that we understand the more theoretical aspect of it.

• What you need to know about GRUB
  https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/grub.html
  https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/grub-2.html

  We already had a couple of issues about grub such as "GRUB, LILO, and LOADER" in issue 146 and "Learn GRUB commands" in 106. This time we're checking the overall configurations, files and others.

• Your own virtual plant
  https://github.com/jifunks/botany

  "Why do you want a tamagotchi©®, we already have one at home" (in the terminal).

Life & Other

• DWIM
  http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/D/DWIM.html

  Do what I mean.

• MEMS
  https://youtu.be/iPGpoUN29zk
  https://blog.robertelder.org/how-to-make-a-cpu/
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MEMS

  I wasn't aware this was even possible to create mechanical parts using the same techniques used for chip die. I've linked the classic "how to make a cpu" article. Now you can start to wonder about nanobots invasion.

Thoughts

"The first thing you think of looks sensible. Easy to implement. Terrible, ineffective solutions will cause suffering. Why are we made to suffer?" from https://youtu.be/oAHbLRjF0vo

Similar to this quote: "We Don’t See Things As They Are, We See Them As We Are", which doesn't seem to have a clear origin.

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Reviving Very Old X Code
  https://keithp.com/blogs/kgames/

  A tale of being on holiday, getting a small bug report, which leads into a rabbit hole of old code, which then gets revamped!

• Yo Cool Kids!
  https://itsfoss.com/immutable-linux-distros/

  Immutable distros are all the hype these days, "they're the future". You know things are getting spicy when ideas that were on the fringe are suddenly popping on more casual websites. Yet, there's not even a mention of NixOS, nor a lot of the more popular distros.

• Simplified history of init
  http://www.sabi.co.uk/blog/21-one.html?210415#210415
  http://www.sabi.co.uk/blog/21-att/unixBSD29PDP1134boot.jpg
  http://www.sabi.co.uk/blog/21-one.html?210416#210416

  A continuation of our series on init-systems & service-manager. In the above we get some trivia about the history of early init systems on Unix, and in the last post a review of the design of some more recent ones that include process supervision too.

• nftables
  https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Nftables

  nftables are said to be an easier and more efficient way to manage firewall rules on Linux. It reuses the core linux functionality of tables and chains, but expands on it with concepts such as grouping and expressions.

• Playing with AppImage
  https://bkhome.org/news/202303/strategy-to-find-the-latest-appimage-file.html
  https://bkhome.org/news/202303/appimage-installer-now-using-xdotool.html

  Yet, the way it's implemented with a webpage open and xdotool isn't the most efficient at all. Quirky!

• SAUCE for ASCII and ANSI art
  https://web.archive.org/web/20190414035508/http://www.acid.org/info/sauce/sauce.htm
  https://github.com/maaslalani/draw
  https://github.com/cwensley/pablodraw/
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TheDraw
  https://www.acid.org/apps/apps.html

  Ever heard of the SAUCE format? If you like ascii and ansi art then this is for you. Also, I'm wondering if anyone would be interested in a series about metadata and file formats?

• Memory, Pages, mmap, and Linear Address Spaces
  https://pointersgonewild.com/2023/03/12/memory-pages-mmap-and-linear-address-spaces/

  Sometimes toy/side-projects are the best at making ponder about why things are the way they are. In this post the author implemented a Harvard architecture, separating code and data address space, and wonders what are the implications of that.

• Threads, clones, and ELF
  https://eli.thegreenplace.net/2018/launching-linux-threads-and-processes-with-clone/
  https://eli.thegreenplace.net/2018/measuring-context-switching-and-memory-overheads-for-linux-threads/
  https://eli.thegreenplace.net/2012/08/13/how-statically-linked-programs-run-on-linux

  A couple of really great blog posts about Linux threads/tasks and others. I probably should've read that when starting this thread back then, I wasn't really aware of most details.

• Shell redirection
  https://www.davepacheco.net/blog/2019/shell-redirection-example/

  It's surprising at first, but obvious afterward, yet you might not remember it the next time you redirect outputs.

• Agile Data Technology
  http://dtrace.org/blogs/eschrock/2013/04/21/the-power-of-agile-data/

  I hadn't heard of "agile data" before, it seemed to have been a hype from 10 years ago, especially that the blog posts ends with a product marketing pitch.

• Comprehensive keyboard handling in terminals
  https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/keyboard-protocol/
  https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/

  The kitty terminal goes to great length to make keyboard handling (key events) better by rolling a wrapper protocol.

Life & Other

• Fish would be bad swimming instructors
  http://blog.tyrannyofthemouse.com/2022/08/extended-shower-thought-fish-would-be.html

  A longer way to say "défaut professional" mixed with "curse of knowledge".

• Blog Maps
  https://tomcritchlow.com/2023/04/03/blog-maps/

  We now always talk of digital garden, but sometimes, and a lot of times, our own blog space acts as a sort of notepad of ideas. Would it be cool to have a map displaying it. The above post shows a couple of example blogs to inspire you.

Thoughts

You can't force someone to learn something, all you can do is plant seeds of knowledge which might grow in the future. That's true of a lot of things, be it learning or changing someone's opinion.

This is the 189th issue, that number might not mean much, but it's been a year since we relaunched the newsletter after the previous multi-year hiatus. Hence, congratulations!
Let me know what you thought and feedbacks on the issues this years, what you'd like to see, or simply share your feelings about how it's going so far.

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Not everyone likes standardization
  https://xdgbasedirectoryspecification.com/

  This post is probably no surprise to anyone reading this newsletter, as they're probably well aware of the XDG specs, yet it's still interesting. Instead of using this we're bound to rely on link farms (dotfiles managers) instead.

• Simpler Tasks, Not Simple Systems
  http://designinginteraction.blogspot.com/2006/12/simpler-tasks-not-simple-systems.html

  A classic blog post about usability and design. Simplicity doesn't mean less, and accessibility doesn't mean inferior.

• The zeitgeist is flooded with large-language-model discussions
  https://letterstoanewdeveloper.com/2020/01/27/software-is-about-people-not-code/
  https://venam.nixers.net/blog/programming/2015/11/04/what-is-programming.html
  https://www.deusinmachina.net/p/how-we-code-is-changing

  In sync with the previous link, let's remember that software is about getting things done, it's about solving people's problems, so let's keep doing that. As usual, it's always a people's problem, however you look a it.

• Linux ate my ram !
  https://www.linuxatemyram.com/

  Don't panic! Your ram is fine!

• Funky fonts
  https://mulenmar.wordpress.com/2015/10/24/funky-fonts-flocking-free-from-foundry-fog-eh-i-give-up/

  An old advice for noscript users and privacy and security conscious individuals: It's better to manually get the fonts than to let the browser fetch them.

• Blogging the good ol' fashion way
  https://mmlinux.wordpress.com/2009/08/09/speeding-up-the-build-with-ccache/
  https://mmlinux.wordpress.com/2010/08/18/what-have-i-been-doing-in-the-past-one-year/

  I like these small update blogs, instead of today's social media, they're much more personal. I've been doing them too on my own blog and it seems everyone in early 2000s was doing the same thing but that it suddenly got out of fashion.

• FreeBSD CLI formatting out-of-the-box
  https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=xo&sektion=1&apropos=0
  https://klarasystems.com/articles/automation-and-hacking-your-freebsd-cli/

  I had no clue this was integrated with some userland utilities, but it seems super useful.

• A controversial blog with a simple tag line
  <https://garrit.xyz/posts/2023-03-26-software-is-not-defined-by-the-language-it's-written-in>

  The premise is pretty simple: Pick the language after knowing the domain and requirements of the project. This shouldn't even be controversial.

• libc-free threading on Linux
  https://nullprogram.com/blog/2023/03/23/

  Ever wanted to have your own threading without relying on C runtime lib, well that's how you do it. You have to manually do the clone sys-call, build your own stack, and wrap everything in usable functions.

• Why write another process supervisor
  http://skarnet.org/software/s6/why.html

  In continuation with our series on init system and service manager, we ask the question: why write another?

• Butler virtual OS
  https://tristancacqueray.github.io/blog/introducing-butler

  I like the idea of a framework that can build on top of any OS to build another OS on top of it.

• eBPF PoC
  https://hondu.co/blog/file-expiration-using-bpf

  Anyone needs a reason or some will to test a tech, try it out as a PoC.

Life & Other

• Music that is also visual art
  https://oscilloscopemusic.com/

  A fascinating musical project, if you've never heard of it take a look (pun intended).

• The omnipresence of war and how it affects perception
  https://blog.alltheanime.com/memories-cannon-fodder/
  https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/926798/b8f7d5df1ee91de7/

  For some people war is always something far away, Yet, sadly at least for now, there's always a war somewhere, be it "warm" or "cold". As it continues and grows, both sides drowns in propaganda, and the reasons are lost and everything is retrospectively justified, amplified. Software lives in its own space.

• When you're overly rational about being an irrational monkey in a suit
  https://putanumonit.com/2023/02/11/building-and-entertaining-couples/

  I like this blog, the author always spends so much time diving into all topics and "putting a number of it", most of the time human-relationship-related. It's a sort of like Randall Munroe's "what if" but more narrow.

Thoughts

"Poor planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part"

https://www.incirlik.af.mil/News/Commentaries/Display/Article/303134/poor-planning-on-your-part-does-not-constitute-an-emergency-on-my-part/

His remark served as a lesson. This taught me, no matter what task I'm working, more than likely it isn't more important than any other task just because I failed to properly plan.

Keep that in mind!

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• One of the most classic blog
  https://inconsolation.wordpress.com/

  This is K. Mandla's second blog (first one is this). Like all internet legends, the author vanishes and all their online accounts go dormant. His legacy stays alive in his blog and the reddit community /r/pkgoftheday.

• Terminal app colorscheme designer
  http://bytefluent.com/vivify/

  Everyone has their favorite method to come up with their terminal colorscheme, so here's one to add to your toolbox of possibilities.

• Code as art
  http://aem1k.com/

  Creative Coding is it's own branch of programming. It emphasizes, not having an efficient code, but having a code that is literally visually artistic. Other branches of programming include obfuscated code, such as the IOCCC which we mentioned in issue 11, Quines, and many more exotic ones.

• No license is not unlicensed
  https://unlicense.org/

  Countless jurisdictions around the world automatically grant ip to the original author if it can be proven that it was them. The above "unlicense" license, allows forfeiting these rights, however, even when including this license some jurisdiction could still allow the original author to claim them. You can't have legal procedures work everywhere the same, yet the internet is global.

• Accounting on OpenBSD
  http://man.openbsd.org/OpenBSD-current/man5/acct.5
  http://man.openbsd.org/OpenBSD-current/man1/lastcomm.1

  One could rely on w/last/who and others but on OpenBSD there's the addition of accounting files that allow more granular debugging of who did what.

• iptables and networking
  https://www.frozentux.net/iptables-tutorial/images/tables_traverse.jpg
  https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Iptables
  https://i.stack.imgur.com/NHq7t.png

  That's it, I'm finally taking matter in my own hands and upgrading my knowledge of networking, one step at a time. I've got a brand new book to read and I'll add one link related to networking every week. Let's start with iptables, I've found the diagrams and the example Dropbox scenario to be insightful at understanding how its chaining mechanism works.

• cronjob vs systemd-timer
  https://trstringer.com/systemd-timer-vs-cronjob/

  An article arguing about the pros of relying on systemd-timers instead of cron. This is in continuation with our series on service managers.

• Jail Wrappers
  https://bastillebsd.org
  https://github.com/iocage/iocage
  https://github.com/bsdpot/pot
  https://github.com/cbsd/cbsd

  People tend to focus mainly on Linux when it comes to containerisation, however, FreeBSD does have good solutions too on top of jails.

• SMACK
  https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v4.14/admin-guide/LSM/Smack.html
  https://venam.nixers.net/blog/unix/2023/02/28/access_control.html#other-lsms

  There's a lot of talk about more popular LSM, but SMACK is rarely mentioned, even though it's included in the Linux kernel tree. It's an interesting mandatory access control system that relies on file system attributes.

• When you divert from standard expected behavior
  https://www.da.vidbuchanan.co.uk/blog/exploiting-acropalypse.html

  There's a reason why you shouldn't override the expected behavior of core code that everything else relies on.

Life & Other

• Site of the day
  https://someonewhocares.org/siteoftheday/

  A compilation of sites that could catch your interest. One thing that it shows more than anything is how fast things die on the internet.

• Hey I used to have one of these
  http://www.ebb.org/ungeek/
  https://www.geekcode.xyz/geek.html

  I used to find that these were cool back in the days, as a sort of alternative to social media. Now that our lives are tracked by a multitude of entities, it makes less sense to display this sort of information to the public eye.

• Ankify your life
  https://abouttolearn.substack.com/p/anki-fy-your-life
  https://xkcd.com/903/

  It's been a trend the past few years to micro-optimize externalization of memories. Anki is one of these spaced-repetition app that is highly popular.

• Rituals, Consciousness, and Modern Mind Monoculture
  https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2015/01/08/ritual-and-the-consciousness-monoculture/

  In sync with last's week art rant, this time we inspect another side: monoculture of mind. Let me know if you like such long form articles.

Thoughts

Duplication is far cheaper than the wrong abstraction. — Sandi Metz

A programming quote that resonates with most of us. We've all encountered over-engineered codebases.

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Use the macOS secure enclave more easily
  https://github.com/maxgoedjen/secretive
  https://support.apple.com/en-lb/guide/security/sec59b0b31ff/web

  A pretty neat feature that comes with latest Apple devices, and also on some Android devices too. The above project adds a UI on top of it to make it easier to manage.

• Netflix on Asahi
  https://www.da.vidbuchanan.co.uk/blog/netflix-on-asahi.html

  DRM is a mess, and that article truly shows it.

• Emulate x86_64 on ARM64 Linux
  https://github.com/ptitSeb/box64

  A must-have tool when you're on an ARM64 machine and have to run a pre-compiled binary that is only available for x86_64 machines.

• Disambiguating Arm, Arm ARM, Armv9, ARM9, ARM64, Aarch64, A64, A78, …
  https://nickdesaulniers.github.io/blog/2023/03/10/disambiguating-arm/

  Since we're talking Arm, then better remove some ambiguities around the terms, because it can truly get confusing.

• Hibernation on BTRFS swap
  https://nwb.sh/btrfs_swapfile_hibernation/

  The post starts at the ArchLinux installation steps, setting up an encrypted partition with btrfs, going through everything to then finally make hibernation work.

• Tired of solid software
  https://github.com/sharkdp/fd

  find is one of my favorite command, it's pretty solid, and the syntax is allows flexibility. But you know, there's always someone who doesn't want to read the man page and feel the NIH syndrome.

• speedread
  https://github.com/pasky/speedread

  It's my first time encountering a speed reading software for the terminal, pretty cool!

• Write POSIX shell
  https://j3s.sh/thought/write-posix-shell.html

  A post that made people talk. Yet it could probably be summarized as: Shell is a quick scripting language for small problems (200 lines or less), but use shellcheck if you want it to be portable. (Aside: I love the plain text layout).

• One of the oldest privilege escalation
  https://www.errno.fr/TTYPushback.html

  This is basically about writing directly to the pseudo-tty of the parent because the child inherits it. Lesson: use -P with su or rely on more secure approaches like sudo.

• Making your own fontconfig overrides
  https://jichu4n.com/posts/how-to-set-default-fonts-and-font-aliases-on-linux/

  While this is a simple tutorial on font-family override, I'm not sure I actually prefer the result.

• scrcpy
  https://blog.rom1v.com/2023/03/scrcpy-2-0-with-audio/

  An Android remote control application that allows to forward audio, video/screen, record, and much more.

• Old Linux
  http://www.oldlinux.org/

  A website regrouping old Linux material.

• Understanding Flatpak by building packages without the CLI
  https://ranfdev.com/blog/building-a-flatpak-app-without-the-flatpak-cli/

  Trying to learn something by taking the long road instead of the shortest path, and keep asking the right questions, is the best way to learn.

Life & Other

• The advent of AI and memetic wars
  https://xeiaso.net/blog/a-weapon-to-surpass-metal-gear

  A blog I truly enjoy reading. This particular article delves into the idea of narrative warfare, and AI taking over the endless media machine along with all the worldwide political implications, and then the slam from fiction back into reality.

Thoughts

If you have to ask if you're a member of a group, you're probably not.

A cliché quote, nevertheless, that makes you think about some things in your life. What's a group? What does membership means?

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Exporting Flatpak
  https://dataswamp.org/~solene/2023-01-01-flatpak-export-import.html

  Since everyone is hyping about image-based distros and containerised packages, they should definitely be a way to export them from one machine to the next, laterally, instead of from upstream directly. This is the topic of this post, checking how the create-usb feature of flatpak works.

• Fedora Silverblue is getting traction
  https://yorickpeterse.com/articles/switching-to-fedora-silverblue/

  Another image-based distro that everyone is talking about is Silveblue, in sync with the above, it relies on Flatpak.

• Setting up a FreeBSD Audio Studio
  https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2023/03/02/freebsd-home-audio-studio/

  A guest from from @Neomoevius about preparing a FreeBSD machine for audio recording and studio processing (DAW). This involves enabling realtime scheduling, installing jack, and enabling alsa-seq-server which is a user-space MIDI sequencer.

• The Woes and Headaches of DB Encryption
  https://soatok.blog/2023/03/01/database-cryptography-fur-the-rest-of-us/

  Just when you thought things would be simple, security almost never is. In this fabulous post, soatok takes leads the way and let us ponder about all that needs to be taken in consideration when "encrypting the DB".

• On nix
  https://jvns.ca/blog/2023/02/28/some-notes-on-using-nix/
  https://jvns.ca/blog/2023/03/03/how-do-nix-builds-work-/
  https://tinkering.xyz/nix-docs-unified-theory/

  I got to admit, I attempted nix multiple times, but mostly failed each time. I went through the nix-pills and other tutorials, and all the usual paths. Now my only hope to get back to it is a more approachable explanation from jvns, or to wait for a rework of the official docs.

• Dynamic Platform and Thermal Framework (Intel)
  https://github.com/erpalma/throttled
  https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/54923.html
  https://github.com/intel/thermal_daemon

  Each CPU have their magic, Intel has its own for DPTF, which is a dynamic mechanism to control thermal and core usage relationship. The above links try to reverse engineer them, disable them, and control them in some ways.

• Yet another attempt at seeing what will happen in 2038
  https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2023/01/19/time/

  Every time I read one of these, or attempt it myself, I'm shocked at the amount of software that simply break and those which keep going.

• Demystifying bitwise ops
  https://www.andreinc.net/2023/02/01/demystifying-bitwise-ops

  My new go-to article that I'll link everyone to when they ask about what bitwise operators are. Truly a golden resource.

• Making peripherals work
  https://www.michaelminn.com/linux/peripherals/

  A general guide on debugging multiple peripherals, ranging from scanners, printers, and USB storages.

• The Ultimate Linux ARM64 Workstation
  https://jasoneckert.github.io/myblog/ultimate-linux-arm64-workstation/

  Linux Asahi is making some progress, though slowly because of the lack of transparency from Apple, but the developers are moving forward. The article above runs Asahi on Mac Studio and everything is claimed to just work™.

• whoarethey
  https://www.agwa.name/blog/post/whoarethey

  An explanation of a privacy issue with publicly available keys on SSH servers like Github.

• Homemade Rootkit detection on Linux
  https://unfinished.bike/diy-linux-kernel-rootkit-detection
  https://www.sleuthkit.org/
  https://github.com/jessek/hashdeep

  See also "Law enforcement guide to Linux" in issue 107 and "We discussed a lot of forensic..." in issue 56.

Life & Other

• Wimmelbilderbuch, a bottom-up drawing
  https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/wimmelbooks-hidden-picture-dutch-masters

  In art they often say to not focus on the details, to focus on the overall aspect. Well, for that type of pieces the authors do the exact opposite, embracing them and going wild. I find these fascinating, staring for hours at every minute things that are in the image.

• System design interview
  https://interviewing.io/guides/system-design-interview

  The interview aspect aside, you can think of this as a resource to learn about different architectures. I remember linking a book with different real system architecture but I just can't find the URL.

Thoughts

Art has multiple definitions, it's hard to pin down, for example here there are many of them, from transmitting emotions, to create aesthetically pleasing objects, and a form of expression. For me, art is what makes you ponder about deep topics you normally wouldn't encounter, something that challenges your perception of life, maybe even shock and touch your own cultural malaise and boundaries, something that is hard to define until directly experienced. "What if something has meaning away from you and your own assignation to it." Like spoken or written language, local context shapes art and changes its signification. I often like to challenge people by throwing words that have a widely different meaning than what they presuppose, to blow their own contextual bubble, break away from their inner limitations.

One especially interesting piece I've stumbled upon is "The Caretaker, Everywhere At The End Of Time". You can find it on YT here. It has this ephemeral aura, it carries you on a journey of frightening feelings you might have never touched before, "a series exploring dementia, its advancement and its totality". Some describe it as making you doubt your own reality, the edge of consciousness, trying to transcribe something you might never experience.

