nixers newsletter issue | 2025-05-09 00:00:00 | 288

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Cool WMs
https://eaglemode.sourceforge.net/
https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri

These are worth giving a go if you haven't before, even if it's just to see what they're about.
Bootloader and GRUB
https://github.com/Jacksaur/Gorgeous-GRUB
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Stefan20162016/linux-insides-code/master/bootloader.asm

Want the most minimalist bootloader, or the coolest inspo.
High quality streaming on Linux
https://battlepenguin.com/tech/how-to-play-videos-in-hdr-on-linux-for-a-home-theater/

This can be interesting for those who have a TV or device with high dynamic range.
x86 on Android
https://0f5f.blogs.minster.io/2022/08/running-x86-binaries-on-android/

It's with qemu but with the specs of phones these days, this might become our new platforms.
Post-Quantum Cryptography on NetBSD
https://www.netmeister.org/blog/netbsd-pqc.html

That's how to setup OpenSSL OQS Provider or other PQC on NetBSD.
passt with pasta
https://passt.top/passt/about/
https://slirp.sourceforge.net/

This is a software relying on user-mode networking to "proxy" the TCP/IP stack, mostly for container-host networking. The graphics are well-done. It's a cool project.
podfox
https://codeberg.org/valpackett/podfox#podfox
https://val.packett.cool/blog/podfox/

"Podfox is a SOCKS5 proxy for accessing Podman's rootless network namespace from the host. It creates a virtual domain hierarchy in the proxy: a ..podman request gets resolved as .dns.podman on 's aardvark-dns server. Firefox can be configured to use it through a PAC policy or an included one-liner extension."
Core Unix programs
https://wizardzines.com/comics/every-core-unix-program-i-use/

A useful cheatsheet for newcomers.
System boundaries and the Linux kernel
https://www.tedinski.com/2019/01/15/system-boundaries-and-the-linux-kernel.html

Don't break user-space, but these days people dabble in kernel-space all the time, see also "eBPF issue, then blame Fred" in issue 280.
LWNs of the week
https://lwn.net/Articles/1018082/
https://lwn.net/Articles/1017846/
https://lwn.net/Articles/1017315/

Please contribute to LWN if you can afford it.

Life & Other

Richly flavored farts
https://utsavmamoria.substack.com/p/how-to-live-an-intellectually-rich

Some things were cool, others felt like fluff.
No more daydreaming for you
https://www.afterbabel.com/p/on-the-death-of-daydreaming

Go read some Byung-Chul Han too. This feels a bit like an over-stretch to me, but it's probably because I don't use my phone as much.
Got to be mad to be stylish
https://alan.norbauer.com/articles/dying-for-beauty/

And prettiness is also efficient and clean.
Web Athologists
https://olano.dev/blog/web-anthologists/

If you write the history of the web then it's going to be the only thing we remember, not the actual web.
A Sisyphean quest
https://notashelf.dev/posts/curse-of-knowing

Can't say I haven't felt that.

Thoughts

"We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes" - Kafka

Archive

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nixers newsletter issue | 2025-04-25 00:00:00 | 287

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Using authorized keys for granular access control
https://dan.langille.org/2025/04/17/using-ssh-authorized-keys-to-decide-what-the-incoming-connection-can-do/

I knew authorized keys was flexible, but I didn't remember it could be used that way.
Shell script mistakes
https://www.pixelbeat.org/programming/shell_script_mistakes.html

These are a lot of great tips, but also remember shellcheck to find problems you've missed.
Linux is Chicken Soup for the Programmer's Soul
https://smustafa.blog/2025/03/10/chicken-soup-for-the-programmers-soul/

The main lesson is that it forces you to be a self-learner and to discover things, changing your perception.
Isolated Execution Environment for eBPF
https://ebpf.foundation/research-update-isolated-execution-environment-for-ebpf/

A proposed approach to consider eBPF to have their own isolation environment. They do that by first making a summary of all that the verifier currently checks before loading the eBPF in the kernel with the JIT, but then cut the exploration to future posts mentioning a Software-Based Fault Isolation (SFI) approach.
OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD and DragonFly BSD
https://unixdigest.com/articles/the-main-differences-between-openbsd-freebsd-netbsd-and-dragonflybsd.html

It's been such a long time since I had seen the vehicle analogy.
GNOME Shell Frippery
https://frippery.org/extensions/

Get your toes wet in the ricing space with some of these ideas.
Mute machine when locked
https://blog.fernvenue.com/archives/mute-when-lock/

Now that's a neat idea I never thought about.
The Joy of Linux Theming in the Age of Bootable Containers
https://blues.win/posts/joy-of-linux-theming/

A reproducible ricer mode or an immutable distro rice?
Keeping an old Mac alive
https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/15/classic_mac_os_apps/

This should keep you going for another 25 years.
sandbox-exec
https://igorstechnoclub.com/sandbox-exec/

See also "macOS sandbox" in issue 184. Since the profile syntax is undocumented, maybe some LLMs can help with gathering all it knows from around the web and decipher it, putting an end to the dogma.

Life & Other

Personal Home Pages and the Construction of Identities on the Web
http://visual-memory.co.uk/daniel/Documents/short/webident.html

It's the type of things that seem obvious nowadays but that needs to be written down and explained.
How to make people feel stupid
https://nedbatchelder.com/blog/200801/how_to_make_people_feel_stupid.html

That's a tip for when you're presenting a topic.
irongeek
https://www.irongeek.com/

Who remembers this legendary blog?

Thoughts

It is language which speaks, not the author; to write is, through a prerequisite impersonality, to reach that point where only language acts, 'performs', and not 'me'. — Roland Barthes

Archive

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nixers newsletter issue | 2025-04-18 00:00:00 | 286

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

PulseAudioDB
https://unnamed.website/posts/pulseaudiodb/

And no, this isn't the restore DB of pulseaudio that uses TDB, it's about storing info within sinks. See also the stuff on kernel keyring in "Relying on the Linux kernel keystore" in issue 226. Seriously, I love these types of random experiments.
The modern OpenBSD router
https://www.azabani.com/2015/08/06/modern-openbsd-home-router.html

It's never about the outcome, it's always about what you learn along the way.
5 levels of confs
https://beza1e1.tuxen.de/config_levels.html

I like the guiding principle "using the lowest level possible".
Debian oh Debian
https://blog.liw.fi/posts/2025/why-debian-changes/
https://blog.liw.fi/posts/2023/debian-reasons/

At this point Debian is its own nation-state.
Fedora wants 99% reproducibility
https://lwn.net/Articles/1014979/
https://github.com/kpcyrd/rebuilderd

I think that's a good idea for supply chain security.
Better shell history
https://tratt.net/laurie/blog/2025/better_shell_history_search.html

This is similar to "A year of command line usage" in issue 283.
Get your own home bin
https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/sysadmin/MyPersonalProgramsSetup

It's something we probably all do already in our own special ways.
Bootstrapping Understanding
https://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/txt/bure.html

Every reverse engineer has a tale that differs but that captivates. It starts with opaque gibberish hexadecimals and end up with structures and logic.

Life & Other

IBM Code Page 437
https://blog.glyphdrawing.club/why-is-there-a-small-house-in-ibm-s-code-page-437/

The amazing story and usage of the house character.
Setting up your own LTE network
https://lantian.pub/en/article/modify-computer/legal-lte-network-at-home-for-100-bucks.lantian/

So many limitations, where's the free market and liberty.
Fuzzing the APDU-ME interface
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ou_MxSmiVo
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1rr9i5y9IzNo4tO0YLGBz-blq1aHc9lKHI1NVTW1qe2w/edit

A continuation on the previous post on telco, that should open your appetite to learn about sim cards.
Virtualization for Isolation
https://blog.snork.dev/posts/we-don-t-need-no-virtualization.html

Food for thought (see we're using the hungry metaphors).

Thoughts

I am firm; you are obstinate; he is a pig-headed fool — The Brains Trust

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nixers newsletter issue | 2025-04-11 00:00:00 | 285

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

8-pin Linux
https://dmitry.gr/?r=05.Projects&proj=36.%208pinLinux

The mad man does it again, see "Linux on intel 4004" in issue 262. I'm truly impressed, and the design is shared and "reproduce able".
XNU deep dive in Darwin
https://tansanrao.com/blog/2025/04/xnu-kernel-and-darwin-evolution-and-architecture/

The first sections of the article is mostly a historical listicle, it's the second part that touches the core of the topic. There's a lot to learn about the interaction between Mach and the BSD part of the kernel.
Same subnet, dual NICs
https://egbert.net/blog/articles/dual-nics-same-ip-subnet.html

I thought it'd be more complex than this, but a few routing rules and it's ok. Can this be called multihoming if the two interfaces are on the same subnet?
The Wizard and His Shell
https://terminal.click/posts/2025/04/the-wizard-and-his-shell/

That reminds me of the Arcan project (but not free, it's kind of an ad), see also "Moving on from terminal" in issue 275.
BPF in rust
https://yeet.cx/blog/bpf-from-scratch-in-rust/

"Linux kernel’s deepest, weirdest, most misunderstood subsystem" or is it? It's also and ad for their yeet thing, so meh (why people write to make ads).
Linux kernel Defence Map
https://github.com/a13xp0p0v/linux-kernel-defence-map

A diagram of different mechanisms found in Linux to thwart certain attacks.
exherbolinux
https://www.exherbolinux.org/
https://man.exherbolinux.org/sydtutorial.7.html
https://man.exherbolinux.org/syd.1.html

This came up during a discussion and it seems I've never shared it in the newsletter. SYD is a new mechanism for access control over the whole OS (the documentation is horrendous).
The chroot technique
https://livesys.se/posts/the-chroot-technique/

Old school, old trick, but I guess it's often much easier to just boot a live distro.
Are jails containers?
https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2025/04/08/are-freebsd-jails-containers/
https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2025/04/11/freebsd-jails-security/

As with most things, words are redefined and reused and that creates useless misunderstandings. So, when arguing it's better to simply not use the word altogether and instead actually explain what you mean by it. OCI standardized container solution, or the idea of OS level virtualization?
The second article is an overview of FreeBSD jails and the security mechanisms of isolation it has.
Demystifying the shebang
https://crocidb.com/post/kernel-adventures/demystifying-the-shebang/

See also "Magic bytes" in issue 100 and "Executables & default program" in issue 77.
Writing your own linux module
https://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/txt/mopb.html

And the goal of that module is to get a new binfmt running, without an external interpreter, see also previous link. A great and fun write up. See also "Tiny ELF" in issue 47, since the goal of the module is to run even tinier execs.
Man pages vs Man Readers
https://whynothugo.nl/journal/2025/04/09/man-pages-are-great-man-readers-are-the-problem/

Yes, mdoc is messy and archaic and probably most people have not read it and that might be why the man reader/display doesn't support all features.
journalctl cheatsheet
https://dataswamp.org/~solene/2024-12-24-systemd-journald-cheatsheet.html

I can never remember how to use journalctl, it's the type of software that needs a second software to understand it, and you have to remember you're manipulating a binary log db, with fixed defined fields, and not a file.
userdbtcl
https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/247/userdbctl.html
https://commandmasters.com/commands/userdbctl-linux/

TIL this existed but I don't know why other than adding another layer of abstraction and to unify things.
Things spammers believe
https://bsdly.blogspot.com/2022/09/the-things-spammers-believe-tale-of.html
https://www.bsdly.net/~peter/traplist.shtml

Fighting spam is Sisyphean work, it never ends, never gets anywhere, it's like doing the chores.

Life & Other

Ancient Art
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/adventure/article/141203-mussel-shell-oldest-art

This is the type of things that makes you wonder in awe at what humanity mean and what it is about.

Thoughts

Motho ke motho ka botho

For those who know and remember.

Archive

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nixers newsletter issue | 2025-04-04 00:00:00 | 284

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Writing a bash built-in
https://mbuki-mvuki.org/posts/2021-07-12-writing-a-bash-builtin-in-c-to-parse-ini-configs/

Usually, I think people choose option 1, it's the first time I see someone going the second route.
Disk IO mishaps
https://notes.eatonphil.com/2025-03-27-things-that-go-wrong-with-disk-io.html

A lot of good things to keep in mind, there's a buffer and possible error at every layer.
Where do the bytes go?
https://flak.tedunangst.com/post/where-do-the-bytes-go

This is related to the previous article, but focusing on the path taken within OpenBSD's kernel.
Swap, no swap, or somewhere in between
https://linuxblog.io/linux-performance-almost-always-add-swap-space/
https://linuxblog.io/linux-performance-almost-always-add-swap-part2-zram/
https://linuxblog.io/linux-performance-no-swap-space/

I fear the OOM-killer too much to disable swap, I'd disable swap only in case of real-time systems with fixed procedures that run for set amounts of time.
vramfs
https://github.com/Overv/vramfs

It's taking the idea of tmpfs/ramfs but with the graphic card memory instead, see also issue 20.
Benchmarking a distro
https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/benchmarking-a-distribution-and-some-o3-results/58027

That's a very hard question, they went for a selected few packages and discovered that the "optimization" didn't provide the benefits they were looking for, but actual regression.
Converting Linux to Windows
https://philipbohun.com/blog/0007.html

That quickly went from an idea into a rant about stable ABI. So Windows exe is the new java run everywhere.
Ricing
https://marcelofern.com/posts/linux/rice/index.html

Where are my fellow ricers at?
Thinking of modernizing Plasma login manager
https://blog.davidedmundson.co.uk/blog/a-roadmap-for-a-modern-plasma-login-manager/

It's good to have a clear plan of action and be open about ideas, also it shows that some things we take for granted are much more complex than we thought.
DWARF
https://calabro.io/dwarf
https://calabro.io/dwarf/elf
https://calabro.io/dwarf/die

A series teaching about the DWARF debugging format (which ended abruptly).
Another issue of PagedOut
https://pagedout.institute/download/PagedOut_006.pdf

There's something for everyone in it.
Dipping in OpenBSD
https://ewintr.nl/posts/2025/dipping-my-toes-in-openbsd-in-amsterdam/

Long story short, you can get a website running on OpenBSD, whowudavknown. The setup is relayd with acme for TLS termination, and httpd as the webserver.
SSHing regardless of limitations
https://blog.frost.kiwi/tunneling-corporate-firewalls/

That's a very long way to say they'll proxy ssh within an https tunnel.

Life & Other

We have a reality problem
https://www.chrbutler.com/we-have-a-reality-problem

"Who was rebelling and who was vlogging?"
You know, you've seen it
https://hilariusbookbinder.substack.com/p/the-average-college-student-today
https://www.honest-broker.com/p/whats-happening-to-students

Yet, it's comforting to read the studies and other people's account.
TV Garden
https://tv.garden

Want to see what other countries watch on the big screen?
The politicization of everything
https://shwin.co/blog/why-i-dont-discuss-politics-with-friends
https://andrewchatora.wordpress.com/2010/03/26/a-critical-review-of-pierre-bourdieus-distinction-a-social-critique-of-the-judgement-of-taste/
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9kcTNWopvXFncXgPy/intellectual-hipsters-and-meta-contrarianism
http://www.metamodernism.org/
https://www.paulgraham.com/mod.html

A couple of links to get you going down a rabbit hole.

Thoughts

"When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less" — Through the looking glass

"There are no facts, only interpretations" — Nietzsche

"Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world." — Jean-Luc Godard

Basically: read my mind. Communication is tough.

Archive

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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 issue | 2025-03-28 00:00:00 | 283

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Oxidizing Ubuntu
https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/carefully-but-purposefully-oxidising-ubuntu/56995
https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/1014002/580b8750bf02cf41/
https://alexgaynor.net/2025/mar/22/coreutils-in-rust/
https://github.com/jnsgruk/oxidizr

What do you think of all this? The justifications are a bit flimsy, but in my opinion if it keeps 100% backward compatibility, size, and speed, then I don't see the issue (but it's probably not the case).
A new LSM
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Microsoft-Hornet-Linux-LSM
https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20250321164537.16719-2-bboscaccy@linux.microsoft.com/

Hornet's idea is to load a cert to verify eBPF signature. The big question is why?
Another LSM we don't talk enough about
https://github.com/Zouuup/landrun

The landlock LSM isn't frequently spoken about, it's Linux equivalent of OpenBSD unveil. See also "Following landlock development" in 204, "Landlock" in 161 among others. Or what I've written about it.
Tiling on macos
https://lilysthings.org/blog/tiling-macos/

With 25 years far behind, ricing might soon arrive to macos.
A preference
https://matklad.github.io/2025/03/21/use-long-options-in-scripts.html

And I got to admit it, when sharing example, I prefer reading long options too.
A year of command line usage
https://danishpraka.sh/posts/year-in-command-line/

That's cool, now I want to store all my shell history in a place where it won't rollover. There's nothing like the feeling you've done something before, knew a few part of the command, but can't find it in the history. Overall, insightful!
Desktop icons are hard
https://akselmo.dev/posts/plasma-desktop-icons-positioning-refactor/

We learn a little bit every day, and today I learned about stripes, and icon positioning, which is more work than you might believe.
Debian dev guide
https://anarc.at/software/debian-development/

This is golden, it's the guide that everyone wishes they had when making or modifying packages.
Supply chain attack on Fedora
https://fenrisk.com/pagure

We need more PoCs like these to learn to protect our stack, as the meme goes: XKCD 2347.
Why BSD in 2025
https://it-notes.dragas.net/2025/03/23/osday-2025-why-choose-bsd-in-2025/

This is more of a scratch on top of the topic.
The little book about OS dev
https://littleosbook.github.io/

Condensed and straight forward, it can be used either as an introduction to OS or as a good refresher.
DNS resolution and Kubernetes
https://jpetazzo.github.io/2024/05/12/understanding-kubernetes-dns-hostnetwork-dnspolicy-dnsconfigforming/

See also "DNS unmystification" in issue 139 and a couple of others in the newsletter.
You Need To Know About Bootc
https://sean.thrailkill.cloud/posts/you-need-to-know-about-bootc/

Lots of talk about immutable/atomic distros the past few years. What do you think of them?

Life & Other

Open source myths
https://lgug2z.com/articles/on-open-source-mythology/

We should have a new "jargon" files but with tidbits like these, but they don't do them like these anymore.

Thoughts

"Power operates most effectively when it is invisible" — Colapietro

Another interesting one, that might be related

"Propaganda is most effective when it is least noticeable"

Archive

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Contribute

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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 issue | 2025-03-21 00:00:00 | 282

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

PAM unixsock
https://miek.nl/2025/march/14/pam-unixsock/

I love pam modules, but pam modules never love anyone back.
A 6502 emulator written in busybox ash
https://codeberg.org/calebccff/6502.sh

Now we'll wait for someone to run a shell on top of 6502 on top of ash.
Disaster recovery or disastrous recovery
https://tinyhack.com/2022/09/16/when-you-deleted-lib-on-linux-while-still-connected-via-ssh/

Heard this folks, install a static busybox as a failsafe, otherwise you'll have to do some gymnastics.
Spreadsheets vs CLI utilities vs SQL
https://blog.qiqitori.com/2018/07/spreadsheets-vs-cli-utilities-vs-sql-for-pivot-tables/

Use the right tool for the right job, or change the job to fit your tool. Also TIL about q.
shèlĺ's-éval
https://susam.net/shell-eval.html

Sequentially testing to prove the theory.
Image-based Linux
https://supakeen.com/weblog/image-based-linux/

Nice intro, but we need to send encouragement for the rest of the article series.
They don't want FreeType anymore
https://developer.chrome.com/blog/memory-safety-fonts
https://skia.org/

The Rust bandwagon is now a fast moving bullet train.
The long lost hidden partition
https://www.downtowndougbrown.com/2025/03/apples-long-lost-hidden-recovery-partition-from-1994-has-been-found/

The actual content of the recovery partition isn't as interesting as the path it took to reach it.
How costly is context switch
https://blog.codingconfessions.com/p/context-switching-and-performance

A comprehensive, one of the few, articles about context switch cost and how to think about it (Other than the famous "About memory" from back in issue 58).

Life & Other

whois change
https://www.icann.org/en/announcements/details/icann-update-launching-rdap-sunsetting-whois-27-01-2025-en
https://lookup.icann.org/en/lookup
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Registration_Data_Access_Protocol

The new protocol is RDAP and it's been a long time cooking.
Teach, don't tell
https://stevelosh.com/blog/2013/09/teach-dont-tell/

One thing that is never mentioned is that documentation, by nature, isn't teaching, which is the big issue.

Thoughts

"Myth is not a lie: it is a system of signs." — Roland Barthes

Archive

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Contribute

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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 issue | 2025-03-14 00:00:00 | 281

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Apple Exclaves
https://randomaugustine.medium.com/on-apple-exclaves-d683a2c37194

A tiny lesson in the difference between monolith and microkernel architecture followed by a list of hardware level security mitigations, and then a focus on the exclave extension to XNU for resource isolation. There is not a lot of open information about how it's implemented but they possibly are set in a separate kernel, SK, based on seL4. It runs on the same processor as the main kernel, but the processor has to provide privilege separation when swapping context between the two, possibly via TrustZone. There is then a dance between the main kernel to discover the "domains" provided by the exclaves, and a way for processes to manage, use, and communicate with these . A fascinating article.
Good code design from Linux kernel
https://leandromoreira.com/2019/08/02/linux-ffmpeg-source-internals-a-good-software-design/

That's a good exercise in learning that polymorphism is a concept that can be applied regardless of the language.
Linux scheduler in user-space
https://medium.com/tier-iv-tech-blog/customizing-linux-kernel-scheduler-in-user-space-39baf0a60af0
https://cs.stanford.edu/~jhumphri/documents/ghost.pdf
https://github.com/google/ghost-kernel
https://github.com/google/ghost-userspace

ghost is a handy project if you've ever been interested in scheduling and how it works. See also "It lands in Linux 6.12" in issue 262, "PREEMPT RT support" in 260, among others.
ed for everything
https://aartaka.me/this-post-is-ed.html
https://aartaka.me/sed-ed.html

Should you use it? Sure, but it's a case-by-case, don't go using it everywhere.
Parsing json with awk
https://akr.am/blog/posts/parsing-json-in-forty-lines-of-awk

It's much simpler than you thought.
fontconfig, it works so you don't have to worry about it
https://www.1a-insec.net/blog/11-fonts-where/

It's been a long time since I've read anything about the font stack on Unix-like OSes, is it a good sign?
ANSI escape codes
https://jvns.ca/blog/2025/03/07/escape-code-standards/

That's the most humble and straight intro to ANSI escape codes and terminfo I've read.
Kitty's text-sizing protocol
https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/text-sizing-protocol/

A follow up on the previous link with someone that is trying to get a new standard accepted.

Life & Other

Eisegesis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eisegesis
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/eisegesis

You've learned a new word today.
The Hierarchy of Hazard Controls
https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/hoc/

This should be read by anyone that dabbles in security and safety.
Introduction to PDF syntax
https://gendignoux.com/blog/2016/10/04/pdf-basics.html

"Can this PDF run Linux?" of issue 276 should make more sense now.
A visual explanation of data storage
https://planetscale.com/blog/io-devices-and-latency

That's one of the best I've seen thus far, take a look!

Thoughts

"What a useful thing a pocket-map is!" I remarked.
"That's another thing we've learned from your Nation," said Mein Herr, "map-making. But we've carried it much further than you. What do you consider the largest map that would be really useful?"
"About six inches to the mile."
"Only six inches!" exclaimed Mein Herr. "We very soon got to six yards to the mile. Then we tried a hundred yards to the mile. And then came the grandest idea of all ! We actually made a map of the country, on the scale of a mile to the mile!"
"Have you used it much?" I enquired.
"It has never been spread out, yet," said Mein Herr: "the farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight ! So we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well."
— Lewis Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, Chapter XI, London, 1895

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nixers newsletter issue | 2025-03-07 00:00:00 | 280

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

What is this dbus thing
https://deathandthepenguinblog.wordpress.com/2021/09/21/whats-all-this-new-fangled-dbus-rubbish/

See also "dbus-broker vs dbus-daemon" in 230, "A critique of D-Bus activation" in 199, "Polkit and dbus" in 126, "Your inner daemon" in 79, among others.
ACPI & Device Tree
https://blogsystem5.substack.com/p/hardware-autoconfiguration

A series of questions will always take you to the answer. Let's learn about device mapping with NetBSD as example.
Mapping iSCSI filesystem mounts on Linux
https://blog.unixwiz.net/2018/06/mapping-iscsi-filesystem-mounts-on-linux.html

Ever configured an array of disks over the network?
FP in the shell
https://www.evalapply.org/posts/shell-aint-a-bad-place-to-fp-part-1-doug-mcilroys-pipeline/index.html#main
https://www.evalapply.org/posts/shell-aint-a-bad-place-to-fp-part-2-functions-as-unix-tools/index.html#main

So yeah, pipes can be functional, now what to do with that idea is up to you.
Rich CLI
https://ballingt.com/rich-terminal-applications/
https://ballingt.com/rich-terminal-applications-2/

Deeply thinking about how and where history and completion should appear, whether in multi-screen programs or not. The main example is bpython REPL.
How to play an oldie game
https://www.dedoimedo.com/games/reviving/pharaoh-cleopatra-hd.html

But isn't it as simple as installing the WINE? Nope... You might need an embedded X session too.
eBPF issue, then blame Fred
https://tanelpoder.com/posts/ebpf-pt-regs-error-on-linux-blame-fred/

eBPF is exposed to changes at the kernel level that user-space usually isn't, that FRED thing for instance for Intel CPU level switching.
Everyone hates fork?
https://byroot.github.io/ruby/performance/2025/01/25/why-does-everyone-hate-fork.html

Indeed, in most Unix-like OSes today we have more efficient functions, and it's a good summary of how fork was and is still used for parallelism.
Foldable Words
http://bit-player.org/2021/foldable-words

I didn't think I'd get emotional when reading the story of someone tackling an algo challenge.

Life & Other

Yet more content about writing
https://kupajo.com/write-to-escape-your-default-setting/
https://andregarzia.com/2025/03/the-web-should-be-a-conversation.html

A good friend recently launched their blog, so I'm guessing these types of posts are inciting people to do something.
Explore mythology
https://www.theoi.com/

Learning the past can help guide people for the future.

Thoughts

Hold your identity lightly.

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nixers newsletter issue | 2025-02-28 00:00:00 | 279

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Which init process for containers
https://ahmet.im/blog/minimal-init-process-for-containers/

I know that feeling, when all good practices say something, yet you somehow have to go against it because of some edge case.
A primer on rcctl
https://brynet.ca/article-rcctl.html

For when the manpage isn't enough (sshhh, it's excellent and definitely enough).
A refresher on shell redirection syntax
http://rednafi.com/misc/shell_redirection/

Nothing extraordinary, a quick read.
Deleting files with find
https://b4d.sablun.org/blog/2023-10-19-deleting-files-with-find/

Well.. the most interesting part was the "why". I guess it's because the maxdepth has changed.
Compression to compromise
https://trebledj.me/posts/attack-of-the-zip/

TIL about zip slip.
Sharing secrets
https://www.netmeister.org/blog/sharing-secrets.html

"This document is intended to help you decide how to share confidential information with others. It describes in some detail the various trade-offs, assumptions, and risks associated with each approach."
macos for kde
https://matklad.github.io/2025/02/23/macos-for-kde-users.html

This comes down to homebrew, keybind tool, learning the shortcuts, and that's it.
Adopted WorldWide?
https://brajeshwar.com/2011/a-thought-about-worldwide-adoption-of-linux/

Someone has to ring on his doorbell and tell him that it's already adopted on most servers by all big corps worldwide.

Life & Other

Check this person's Amiga setup
https://datagubbe.se/coolestamiga/

Go bump the battlestation thread on the forums while at it.
I miss Worms
https://heckmeck.de/blog/fun-with-worms-dc-custom-levels/

Having a cutom level building is a great addition.
AnAnAnother one about writing
https://www.gilesthomas.com/2025/02/20250223-til-deep-dive-posts

Having a blog is fun, go make one NOW! See also "Another one about writing" in issue 221.

Thoughts

"The subtlety of nature is greater many times over than the subtlety of argument" — Bacon

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nixers newsletter issue | 2025-02-21 00:00:00 | 278

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Debugging a Linux kernel
https://dasl.cc/2025/01/01/debugging-our-new-linux-kernel/

These debugging stories are always captivating, it's like reading a detective novel.
runaway processes
https://thinkingeek.com/2024/01/05/mitigate-runaway-processes/

It's my first time encountering this use-case to track short-lived processes, I might give it a try, or not.
Fear of IPv6
https://techlog.jenslink.net/posts/ipv6-is-hard/

If it doesn't work it doesn't mean it's hard, fix it instead.
Using raw sockets/packets on Linux
https://schoenitzer.de/blog/2018/Linux%20Raw%20Sockets.html

I'm surprised by the discrepancy in behavior between IPv6 and IPv4, I'd expect them to act the same way.
UNIX maximalism and minimalism
https://0x19.org/posts/2023-05-21.php

It's the kind of articles that lives in between parody and seriousness.
Trying out fzf
https://andrew-quinn.me/fzf

You've heard of fzf, installed it, but don't know what to do with it, then this article is for you.
A few thoughts about s6
https://dudemanguy.github.io/blog/posts/2019-12-19-s6-love/s6-love.html

Keep in mind that when love is blind or makes you wear rosy tinted glasses.
Reverse DDoS Attacks
https://parkalex.dev/posts/reverse-ddos

So you want to shoot yourself in the foot?
The origin of the word "mainframe"
https://www.righto.com/2025/02/origin-of-mainframe-term.html

Someone had to go down the rabbit hole and give us the nitty-gritty tasty details.

Life & Other

Cybersecurity Superstition
https://vale.rocks/posts/cybersecurity-superstition

Something to send to your non-techie friends.
The Inner-Platform Effect
https://mattrickard.com/the-inner-platform-effect

This reminds me of Zawinski’s Law.
What's interesting
https://cognitivewonderland.substack.com/p/what-is-interesting

My expertise gives me the ability to appreciate the exquisite flavors in complex spaghetti code.

Thoughts

"The press may not be very successful in telling us what to think, but they are extraordinarily successful in telling us what to think about." — Bernard Cohen

Or in simple terms: They pick who and what gets free rent in your head.

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nixers newsletter issue | 2025-02-14 00:00:00 | 277

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

getaddrinfo issues
https://valentin.gosu.se/blog/2025/02/getaddrinfo-sucks-everything-else-is-much-worse

I can't say I've used getaddrinfo info directly, most of the time indirectly through other functions, but I didn't know it had so many obvious drawbacks.
14 years of systemd
https://fosdem.org/2025/schedule/event/fosdem-2025-6648-14-years-of-systemd/

Ever heard of systemd? It's a new service manager along with a suite of tools to manage things in its cosmology.
ParticleOS
https://github.com/systemd/particleos

A novel immutable distro that wants to rely on the hermetic tools of systemd (verified image on boot, home management, TPM, and others).
Patching the kernel pipeline tools
https://github.com/geico/tuxtape

kpatch can be tough, the TuxTape project tries to make it easier.
What grinds your gears
https://jvns.ca/blog/2025/02/05/some-terminal-frustrations/

Everyone has frustrations and if these frustrations are aggregated and sorted, we can see that we might have so many in common.
Solving sudoku with tmux
https://willhbr.net/2024/12/27/solving-sudoku-with-tmux/

Obviously, if you add an interpreter to any software it's going to be Turing complete.
Use /tmp more!
https://atthis.link/blog/2025/58671.html

In the opposite direction of "Against /tmp" in issue 273.
Fast and Slow BPF experiments
https://www.p99conf.io/2023/08/31/running-fast-and-slow-experiments-with-bpf-programs-performance/

If you thought BPF programs were all as efficient as they could get from the start, you're wrong, there's always some optimizations here and there.
Linux physical page frame data structure
https://blogs.oracle.com/linux/post/struct-page-the-linux-physical-page-frame-data-structure

You thought a page was just a plain empty area to store data, nope, it has a structure too.
IPv6 WiFi on OpenBSD and FreeBSD
https://vincentdelft.be/post/post_20250208

To be fair when I started reading the title I was ready for a 20 page redaction on how to setup WiFi, but it's straight forward.
Connecting to the internet
https://pjg1.site/linux-internet-from-scratch

From scratch.
A packet journey through pf
https://2024.eurobsdcon.org/slides/eurobsdcon2024-alexander_bluhm-a_packets_journey.pdf
https://fosdem.org/2025/events/attachments/fosdem-2025-4306-a-packet-s-journey-through-pf/slides/237084/presentat_GzZfyhT.pdf

There's nothing better to learn about networking than to see how firewalls handling things.
One of the best Linux networking blog on the internet
https://thermalcircle.de/

I'm still sifting through this gold mine, so much to learn!

Life & Other

Ok, ok, here's you LLMs-related articles
https://thebullshitmachines.com/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xTGNNLPyMI
https://anfalmushtaq.com/articles/deep-dive-into-llms-like-chatgpt-tldr
https://bbycroft.net/llm

This content is high quality and recommended by most dentists in your country.

Thoughts

"When all think alike, then no one is thinking." — Walter Lippmann

Archive

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nixers newsletter issue | 2025-02-07 00:00:00 | 276

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Vanilla vim
https://leblancfg.com/i-miss-vim.html

This is more of someone's woes about neovim than it is about vim.
Can this PDF run Linux?
https://github.com/ading2210/linuxpdf

Or how someone will always abuse Turing completeness.
Can this Android run Linux?
https://www.androidauthority.com/android-16-linux-terminal-doom-3521804/

Pedantic: It always was. But the novelty is that the terminal can now run graphical apps and support a display server such as weston (Wayland compositor).
Can this Linux run Android?
https://waydro.id/

It's been available for a while, but it's resurfacing in the tech news.
Perfetto
https://perfetto.dev/docs/quickstart/linux-tracing
https://ui.perfetto.dev/

This is an advanced tracing system that also has neat visualizations tools.
X-Ray vision on Linux
https://0x.tools/
https://tanelpoder.com/posts/tpargs-list-tracepoint-arguments-and-structures/

Tracing on Linux has moved forward a lot with the appearance of eBPF. 0xtools is also, similarly to the previous link, part of these tools that can be used for that.
Creating a nameless file
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/vmucmc/is_there_a_way_to_create_a_nameless_file_in_linux/
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/381474/can-i-create-a-file-without-metadata#381476

There's no such thing as a stupid question, if you follow through deeply enough in the details.
This message will self-destruct
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8981164/self-deleting-shell-script
https://github.com/reedHam/self-shred

This will go in your "neat tricks" directory.
disown
https://www.commandinline.com/cheat-sheet/disown/
https://phoenixnap.com/kb/disown-command-linux

Let's revisit a job management shell commands that we constantly use.
Worse is Better
https://www.dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html

A classic duel of design classicists.
Fiwix a Unix/POSIX-compatible OS
https://www.fiwix.org/features.html

It's always interesting to see someone create a new OS from scratch, especially the novel aspects in it. Here, there's not much, but it's simple enough that if someone wants to play around with, let's say the scheduler, they can easily modify and run it.

Life & Other

Stuck in Someone Else's Theory
https://jimmyhmiller.github.io/stuck

I gotta put that on my CV: "theory builder".
The library of libraries
https://phiresky.github.io/blog/2025/visualizing-all-books-in-isbn-space/
https://phiresky.github.io/isbn-visualization/

That's one amazing visualization!

Thoughts

"Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don't resist them; that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like." – Lao Tzu

What makes you enter your flow state?

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nixers newsletter issue | 2025-01-31 00:00:00 | 275

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Oracle Linux VM on MacBooks
https://xeiaso.net/notes/2025/k8s-dev-mac-oracle-linux/

That's a trick for those that need it that makes it easier with UTM.
Faster resume/suspend on Linux
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.14-ACPI

This is the type of small change that has a noticeable impact on certain hardware.
Unix print driver fun
https://jholloway.dev/posts/print-driver-fun/

As soon as anyone reads CUPS, they know there's going to be a mess. It ends up in a juggling of binary compatibility.
Chimera Linux distro
https://lwn.net/Articles/1004324/

A distro made with modernity in mind, with musl as the C library, it's systemd-free but not for ideological reasons and instead relies on dinit which offers similar features.
A fast(er) linker for Linux
https://github.com/davidlattimore/wild

You'll be shaving off milliseconds from your start time, worth it on tiny devices.
X11 listening to events
https://nrk.neocities.org/articles/x11-timeout-with-xsyncalarm

Every time I think I know a bit about X11, I learn that there's another extension or feature I had never heard of.
Real world latency between GNOME rendering backends
https://mort.coffee/home/wayland-input-latency/

So, is X11 always faster than Wayland? Let's see if it's a reproducible finding on different machines too.
bisecting the Linux kernel using nixos
https://mathieu.fenniak.net/bisecting-the-linux-kernel-with-nixos/

git bisect is this utility you take out of the garage once every 5 years to debug something, it's huge and bulky, tedious to use, but it eventually gets the job done.
Moving on from terminal
https://arcan-fe.com/2025/01/27/sunsetting-cursed-terminal-emulation/

We've been following the arcan project for years in this newsletter, and it's always daring and rethinking, and pushing forward what we take for granted, and the pieces that blocks us from moving away from terminal and novel HCI that don't depend on it.

Life & Other

Dual qr code generator
https://dualqrcode.com/

Someone comes up with a novel attack and the PoCs pop up everywhere.
Cookie banners or spirit of the law
https://jfagerberg.me/blog/2022-06-09-analytics-cookie-compliance/

It's a case of pedantic nagging, but a great reminder that it's not the cookies that are important, it's the tracking.
HTML display page
https://iamwillwang.com/dollar/every-html-element/

That's a great way to visually learn what the elements are.

Thoughts

"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum – even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate." — Chomsky

That also irks back to the concept of the Overton Window.

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nixers newsletter issue | 2025-01-24 00:00:00 | 274

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Graphics without X11 on NetBSD
https://blogsystem5.substack.com/p/netbsd-graphics-wo-x11

This kinds of reminds me of Amiga. See also "The graphic stack on Linux" in issue 225 and "Accessing the DRM framebuffer" in 271.
Unix Spell
https://blog.codingconfessions.com/p/how-unix-spell-ran-in-64kb-ram

Now that's some innovative algorithm for the time, impressive.
Interactive systemd
https://github.com/isd-project/isd
https://isd-project.github.io/isd/#working-with-isd

This stands as an alternative to TUI and GUIs such as "systemd gui" in 54.
Essential CLI/TUI Tools for Developers
https://packagemain.tech/p/essential-clitui-tools-for-developers

A standard listicle where the interesting suspects are the ones at the bottom: jq, bat, ripgrep, etc..
dinit
https://github.com/davmac314/dinit

This is the init system we mentioend in "Dinit on Chimera" in issue 244.
UNIX Epoch from UTC
https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/how-to-get-a-unix-epoch-from-a-utc-date-time-string/

As with anything related to time and timezones, it quickly gets messy.
eSIM from Linux
https://neilzone.co.uk/2025/01/using-esims-with-devices-that-only-have-a-physical-sim-slot-via-a-9esim-sim-card-with-android-and-linux/

Now that we have local assistants and the hardware card readers are widely available, there's nothing stopping the innovation.
Migrating from bcachefs
https://blog.sesse.net/blog/tech/2025-01-20-21-45_migrating_away_from_bcachefs.html

Trying bleeding edge tech comes at a cost, but it has its fun aspects too.
Tiny linux from scratch
https://blinry.org/tiny-linux/

What better way to learn than to build it from scratch.
Line anchors in regex
https://buttondown.com/hillelwayne/archive/why-do-regexes-use-and-as-line-anchors/

I think the guess makes sense, now let's wait for the reply from the actual authors.
Dreaming of new shell experience
https://taylor.town/smel-000
https://linux.die.net/man/1/sponge
https://man.archlinux.org/man/vipe.1.en
https://github.com/ericfreese/rat
https://domterm.org/index.html
https://github.com/unconed/TermKit

I've also added a couple of tools that could actually allow this dream to be true.

Life & Other

Memory management
https://educatedguesswork.org/posts/memory-management-1/

That's a good summary/refresher, or a good intro, to C basic allocation and programming.
Postdoc broken dreams
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00142-y
https://archive.ph/E5aqe

I'm not surprised, from all that I've heard from people who also left postdoc.

Thoughts

The only thing we know about the future is that it will be different. — Peter Drucker

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nixers newsletter issue | 2025-01-17 00:00:00 | 273

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Against /tmp
https://dotat.at/@/2024-10-22-tmp.html

The author makes a good case, tmp has generated so many workarounds over the years because of the security "mishaps".
18 years in the Linux console
https://eugene-andrienko.com/en/it/2024/01/02/life-in-console

Oh, these stories are always captivating—the journey of learning and growth someone has undertaken over the year, along with all the things they've accomplished and reflect upon.
20 years of Linux desktop
https://ploum.net/2024-10-20-20years-linux-desktop-part1.html
https://ploum.net/2024-12-16-linux_desktop2.html

Another story but this time it's a bit different, it's from someone who started installing and helping people around them with Linux desktops. Then dreamed of more friendly desktops, which then became a quest.
"modern" terminal setup
https://jvns.ca/blog/2025/01/11/getting-a-modern-terminal-setup/

When I read the first sentence I had a similar train of thought, and then I went through the list, and I couldn't agree more. It sounds like a few common-sense ideas, yet, they're not easy to achieve.
sudo-rs
https://github.com/trifectatechfoundation/sudo-rs

A follow up on "sudo in rust" in issue 206.
Eternal Terminal
https://eternalterminal.dev/

Think of it as an infinite auto-ssh.
The state of vim
https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/1002342/a8d8a17f30968b93/

What happens when a BDFL dies or quits the project, here's a relevant example.
Process creation in io_uring
https://lwn.net/Articles/1002371/

Like any cool project, it starts as a small idea, and then slowly gets extended with more features.
Files and actors with io_uring
https://lewiscampbell.tech/blog/250104.html

Or, another way to view things. There's always some perspective to stuff, if you find some paragraph in history that somewhat resembles/match it.
Is Unix microservice?
https://www.brandonbloom.name/blog/2021/08/02/unix-and-microservice-platforms/

Similar to the previous post, it's not really, but again, it can be used as a metaphor for software architecture and design.
Context switch in Linux
https://blog.codingconfessions.com/p/linux-context-switching-internals

Kind of a continuation of "Disillusioning the Magic of the fork System Call" in issue 2070.
Multi-Path and routing fundamentals on Linux
https://blog.sdn.clinic/2025/01/linux-routing-fundamentals/
https://blog.cloudflare.com/multi-path-tcp-revolutionizing-connectivity-one-path-at-a-time/

Two excellent networking articles. The first one is mainly an explanation of iproute2 and the second explains MTCP.
The Makefile effect
https://blog.yossarian.net/2025/01/10/Be-aware-of-the-Makefile-effect

An aptly named effect/situation.
hashmap in bash
https://xeiaso.net/notes/2024/bash-hashmap/

Well, someone learned something today, let's take this as an opportunity to refresh our memory too.
Plan9 is a bicycle
https://liam-on-linux.dreamwidth.org/93196.html
https://asyncial.github.io/plan-9-linux/

I remember that whole first article used to be summarized in a single meme image back in the days. Go find it and share it on IRC!
CLI Club
https://cli.club/

A categorized list of command line interfaces to perform different things.
Viewing images
https://wolf.nereid.pl/posts/image-viewer/

There's ton of tiny trivia in there, from someone truly passionate and that went down the rabbit hole when it comes to cursor rendering and image rendering in general. It's a golden nugget to go through.

Life & Other

A New SUPERPOWER
https://danielwirtz.com/blog/spot-the-difference-superpower

Simply said: they discovered stereograms aka magic-eye.
Adulting
https://grantslatton.com/nobody-cares

They've just realized the world is a mishmash jumble of random stuff held together by people who care just enough to keep the crumbling mess functional. Also, the grass isn't always greener, don't go on believing it's not the same everywhere, no need to be idealist either. How I personally cope: a bottom-up approach, I care about my personal space and stuff and then move up if I still have the time and energy. How do you do it?

Thoughts

"That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history." — Aldous Huxley

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nixers newsletter issue | 2024-12-20 00:00:00 | 272

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Some common sense
https://jvns.ca/blog/2024/11/26/terminal-rules/

A couple of "rules" that we implicitly learn while using terminals.
Manpages are Turing complete!
https://codeberg.org/cve/mott

...And you can implement Conway's GOL in it.
Xfce new release
https://alexxcons.github.io/blogpost_14.html

It's starting on it's route towards full Wayland support.
Spring system
https://web.archive.org/web/20100116211311/http://research.sun.com/features/tenyears/volcd/papers/mitchell.htm
https://web.archive.org/web/20110718052403/https://labs.oracle.com/features/tenyears/volcd/papers/Mitchell.pdf

An experimental project that was made to "reimplement UNIX in an object-oriented fashion".
Adding objects in the Unix shell
https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2024/12/objects.html
https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2024/09/project-overview.html

To be fair, it's a completely new shell language, it's not your POSIX shell script. The language is clean, I might give it a try.
What is Vim?
https://blog.jonas.foo/whats_vim.html

That's a compelling meta-point about what vim is, I'll keep it in mind.
Why Don't We Have a General Purpose Tree Editor?
https://pcmonk.me/2014/04/01/why-dont-we-have-a-general-purpose-tree-editor.html?

And obviously, commenters had a lot of answers with pretty good software. Mine is hnb.
Eye Tracker Reviews
https://thume.ca/2016/03/24/eye-tracker-reviews-pupil-labs-tobii-eyex-eye-tribe-tobii-x2-30/

Ever heard of eye trackers, neither did I. Yet, it makes total sense in the context of an HCI research and I guess I indirectly read about it once.
How fast are they talking?
https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/talk-fast/

Pretty impressive analysis, I never thought of doing it like this. I also guess that for the transcript, these days, AI would help quite a lot.
NetBSD on IBM ThinkPad 380Z
https://luke8086.dev/netbsd-on-thinkpad-380z.html

NetBSD stays true to its motto: runs everywhere.

Life & Other

Map of Github
https://anvaka.github.io/map-of-github/#2/0/0
https://paperscape.org/

The Github relations map, reminded me of the amazing map of research papers, showing galaxies, and how to visualize references as if they were a living organism, constantly evolving and growing.
RAM data remanence times
https://blog.3mdeb.com/2024/2024-12-13-ram-data-decay-research/

How long does data stay in RAM? You can jump to the measurement graph at the end for the conclusion.

Thoughts

The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance. — Alan Watts

What do you think: plunge in the change, or resist change?

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nixers newsletter issue | 2024-12-13 00:00:00 | 271

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

The biggest shell programs
https://github.com/oils-for-unix/oils/wiki/The-Biggest-Shell-Programs-in-the-World

If someone reaches a certain number of lines in a shell script, others will start to frown and propose switching to another language. This list is about certain cases where they didn't listen, for a reason or another, be it portability, or simplicity.
OpenWrt supply chain attack
https://flatt.tech/research/posts/compromising-openwrt-supply-chain-sha256-collision/

It starts with the usual catch of trusting user input, then to container escape, and finally hash collision and possible supply chain attack.
We're not a museum anymore!
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-EFI-Zboot-Gzip-Zstd

So it's passing from seven different compression types to only two.
Accessing the DRM framebuffer
https://embear.ch/blog/drm-framebuffer

The old /dev/fbN interface is one we're familiar with and often seen when using the TTY, but what about cases where it's not available and a bit more complex.
Conjuring a Linux distro from thin air
https://blog.brixit.nl/conjuring-a-linux-distribution-out-of-thin-air/

Sometimes we have to do this just for the sake of it.
TCC and sandboxing on macOS
https://bdash.net.nz/posts/sandboxing-on-macos/
https://bdash.net.nz/posts/tcc-and-the-platform-sandbox-policy/

See also "macOS sandbox" in issue 184.
Making memcpy(NULL, NULL, 0) well-defined
https://developers.redhat.com/articles/2024/12/11/making-memcpynull-null-0-well-defined

It's not everyday that an UB gets removed from C, rejoice!
Mac servers
https://eclecticlight.co/2024/12/07/a-brief-history-of-mac-servers/

Short-lived, they still were kind of niche and interesting.