Similarly, the psyche.co website has a series of wonderful indie films that I truly enjoy. Man on the chair touches upon the upside downs of life, its inner meanings and cloudiness.

I've digressed, let me know if you like this type of content.

NB: You might have noticed but I linked quite a lot of my favorite tech bloggers in this issue. Kudos these fabulous writers, Julia Evans (jvns.ca), solene (dataswamp.org/~solene/), Soatok, Vermaden, Matthew Garrett (mjg59), and Rachel Kroll (rachelbythebay), o7 I salute you!

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Flathub refreshing
  https://github.com/PlaintextGroup/oss-virtual-incubator/blob/main/proposals/flathub-linux-app-store.md
  https://blog.jimmac.eu/2023/flathub-brand-refresh/
  https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/ubuntu-flavor-packaging-defaults/34061

  GNOME and KDE are joining hand to push forward Flathub as a vendor neutral service. Meanwhile, Flathub itself is gaining more and more traction and rebrands its visual design. Meanwhile, Ubuntu if fighting hard to keep snap relevant, the same way it fought for upstart and unity.

• Nagging is free
  https://felipec.wordpress.com/2023/02/24/gnomes-horrid-coding-practices/

  The rant is mainly about GNOME and other projects approach to maintaining software. On one side, the user experience comes first, never breaking user-space, and on the other side, the developers free time and good-enough solutions come first. It's a lengthy article but with lots of insights into development practices.

• Bottles Runner
  https://github.com/bottlesdevs/Bottles
  https://docs.usebottles.com/components/runners

  A wine wrapper that allows easier management of containerised software.

• Linux container using bastille jails on FreeBSD
  https://byte-sized.de/linux-unix/linux-container-mit-bastille-fuer-freebsd-13/

  Bastille is a FreeBSD jail wrapper, allowing to manage them in a container-way.

• Threat modeling for developers
  https://archive.fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/security_threat_modelling_for_developers/
  https://archive.fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/security_threat_modelling_for_developers/attachments/slides/4150/export/events/attachments/security_threat_modelling_for_developers/slides/4150/Threat_modelling_for_developers.pdf

  A FOSDEM talk from 2020 about threat modeling, something that we need to do more often.

• Guide to Linux Process Scheduling
  https://trepo.tuni.fi/bitstream/handle/10024/96864/GRADU-1428493916.pdf

  A beautiful thesis which goal is to remove the mystification and hostility around kernel scheduler. It touches the kernel data structures (task_struct, and doubly-linked lists) and memory management (SLAB/SLUB), to then dive into the core of schedulers.

• macOS sandbox
  https://jmmv.dev/2019/11/macos-sandbox-exec.html
  https://reverse.put.as/2011/09/14/apple-sandbox-guide-v1-0/
  https://reverse.put.as/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Apple-Sandbox-Guide-v1.0.pdf

  This is a lesser-known feature of macOS, which I've discussed in details in my upcoming article on access control.

• Privsep & Privdrop
  https://sha256.net/privsep.html
  https://isopenbsdsecu.re/mitigations/privsec_privdrop/

  This is arguably one of the most important security motto on OpenBSD: reduce the attack surface, drop privilege and separate them as soon as possible.

• A Compendium of Access Control on Unix-like Systems
  https://venam.nixers.net/blog/unix/2023/02/28/access_control.html

  The long-awaited article on access control that I've been working on. It's still full of typos and mistakes, so if notice some or have additions to include, please notify me!

• Going Further Into Attack Surface Reduction
  https://saaramar.github.io/memory_safety_blogpost_2022/
  https://msrc.microsoft.com/blog/2023/02/first-steps-in-cheriot-security-research/

  The previous article was only about access control, however it didn't touch the latest research into attack surface reduction, mitigations, memory safety, and architecture. This is what the above two links are about (but the second is also a lot of indirect marketing about Microsoft platforms)

• A long Reddit argument on Haiku and the definition of what makes a system Unix-like
  https://lobste.rs/s/ws2n6z/elephant_room_it_s_time_get_posix_elephant
  https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3570921
  https://tedd.it/r/haikuOS/comments/109aoto/haiku_r1beta4_reviewed_in_the_register/j3x2qit/

  The main Haiku developer argues with a journal writer about the definition of "UNIX". Practically it is mainly about whoever implements POSIX, to an extent, and is or isn't able to get certified for the trademark.

• High self-esteem
  https://unixsheikh.com/articles/dont-use-reddit-for-linux-or-bsd-related-questions.html
  https://tedd.it/r/BSD/comments/ydr0hj/dont_use_reddit_for_linux_or_bsd_related_questions/

  As we've seen last week (issue 183) in "Google Search Results are Getting Worse", Reddit is becoming a de-facto place to search for Q&A. Yet, this doesn't suit everyone, obviously, and definitely doesn't breed high-quality content either. Just more general internet discussion, as usual, the social/credit-score and virtue signaling aspects of reddit doesn't help.

• What's this weird Plan9 thing?
  https://www.mcafee.com/blogs/other-blogs/mcafee-labs/hunting-for-blues-the-wsl-plan-9-protocol-bsod/
  https://superuser.com/questions/1749690/what-is-this-weird-process-i-see-in-wsl-called-plan9
  https://superuser.com/questions/1643551/windows-10-wsl-mount-creates-9p-filesystem-instead-of-drvfs

  I'm still impressed at how, of all places, it's on WSL that 9p is probably used the most today.

Life & Other

• Culture Shock
  https://hr.un.org/sites/hr.un.org/files/Culture%20Shock_1.pdf

  We hear these catchy two words often, but do we ever spend the time to ponder on them. What has local contextual meaning might not have any in another context. It's easy to transpose our own life experience unto another, however it never match up, and that's even truer across cultural boundaries. I'd recommend a recent book I've read called "The Culture Map" by Erin Meyer, if you can afford it, find an online version, or simply read summaries.

Thoughts

"Before I was shot, I always thought that I was more half-there than all-there – I always suspected that I was watching TV instead of living life. People sometimes say that the way things happen in movies is unreal, but actually it's the way things happen in life that's unreal. The movies make emotions look so strong and real, whereas when things really do happen to you, it's like watching television – you don't feel anything. Right when I was being shot and ever since, I knew that I was watching television. The channels switch, but it's all television." ― Andy Warhol

I kept wondering about this quote after watching this video.

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• A proposal to hide the current process executable
  https://www.scrivano.org/posts/2022-12-21-hide-self-exe/

  prctl on Linux is pretty powerful, with so many ways to change the behavior of a process. The author argues for a new flag PR_HIDE_SELF_EXE to hide the /proc/<PID>/exe file in procfs.

• Bind & Union/Overlay Mounts
  https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=nullfs&sektion=5
  https://tomwh.uk/git/fake-home.git/
  https://tomwh.uk/blog/posts/2020/03/28/fake-home-prison/
  https://github.com/b3nj5m1n/xdg-ninja
  https://github.com/queer/boxxy
  https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/198590/what-is-a-bind-mount

  Bind/nullfs mounts are very useful, they act like symlinks but mounted as virtual devices. Similarly union/overlay mounts, which were inspired by Plan9, are a really neat features that allow to save space by organizing directories into categories that could be merged together.

• Linux Namespaces Are a Poor Man's Plan 9 Namespaces
  https://yotam.net/posts/linux-namespaces-are-a-poor-mans-plan9-namespaces/

  In sync with the above links, here's an article doing a small comparison between Linux namespaces and Plan9 out-of-the-box namespaces.

• Tidying up your $HOME with Nix
  https://juliu.is/tidying-your-home-with-nix/

  A lot of people now rely on nix to clean up their dot files and have a centralized way to manage their whole system.

• Haiku Package Management
  https://www.markround.com/blog/2023/02/13/haiku-package-management/

  There's a lot to be inspired from how Haiku does package management. It makes seamless immutable system directories and rollbacks, while still allowing user-specific packages separated from system packages. In sync with the above, Haiku's "packagefs" is its version of union/overlay-mount, helping achieve its immutable core.

• An Immutable Meta-Distro
  https://github.com/ashos/ashos

  AshOS relies on snapshot trees and the built-in package manager of your distro. It is installed on top of any distro and manages the whole file system by taking snapshots (ash command).

• Single Purpose Distros
  https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/922968/4a69aa7f1f2332d7/

  Miniature, trimmed, distributions are getting popular not only in the embedded space, but also in the container world. Will this trend last, will these distro be kept up-to-date, no idea.

• Which "modern" tool should be included and maybe replace standard POSIX ones
  https://exple.tive.org/blarg/2023/02/17/modern-problems-require-modern-solutions/

  A controversial topic, to say the least. Yet, an interesting one.

• Replaced GRUB with systemd-boot
  https://blog.bofh.it/debian/id_465

  sd-boot or systemd-boot, is systemd's UEFI boot manager. The author documents the steps needed to switch from GRUB.

• Check opened files
  https://man.openbsd.org/fstat
  https://linux.die.net/man/8/lsof

  Nothing really impressive in the above links, just the usual utilities to check which files are opened by processes.

• Linux Keyring Usage
  https://rtfm.co.ua/en/what-is-linux-keyring-gnome-keyring-secret-service-and-d-bus/

  A rehash of a link shared in issue 137 "Certs, keys, and keyrings". The Linux kernel keyring functionality isn't that well-known, along with other secret facilities. This article does a neat job at regrouping it all together.

• Another Attack Surface Mitigation
  https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20230222064027

  If you thought ASLR was enough, you're far from it, now OpenBSD includes by default in it's linker a check to not allow another entry point within the same executable space pinsyscall(2).

Life & Other

• Google Search Results are Getting Worse
  https://dkb.blog/p/google-search-is-dying
  https://dkb.blog/p/organize-the-world-information

  We've all experienced it, Google search results are getting worse and we're trying to fight our ways around it. See also "Are we our tools" in issue 68 and "The Grand Analogy" in 66 and "The extended mind" in 64, and a bit of "Keeping track of your things" thread on the forums (https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=1637).

• CSS lobotomized owls
  https://alistapart.com/article/axiomatic-css-and-lobotomized-owls/

  Stay focused, 'cause that CSS line will blow you away (at least it did for me).

• Been on a tangent hate with Alegria, but who hasn't?
  https://eyeondesign.aiga.org/dont-worry-these-gangley-armed-cartoons-are-here-to-protect-you-from-big-tech/
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_Memphis
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVE5crbE67I
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFb7BOI_QFc
  https://qz.com/quartzy/1728767/why-editorial-illustrations-look-so-similar-these-days
  https://buck.co/work/facebook-alegria

  This art-style is found everywhere, I kind of knew about the meme surrounding it, but I hadn't really put that much thought into it until today.

• Probably yet another follow up on "WRITE MORE"
  https://josem.co/creation-happens-in-silence/

  Even more empty motivational content!

Thoughts

Form follows function. — Louis H. Sullivan

I've been diving into architecture topics these days, and it's akin to software in a lot of ways. The levels of designs, theories, and thoughts that go into constructing a space is incredible. Check just this.

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• More on systrace
  https://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=363731

  We mentioned systrace in issue 159, let's see it again because frankly, it's a fantastic tool that was left out. It was even ported to Linux in 2004.

• pivot_root & switch_root
  https://web.archive.org/web/20160730094856/http://wiki.sourcemage.org/HowTo(2f)Initramfs.html
  https://tbhaxor.com/pivot-root-vs-chroot-for-containers/

  Even the above links don't really explain properly what pivot_root does so let me do it in a few words: It's like chroot but when you change root to the new directory you keep the previous root in a bind-mount under your new root. That means you could unmount the old root, completely cutting access to it. This is why it's used in container solutions.

• rctl(8)
  https://klarasystems.com/articles/controlling-resource-limits-with-rctl-in-freebsd/

  rctl, not to be confused with SunOS rctl, is a neat FreeBSD daemon that allows creating hardware resource control the same way you'd create firewall rules.

• Quotas
  https://people.freebsd.org/~blackend/doc/el/books/handbook/quotas.html
  https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/8/html/managing_file_systems/assembly_limiting-storage-space-usage-on-ext4-with-quotas_managing-file-systems

  Quotas are this file system feature present on most Unix-like systems that barely anyone use. Yet it's another hardware resource control mechanism that could be useful.

• Hosting your own deb/apt pkg repository
  https://earthly.dev/blog/creating-and-hosting-your-own-deb-packages-and-apt-repo/

  While this article does teach how to build deb packages and a repo, it also indirectly shows how to debug and analyze the packages you download.

• Another Gentoo Year
  https://www.gentoo.org/news/2023/02/09/new-year.html

  A summary presented in a clear, transparent, and entertaining fashion of all that happened in the Gentoo distribution and community during 2022.

• FOSDEM Transcription
  https://jonatron.github.io/fosdem2023whisper/links.html

  If you couldn't join FOSDEM this year and don't want to bother watching videos of the talks you would've liked to see, then this is for you. The files can also be used with ffmpeg to add subtitles, however I'm not sure if the format is one that works with it because usually it is either .vtt or .srt files, yet the format does look a bit like srt to me.

• General Suggestions for Portable Linux Binaries
  https://blog.gibson.sh/2017/11/26/creating-portable-linux-binaries/#some-general-suggestions

  ...and the suggestions are indeed very generic. However, this could be a good checklist.

• Creating network routes on Linux
  https://linuxconcept.com/adding-a-route-in-linux/
  https://linuxconcept.com/adding-a-route-using-legacy-approaches-in-linux/

  I'm still clumsy when it comes to networking management and understanding, however I want to remediate this (I recently even bought a networking book!). Routing is one of these things that is very useful but that I find complicated, even though after reading these articles it's not such a monster anymore.

• Notes on Linux Virtual Memory
  https://github.com/lorenzo-stoakes/linux-vm-notes
  http://landley.net/writing/memory-faq.txt

  A lot of really insightful content on Linux virtual memory. See also issue 58 "About memory".

• Moving Into a Future
  https://pierre.equoy.fr/blog/posts/2023/02/a-promising-mess/

  This harks back to a a post I made on my blog which had shaken some people at the time. It was simply trying to describe the current evolution of stuff in mainstream Linux distros, yet what's mainstream doesn't suit everyone, including myself.

Life & Other

• An article that strikes a chord
  https://www.ufried.com/blog/continuous_amnesia_issue/

  We've all felt it at least once.

Thoughts

Beauty is the promise of happiness. — Stendhal

How can beauty promise happiness? And what kind of beauty would this be? What sort of happiness?
Some take it quite literally, meanwhile others go deeper in the meaning.

What do you find beautiful? What makes you happy?
Have a great week!

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Hold your horse, here's a thing you might not have heard before
  https://www.rsbac.org/

  I was pretty shocked to see that nobody was talking about this project, and the last update is from 2021. It was only mentioned once on slashdot maybe, but considering it was never mainstream and only lived as a patch I'm not surprised. Since I covered and explained it in my "never-ending" upcoming article, I felt like sharing. The big drawback is that the documentation is still crap even after 20+ years in development.

• Sudo in ldap
  https://www.sudo.ws/docs/man/1.8.17/sudoers.ldap.man/

  It's rare to have corporations relying on centralized sudoers files, especially since there are more manageable solutions these days like IdAM servers. It might be news to some people to hear that sudo has plugins(sudo_plugin(5)) allowing storing rules on remote servers, but that's a thing. Probably because the majority of users rely on sudo for simple rules, in that case doas is much cleaner.

• OpenBSD anywhere
  http://muezza.ca/thoughts/openbsd_imac_g4/

  This used to be NetBSD's motto, but it seems now that OpenBSD is the goto lightweight and solid OS running anywhere, at least that's what we see from tech news.

• pkgsrc call for action
  https://bentsukun.ch/posts/pkgsrc-agitprop/

  In sync with the above "it seems to me that people have more or less forgotten about NetBSD and pkgsrc". This is a call for action to simply add a line in your README file on how to install your software using pkgin command.

• Awesome Package Maintainer
  https://github.com/jubalh/awesome-package-maintainer

  To prove you can do a GH "Awesome" list of anything, here's one about package management/maintainer, and it's pretty good.

• The Genode OS Framework
  https://genode.org/documentation/general-overview/index
  https://genode.org/documentation/genode-foundations/21.05/system_configuration/The_init_component.html
  https://genode.org/documentation/developer-resources/init

  Here's a parenthesis in our init-system series with a system that isn't Unix-like: Genode. It employs a capability-based security model where child processes are only allowed to communicate with their parents and the capability they have should originates from that same parent. With that mindset, the init component is the parent of all processes and thus should have all the capabilities that can possibly exist on that system. Furthermore, the init process decides which child processes can interface with one another, their relationship. This is a radically different approach than "common" init systems on other platforms.

• incron
  https://www.linux.com/topic/desktop/how-use-incron-monitor-important-files-and-folders/
  https://github.com/ar-/incron

  If you hadn't heard, incron is like cron but for inotify events. It can act on granular events such as creation, deletion, move, and much more.

• Non-free firmwares Now Allowed on Debian
  https://www.makeuseof.com/debian-votes-to-include-non-free-firmware/
  https://www.debian.org/vote/2022/vote_003#outcome
  https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2023/01/msg00312.html
  https://www.linux-magazine.com/Issues/2023/268/Firmware-in-Debian

  The version of Debian voted last year that will include non-free firmware is coming out. This is an important change and one that shows how their voting mechanism represents actual user needs.

• File Reduction
  https://birds-are-nice.me/software/minuimus.html

  I first learned about this tool as a PDF "minimizer". However, I quickly found out that it did much more than that.

• Visualization of DAG
  https://salsa.debian.org/debian/debtree
  https://man.archlinux.org/man/pactree.8
  http://plindenbaum.blogspot.com/2012/11/visualizing-dependencies-of-makefile.html
  https://github.com/lindenb/makefile2graph

  Directed-acyclic graphs are found in a lot of places, and it's a useful thing to be able to visualize them as such. The above links do this for debian package, Arch package, and makefiles.

Life & Other

• It's all about how you think about states
  https://www.worldofbs.com/minimize-state/

  A simple, yet insightful, thought on how some paradigm all think of programming states differently.

• Exclaves and Enclaves
  https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/e927741a6a1c4157a1e3a91a2645f3f8

  I found this page both well-made and so insightful, I hope you do too.

Thoughts

Mechanisms determine how something is done; policies dictate what is done. Flexibility requires the separation of policy and method.

This has been an adage of computing, yet when taken to the extreme it can lead to such complex system with features that lay unused because the policy isn't relying on it.

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• su without ROOT
  https://sites.google.com/site/fullycapable/su-without-root

  The past 2 weeks I've been away, working on an article on access control, coincidentally, POSIX capabilities is one topic that came up. The only real articles we've mentioned in the newsletter that is properly explaining POSIX capabilities on Linux are "POSIX Capabilities, Not a Capability-Based System" in 156. Yet, that article wasn't so good either, so I went to the source: the maintainer of the Linux version of this POSIX.1e/2c draft, libcap: Google. That particular linked article discusses converting su from a setuid binary to a POSIX capability binary, aka capability-aware. It's still hard to grasp, so wait for my future article to finally understand all this :D !

• doas as a dedicated subexecutor
  https://flak.tedunangst.com/post/doas

  In the same note as the above link, while writing I also dabbled with sudo and doas, in ways in which I felt like I never understood them before. In this beautiful historical article from 2015 linked above, we can see the progression that the author of doas has been through, slowly leading to its adoption on OpenBSD.

• Randomize anything that can be randomized
  https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20230119075627

  This time it's sshd randomized boot-time relinking.

• Troubleshooting ssh generic issues
  https://ittavern.com/ssh-troubleshooting-guide/

  A quick and neat list of common ssh issues that can easily be fixed. There's nothing very particular here apart from having it as a checklist, which can come in handy when you're running out of options for debugging.

• Difference between Linux secure boot and kernel lockdown
  https://stackoverflow.com/questions/60092190/is-there-any-relationship-between-secure-boot-and-kernel-lockdown

  Two interesting features: making sure a binary is signed properly, and enforcing not being able to modify the kernel code as it runs. While independent, combined they offer a good defense surface.

• TPM, PKCS#11, Okta, Apple, and more
  https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/64311.html
  https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/64968.html

  There's a lot of solutions to store keys and password, and methods to access them, via some sort of verification/signature, within a hardware, and more. The above blog enjoys discussing this topic to great ends.

• USBGuard
  https://usbguard.github.io/
  https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/USBGuard
  https://docs.kernel.org/usb/authorization.html
  https://usbguard.github.io/documentation/rule-language.html

  Yet more security content related to the previous post! This one is specifically about creating a whitelist/blacklist of USB devices. It can also integrate with polkit for interfacing with the DE and can be secured with seccomp. The nice thing is that it relies on the kernel pseudo-fs sysfs for authorization policies instead of udev (it has deprecated the udev backend in favor of the file backend).

• Vermaden's Twitter friend NeoMoevius about running Urban Terror on FreeBSD
  https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2023/01/20/native-urban-terror-on-freebsd/

  A straight forward raw tutorial on making something run.

• Monochrome terminal setup for an E-ink monitor
  https://bsandro.tech/posts/monochrome-terminal-setup-for-an-e-ink-monitor/

  Who wouldn't want an E-ink monitor and plug it in their day-to-day machine, having crisp text that doesn't hurt the eye. Yet you got to forgo a couple of things when on a colorless screen with the framerate of 15fps.

• OpenZFS — the final word in file systems
  https://jro.io/truenas/openzfs/

  An article rounding up some features of OpenZFS, explaining them in coherent and expensive details.

• eBPF XDP
  https://www.tigera.io/learn/guides/ebpf/ebpf-xdp/

  Networking monitoring and decision making is always getting faster and smarter. XDP, eXpress Data Path, allows processing packets at high speed, either directly on the NIC or in software in the kernel, meanwhile eBPF let you interpret programs within the kernel. A combination of both is electric!

• send2trash
  https://pypi.org/project/Send2Trash/

  This chic little python package will also install a cli going by the same name: send2trash, which respects xdg standards for trash and will be a good replacement alias for your rm.

Life & Other

• The never ending motivational writing posts trend
  https://fromdevtodev.com/what-to-blog-developer

  Hey, it's either positive or not, but I find it both fascinating, that it's a trend to write about writing more, and inspiring. In all cases, I do need motivation too!

• SMTP convo
  https://blog.bityard.net/articles/2023/January/various-ways-of-sending-mail-via-smtp

  A very entertaining and resourceful article. There's a lot to learn if you've never seen the SMTP proto in action.

Thoughts

We're back on track!
We all need a reset from time to time, a change of pace is welcome. So let's throw a cheesy quote to get this going:

We all get so caught up in the moment of what we're doing every day, it's hard to hit that reset button and get pulled away from all that and see life from a different perspective. — Tony Stewart (race car driver)

It's not only moving that creates new starting points. Sometimes all it takes is a subtle shift in perspective, an opening of the mind, an intentional pause and reset, or a new route to start to see new options and new possibilities. — Kristin Armstrong (road bicycle racer)

"Gotta go fast" to understand what some breathing space can offer.

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• PID namespaces and containers on Linux
  https://hackernoon.com/the-curious-case-of-pid-namespaces-1ce86b6bc900
  https://github.com/rkt/rkt

  There are many namespaces on Linux, one for each type of resource, ipc, pid, time, user, network, etc.. This is somewhat a continuation of the series on init systems, as a process will be created as PID 1 in the namespace while keeping its previous PID in the host namespace. This question of containers with their own namespaces and init process is one that is novel to this day and one that we should ponder on, as is done in this article. (Note: rkt is discontinued)

• FHS meets GUIX containers
  https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2023/the-filesystem-hierarchy-standard-comes-to-guix-containers/

  Guix introces a way to create a temporary 'normal' file-system hierarchy in a container-like fashion through a new argument to the guix shell.

• A review of Vanilla OS
  https://memoryfile.codeberg.page/posts/Vanilla-OS-and-the-next-generation-Linux-desktop/

  In the last issue we posted about Vanilla OS, this time let's see someone who plunged into the details and compared it with other similar distribution

• OSD for keyboard and mouse
  https://github.com/DaveJarvis/kmcaster
  https://www.thregr.org/~wavexx/software/screenkey/

  There's a couple of similar software on linux for on-scree-display of keys pressed, such as screenkey. However, the author felt that some features were missing such as translucent background, showing scrolling and others.

• X servers all around
  https://who-t.blogspot.com/2023/01/x-servers-no-longer-allow-byte-swapped.html
  https://github.com/tinycorelinux/tinyx
  https://github.com/waddlesplash/xlibe

  From X server implementations planning on defaulting on skipping support for big-endian as it becomes too niche (at least on Xorg, Xwayland, Xnest,..), to two other cool X layers and server one making it work on HaikuOS and the other being a minimal X server implementation.

• POSIX.1e/2c capabilities and SunOS-derivative privileges
  https://www.illumos.org/man/7/privileges
  https://man.omnios.org/privileges.7
  http://www.polarhome.com/service/man/?qf=privileges&af=0&sf=0&of=OpenIndiana&tf=2

  We've seen POSIX capabilities in issue 156 "POSIX Capabilities, Not a Capability-Based System". Since I'm having fun writing on the topic I thought it would be nice to mention the black sheep in the group: SunOS and all its derivatives (Solaris, OpenSolaris/OpenIndiana, illumos, etc..). Interestingly, they have their own way of implementing security features such as privileges which are close-enough to POSIX capabilities, but they are also one of the rare systems implementing a role-based access control (RBAC) mechanism.

• Why Even Try?
  https://rubenerd.com/i-feel-for-the-netbsd-community/

  I'm not sure how distro-hopping is going these days, but I hope it's still as omnipresent in the discovery of the wide variety of Unix-like distributions, each with their own mindsets. Questions such as "why do you run it", should be nuked with "because it's just fun and new and interesting and blows your mind".

• Tilck - a new kernel emulating/compatible with Linux
  https://github.com/vvaltchev/tilck
  https://github.com/vvaltchev/tilck/blob/master/docs/syscalls.md

  A neat project building a brand new kernel that has some API/ABI compatibility with Linux. It even has its own sysfs under /syst.

• Connmap X11 client
  https://github.com/jafarlihi/connmap

  A simple tool that displays the geo-location of IPs your machine is currently interacting with.

Life & Other

• Software Engineering for Real Life
  https://vadimkravcenko.com/shorts/things-they-didnt-teach-you/

  We all have our thoughts on this topic, I sure do too. There's a big difference between scholarly software engineering, theoretical one, the hobby-one (kenobi), and the actual day-to-day work-life one.

Thoughts

The newsletter will have a two weeks hiatus.
See you later!

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Vanilla OS
  https://vanillaos.org/
  https://github.com/Vanilla-OS/ABRoot
  https://documentation.vanillaos.org/docs/apx/
  https://ostreedev.github.io/ostree/introduction/

  An OS based on Ubuntu that has gained recent traction. It's another immutable istro where the core is locked, similar to silverblue. To achieve immutability it has created its own system called ABRoot and considers using OSTree in the future, which also does atomic upgrades. As for the package manager, it uses apx a package manager that runs programs within containers. All considered, this sounds pretty good.

• DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 1000
  https://distrowatch.com/weekly-mobile.php?issue=20230102

  That's a lot of issues, 1k, 827 more than the nixers newsletter, can you imagine. DistroWatch is a blessing to all of us, those deep reviews, the listing, ranking based on site views, and more, it's priceless.

• sd a script directory
  https://github.com/ianthehenry/sd

  "Write a solution to your own problems", that's the best motto ever and this is the case here. It structures commands within a tree and let you call them as subcommands to sd, sort of like what Plan9 achieves, pretty cool.

• Supply Chain, Are We Suppliers?
  https://www.softwaremaxims.com/blog/not-a-supplier

  A really well-put article summarizing the situation of software libraries reuse today. It puts into light why licenses providing the software as-is are so important in this equation.

• Getting acquainted with the Linux Kernel
  https://lwn.net/Kernel/LDD3/
  https://linux-kernel-labs.github.io/refs/heads/master/

  Two huge resource to learn about the Linux kernel and operating systems in general. I really enjoyed skimming through the second links, it covers a lot of ground.

• System Security Services Daemon
  https://sssd.io/

  Ever wondered how the identity management systems integrate with Unix, well you'd think they'd use PAM but they don't. They rely on SSSD instead, intercepting syscalls. See also issue 172 "FreeBSD integration with RedHat IdM".

• Linux Enumeration and Privilege Escalation Checks
  https://github.com/rebootuser/LinEnum

  Whether you're in a red team, or blue team, or even just want to make sure your system is secure, this tool can come handy.

• Find hidden Linux Kernel Modules
  https://github.com/jafarlihi/modreveal

  A utility to show possible rootkits that might be hidden as kernel modules.

• A Decade of HardenedBSD
  https://git.hardenedbsd.org/shawn.webb/articles/-/blob/master/hardenedbsd/2023-01_decade/article.md

  I've been reading a ton of access control content to feed my appetite for the article I'm currently in the process of writing, and HardenedBSD and TrustedBSD have come up a lot. HardenedBSD went further than TrustedBSD which introduced things like MAC policies, and it added ASLR and other interesting security features. There's also the personal aspect to the post, the story of the author, what brought them there, and what they're looking for in the future.

• systemd timer, architecture, and administration
  https://trstringer.com/systemd-timer-vs-cronjob/
  http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd-for-admins-1.html
  https://opensource.com/sites/default/files/uploads/systemd-architecture.png

  In continuation with our series on Init systems and service managers, this week we focus on systemd huge service manager framework, specifically timers and general administration.

• File descriptors, pipes, terminals, user sessions, process groups and daemons
  https://biriukov.dev/docs/fd-pipe-session-terminal/0-sre-should-know-about-gnu-linux-shell-related-internals-file-descriptors-pipes-terminals-user-sessions-process-groups-and-daemons/

  A walk though some unix file manipulation and shell and terminal management through a couple of python examples.

• A new pager
  https://github.com/noborus/ov

  A pretty neat feature complete pager.

Life & Other

• Write more more
  https://candrewlee14.github.io/blog/i-will-write-more/

  Alright, alright, it's been a couple of motivational writing weeks, so let's keep it going! In 2023 I'll indeed write more.

• Security and privacy
  https://invisv.com/articles/privacy-and-security.html

  I find this sort of discussion confusing, because often the terms are misused and barely defined properly. As I'm currently writing on the topic of security I've found that the definitions can be conflicting, but once you settle on one that is scientifically sound (as in measurable) then you can move from there. One policy that is often taken as the definition of security is the CIA: confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Now if confidentiality contains the one of the users of the system, and not only the internals, their privacy is included.

Thoughts

People are usually afraid of change because they fear the unknown. But the single greatest constant of history is that everything changes. — Yuval Noah Harari

What a great quote to initiate the year, start with a change and growth mindset.

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• A Survey of (Linux) Init Systems
  https://www.linux-magazine.com/Online/Features/A-Survey-of-Init-Systems

  A quick tour of six different init systems on Linux.

• From WM to DE
  https://michaelneuper.com/posts/turning-a-window-manager-into-a-desktop-environment/

  A step-by-step guide of the pieces used to build a desktop environment. You don't often find such articles, it's the type that's good to send to newcomers that are wondering how to set their own DE from scratch.

• NixOS on the laptop
  https://bmcgee.ie/posts/2022/12/setting-up-my-new-laptop-nix-style/

  A continuation with immutable distributions, let's see how to setup a laptop with NixOS. It's interesting that you can even create the filesystems using nix scripts.

• The X11 Conservancy Project
  https://x11cp.org/
  https://codeberg.org/x11cp/x11cp

  A site dedicating to grouping and maintaining a list of X11 softwares that were created between the 80s and 90s. So far there's only one program in that list, so there's a long way to go.

• A year of building a terminal application
  https://textual.textualize.io/blog/2022/12/20/a-year-of-building-for-the-terminal/
  https://github.com/Textualize/textual

  A truly impressive feat from devs working on terminal tooling. The TUI they've come with is smooth and full of neat features (even animation!).

• Doing Repos the right way, the Zen of Comprehensive Archive Networks
  https://www.cpan.org/misc/ZCAN.html

  Notes on how CPAN philosophy works, in general. It's very: make it work, and put things together, no over the top over-engineering, and I like that.

• Use-after-free to a privilege exploitation using io_uring
  https://exploiter.dev/blog/2022/CVE-2022-2602.html

  The authors take a possible CVE and turn it into a real PoC. I admire this because usually CVEs are mostly abstract and theoretical, but real exploits based on them are rare.

• The TTY, again
  https://thevaluable.dev/guide-terminal-shell-console/

  With the amount of similar articles coming out, I guess you should get more and more familiar with this topic.

• Get your env right
  https://bvnf.space/blog/008-sudo-make-install.html

  A tale on how sometimes you should beware of the environment you run things in (or otherwise embrace containers).

Life & Other

• SuperNormal Stimuli
  https://www.sparringmind.com/supernormal-stimuli/

  I thought this was presented in a fabulous way, with illustrations and links to further research for those who are interested.

Thoughts

Happy end of year!
Let's hope for more adventures and cool newsletter links for the next one.

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Using group passwords
  https://blog.mirch.io/2019/01/09/linux-persistence-idea-using-group-passwords/

  A feature I found myself recently writing about but that is rarely used these days: group passwords. In this article we see it from an attacker's perspective.

• Why polkit
  https://www.collabora.com/about-us/blog/2015/06/08/why-polkit-(or,-how-to-mount-a-disk-on-modern-linux)

  A very good article at explaining polkit in simple terms. A highly advised read if you've always wondered what or why this was needed.

• Linux TTY
  https://linuxtldr.com/tty-and-pty/
  https://linuxtldr.com/chvt-command/

  A quick historical detour and a couple of explanation of terminologies about terminals.

• Understanding Linux' Readahead
  https://lwn.net/Articles/888715/

  Lots of efforts put into documenting and refactoring the readahead code. I like this "documentation as a means for finding and fixing bugs"... "to ensure that I understood the code and ensure that others would be able to understand my motivation for changes to that code".

• Get some cool graphics in your terminal
  https://www.linuxlinks.com/linux-candy-ctree-christmas-tree-terminal/

  ctree is an xmas tree in the terminal.

• A small linux computer
  https://thelittleengineerthatcould.blogspot.com/2022/12/the-8-linux-computer.html

  "It looks like a microcontroller, but behaves like a UNIX machine." A struggling start to get things going on a miniature single board computer. I've always loved to try that out, but I would have no idea what to do with it other than posting on the internet that I got it running.

• Init process by YoLinux
  http://www.yolinux.com/TUTORIALS/LinuxTutorialInitProcess.html

  A generic look at the Linux init process, mostly SysV and systemd.

• What can you do with a PID
  https://will-keleher.com/posts/What-can-you-do-with-a-pid.html

  While these are sort of obvious for a lot of people, I still find it nice to have a whole list set up like this. It's pretty good for debugging.

• Persistent Memory Allocation
  https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3534855

  An overview of some of the capability that persistent memory can bring to programming.

Life & Other

• Selfish Writing
  https://collabfund.com/blog/selfish-writing/

  It feels like every few weeks I'm posting inspiration and motivational posts about writing. Yet, I do indeed need that motivation right now, and I'm always excited to read blog posts.

• Breaking a Monopoly
  https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/12/linux-amazon-meta-and-microsoft-want-to-break-the-google-maps-monopoly/
  https://overturemaps.org/

  A few tech giants get together to try to create a competitor to Google Maps, they'll achieve this through a foundation called Overture Maps that will help share and collectively strengthen each others map data. Now, in reality, how much they'll cooperate with one another is still something that remains to be seen.

Thoughts

Take a glance at "The Most Productive Ways to Disagree Across Cultures", it's a nifty article. These cultural trivia, differences, points of confluence, are often hidden or misinterpreted until the moment they finally float up and unfold on top of the water of our minds like lily pads. That shows how blind we can be without realizing it.

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Custom Silverblue
  https://www.ypsidanger.com/building-your-own-fedora-silverblue-image/

  A lot of new jargon has emerged around immutable distros: "package entropy", "image-based desktop". It's fun to think that your OS could be a docker image.

• DAX and read-only memory file systems
  https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v5.19/filesystems/dax.html
  https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v5.19/filesystems/erofs.html
  https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/917097/88e6e29487df7947/

  You know when they say you need a solution for a problem you created, then that's exactly what I thought when I read about Direct Access for files/DAX.

• Using certificates for SSH authentication
  https://lwn.net/Articles/913971/

  Another review of certificate hierarchy use with SSH, see also "SSH as a hierarchy" in 119.

• dir, vdir, and ls
  https://askubuntu.com/questions/103913/difference-between-dir-and-ls-terminal-commands

  Call me late, but I really didn't know dir was a command part of GNU coreutils.

• Even more talk on mimmutable
  https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/915640/53bc300d11179c62/

  There's been quite a lot of talk about, and now it reached the Linux folks for inspo. (Yeah I know, it's a lot of lwn links this week)

• FreeBSD vs Linux
  https://klarasystems.com/articles/freebsd-vs-linux-networking/
  https://klarasystems.com/articles/virtualization-showdown-freebsd-bhyve-linux-kvm/

  While the titles are a bit cliché, the contents are pretty good with a lot of performance analysis.

• Your own IM and VOIP
  https://マリウス.com/run-your-own-instant-messaging-service-on-freebsd/
  https://www.linphone.org/
  https://computingforgeeks.com/how-to-install-kamailio-sip-server-on-ubuntu/
  https://www.alibabacloud.com/blog/how-to-setup-kamailio-sip-server-on-ubuntu-18-04_595714

  These days it's relatively easy to host these chat and video applications. The big issue is to get everyone else you want to communicate with to use them.

• An argument about not fixing what's not broken
  http://groups.di.unipi.it/~nids/docs/the_plan-9_effect.html

  While the argument portrayed in the article is sensible, it dismisses what research is about and it's purpose, it also favors specific narrow thinking instead of seeing a more holistic view of the environment explaining why Plan9 didn't prosper as much as its predecessor. It also will irks some people when it calls Plan9 a version of Unix, which it isn't...

• The birth of stderr
  https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20131211/

  I love these small historical stories explaining where stuff come from, it's always something benign and hilarious.

• A reply to a couple of arguments on systemd
  https://shibumi.dev/posts/why-suckless-is-wrong/

  Lots of people don't like systemd for some one reason or another, but there's also a lot of mysticism surrounding the topic and frankly false assumptions too. This article tackles a couple of point, but with a tone that's definitely angry.

Life & Other

• Scams these days
  https://indeedjobscam.pages.dev/

  A bit technical, and also an entertaining read, that's why I added it.

• IPv6 is broken
  https://adminhacks.com/broken-IPv6.html

  An article that made it all around tech news websites. The conclusion most had in the comments was to blame the mentioned AS provider. That's probably the first thing that would come to mind, but I'd also fall down to the Five Whys.

Thoughts

A system that is trustworthy is not the same as a system we must trust. This distinction is important because systems that need to be trusted are not necessarily trustworthy.

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Powerup your GNU Readline skills
  https://www.masteringemacs.org/article/keyboard-shortcuts-every-command-line-hacker-should-know-about-gnu-readline

  Not everyone is an emacs user, thus might not be familiar with all keybinds available. This article goes over some common and extra ones that are omnipresent all over software that rely on GNU readline.

• Creating your own TTF font on Linux
  https://gordonlesti.com/creating-a-handwritten-truetype-font-in-linux/

  Ever wondered if you could create your own font and how hard that would be, then this article is for you. It starts with letters on papers, scanning them, adjusting contrast, converting to vector graphic, from svg to character path, some adjustments, and here we go!

• Drag and drop integration with terminal
  https://blog.meain.io/2022/terminal-drag-and-drop/
  https://github.com/mwh/dragon

  While this works one way only, from terminal to other applications, it's something I've found myself requiring. I don't actually use the same method as in the post, I actually do the cumbersome part described in the intro: xdg-open . and drag the file from the file manager. It'd definitely be smoother with what's described here and it's actually genius to mix it with tmux.

• xcompose
  https://linux.die.net/man/3/xcompose

  You learn something everyday and last week I found that xcompose could actually be configured through a .XCompose in the home directory.

• UEFI boot
  https://www.happyassassin.net/posts/2014/01/25/uefi-boot-how-does-that-actually-work-then/

  A superbly written article about UEFI that covers many of the inner workings and misconceptions. If you have a few hours to spend, it's a highly recommended read.

• TPM Key Hierarchy
  https://ericchiang.github.io/post/tpm-keys/

  The latest TPM specs are very new. This is a sort of standard key hierarchy and usage for OS, similar to an HSM.

• runit
  http://smarden.org/runit/
  https://docs.voidlinux.org/config/services/index.html
  https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Runit

  In continuation with the series on init systems, this week we take a look at runit. It is an extremely simple init/supervision system based on directories and scripts.

• Tending your digital garden
  https://www.taniarascia.com/digital-gardening/

  This topic has been one that keep emerging in the current zeitgeist, the past 2-3 years the terms have gotten polished and now it's something people talk about more openly even in small update blogs (which I find refreshing to read in general).

• Sustainability in IT
  https://blog.siphos.be/2022/09/sustainability-in-IT/

  An excellent brainstorming about what it takes to be sustainable in IT.

• Losing the magic
  https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/915163/ba83480903b82cb8/

  The magic number at the start of structs were there because "The kernel community has, for many years now, tried to use type-safe interfaces rather than passing void pointers around, making it less likely that the wrong structure type will be passed into a function."

• SSH as a public service
  <gopher://phlog.z3bra.org/0/ssh-as-a-public-service.txt>

  Here's a neat trick to give public access to users via ssh that directly launches a special executable.

Life & Other

• 100 days to offload
  https://major.io/p/100-days-to-offload/

  A challenge that's super hard to achieve, unblocking your writer's block.

Thoughts

Not all who wander are lost, not all who are lost have wandered

https://www.publicstreet.org/derive

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• A tour of fzf
  https://www.redhat.com/sysadmin/fzf-linux-fuzzy-finder

  You know your tool is successful when lots of people start to talk about it in details, not just in a listicle but in deep details. If you haven't tried fzf yet, you're in for a life-changing paradigm.