Life & Other

More powerful phones or not?
https://www.androidauthority.com/phone-pc-performance-3504716/

The car metaphor is a classic that I use because it discerns clearly between utility and appearances.
Creating an AS
http://blog.thelifeofkenneth.com/2017/11/creating-autonomous-system-for-fun-and.html

This is epic, it reminds me of "Build your own anycast network" in issue 197.

Thoughts

"Freedom is the will to be responsible for ourselves." — Friedrich Nietzsche

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nixers newsletter issue | 2024-12-06 00:00:00 | 270

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

sudo warning history
https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/12521/when-was-the-famous-sudo-warning-introduced-under-what-background-by-whom

I didn't expect to be so much trivia and history behind this.
Mis-issued certificate
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1934361

Since the Moz CA trust store is used in a lot of places, these discussions and related decisions are very important.
Disillusioning the Magic of the fork System Call
https://blog.codingconfessions.com/p/the-magic-of-fork

Seems to be the trend these days to explain forking over and over again, see also "Linux threads and processes" in issue 264. This one has an emphasis on examples in assembly.
Why your pipe gets stuck
https://jvns.ca/blog/2024/11/29/why-pipes-get-stuck-buffering/

It couldn't handle the pressure and go with the flow, some plumbing should fix it.
Low maintenance password management
https://tzcrawford.com/blog/secure-and-low-maintenance-password-management.html

It's secure and low maintenance, but definitely not simple, it's now a whole distributed key management system (KMS) from scratch.
git submodules
https://www.cyberdemon.org/2024/03/20/submodules.html

I got to say, it's the first time these make total sense to me, it's a great explanation.
OCI containers on FreeBSD
https://people.freebsd.org/~dch/posts/2024-12-04-freebsd-containers/

Containers are coming to FreeBSD, you'll get your podman and companies.
Linux TCP SO_REUSEPORT
https://linuxjournal.rubdos.be/ljarchive/LJ/298/12538.html

I finally understand why sometimes restarting my server quickly will fail and say that it's already binded, then I have to wait a bit to restart it again.
Easier man pages
https://kokada.dev/blog/praise-to-scdoc-to-generate-man-pages/

This is really neat, I didn't know about scdoc before, it covers any simple man page creation (which are most man pages).

Life & Other

Restaurant Menus
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20171120-the-secret-tricks-hidden-inside-restaurant-menus
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p028z2z0

Who doesn't enjoy a good meal? Personally, I mainly look for a picture of the meal and the ingredient description.
Security model of dark web markets
https://boehs.org/node/dark-web-security

There's so much to learn from that article and the dark web, give it a glance.

Thoughts

"Missing a train is only painful if you run after it! Likewise, not matching the idea of success others expect from you is only painful if that’s what you are seeking." ― NNT

Or in other words, we are hurt by our unfulfilled desires, whether they emanated from us or society.

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nixers newsletter issue | 2024-11-29 00:00:00 | 269

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Getting in the shoes of others to understand them
https://www.5snb.club/posts/2024/making-your-connection-bad/

I wasn't aware this can be done with simple traffic control.
Search in everything of every type
https://phiresky.github.io/blog/2019/rga--ripgrep-for-zip-targz-docx-odt-epub-jpg/

That's useful, I'll test it out, it's a wrapper over rg.
You've built a kubernetes
https://www.macchaffee.com/blog/2024/you-have-built-a-kubernetes/

Things can quickly go the slippery slope argument with that type of articles.
Freshly baked malware
https://www.techradar.com/pro/security/linux-devices-hit-with-even-more-new-malware-this-time-from-chinese-hackers
https://www.welivesecurity.com/en/eset-research/unveiling-wolfsbane-gelsemiums-linux-counterpart-to-gelsevirine/

The second link is a deep technical analysis of the code and how the malware works.
Tiny code but huge improvements
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linus-2.6p-Faster-Scale-Patch
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-Linux-3888.9-Performance

It's always impressive when small changes lead to amazing outcomes.
Advanced Wireguard
https://sloonz.github.io/posts/wireguard-beyond-basic-configuration/

Mainly two points, on NATing and IPv6.
A week in the TTY 2024
https://neilzone.co.uk/2024/10/could-i-cope-with-a-terminal-only-computer/
https://neilzone.co.uk/2024/11/using-only-a-linux-terminal-for-my-personal-computing-in-2024/

We should try this out again, there's a lot to learn and what people write after such experience is full of knowledge.
Arch adds a license for PKGBUILDs
https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/998778/aa5fd76c0574a311/

After 22 years, it's just now that we see this happen.

Life & Other

Nearest neighbor attack
https://www.volexity.com/blog/2024/11/22/the-nearest-neighbor-attack-how-a-russian-apt-weaponized-nearby-wi-fi-networks-for-covert-access/

Lesson of the story is to not trust login and skip MFA, even when authenticating at proximity.
Human compiler?
https://news.radio-t.com/post/i-m-a-developer-not-a-compiler

Do you think we're moving away from memorizing facts and towards a more practical, creative, and hands-on way of learning?
Beyond bcrypt
https://soatok.blog/2024/11/27/beyond-bcrypt/

This article has a lot to teach, especially if you've also used bcrypt in similar situations.

Thoughts

Peace cannot be kept by force; it can only be achieved by understanding.

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nixers newsletter issue | 2024-11-22 00:00:00 | 268

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

bpftune
https://github.com/oracle/bpftune

It seems bpf is used more and more in everything these days, this specific tool is for Linux kernel tunables observability and calibration by relying on some for of control theory. See also "Tuning TCP" in issue 191.
Mental model for links
https://bhoot.dev/2024/on-linux-file-and-links/

A simple explanation for inodes, soft and hard links.
Losing NFS locks and the SunOS SIGLOST signal
https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/NFSLosingLocksAndSIGLOST

Some trivia and history about SIGLOST.
Scan on FreeBSD
https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2024/11/17/scan-on-freebsd/

An everyday story of setting up something and getting it to work.
Using find to solve a problem
https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2024/11/12/find-file-names/

I'm not sure I find the solution to be clean, but it works.
gdb frontends
https://begriffs.com/posts/2022-07-17-debugging-gdb-ddd.html

A repost of "Less annoying gdb usage" in issue 154.
traceroute isn't real!
https://gekk.info/articles/traceroute.htm

Now this might be news to some people that traceroute is a hack, but to others, it's a known fact. Yet a hack that consistently works is called a solution.
Container 101, again
https://maelstrom-software.com/blog/spawning-processes-on-linux/

A summary of the difference between different ways to spawn processes on Linux.
Safety in an unsafe world
https://lwn.net/Articles/995814/

A few examples from Fucshia OS about how Rust can be used to make things "safer" and "reliable".
Why solene stopped using OpenBSD
https://dataswamp.org/~solene/2024-11-15-why-i-stopped-using-openbsd.html

Coming from one of the biggest online OpenBSD blogger, this is surprising, and interesting to read.

Life & Other

DIMM vs UDIMM vs RDIMM vs SODIMM vs CUDIMM: What's the Difference?
https://www.corsair.com/us/en/explorer/diy-builder/memory/dimm-vs-udimm-vs-rdimm-vs-sodimm-vs-cudimm-whats-the-difference/

Apart from the obvious product placement, it's a good summary of the differences. Interestingly, every time I tried to find such a comparison article, it was also riddled with placements.

Thoughts

Some people live more in twenty years than others do in eighty. It's not the time that matters, it's the person. — Doctor Who

Now I got to add Doctor Who to my watchlist.

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nixers newsletter issue | 2024-11-15 00:00:00 | 267

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

NetBSD on a ROCK64 Board
https://simonevellei.com/blog/posts/netbsd-on-a-rock64-board/

The usual "NetBSD will solve it".
setenv and multithreaded envs performance
https://ttimo.typepad.com/blog/2024/11/the-steam-client-update-earlier-this-week-mentions-fixed-some-miscellaneous-common-crashes-in-the-linux-notes-which-i-wante.html

It doesn't answer why the setenv/getenv makes the threads crash, I'm curious.
Macintosh Garden Library
https://blog.persistent.info/2024/11/infinite-mac-macintosh-garden-library.html
https://macintoshgarden.org/

Now it's easier than ever to play around with retro Mac software.
Shells again
https://developer.ibm.com/tutorials/l-linux-shells/

A repost, but worthwhile. Find when we initially posted this and you'll get a round of applause.
zram tool
https://github.com/eylles/zram-service

We've explored "zram" in 227 and ram disks in a couple of issues. This tiny set of scripts should be helpful for those that want an easy management.
An interview with Kernighan
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VloimYuCxBs

Apart from the very repetitive questions that the speaker constantly gets, there's a lot of golden questions that dive deeper.
Security Is A Useless Controls Problem
https://securityis.substack.com/p/security-is-a-useless-controls-problem

Catchy title, but it's a great explanation of security theater.
Syncing shell history
https://calebhearth.com/search-sync-shell-atuin
https://atuin.sh/

I'm not sure I'll rely on this particular tool, but I've always wanted to do something similar to this.

Life & Other

Something light for this week
https://neal.fun/

Simply enjoy it!

Thoughts

"Common sense is for common people" — A random internet user

But what does it mean?

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nixers newsletter issue | 2024-11-08 00:00:00 | 266

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Linux hardware info
https://nixsanctuary.com/best-linux-hardware-system-info-commands/
https://www.golinuxcloud.com/dmidecode-command-in-linux/

A sort of listicle about commands that can be used to get hardware info.
POSIX 2024 novelties
https://blog.toast.cafe/posix2024-xcu

A continuation of "A continuation on POSIX 2024" in issue 251. It's a much deeper and better explanation, going into the reason why the changes were made too.
Dive into mseal
https://blog.trailofbits.com/2024/10/25/a-deep-dive-into-linuxs-new-mseal-syscall/

Now that's a true deep dive, within the kernel and with as many details as you want.
ioctl and window size
https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/WindowSizeIoctlAndSignal

As usual there's some SunOS innovation in there.
Useful built-in macOS tools
https://weiyen.net/articles/useful-macos-cmd-line-utilities

There's a bunch of these that could inspire some to create similar tools.
systemd and embedded linux
https://kevinboone.me/systemd_embedded.html

If you happen to be developing on embedded systems, then this is relevant.
a smaller getopt
https://dotat.at/@/2024-11-06-getopt.html

Revisiting basic constructs is a great way to enhance insights into how they can possibly be improved or seen with new eyes.
wildcard expansion
https://seclists.org/oss-sec/2024/q4/56

We all know that wildcard expansion has devilish details that can often be abused. For some, this is a new bug, for others, it's why shell scripts are so messy.

Life & Other

The last ones standing
https://johnhawks.net/weblog/the-mystery-of-the-german-cockroach/

The idea of them traveling on planes around the world, and on cruise ships is as old as time, and still a funny one.

Thoughts

"I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do." — Leonardo da Vinci

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nixers newsletter issue | 2024-10-18 00:00:00 | 265

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Making FreeBSD more user-friendly
https://gyptazy.com/freebsd-how-can-we-make-it-more-attractive-to-new-users/

A follow up on "Laptop support NOW" from issue 263. There's an earthquake-like awakening within FreeBSD to focus on this.
Switching from Linux to BSD
https://it-notes.dragas.net/2024/10/03/i-solve-problems-eurobsdcon/
https://www.theregister.com/2024/10/08/switching_from_linux_to_bsd/

Boring, predictable, and low-maintenance sound like extremely good qualities in the world of software.
OpenBSD is hard to show off
https://atthis.link/blog/2024/16379.html
https://dataswamp.org/~solene/2023-10-01-octopenbsd-2023.html

A somewhat follow up on the stability topic: obviously OpenBSD also provides reliable and stable computing.
macOS 15 is UNIX/POSIX certified
https://www.theregister.com/2024/10/11/macos_15_is_unix/

If you can pay for it, then get it. It seems to be the motto, even if another OS is UNIX-compatible, if it can't pay then it can't have the trademark.
Plan9 and GNU Guix
https://the-dam.org/docs/explanations/Plan9ListenOnLinux.html

An implementation of a super-server-like system similar to Plan9's listen by relying on Guix' service mechanism.
Updating the BIOS using Linux
https://www.pixelbeat.org/docs/bios/
https://superuser.com/questions/1683932/write-custom-nvram-entry#1683937

Risky procedure, but good to know.
The life of a container
https://indradhanush.github.io/blog/life-of-a-container/

This is your typical post about the components that make up a container, see also "What, why, and how of containers" in issue 239 and "Another look at containers from scratch" in issue 234, among others.
JS tricks for polkit granular authorization
https://www.timesys.com/security/linux-polkit-implementing-user-space-authorization-on-embedded-platforms/
https://gist.github.com/grawity/3886114

It's always good to have a refresher, even on topics you've already researched and think you know well, especially when it's someonene else explaining it in a different way.
Multitasking in the kernel
https://kukuruku.co/post/multitasking-management-in-the-operating-system-kernel/

The formatting is a bit broken, but the content is gold. A big reminder of OS courses and basics.
X11 selection sharing
https://github.com/splitbrain/clipscreen

This creates a virtual monitor to share only sections of the screen, pretty handy.

Life & Other

The end of the pagerank era
https://blog.kagi.com/age-pagerank-over

Apart from walled-gardens, now I see so many people relying on AI instead of search engines for basic day-to-day questions. (I don't care much about Kagi and have never used it, this isn't an ad for them).
DST evolution in pictures
https://blog.scottlogic.com/2021/09/14/120-years-timezone.html

...and we're still to see the removal of DST in the EU.

Thoughts

"Peace begins with a smile." — Mother Teresa

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nixers newsletter issue | 2024-10-11 00:00:00 | 264

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Comments over SSH
https://blog.haschek.at/2023/ssh-based-comment-system.html

That's a fun idea. It thwarts automated bots that rely on standard comment systems but won't deter any other attacker.
RootAsRole
https://lechatp.github.io/RootAsRole/
https://lechatp.github.io/RootAsRole/chsr/file-config.html

This is a new tool I had missed when doing research on access-control on Unix. It's neat but a bit cumbersome to use compared with relatively more simple mechanisms.
Solaris profiles
https://softpanorama.org/Solaris/Security/RBAC/profile_shells.shtml
https://venam.net/blog/unix/2023/02/28/access_control.html#sunos-derivatives-profiles

Now, this is something I do know and it's similar to the previous one, though it's a bit simplified yet requires a "keywords" learning curve to be able to configure it properly.
Proxying CLI tools
https://blog.ropnop.com/proxying-cli-tools/

Now the big question is why the trust stores are not consolidated.
Linux threads and processes
https://pthorpe92.dev/programming/systems/common-misunderstandings/
https://pthorpe92.dev/programming/systems/threads-async-runtimes-part0/
https://learnlinuxconcepts.blogspot.com/2014/03/process-management.html

These might sound basic operating system components but it's still good to go back and do an overview of key differences.
Software supply responsibilities
https://blog.liw.fi/posts/2024/swroles/

Can you split this up even more, probably, but having a big idea of the usual persons or roles and responsibilities involved alleviate the planning when thinking about releasing your software.
Cypto proto odds
http://blog.bjrn.se/2016/08/cabinet-of-curiosities-bunch-of.html

A list of protocols cryptographic operations that are a bit odd, according to the author.
BGP endless AS paths
https://vincent.bernat.ch/en/blog/2024-bgp-endless-aspath

A combination of two features that might sound good separately then give rise to the worst outcome.

Life & Other

Learning to fuzz by examples
https://github.com/antonio-morales/Fuzzing101

I've always been fascinated by fuzzers, how by mere bruteforce, constant trial and errors, one can find weak points in software. Now is a good chance to learn a bit about this.
A few notes on indoctrination
https://mosermichael.github.io/cstuff/all/blogg/2019/06/26/doctr.html

"all incoming information has to be understood exclusively by the subject in terms of the main doctrine; also the school system has to actively instill the doctrine and expunge all doubts and heresies."

Thoughts

The indoctrination is so deep that educated people think they’re being objective. — Noam Chomsky

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nixers newsletter issue | 2024-10-04 00:00:00 | 263

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

The network ate my font
https://verticalsysadmin.com/2017/09/13/sysadmin-war-story-the-network-ate-my-font/

... I didn't expect caches at this level. But why not, always expect caches at all levels.
The latest hyped attack
https://www.evilsocket.net/2024/09/26/Attacking-UNIX-systems-via-CUPS-Part-I/
https://ubuntu.com/blog/cups-remote-code-execution-vulnerability-fix-available

It's a pretty neat attack, I got to say, I was pretty sure somehow zeroconf/multicast services would be like IoT and be full of holes and assumptions (though mostly limited to local network).
Everything is a file
https://ph7spot.com/musings/in-unix-everything-is-a-file
https://web.archive.org/web/20180722143912/https://ph7spot.com/musings/in-unix-everything-is-a-file

One of the few times I see this distinction explained in a well-put manner.
trying a simple task
https://virtuallyfun.com/2018/01/10/life-in-unix-v7-an-attempt-at-a-simple-task/

An experience in masochism just to see if someone was right!
What rm does
https://blog.safia.rocks/post/173241985600/unraveling-rm-what-happens-when-you-run-it
https://web.archive.org/web/20180424164514/https://blog.safia.rocks/post/173241985600/unraveling-rm-what-happens-when-you-run-it

The type of learning I like, trying to reverse engineer something, reassemble it, dissect it, and see what every part does.
Unix error messages
https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/unix.errors.html

Old school puns, might not be for everyone, but got a few laughs from me.
Laptop support NOW
https://freebsdfoundation.org/blog/why-laptop-support-why-now-freebsds-strategic-move-toward-broader-adoption/

It's a move to be applauded.
Picking the right terminal colorscheme
https://jvns.ca/blog/2024/10/01/terminal-colours/

I don't think I've seen the terminal colorscheme issues laid down like that before, but each of these hit a particular pain spot I've had and most people had before.

Life & Other

Flow not force
https://www.thepositivepsychologypeople.com/living-life-through-flow-not-force/

Sometimes we need a bit of positivism.

Thoughts

"When a man is stung, he doesn't destroy all beehives." — proverb from Tanzania

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nixers newsletter issue | 2024-09-27 00:00:00 | 262

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Another visual guide to ssh tunneling
https://ittavern.com/visual-guide-to-ssh-tunneling-and-port-forwarding/

This is very similar to a previous one I had linked: https://robotmoon.com/ssh-tunnels/.
Linux on intel 4004
https://dmitry.gr/?r=05.Projects&proj=35.%20Linux4004

This is a continuation of "Linux on 8-bit microcontroller" in issue 125.
More modern horror stories
https://www.blopig.com/blog/2021/07/linux-horror-stories-and-protection-spells-volume-i/

At least these ones are accompanied with remediation, can't say I haven't encountered the second scenario with a huge number of files in a single directory.
self-contained exec
https://brioche.dev/blog/portable-dynamically-linked-pacakges-on-linux/

You've heard of nix, and container-based pkg managers, this is similar. See also "Portable Linux binaries" in issue 53 for fun.
Container desktop, again
https://container-desktop.com/
https://rancherdesktop.io/
https://orbstack.dev/
https://docs.orbstack.dev/architecture

As time passes by, it seems this tech and trend is here to stay.
Rethinking the Unix shell in Lisp
https://github.com/PuellaeMagicae/unix-in-lisp/blob/master/TUTORIAL.org

Do you prefer this way? I'm not sure I personally do, but it is nice to think about.
It lands in Linux 6.12
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.12-Lands-sched-ext

A follow up on "PREEMPT RT support" of issue 260, it allows for an extensible scheduler in Linux that can have its policies implemented with BFP, which is pretty cool.
A post-quantum world
https://lwn.net/Articles/973231/

The new FIPS is still in draft format but it's good to keep up-to-date.
A simple explanation of io_uring
https://matklad.github.io/2024/09/32/-what-is-io-uring.html

I've seen a lot of convoluted blog posts about io_uring but this is probably the most concise and clear one.
Stricted OpenBSD's ksh
https://www.undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20240924105732

It won't allow invalid NUL characters as part of the input string.

Life & Other

Notre-Dame is back
https://www.gq.com/story/the-miraculous-resurrection-of-notre-dame

I've been following the reconstruction of Notre-Dame for a while, there are a few wonderful documentaries about the artisans and craftsmanship, which I'm sure lots of people would enjoy.

Thoughts

Families, when a child is born, Want it to be intelligent.
I, through intelligence, Having wrecked my whole life,
Only hope the baby will prove, Ignorant and stupid.
Then he will crown a tranquil life, By becoming a Cabinet Minister
Su Tung-Po (K. Rexroth's translation)

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nixers newsletter issue | 2024-09-20 00:00:00 | 261

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Power management GUI for Linux
https://github.com/TheAlexDev23/power-options/

This is a somewhat GUI copy of powertop, see "Powertop" in issue 169.
Raw socket different behavior across systems
https://swagnik.netlify.app/posts/how-raw-sockets-behave-in-different-systems/

"All this time. I repeat, all this time, I have been poring over the linux man pages while sitting comfortably on macOS." See also "Raw sockets" in issue 160.
Falsehood about tcp
https://lwn.net/Articles/990281/

I think to better understand TCP, anyone should go back to the basics and take a few pages from "computer networking a top-down approach" and try to see how a from-scratch tcp-alike protocol would work.
Running 32-bit on 64-bit Linux
https://sigma-star.at/blog/2024/02/aarch64-32-bit-compat-pitfall/

If you're doing cross compilation, pay attention to this issue. Otherwise, you might infer runtime costs.
A better UX for shell scripts?
https://nochlin.com/blog/6-techniques-i-use-to-create-a-great-user-experience-for-shell-scripts

For the color and progress report, be sure to include a way to disable those so that the script can be used in a pipeline.
Installing Arch
https://giacomo.coletto.io/blog/arch-amd/

Good ol' blog post about notes taken during an installation, along with tips.

Life & Other

Steganography technique
https://diffusionillusions.com/

A mix of optical illusion and steganography.
Turns out it might be a scam
https://theconversation.com/the-data-on-extreme-human-ageing-is-rotten-from-the-inside-out-ig-nobel-winner-saul-justin-newman-239023

As they say "if it's too good to be true, it probably is".

Thoughts

"No star is ever lost we once have seen,
We always may be what we might have been
Since Good, though only thought,
Has life and breath -
God's life - can always be redeemed from death.
And evil in its nature is decay,
And any hour may blot it all away.
The hope that lost in some far distance seems,
May be the truer life, and this the dream."
― Adelaide Anne Procter

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nixers newsletter issue | 2024-09-13 00:00:00 | 260

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

A guide to cronjobs
https://ittavern.com/cron-jobs-on-linux-comprehensive-guide/

See also the classic, and so helpful, "This is genius, why didn't this exist before" in issue 39.
Gnome files
https://www.datagubbe.se/gnomefiles/

It's basically a dissection of the GNOME file manager.
Fuzzing an X compositor
https://trace.yshui.dev/2024-09-fuzzing.html

And unsurprisingly, fuzzing uncovers countless bugs.
NetBSD's kauth
https://man.netbsd.org/NetBSD-9.3/kauth.9

A centralized way in the kernel to manage all authorization requests.
PREEMPT RT support
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-PREEMPT_RT-Close-Patches

Linux has had some facilities for real-time scheduling for a long time, but it wasn't covering everything. Now, we're approaching this.
Linux hibernate
https://tookmund.com/2024/09/hibernation-preparation

Yet, even when diving into the kernel code, it still might not work on too many machines.
Copy-on-write archive
https://github.com/teknoraver/car

This is tar but without copying data, it's only support on BtrFS or XFS.
A dive into NT
https://blogsystem5.substack.com/p/windows-nt-vs-unix-design

This is a really good overview of all the early features that came into windows NT and how it compared to different Unix-like OSes at the time.