• Inside the Linux CFS from 2.6
  https://developer.ibm.com/tutorials/l-completely-fair-scheduler/

  A follow up on last weeks 172 "Linux 2.6, the classic". This is a deeper dive into CFS and schedulers in general.

• The History and Future of Core Dumps in FreeBSD
  https://github.com/gwydirsam/bsd-coredump-history/blob/master/freebsd-coredump-history.org

  A paper going over how the coredumps work on FreeBSD, different types: full, mini, and text, and compres it with MacOS. It then goes to talk about future ideas regarding coredumps such as transfering over the network, compressing dumps, and how to modularized the dump code so that changing the behavior wouldn't need recompilation.

• Introduction to the Internet Protocols (1987)
  https://home.ifa.hawaii.edu/users/gmm/intro_ip/index.html

  An oldie doc about TCP/IP inner workings that is a blessing to read. "Of course this should be impossible, but well-designed networks are built to cope with "impossible" conditions."

• Wayland cool updates
  https://zamundaaa.github.io/wayland/2021/12/14/about-gaming-on-wayland.html
  https://www.phoronix.com/news/Wayland-Fractional-Scale-Ready
  https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal/issues/624
  https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal/pull/711

  A series of links discussion the introduction of fractional scaling in the Wayland proto, along with keyboard shortcut. The first link goes over how gaming rendering works on Wayland compared with X.

• mdoc (repost)
  https://mandoc.bsd.lv/man/mdoc.7.html

  A repost of issue 73 "mdoc". This is a one-page full documentation on how to write manpages using mdoc.

• OpenBSD Webzine
  https://webzine.puffy.cafe/issue-12.html

  I wasn't aware of this webzine project, it's pretty cool, sign up!

• Porting a Unix-like OS to your own CPU and compiler
  https://fuel.edby.coffee/posts/how-we-ported-xv6-os-to-a-home-built-cpu-with-a-home-built-c-compiler/
  https://nullpo-head.github.io/emcc-gaia-simu/xv6.html

  A behemoth student dream project. The team buils their own ISA, their own CPU, port xv6 to it, write their own stack for curses and more. Truly impressive.

• Unix's (technical) history is mostly old now
  https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/UnixHistoryMostlyOldNow

  An article that has stirred a lot of discussion about what change really means: does it stop at the kernel or does it include user-space too.

• A pragmatic approach to shell completion
  https://dev.to/rsteube/a-pragmatic-approach-to-shell-completion-4gp0
  https://medium.com/@browninfosecguy/powershell-pipeline-182ea25c622

  The author brings forward a way to generate shell completion scripts dynamically, that is compatible with multiple shells.

• Reasoning about colors
  https://notes.neeasade.net/color-spaces.html

  A post I should've shared a long time ago about color spaces and how to reason about them. Very informative!

Life & Other

• The Ultimate Guide to ffmpeg
  https://img.ly/blog/ultimate-guide-to-ffmpeg
  https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Media/Formats/Video_codecs

  A well-rounded and very approachable guide to ffmeg, from start to end. Long time ffmpeg users won't learn much but it's a great reminder, or a must if you've always wondered about video encoding/decoding.

• I/O is no longer the bottleneck
  https://benhoyt.com/writings/io-is-no-longer-the-bottleneck/

  An article that was controversial mostly because of its title. I agree with the general argument as its presented. It's somewhat similar to "A book on Algorithms For Modern Hardware" in issue 144.

• Programming paradigm can be applied to more tha one place
  http://boston.conman.org/2022/11/25.1

  If one thing is true it's that there often are clans and holy wars between programming language advocates. This articles takes a step back to theories to make us remember that paradigms are paradigms and the things we learn somewhere, even research programming language (See "Ownership and capability, in language and hardware" in 171), can often be applied somewhere else.

Thoughts

Niklaus Wirth, wrote "the belief that complex systems require armies of designers and programmers is wrong. A system that is not understood in its entirety, or at least to a significant degree of detail by a single individual, should probably not be built." Not only have we built such systems, all our collective livelihoods depend on them!

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• FreeBSD integration with RedHat IdM
  https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2022/11/17/connect-freebsd-freeipa-idm/

  I'm currently researching the topic of access control and I had stumbled upon the above RedHat solution of FreeIPA. The article goes into how it can be integrated with FreeBSD so it finds a purpose outside the corporate space.

• Solving software issues using hardware
  https://spectrum.ieee.org/computers-its-time-to-start-over

  In the past years we've seen a lot of software and hardware bugs leading to vulnerabilities (spectre and meltdown). There's a new mindset of compartmentalization at the hardware level, such as project CHERI.

• Averting excessive oopses
  https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/914878/dca7e15b44396f16/

  Oopses are kernel crashes, by default Linux keeps going trying to keep the system alive as much as possible. The researcher here found that this could possibly lead to security vulnerabilities, and so set up a way to monitor oopses from user-space along with a configurable hard-limit to them before rebooting cleanly. (NB: subscriber only content, if you have the ability it would be nice to contribute to LWN).

• Linux 2.6, the classic
  https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6530
  https://www.theregister.com/2022/10/02/linux_kernel_6_0_released/

  One of the most well-known version that came with a lot of new features such as a new O(1) scheduler with SMP scalability (which afterward has been improved). I like how changes were explained properly and in an approachable way on linuxjournal, compare it with other articles about the latest stable release.

• The Orange Book
  http://ftp.ntu.edu.tw/pub/linux/libs/security/Orange-Linux/refs/Orange/Orange0-4.html#ss4.1

  A reference book that set up clear definition of what secure systems requirements and different levels should be about, along with a discussion on MAC.
  "Secure systems will control, through use of specific security features, access to information such that only properly authorized individuals, or processes operating on their behalf, will have access to read, write, create, or delete information. Six fundamental requirements are derived from this basic statement of objective: four deal with what needs to be provided to control access to information; and two deal with how one can obtain credible assurances that this is accomplished in a trusted computer system."

• Beowulf cluster
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beowulf_cluster
  http://ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/docs/HOWTO/archive/Beowulf-HOWTO.html#ss2.2
  https://webhome.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/brahma/Resources/beowulf/

  This is the equivalent of RAID but for a computer cluster. There's a link to the original Beowulf cluster project ran for NASA. Similar to the Orange Book, we have different classifications of clusters.

• An unexpected bug
  http://blog.pkh.me/p/35-investigating-why-steam-started-picking-a-random-font.html

  2038 is indeed going to be very fun, ... Get ready!

• OpenBSD immutable userland, the quest continues
  https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20221120115616

  The syscall to make mmap immutable mimmutable is close to done.

• OpenZFS on OS X
  https://openzfsonosx.org/wiki/Install
  https://github.com/openzfsonosx
  https://support.apple.com/en-lb/guide/security/sec8e454101b/web

  Since OS X is a BSD derivative, you'd think it would be simple to run ZFS on it however it isn't. It is loaded as a kexts, kernel extension, which usually need to be signed, loaded at boot, and explicitly enabled.

• Criticizing Computers
  https://annasofia.xyz/2022/11/05/criticizing-computers.html

  Your typical rant about software quality decline, over-reliance on hardware improvement, and more. The article talks about pipeable programs, and argues that most GUIs aren't, see also "Relational Pipes" in 137.

Life & Other

• Discussion on state machines
  https://www.embeddedrelated.com/showarticle/543.php

  I found that this article did a good job at covering the topic of state machines implementation using C.

Thoughts

"You know what's truly weird about any financial crisis? We made it up. Currency, money, finance, they're all social inventions. When the sun comes up in the morning it's shining on the same physical landscape, all the atoms are in place." ― Bruce Sterling

And now that there are talks of central banks digital currency along with cryptocurrency amongst others, plus a global economic crisis, this quote is even more obvious. We're left dumbstruck wondering why all this is happening.

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• The path to Linux
  https://www.abortretry.fail/p/the-path-to-linux

  One of these articles that take you on a historical journey leading to the present situation, with pitstops on details concerning government and corporate interests.

• Simple pipelines to help machine learning training
  https://jott.live/markdown/ml_pipes

  Making programs pipeline friendly is something that could make some tasks easier. Here's an example of doing this for a machine learning project.

• Why the ISO format has to die
  https://easyos.org/about/why-the-iso-format-has-to-die.html

  A series of posts and points on why images format on USB should be used instead of ISO.

• Debugging slow shell
  https://pickard.cc/posts/why-does-zsh-start-slowly/

  I remember similar posts in the newsletter about finding out why a shell starts slowly such as "Making zsh faster" in 79, but I'm sure there were others. This is one is similar but uses a profiling tool.

• immutable userland mappings on OpenBSD (Applied)
  https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=166203784715942

  The changes from "immutable userland mappings on OpenBSD" in 161 that are finally taking place.

• Ownership and capability, in language and hardware
  https://github.com/microsoft/verona
  https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/ctsrd/cheri/
  https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/ctsrd/cheri/cheribsd.html

  If you've heard of Rust's ownership mechanism, then you'll also understand Verona ownership idea as something similar. CHERI, or Capability Hardware Enhanced RISC Instructions, are extensions to RISC ISAs to add memory-protection and compartmentalization.

• OpenBSD Kiosk
  https://dataswamp.org/~solene/2022-10-11-openbsd-kiosk.html

  We previously shared a couple of posts about kiosks in general, such as "Kiosks" in 154 and "Unix in the library" in 32. This one is also straight forward, a few of lines to start a browser in fullscreen.

• MPV with Pipewire backend and Xorg present
  https://www.phoronix.com/news/MPV-0.35-Released
  https://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/lib/libXpresent/tree/README.md
  https://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/proto/presentproto/tree/presentproto.txt

  Two updates that you can look forward to in MPV. I didn't know about the present extension either so I've added links to check it out.

Life & Other

• Learning to learn
  https://cambridge-community.org.uk/professional-development/gswmeta/index.html
  https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0027432114552569

  Metacognition is often indirectly mentioned in the tech world. I believe it could possibly be helpful to learn about what learning to learn is about.

• Preserving content for the future
  https://www.dpconline.org/docs/miscellaneous/events/270-future-r-d-wheatley/file
  https://blog.archive.org/2022/11/15/digital-books-wear-out-faster-than-physical-books/
  https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2003/jan/09/onlinesupplement3

  Bitrot is something we mentioned in other issues, however I couldn't find those about digital dark age, so here we are.

Thoughts

"The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images." — Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

Don't forget the online sphere is often a digital world of facades and templates. The rules we make up are all spectacles that we willingly choose to abide by. It's good to be reminded of that.

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Overview of "The Linux Scheduler: a Decade of Wasted Cores"
  https://blog.acolyer.org/2016/04/26/the-linux-scheduler-a-decade-of-wasted-cores/

  Similar to "papers we love", this newsletter goes over papers and explain them in a more approachable manner. On the paper itself, it's a fantastic one that dives into the issues with how the Linux scheduler was initially made without multi-core and NUMA in mind, which led to a lot of slow downs.

• Linux Boot Partitions
  https://0pointer.net/blog/linux-boot-partitions.html

  This is in continuation with "UAPI — User-Space API". The blog posts goes into depth into what the current boot partition space on Linux is like and how it possibly could evolve.

• ZFS Boot menu
  https://zfsbootmenu.org/
  https://github.com/zbm-dev/zfsbootmenu/

  In contrast with the above, we take a look at a ZFS boot menu. The bootloader is implemented as a small Linux distro and allows manipulating ZFS pools that would contain different images/OSes.

• backlight testing on Linux
  https://hansdegoede.livejournal.com/27130.html

  A change to /sys/class/backlight that should make things simpler. If you got two entries in there, then it will affect you.

• If your process starts with X it might be acting differently on X
  https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20221105222012.4226-1-Jason@zx2c4.com/
  https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/blob/main/src/gallium/frontends/va/image.c#L240
  https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-DRM-Process-Start-With-X

  A kludge that was committed so that a process wouldn't affect another, and got forgotten.

• How To Corrupt An SQLite Database File
  https://www.sqlite.org/howtocorrupt.html

  SQLite being a file-based db, you'd guessed there are a few ways to corrupt it, from rogue processed, to use of the wrong file descriptor, filesystem issues, hardware failures, etc..

• Unix in automotive
  https://blog.centos.org/2022/03/centos-automotive-sig-announces-new-autosd-distro/
  https://web.archive.org/web/20110903112040/http://www.mp3car.com/show-off-your-project/76345-2004-subaru-impreza-wrx-carpc-install.html
  https://docs.automotivelinux.org/en/lamprey/

  It's been quite some time that Unix systems have made their ways into the automotive industry, both as entertainment system and as core piece. While this has always been possible, we now see more corporate touch pushing it. See also "Kernel Fastboot" in 140.

• Another container from-scratch explanation
  https://earthly.dev/blog/chroot/

  This one emphasizes on chroot, even though there are countless other syscalls involved in containarization. See also "Container piece by piece" in 142, "Containers from scratch" in 51 and "Docker Internals" in 105.

• User-Agent Reduction
  https://www.akamai.com/blog/developers/user-agent-reduction

  I really thought that these days user-agents were mostly useless. Yet, I couldn't be further from the truth, firewalls, tracking/ads, and filter tech are all using it.

• f.lux, but for your house
  https://tylercipriani.com/blog/2022/10/17/whole-house-circadian-lighting-with-home-assistant/

  This is an over engineered upgrade on ambient light systems. See also "Want to try something more responsive than of flux/redshift?".

Life & Other

• More ideas on what to blog/discuss about
  https://simonwillison.net/2022/Nov/6/what-to-blog-about/

  It's tough to write and share what you learn, blogging is the best way to keep track of what you were doing, a sort of diary.

Thoughts

I have always wished for my computer to be as easy to use as my telephone; my wish has come true because I can no longer figure out how to use my telephone." - Aloha (on an HN thread)

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• UAPI — User-Space API
  https://uapi-group.org/specifications/
  https://github.com/uapi-group/specifications

  Currently three sets of specifications, boot loader menu entry specs, an extension of the XDG base dir, and discovery of usual partitions under GPT based on uuid.

• Hishtory
  https://github.com/ddworken/hishtory

  I'm one of these person that keeps very big shell history for later reuse. This project is a more advanced version of that mindset.

• OpenSSL Sec Advisory
  https://www.openssl.org/news/secadv/20221101.txt

  It seems a lot of issues in TLS comes from parsing ASN.1 X.509 certs. Even with all the static checks and sanity, we're not fully covered.

• The Golden Age of Ballooning
  https://9front.org/releases/2022/10/31/0/

  Development never ceases, if you weren't aware, the release pace is every 6 months

• Powertop
  https://github.com/fenrus75/powertop

  We've already seen this topic but it's always a great reminder. See also issue "Linux power management" in issue 51.

• Setting up home permissions
  https://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20221031#qa

  A pretty basic overview of the typical Unix permissions and recommendations on limiting it for home directories.

• Daemon Management Under systemd
  https://www.usenix.org/system/files/login/articles/login_june_06_jedrzejewski-szmek.pdf

  A general overview of multiple aspects of systemd's daemon management.

Life & Other

• Political critics of software, does it matter?
  https://unixsheikh.com/articles/is-criticizing-tech-on-political-grounds-valid.html

  A lot of valid points have been raised in this article. What do you think?

Thoughts

No == "can't you be more creative than that?"

The newsletter is a bit shorter this week, I was on holiday and didn't get the time to read more content.

Have a great start of end of day, wherever you are in the world!

Archive

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https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• FreeBSD's package management quick history
  https://klarasystems.com/articles/a-quick-look-at-the-history-of-package-management-on-freebsd/

  A look at some of the history of FreeBSD's package managers, from inception port tree, to the newer pkgng.

• Config file for malloc
  https://man.openbsd.org/OpenBSD-5.3/man5/malloc.conf.5#MALLOC_OPTIONS

  I'm not sure if this is present on other systems, but openBSD offers an malloc.conf file with different options ranging from security to optimization, but mostly security.

• Rethink Service Managers
  https://skarnet.com/projects/service-manager.html

  The author of the s6 process supervision system takes us on a ride to understand the requirement around service management.

• How the clipboard works
  https://whynothugo.nl/journal/2022/10/21/how-the-clipboard-works/

  We already dived a bit into the keyboard (X11) in "Dear old vain teaches us yet again" in 34 and "X11 Clipboard" in 9. This one focuses on Wayland, which clipboard management standard was a real pain before (and probably still now).

• Is the Unity Desktop better or good today?
  https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/unity-desktop-2022.html

  If you've ever used Ubuntu with Unity desktop then none of the content of that page should be new. It stands as a review in a time where Ubuntu has moved to GNOME and where Unity is seen as a soon-to-be-unmaintained project.

• Free space with ZFS
  https://taras.glek.net/post/curious-case-of-maintaining-sufficient-free-space-with-zfs/

  A case of delayed deletion on ZFS due to multiple factors, be it because it's transactional, because of multiple checks, because of journaling, or deduplication checks, queueing, etc..

• Helping people with issues on their Linux machine
  https://matklad.github.io/2022/10/19/why-linux-troubleshooting-advice-sucks.html

  Most of the comments related to this article rotate around different mentalities in sending feedbacks: by providing snippets to try out directly, or to actually spend some time to understand what's happening, or a combination of both, or maybe just a RTFM.

• What can you epoll
  https://darkcoding.net/software/linux-what-can-you-epoll/

  Async/non-block everything to make it event/notification driven!

• A consideration to drop i486 in Linux
  https://itwire.com/business-it-news/open-source/removing-i486-support-in-linux-only-at-discussion-stage-torvalds.html

  Some system pick which older hardware they support, others choose to keep up backward compatibility with toasters.

• Another blog posts about setting up a smartcard
  https://pandasauce.org/post/how-i-picked-set-up-smartcard/

  This one relies on NitroKey and GPG.

• Unix time issues
  https://www.netmeister.org/blog/epoch.html

  A blog post listing a couple of issues with unix time, differences between Unix-like OSes, and a lot of play with Y2K38.

Life & Other

• Do you want to be tracked :D
  https://noyb.eu/en/where-did-all-reject-buttons-come

  Some great numbers on these cookie consent popups.

Thoughts

Why think! We have computers to do that for us. — Jean Rostand

Jean Rostand was a half-baked futurist/scholar in biology and other fields, interested in human evolution along with the degeneration of mankind and how to remediate it. A more famous quote of him is "Kill one man, and you are a murderer. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill them all, and you are a God."

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• MultiPath TCP
  https://www.multipath-tcp.org/
  http://multipath-tcp.org/data/MultipathTCP-netsys.pdf
  https://freebsdfoundation.org/project/multipath-tcp-for-freebsd/
  https://www.freebsd.org/status/report-2020-10-2020-12.html#Scalable-routing-multipath-support
  https://www.multipath-tcp.org/pmwiki.php/Users/Android

  MultiPath TCP is a cool concept that is starting to gain more traction, along with other protocols and stacks that allow consistent and reliable use over different networks and interfaces (mosh for instance). Android devices also have the option to use WiFi and mobile data at the same time.

• Lash#Cat9 a newcomer to the Arcan land
  https://arcan-fe.com/2022/10/15/whipping-up-a-new-shell-lashcat9/

  A rethinking of what shell issues are and how it could be better. As usual Arcan is driving its own future, with novel ideas, touching things others wouldn't even try in the desktop environment space. It's a sort of mix of fish shell along with more ideas. Kudos!

• nosh
  https://web.archive.org/web/20151115152101/http://homepage.ntlworld.com/jonathan.deboynepollard/Softwares/nosh.html
  https://web.archive.org/web/20151023055305/http://homepage.ntlworld.com/jonathan.deboynepollard/FGA/daemontools-family.html
  https://github.com/zoujiaqing/nosh/tree/master/source

  To continue the series on init/service managers, we're looking at nosh, which is now apparently unmaintained. It is a pretty advanced init system, well-thought, covering multiple features in a nice way. It is part of the daemontools family, which is explained in the second link.

• Tracing Linux kernel with retsnoop
  https://nakryiko.com/posts/retsnoop-intro/
  https://github.com/anakryiko/retsnoop

  retsnoop is a tool that relies on BPF to help debug and trace Linux kernel issues.

• User input cleaning
  https://codeofhonor.substack.com/p/escaping-user-input-is-ridonkulously

  Some thought from someone in the security industry about the security theatre that sometimes happens around user-input sanitization. There's good ideas in there, and a lot of fun rant too.

• A good personality
  https://linux.die.net/man/2/personality
  https://linux.die.net/man/8/setarch

  These are two features that are used to swap between architectures or binary formats. I've seen personality mainly used in chroot environment to run 32 bit on 64 bit systems, but if anyone got more use of this let me know, I'm interested.

• Udica
  https://github.com/containers/udica

  Generating your own SELinux policies is a painstaking task. You should most often rely on the reference policy (see issue 165). With a tool such as udica, you can more easily generate profiles for container scenarios (at least the usual: docker, podman, containerd, etc..).