Life & Other

Against rereading
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2024/09/04/against-rereading/

I've never pondered as much as the author about rereading a book. However, in cinema there are many critics who swear by rewatching and that its the only way to truly enjoy a movie. Yet, at the same time, like the author, I feel like something is lost when doing so.
When security gets in the way
https://cohost.org/mononcqc/post/3647311-paper-you-want-my-p0

Software for the real world should be tested with real people in real scenarios.

Thoughts

If it costs you your peace, it's too expensive. — Paulo Coelho

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nixers newsletter issue | 2024-09-06 00:00:00 | 259

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Copy instead of install
https://battlepenguin.com/tech/copying-linux-between-machines/

This seems very cumbersome, having an immutable distro, or just a list of packages with user files alongside would be easier to set up.
Swap the cloud OS
https://cloudbsd.xyz/main/

I had heard of this risky procedure before, but I'm not sure I'd ever try it on one of my VPS.
Why learn Linux
https://opiero.medium.com/why-you-should-learn-linux-9ceace168e5c

They mean by that to develop software using a Linux-based OS. Frankly, it seems like a pretty cliche and superficial article, but probably something worth sending to newcomers to Unix-like environments.
SSH certificate authority with TPM
https://linderud.dev/blog/ssh-ca-with-device-and-identity-attestation-ssh-tpm-ca-authority/

This supersedes issue 175 "Using certificates for SSH authentication" by adding hardware keys (HSM/TPM).
Yubikey got pwned
https://www.zagaja.com/2024/09/yubikey-digital-seatbelt/
https://www.yubico.com/support/security-advisories/ysa-2024-03/

..And when we were just starting to discuss hardware sources of trust. The attack requires physical access, but still.
Debian is an easy target
https://unix.foo/posts/insecurity-of-debian/

See also "16 years anniversary of a CVE" in issue 244.
WiFi auth using SIM cards
https://kittenlabs.de/blog/2024/08/31/wifi-auth-with-osmohlr/sim-cards/

You've all heard of WEP and WPA for WiFi auth, but get ready for this. I know this isn't everyone's cup of tea, but it's something I deal with professionally and when I saw the article pop-up, I couldn't resist adding it here. It can seem a bit complex with an HLR, a RADIUS server, custom firmware on the router, and configured sim card and device. Yet, it also the same sort of things used when doing tunnels towards the operator's core network for VoWiFi for example.
TCP thin-stream on Linux
https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.5555/2346888.2346891

In sum, it reduces the latency by modifying the TCP retransmission mechanism (fast retransmitting on first duplicate ACK, instead of 3 if I'm not wrong, and to not apply exponential backoff, so not reducing the wait time between retransmission and possibly window size).
Myths and controversial info
https://itvision.altervista.org/

A lot of miscellaneous articles you might find interesting.
Missing BSD/Linux
https://brainbaking.com/post/2024/05/i-miss-bsd-linux/

The basic woes of someone who owns a macbook.
ALSA bit perfect
https://kevinboone.me/alsa_bitperfect.html

Who needs a sound server when you can force yourself to use ALSA. Yet, I don't understand why not configure the audio server to simply not resample audio if it's under a certain bitrate.
The dc calc
https://howdytx.technology/unix-history-the-dc-calculator/

RPN is one of the CS student's first weapon of choice.
wak and awk implementation
https://www.raygard.net/awkdoc/

Ever wondered how awk works, let's write it from scratch.
A shell rabbit hole
https://zwischenzugs.com/2022/09/28/a-little-shell-rabbit-hole/

That's one way to learn.
Manual driver binding on Linux
https://lwn.net/Articles/143397/

It's nothing novel but one of the TIL sort of posts, you can bind/unbind device drivers through the /sys virtual fs.
A beginner's guide to install from source
https://moi.vonos.net/linux/beginners-installing-from-source/

A very basic tutorial to get people initiate on what it means to download from source, how to check it was downloaded properly, extract, patch, and install software.
Command line conventions over time
https://blog.liw.fi/posts/2022/05/07/unix-cli/

A summary of different techniques and conventions used on the cli that appeared over the years.
SIGnal handling presentation
https://sunshowers.io/posts/beyond-ctrl-c-signals/

It consists of a basic review of signals, a few mentions of security, and mostly an how-to handle them in Rust.
Steps to secure a Linux server
https://kenhv.com/blog/securing-a-linux-server

See also "Fail2ban: an enemy of script-kiddies" in issue 145.
Porting systemd to musl lib
https://catfox.life/2024/09/05/porting-systemd-to-musl-libc-powered-linux/

As the title says.

Life & Other

An InfoSec homelab
https://www.archcloudlabs.com/projects/5-years-of-homelab/

We tend to see a lot of posts about random homelabs, but never something specifically made with the intention of learning security.
Internet hourglass again
https://systemsapproach.org/2024/08/19/how-the-hourglass-won/

Another perception of the hourglass, see also "Internet hourglass" in issue 194.

Thoughts

90% of the work is always maintenance, life is maintenance.

Enjoy the longer than usual newsletter this week!

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nixers newsletter issue | 2024-08-30 00:00:00 | 258

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Android adding support for bigger PAGESIZE
https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2024/08/adding-16-kb-page-size-to-android.html

This won't appear until Android 15 is out and even then it'll only be as a dev option.
Explaining any shell
https://www.shell.how/

The explanation isn't always extraordinary helpful but it's a start. It relies on fig.io docs (which seems to be soon deprecated).
Removing Greek quiz for a ship quiz
https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-cvs&m=172443408727088&w=2

The Greek quiz appeared in 1995 but most people aren't learning Greek.
OpenSSH Backdoors
https://blog.isosceles.com/openssh-backdoors/

The story of a 22yo attack on OpenSSH and how it related to today.
netcat for IRC
https://gir.st/ircpipe.html

This reminds me of ii, the suckless irc client. I bet it could be used in the same manner.
Linux pipes are slow
https://qsantos.fr/2024/08/25/linux-pipes-are-slow/

Why are they slow and how does vmsplice call help.
Pong in bash
https://0x0.st/XJg2.bash

Pretty impressive that it takes as few lines as this.
New malware on Linux
https://thehackernews.com/2024/08/new-linux-malware-sedexp-hides-credit.html

It basically adds a UDEV rules to run the malware at boot by executing it every time /dev/random is attached/loaded.
Overengineered todo list
https://taskwarrior.org/docs/start/

Not dismissing the usefulness, but I personally prefer either a plain text file, or paper and pen if it's for something this simple.

Life & Other

Something thought provoking
https://readsomethinginteresting.com/

A collection roulette of random ideas and thoughts in web articles.
When you miss traffic
https://driveandlisten.herokuapp.com/

This is pretty entertaining if you put it on all day on a smart TV.
Who's stuck in space
https://www.howmanypeopleareinspacerightnow.com/

Just a fun trivia website.

Thoughts

The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven — John Milton

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nixers newsletter issue | 2024-08-23 00:00:00 | 257

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Building an embedded Linux system
https://jaycarlson.net/embedded-linux/

A comprehensive yet accessible guide to help build an embedded system that includes Linux.
FreeBSD considers Rust
https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/985210/f3c3beb9ef9c550e/

As with anything Rust related, even rumors have a huge sensationalism online.
The day /proc died
https://dev.to/rkeene/the-day-proc-died-53ic

A full storage always leads to the weirdest bugs.
Cathedral vs Bazaar Design discrepancies
https://j3s.sh/thought/trainwreck-design.html

An argument that things don't have to be black and white, there could be a middle-ground.
lyrebird
https://github.com/lyrebird-voice-changer/lyrebird/

Once upon a time, I used to have fun with these voice modifiers, some were amazingly good, others not so much. With a bit of fiddling these can sound convincing.
OOM kill count
https://medium.com/opsops/there-is-an-oom-kill-count-in-linux-e9936aa33102

Well, today I learned something! My previous machine used to have a trigger happy OOM-killer, so I guess its kill count was quite high.
epoll
https://darkcoding.net/software/epoll-the-api-that-powers-the-modern-internet/

See also "What can you epoll" in issue 168.

Life & Other

A reflection on the matrix
https://theconversation.com/the-matrix-20-years-on-how-a-sci-fi-film-tackled-big-philosophical-questions-114007

One of the best piece discussing the topic.
More cinema reflections
https://www.openculture.com/2015/03/andrei-tarkovskys-message-to-young-people.html

What does this mean in an always connected world?

Thoughts

"It is possible to commit no errors and still lose, that is not failure. That is life" — Captain Jean-Luc Picard, Star Trek

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nixers newsletter issue | 2024-08-16 00:00:00 | 256

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

ML using pipes
https://jott.live/markdown/ml_pipes

Practically it's a command line tool relying on shumai (a tensor library), nothing too out-of-the-ordinary.
Atomic Operations
https://rcrowley.org/2010/01/06/things-unix-can-do-atomically.html

A list of thing that POSIX-like/compliant systems should do atomically, and that you should trust.
Modern or classic tools
https://meetryanflowers.com/modern-linux-tools-vs-unix-classics-which-would-i-choose/

In my opinion jq is now a classic, with the omnipresence of json, it's a must have tool.
why is there a delay
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/335648/why-does-the-reset-command-include-a-delay
https://invisible-island.net/ncurses/man/tset.1.html#h2-HISTORY

As usual, the answer is because of archaic constraints.
Writing a Unix clone in about a month
https://drewdevault.com/2024/05/24/2024-05-24-Bunnix.html

Interesting project, but the write-up about the experience could've had more details.
Wayland finally merges a screen capture protocol
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Wayland-Merges-Screen-Capture
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/merge_requests/124

This has been cooking for more than 2 years.
A new way to develop on Linux
https://www.codethink.co.uk/articles/2024/A-new-way-to-develop-on-Linux/
https://www.codethink.co.uk/articles/2024/A-new-way-to-develop-on-Linux-PartII/
https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/systemd-sysext.html

A set of tools built on top of systemd-sysext, system extension images. This is a sort of overlay filesystem that is used to test new component software.

Life & Other

What one can learn from teaching
https://claytonwramsey.com/blog/learned-from-teaching

I think these are good general life advices.

Thoughts

Meet them where they are.

Archive

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nixers newsletter issue | 2024-08-09 00:00:00 | 255

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Revisiting Linux CPU scheduling
https://www.uninformativ.de/blog/postings/2024-08-03/0/POSTING-en.html

Why does nice doesn't see to work as intended, this blog post answers this question by going through some linux scheduling, cgroup and slices. Everyone explains cgroups in their own way, I've also written a bit about them.
A UX designer look at Linux
https://www.chris-wood.design/resources/linux-for-ux-designers

I'm not familiar with most of the tools mentioned, but that should come in handy for those in the know.
The Burroughs ICON
https://jasoneckert.github.io/myblog/icon-computer/

The peculiar ICON system running with QNX. It was a system conceived by a government for educational purposes.
Another tracer tutorial
https://sh4dy.com/2024/08/03/beetracer/

This one tries to simulate an strace-clone.
Undo function
https://www.theregister.com/2024/08/01/linux_rollback_options/

We're all following immutable distros, reproducible builds, snapshots, but most of these are often in the fringes. Here we see that it's starting to appear in a more popular Linux distro.
Userspaceification of POSIX
https://www.redox-os.org/news/kernel-11/

Redox is a Unix-like OS written in Rust. In its signals project it's doing a rewrite of signal handling in user-space.
A screen tutorial
https://linuxtldr.com/installing-screen/

Someone asked me for a basic screen tutorial.
Cat9 Microdosing: Each and Contain
https://arcan-fe.com/2024/08/05/cat9-microdosing-each-and-contain/

An update on the Arcan's side projects to experiment at making better CLI.

Life & Other

Andy Warhol’s lost Amiga art found
https://dfarq.homeip.net/andy-warhols-lost-amiga-art-found/

Now, that's a type of computer art you won't see much these days.

Thoughts

Credula est spes improba.
He that lives on hope will die fasting.
He that lives on hope dances without music. — Latin proverb

Archive

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nixers newsletter issue | 2024-08-02 00:00:00 | 254

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

In the Beginning was the Command Line
https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs81n/command.txt

A pre-2000s article about a generic history of computing from the author's personal point of view, it emphasises on the idea that we shouldn't take things at face value. Very entertaining!
The ultimate guide to Linux network performance
https://ntk148v.github.io/posts/linux-network-performance-ultimate-guide/

Yet, it's more of an amalgam of random network info and configs than an actual guide.
Path of a packet in Linux
https://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~sergey/netreads/path-of-packet/Network_stack.pdf

A bit old but it complements the previous link.
Are find and mkdir together Turing complete?
https://ogiekako.vercel.app/blog/find_mkdir_tc

From that article, it's close to being, with some limitations.
ed from less
http://blog.syncpup.com/posts/calling-ed-from-less.html

If you're into ed that's a great setup, as for others it's a neat party-trick.
Debugging slow terminal
https://lock.cmpxchg8b.com/slowterm.html

This is similar to issue 171 "Debugging slow shell" but for terminals on WSL.
Computer setup of blogger
https://jnsgr.uk/2024/07/how-i-computer-in-2024/

Your usual battle station/setup blog post, share yours and I'll add it to the newsletter next week.
Vanilla OS
https://www.theregister.com/2024/07/31/vanilla_os_friendly_radical/

Another review of Vanilla OS, see also "A review of Vanilla OS" in issue 179. Their latest version works a bit differently than the previous one.
A self-built system
https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/983340/25f5b1f6b1247079/

Impressive and quite useful.

Life & Other

DnD teachings
https://ericwbailey.website/published/dungeons-and-dragons-taught-me-how-to-write-alt-text/

I've never actually tried dnd but that makes me want to, now I have to find a group of acolytes to join me.
Just remove the plug
https://computer.rip/2024-07-31-just-disconnect-the-internet.html

Basically a reply to "we can isolate them from the web".

Thoughts

"You can avoid reality, but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality." — Ayn Rand

Now that's what news addicts will tell you, but then what are they doing with the info they get?

Archive

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nixers newsletter issue | 2024-07-26 00:00:00 | 253

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

What's a stipple
https://matttproud.com/blog/posts/x-window-system-boot-stipple.html

Now I've learned a lot about something I didn't know I should know, nor will ever use, but it feels great.
Another few websites for syscalls search
https://syscalls.mebeim.net/?table=x86/64/x64/latest
https://syscall.sh/

See also "Syscalls list" in issue 160.
CAMARA project
https://camaraproject.org/

I had read these specs before, however I wasn't aware this was a Linux foundation project. It defines a common api to interface with telcos to do things such as phone number or location verification.
Secure boot on Gentoo
https://www.setphaserstostun.org/posts/secure-boot-on-gentoo-with-shim-grub/
https://www.linux.org/docs/man1/mokutil.html

Having every step done from scratch is a great way to learn about secure boot.
Reasons why someone might like NetBSD
https://mccd.space/posts/netbsd-review/

pkgsrc one of the first cross-platform package manager, you agree?
Linux audio stack demystified
https://blog.rtrace.io/posts/the-linux-audio-stack-demystified/
https://venam.net/blog/unix/2021/02/07/audio-stack.html
https://venam.net/blog/unix/2021/06/23/pipewire-under-the-hood.html

A great post touching everything on the audio stack on Linux. As someone who has dived into this before on articles on my blog, I can assess that it's great content. I've never linked them in the newsletter, so I'll add them along.
Dell UNIX brief history
https://notes.technologists.com/notes/2008/01/10/a-brief-history-of-dell-unix/

A pretty personal story in relation to Dell UNIX.
Software supply chain sec according to RedHat
https://www.redhat.com/en/topics/security/what-is-software-supply-chain-security

There's nothing really new here, but it's a good summary.

Life & Other

Evolution of Data Storage
https://medium.com/predict/the-evolution-of-data-storage-from-clay-tablets-to-quantum-computing-c1d8cc3cf8df

I watched a talk about this recently, and I thought I'd share something similar. Record keeping, storing information, is a fascinating topic. In this post you'll find a list of different technologies and future tech that are used to achieve this.

Thoughts

"You can be the ripest, juiciest peach in the world, and there's still going to be somebody who hates peaches." — Dita Von Teese

I don't know the author of this quote, but I felt it properly encompasses the idea that people have different likings and that we should be ok with it.

Archive

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nixers newsletter issue | 2024-07-12 00:00:00 | 252

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

FAMF
https://prma.dev/posts/files-as-metadata-format

I like ideas like this, not because they're perfect but because they stimulate a lot of discussion around them.
GNOME testing a new font
https://www.omglinux.com/gnome-may-switch-to-inter-font/
https://github.com/rsms/inter

It's trying out Inter instead of Cantarell.
Another TUI for wifi on Linux
https://github.com/pythops/impala

It relies on iwd backend to be installed.
Bash dungeon
https://github.com/wolandark/bash-dungeon

This is similar to dungeonfs in issue 138 "Check your FUSE".
terminal discipline and readline
https://jvns.ca/blog/2024/07/08/readline/

An exploration of different tools that rely on readline and others to input text and manipulate it.
The background for file max and nr open
https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/TwoFileDescriptorLimits

So there's some historic reason for it, and also a limit per process and a global limit.
Use the kernel as a bootloader
https://pretalx.com/devconf-cz-2024/talk/W3AVCT/
https://github.com/rhboot/nmbl-poc

A WIP/PoC replacement for GRUB called nmbl, developed at Red Hat.
One file linux
https://hub.zhovner.com/geek/one-file-linux/
https://github.com/zhovner/OneFileLinux/

A Linux distro in a ~20MB file, it boots directly from the UEFI image.
State of Text Rendering 2024
https://behdad.org/text2024/

A survey of all text rendering changes and advancement in 2024, written by a developer that has previously led and contributed to projects such as HarfBuzz, Cairo, and Pango among others. It discusses things such as OpenType adding support for colored fonts, variable fonts, and a Universal Shaping Engine. There's a good list of libraries, tools, toolkits, in the applications section.

Life & Other

After the bankruptcy
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/09/business/synapse-bankruptcy-fintech-fdic-insurance.html
https://archive.ph/LWmgP

That's something not everyone in the world has in mind: What if the bank fails, then what, how much is insured, can it really be covered? In the USA $250k should be covered, in theory, meanwhile the European Central Bank covers €100k. However, in the case above, it's about the new "virtual" online banks, neobanks with the hype in fintech, that younger people are starting to use.

Thoughts

"A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for." — John A. Shedd

A classic quote to incite you to be out there this week.

Archive

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nixers newsletter issue | 2024-07-05 00:00:00 | 251

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Bash strict mode
http://redsymbol.net/articles/unofficial-bash-strict-mode/

A couple of setups in a bash script that can help avoid common issues, however they all have drawbacks.
A Linux CNA Case Study
https://grsecurity.net/cve-2021-4440_linux_cna_case_study

It's kind of alarming that multiple projects rely on these CVE notification schemes to fix their issues, and if this chain breaks they're unaware of them.
Y292B bug
https://www.dpolakovic.space/blogs/y292b

That's the definition of solving a problem just because it's a problem, not because it's relevant.
Linux is dead, long-live Docker monoculture
https://antranigv.am/posts/2021/08/2021-08-13-13-37/

A rant about porting a docker build script to a BSD system.
Editors
https://github.com/istoph/editor
https://github.com/bisqwit/that_editor

They're all looking to emulate that 90s or 16-bit DOS style.
A continuation on POSIX 2024
https://sortix.org/blog/posix-2024/

This is a well made summary of all that changed in POSIX 2024.
trurl
https://github.com/curl/trurl

A tool to help manipulate URLs, by the same lead dev as cURL.
Sci-fi interfaces
https://scifiinterfaces.com/

This blog is epic, it regroups all sorts of futuristic movie props UI.
Pixie in a dock
https://www.linuxserver.io/blog/2019-12-16-netboot-xyz-docker-network-boot-server-pxe

This docker image will help you mange your PXE.
Booting Linux from Google Drive
https://ersei.net/en/blog/fuse-root

First boot from FUSE then from Google Drive.
ed semantics
http://blog.syncpup.com/posts/ed-semantics.html

Getting into the right mindset helps understand the tool.
Playing H.264 videos on a Raspberry pi
https://www.downtowndougbrown.com/2024/06/playing-1080p-h-264-video-on-my-old-256-mb-raspberry-pi/

And not any quality, but 1080p, which lags even on my laptop.
Userland rootkits are lame
https://grugq.substack.com/p/userland-rootkits-are-lame

A list of all the evasion that userland rootkits can use, and a simple trick to avoid them.
Job Control
https://jvns.ca/blog/2024/07/03/reasons-to-use-job-control/

A summary of shell job control.

Life & Other

A new hex editor
https://github.com/WerWolv/ImHex

I've been looking for a better hex editor for a long time now, this one is better than most I've tried.

Thoughts

"Don't take criticism from someone you wouldn't take advice from." — Earliest attribution to a listener to The Minimalist Podcast during call-in

Archive

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nixers newsletter issue | 2024-06-28 00:00:00 | 250

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

printing teeth
https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2024/06/3d-printing-my-teeth/

Ever wanted to convert a CT scan to a 3d print.. Here you go.
run0
https://news.itsfoss.com/systemd-run0/

I knew about systemd-run to execute tasks that are cpu bound or within a cgroup, and other container tech, but that's the first time I saw someone making the relation with sudo.
GNU coreutils to uutils coreutils
https://www.joshmcguigan.com/blog/gentoo-uutils-coreutils/

This is a project that tries to replace the GNU coreutils with rust utilities. There are a few things that need fixing for them to work inplace, that's what the post is about.
Comment on mseal
https://lwn.net/Articles/978010/

Since that 6.10 Linux includes this it now needs to be propagated to users via glibc.
Comparing cross-distro pkg managers
https://github.com/AppImage/AppImageKit/wiki/Similar-projects#comparison

I think it's a fair comparison. Usually, if a software writes their comparison doc then they're always better than the "competition" but here it's relative.
shpool
https://github.com/shell-pool/shpool

Think dtach but modernized with rust.
bhyve companion tools
https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2024/06/23/freebsd-bhyve-companion-tools/

Two helper scripts that can help while running bhyve.
ChatGPT Linux
https://incoherency.co.uk/blog/stories/chatgpt-linux.html

Got enough AI articles in your reading list already? Is whatever the AI is spurting out to the author confabulated or is it real? "Jailbreaking" these LLM seems like a huge security hole.

Life & Other

NASCAR problem
https://indieweb.org/NASCAR_problem

I'm sure you've encountered it but didn't know there was a name for this phenomenon.
Curated Web
https://rafichaudhury.com/site/blog/Freehand-Web

A meditation on the state of the internet, what the web can be, and an emphasis on custom and "wilder" personal websites while making their creation available to anyone.
20 years of blogging
https://blogsystem5.substack.com/p/20-years-of-blogging

I just love reading about the path people have taken and the evolution they've had over the years.

Thoughts

"He who angers you conquers you." — Elizabeth Kenny

Seems like trolls on the web control a lot of people.