• KataOS
  https://www.theregister.com/2022/10/17/google_kata_os/
  https://opensource.googleblog.com/2022/10/announcing-kataos-and-sparrow.html

  You've heard of ChromeOS, Android, and Fuchsia, now it's time for KataOS.

• Exotic Silicon Blog
  https://archive.ph/3gziv
  https://archive.ph/Drd9k
  https://research.exoticsilicon.com/articles/candlelit_console
  https://research.exoticsilicon.com/series/real_programming

  A truly amazing and full of inner jokes blog but that unfortunately went offline. Peruse whatever is left, and if you can find better archives of it, please let me know.

• FreeBSD's Firecracker
  https://www.daemonology.net/blog/2022-10-18-FreeBSD-Firecracker.html
  https://firecracker-microvm.github.io/
  https://github.com/firecracker-microvm/firecracker/blob/main/docs/getting-started.md

  Firecracker is a VMM, virtual machine manager/monitor. The big news is that it now runs on FreeBSD. Now why run this instead of another VMM, I'm not sure, but there's a lot of AWS branding on this.

Life & Other

• Better check this
  https://ciechanow.ski/archives/

  A blog full of explorable explanations done beautifully. See also "Awesome GAMES for kids!" in 23 and "This week we have fun in space" in 100.

Thoughts

"Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes." — Oscar Wilde

This is related to the quote in issue 125, "Experience is what you get when you didn't get what you wanted.".

All and all, it seems that anything wrong, unexpected, and mistakes, will lead to more experience. Isn't that a tautology: Anything new will be an experience.

Archive

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https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Beyond process supervisors
  http://catern.com/supervisors.html

  In continuation with the series on init systems, let's read more about process supervision and beyond. The article makes the point that not all long-running child-processes should necessarily be daemons, they could rely on their normal-process parent instead.

• Historical GUI
  https://guidebookgallery.org/

  A compendium gallery of user interfaces (gui, components, and icons) from different OSes, along with tutorials, ads, and lots of great content. It was shared on the forums by seninha but I thought it was too good not to push again in the newsletter.

• Unix Signals Age
  https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/SignalsHowOld

  Unix history has become it's own research topic, people become archaeologist of the gritty details in it and attempt to discover more and more.

• Subtitle Editors
  https://www.debugpoint.com/3-great-subtitle-editors-in-linux-systems/

  I had never really given any thought about such software before. Now if needed I could possibly write my own subtitle files or edit existing ones.

• NILFS on Linux
  https://dataswamp.org/~solene/2022-10-05-linux-nilfs-filesystem.html

  NILFS is a special file system that not many have heard of but that has a cool feature worth mentioning. Namely, the snapshot/checkpoint feature is what the article focuses on.

• tar without gzip option, is that fast? https://lowendbox.com/blog/how-much-faster-is-making-a-tar-archive-without-gzip/

  With tar we often remember a few flags and reuse them as-is but there comes a time when it's not necessary to compress the archive. In such case, compressing will consume way more processing power than what you'd actually want, especially if you'll extract the data right after.

• Perceptual Hashing
  https://matt-rickard.com/perceptual-hashing

  I swear I thought linked something about perceptual hashing before. This is somewhat related to differential privacy (see issue 45).

• Firefox speed up on macOS
  https://hacks.mozilla.org/2022/10/improving-firefox-responsiveness-on-macos/

  I had no clue Firefox uses its own memory allocator. We also learn about abstraction of lock mechanism that aren't as efficient, and the "hack" to make it faster on macOS.

• Embedded Linux
  https://ubuntu.com/blog/what-is-embedded-linux
  https://ubuntu.com/blog/embedded-systems

  A well-rounded quick overview of the Linux embedded landscape (Apart from the Ubuntu Core placement). In continuation with our review of RTOS in last week's issue.

• How wine works
  https://werat.dev/blog/how-wine-works-101/

  If you've ever wondered how wine worked then this is for you, and even if you didn't, then it's still insightful. It dives into the linker, executable format, and the actual reason why we say that we don't need an emulator.

Life & Other

• Ripples on the brain
  https://nautil.us/how-we-remember-last-weekend-240328/

  A theory related to the soft-problem of consciousness that argues ripples are behind it.

• Get that habit out of your mind
  https://bakadesuyo.com/2022/10/ritual-2/

  We all have habit/routines/rituals that we perform. What lies behind them, are they beneficial, how so?

Thoughts

The only truly secure system is one that is powered off, cast in a block of concrete and sealed in a lead-lined room with armed guards. — Gene Spafford

Is that why cold storage is great?

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
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Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Composable desktop environment
  https://mmcthrow-musings.blogspot.com/2020/04/a-proposal-for-flexible-composable.html

  Sounds like the author of the first post has never heard of freedesktop standards, dbus, desktop portals, Arcan, and even of Plan9's plumbing. See also this thread on the forums.

• Password expiry on Linux with chage
  https://linux.die.net/man/1/chage
  https://linux.die.net/man/8/faillock
  https://man.openbsd.org/login.conf

  I'm not sure what's the equivalent command on OpenBSD but the same feature is present there too.

• The Inevitability of Failure: The Flawed Assumption of Security in Modern Computing Environments
  https://web.archive.org/web/20070621155813/http://jya.com/paperF1.htm

  A classic paper pointing out some of the features that would be needed at the OS level, not application level, to have a secure environment.

• Comparing SystemTap and bpftrace
  https://lwn.net/Articles/852112/

  There are a few system tracing utilities, DTrace, SystemTap, bpftrace, etc.. They make more sense when comparing them together in a generic overview, like here.

• Printing the easy way
  https://unixorn.github.io/post/home-assistant-printer-power-management/

  With smart devices these days it's pretty simple to setup such system. (A huge license on a one line file, are you as surprised as me?).

• Don't reinvent the wheel
  https://ilya-sher.org/2020/01/04/use-dumb-shell-dont-reinvent-the-wheel/

  The premise of the article is mostly based on interpreting an argument as a slipery slope. The discussion around these types of articles can bring some good ideas.

• Real-time programming on Linux
  https://shuhaowu.com/blog/2022/01-linux-rt-appdev-part1.html

  A great, pragmatic, and understandable series of articles on real-time programming. Highly recommended!

• Modern unix
  https://github.com/ibraheemdev/modern-unix

  Want to change up from classic Unix userland, try to swap a few of the commands with these fancy colorful ones.

• InitKit
  https://github.com/InitKit/InitKit

  This week we're checking another init system, one also trying to be an in-place swap of systemd. The project is still in early phase and the docs are lacking, but the idea is promising.

• SELinux Reference Policy
  https://github.com/SELinuxProject/refpolicy/wiki

  Without this project, SELinux would be an extreme pain to use. It has presets for rules related to user, role, type, and sensitivity, all the goodies from SELinux.

Life & Other

• Eternal September
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

  Is that a rosy-retrospection, or do newcomers really spoil everything?

Thoughts

There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things. — Phil Karlton

Archive

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https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Emulating input devices
  https://docs.kernel.org/input/uinput.html
  https://github.com/ReimuNotMoe/ydotool

  uinput is a module that allows creating virtual devices on Linux to emulate input devices in user-space. An example of a tool that uses it is ydotool, it shows how you don't need necessarily to have a graphic server such as X11 to do these things.

• AWK, a better understanding of field manipulation
  https://kau.sh/blog/awk-1-oneliner-dollar-explanation/

  A rich explanation of an example that brings up many features of AWK and slowly but certainly makes us grasp the intricacies of it.

• Funky way to write crontab and achieve results
  https://blog.healthchecks.io/2022/09/schedule-cron-job-the-funky-way/

  A post about trying so much with a technology you reach a point where you can play with its intricacy, in this case its crontab syntax twists.

• Orderly
  https://github.com/andrewchambers/orderly
  https://github.com/andrewchambers/orderly/blob/master/man/orderly.1.md

  In continuation with our series on init and service manager systems, this week we take a look at "orderly". This project aims at a simple, linear, foreground running, service management and supervision system. It targets container environment but can be used anywhere.

• Port Knocking
  https://www.linux.com/news/critique-port-knocking/
  https://www.idealintegrations.net/what-is-port-knocking-and-why-should-you-use-it/
  https://linux.die.net/man/1/knockd

  Obfuscation-as-security or security through obscurity is not a very good security practice. Yet, as an additional layer of security it could help thwart simple attacks.

• The Insecurity of OpenBSD
  https://allthatiswrong.wordpress.com/2010/01/20/the-insecurity-of-openbsd/

  To implement strong access control, MAC, and isolation or instead to focus on minimizing attack surface and correctness. OpenBSD has chosen the later, however, recently with pledge/unveil we're seing that it's also implementing isolation in its own way.

• "X For Linux", but it's always "Linux in X"
  https://github.com/haileys/doslinux
  https://github.com/macbian-linux/macos-subsystem-for-linux
  https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/about

  This recent naming trend regarding emulating or running in a vm a Linux box within another OS is funny.

• Trying out Plan9 again
  https://boxbase.org/entries/2020/nov/1/return-to-plan9/

  There's always something to learn by exploring other OSes, especially Plan9. I wasn't aware of the wloc command, I would really like to have something as easy for X11/Wayland.

• Where do argc and argv come from?
  https://briancallahan.net/blog/20200808.html

  A dive into how argc/argv are passed to programs on OpenBSD (calling convention).

• A long running bug
  https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-AMD-Old-Chipset-WA

  A fix for old AMD hardware that was related to idle operation lead to downgrade for the efficiency of more modern processors which didn't need the fix. The new benchmarks are clearly showing that anyone with AMD should update to the latest kernel and will notice a difference.

Life & Other

• It always degenerates real quick on the internet
  https://fringeassociation.com/2019/01/07/2019-my-year-of-color/
  https://fringeassociation.com/2019/01/12/words-matter/

  An online example I caught in a book I was reading about how online comments and misrepresentation quickly happens online. In the comment section it starts to go downhill starting at "Alex"'s comment. This is related to "Social Cooling" in issue 160.

Thoughts

The most potent weapon of mass destruction is the humiliated mind — Dr Evelin Lindner

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Multiseat example usage
  https://www.apalrd.net/posts/2022/multiseat_intro/

  I've read a lot about multiseat systems but never really saw anyone use one. I've also heard it's used in car entertainment systems but I got no more info on that. See also "Multiseat" in 27.

• Linux kthreadd
  https://www.cs.fsu.edu/~cop4610t/lectures/project2/kthreads/kthreads.pdf
  https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17988526/what-is-kthreadd-process-and-children-and-how-it-is-different-from-init-and-chil
  https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/kernel-per-CPU-kthreads.txt
  https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/152819/how-interpret-kworker-threads-names
  https://access.redhat.com/discussions/683863
  https://man.openbsd.org/kthread

  kthreads on Linux are a barely documented feature of Linux, yet everyone asks themselves what is up with them showing up in the process tree with as parent PID 2 kthreadd. One simple explanation is that they are threads as kernel modules. The 5th link give at least an explanation of some of them, which is insightful when trying to debug what is taking a lot of processing. They are also present on OpenBSD but in a different way.

• Random PIDs
  http://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/sys/kern/kern_fork.c#rev1.8
  https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/stable/4/sys/kern/kern_fork.c#rev53842
  https://sysctl-explorer.net/kernel/ns_last_pid/
  https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/PidRollover

  We're used to random PIDs, at least that sounds like a good idea, but that wasn't always the case and still isn't the case on Linux. "If something can be random, make it random."

• Linux RNG's evolution
  https://www.zx2c4.com/projects/linux-rng-5.17-5.18/inside-linux-kernel-rng-presentation-sept-13-2022.pdf

  A look inside the Linux kernel RNG and its features and evolution.

• What's AppArmor
  https://medium.com/information-and-technology/so-what-is-apparmor-64d7ae211ed

  Unlike a lot of solutions for isolating software today, AppArmor is an easy MAC to use. It doesn't require modifying the source code like some other privilege separation implementations need (landlock/seccomp, capsicum, unveil/pledge, etc). It works by having a profile per application/path that will decide what access is allowed. Like the name implies, it is suited per App policies, and not really as a system-wide access control.

• Eavesdropping On Serial
  https://hackaday.com/2022/09/07/linux-fu-eavesdropping-on-serial/
  https://github.com/geoffmeyers/interceptty

  A post about interceptty, how to use it and interpret its output.

• InitWare
  https://github.com/InitWare/InitWare
  https://github.com/InitWare/InitWare/wiki/Architectural-plan

  In continuation with last week's "dinit" of 162, we take a look at another lesser-known init system/service manager InitWare. It is highly portable and modular. It offers a job scheduler, a logging system, and more. Internally, it's a sort of in-place replacement for systemd while making every piece optional instead of monolithic. It has unit files and uses svcctl, sessionctl, and evlogctl as replacement for systemctl, loginctl, and journalctl commands respectively. An interesting project to follow if you like some of the ideas of systemd but not the all-encompassing system you'd have to buy into.

• OS-Release
  https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/os-release.html

  I never really pondered about why this file exists or if there were others like it, I just knew it was sort of standard.

• Breaking LUKS encryption
  https://eforensicsmag.com/breaking-luks-encryption-by-oleg-afonin/

  While the article focuses on Elcomsoft Forensic's proprietary tool on Windows, the first few parts are good insights into disk encryption features.

• Avoid loosing what's important
  https://xenodium.com/rm-important-txt-oh-sht/

  This post shows how to use the system trash (here macOS) interfacing with emacs. This is related to a discussion on nixers and the specs.

Life & Other

• scooby-doo by-doo
  https://minikino.org/articles/why-do-we-do-what-we-do/

  "To fully appreciate a great ending, I think you must first understand the beginning and the middle." Related to last week's "Need for closure", here we can clearly see it in the intro.

• Reasons you aren't updating your personal site
  https://brianlovin.com/writing/reasons-you-arent-updating-your-personal-site

  A couple of reasons why it's hard to maintain an activity in general, I think all of the ideas could be extended for any hobbies.

Thoughts

• Thought Terminating Cliché (bis)
  https://prowritingaid.com/thought-terminating-cliche

  It's an idea we've dealt with in a previous newsletter but that I think should be reviewed now and then.

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• A look at the future after POSIX
  https://www.usenix.org/publications/loginonline/transcending-posix-end-era

  The article summarizes some of POSIX abstractions, files, processes, vm, etc.. To then propose novel ideas that go beyond them: computation offloading to domain specific cores, async IO, cross machine APIs, etc..

• BSD Auth
  https://blog.lambda.cx/posts/how-bsd-authentication-works/

  BSD Auth, originating from BSD/OS, wasn't initially part of OpenBSD but the choice was made to ditched PAM in favor of it. In a way, it's similar to PAM, one big difference is the use of external programs and not libraries.

• PAM Duress
  https://github.com/nuvious/pam-duress

  I think that's one of the example of something that solves really well a problem you didn't even think you could have.

• If it ain't broke don't fix it or should we release more often
  https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/balancing-if-it-aint-broke-dont-fix-it-vs-release-early-and-often

  The type of blog posts I like: lots of life stories, some brainstorming, but everything left to the reader to assess, no big conclusion only hints and ideas. See also "Google's Linux" in 156.

• The chrome is a webpage
  <chrome://browser/content/browser.xhtml>
  https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/file/tip/browser/base/content/browser.xhtml

  The links above are only relevant to Firefox users. I had been searching for the old browser.xul page, however it seems to have changed to the above xhtml one. Obviously, this is can be customized via the userChrome.css too.

• Put everything in the kernel, it makes it faster!
  https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/networking/tls.html
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-kernel_web_server

  There's a recent addition in Linux, it's TLS in the kernel. It reminded me of the in-kernel web-server that used to be there, along with all its flaws, which are probably going to be replicated here too.

• Netlink
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netlink

  Related to the previous link, netlink is an IPC between userspace and kernelspace. What's nice about it is that it uses the usual socket interface.

• Auditing
  https://goteleport.com/blog/linux-audit/
  https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/audit/
  https://github.com/openbsm/openbsm

  FreeBSD audit is based on the POSIX.1e draft using the open BSM format for storage and interaction. Meanwhile, Linux uses it's own recipe for auditing but the mindset is mostly the same.

• dinit
  https://github.com/davmac314/dinit/
  https://davmac.org/projects/dinit/man-pages-html/dinit-service.5.html

  dinit is an interesting dependency manager/init system, it's got a lot of things down. I'm thinking that we should we do a round-robin tour of init systems in the newsletter, let me know what you think of that idea.

• A FreeBSD WiFi Setup
  https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2022/09/14/freebsd-cope-with-wifi-fuckup/

  Setting up WiFi on FreeBSD is a pain, this article regroups a couple of tricks to go around the issue.

Life & Other

• Need for closure
  https://psychology.fandom.com/wiki/Need_for_closure
  https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NoEnding

  One of the reason why I enjoy the sci-fi genre is that often the stories end ambiguously, leaving room for the imagination.

Thoughts

Your sixth sense works quickly and is not prone to second guessing — Nicholas Epley

We tend to think we got skills we sometimes don't have. One of them is reading other's minds, we can't do that.

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Libinput and handling evdev
  https://who-t.blogspot.com/2018/07/why-its-not-good-idea-to-handle-evdev.html
  https://wayland.freedesktop.org/libinput/doc/latest/

  An article that shows how it's not as simple as it seems to handle input devices. See also "Gestures Related Stuff" in 145, and "Libinput and Synaptics driver" in 119.

• Landlock
  https://infosecadalid.com/2021/08/19/introduction-to-landlock/

  Landlock is the equivalent of OpenBSD unveil but for Linux systems. Meanwhile, seccomp is the equivalent of OpenBSD pledge. See also "Security on top of seccomp" in 143.

• A Brief History of Sudo
  https://www.sudo.ws/sudo/history.html

  Sometimes it's good to review history, even if just for personal curiosity.

• nologin
  https://man.archlinux.org/man/nologin.8

  You can simply lock a machine by creating the file /etc/nologin, did you know that?

• vsyscall and vDSO on Linux
  https://lwn.net/Articles/446528/
  https://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/kinetic/en/man7/vdso.7.html

  Ever heard of vdso on Linux, then time to read a bit about it and learn what it consists of.

• immutable userland mappings on OpenBSD
  https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20220902100648
  https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=166203784715942&w=2

  A new userland attack minimization feature has been added to OpenBSD. This one is very useful, mitigating overflow attacks and injection to run arbitrary code, it's going to make this almost impossible for attackers. Good stuff!

• Oberon, Plan9, and Inferno
  https://blog.tsr-podcast.com/index.php/2021/05/13/episode-76-oberon-plan-9-inferno/

  I had no clue an OS has a zooming user interface as a default UI (see). As for the rest, I'll let you enjoy the read.

• Linux system activity reporter
  https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/how-use-sar-system-activity-reporter

  A basic and straight forward tutorial on running sar on your system.

• FUSE for macOS
  https://www.fuse-t.org/

  This isn't actually a kernel extension, as explained, it's a translation layer from FUSE to NFS, which in theory would apply to other systems than macOS (but wouldn't be as efficient as normal FUSE).

Life & Other

• We've all been there and felt the pain
  https://cfenollosa.com/blog/after-self-hosting-my-email-for-twenty-three-years-i-have-thrown-in-the-towel-the-oligopoly-has-won.html

  Are you still receiving this newsletter? Then we're good for now!

• Task conflicts vs relationship conflicts
  https://www.collaboration-dynamics.com/blog/m3dtj2s0gyx13zy453ai19ommvla1t

  "Hold your identity lightly", that's something we need to keep in mind more often.

Thoughts

"Clothes make the man", "don't judge a book by its cover"
"birds of feather flock together", "opposites attract"
"just be yourself", "when in Rome, do as the Romans do"

We just got to admit sometimes, we have no clue what we're doing.

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• privsep/privdrop
  https://medium.com/@jan.schreib/introduction-into-privilege-dropping-in-c-b0dca6f47b82

  Privilege separation and dropping are practices that are now more and more apparent when developing software. It's something that is obvious but that needs to be said out loud. Additionally, there are system calls in different OS that are being added to facilitate this.

• Minijail
  https://github.com/google/minijail
  https://google.github.io/minijail/minijail0.1
  https://google.github.io/minijail/minijail0.5

  Minijail is a tool that I've seen only used with Chrome. However, the idea is quite good, it's a wrapper tool over multiple Linux security features. systemd does similar things for services, but doesn't have such command line interface.

• Secure coding standards
  https://wiki.sei.cmu.edu/confluence/display/c/SEI+CERT+C+Coding+Standard
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CERT_Coding_Standards

  This page regroups a really good list of secure practices, have a look, browse around. It's based on SEI CERT standard guidelines.

• Custom info in extended attributes
  https://blog.siphos.be/2013/06/using-extended-attributes-for-custom-information/

  Extended attributes aren't standardized, so these commands will change depending on the OS and how they are implemented. These can be used as metadata on Linux by using the user namespace. Now that might give some ideas for CTF challenges.

• Syscalls list
  https://john-millikin.com/unix-syscalls

  A huge catalog of system call invocation and workings on different Unix-like systems. In relation with the previous link check the calls having attr in them.