Archive

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nixers newsletter issue | 2024-06-21 00:00:00 | 249

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

POSIX 2024
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10555529
https://www.heise.de/en/news/Update-of-the-POSIX-standard-1003-1-2024-with-new-tools-and-functions-9764724.html

A new specs of POSIX is out, want to read it? Got to pay or otherwise have access through an institution. Fortunately, I think I know someone part of an IEEE group that I could ask. I'll let you know if I get indirect access.
An ls replacement
https://github.com/arp242/elles

The big difference is that it's a little bit more human readable
But is it parsable?
https://mywiki.wooledge.org/ParsingLs

Listen to the advices and pitfalls on how messy parsing ls can be and what to do instead.
diff and merge
https://exple.tive.org/blarg/2024/06/14/fifty-years-of-diff-and-merge/

An prose chanting how the patch/diff/merge mechanism are the building block of any community contribution project.
a key expander
https://github.com/jarusll/keydogger

I'm not sure it's as useful as aliases.
Building an embedded Linux system
https://popovicu.com/posts/making-my-first-embedded-linux-system/

A sort of guide or story about building a small breadboard system running along with Linux.
Traces of honey
https://blog.sofiane.cc/ssh_honeypot/

These types of research gives us a good idea of the current automated attacks on the public internet going on these days. Apparently, they target a lot of IoT devices.
OpenBSD on computer appliances
https://hiandrewquinn.github.io/til-site/posts/openbsd-the-computer-appliance-maker-s-secret-weapon/

This is somewhat a solution to what happens in the previous link.
Packaging swift apps
https://mko.re/blog/swift-alpine-packaging/

Swift now runs on Linux, however it needs a couple of glib stuff, so what do you need to do to make it work on Alpine.

Life & Other

Documentation Driven Development
https://unicorn-utterances.com/posts/documentation-driven-development

While nice in theory, and probably one of the best way to develop in my opinion, it still includes countless refining and ambiguity if you're unsure about what to initially write.
Real-World Threat Modelling
https://medium.com/sagefuturemakers/real-world-threat-modelling-fb14ef767c49

Want to see a pragmatic example of threat modelling.

Thoughts

"The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper names." — Chinese proverb.

There's also the saying that the map is not the territory. Hence, maybe we should describe properly what we're talking about before even jumping to conclusion based on words that might carry meanings that were not initially intended.

Archive

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nixers newsletter issue | 2024-06-14 00:00:00 | 248

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

What is PID 0
https://blog.dave.tf/post/linux-pid0/

A clarification on what PID 0 actually represents on Unix-like systems. See also issue 145 "It's Hard to Stay Idle".
OpenSSH adds penalty mechanism
https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20240607042157

Now you might not have to install fail2ban, by default it'll give a somewhat similar behavior.
A linter for make
https://github.com/mcandre/unmake

It should be useful for minor stuff you might have missed.
Communication
https://www.networkworld.com/article/968450/communicating-with-other-users-on-the-linux-command-line.html

The days where this was useful have passed, but it's still good to know about how to achieve this.
sudon't
https://dotat.at/@/2024-05-02-sudo.html
https://dmitry.khlebnikov.net/2015/07/18/should-we-use-sudo-for-day-to-day-activities/

We've got a lot of previous content about sudo in this newsletter archive. So here's a common critiques.
rm -rf /
https://web.archive.org/web/20150512013857/http://justpasha.org/folk/rm.html

Yes, a classic horror story, and legendary admins that put the system back up.
007
https://web.archive.org/web/20180322180833/https://react-etc.net/page/james-bond-007-unix-permissions

Just a pun...

Life & Other

Reading an RSS feed
https://hamatti.org/posts/what-does-it-feel-like-to-read-rss-feeds/

A few points about what it feels like to curate and read your own RSS feed (in comparison with social media and the attention economy).
ASCII-fy this
https://meatfighter.com/ascii-silhouettify/

This is a new auto-converter to ascii, it mostly works well for small logos which is cool to have in a terminal (but will never look as good as hand-drawn ascii).

Thoughts

"If you hate a person, then you’re defeated by them." — Confucius

Confusius, aka Kong Fuzi, had a much nicer way of saying "Living rent free in your head".

Archive

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nixers newsletter issue | 2024-06-07 00:00:00 | 247

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Copying a file from an older laptop
https://www.unterminated.com/random-fun/how-to-copy-a-file-from-a-30-year-old-laptop

This turns out to be more interesting and complex than at first glance.
A distro for digital painting
https://www.davidrevoy.com/article1030/debian-12-kde-plasma-2024-install-guide

This is a custom setup guide to help install what is necessary to get a good environment for working on graphic. Who could've thought that Wayland isn't ready for professional digital painters.
kdenlive adds AI subtitle translation
https://kdenlive.org/en/2024/05/kdenlive-24-05-0-released/

...And yes, the model is offline.
Powershell
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/scripting/install/installing-powershell-on-linux?view=powershell-7.4

Isn't that your favorite shell?
Ebury Malware
https://cyberinsider.com/ebury-malware-compromised-400000-linux-servers-for-financial-gain/
https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/05/ssh-backdoor-has-infected-400000-linux-servers-over-15-years-and-keeps-on-spreading/

When attackers are persistent they'll use lateral attacks, spread and infiltrate through internal networks in manners that couldn't have been done without the initial phase.
State of sandboxing on Linux
https://git.sr.ht/~alip/syd/tree/main/item/doc/toctou-or-gtfo.md

A few show of race-condition attacks for different sandbox techs, the so-called time-of-check-time-of-use attacks.
Implementing a cache on NetBSD
https://indico.bsdcan.org/event/1/contributions/11/attachments/2/2/presentation_bsdcan_final.pdf
https://bcachefs.org/

The goal is to achieve something similar to bcachefs on Linux but simpler.
autoconf and xz
https://leahneukirchen.org/blog/archive/2024/04/what-autoconf-got-right.html

It has nothing to do with xz though, but more of a summary of what a well-known and well-used build system is expected to have.

Life & Other

Intellectual Obesity Crisis
https://www.gurwinder.blog/p/the-intellectual-obesity-crisis

Everything is a "crisis" these days, a crisis of being too dramatic. Anyway, this article is about infobesity, if you've heard of the term.

Thoughts

There is only one thing a philosopher can be relied upon to do, and that is to contradict other philosophers. — William James

Do you agree to agree, are you a contrarian, or others?

Archive

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nixers newsletter issue | 2024-05-31 00:00:00 | 246

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

The evolution of ELF object format
https://maskray.me/blog/2024-05-26-evolution-of-elf-object-file-format

If you like Unix history, you might also like to dive into ELF history too. This is what this post is about, the different handover through time, additions, contributions, evolution, and new direction.
mseal making its appearance in 6.10 Linux
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.10-Merges-mseal

It is getting merged, see "mseal" in issue 230.
tmux is worse is better
https://hiandrewquinn.github.io/til-site/posts/tmux-is-worse-is-better/

This post sums up a lot of ideas in software dev with a few words. Often, some people are so idealists that they break basic features for their users.
Effects in the terminal
https://chrisbuilds.github.io/terminaltexteffects/showroom/

These are some of the best and cool visual effects I've seen achieved in the terminal, kudos. This is definitely going to be used on some movie set.
open source TTS
https://github.com/2noise/ChatTTS

This is a life changing moment for text-to-speech. Once upon a time you had to install horrible libraries in a complex mesh of voice files to download, or pay a hefty sum, to have any voice that resembles a human. And it doesn't come close to what the "AI trend" can achieve these days, truly impressive!
Wayland compositor on OpenBSD
https://x61.sh/log/2024/05/27052024192206-sway_openbsd.html

I wasn't aware of the progress of Wayland support on OpenBSD, but it seems like it's coming along fine.
ZFR on SMR Drives
https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2022/05/08/zfs-on-smr-drives/
https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2024/05/29/zfs-resilver-smr-drives/

SMR have their ups and downs, but how do we configure them for efficiency, can we resilver them if within a RAID?
Writing a USB driver
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXBC85SGC0Q&ab_channel=BitsinsidebyRen%C3%A9Rebe

I'm not a fan of livestream, but this time it seems like the kind of topic you can actually learn from, sort of like pair programming.
A few reasons why Linux kernel bugs won't get replies
https://linux-regtracking.leemhuis.info/post/frequent-reasons-why-linux-kernel-bug-reports-are-ignored/

It's tough to fill bugs, but it's even tougher to handle them, in a way it's understandable that they'd put "a spoke in the wheel".

Life & Other

file id
http://pcmicro.com/getdiz/file_id.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20240528063222/pcmicro.com/getdiz/file_id.html

Want to learn a bit about old school BBS shareware distribution info format?
Understanding Frappe's Scheduler
https://frappe.io/blog/engineering/if-you-wish-to-truly-understand-frappes-scheduler-you-must-first-invent-the-universe

Things that seem simple at first rarely are.

Thoughts

"My life has been full of terrible misfortunes most of which never happened." — Michel de Montaigne

As far as I'm concerned, I think this quote is about how worrying and anxiety is worse than the actual events. Do you agree, how would you interpret this?

Archive

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nixers newsletter issue | 2024-05-24 00:00:00 | 245

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Terminal inner workings
https://kevroletin.github.io/terminal/2021/12/11/how-terminal-works-in.html
https://kevroletin.github.io/terminal/2021/12/11/how-terminal-works-out.html
https://kevroletin.github.io/terminal/2022/01/27/how-tty-works-stty.html
https://kevroletin.github.io/terminal/2022/02/05/how-tty-works-sessions.html

Another one of these 'how terminals work' article, similar to a couple we've shared before. It's a good series, add it to your list.
Infiltration in your terminal
https://iterm2.com/downloads/stable/iTerm2-3_5_0.changelog

People have not taken this sudden change very positively, that is to say the least.
Patching binaries on the fly
https://github.com/corsix/polyfill-glibc/
https://github.com/corsix/polyfill-glibc/blob/main/docs/How_does_polyfill_glibc_work.md
https://github.com/corsix/polyfill-glibc/blob/main/docs/The_Linux_loading_process.md

This is a Linux tool to modify ELF executables to try to fix the libraries so that they work on older glibc versions.
Linux on a small board
https://www.bigmessowires.com/2014/11/17/68-katy-68000-linux-on-a-solderless-breadboard/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRdLlaUmmpM
https://www.bigmessowires.com/68-katy/

This irks back to "A small linux computer" in issue 176, another impressive feat.
Printing memory slots on Linux boot
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.10-Prints-Memory-Slots

This is a minor informational update that will apply to Linux 6.10 to display when the DMI driver attaches the memory slots.
lvm thin send/recv
https://abbbi.github.io/lvm/
https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/admin-guide/device-mapper/thin-provisioning.html

Thin provisioning, as I recently learned, is about allocating storage only when needed (compared to thick/bare partitioning). The first link shows a trick to track changes on thin partitions.
The state of X11 on NetBSD
https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/x_org_on_netbsd_the

Just a summary of how NetBSD handles the Xorg package, what they include, support, etc..

Life & Other

Hustle Culture
https://moneywithkatie.com/blog/to-embrace-hustle-culture-or-reject-it

Work has a weird place in our lives today, the economy needs to go in a unique direction. The machines of society all run towards that unique goal, at all costs.

Thoughts

"Happiness is the feeling that power increases — that resistance is being overcome." — Nietzsche

Is that a control-freak quote, or do you see it in another light? Does freedom of action equal to power, and, "hence", happiness.

Archive

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nixers newsletter issue | 2024-05-17 00:00:00 | 244

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Alpine for a 'BSD person'
https://rubenerd.com/a-bsd-pserson-trying-alpine-linux/

This was too shallow of a review for my tastes. The only thing that caught my attention was that it ran OpenRC, like Gentoo and others, which has a similar config to classic rc systems like OpenBSD.
Another OpenBSD Desktop
https://x61.ar/log/2024/05/06052024135732-openbsd_desktop.html

A prototypical ricer's post, just like we like them.
Dinit on Chimera
https://chimera-linux.org/docs/configuration/services

Dinit usage and service file looks similar enough to other init and service managers that it seems intuitive. Yet, it also has config dirs similar to traditional rc systems.
version control lore
https://dotat.at/@/2024-05-13-what-ident.html

What about keeping the metadata in the binary too, so that you can investigate later. That is instead of adding a -v flag, obviously, yet it's simpler too.
Keeping Netflix running
https://freebsdfoundation.org/netflix-case-study/

This consist of keeping up with CURRENT, a few kernel tweaks for networking and VM page caching, in-kernel TLS, all to improve throughput.
16 years anniversary of a CVE
https://16years.secvuln.info/

That's a continuation to "Debian security mishaps" in issue 241.
super servers
https://social.treehouse.systems/@ska/112417619168307725

A social media post about super servers (inetd and others), ending in a bitter note about systemd (since it's a post from the author of the s6 init system).
emacs wm
https://karthinks.com/software/emacs-window-management-almanac/

The best article you'll find explaining window management in emacs.
Classic Mac
https://www.macrelix.org/
https://github.com/macminix/MacMinix

Ever wanted to get back that oldies experience?
Nvidia
https://www.phoronix.com/news/NVIDIA-R560-Open-Default

So NVIDIA is moving towards more open source drivers.

Life & Other

We are what we do
https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2024/you-are-what-you-read/

If anything, this reminds us that what we interact with and ingest, either physically or mentally, will affect us.

Thoughts

"Well, I must endure the presence of a few caterpillars if I wish to become acquainted with the butterflies." — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

That's a beautiful quote, what does it remind you of? Growth, mentoring, children, early beginnings, etc..?

Archive

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nixers newsletter issue | 2024-04-26 00:00:00 | 243

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

BSD on a PC
https://michal.sapka.me/bsd/why-not-bsd/

A series of points/rants on which BSDs, in general, lack features and desktop facilities.
Lunatik
https://github.com/luainkernel/lunatik

I had heard of NetBSD adding Lua support in the kernel, now you can do something similar on Linux by relying on this device driver.
Shared libs, rpath and the runtime linker
https://carlosrdrz.dev/shared-libs-rpath-and-the-runtime-linker

A troubleshooting session that leads to learning a bunch of things, the kind of stuff that's always nice to read about.
Add JSON output to your CLI?
https://blog.kellybrazil.com/2021/12/03/tips-on-adding-json-output-to-your-cli-app/

What do you think? Is it modernizing the Unix philosophy, or is it something you wouldn't consider?
NLP in Bash
https://massimo-nazaria.github.io/nlp.html

Have your own simpler "AI", aka text-generation, at home.
Hyra
https://osmora.org/cgit/Hyra/tree/README?h=main

A new project for a modern POSIX-like OS mostly from scratch.
Accurate metrics in containers
https://dzone.com/articles/top-reporting-accurate-metrics-within-containers

This is a simple issue, cpu usage is reported incorrectly within the container, so how do we get the right values?

Life & Other

The end of the web
https://archive.is/BF0lR

An article putting into words the obvious: the state of the web with the advent of AI content.

Thoughts

"Every man is a creature of the age in which he lives and few are able to raise themselves above the ideas of the time." – Voltaire

In what age do we live in?

Archive

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nixers newsletter issue | 2024-04-19 00:00:00 | 242

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Hidden Dependencies in Linux Binaries
https://thelittleengineerthatcould.blogspot.com/2024/04/hidden-dependencies-in-linux-binaries.html

This is showcase of sotrace a new tool to show share-object dependencies.
Getting started with systemd
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/11/linux-fu-getting-started-with-systemd/
https://mysystemd.talos.sh/
https://systemd-timer.havrlent.com/

This is a great starter on systemd units, I wasn't aware that online generators existed, it's nice to know.
bunkchat
https://git.bunk.computer/bunk/bunkchat

Everyone seems to want to show off that they can rewrite something in shell script.
Can you grok it
https://0xda.de/blog/2024/04/can-you-grok-it/

How to make tunnel creation and management easier.
Bubblebox
https://www.ralfj.de/blog/2024/04/14/bubblebox.html
https://github.com/containers/bubblewrap
https://github.com/igo95862/bubblejail

"The easiest sandbox to maintain is the sandbox maintained by someone else."
sched-ext development
http://arighi.blogspot.com/2024/04/getting-started-with-sched-ext.html
https://github.com/sched-ext/scx/blob/case-studies/case-studies/scx_layered.md
https://github.com/sched-ext/scx

Want to test a Linux scheduler that is written in rust, here you go.
An XZ backdoor story
https://securelist.com/xz-backdoor-story-part-1/112354/

Probably the most thorough analysis of the XZ 'mishaps'.
purl
https://github.com/catatsuy/purl

This has no relatino to cURL and more in relation with sed and grep. Yes, it's yet another of these.
How files in Linux work
https://popovicu.com/posts/how-files-in-linux-work/

That's a simple question, for a basic concept, however it's worth asking for anyone who has never wondered about this before.
GestureX
https://github.com/flying-pizza-69/GestureX

We've all heard of touch-screen gestures, but what about doing hand gestures in front of the camera.
TAI on Debian
https://www.bortzmeyer.org/tai-on-debian.html

Do you want more precise time and deal with atomic time? Then you'll need to constantly refresh your leap-seconds file.
OpenBSD full text search and raw IP
https://man.ifconfig.se/
https://www.undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20240418050520

Parallel processing at the protocol layer is fine, but now on OpenBSD you can finally do it at the network (IP) layer too. This can result in faster packet processing by utilizing multiple cores, sometimes most OSes have had for a long time already.

Life & Other

Impossible to say
https://www.thecollector.com/sense-nonsense-wittgenstein-language/

Language is full of limits, it's a box which we're trying to expand beyond its boundaries. Learning a new language could help, but it's also limited in its own ways.

Thoughts

"No pressure, no diamonds." — Thomas Carlyle

That's a classic quote, part of the pop culture, and of the modern day myth. But does it stand true, is anything of value only coming out of pressure, why is pressure valorized as the impetus or the action giving rise to what is cherished. What are diamonds and why do we value them? Isn't it because of marketing campaigns originating in the 40s.

Archive

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nixers newsletter issue | 2024-04-12 00:00:00 | 241

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

GNOME terminal improvements
https://bxt.rs/blog/just-how-much-faster-are-the-gnome-47-terminals/

This is more about VTE updates, yet the actual benchmarking method by relying on a hardware sensor is pretty cool.
rsync new version
https://download.samba.org/pub/rsync/NEWS#3.3.0

rsync is one software that is essential and keeps on improving and getting bug squashed.
Writing PAM software
https://web.archive.org/web/20190523222819/https://fedetask.com/write-linux-pam-module/
https://github.com/fedetask/pam-tutorials
https://github.com/linux-pam/linux-pam/tree/master/examples

Not everyone might want to rely on PAM directly these days, and might want to use polkit instead for more granular authorization. However, if you need a tutorial, this one is one of the best out there.
sotrace
https://pypi.org/project/sotrace/

Some people rely on ChatGPT these days for the same behavior, but good ol' SO can be helpful too.
Building BerkeleyDB
https://transactional.blog/building-berkeleydb/

Ever wondered what it takes to build a B-Tree based DB such as BerkeleyDB, then this series of posts is for you.
Debian security mishaps
https://www.hezmatt.org/~mpalmer/blog/2024/04/09/how-i-tripped-over-the-debian-weak-keys-vuln.html

No, this isn't something new, but a recollection of an issue that happened back in 2008. I promise, this one is a captivating read.
Google's public DNS protection
https://security.googleblog.com/2024/03/google-public-dnss-approach-to-fight.html

DNS cache poisoning is one of the most common DNS attack. It's my first time hearing of case randomization, but it's a smart trick.

Life & Other

Calibrating a controller in the browser
https://blog.the.al/2024/04/09/dualshock-calibration-in-the-browser.html
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/WebHID_API

I knew lots of inputs were supported on browsers, mostly finger movements. However, I didn't know controllers could be. But beware, this will only work on Chrome-based browsers (or browsers that support WebHID).

Thoughts

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

These days even the past can be re-interpreted, what do you think of that?

Archive

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nixers newsletter issue | 2024-04-05 00:00:00 | 240

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

LUKS key derivation issue
https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/66429.html

The author didn't answer the initial claim of how the person's laptop got broken into. Still it implies that it's from the KDF.
I am not a supplier
https://www.softwaremaxims.com/blog/not-a-supplier

Let's discuss the "software supply chain", and how there's actually no "supplier" but just people, and that this sentence, as it needs to be reminded, is only doing a parallel with the industrial world.
The xz attack
https://research.swtch.com/xz-timeline

Since everyone is talking about it, I had to add something related.
A review of GNU autotools
https://www.owlfolio.org/development/autoconf-swot/
https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2024/04/02/autoconf/

it's a strength and weakness analysis of autoconf, and how it relates to the "xz backdoor".
Debian monorepo
https://blog.liw.fi/posts/2024/monorepo/

...Will Debian now rely on a single/mono repo for their packages management, a single gigantic 500GiB chunk where everyone can work across any packages. Definitely no, it's an April's fool!
CachyOS
https://cachyos.org/about/
https://cachyos.org/blog/2404-april-release/
https://www.phoronix.com/news/CachyOS-April-2024-Released

An ArchLinux-based distro that focuses on gaming and desktop performance tweaks.
NetBSD new release
https://www.netbsd.org/releases/formal-10/NetBSD-10.0.html

It's always nice to follow the updates of different OSes and what each inspire the other.
IPv4 Addressing
https://blog.bytebytego.com/p/a-crash-course-in-ipv4-addressing

A mini refresher on IPv4.

Life & Other

GC for systems programmers
https://bitbashing.io/gc-for-systems-programmers.html

A basic overview of what can be considered garbage collection in OS (and system), how RCU (read-copy-update) can be seen as such.
Winning the rat race
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/alexxubyte_systemdesign-coding-interviewtips-activity-7149441688904638464-Cs0R

And it's posted on LinkedIn for better effects.

Thoughts

"We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us." — Marshall McLuhan

Do you agree with the idea that the most prominent medium of communication of an era is what defines it? What about the internet and social media, how do they define this generation?

Archive

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nixers newsletter issue | 2024-03-29 00:00:00 | 239

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Monado
https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/news-and-events/monado-2100-officially-conformant-openxr-implementation.html
https://monado.freedesktop.org/
https://www.khronos.org/openxr/

OpenXR is to VR/AR as what OpenGL is to 3D, Monado is an open source compatible implementation of this specs.
Command line is cheap
https://me.micahrl.com/blog/command-line-cheap/
https://me.micahrl.com/blog/command-line-like-mobile-interfaces/

The question of pricing is one that I never wondered about before. However, I'm not sure it makes a lot of sense if all devs are trained to quickly create web UI and all the tooling is there, meanwhile not everyone is familiar with the ins-and-outs of building a CLIs. Yet the hardware price restriction does make sense.
Linux Crisis Tools
https://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2024-03-24/linux-crisis-tools.html

The wizard of performance optimization and debugging strikes again, here's a list of tools that you should print out and keep next to you in case you need to perform some outage action.
What, why, and how of containers
https://www.annwan.me/computers/what-why-how-containers/

This is yet another "container from scratch" type of post, but its approach is technology oriented, gradually introducing the pieces needed to build a container on Linux.
The worlds of telnet
https://thenewstack.io/the-lost-worlds-of-telnet/

A collection of openly available services and trivia over telnet.
Marking sockets
https://dengking.github.io/Linux-OS/Network/Programming/Socket/Socket-option/Mark-socket/

Packet marking is something I wasn't familiar with before, but it's very useful while creating routing and firewall rules.
Linux Kernel TLS offload
https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/networking/tls-offload.html

I'm sure I shared this before, but I can't find it, so I'm sharing it again.

Life & Other

Explorative Programming
https://blog.dziban.net/essays/explorative-programming/

I like how this simple concept is presented, it's something we've all done and probably always do. Starting with miniature self-contained testable units is definitely a great way to explore things, and learn. It can be used as a teaching/mentoring tool too.

Thoughts

"Tourism, human circulation considered as consumption is fundamentally nothing more than the leisure of going to see what has become banal." ― Guy Debord

Do you agree with this quote, what's the difference between traveling, adventure and tourism? Does the reach of multi-media platform convert these into objects of consumption?

Archive

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nixers newsletter issue | 2024-03-22 00:00:00 | 238

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

realmd
https://www.freedesktop.org/software/realmd/
https://www.freedesktop.org/software/realmd/docs/index.html

This is a solution I wasn't aware of, usually people struggle with complex configuration in PAM, this seems to auto-discover them.
Linux as a router
https://blog.codefarm.me/2022/11/08/linux-as-router/

That table with the mapping of deprecated commands is a blessing.
TCP tuning
https://blog.cloudflare.com/optimizing-tcp-for-high-throughput-and-low-latency/
https://fast-data-transfer.github.io/doc-system-tuning.html

Take these with a grain of salt and double check what each sysctl param does before applying them. Be sure to take stats and monitor the behavior. However, in general this should give you food for thought on what's possible to improve.
Implementing SACK compression
https://lwn.net/Articles/755078/

Sending ack in bulk/compressed is a must-have feature when working over wifi.
TextSnatcher
https://github.com/RajSolai/TextSnatcher
https://tesseract-ocr.github.io/tessdoc/Home.html

A neat tool that relies on tesseract (OCR) to extract text from screenshots. Pretty handy!
It's the TTY week all over again
https://punkx.org/jackdoe/tty.txt

This is the same type of fun activity we used to do (and we should again organize new ones soon). It's funny that the author has a lot of the same conclusions we had here.
Zero toil homelab
https://blog.gripdev.xyz/2024/03/16/in-search-of-a-zero-toil-homelab-with-immutable-linux/

Take notes if you're running your own homelab, maybe you'll consider an immutable distro.

Life & Other

I thought I shared this before
https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2024-03-14
https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2023-08-09

AI goes military (as usual)!
For my perl loving folks out there
https://jwgoerlich.com/we-were-wizards-learning-perl/

They don't make such introduction to a language anymore...

Thoughts

"Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire." — Roland Barthes

Communication is frought with issues, remember the Shannon–Weaver model, among others, that portrays such things.

Archive

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nixers newsletter issue | 2024-03-15 00:00:00 | 237

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Bustle
https://gitlab.gnome.org/World/bustle

If you've ever touched D-Bus then this is a must-have debug tool, it permits to see a trace of the flow of requests between services.
Minimal initramfs
https://blog.izissise.net/posts/initramfs/

The reasons to build your own initramfs are varied, I don't personally have one, but I guess for iot systems it's a must.
Losing control of your shell
https://registerspill.thorstenball.com/p/how-to-lose-control-of-your-shell
https://fasterthanli.me/articles/a-terminal-case-of-linux

A tale of debugging a simple problem which turns into a messy rabbit hole.
state of terminal
https://gpanders.com/blog/state-of-the-terminal/

Mostly a review of escape sequences and capabilities.
Setup your own home lab
https://linuxblog.io/home-lab-beginners-guide-hardware/

"Home lab" is a broad concept, here it's about hosting a home server to be able to test networking features. It's a pretty cool setup.
Latest Linux will drop old NTFS driver
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.9-Dropping-Old-NTFS

The news isn't as frightening as the title makes it seem, it's more like updating the driver, swapping the old one with an improved one, it's not actually removing a feature but an improvement.
Compact relocation format for ELF
https://maskray.me/blog/2024-03-09-a-compact-relocation-format-for-elf

Some deep optimization in ELF formatting to make them more compact.
A refresher on MSS
https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/network-layer/what-is-mss/

This is a basic of TCP, the MSS and window sizing algo are the essential part of how it handles resending and congestion (which are not mentioned in the above article).
TCP time wait assassination
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1337
https://serverfault.com/questions/787624/why-isnt-net-ipv4-tcp-rfc1337-enabled-by-default
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/39461090/tcp-time-wait-assassination

It's nice to check a few networking (informational) RFCs that are lesser known and deal with certain issues you might not have encountered.
Basics of Ethernet
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/12/ethernet-for-hackers-the-very-basics/

This is probably more than you wanted to know and more than what you expected the 'basics' to be.
Lossless network audio
https://interfacinglinux.com/2024/03/02/lossless-network-audio-with-netjack2/

I hadn't heard of netjack2 before, along with multicast it makes for a deadly combo (probably also with pipewire).
The thumbnail specs
https://specifications.freedesktop.org/thumbnail-spec/thumbnail-spec-latest.html

I like perusing through the freedesktop specs from time to time to remind myself of what is standardized and what isn't, or what won't be respected.
nvtop
https://github.com/Syllo/nvtop

This is basically htop but for GPU, see also "Zombie processes using GPU" in issue 225.
Linux system at a glance
https://github.com/lsc4719/MyViewOfLinuxSystems

A very generic diagram of the Linux system basic components.

Life & Other

Numbers every programmer should know
https://samwho.dev/numbers/

This is an excellent showcase these numbers and giving the possibility of browsing through the changes over the years.
Color spaces
https://ericportis.com/posts/2024/okay-color-spaces

One of the best demystification of color spaces.
HTTP explained
https://alexandrehtrb.github.io/posts/2024/03/http2-and-http3-explained/

The differences between all http versions from 0.9 to 3.

Thoughts

"Postmodernity is said to be a culture of fragmentary sensations, eclectic nostalgia, disposable simulacra, and promiscuous superficiality, in which the traditionally valued qualities of depth, coherence, meaning, originality, and authenticity are evacuated or dissolved amid the random swirl of empty signals." ― Jean Baudrillard

Archive

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nixers newsletter issue | 2024-03-08 00:00:00 | 236

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Differentiated services
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differentiated_services
https://web.archive.org/web/20230701140203/https://linuxreviews.org/Type_of_Service_(ToS)_and_DSCP_Values
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/48095837/setting-dscp-value-to-socket-using-setsockopt
https://linux.die.net/man/7/ip
https://www.iana.org/assignments/dscp-registry/dscp-registry.xhtml

How to provie QoS on a normal IP connection, this comes in, but how do you apply it? As usual as part of the ip socket creation, but is it respected? Probably not by every router. There's the option in sysctl also of tcp_reflect_tos, reflect type of service to set the same service in response packets.
TCP slow start, why?
https://blog.donatas.net/blog/2015/08/08/slow-start-after-idle/

You can also check IP-TCP_METRICS(8) for more info on what is tracked.
Your pipes are too big
https://medium.com/maverislabs/are-your-pipes-too-big-c3e78e769161

We're talking of network pipes, not unix pipes, the issue of long fat networks.
That's a new one, cat pipes
https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/56307/can-cat-ing-a-file-be-a-potential-security-risk

So yeah, escape sequences from runaway programs that get interpreted can be dangerous, this is very similar to issue 218 "Rogue escape sequence" which can appear in logs.
Plus the classic don't internet to pipe
https://www.seancassidy.me/dont-pipe-to-your-shell.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20240228190305/https://www.idontplaydarts.com/2016/04/detecting-curl-pipe-bash-server-side/

This is one topic that we've talked about a lot before.
A trick everyone should know
https://nuclearsquid.com/writings/edit-long-commands/

I've used this quite a lot and people kept asking how I did that, so here we go, that's the inspired by emacs keybind for running list expression.
Text UI and terminal UI
https://aartaka.me/tui-is-not-tui

This is kind of a follow up on last issue 235 "Linux accessibility".
Bash scripting tips/debugs
https://wizardzines.com/comics/bash-debugging/
https://github.com/anordal/shellharden/blob/master/how_to_do_things_safely_in_bash.md
https://robertmuth.blogspot.com/2012/08/better-bash-scripting-in-15-minutes.html
https://www.davidpashley.com/articles/writing-robust-shell-scripts/

Not everyone writes so many bash shell scripts, but when you do you could peruse a couple of these links to have a refresher.

Life & Other

A single vendor is the new proprietary
https://opensource.net/why-single-vendor-is-the-new-proprietary/

A controversial point, but a fair one.

Thoughts

You only know me as you see me, not as I actually am. — Kant

What's identity, and are we only what we portray or do we all have a 'true' me inside of us. This is relevant in the age of the internet, everyone with one or multiple online persona that are puppet identities of us, molded how we want.

Archive

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

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nixers newsletter issue | 2024-03-01 00:00:00 | 235

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Linux accessibility
https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-2949-enhancing-linux-accessibility-a-unified-approach/
https://blogs.gnome.org/a11y/2023/10/27/a-new-accessibility-architecture-for-modern-free-desktops/
https://opensource.com/article/22/1/linux-accessibility-settings

A couple of links about recent updates in accessiblity (mostly on Gnome desktop).
FAMFS
https://github.com/cxl-micron-reskit/famfs
https://lkml.org/lkml/2024/2/23/1124
https://openfam.org/

This is a new shared-memory file system for FAM, fabric-attached memory (had to look that up). This kinds of harks back to the entry on DAX from last week.
Remember Unity, gnome and gnome3
https://liam-on-linux.dreamwidth.org/85359.html

It's probably a story I missed at the time, maybe because nobody that read the news took it seriously. But if that's really the reason, then I'm shocked.
Two different TCP buffer sysconfs
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/62641621/what-is-the-difference-between-tcp-max-syn-backlog-and-somaxconn
http://veithen.io/2014/01/01/how-tcp-backlog-works-in-linux.html

Let's continue our dive into Linux networking stack. Sometimes having someone explain the scenario in which the settings are used is more practical than simply reading the description.
Using Linux kernel key management
https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-linux-kernel-key-retention-service-and-why-you-should-use-it-in-your-next-application

This relates to "Relying on the Linux kernel keystore" in issue 226. This seems to be getting more in the open, however I'm afraid that if people start to rely too much on it then it might tie the code to be Linux specific.
Rust in the Linux kernel
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CEznkXjYFb4

Mostly an example and case of using Rust in the Linux kernel from an Android developer that ported "binder", the ipc mechanism in android, to Rust.
Building Gentoo virtual hosts
https://catfox.life/2024/02/23/experiences-with-building-a-gentoo-virtualisation-host/

I guess most people rely on other OSes for virtual host but if you ever need Gentoo, then bookmark this.
Review on Qubes OS
https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/962787/35f1ff3af9031437/

We had a couple of previous entries on Qubes OS before, so here's another one. In sync with the link about Gentoo, Qubes OS relies on virtualization.
A history of TTYs
https://computer.rip/2024-02-25-a-history-of-the-tty.html

Brace yourself because this starts off with telegraph systems.

Life & Other

Subjectivity of time
https://invertedpassion.com/why-time-seems-to-pass-faster-as-we-age/

This is a list of all the reasons we've read everywhere else, but it's good to have it summed up.
What is cinematography
https://www.studiobinder.com/blog/what-is-cinematography/

Even though studiobinder is a product, it seems they're pushing so much educational content online that is high quality. If you're into movies, check this out.

Thoughts

We learn from history that we do not learn from history — Hegel

What do you think?

Archive

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nixers newsletter issue | 2024-02-23 00:00:00 | 234

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

The meaning of Unix
https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/16/what_is_unix/

Probably one of the best review of what Unix is today that isn't just regurgitating what someone's read online.
The BSD
https://www.abortretry.fail/p/the-berkley-software-distribution

The most detailed history of BSD you'll read about.
Understanding the Linux kernel
https://blog.codefarm.me/2017/11/12/understanding-the-linux-kernel-01-introduction/
https://blog.codefarm.me/2017/11/26/understanding-the-linux-kernel-02-memory-addressing/

This is a fantastic amalgam of info about the Linux kernel.
Magika
https://google.github.io/magika/

This is a "AI" version of file(1), to determine file type. It does a lot of false positives, so it might not be "prod" ready, but it's very convenient.
progman wm
https://github.com/jcs/progman

This is a WM that looks like early 90s desktop. It's not anything truly novel, but the look of it is appealing.
A pure bash web server
https://github.com/dzove855/Bash-web-server

It's an impressive project but to get the accept built-in you need to patch your bash, which isn't practical.
TCP keepalive overview
https://tldp.org/HOWTO/TCP-Keepalive-HOWTO/overview.html
https://tldp.org/HOWTO/TCP-Keepalive-HOWTO/usingkeepalive.html

Again, this week we'll review a couple of networking-related links. We'll start with TCP keepalive mechanism, do you really understand it? Also, the author has a nice and light way of explaining the topic.
SYN packet handling in the wild
https://blog.cloudflare.com/syn-packet-handling-in-the-wild/

If you think you know TCP handshake, think again. This article dives into the SYN/ACK and different params that affects it.
Vector Packet Processor on FreeBSD
https://ipng.ch/s/articles/2024/02/17/vpp-freebsd-2.html

To continue on our networking discussion, here's a topic that merge software-defined-networking (SDN) and fast packet processing, which has become popular these days.
Linux' proc fd is not the same as dup
https://blog.gnoack.org/post/proc-fd-is-not-dup/

Now this is surprising, TIL.
Another look at containers from scratch
https://ikouchiha47.github.io/2024/02/05/how-containers-work.html

Similar to a couple of other posts, this is a rundown of all the tech used to make containers possible on Linux.

Life & Other

Huffman code
https://two-wrongs.com/huffman-codes-how-do-they-work

A great and fun explanation of huffman coding.

Thoughts

"Words are where most change begins." — Brandon Sanderson

The words we use often reflect how we think, even implicitly. We say 'fake it till you make it', that doesn't work most of the time, but with language it has a big effect.

Archive

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nixers newsletter issue | 2024-02-16 00:00:00 | 233

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

dm-multipath
https://www.thegeekdiary.com/understanding-linux-multipath-using-dm-multipath/

The dm layer on Linux allows for some fabulous innovation and abstraction. In the above, we see something similar to lvm, the usage of multiple physical disks as if they were a single virtual one, with different rules to decide where the data will be sent.
dm-stripe and dm-linear
https://pmem.io/blog/2018/05/using-persistent-memory-devices-with-the-linux-device-mapper/
https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/filesystems/dax.html

A continuation of the previous link, let's see two other device mappers. This one focuses on persistent memory, types of devices that are non-volatile and allow direct access.
Shared library management and debugging under Linux
https://blog.codefarm.me/2016/05/12/linux-commands-for-shared-library-management-and-debugging-problem/

This is an excellent resource to learn about shared libraries. Heck, I've learned a few things too, I didn't know what was ld.so.conf before, I was only aware of LD_LIBRARY_PATH. Further, I've known people who literally search the whole system to find if a library file exists instead of relying on this or a well-known build system.
Path MTU discovery in practice
https://blog.cloudflare.com/path-mtu-discovery-in-practice/

I'm back on a networking topics dive (I should also remove the dust from my books to re-read them), the above article was so insightful on the topic of MTU discovery! Aside: it truly seems like Marek is lifting the weight of Cloudflare by himself with his deep technical knowledge, though he's probably only the public facing part of that company.
Time to bring Word to OpenBSD
https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=170742832804260&w=2

Now that's the kind of quarrel I want to read about.
Making windows vanish
https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/XOffscreenIconMistake

This the kind of problematic that only happens when the windowing environment is as configurable as it is now.
Fetching SSH keys from different sources
https://git.sr.ht/~hauleth/fuk

That's a solution to a problem we've recently invented, but yet a valid one.
Search log files
https://github.com/Textualize/toolong

Kind of a neat too, but I don't think I'll even remember to use it to check logs though.
Bootloader debug story
https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2024-02-11-minimal-linux-bootloader-debugging-story/

This was a rollercoaster of a debug session. Goes to show that maintaining anything at this level can quickly become insanely complex.

Life & Other

The great GPT firewall
https://github.com/samber/the-great-gpt-firewall

Should we all do that on our websites?
Body swap
https://youtu.be/f7q8f6KMcac?si=pe2x7xv_RcDV-6Xz

Hey I don't often link something truly off topic, but that channel's skits are really well made and full of fun twists on tropes.

Thoughts

Shit happens!

Hope everything is going fine in your life. Let's appreciate the small pleasures of everyday, we never know what tomorrow will bring.

Archive

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nixers newsletter issue | 2024-02-09 00:00:00 | 232

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

OverlayFS and containers
https://blog.codefarm.me/2021/11/26/linux-overlayfs-and-container/

We've all heard of overlayfs/union-mount and how they are used to make containers space-usage more efficient, but how do they actually work. Read more to find out.
Building an hypervisor
https://iovec.net/2024-01-29

A series about building a KVM based hypervisor from scratch.
Kernel instrumentations
https://linuxdevices.org/kurt-the-ku-real-time-linux/
https://elinux.org/Kernel_Instrumentation

These were mostly before the advent of eBPF.
What's nice about zsh
https://www.arp242.net/why-zsh.html

A few things that zsh does better, from calculation, to null byte insertion in strings, and more.
OpenBSD system-call pinning
https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/959562/0578b8e463f790c1/

The linux kernel is getting a lot of inspo from OpenBSD, for instance the latest mseal, here the lwn discusses the latest additions to OpenBSD.
Deconstructing files
https://danluu.com/deconstruct-files/

Don't go to reddit for any serious answer, visit blogs instead.
Reducing docker image size
https://bhupesh.me/publishing-my-first-ever-dockerfile-optimization-ugit/

I don't know how to feel about this, a shell script distributed as a docker image that is MBs big and calling it optimization.
Visual overview of malloc
https://silent-tower.net/projects/visual-overview-malloc

See also "sbrk and malloc" in issue 53, "Malloc source" in 42.
NetBSD in 2024
https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-3508-netbsd-10-thirty-years-still-going-strong-/
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1ZzaW9eI4wmMRGOnJ1uo-kGk5b_UvIOuU9Zgur4au_8s/edit

A historical review of BSD and NetBSD, the infamous toaster, and a look into the future.

Life & Other

Learn the land
https://www.namethatnation.com/
https://travle.earth/challenge/
https://www.geoguessr.com/

I've always like these types of games, what do you think?

Thoughts

"Knowledge is power." — Francis Bacon

Do you agree that knowledge alone is power? What about taking action?

Archive

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nixers newsletter issue | 2024-02-02 00:00:00 | 231

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Simple X Mobile
https://sxmo.org/

This is an environment for Linux-based mobile devices that has a suckless-style.
niri compositor
https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/releases/tag/v0.1.0

A wayland compositor inspired by PaperWM, it's basically an infinite parchemin/scroll of windows.
To learn we must admit
https://j11g.com/2023/01/14/i-dont-understand-terminals-shells-and-ssh/

The author realizes that they don't really know something, and shares ways to learn more.
Mini guide to bash
https://www.meetgor.com/bash-guide-p2/

If you already know this stuff, then it's a good reminder, otherwise it's also a good practical introduction.
Fun with device mapper (dm)
https://blog.oddbit.com/post/2018-01-25-fun-with-devicemapper-snapshot/
https://blog.codefarm.me/2021/11/29/device-mapper-and-linux-lvm/

What fun is there with simple solutions when you can go around it and use that as an excuse to learn something new instead.
setting up your pc for remote access
https://ciesie.com/post/pc_remote_access/
https://www.xmodulo.com/access-linux-server-behind-nat-reverse-ssh-tunnel.html

That's a good start, however it doesn't address the issue of machines hidden under NAT, that would require a reverse SSH tunnel such as the second link.
Phone audio towards pc
https://bash-prompt.net/guides/pulse-audio-bluetooth-streaming/

It's much easier than you thought, this should also work on pipewire.
GNOME and gtk stuff
https://blog.gtk.org/2024/01/28/new-renderers-for-gtk/
https://vdwaa.nl/gnome-upower-charge-thresholds.html#gnome-upower-charge-thresholds
https://alnvdl.github.io/2023/11/18/a-cloud-based-vs-code-workspace.html
https://docs.gtk.org/gtk4/broadway.html

A brand new renderer mechanism is coming up in gtk, and something for laptop users to make their battery last long: charge thresholds.
Visually learning about binaries
http://binvis.io/#/

This is more or less a follow up on "What does ext4 look like?" in issue 228.

Life & Other

Diving into DICOM format
https://www.vladsiv.com/dicom-file-format-basics/
https://www.vladsiv.com/dicom-file-processing/

I thought we saw that one when doing the series on file formats, but apparently we didn't. It's a basic TLV format. This could've been parsed using kaitai also.
What's in a private key
https://cendyne.dev/posts/2021-04-16-private-key.html

An indirect intro to ASN.1 encoding by looking at the format of private keys (PKCS#8).
IPv6 over websocket
https://www.nuke24.net/plog/15.html

It's better to just open the page and test it out rather than spending the time explaining it.
A full game in a PDF
https://lucas-c.itch.io/undying-dusk

This is some impressive work, have a look.

Thoughts

F U cn rd dis U mst uz Unix. — Tim Roberts

Archive

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nixers newsletter issue | 2024-01-26 00:00:00 | 230

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

mseal
https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/958438/d5f91f251b309612/

A new proposed syscall to the linux kernel similar to OpenBSD's mimmutable.
An admin guide to sysrq
https://kernel.org/doc/html/latest/admin-guide/sysrq.html

I've used this oh-so-many-times when in dire situations, but never went as far as understanding the nitty gritty details behind it. It seems it can be used for other day-to-day things too.
Reversing an unfamiliar touchscreen
https://laplab.me/posts/whats-that-touchscreen-in-my-room/

This is a really fun rabbit hole of tidbits of reverse engineering and OSINT. Yet one thing I didn't understand is, if they got full write access to /etc/shadow, why couldn't they just add a line with the right encrypted password (plus the sshd fix obviously).
COMMAND.COM
https://github.com/alexmyczko/autoexec.bat/blob/master/COMMAND.COM

Want to use your unix box like a DOS box, here you go.
Note down your breaks for "productivity"
https://github.com/svandragt/break-aware
http://arbtt.nomeata.de/#what

By taking a look at the code, this is definitely not portable, but it gives me a couple of ideas on projects. It reminds me a bit of projects like ActivityWatch and the classic arbtt.
irq pressure stall information meaning
https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/linux/PSIIRQNumbersAndMeanings

Some clarifications on this new metric that can be used for accounting, however it might not be that useful.
A weird hack
https://www.tomshardware.com/software/operating-systems/driver-hack-lets-you-run-linux-after-windows-bsods-no-reboot-required

In sum, someone was able to inject a tiny RISC-V Linux emulator in the Windows error handling function.
Extending eBPF from Kernel to User Space
https://eunomia.dev/blogs/bpftime/
https://github.com/eunomia-bpf/bpftime

bpftime is like eBPF but it runs in user space instead of kernel space. It doesn't support all features, but aims to be compatible, and to support older kernels that don't have eBPF. It can be useful for auditing, hot patching, stats, and others.
dbus-broker vs dbus-daemon
https://github.com/bus1/dbus-broker/wiki
https://github.com/bus1/dbus-broker/wiki/Deviations
https://dbus.freedesktop.org/doc/dbus-daemon.1.html
https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/dbus/

Fedora/RedHat and Arch Linux are switching to dbus-broker, what's the difference with the dbus-daemon. The dbus-daemon is the reference implementation that is multiplatform. The dbus-broker is a Linux-specific implementation, also written in C, that uses novel features of Linux to make itself faster, simpler, and more reliable (at least that's what's advertised). Does this mean that we might see discrepancies in what software expects of dbus or will they stick to the standard?

Life & Other

Do lowercase letters save data?
https://endtimes.dev/why-lowercase-letters-save-data/

The answer is compression and probability, read to find more.
Learning math as an adult
https://gmays.com/how-im-relearning-math-as-an-adult/
https://afaik.io/nebula?mode=nebula&category=blueprint&id=ed0mb7N4rYw3
https://www.myopenmath.com/index.php
https://mathispower4u.com/

This is inspiring, it's been a long time since I dived into math, and I'm thinking maybe I should. The first link is referring to a paid service, but there are many others that are free and open.
Is understandability the most important design goal
https://ntietz.com/blog/the-most-important-goal-in-designing-software-is-understandability/
https://github.com/zakirullin/cognitive-load

While this is a very good point, I'd say the main goal of software is to actually do what it's supposed to do, to be functional. Understandability is a non-functional requirement, and is assumed within the professional setting, yet a user wouldn't care.

Thoughts

"When you come up with a theory, you fall in love with the beauty the simplicity and elegance of it. But then you have to get a sheet of paper and pencil and crack out all the details. Hundreds and hundreds of pages. Because you have to prove it." — Michio Kaku

Do you think the same applies to computer science and programming, simple programs are beautiful, but what does this imply on the proof?