• Tasty Wafers
  https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2022/01/12/5-5-mm-in-1-25-nanoseconds/
  https://en.algorithmica.org/hpc/cpu-cache/latency/

  One of these cool hardware stories where you learn so much from all the small details. I've added some docs on how to measure CPU cache latency.

• Bypassing aliases
  https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/bash-bypass-alias-command-on-linux-macos-unix/

  While the article says it's for MacOS, it applies to other Unix-like OS too. There's probably a few alias-bypass tricks you were not aware in there, at least I did learn a few.

• Raw sockets
  https://linux.die.net/man/7/raw
  https://squidarth.com/networking/systems/rc/2018/05/28/using-raw-sockets.html
  https://www.schoenitzer.de/blog/2018/Linux%20Raw%20Sockets.html
  https://stevendanna.github.io/blog/2013/06/23/a-short-sock-raw-adventure/

  Ever wanted to implement your own transport layer protocol, then raw socket is a must. It also let's you explore raw packets (duh) and let you learn about how to parse them (but there's Wireshark too for that).

• Unstripping
  https://lock.cmpxchg8b.com/symbols.html

  If you've heard of DWARD, then get ready to learn about STABS, a deprecating debugging format. See also "WordPerfect for UNIX" in 154.

• Intro to pipewire
  https://bootlin.com/blog/an-introduction-to-pipewire/

  Another great intro that covers well most pieces of pipewire.

Life & Other

• Stick to Tinkering
  https://walid.dev/blog/stick-to-tinkering/
  https://www.hanselman.com/blog/systems-thinking-as-important-as-ever-for-new-coders

  It's been shared around everywhere, but I feel it's a great article, pondering on the nature of our work.

• Social Cooling
  https://vadimkravcenko.com/shorts/the-silent-majority/
  https://reasonandmeaning.com/2017/10/31/what-is-social-cooling/
  https://venam.nixers.net/blog/psychology/2021/04/16/internet_communication_narrative_control_part4_section1_paralysis.html

  Dismiss the intro of the silent majority article, also sorry for my shameless plug of my writing. All of these deals with the topic of who talks online and who is vocal and trying to be representative. See also "Language and programming" in 147.

• Not getting locked out
  https://log.pyratebeard.net/entry/20220830-a_well-fortified_position.html

  A follow up on "tied up, locked out" of issue 151.

Thoughts

Prevention is better than cure.

It's definitely better to be proactive than reactive. Yet, we can't be proactive with everything, we all have a limited amount of power.

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• chattr and chflags
  https://blog.ononoki.org/chattr-and-lsattr-usage/
  https://www.unix.com/man-page/OSX/1/chflags/
  https://www.linuxintheshell.com/2013/04/23/episode-028-extended-attributes-lsattr-and-chattr/

  chflags for BSD-like systems and chattr on Linux systems are per-filesystem utilities that allow setting extended attributes that control what happens to a file. Some of these extended attributes require elevated permission to be set on files. Indirectly, this can be used for access control, namely immutability or making files read-only or undeletable.

• Common Criteria
  https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/common-criteria
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Criteria

  Common criteria is a stringent security evaluation for OS along with its hardware, the whole computer system. There are different levels of assurance that can be reached, the last one even requiring a formally verified design and testing of the whole system. Most of the common criteria systems are embedded and often unheard of in daily life, things such as sim cards that have a small OS with a small attack vector.

• IKEv2 and VPNs
  https://www.cactusvpn.com/beginners-guide-to-vpn/what-is-ikev2/
  https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/StrongSwan
  https://www.strongswan.org/download.html
  https://github.com/sshuttle/sshuttle
  https://youtu.be/WVDQEoe6ZWY

  The word "VPN" has been twisted to a non-sense marketing buzzword rotating around some arguable "privacy feature" in the same way "anti-virus" were brought to the general public, through FUD. Yet, for those who use it practically everyday to connect to servers, often separated from public internet, and do sysadmin stuffs, it has a totally different meaning which non-technical users subjected to the previous buzzword wouldn't necessarily understand. I've shared a few articles showing the IKEv2 protocol (forgive me because I couldn't find one without at least one ad for their own "service"), and how to setup a client using StrongSwan. If all fails, go for ssh tunneling, be it with wrappers like sshuttle, or directly with binding.

• systrace — if you haven't heard, it's not the same as strace
  http://www.citi.umich.edu/u/provos/systrace/
  https://man.openbsd.org/OpenBSD-5.9/systrace
  https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-cvs&m=146161509612179&w=2
  https://www.linux.com/news/add-extra-layer-security-systrace/

  systrace is a tool that initially interactively traces system calls, to then generate a profile which can be used to whitelist the ones allowed by the application. Initially, it was part of the OpenBSD project but removed in 2016 in favor of pledge which doesn't require an external program but requires developers to write the rules explicitly within their code. The project has also been ported to Linux, but was not maintained, it achieved something similar to seccomp-bpf, also configuring a dynamic policy (as BPF rules) to filter system calls.

• ucspi-unix
  https://untroubled.org/ucspi-unix/

  ucspi stands for the UNIX Client-Server Program Interface. To put it simply, it's similar to what netcat does. Here we have the command line interface for creating unix domain sockets. After compiling the project you'll get both a unixclient and unixserver binary.

• Netflix's optimizations to serve data at 800Gb/s
  http://nabstreamingsummit.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/2022-Streaming-Summit-Netflix.pdf

  A fun presentation to go over to get a glimpse at optimizations done at the edge of computing.

• aio and io_uring
  https://lwn.net/Articles/903855/
  https://www.unix.com/man-page/FreeBSD/4/aio/
  https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=aio_read&apropos=0&sektion=0&manpath=SunOS+5.5.1&format

  io_uring isn't that easy to understand, but it seems like some next level-async mechanism that would allow fast block devices in user-space. aio on the other hand is much more sane.

• A text-based accounting software
  https://hledger.org/

  I'm not the type of person to use these anymore but maybe someone else will find this useful.

• I know I know
  https://trendoceans.com/ls-command-usage/

  Sometimes it's good to take some distance from the commands we use everyday and check if there are options we aren't aware of. See also issue 125 "Speedup ls(1) command by setting proper LS_COLORS environment variable."

• nmcli
  https://linuxcommandlibrary.com/man/nmcli-device

  I'm sharing that one specifically for the qr code trick, but the rest is fun too.

Life & Other

• A real capability-based system
  https://sandstorm.io/how-it-works#grains
  https://sandstorm.io/how-it-works#capabilities
  https://capnproto.org/

  Sandstorm is mostly used as a proof of concept of capabilities through a WYSIWYG suite. The particularity is that in the backend it implements a capability based system, permissions are dynamic, through tokens exchanged moving from person to person, with all the management around it. See also "Don’t separate designation from authority" in 158.

• Homoglyph attack
  https://util.unicode.org/UnicodeJsps/confusables.jsp?a=nixers.net

  We've had a couple of linked related to unicode before such as "Unicode" in 116, "Normalization of unicode" in 120, "Text on computers" in 137. Additionally, we've also dealt with normalization of URL on the forums in a thread called "having fun with domain names". What this can give rise to are homoglyph attacks.

Thoughts

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_satiation

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• POSIX.1e Draft
  http://wt.tuxomania.net/topics/1999_06_Posix_1e/download/Posix_1003.1e-990310.pdf

  In continuation with the series on access control "POSIX (draft) ACL" in 157. I finally finished reading the POSIX.1e draft so I'm linking it this week. This was a trend setting draft that set the pace for OS to implement some of the feature in their "trusted" extension, even though it was kept as a draft and never made part of the standard. It deals with Access Control Lists (ACL), Security Auditing, Capability, Mandatory Access Control (MAC), and Information Labeling (IL).

• Sandboxing using systemd
  https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/systemd-service-hardening.html
  https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/systemd-service-strengthening

  The security analysis feature of systemd services is quite a nice introspective one into learning what are the sandbox possibilities.

• mDNS on linux what is it how does it work
  https://wlog.viltstigen.se/articles/2021/05/02/mdns-for-linux/
  https://avahi.org/

  A follow up on last week's "How chromecast protocol works", we now take a look at mDNS and clients to interact with the protocol.

• Snapper and borgmatic
  http://snapper.io/
  https://torsion.org/borgmatic/

  These two tools are often mentioned in conjunction with one another, the first to take snapshots and move between them, and the second to backup the file using deduplication and host them safely somewhere else. There has been alreay a couple of links mentioning backup and restore, some related to Borg too such as "Deduplication" in 57. NB: "Supports Access Control Lists and Extended Attributes", this is a feature only a few tools with custom flags support, such as GNU version of tar (not standard flags).

• virtiofs
  https://virtio-fs.gitlab.io/
  https://wiki.qemu.org/Documentation/9p

  virtiofs is an interesting project, technically speaking. It uses FUSE on the host to transport message on a driver (VIRTIO device) in the guest as a standard PCI driver. Before this, share drives needed to speak a network protocol, such as 9p virtio.

• What's a (Linux) kernel headers package anyway
  https://www.labbott.name/blog/2019/11/16/what-s-a-kernel-headers-package-anyway/

  Just a simple article on what different kernel headers packages are used for.

• A refresher on TTY tech
  https://www.kawabangga.com/posts/4515
  https://www.sobyte.net/post/2022-05/tty/
  https://susam.net/blog/from-xon-xoff-to-forward-incremental-search.html

  Once every now and then people rediscover what A TTY actually is, control sequences, line discipline, virtual terminals, and others. See also "Terminal madness (continue)" in 95, among others for more in-depth content. NB: You'll notice that some screenshots from the sobyte.net article are stolen from another website without attribution, that is because all of the post was stolen and translated from the kawabangga.com blog, which does have attribution. I find this a bit infuriating and disrespectful, let me know what you think of the ethicality of this).

• Project ACRN
  https://projectacrn.org/

  A new Virtual Machine Manager specifically targeted at IoT ecosystems.

• If you want games, you got to explicitly say it
  https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20220810120423

  This is a pretty insignificant commit but that I found funny to mention. /usr/games has all the classic games on OpenBSD, and it was removed from the $PATH, so now you have to explicitly put the full path to play them. Obviously, this was done because of the security implication of old unmaintained and buggy code, so understandable.

• 9 months without JS
  <gemini://blog.schmidhuberj.de/2022/08/12/nine-months-without-js/>
  https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/blog.schmidhuberj.de/2022/08/12/nine-months-without-js/ (Gemini proxy)

  This person went the extra way and spent a whole gestation period without javascript. In this post you can find some of the knowledge that came out of this.

Life & Other

• A take on learning to program
  https://headlinedev.xyz/2022/08/12/how-to-learn-to-program.html

  While I don't agree on the learning pyramid because learning changes from person to person, nor am I a fan of didactic learning and putting boxes around people; yet, I find that having more of these small ideas about better learning tricks is good to have around and read about.

• Don’t separate designation from authority
  http://habitatchronicles.com/2017/05/what-are-capabilities/
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confused_deputy_problem

  A nitpick clarification on "POSIX (draft) ACL" of last week's issue 157 for those who want to dive further into real capability-based security.

Thoughts

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Resignation

I find it fascinating to read about current social phenomena from a Wikipedia's retrospective.

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Want to try something more responsive than of flux/redshift?
  https://www.linuxuprising.com/2019/08/gammy-adaptive-screen-brightness-tool.html
  https://github.com/anishathalye/lumen
  https://github.com/FedeDP/Clight
  https://github.com/maximbaz/wluma

  "ALS = Ambient Light Sensor". In the above links you can find other ways to adapt backlight based on either ALS or screen content, you can use it in combination with redshift/flux, I'm currently trying it out this week.

• mat2 lib
  https://0xacab.org/jvoisin/mat2

  "keep your data, trash your meta", A metadata removal tool, what is that? It's a tool that is made to automatically guess file format, find metadata in it, and scrub it. It could be really useful to have this running in a cron job for specific directories on your system, especially media files (the xdg XDG_DOWNLOAD_DIR, XDG_MUSIC_DIR, XDG_PICTURES_DIR, XDG_VIDEOS_DIR, among others).

• ClamAV
  https://docs.clamav.net/manual/Usage.html
  https://docs.clamav.net/manual/Usage/Scanning.html
  https://askubuntu.com/questions/749129/how-to-schedule-clamav-to-perform-a-daily-scan

  Sometimes you're required by certain work policies to run AV scans, my choice is clamAV. Full scans are often too costly, so I'm not always sure how to go about that. Should I have a cron job like what is mentioned in the last link or should I have another script checking for timestamp on files before scanning it?

• POSIX (draft) ACL
  https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedings/usenix03/tech/freenix03/full_papers/gruenbacher/gruenbacher_html/main.html
  https://rofi.roger-ferrer.org/eiciel/

  On a roll with last week "POSIX Capabilities, Not a Capability-Based System" issue 156, this week we take a look at another one of the feature of the draft 1e, ACL (a discretionary access control list). I've also added a gnome software that is a GUI to edit these, which I haven't found any other (sadly, but if you have any that I missed let me know).

• Nix – taming Unix with functional programming
  https://www.tweag.io/blog/2022-07-14-taming-unix-with-nix/

  A great article reviewing some history and where Nix stands, along with where it aims to be. Well, at least it starts with that mindset but then only spares half a line to that purpose while instead delving into the theory of functional programming applied to system build and entire OS file management. See also "Immutable distros" for the nix pill in 137 and "Convinced about nix and nixOS or not yet?" in 45.

• lcarsde
  https://lcarsde.github.io/index.html

  A pretty cool project with its own WM that recreates the LCARS OS from Star Trek. I really love these fantasy/movie UI project, this one is stunning because it's actually usable and not only some eye-candy.

• How chromecast protocol works
  https://kyteinsky.github.io/p/chromecast-protocol/

  An overview of the chromecast protocol interaction and how to play a video.

• FreeAstro, free world encyclopaedia for astronomy software
  https://free-astro.org/index.php?title=Main_Page

  This is somewhat in continuation with "What’s behind the world’s largest crowd-sourced microbiome project" in 153, seeing again free software helping big scientific projects.

• Jon "maddog" Hall reflects on his career
  https://www.linux-magazine.com/Issues/2021/250/maddog-s-Doghouse

  Retrospective on life are generally full of insights.

Life & Other

• A website I thought I had linked before
  https://emotionalgranularity.com/

  This is quite a fun site to visite, especially to learn about how to express some things that are hard to put things into word.

Thoughts

You can learn from anyone, you simply have to approach the situation with this intent and keep reminding yourself of this.

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Linux Around the world
  https://www.linuxlinks.com/linux-slovenia/
  https://www.linuxlinks.com/author/erik-karlsson/

  An interesting website showing the Linux usage and local groups and meetups/workshops. This is an example of Slovenia, a beautiful country.

• Build UNIX, not Uber
  https://thesephist.com/posts/legacy/

  I love it when people find threads in their daily life, and then ponders in brainstorm sessions that take the form of articles. Maybe you like that too, like me, let me know. Apart from what is mentioned in the article, I'd add the concept of intangible economy to it, with the book of the same name.

• Google's Linux
  https://www.computerworld.com/article/3668548/the-story-behind-google-s-in-house-desktop-linux.html

  Sort of similar to "The trendy distro: Oracle Linux" in previous issue 155, this time we look at an internal corp distro gLinux. LTS "meant that we had to upgrade every machine in our fleet of over 100,000 devices before the end-of-life date of the OS." This is also one of the reason I have issues with LTS, it's a one-shot pain that I don't want to deal with on the desktop. What do you think, do you prefer rolling distros?

• Should we still package this or that?
  https://odysee.com/@TheLinuxExperiment:e/should-linux-distros-still-package:4

  See also "Discussions on Package Management" in 144 and all the immutable package management series we had, see "Immutable distros" in 137. Now a common discussion, so much you get pop-video about it, and not a bad explanation at that.

• Adwaita UI lib
  https://theevilskeleton.gitlab.io/2022/07/28/libadwaita-fixing-usability-problems-on-the-linux-desktop.html

  A tour of gtk Adwaita theme and the logic behind it. It's a very comprehensive article.

• Why windows registry sucks
  https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2010/02/18/why-the-windows-registry-sucks-technically/
  https://raduzaharia.medium.com/configuring-gnome-with-gsettings-and-dconf-91c264843ea6
  https://fosspost.org/dconf-gsettings-gnome/

  Nothing to do with Unix particularly, but lots to learn from design/architecture decisions related to a centralize configuration (Gsettings/dconf). In a way it's also related to format exploration, see "Tar & Quadratic Time" in 155.

• Wasting disk space
  https://www.ypsidanger.com/wasting-disk-space/
  https://blogs.gnome.org/wjjt/2021/11/24/on-flatpak-disk-usage-and-deduplication/
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UnionFS

  A comparison of an OS that only ships with containarized applications versus one that doesn't.

• But you can RTFM to know that
  https://medium.com/@rmolsen/ssh-tricks-escape-sequences-4a7a5d889d70
  https://private-article-reader.vercel.app/article?url=https://medium.com/@rmolsen/ssh-tricks-escape-sequences-4a7a5d889d70

  Yes, but I've rarely seen people bring the escape sequences up when using ssh.

• POSIX Capabilities, Not a Capability-Based System
  https://blog.ploetzli.ch/2014/understanding-linux-capabilities/
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability-based_security
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capsicum_(Unix)

  In continuation with last week's "Tutorial of applied MAC on TrustedBsd" in 155. If you want to understand this in a few words: That's how you split the capabilities of a super-user into fragments, instead of having it all as a big blob. I've also added a link to what a real capability-based system is. Next week I'll add POSIX.1e extension/amendment (never accepted draft), but I got to read it first.

Life & Other

• "Deserve" what does it even mean
  https://kaashif.co.uk/2022/07/31/what-does-it-mean-for-someone-to-deserve-success/

  I like blog posts that put their ideas out there, in their raw form. That's one of the best way to make sense of things.

Thoughts

If someone shares some piece of information that doesn't mean they agree with it, nor support it, nor imply it has anything to do with them.

Just some common sense, but that needs so often to be reminded.

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Tutorial of applied MAC on TrustedBsd
  https://networksynapse.net/freebsd/mandatory-access-control-mac-part-1-bsd-extended-tutorial/
  https://networksynapse.net/freebsd/trustedbsd-mac-processes/
  https://networksynapse.net/freebsd/trustedbsd-mandatory-access-control-part-3-policy-mac-biba/

  I've been diving into the world of permission and integrity models. In these 3 articles we see the application of some MAC models in TrustedBsd. If you've never glanced at such content before, brace yourself for a whole new world in security.

• Tar & Quadratic Time
  https://mort.coffee/home/tar/

  I never knew there were so many different extensions to the tar format and the effect on extraction. A great post about file format!

• The trouble with symbolic links
  https://lwn.net/Articles/899543/

  In synchronization with the above post, tar is mentioned as one program that had issues with symbolic links.

• Docker usage
  https://matt-rickard.com/non-obvious-docker-uses/

  Docker is a container environment builder/runner, now some might be bound to limit that to microservices only, but the idea goea much further, it's only recently that trendy-devs have been less imaginative about their usage. See also "Docker as a Universal Package Manager" in 142.

• Wallpaper Setter Using systemd
  https://randthoughts.github.io/random-wallpaper-with-just-bash-and-systemd/

  A simpler script than I thought, some curl along with gsettings (could've been any other background setter too). Sprinkle on that some systemd timer and the author got themselves a wallpaper setter.

• Beets
  https://beets.io/

  An open source automatic music collection manager. You can combine it with your favorite music player.

• The trendy distro: Oracle Linux
  https://www.makeuseof.com/what-is-oracle-linux-explained/

  It's the first time I see a distro review of Oracle Linux similar to what you'd get from other ones. That's peculiar, to say the least.

• Three trends in automation
  https://enterprisersproject.com/article/2022/7/automation-3-emerging-issues-watch

  If you want a summary: Edge computing automation, automated security and security of automation, and automation as a job creator and career killer. Lots of mumbo jumbo business words in there.

• Podcast on mistakes
  https://www.redhat.com/en/compiler-podcast/big-mistakes-part-1

  "We're not defined by our mistakes." That's a good take, we all do big blunders from time to time.

• If you press a key in a terminal what processes the input
  https://jvns.ca/blog/2022/07/20/pseudoterminals/

  This is something we've been talking about previous on the forums here, the input redirection and what catches what. Definitely something that teaches you a lot about the architecture of the system.

Life & Other

• A science blog and solar innovations
  https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2020/12/27/the-future-of-electricity-is-local/
  https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2022/07/22/were-going-to-need-a-lot-of-solar-panels/
  https://singularityhub.com/2022/07/25/this-solar-tower-system-produces-jet-fuel-from-co2-water-and-sunlight/

  There's a lot of good insights into energy future in these two blog posts.

Thoughts

It might just be a lonely rainy night on the side of mount Everest — A random sentence from a podcast

Life's hard, sometimes we focus on momentary pain while we're on our path to something else.

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Digging into Linux Namespaces
  https://blog.quarkslab.com/digging-into-linux-namespaces-part-1.html
  https://blog.quarkslab.com/digging-into-linux-namespaces-part-2.html

  A series of two posts on Linux namespaces that will, in a practical way, teach you what this is all about and how to use them.

• Performance Analysis
  https://netflixtechblog.com/linux-performance-analysis-in-60-000-milliseconds-accc10403c55

  A series of steps to debug performance issues.

• Less annoying gdb usage
  https://begriffs.com/posts/2022-07-17-debugging-gdb-ddd.html

  In continuation with the debugging trend, here's how to wrap up gdb to make it easier to debug things. These should come in handy.

• Console Tiling
  http://joeyh.name/blog/entry/a_tiling_region_manager_for_the_console/

  A homemade Haskell console "region manager".

• Reptyr
  https://ostechnix.com/reptyr-move-running-process-new-terminal/

  If you've heard or are using a terminal multiplexer, then this is somewhat similar to abduco (often used alongside dvtm).

• no-look, no-leap Shell script dependencies
  https://t-ravis.com/post/shell/no_look_no_leap_shell_with_nix/

  An article about fixing the complication it takes to double check if a command is present or not. The solution relies on Nix, so it's a selling point for the whole thing, but is it really a generic solution to the problem... I don't think so.

• A lifehack for your shell
  https://xenodium.com/a-lifehack-for-your-shell/

  This is the typical aliasing for extracting files in a unified manner. Most people have a similar way to do that, if you don't then you're missing out.

• Kiosks
  http://tuxdiary.com/2014/11/05/linux-distros-for-kiosks/
  https://porteus-kiosk.org/

  What's a kiosks and what would you use it for? Which OS and software should you set on it? The first article lists possible distros and scripts, and the second link is an example.

• SqueakPhone
  https://syndicate-lang.org/journal/2022/06/03/phone-progress

  A herculean project, truly impressive, building of both a new-gen init system, and a mobile operating system.

• Smart Mirror
  https://magicmirror.builders/
  https://blog.ronrecord.com/index.php/2020/02/18/magicmirror-open-source-smart-mirror-platform/

  Since someone mentioned smart mirrors on IRC and it was my first time learning about them, I thought I'd share. Maybe someone out there hasn't heard of this too, along with the open source possibilities.

• A new tool in town
  https://github.com/untitaker/quickenv

  This is the brother tool of direnv, which we've seen in "A manager for env variables" of 142. Personally, I see that it mostly achieves the same thing.

• WordPerfect for UNIX
  https://lock.cmpxchg8b.com/wordperfect.html

  In continuation with the "Old ads pamphlet" from 152, we now see someone being intrigued by what's mentioned in one and testing it to see what it's about.

Life & Other

• Serendipitously Making Online Friends
  https://ferrucc.io/posts/friendcatchers/

  Call if friend catchers or anything else, I think it's more about connection through shared interests and hobbies.

Thoughts

Slowdown.

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Soname
  https://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/Library#soname
  https://tldp.org/HOWTO/Program-Library-HOWTO/shared-libraries.html#AEN46

  Shared libraries are something that's part of our daily usage. The two links above are small overall refreshers of the cogs making them work, not the library format itself but the file layout and conventions.

• The Demise of Workstations
  https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/the-untimely-demise-of-workstations/

  A review of the history of workstations, top-down vs bottom-up view of computing, along with the take of the author on where this is all going.

• Coding vs Programming
  https://www.ubuntupit.com/coding-vs-programming-an-in-depth-comparison/

  A light semantic scuffle, which I think most of us didn't even pay attention to before. I think the article doesn't do a bad job at presenting the difference, yet I'm torn if it's actually a meaningful one or not, it feels a bit stretched.

• A journey into the Linux scheduler
  https://blog.maxgio.me/posts/linux-scheduler-journey/

  One of the best way to share knowledge is to write about it while learning. See also "Thread Scheduling" in 145 and "Threads" in 139, "Schedulers" in 48, and, "Evolutionary scheduler" in 52 (find the dead link here instead).

• KaiOS
  https://www.kaiostech.com
  https://yourstory.com/2018/06/google-puts-22-m-linux-based-mobile-operating-system-kaios/
  https://github.com/kaiostech/B2G

  Google invested quiet a lot back then in KaiOS. The stats are saying there are millions of people using it, but will it go the same route as FirefoxOS or other lightweight mobile OS, which frankly had the exact same mission. Interestingly, it's a fork of Boot to Gecko, B2G, which was also the base for FirefoxOS.

• Automation and Risks
  https://linux.codehelp.co.uk/automation-and-risk.html
  https://docs.lavasoftware.org/lava/index.html
  https://docs.lavasoftware.org/lava/lava_ci.html

  LAVA is part of the validation, CI, and QA tasks. It's an infrastructure to run your tests for OS deployment unto hardware made as a continuous integration system.

• Pipeline + Unix
  https://nanxiao.me/en/what-you-need-may-be-pipeline-unix-commands-only/
  http://widgetsandshit.com/teddziuba/2010/10/taco-bell-programming.html

  Maybe all you need is some Unix pipeline. See also "AWK fast" in 139.

• What’s behind the world’s largest crowd-sourced microbiome project
  https://www.selectscience.net/editorial-articles/whats-behind-the-worlds-largest-crowd-sourced-microbiome-project/?artID=49784
  https://qiime2.org/
  https://qiita.ucsd.edu/emp/

  Open source bioinformatic platforms look so impressive to me, like magic. But that's probably because I know nothing of that domain, and as they say anything that is beyond your knowledge looks like magic.

• Container vs Unikernel
  https://containerjournal.com/2019/03/28/containers-vs-unikernels-an-apples-to-oranges-comparison/

  I hadn't heard of unikernel before, so this was insightful. Now it's time to learn the differences with containers, or why unikernels were created (or recreated because that's going back in time), or again, why we're reinventing the wheel over and over again.

• TripleCross Privilege Escalation
  https://github.com/h3xduck/TripleCross

  A privilege escalation that installs a rootkit using eBPF.

Life & Other

• I'll Just Leave These Here
  https://ferfal.blogspot.com/2015/07/argentine-and-greek-collapse-12.html
  https://greekpreparedness.blogspot.com/2015/07/greek-capital-controls-lessons-learned.html
  https://betterhumans.pub/what-losing-95-of-my-money-taught-me-and-my-fellow-countrymen-c5e9e6f47169?gi=ccceaa99bcb3

  Wherever you are, maybe we can learn a lesson or two from the similarities and not repeat the same mistakes, yet it seems to keep repeating.

Thoughts

"Read a Lot, Forget Most of What You Read, and Be Slow-witted"
https://fs.blog/what-did-montaigne-like-to-read/
https://www.theatlantic.com/daily-dish/archive/2010/02/-read-a-lot-forget-most-of-what-you-read-and-be-slow-witted/190691/

Sometimes we dwell too much on the appearances or efficacy of all our minute actions. Why not take things more lightly this week, read and let it imprint you in whatever way it does, without forcing it.

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Managing a Repo of Binary Pkgs
  https://sleepmap.de/2022/packaging-for-arch-linux/
  https://sleepmap.de/2022/managing-binary-package-repositories/

  A look into what it means to be part of a software distribution team, the ins and outs, along with the background knowledge that we need to understand the mechanisms. A fantastic blog. See also "Discussions on Package Management" in 144.

• Old ads pamphlet
  http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/LSI/LSI.ADM31.1978.102646290.pdf
  http://www.bitsavers.org/magazines/Datamation/197708.pdf
  http://www.bitsavers.org/magazines/Datamation/197709.pdf
  https://www.trademarkelite.com/trademark/trademark-detail/73110312/DUMB-TERMINAL
  https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=73110312&caseType=SERIAL_NO&searchType=statusSearch

  It's interesting to see how many details they explained about terminals in the marketing pamphlet. That also got me researching trademarks, "Dump Terminal" seems to have been held by Lear Siegler from 1978 till 1999. So technically, all the terminals that claimed to be "dumb terminals" between these dates and not from Lear Siegler are wrong.

• Is UNIX dead?
  https://www.cio.com/article/297153/enterprise-software-is-unix-dead.html

  A glance at the usage of UNIX today (2011), and its future, from an enterprise perspective. See also "Is FreeBSD a real Unix" in 150 and "Awesome UNIX®. Exploration of the world of UNIX® including UNIX history and its relevance of today." in 105.

• The case of the supersized shebang
  https://lwn.net/Articles/779997/

  The story of a bug that made it around the web back then (2019). It's still a good lesson to see how regressions have snowball effects.

• Remote Host Information Gathering Techniques
  https://web.archive.org/web/20210225135806/https://linuxconfig.org/how-to-determine-os-of-the-remote-host
  https://nmap.org/book/osdetect-methods.html

  In continuation with "Networking tracing and debugging" in 150, we see an application of what was explained to fingerprint hosts.

• A web around the world series
  https://www.filfre.net/2022/05/a-web-around-the-world-part-10-a-web-of-associations/

  A big series of long-form articles on the history of the web and computing. The metaphor with cars at the beginning of that article (part of a series) is the same one found in "2006 presentation on the future of storage" in 150 (slide 11).

• V4L
  https://jayrambhia.com/blog/capture-v4l2
  https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PipeWire#Video
  https://uvtutorial.blogspot.com/2011/10/reverse-engineering-usb-device.html

  I started testing the pw-v4l2 wrapper that catche v4l2 calls and reroutes them to pipewire, but it crashes all applications I've tried it with. Last article is about reverse engineering hardware, which is always fun.

• TTS and STT for commands
  https://fedoramagazine.org/your-personal-voice-assistant-on-fedora-linux/

  Emojis aside, the project looks more mature than a lot of the ones I've seen out there. See also "More on accessibility" in 145 and "Thinking About Accessibility" in 144.

• Disk/FS encryption
  https://hugo.barrera.io/journal/2021/09/03/how-disk-encryption-works/
  https://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq14.html#softraid
  https://people.freebsd.org/~rodrigc/doc/handbook/disks-encrypting.html
  https://www.ecryptfs.org/
  https://www.linux.com/training-tutorials/how-encrypt-linux-file-system-dm-crypt/
  https://www.askdavetaylor.com/what_is_hardware-based_disk_encryption/ (WARNING: corporate talk about FIPS 140-2 lvl3)

  There's multiple way to encrypt file systems, either at the hardware level, VFS level, RAID leve, FS level, software level, and others. Pick your favorite one.

• Machine Layout Optimization
  https://dendibakh.github.io/blog/2019/03/27/Machine-code-layout-optimizatoins

  An explanation of machine code layout, along with ways to optimize your binary code to match it. See also the book "A book on Algorithms For Modern Hardware" in issue 144 there's a section on compiler optimizations similar to the ones mentioned.

• Simulating a CPU
  https://djharper.dev/post/2019/05/21/i-dont-know-how-cpus-work-so-i-simulated-one-in-code/

  One of the best way to learn something is to try and experience it first hand. But even more important than this, it's to first be comfortable with knowing what you don't know and are willing to know.

Life & Other

• Software Over Time
  https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2022/software-over-time/

  Pondering about the implications of an observation: Will this piece of software live long enough, or can it only live a small burst of time. What does it take for software to be maintainable, changeable, and adaptable? All good software architecture and engineering questions. Somehow this reminds me of the credo of chaos engineering and the stringent stress it incurs on software to make it resilient and flexible.

• A Very Regional Thing
  https://text.npr.org/1109498551

  Plastic is omnipresent. Some places use it more than others, some places use it less but don't recycle, some places have litter issues, some have waste management issues, and some have very different issues. This article puts you in the shoes of someone in the USA, take it with a grain of salt if you're not from there and can't relate.

• Open Source Pain Logger for Patients
  https://medevel.com/pain-diary/

  I had read about these scales in the past, and their gruesome history. It makes me happy to see that we can do that without being tracked by Big Corp, thanks to this team in Germany.

Thoughts

We all gradually change, sometimes more abruptly than others, but we all do. What are some changes others have noticed in you that you might not have yet? Think back to the Johari window I mentioned back in issue 141, apart from relationships, what are other changes happening.
Boring?
Have a fun week!

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1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
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Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• A Great Blog
  https://calomel.org/

  A blog I've discovered and that is full of useful articles on multiple topics rotating aroun Unix and programming.

• FreeBSD Guide
  https://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/rants/bsd4linux/01

  A comprehensive explanative series of articles on FreeBSD system. It's written in a way that starts with the assumption that users know Linux and want to get acquainted with the BSD philosophy and more precisely FreeBSD. If you're in that category or if you want to take a glance, go for it.

• Virtual/Memory Disks, RAM disks, and Transportable Systems
  http://openbsd.wikia.com/wiki/Creating_a_custom_OpenBSD_RAM_disk
  https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/disks-virtual.html
  http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/66329/creating-a-ram-disk-on-linux#66331

  Virtual disks, in memory chunk of storage, RAM disks booted entirely in RAM, can be created in different ways on different systems. The concept got its usefulness, especially in infosec.

• Security Importance
  https://github.com/lattera/articles/blob/master/opsec/2018-02-23_good-opsec/article.md
  https://github.com/lattera/articles/blob/master/infosec/Exploit%20Mitigations/General/2017-03-21-importance/article.md

  Two articles on security practices and exploit mitigation. The subjects is approached properly, yet it isn't novel, but a good reminder of spy-level infosec.

• Flatpak Security Model
  https://blogs.gnome.org/alexl/2017/01/18/the-flatpak-security-model-part-1-the-basics/

  An explanation of the security model used by flatpak, relying on bubblewrap and other mechanism.

• The evolution of Unix Architecture
  https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20210618/index.html

  Studying the architecture of a complex software over time can give some golden insights. Which element are conserved, which get morphed, what grows, what issues are always repeated. Specifically, we're looking at elements in user-space and kernel-space, the basic blocks of OSs.

• Interactive UNIX
  https://computeradsfromthepast.substack.com/p/interactive-unix

  Let's go back in time and relive the release of INTERACTIVE™ UNIX® operating system.

• Per-app bandwidth tracking using eBPF on Linux
  https://github.com/elesiuta/picosnitch
  https://humdi.net/vnstat/

  A nifty tool that let you granularly interact with app and their network connection, getting notified when they use it, and monitor their usage. It's a bit similar to vnstat, so I've linked it too.

• Terminal Wiki
  http://terminals-wiki.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
  http://www.epocalc.net/php/liste_models.php?texte=&look=All+fields&yearmax=2018&nocomp=pc&cat=Terminal

  An up-to-date wiki about terminals, it has an immense amount of info about hundreds of models and their specificities.

• tput
  https://www.linuxcommand.org/lc3_adv_tput.php
  https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/tput.1.html
  https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19253-01/816-5165/tput-1/index.html

  In continuation with the previous link, tput a command used to manipulate the terminal and get info through the terminfo db.

Life & Other

• Tied Up, Locked Out
  https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2022/06/ive-locked-myself-out-of-my-digital-life/
  https://log.pyratebeard.net/entry/20220512-distrust,_but_verify.html
  https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2022/06/ive-locked-myself-out-of-my-digital-life/#comments
  https://lobste.rs/s/tqull2/i_ve_locked_myself_out_my_digital_life
  https://nixers.net/Thread-Less-Ties-With-A-Machine

  The nightmare for people who hadn't considered this very imminent scenario. The comments regarding this topic are especially important as this discussion is one that must be had.

• Optimizing Game Software
  http://blog.system11.org/?p=1442

  The game development world is full of these tales. I've personally experienced the slowdown even when running the game in an emulator.

• Negative Space
  http://www.mosaikhomes.com/blog/the-power-of-negative-space-in-interior-design/
  https://artignition.com/negative-space-in-art/

  Who said negativity was always bad. The powerful concept of negative space is one that once enters your mind, you then see it everywhere. One of these frequency bias thing. Do you think it's related or could be related to digital minimalism, or minimalism in general? Try to visit one of today's popular news website, it'll give you an idea of what negative space isn't.

Thoughts

Take the time to really listen to someone this week, we often forget that.
Have a great day!

Archive

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Contribute

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1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
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3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
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Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• A true random number generator
  https://www.valerionappi.it/brng-en/

  While not as advanced as "Lavarand" from 93, it's cooler when it's homemade like this.

• Networking tracing and debugging
  https://www.rumble.run/blog/lean-network-discovery-icmp/
  https://www.linux.com/news/linux-security-fundamentals-part-5-introduction-tcpdump-and-wireshark/

  The first article gets us thinking about all the information we can extract from simple ping (ICMP) packets. I've also added an intro, even though the images are dead, it's a good and quick tutorial.

• The rsync series
  https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2022-06-18-rsync-overview/
  https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2022-06-18-rsync-article-1-scenarios/

  A series of posts (planned) on rsync. The first one is already captivating so stay updated.

• Curves and crypto
  https://curves.ulfheim.net/

  We've seen that website for TLS in "TLS and crypto" in 141, similarly this is some content about TLS and elliptical curves.

• faketime
  https://github.com/wolfcw/libfaketime

  The readme of this project is all-encompassing, informative. If you've never dealt with this lib then I urge you to. Maybe test Y2K and 2K38 year issues too while at it.

• Another shell comparison
  http://linuxclass.heinz.cmu.edu/misc/shell-comparison.htm

  In the same spirit as when we compare distros, we always like to compare. This guide is really great, give it a read. See also What shell do you guys use?.

• pushd and popd
  https://docstore.mik.ua/orelly/unix/upt/ch14_06.htm
  https://www.baeldung.com/linux/pushd-popd
  https://dev.to/andyanderson/comment/127pb

  I've known pushd and popd for a long while, however never really used it. Here are explanations and a way to use it efficiently.

• Is FreeBSD a real Unix
  https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2022/06/19/is-freebsd-a-real-unix/

  A review of the concept of Unix certification and what it means to have it or not.

• XPRA
  https://www.xpra.org/
  https://subuser.org/
  https://subuser.org/news/0.3.html#the-xpra-x11-bridge

  X11 forwarding in SSH is well-known, VNC too, XPRA is a lesser-known option. It comes with an easy to use client. subuser is a software that can rely on xpra to help with containers gui applications.

• History fuzzed search
  https://ane.iki.fi/2022/06/21/beenthere-donethat.html

  I also keep my shell history huge and find it very useful, what do you think? See also "Are we our tools" in 68 for a similar topic.

Life & Other

• 2006 presentation on the future of storage
  https://web.archive.org/web/20060717001830/http://www.snwusa.com/documents/presentations-s06/MarkKryder.pdf

  While heavy on the technical content (at least visually), this presentation is worth every slide.

Thoughts

Live your life so that whenever you lose, you are ahead. — Will Rogers

Yet another cheesy quote! Not one to take too literally, but one to ponder upon. This isn't a call for action to let go and keep your head high, nor to lose everything, but about what it means to take risks and learning from experience. At least that's how I see it.
Have a nice week!

Archive

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Contribute

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1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Browser Cache
  https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Firefox/Tweaks
  https://www.ghacks.net/2015/12/11/an-analysis-of-firefox-local-cache-locations/

  The second article is a bit outdated, but it's a quick summary of different types of caches that FF uses. As for the first link, it's an awesome resource for FF tweaks, check out the ones on cache too.

• TCL and Expect
  https://www2.lib.uchicago.edu/keith/tcl-course/topics/expect.html
  https://core.tcl-lang.org/expect/file?name=README&ci=tip

  "Good Unix programs are written as tools, and are meant to be programmed with. The primary mechanism for hooking tools together is the pipe, combined with the standard input / standard output filter model (though pipes can also work with more file descriptors). However, there is a class of Unix programs that can't be hooked together this way: programs which talk directly to a terminal device (i.e., interactive programs)." This summarizes it clearly. See also "Automating tasks using expect" in 1.

• Kernel Processes
  https://www.uninformativ.de/blog/postings/2022-06-11/0/POSTING-en.html
  https://www.uninformativ.de/blog/postings/2022-06-12/0/POSTING-en.html

  An investigative post that leads into learning about kernel spawned threads, and bpfilter.

• Another one of these CLI good pracices
  https://lucasfcosta.com/2022/06/01/ux-patterns-cli-tools.html
  https://seirdy.one/posts/2022/06/10/cli-best-practices/

  While I don't agree with a lot of the tips given, I like to see the conversation going and ideas flowing. See also "CLI Conventions and Doc" in 144 and "Making those object cli compatible" in 134.

• Runlevels, what are they and why?
  http://www.linfo.org/runlevel_def.html
  https://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/Run_Levels
  https://www.unix.com/unix-for-dummies-questions-and-answers/9777-runlevel-freebsd.html

  What does it mean to boot, when is it reached? The runlevels are a sort of abstraction over this, along with different states the system can be in. Do you miss this style of init? See also "Different runlevels" in 8, the link is dead but it's on archive.org.

• Why sbin and bin
  https://hn.svelte.dev/item/31336396
  https://gobolinux.org/
  https://refspecs.linuxfoundation.org/fhs.shtml

  Historical decisions don't necessary make sense in the present, however always think of the [Chesterton's Fence]https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/) first. "Do not remove a fence until you know why it was put up in the first place." See also "Convinced about nix and nixOS or not yet?" in 45, and this thread.

• The growth of command line options
  https://danluu.com/cli-complexity/

  In tandem with the previous link, a research into what has accumulated over the years as options for classic unix tools.