Archive

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nixers newsletter issue | 2024-01-19 00:00:00 | 229

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

CLI user experience case study
https://www.tweag.io/blog/2023-10-05-cli-ux-in-topiary/

When someone gets into HCI they start to rethink how they see the world. In this case the author tries to simplify the CLI by making a clear state separation by using sub-commands among other things.
liquidprompt
https://github.com/liquidprompt/liquidprompt
https://liquidprompt.readthedocs.io/en/stable/install.html

This is in the same vein as the previous link, making the CLI easier to use through a custom prompt.
How fast is your shell
https://registerspill.thorstenball.com/p/how-fast-is-your-shell
https://tratt.net/laurie/blog/2024/faster_shell_startup_with_shell_switching.html

A comparison of the processing speed of different shells, nothing really surprising, but there are a lot of tips on how to speed up zsh. See also this comparison by jkl on the forums.
Ed is the standard text editor
https://cs.wellesley.edu/~cs249/Resources/ed_is_the_standard_text_editor.html

A classic post about ed, if you've never read it then now is the time.
FreeBSD Desktop audio improvements
https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2024/01/13/freebsd-desktop-part-29-configuration-audio-improvements/

This article clearly shows the need for an audio server. However, instead of taking the hassle to write a script to automatically switch to the device when it is plugged, the only thing needed instead is to simply load the module module-switch-on-connect which will achieve the same thing.
"Effortless" OpenBSD Audio and Desktop Screen Recording Guide
https://www.undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20240115170740

As someone said "I think OpenBSD folks and non-OpenBSD folks have a different meaning of the word effortless."
Only a tablet for studying CS
https://ezrizhu.com/blog/tablet-for-cs

This is basically the "dream" of having a cloud-hosted dev environment you can take anywhere. But would you actually use that?
Preventing DNS Leak using OpenVPN
https://blog.deepjyoti30.dev/openvpn-dns-leak
https://github.com/jonathanio/update-systemd-resolved

Nothing too fancy, but a reminder that your vpn conf will dictate how the traffic will be handled, and DNS shouldn't be forgotten. The second link is a solution for systemd, but openvpn works on multiple machines, and the DNS update also needs to happen there.
Build Reliable Operating System Images
https://www.osbuild.org/
https://www.osbuild.org/guides/image-builder-on-premises/basic-concepts.html
https://www.redhat.com/sysadmin/containers-build-once-run-anywhere-edge

OSBuild is kind of like a high-level docker but more complex, and corporate. It's mainly an abstract format to run in the cloud and be converted to proprietary confs.
Exploring Podman
https://betterstack.com/community/guides/scaling-docker/podman-vs-docker/

I've always wondered what the differences were between Podman and Docker apart from "Podman doesn't run as root".
PineTime and InfiniTime
https://blog.mlich.cz/2023/10/pinetime-experience/
https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/PineTime
https://github.com/InfiniTimeOrg/InfiniTime/
https://www.pine64.org/pinetime/

People often bring up the topic of open-source Unix-like system for mobile phones, but have you ever heard of it for smart watches?
pam timestamp plugin
https://ikerexxe.github.io/idm/2022/05/18/pam-timestamp.html

This plugin is used to not have to type your password again if you've already done so in the last defined window frame, in a similar fashion to sudo.
Hacking the OSS supply chain
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oEwBhwdLC3Y

We keep hearing of supply chain attacks, well this is a practical example.
binfmt for WSL
https://kaashif.co.uk/2024/01/03/binfmt-misc-the-magic-behind-linux-windows-interop/

See also "Magic bytes" in issue 100.

Life & Other

Greenspun's tenth rule
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_tenth_rule

So have you ever written such program, or discovered one like it?

Thoughts

Code never lies, comments sometimes do. — Ron Jeffries one of the founders of XP methodology

Archive

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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 issue | 2024-01-12 00:00:00 | 228

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Misconceptions about the unix philosophy
https://posixcafe.org/blogs/2024/01/05/0/

You could basically say "composability" and not "atomisation".
Adélie Linux
https://www.adelielinux.org/about/

A libre OS, using musl and APK, in pursuit of POSIX® cert for stability. That sounds good.
The state of Enterprise Linux
https://crunchtools.com/the-state-of-enterprise-linux-in-2023/

This is a bit different than how usual distributions operate. Take a look.
How to build a lab
https://labs.ripe.net/author/ondrej_caletka_1/hands-on-learning-how-we-built-the-ipv6-security-course-virtual-lab-activities/

Take note, if you ever want to create one of these web-console virtual env.
A modern implementation of traceroute
https://github.com/catchpoint/Networking.traceroute

This is traceroute but with more options and support.
nmstate
https://github.com/nmstate/nmstate

This is sort of an alternative, centralized, and declarative way to manipulate host networking configurations (think dns, routes, interfaces, etc..).
Streaming to chromecast
https://linderud.dev/blog/stream-to-chromecast-with-resolved-vlc-and-bash/

That's something I've tried to do too and usually fell back to the vlc plus renderer option, now I got an alternative. See also issue 208 "An mDNS primer".
Hardening an OpenBSD workstation
https://dataswamp.org/~solene/2023-12-31-hardened-openbsd-workstation.html

A couple of useful tips to make your home station more secure.
IaM on Linux in 2024
https://ostconf.com/system/attachments/files/000/001/693/original/Alexander_Bokovoy.pdf

This is mostly for Fedora/RedHat systems but the ideas are still relevant to other systems too.
systemd through the eyes of a musl distribution maintainer
https://catfox.life/2024/01/05/systemd-through-the-eyes-of-a-musl-distribution-maintainer/

This is one of the most balanced review I've read so far.
Linux & TPMs
https://media.ccc.de/v/all-systems-go-2023-186-linux-tpms

systemd is including some integration with TPMs, especially for boot process, credentials, and disk encryption.
Dropping SLAB in favor of SLUB
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.8-SLAB-SLUB-Changes
https://lwn.net/Articles/932201/

The names are confusing but it makes sense when you read about it.
Stopping a Linux thread
https://mazzo.li/posts/stopping-linux-threads.html

If you've never given any thought to this topic, this will mind blow you, and even if you have, you'll still be dumbfounded by the amount you didn't know about.
How can stdout be faster than stderr
https://blog.orhun.dev/stdout-vs-stderr/

And this takes us on a rabbithole learning about pseudo-terminals, curses, terminal raw mode, rendering TUI via stderr, using firefox tools to take stack traces and debug, to then trace the chain from stdout to the terminal output.
What does ext4 look like?
https://buredoranna.github.io/linux/ext4/2020/01/09/ext4-viz.html

That's the type of learning I love, reverse engineering and playing around to learn the format of something and what it means.

Life & Other

Having fun with PNG format
https://evanhahn.com/worlds-smallest-png/
https://belkadan.com/blog/2024/01/The-Biggest-Smallest-PNG/

These were highly entertaining and educational to read, recommended.
...and having fun with fonts too
https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2015/07/one-font-vulnerability-to-rule-them-all.html

This is an attack vector that we don't often hear about but that is very impactful, remember the emojis that crashed the iPhone?

Thoughts

That's a lot of Unix content for one week! It seems like there's a hype to write about anything related to OS since the start of the year, it's thrilling.

Archive

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

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
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Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2024-01-05 00:00:00 | 227

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

tm.tm_gmtoff why such a great offset
https://gist.github.com/FeepingCreature/9d85ed1e716fe568e20e1074c117f7c8

As with a lot of things, it comes down to backward compatibility and historical reasons.
Forking SteamOS
https://iliana.fyi/blog/build-your-own-steamos-updates/

Even if you don't care about SteamOS it's a good rundown and dive into the architecture of a customized distro.
Android data encryption
https://blog.quarkslab.com/android-data-encryption-in-depth.html

A really in-depth look at the file-based encryption mechanisms found on Android, from key derivation, encryption, PoC exploits, and more.
Current directory
https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/ShellsAndCurrentDirectory

I've actually learned something from this! The ins and outs of how the current directory is interpreted differently in the kernel and in shells and differs among systems.
Some stuff about ssh and shell
https://blogsystem5.substack.com/p/ssh-agent-forwarding-and-tmux-done
https://blogsystem5.substack.com/p/why-do-i-know-shell-and-how-can-you

A fine looking blog. The issue of ssh sock being exposed when using the forwarding option and pointing to an invalid file on long-running tmux session is surprising but was already mentioned with a warning in the manpage (as shown at the end of the article).
write your own terminal
https://flak.tedunangst.com/post/write-your-own-terminal
https://flak.tedunangst.com/post/terminal-smooth-scrolling

A brainstorm guide to challenge yourself into writing your own terminal emulator. Followed by some cool feature the author implements.
Spatial shell
https://soap.coffee/~lthms/posts/SpatialShell6.html

And this has nothing to do with shell but more with window management, a Sway plugin. It's a new way to interface with windows, I'm not a fan of it, but take a look anyway and make your mind.
zram
https://docs.kernel.org/admin-guide/blockdev/zram.html

Nothing new, but it's great to present tech that not everyone uses all the time, good reminders. If you're looking for the actual value of this check section 6 of the doc "Activate".
Why does ACPI exist
https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/68350.html

It answered the question, basically having something common via the bios, but then the argument would be "why not have it through a common hardware interface instead", but history has already played out.
Gentoo goes binary!
https://www.gentoo.org/news/2023/12/29/Gentoo-binary.html

This requires a post, since not everyone is aware that Portage also has pre-built binaries, kind of like most other source-based distros these days too.

Life & Other

Erasure Coding Demystified
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5kVuM7zEUI

Ever wondered how erasure coding worked (think RAID and similar), then this video will help.
Legal definitions aside – what makes you think you’re an adult?
https://psyche.co/ideas/legal-definitions-aside-what-makes-you-think-youre-an-adult

Lots to ponder on. What's your take on this?
Writing a TrueType font renderer
https://axleos.com/writing-a-truetype-font-renderer/

An entertaining article tackling what it takes to render a font on the screen. There's a lot of intricate details we often don't think about when looking at text.

Thoughts

"Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the universe trying to build bigger and better idiots. So far, the universe is winning." — Rick Cook

Archive

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Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

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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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 issue | 2023-12-29 00:00:00 | 226

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Unicode in terminal emulators
https://www.jeffquast.com/post/ucs-detect-test-results/

The author is definitely someone who knows their ways around unicode interpretation in terminals. This article particularly focuses on the respect of the width of unicode.
Reforming Unix
https://github.com/Ericson2314/baccumulation/blob/main/reforming-unix.adoc

A living document about different ideas, mostly related to security, to "reform" unix. Most of them are on-their-ways.
non-interactive ssh password auth
https://vincent.bernat.ch/en/blog/2023-sshpass-without-sshpass

A couple of shell wrappers to make ssh with password easier (but not safer).
puzzlefs
https://github.com/project-machine/puzzlefs

A new filesystem dedicated and focused on containers. It's main emphasis is on deduplication because of the sharing of layers of containers. It is currently implemented as a FUSE.
libvpoll
https://github.com/rd235/libvpoll-eventfd

A few additions to the Linux kernel to add new ways to perform polling more uniformly instead of having custom implementations.
GPLv2 is routinely violated
https://www.devever.net/~hl/linuxgpl

And as everything regarding laws, interpretations differ and legality is nebulous.
Guide to eBPF networking techniques
https://who.ldelossa.is/posts/ebpf-networking-technique-packet-redirection/

Using eBPF for packing filtering/redirection is all the craze these days. However, it's a tough topic that requires the latest kernel and latest tool, this guide is gladly welcomed.
Relying on the Linux kernel keystore
https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon23apac/presentation/korchagin

This is a great presentation, it dives into what is a keystore and why we need it (different vulnerabilities). Then dive into the key-agent interface of the kernel, why it was created initially (LUKS/dm-crypt), goes into the structure (keyrings). It follows by multiple examples of the usage of the kernel keystore and how it could possibly be used with a TPM or HSM for storage.

Life & Other

How to design Google Maps
https://medium.com/google-design/google-maps-cb0326d165f5

There's a lot of in-depth details about cartography in there, along with software design tricks that were used to make online maps possible.
Cyber magicians
https://theintercept.com/document/art-deception-training-new-generation-online-covert-operations/

Probably nothing in this presentation is surprising to anyone reading this newsletter, but it's still appalling to see it displayed so obviously.

Thoughts

I don't know who initially created the joke, but it's been spread around so much.

A man is flying in a hot air balloon and realizes he is lost. He reduces height and spots a man down below. He lowers the balloon further and shouts:
"Excuse me, can you help me? I promised my friend. I would meet him half an hour ago, but I don't know where I am."
The man below says, "Yes, you are in a hot air balloon, hovering approximately 30 feet above this field. You are between 40 and 42 degrees North latitude, and between 58 and 60 degrees West longitude."
"You must be a programmer," says the balloonist.
"I am," replies the man. "How did you know?"
"Well," says the balloonist, "everything you have told me is technically correct, but I have no idea what to make of your information, and the fact is I am still lost."
The man below says, "You must be a project manager"
"I am," replies the balloonist, "but how did you know?"
"Well," says the man, "you don't know where you are or where you are going. You have made a promise which you have no idea how to keep, and you expect me to solve your problem. The fact is you are in the exact same position you were in before we met, but now it is somehow my fault."

Archive

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Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

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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Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2023-12-22 00:00:00 | 225

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

SSH over HTTP/3
https://github.com/francoismichel/ssh3

A complete rewrite of ssh over HTTP/3 with addition of authentication via OAuth2 and OpenID Connect. Since it relies on this, it can possibly benefit from connection migration (when switching or changing network on the go) and multipath connections, similar to mosh in a way.
Using ssh as sudo
https://tim.siosm.fr/blog/2023/12/19/ssh-over-unix-socket/

This is a quite convoluted security measure, and it might be counterproductive since you're opening the door to other issues.
Gnome's Prompt
https://blogs.gnome.org/chergert/2023/12/14/prompt/
https://gitlab.gnome.org/chergert/prompt

This is a terminal for a immutable/container-oriented desktop. Basically it tracks which containers are running or available and help you launch sessions over them, but this is limited to hosts that are Fedora based.
Linux Cockpit
https://cockpit-project.org/

It might not be something that people reading this newsletter might want to use, but it still might be a tool that is interesting to get an overview and monitor a system at a glance.
Simple tutorials on ACLs
https://www.linuxquestions.org/linux/answers/Security/Quick_and_Dirty_Guide_to_Linux_File_Permissions
https://www.linuxquestions.org/linux/answers/security/acls_extended_filepermissions

We've had a few weeks in the past where we've dived into anything related to access control, let's refresh on the basics.
Bluetooth keyboard injection on Android (and others)
https://github.com/skysafe/reblog/tree/main/cve-2023-45866

Well, for now I'll keep my bluetooth turned off while in public.
Zombie processes using GPU
https://theblackcat102.github.io/fixing-nvidia-gpu-zombie-process/

We often talk of zombie processes using a tiny bit of memory, but have you ever wondered if they could hold GPU memory too?
Setting up your own VoIP/SIP service
https://allanrbo.blogspot.com/2023/03/peer-to-peer-voice-over-ip-call-with.html

We've seen something similar in issue 197 "Your personal VoIP", this is another thing you could test out from the CLI. This could be useful to get away from IM proprietary software stack.
The BPF-programmable network device
https://lwn.net/Articles/949960/

On Linux, the kernel 6.7 now includes a BPF-programmable network device. What does that mean? A new virtual network device called "netkit" that allow to load custom BPF programs in it to control the routing of packets and other modifications.
First Impressions of the Yggdrasil Peer-to-Peer Network
https://cheapskatesguide.org/articles/yggdrasil.html

I've always been curious about what yggdrasil is and how to use it. Since I've played cyb.farm recently I got to try it first hand and test it. Read the above post to also get an idea from someone else. For me, it was relatively simple to setup, I found the list of public peers online, and added them using yggdrasilctl.
The graphic stack on Linux
https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/955376/b3fba3bbfabbc411/

A rundown of all the pieces involved into drawing graphics on Linux.

Life & Other

Sunk cost fallacy
https://tidyfirst.substack.com/p/not-my-money-any-more-lessons-from

A good lesson, sometimes we imagine we have more power over the world than we actually have, we appropriate things and behavior while in reality we don't.
Hilbert construction
http://bit-player.org/extras/hilbert/hilbert-construction.html

A step by step explanation of the Hilbert curve, which is part of many algorithms.
A fun magazine à la "poc || gtfo"
https://pagedout.institute/download/PagedOut_003_beta1.pdf

It's however, much more approachable and enjoyable to read, give it a go.

Thoughts

A gentle reminder:

Deleted code is debugged code. — Jeff Sickel

Archive

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

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
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Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2023-12-15 00:00:00 | 224

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Capturing Touch Events
https://blog.owulveryck.info/2023/12/02/simplifying-complexity-the-journey-from-websockets-to-http-streams.html

A pretty neat breakdown of a project about sending events from one Linux machine to a server, from the capture, serialization, sending, and more.
What happened to the Linux zealots
https://boilingsteam.com/what-happened-to-the-native-linux-zealots/index.html

I'm not familiar with the gaming platforms available, however this post still poses a good debate about the progression of any community and its extreme through time.
FreeBSD experiments
https://notes.eatonphil.com/finishing-up-a-freebsd-experiment.html

It's a type of post I enjoy but that we see less often, just day to day notes, issues, and findings about what someone uses.
No real-life input looks like that
https://sigwait.org/~alex/blog/2022/09/11/puYjYw.html

Some fun trivia.
Debunking btrfs
https://swag.industries/debunking-btrfs/

It's usually in debunking articles that you also find good info about a technology and insights about new things.
SSH Hardening with ssh-audit
https://thoughts.greyh.at/posts/ssh-audit/

Scared that you haven't setup an ssh server properly, this tool should help.
OpenBSD adds more mitigations
https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=170205367232026&w=2
https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=170234892604404&w=2

Always on track to have program correctness and exploit mitigation, OpenBSD adds pinning of all syscalls.
What does it mean to remove Xorg
https://who-t.blogspot.com/2023/12/xorg-being-removed-what-does-this-mean.html

This is a fair explanation of what's happening.

Life & Other

Timezones in Postgres
https://blog.untrod.com/2016/08/actually-understanding-timezones-in-postgresql.html

And now I finally understand timezones, and I'll store everything in UTC.
Systems design for advanced beginners
https://robertheaton.com/2020/04/06/systems-design-for-advanced-beginners/

A fun and easy article describing some basics of system design that you can send to your peers that are on their ways in this domain.
Always learning, always teaching
https://stephango.com/always-learning-always-teaching

Just some motivational post about continual growth.

Thoughts

It might not be your fault, but it is your problem.

This could be a sentence you tell yourself, or that someone else tells you. Often things happen that aren't caused by us, but we still have to deal with them.

Archive

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nixers newsletter issue | 2023-12-08 00:00:00 | 223

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Being pedantic about what immutable means
https://blog.verbum.org/2020/08/22/immutable-%E2%86%92-reprovisionable-anti-hysteresis/

"Reprovisionable infrastructure with anti-hysteresis properties" is a tongue twister, but trying to spend time to define the current marketing terms with more precise ones has the advantage of making us understand the mechanics.
Patching Linux at Hyperscale
https://thenewstack.io/how-meta-patches-linux-at-hyperscale/

It's not the KLP in itself that's interesting but the complexity of doing this across so many machines.
toolchain security features status update
https://outflux.net/slides/2023/lpc/features.pdf

Language compile- and run- time hardening is making some progress on Linux.
Relative shell script includes with realpath on FreeBSD
https://patmaddox.com/doc/trunk/www/2023-12-sh-relative-shell-script-includes-with-realpath-on-freebsd/

An ingenious solution to make shell scripts includes work regardless of the path you're executing it from.
makima
https://github.com/cyber-sushi/makima

This is a sort of Linux equivalent of autohotkey.
The Origin of the word Daemon
https://ei.cs.vt.edu/~history/Daemon.html

The story behind the word from the people involved in its initial usage.
Pipes vs FIFOs
https://phala.isatty.net/~amber/hacks/pipefifo

A post convincing you to not use named pipes (FIFOs) for process substitution, or at least point out certain discrepancies in it that could not fit certain use-cases.
Why Unix kernels have grown caches for directory entries
https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/KernelNameCachesWhy

And obviously it's a solution to make things more efficient.
A view on Wayland
https://dudemanguy.github.io/blog/posts/2022-06-10-wayland-xorg/wayland-xorg.html

The author presses some fair points about Wayland, make what you want of this discussion.
Interview with pipewire's main creator
https://fedoramagazine.org/pipewire-1-0-an-interview-with-pipewire-creator-wim-taymans/

This interview is a great review of all the features and changes happening the past 2 years.

Life & Other

Building stupid tools
https://blog.stulta.dev/posts/stupid_tools/

The author makes some very good points about building more tools.
money first
https://siliconvict.com/articles/1-choose-money-first

A quite controversial article, but worth pondering on.

Thoughts

"Writing program code is a good way of debugging your thinking." — Bill Venables"

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nixers newsletter issue | 2023-12-01 00:00:00 | 222

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

A NetBSD ramdisk kernel
https://bentsukun.ch/posts/ramdisk-kernel/

This is the type of post that should be added to the official documentation since it's so relevant to many people and is a standard procedure.
Per-process capability-based restrictions on dragonflybsd
https://lists.dragonflybsd.org/pipermail/commits/2023-October/922780.html

This is not to be confused with capability-based access control, but it's more similar to OpenBSD's pledge and Linux' seccomp. A very nice addition.
From Linux to FreeBSD
https://it-notes.dragas.net/2023/10/25/migrating-from-an-old-linux-server-to-a-new-freebsd-machine/

After 5 years of uptime you need to be really convincing to swap that system with another.
An stty intro
https://blog.robertelder.org/intro-to-stty-command/

A quick explanation of he stty command along with a couple examples to grasp the concept.
Understanding the Origins and the Evolution of Vi & Vim
https://pikuma.com/blog/origins-of-vim-text-editor

A piece about the history from ed to vim, and most things in between.
Freezing in Style
https://blog.broulik.de/2023/11/freezing-in-style/

This is KDE's Plasma reimplementation of X's "your app is unresponsive" pop-up for their Wayland backend. It's not as simple to implement as it sounds and requires redesign and rethinking in a lot of places.
The curse of docker
https://computer.rip/2023-11-25-the-curse-of-docker.html

An article about why the author thinks docker as a method of software distribution has many flaws. From the non-standard configuration, non-portability and bad practices, and more.

Life & Other

Fun with DNS TXT Records
https://thoughts.theden.sh/posts/dns-txt-record-fun/

Basically using DNS as a small free storage, something we've recurrently seen around the web.

Thoughts

Consistency Is the Last Refuge of the Unimaginative — Oscar Wilde
I adore simple pleasures. They are the last refuge of the complex.
Ambition is the last refuge of the failure.

Challenging quotes, I'll let you ponder on them since Mr.Wilde was so adamant to repeat the same idea in many of his work.

On that note, let's mention this website: https://quoteinvestigator.com/, I find it fascinating to dive behind the origin of quotes. Even though most quotes are by definition extracted from their context and infinitely reinterpreted, I still like to shatter that and try to find even more meaning by doing so.