• Window management features and costs
  https://hal.inria.fr/hal-01497472/document
  https://arxiv.org/pdf/1810.04673.pdf

  The first paper goes into a stack & tile group feature for the Haiku OS and then let the community test it. It's a feature that is also found in the shod WM as tabs. The second paper is about a classification of what WM tasks are about when doing sequential multitasking, what hinders them, to then be used to measure efficiency.

• Linux in Higher Education
  https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/5071

  An article from 2000 who goes over the case for using open source software and Linux as the base for university computing. I'm not sure that's true for all majors but for certain ones and in research it's somewhat true. What do you think of the opinions laid out?

• FS Fragmentation
  https://web.archive.org/web/20120527192204/http://geekblog.oneandoneis2.org/index.php/2006/08/17/why_doesn_t_linux_need_defragmenting
  https://jmmv.dev/2005/06/fragmentation-in-unix-file-systems.html
  https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man8/e4defrag.8.html

  An explanation of fragmentation and why some fs have this issue, along with a counter example of fragmentation still happening.

Life & Other

• Apple's codenames
  https://appleinsider.com/articles/14/11/07/inside-apples-secret-confidentiality-agreements-code-names-security-requirements-fines-more
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Apple_codenames
  https://www.pingdom.com/blog/the-developer-obsession-with-code-names-186-interesting-examples/

  As anyone who's worked at or with Apple can assess, there's a lot of secrecy involved. The first article gives an insider's look into it.

Thoughts

Those who promise us paradise on earth never produced anything but a hell. — Karl Popper

Great quote that asks for due diligence. Rhetoric is an art and those who master it can often be only about talk and no actions.
Have a phenomenal week!

Archive

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Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• A look at distro from a "customer"
  https://www.ypsidanger.com/lets-just-kill-the-silly-myths/

  It's hard to sell the desktop, this article portrays a down to earth look at the current situation. See also "Discussions on Package Management" in 144 and all the immutable package management series we had, see "Immutable distros" in 137 for example.

• Why suckless
  https://xeiaso.net/blog/why-i-use-suckless-tools-2020-06-05

  Some people enjoy simplicity and being able to build things by combining unitary blocks. This post takes a window manager as an example from suckless software to show that, displaying what are the pieces making their desktop environment.

• Plumbing from Plan9 within Xorg
  https://dataswamp.org/~lich/musings/plumbing.html

  This is a thought, which I've seen in a couple of places and implemented too, about having plumbing work within Xorg.

• Track file changes (continue)
  https://github.com/spieglt/whatfiles

  In continuation with last week's file change follow up. Here's another project aiming at doing that (specific to Linux).

• How do I know it's an init system?
  https://leahneukirchen.org/blog/archive/2022/01/how-to-check-you-re-in-the-initial-pid-namespace.html

  This also begs the question of whether we should even be able to when running containers.

• Fuzzing and Learning About Pipes Speed
  https://mazzo.li/posts/fast-pipes.html
  https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=netmap&sektion=4&n=1

  A tale of optimization that leads us into understanding pipes and specific system calls for them on Linux. As an extra there's a link to something similar on FreeBSD.

• Teleforking
  https://thume.ca/2020/04/18/telefork-forking-a-process-onto-a-different-computer/
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOCUS

  What if you could fork a process unto another computer. This blog post goes into implemented this for Linux. It is inspired by CRIU, see also "Cryogenic on Unix" in issue 24.

• Spaces in passwords
  https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/32691/why-not-allow-spaces-in-a-password/32694#32694
  https://stackoverflow.com/questions/47154078/linux-password-manager-trims-trailing-spaces-in-passwords

  This is somewhat related to a discussion we had on the forums in the past about Spaces in password and special characters, see it here.

• Do you need atime?
  https://opensource.com/article/20/6/linux-noatime

  An insightful article about atime, the noatime feature, relatime, and anything in between.

• In defence of swap
  https://chrisdown.name/2018/01/02/in-defence-of-swap.html

  A comprehensive article about swap and its utility, or the lack thereof.

Life & Other

• Software engineers and woodworking
  https://www.zainrizvi.io/blog/why-software-engineers-like-woodworking/

  The online cliché of software engineers wanting to leave their jobs to do woodworking or live on a farm has always been foreign to me. Maybe it's a cultural thing very specific to certain regions. This article sheds some light on the subject.

Thoughts

Everyone should know how to program a computer, because it teaches you how to think! — Steve Jobs

What a cheesy quote, right? Also a big hyperbole! Yet, I think there's some truth to it, programming computers does change the way you think about some things and approach problems. It probably doesn't teach you to "think" but it does teach you how to apply a certain methodological way to look a things, similar to how learning a new skill set would.
How did that affect you in your life?

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Linux Insides
  https://0xax.gitbooks.io/linux-insides/content/

  An advanced book on the Linux kernel's internal working. I've only read and glanced at a few chapters but I'll definitely recommend to bookmark this and read a few things from time to time as documentation.

• OOM Killer Killing too Much
  https://old.reddit.com/r/Ubuntu/comments/uyl4i6/ubuntu_2204s_new_oom_killing_system_is_killing/
  https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/unload-inactive-tabs-save-system-memory-firefox
  https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man5/oomd.conf.5.html

  Redditors redditing in a reddit manner about the OOM killer (shipped with systemd) on Ubuntu acting wild and killing important processes while there seems to be enough memory on the system. Yet, what is memory, and why did the OOM pick them if the usage wasn't above the threshold. That leads into checking the configs of the OOM, and of Firefox to remediate the issue. In retrospect, I'm not sure if I've experienced the same issue on Ubuntu before, maybe I have. See also "In userspace OOM manager" in 85.

• On finger and social networks
  https://www.somanymachines.com/tx/finger-the-first-social-software/

  A small piece on a thought: what's a social network and how can we connect people using software. See also "Let me put my finger on that" in 30.

• Why Wheel
  https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/1262/where-did-the-wheel-group-get-its-name
  http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/W/wheel-bit.html
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheel_(computing)#Origins
  http://www.poker-vibe.com/poker/terms/wheel/

  These links are about the phenomenon related to picking a name for a project one day and not thinking about it much. Then time passes, and as time passes with the project becoming more popular, people start wondering about the history behind the name, scavenging, searching, software archaeology. What seems obvious today might not be in the future. It's fascinating how there are so many theories behind the wheel name, enjoy!

• su as GNU
  https://ftp.gnu.org/old-gnu/Manuals/coreutils-4.5.4/html_node/coreutils_149.html#SEC150

  In continuation with the previous links, more trivia. GNU su doesn't support the wheel group, and for one heck of a reason. Make what you want out of this, yet it's something worth reading.

• To avoid
  https://linuxfx.org/
  https://kernal.gitlab.io/posts/linuxfx/
  https://kernal.gitlab.io/posts/linuxfx-part-2/

  A beautiful reverse engineering writeup of a distribution that nastily claims to be secure while employing dubious means. A good lesson in why security through obscurity never works.

• File system monitoring
  https://mmonit.com/monit/
  https://github.com/rflament/loggedfs
  https://github.com/gorakhargosh/watchdog
  https://github.com/inotify-tools/inotify-tools/wiki
  https://lwn.net/Articles/604686/

  There's so many different ways to track file system changes, and it's not the same on all Unix-like systems. Fortunately, there are a lot of tools and people trying to do that type of monitoring. Unfortunately, the space is fragmented, and you don't always get the behavior or granularity you want.

• newgrp and passwords
  https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/NewgrpCommandWhy

  Unix groups can have passwords, I think this was discussed once on IRC. Along with that you'll see why newgrp was added.

• Unfixable Designs
  https://lwn.net/Articles/414618/

  Unix signals and the permission model are here to stay. In this article, the authors ponder on what can actually be done about them, and why we're stuck.

• The self-pipe trick
  http://cr.yp.to/docs/selfpipe.html

  A small trick to be able to avoid one of the issue with signals mixed with polling/select.

Life & Other

• Quartz and Time Keeping
  https://www.explainthatstuff.com/quartzclockwatch.html
  https://www.engineersgarage.com/insight-how-piezoelectric-gas-lighter-igniter-works/

  I love these types of articles, just enough to spark curiosity into the topic and initiate more research.

• Language and programming
  http://labs.theguardian.com/digital-language-divide/
  https://games.greggman.com/game/2022-06-02-western-naming-convensions-wasting-time_md/

  When something is created by someone, it's inherently imbued with their way of approaching the world, and people who will subsequently use that creation will then embrace it as is. Yet it could possibly be different, a sort of "the winner writes history" type of scenario. See also "Locality Bias" in 139 and "Reminding Ourselves of the Importance of Internationalization" in 144.

Thoughts

Don't worry about what anybody else is going to do. The best way to predict the future is to invent it. — Alan Kay

An inspirational quote that you can listen to while working out. In all seriousness, sometimes we pay more attention to what is happening around us, what others are planning for, than what we would like to see. Think about this for next week.
Cheers!

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Kernel Storage and Circular Buffer
  https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/core-api/circular-buffers.html
  https://blogs.oracle.com/linux/post/pstore-linux-kernel-persistent-storage-file-system

  Circular buffers are one of the most important data structure in most kernels, while simple in nature, and one of the basic structure students learn, there are many sub-details in their implementation. Additionally, we're taking a look at kernel persistent storage. For info ACPI ERST, that is used for persistent storage stands for "Error Record Serialization Table", as you can find here.

• KV Stores Tech
  https://www.gnu.org.ua/software/gdbm/
  https://dbdb.io/db/berkeley-db
  https://www.oracle.com/database/technologies/related/berkeleydb.html
  https://github.com/tiebingzhang/nildb
  https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/fs/fuse/dbfs.git/tree/README
  https://github.com/basho/innostore
  https://dbmx.net/kyotocabinet/
  https://riak.com/assets/bitcask-intro.pdf

  In continuation with the above. There are so many key-value stores out there, some of them tied with Unix-like systems history. Which ones do you use?

• REBOOT
  https://keunwoo.com/notes/rebooting/

  To reboot or not to reboot, what should it even affect? That's a long running question. We've had a discussion in a forums thread before, and you can also see "No reboot" in 118, and "Don't REBOOT IT!" in 46.

• Block Manipulation
  https://eklitzke.org/the-cult-of-dd
  https://sortix.org/rw/
  https://pub.sortix.org/sortix/release/nightly/man/man1/rw.1.html

  Do you like dd, here are some food for thought that will make you rethink it.

• Corkami
  https://corkami.github.io/

  A must-known resource for visualizing certain file format and understanding them, either for reverse engineering, development, or simply fun.

• GRUB, LILO, and LOADER
  https://davmac.wordpress.com/2007/01/22/grub-vs-lilo/
  https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?loader(8)

  We usually don't pay much attention bootloaders unless we have multiple OS on one machine or when the system doesn't actually start. See also "Learn GRUB commands" in 106.

• Dracut
  https://dracut.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Main_Page
  https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Dracut

  I wasn't aware of dracut, maybe you weren't too. Time to learn something new.

• PPG Implementation and Complexity, Lessons to Learn
  https://articles.59.ca/doku.php?id=pgpfan:tpp
  https://www.arp242.net/signing-emails.html
  https://secushare.org/PGP
  https://autocrypt.org/

  See also "PGP keys and the usual nag" in issue 134, "Chrome and crypto" in issue 94, and "Why we should use plain text emails" in 75, and "Don't use PGP? Why?" in 42. Suffice to say, that's a topic everyone seems to have an opinion on, kind of like any topic that resonates as to why any specific thing never took off and retrospectively explaining it.

• v4l2 and gstreamer
  https://aweirdimagination.net/2020/07/05/gstreamer-webrtc/
  https://aweirdimagination.net/2020/07/12/virtual-web-cam-using-gstreamer-and-v4l2loopback/

  The above are related to a new personal project/research I got interested in. While, similar to the second post, I'm still figuring it out why it doesn't work in some place. I got the camera to show up on one of my machine when the resolution was either 320x240 or 1280x720, or probably any multiple of that. Weirdly, the same approach that worked on Arch Linux didn't work on Ubuntu. I'll write more on that when I actually understand what's happening. If you want to give it a shot, be sure to specify the aspect ratio, otherwise even the test source won't show up in applications, example: gst-launch-1.0 -vet videotestsrc ! video/x-raw, format=YUY2, width=1280, height=720 ! v4l2sink device=/dev/video42

• Debian, People Like to Hate on It..
  https://unixsheikh.com/articles/the-delusions-of-debian.html

  To me this sounds like generic issues of any community. See also "Extra because we've already followed this stuff before" in 118, and "Nagging about Debian" in 64.

Life & Other

• Geeks, MOPS, and Sociopaths
  https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths

  A twist on the classical path that community/niche takes, or even any trend takes. In marketing terms, from early adopters to late adopters.

Thoughts

There are no shortcuts to any place worth going ― Helen Keller

Life can take us on so many path, some of them taken deliberately, some of them serendipitously. Yet, when we yearn for something, we want to arrive there early, but for things that matter, it's the road that is more important than the end.
Enough sentimental jargon, enjoy the week!

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Unix For poets
  https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs124/kwc-unix-for-poets.pdf
  https://www.everything2.com/title/UNIX+poetry

  Frankly, I don't think I got the first joke, but the rest of the content is amazing. Somewhat related to this thread on the forums.

• Gestures Related Stuff
  https://github.com/JoseExposito/touchegg
  https://github.com/NayamAmarshe/ToucheggKDE
  https://github.com/Coffee2CodeNL/gebaar-libinput
  https://linuxtouchpad.org/docs/

  Gestures on Laptops are not everyone's cup of tea, yet they open a world of possibilities akin to what is seen in sci-fi movies. See "Libinput and Synaptics driver" in 119 and also "UX and scrolling" in the recent 143 issue.

• Pondering About System Design and System Thinking
  https://apenwarr.ca/log/20201227

  A lengthy article about system design, put aside your previous knowledge on the topic and you'll enjoy it. It tackles many facets of why things are never as obvious as they seem.

• Thread Scheduling
  https://web.archive.org/web/20190427214335/http://www.unobvious.com/bsd/freebsd-threads.html
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LinuxThreads
  https://www.icir.org/gregor/tools/pthread-scheduling.html

  Two docs that are quite dated yet they give insight into the attempt at improving and trying out different threading features. See also "pthread scheduling on FreeBSD and Linux" in 35 and "Threads" in 139.

• A Start With eBPF
  https://devopsspiral.com/articles/linux/ebpf-unlock/
  https://filipnikolovski.com/posts/ebpf/
  https://jvns.ca/blog/2017/06/28/notes-on-bpf---ebpf/

  These are some good and approachable content to get started with eBPF.

• nftables, iptables, and pf
  https://www.openbsd.org/faq/pf/
  https://www.openbsd.org/faq/pf/filter.html
  https://linuxhandbook.com/iptables-vs-nftables/
  https://wyssmann.com/blog/2021/07/packet-filtering-in-linux-iptables-nftables-and-firewalld/

  Firewalls as they are commonly called, or packet filtering, are some of the tech that I find the most confusing. Hopefully, there's always good online content to read, and re-read, in case I need help figuring things out. See also 'translate("douane") == "customs"' in 22, "Firewalls" in 3, "Packet Filter Rule Editor for OpenBSD pf Firewall." in 127, "Firewalls on Linux" in 72,, and more

• Fail2ban: an enemy of script-kiddies
  https://debaday.debian.net/2007/04/29/fail2ban-an-enemy-of-script-kiddies/
  https://blog.sailed.io/fail2ban-wordpress-digitalocean/
  https://mvcp007.wordpress.com/2017/05/22/how-to-protect-ssh-with-fail2ban-on-rhel-7/

  Fail2ban is one piece of software that has saved me against attacks more than once. However, I can't say I fully understood it before reading the above articles.

• Overview of system protection and Linux CAP
  https://www.cs.uic.edu/~jbell/CourseNotes/OperatingSystems/14_Protection.html
  https://k3a.me/linux-capabilities-in-a-nutshell/

  Permissions, privileges, capabilities, policies, access control, authentication, authorization, trust mechanism, ownership policies, domains policies, it can get confusing when this type of jargon intermixes. The above links are great overview of basic OS security concepts. Additionally there's a section in the classic "dinosaur book" about that.

• It's Hard to Stay Idle
  https://web.archive.org/web/20150531232807/http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/611
  https://lwn.net/Articles/602479/
  https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v5.0/admin-guide/pm/cpuidle.html
  https://lwn.net/Articles/767630/

  It seems natural to think that doing nothing, staying idle, is the natural state of affairs, on computers it's quite the oppostire. See also 'Some lwn with Linux inspired by BSDs' in 97 and "Power consumption control" in 137.

• More on accessibility
  https://christianheilmann.com/2021/07/20/the-accessibility-stalemate/
  https://scribe.rip/@r.d.t.prater/linux-accessibility-an-unmaintained-mess-8fbf9decaf8a

  A continuation of last week's accessibility related articles, this time with a bunch of rants.

Life & Other

• Vintage computing
  https://ub.fnwi.uva.nl/computermuseum/X1.html

  Reading specs of older machines is a way to travel in time, especially when comparing them with today.

Thoughts

Wear sunscreen
https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/1198000-wear-sunscreen

A classic monologue, with a single punchline. Yet, I also think sunscreen is very important, put some today maybe.

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Thinking About Accessibility
  https://wiki.gnome.org/Accessibility
  https://wiki.gnome.org/Accessibility/IntroATs
  https://community.kde.org/Accessibility
  https://opensource.com/life/15/5/accessibility-linux

  Accessibility is something we often dismiss, so here are a few links from two of the most used desktop environment on free Unix-like OSes. On one side we have a suite of software such as magnifier, automatic clicker, gestures, text-to-speech (screen readers), Braille display, and speech recognition. On the other side we have generic UX guidelines (which I found the link was dead for KDE) and then the software counterpart shown as an instance or solution to certain guidelines. Additionally, there is a list of distributions that catters to specific needs listed in that last article.

• Reminding Ourselves of the Importance of Internationalization
  https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6176
  https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/3286

  While internationalization is not as overlooked as accessibility, it's also something that isn't easy to do properly (especially outside of business settings). See also "Text on computers" in 137, "Unicode" in 72, Unicode in 116, and many others.

• Sabayon Linux
  https://www.unixmen.com/interview-with-fabio-erculiani-of-sabayon-linux/
  http://www.sabayon.org/

  Sabayon is a unique Linux distro, it combined source based package management, rolling release, and friendliness. It's my first time hearing the term "meta-distribution" but I think it resonates well, a distribution used as a building block for another one.

• Discussions on Package Management
  https://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=package-management
  https://web.archive.org/web/20171017151526/http://aptitude.alioth.debian.org/doc/en/pr01s02.html
  http://ianmurdock.debian.net/index.html%3Fp=437.html
  http://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs2043/2019sp/_data/lecture-source/lecture-slides/light/17_package_management.pdf
  https://github.com/jordansissel/fpm
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_software_package_management_systems
  https://www.haskellforall.com/2022/05/the-golden-rule-of-software.html

  We're drowning in package management systems, from language-specific ones to distributions one. But what is a package manager?

• CLI Conventions and Doc
  https://blog.liw.fi/posts/2022/05/07/unix-cli/
  https://explainshell.com/
  https://dashdash.io
  https://tldr.sh/
  https://www.mankier.com/

  Multiple of these websites have the same function, they act as "easier" or more "approachable" and quick documentation than man pages. Somewhat related to this forums thread and this one also, especially the links in it.

• Another one of these Brain Dump
  https://furbo.org/2014/09/03/the-terminal/

  Similar to "Dumps that everyone just glimpse at for 5min and forget" in 141, this is a tips and tricks article that was posted on most tech news websites. You can glimpse at it, maybe you'll find something useful.

• How to Use GNU Info
  https://znpy.wordpress.com/2016/12/08/learn-how-to-use-gnu-info/
  https://linuxhint.com/read-gnu-info-without-emacs/
  https://gist.github.com/egmontkob/eb114294efbcd5adb1944c9f3cb5feda

  Info pages are one of the lesser used documentation system, at least the people I know have been avoiding it. Yet, it is a very complete and deep system that covers a lot. I've also added a link to a terminal escape sequence for hyperlink, as it's something I've seen a lot there.

• Advanced sudo-ing techniques
  https://www.sudo.ws/posts/2022/05/sudo-for-blue-teams-how-to-control-and-log-better/
  https://manpages.debian.org/unstable/libpam-modules/faillock.conf.5.en.html

  Frankly, I had no clue sudo had all these features, but I can't say I've used it that much either. Additionally, I've linked faillock, because I always forget this even exists.

• Perl History
  https://history.perl.org/PerlTimeline.html

  Everyone loves Perl (presumptuous to say), it's tied to Unix history and the web. The history laid down on this page show this clearly, very interesting to go through all this.

• A book on Algorithms For Modern Hardware
  https://en.algorithmica.org/hpc/

  I just started reading this book, it's still a work-in-progress, yet so far it's extremely valuable. It breaks many of the misconception about algorithm complexity calculations and how to achieve fast code in the current age.