Archive

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nixers newsletter issue | 2023-11-24 00:00:00 | 221

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Contextual CLIs
https://garnix.io/blog/contextual-cli
https://jmmv.dev/2013/09/cli-design-subcommand-based-interfaces.html

This is the kind of ideas that shatters pre-conceived notion, but that could be so innovative they become the building stone of other ideas. The subcommand part reminds me of the second link.
CLI to extract context from data
https://blanchardjulien.com/posts/textract/

While not technically Unix-related, it's a good basic example of building a simple script from scratch. Though the exercise would be on how to make it more Unix-like and following best practices.
Navigating around the shell
https://blog.meain.io/2023/navigating-around-in-shell/

A couple of basic ideas and helpers (for zsh mostly), that you can use as inspo in your daily life.
SSH Tarpits
https://www.bentasker.co.uk/posts/blog/security/are-ssh-tarpits-still-effective.html

I have to say I didn't know what ssh tarpits were before this post, but now I know that they're a sort of ssh honeypot. The stats are quite interesting.
Gtk graphics offload
https://blog.gtk.org/2023/11/15/introducing-graphics-offload/

An update on the work of Gtk on Wayland Linux to rely on dmabuf for graphics offloading.
VT320 terminal repair
http://nuclear.mutantstargoat.com/blog/103-vt320_repair.html

This is my first time reading about the loadable character set, however I can't find much information about it online. The whole post is amazing, from the terminal mingling to the keyboard fix. Aside: I do only use ctrl-[ to exit insert mode in vim, and I find it less annoying than pressing esc.
setenv is not thread safe
https://www.evanjones.ca/setenv-is-not-thread-safe.html

I'm not a big fan of using environment variables to configure programs, I prefer them to really be only about the global environment, read first when a program start and then not read again nor changed. But I see a trend these days that abuses and overuses env.
tmpout issue 3
https://tmpout.sh/3/

A new issue from this journal à la pocorgtfo and phrack. The content is mostly targeted towards Linux and Unix systems.
Mess with dns
https://messwithdns.net

If you've ever wanted to try things with DNS but didn't want to go through the hassle of setting up a local DNS then this is for you.
Fixing the bell tone
https://cgit.freebsd.org/src/commit/?id=ba48d52ca6c8

Such a simple change but with a whole story behind it.
Test bracket
https://jmmv.dev/2020/03/test-bracket.html

One of the best explanation of what the test brackets are and the difference with the bash extension double brackets.

Life & Other

Another one about writing
https://offlinemark.com/2023/11/05/software-engineers-must-learn-to-write/

...just to keep you in the mood and write more often.
Does it make sense to build new capitals from scratch
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-04-10/why-relocating-capital-cities-can-be-a-smart-move

There are many pieces on the topic, here's one to get the convo going.

Thoughts

"People don't spend sixty bucks on a game they know they can beat." — George Wood

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nixers newsletter issue | 2023-11-17 00:00:00 | 220

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

bcachefs
https://bcachefs.org/

It's not everyday that an advanced modern file system is created. It's still in beta version, but worth following its development.
Snap without the Snap Store
https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/10/snap_without_ubuntu_tools/

Skip straight to the section "Distributing without the Store" to get to the core of the topic.
My input hardware stopped working after a kernel update, FIX
https://www.davidrevoy.com/article1002/how-a-kernel-developer-made-my-styluses-work-again

The response from the kernel dev gives lots of insights into what is needed to make HID input devices work, and their logic.
CET, control flow enforcement, shadow stack
https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/next/x86/shstk.html
https://clang.llvm.org/docs/ShadowCallStack.html

The security protections these days are getting so advanced, at both hardware and software level. This one requires a mix of both new hardware capabilities being enabled and the software relying on it. It reminds me of CHERI in a way.
List of fonts
https://jdsalaro.com/note/best-programming-fonts/

It's just some additional ones for inspo, to continue with this thread.
Cgroup v2 Checkpoint
https://blogs.oracle.com/linux/post/cgroup-v2-checkpoint

Most people don't deal with cgroups directly, they often rely on them indirectly through some other software that uses them. In the above, I'm highlighting one of the maintainers of the tech.
Storing authorized keys in LDAP
https://sigillatum.tesarici.cz/2021-03-12-openssh-authorized-keys-in-ldap.html

It mostly relies on the AuthorizedKeysCommand directive, and you're left wondering: why use ldap as storage and not something else.
A subtle Python bug
https://blog.nelhage.com/2010/02/a-very-subtle-bug/

Often bugs are about silly things because we've already thought of all the hard ways that things could fail, but in rare cases we're faced with messy ones like the above.

Life & Other

Just use cash!
https://steelrods.hashnode.dev/the-importance-of-cash-in-a-technological-society
https://www.wbur.org/npr/182309623/why-almost-no-one-in-myanmar-wanted-my-money
https://www.mybanktracker.com/credit-cards/travel/crisp-clean-us-dollar-bills-travel-country-275899

While that first article has an USA-centric vibe, it still brings up a lot of questions about the trend to digitalize economics around the world. However, cash doesn't always work everywhere, even currencies that are thought to be "stable" might be refused, especially when traveling and during uncertain times. Make what you want out of this info!

Thoughts

"A witty saying proves nothing." — Voltaire

Since we're always adding quotes here, let's add a quote criticizing quotes/sayings.

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nixers newsletter issue | 2023-11-10 00:00:00 | 219

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

not knowing the /proc filesystem
https://admccartney.mur.at/programming/idkproc/
https://admccartney.mur.at/programming/idkprocii/

People should write more about their about their learning process on their blog, even with simple exercises such as listing processes by relying on the /proc fs.
Avoid Load-bearing Shell Scripts
https://benjamincongdon.me/blog/2023/10/29/Avoid-Load-bearing-Shell-Scripts/

Basically just a thought about scripts that grow out of size and eventually have to be rewritten.
Useful shell functions
https://muhammadraza.me/2023/shell-functions/

There used to be a time when we shared and exchanged these on forums like some trading cards.
Jails vs docker
https://justanerds.site/freebsd-jails-vs-docker/

A simple run down of a few differences between FreeBSD jails and docker.
Bluefin distro
https://projectbluefin.io/

As I understood it, this is a custom version of Fedora Silverblue but made for devs and "cloud native".
Porting Linux "version" of pledge to go
https://flak.tedunangst.com/post/porting-linux-pledge-to-go
https://flak.tedunangst.com/post/two-hackers-one-keyboard-two-ways

Plus another post from that blog since I found it cool.
Gentoo's package deprecation procedure
https://artemis.sh/2023/11/05/gentoo-mask-process.html

It takes an enormous amount of efforts to maintain a distribution, to make sure all packages are well-kept and that users are aware of the changes going on.

Life & Other

Cyber Hunt
https://cyb.farm/

This is the scavenger hunt/CTF that z3bra has been working on for the past year. It's amazingly well made, enjoy!

Thoughts

The competence sufficient to produce sentences capable of being understood may be completely insufficient to produce sentences capable of being listened to, sentences capable of being recognized as admissible in all situations where there is reason to speak — Pierre Bourdieu

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nixers newsletter issue | 2023-10-27 00:00:00 | 218

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

recover lost text by coredumping firefox
https://j3s.sh/thought/recover-lost-text-by-coredumping-firefox.html

This resonates so much, my only solution to this is that if I spend more than 2-3min writing I should write on a text editor outside the browser. I'm not sure if I'll try out the coredump next time.
Image-Based Linux Summit 2022
https://lwn.net/Articles/912774/

This is basically the background story behind "UAPI — User-Space API" of issue 169, which was the result of this summit organized by Microsoft.
Boot loader specs
https://iliana.fyi/blog/kexec-systemd-boot-kernel-image/

This is an example of how to implement the previous link's UAPI boot loader specs.
Software Lasts WAY Longer than You Think
https://mikeseidle.com/2022/04/02/software-lasts-way-longer-than-you-would-think/

A simple reflection on how pieces of software can carry across time.
Customization
https://blog.thetrevor.tech/my-terminal.n.html

It's quite an expressive way to describe a terminal with a bunch of pretty print messages. Your terminal could be your next social media post.
A tale of /dev/fd
http://phala.isatty.net/~amber/hacks/devfd

As usual the behavior seems to only have quirks on Linux.
Rogue escape sequence
https://www.gresearch.com/blog/article/g-research-the-terminal-escapes/
https://dgl.cx/2023/09/ansi-terminal-security

I thought I had linked that first one when it came out. In sum, it's a vulnerability related to logs or output that accepts text that is valid terminal escape sequences, thus when displayed on a terminal they will execute or have a behavior that wasn't expected.
Hey he's got wisdom, let's sit and listen
https://blog.vito.nyc/posts/on-programming/

This is the classic rant about learning to program, how it's a creative endeavour, etc..
Server-side sandboxing on linux
https://www.figma.com/blog/server-side-sandboxing-containers-and-seccomp/

Think of the seccomp interface on Linux as something similar to OpenBSD's pledge (however a bit more complex to use, see). The article doesn't spend time on details but more on a generic view of different high-level things that relate to sandbox and their ups and downs.

Life & Other

Amiga ASCII
https://blog.glyphdrawing.club/an-outsider-s-journey-into-the-amiga-ascii-community/
https://blog.glyphdrawing.club/amiga-ascii-art/

This is the thesis and website of a friend, it's a great intro to the world of ascii art.
Walking around with an opinion
https://www.oblomovka.com/wp/2023/04/11/walking-around-without-an-opinion/

Should we always have something to say about everything?
Dreams of inter-connectedness
https://daily.jstor.org/the-pan-american-highway-and-the-darien-gap/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interoceanic_Highway
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairo-Cape_Town_Highway
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belt_and_Road_Initiative
https://www.unescwa.org/news/escwa-devising-strategy-pan-arab-multimodal-transport-system
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_shipping_routes

We all dream of big infrastructures and cooperation across continents, but the reality on the ground makes it so difficult that most of the above projects are only figment of what they could be.

Thoughts

"A game is over when you start to wonder if the game is worth it" — Pierre Bourdieu

"The battles were so ferocious because the stakes were so small" — Henry Kissinger

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nixers newsletter issue | 2023-10-20 00:00:00 | 217

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Shell scripts as a poor man's AppImage
https://www.gkbrk.com/2023/04/poor-mans-appimage/

Basically it's a re-creation of the "makeself" see issue 14, or statifier scripts.
Learning about Wayland
https://gaultier.github.io/blog/wayland_from_scratch.html

If you've read the Wayland Book see, this one should be interesting, it goes into finer and low-level details about the communication protocol from scratch.
F-Droid version of KDEConnect uninstalled by PlayProtect
https://discuss.kde.org/t/f-droid-version-of-kdeconnect-uninstalled-by-playprotect/5992

Well, basically you're installing a RAT, so it's obvious it would get flagged.
Linux on the Web
https://linuxontheweb.github.io/
https://linuxontheweb.github.io/docs/what-it-is.html

I'm surprised by how well it works as a new tab.
Porting proprietary apps from one OS to run on another
https://lock.cmpxchg8b.com/linux123.html
https://github.com/taviso/123elf

Now this is a good mix of the scene world and Unix-like systems.
MTU
https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/why-is-ethernet-mtu-1500

Where did 1500 come from and why are we still using it?

Life & Other

Homesteading
https://jackrusher.com/journal/homesteading.html

A story that resonates deeply with many.

Thoughts

All advertising advertises advertising. — McLuhan

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nixers newsletter issue | 2023-10-13 00:00:00 | 216

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Remote Dbus notifications
https://nikhilism.com/post/2023/remote-dbus-notifications/

It's a bit of a clumsy solution. I'm not sure what would happen with systemd unit management that communicates over dbus, will it show remote services too?
How to (not) remember shell commands
https://standard.dev/details/how-to-not-remember-shell-commands

This is basically just an article that says to install tldr.
Why is Debian
https://blog.liw.fi/posts/2023/debian-reasons/

A memorandum on Debian's raison d'être, its structure and philosophy.
print json with printf
https://j3s.sh/thought/shell-tip-print-json-with-printf.html

Avoid double-quote swamp and heredoc and instead use printf.
Emacs and shellcheck
https://amitp.blogspot.com/2023/10/emacs-and-shellcheck.html

In sync with the previous link, here's a helper to include shellcheck within emacs.
The art of logging
https://www.lelanthran.com/chap10/content.html

This is one of the best quick high-level explanation of logging that I've seen.
AWK is impressive
https://livefreeordichotomize.com/posts/2019-06-04-using-awk-and-r-to-parse-25tb/index.html
https://jeroenjanssens.com/dsatcl/

It seems like AWK is always the undercover here of data scientists.
Understanding TAP on Linux
https://blog.cloudflare.com/virtual-networking-101-understanding-tap/

A good explanation of the Linux tuntap devices, their difference, how to use them, create them, and more.
Unix signals
https://goodyduru.github.io//os/2023/10/05/ipc-unix-signals.html

This is the first time I see such approach to explaining signals, novel and quite nice.

Life & Other

Making Software Last Forever
https://www.danstroot.com/posts/2023-05-25-making_software_last_forever

The usual nag about software engineering practices declining, how we aren't craftsmen anymore. How hardware improvement has made it faster to develop software but not faster software. One of my favorite saying in life is "99% of the work is maintenance" and it's nice to finally have an article discussing this topic.
Culture Jamming
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guerrilla_television
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_jamming

I'll just leave these here and you do what you want with them.

Thoughts

The People are the workers, provided they are unorganized. The Public, and Public Opinion, are the consumers, provided they content themselves with consuming. — Jean Baudrillard

Archive

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nixers newsletter issue | 2023-10-06 00:00:00 | 215

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

The pointing device on Linux
https://monroeclinton.com/pointing-devices-in-linux/

A review of pointing device peripherals, from hardware protocols, to kernel, libevdev, libinput, and finally a Wayland compositor.
Mouseless
https://vit.baisa.cz/notes/code/mouseless/

A rundown of what the author is doing to have a good mouseless desktop environment.
Building a CLI using python
https://simonwillison.net/2023/Sep/30/cli-tools-python/

All good tips and tricks, more in "CLI Best Practices" in issue 205 and "Another one of these CLI good pracices" in 149.
Linux kernel hardening check
https://github.com/a13xp0p0v/kernel-hardening-checker

A neat tool, to not only check for custom kernel compile-time option, but also boot time and sysctl ones.
A different container story
https://jordemort.dev/blog/lwn-lxc-lxd-a-different-container-story/
https://linuxcontainers.org/distrobuilder/introduction/

Everyone focuses on OCI container, this articles meanwhile changes the pace by looking at LXC instead.
GPT saves you from writing bash
https://musings.yasyf.com/never-write-a-bash-command-again-with-gpt-3/

I definitely knew things would come to this. Yet, I can't help but feel like this is a huge security risk, maybe it's better to always have it as an online doc, but not as a shell.
A novel RAT
https://www.trendmicro.com/en_us/research/23/i/earth-lusca-employs-new-linux-backdoor.html

An analysis of this new APT that targets Linux.
syscall interception using ptrace
https://notes.eatonphil.com/2023-10-01-intercepting-and-modifying-linux-system-calls-with-ptrace.html

This is mainly about implementing ptrace hooks in zig.

Life & Other

Radio was the original overhyped technology
https://techinch.com/blog/radio-and-the-technology-cycle

A tale of overestimating change, of hype and trends. Yet change is change, whatever consequences it entails.
Hardware Design and DIY tinkering
https://transistor-man.com/

I love these types of blogs, random projects and inventions.
Building an aroma picker
https://blog.jgc.org/2023/09/weekend-bricolage-aroma-picker-for-le.html

In the same vein as the previous link, here's another wild project: building an automatic picker for category of aroma.

Thoughts

Don't assume that because somebody has one intellectual skillset, they have another — that those tools apply to all types of intelligence, thinking or claims. They don't. — Steven Novella

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nixers newsletter issue | 2023-09-29 00:00:00 | 214

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/

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nixers newsletter issue | 2023-09-22 00:00:00 | 213

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

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nixers newsletter issue | 2023-09-15 00:00:00 | 212

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)

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nixers newsletter issue | 2023-09-08 00:00:00 | 211

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

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nixers newsletter issue | 2023-09-01 00:00:00 | 210

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

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nixers newsletter issue | 2023-08-25 00:00:00 | 209

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.

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nixers newsletter issue | 2023-08-18 00:00:00 | 208

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

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nixers newsletter issue | 2023-08-11 00:00:00 | 207

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

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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 issue | 2023-08-04 00:00:00 | 206

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

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

Contribute

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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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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 issue | 2023-07-28 00:00:00 | 205

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

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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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Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2023-07-21 00:00:00 | 204

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,
1. 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

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

Contribute

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If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
Share your point of view about the newsletter.
Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2023-07-14 00:00:00 | 203

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

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

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
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Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2023-07-07 00:00:00 | 202

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

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

Contribute

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If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
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Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2023-06-30 00:00:00 | 201

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

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nixers newsletter issue | 2023-06-23 00:00:00 | 200

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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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 issue | 2023-06-16 00:00:00 | 199

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

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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 issue | 2023-06-09 00:00:00 | 198

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

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Contribute

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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 issue | 2023-06-02 00:00:00 | 197

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

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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 issue | 2023-05-26 00:00:00 | 196

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

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

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

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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Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2023-05-19 00:00:00 | 195

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:

If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
Share your point of view about the newsletter.
Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2023-05-12 00:00:00 | 194

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

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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 issue | 2023-05-05 00:00:00 | 193

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:

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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Share your point of view about the newsletter.
Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2023-04-28 00:00:00 | 192

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

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

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

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 issue | 2023-04-20 00:00:00 | 191

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:

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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Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2023-04-14 00:00:00 | 190

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

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

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

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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Share your point of view about the newsletter.
Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2023-04-07 00:00:00 | 189

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:

If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
Share your point of view about the newsletter.
Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2023-03-31 00:00:00 | 188

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

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nixers newsletter issue | 2023-03-24 00:00:00 | 187

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

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nixers newsletter issue | 2023-03-17 00:00:00 | 186

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

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

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

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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Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2023-03-10 00:00:00 | 185

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

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

Contribute

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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 issue | 2023-03-03 00:00:00 | 184

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:

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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Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2023-02-24 00:00:00 | 183

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

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nixers newsletter issue | 2023-02-17 00:00:00 | 182

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!

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nixers newsletter issue | 2023-02-10 00:00:00 | 181

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

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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 issue | 2023-02-03 00:00:00 | 180

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

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nixers newsletter issue | 2023-01-12 00:00:00 | 179

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

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nixers newsletter issue | 2023-01-06 00:00:00 | 178

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:

If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
Share your point of view about the newsletter.
Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2022-12-30 00:00:00 | 177

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:

If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
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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 issue | 2022-12-23 00:00:00 | 176

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:

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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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 issue | 2022-12-16 00:00:00 | 175

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:

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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Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2022-12-09 00:00:00 | 174

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:

If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
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Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2022-12-02 00:00:00 | 173

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

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Contribute

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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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Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2022-11-25 00:00:00 | 172

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

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

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

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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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 issue | 2022-11-18 00:00:00 | 171

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:

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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Share your point of view about the newsletter.
Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2022-11-11 00:00:00 | 170

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

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nixers newsletter issue | 2022-11-04 00:00:00 | 169

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!

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nixers newsletter issue | 2022-10-28 00:00:00 | 168

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

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nixers newsletter issue | 2022-10-21 00:00:00 | 167

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.

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nixers newsletter issue | 2022-10-14 00:00:00 | 166

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?

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nixers newsletter issue | 2022-10-07 00:00:00 | 165

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

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nixers newsletter issue | 2022-09-30 00:00:00 | 164

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

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nixers newsletter issue | 2022-09-23 00:00:00 | 163

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:

If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
Share your point of view about the newsletter.
Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2022-09-16 00:00:00 | 162

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:

If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
Share your point of view about the newsletter.
Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2022-09-09 00:00:00 | 161

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:

If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
Share your point of view about the newsletter.
Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2022-09-02 00:00:00 | 160

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:

If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
Share your point of view about the newsletter.
Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2022-08-26 00:00:00 | 159

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:

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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Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2022-08-19 00:00:00 | 158

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:

If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
Share your point of view about the newsletter.
Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2022-08-12 00:00:00 | 157

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

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

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

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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Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2022-08-05 00:00:00 | 156

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

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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 issue | 2022-07-29 00:00:00 | 155

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:

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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Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2022-07-22 00:00:00 | 154

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:

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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Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2022-07-15 00:00:00 | 153

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

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

Contribute

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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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Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2022-07-08 00:00:00 | 152

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!

Archive

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

Contribute

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If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
Share your point of view about the newsletter.
Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2022-07-01 00:00:00 | 151

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

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

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
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Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2022-06-24 00:00:00 | 150

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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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 issue | 2022-06-17 00:00:00 | 149

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!

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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 issue | 2022-06-10 00:00:00 | 148

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

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Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

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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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 issue | 2022-06-03 00:00:00 | 147

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

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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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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 issue | 2022-05-27 00:00:00 | 146

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

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Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
Share your point of view about the newsletter.
Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2022-05-20 00:00:00 | 145

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:

If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
Share your point of view about the newsletter.
Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2022-05-13 00:00:00 | 144

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.

Life & Other

Thought Terminating Cliché
https://fernandogros.com/cliches-and-thought-terminating-cliches/

Some insightful article on the topic of "thought terminating cliché". Let me know if you enjoy this stuff too.

Thoughts

Never wrestle with a pig. You’ll both get dirty and the pig likes it.

In continuation with the previous link, sometimes a fight isn't worth fighting.

Archive

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

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
Share your point of view about the newsletter.
Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2022-05-06 00:00:00 | 143

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Security on top of seccomp
https://firejail.wordpress.com/
https://github.com/projectatomic/bubblewrap
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Bubblewrap
https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/developer-guide/chromium-os-sandboxing/
https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/docs/+/HEAD/sandboxing.md

There are now countless tech that rely on "container/sandbox" features of the Linux kernel. Here we're taking a look at some that use seccomp, along others, which we've seen in the previous issue (140). An indicator of a good building block technology is how useful it is. Related, check out "Unveil @ BSDCan" of issue 128, "Capsicum" in 101, and "execpromises" in 69.
Jails
https://freebsdfoundation.org/freebsd-project/resources/introduction-to-freebsd-jails/
https://eerielinux.wordpress.com/2017/03/30/freebsd-jails-12-introduction-and-frameworks/
https://blog.jessfraz.com/post/containers-zones-jails-vms/
https://serverfault.com/a/944359

In sync with the previous links, let's explore jail, a FreeBSD pioneering containerization technology. First we got some definition, then an introduction to the usage, afterward comparisons with similar technologies.
umask and sticky bit
http://www.bodenzord.com/archives/53
https://abcofaix.wordpress.com/tag/sticky-bit/

A topic that is pretty basic but that I thought of reviewing, because why not refresh our memories on these. For other special attributes, see also "Setuid... again!" in 28, "Oh so confusing setuid" in 8, and "Allow changing uid in range" in 89.
netbsd's pkgsrc
https://www.pkgsrc.org/
https://coderoasis.com/package-source-an-introduction/

In continuation with our series on universal package managers, this week we're giving pkgsrc a glance. Unlike most of the previous ones, this is a source base package manager, but that incidentally also supports binary package in pkgin instead of pkgsrc (unlike the reverse which is more common today). See also "A series on NetBSD pkgsrc" in 91.
Nix vs Guix
https://gist.github.com/abcdw/e54807b0a25e61fe2cf1bf8991410f83
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16490027

Extra links for our universal package manager series, with some package manager that could also possibly be considered source based, but with a "reproducible" touch to them.
Some ZFS good stuff
https://web.archive.org/web/20170829215812/https://wiki.illumos.org/download/attachments/1146951/zfs_last.pdf
https://papers.freebsd.org/2019/COSCUP/philip-ZFS-filesystem.files/The%20ZFS%20filesystem.pdf
https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Classes/736/Fall2007/Projects/BrianKynan/paper.pdf
https://web.archive.org/web/20151208192725/https://blogs.oracle.com/dcb/entry/zfs_boils_the_ocean_consumes
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/12/rsync-net-zfs-replication-to-the-cloud-is-finally-here-and-its-fast/

ZFS has been a true game changer in the file system space. We're going through a series of link, from two dated presentation on ZFS presenting the goals and ideas (both are very similar) to more up-to-date critics, practical applications, and examples.
The Plain Text and "Low-Tech" Trend
https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/power.html
https://danluu.com/web-bloat/
https://100r.co/site/home.html
https://tilde.town/
https://plaintextproject.online/tools.html
https://sjmulder.nl/en/textonly.html
https://250kb.club/
https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/web/PlainHTMLAppeal
https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/web/OnNeedingJavascript

I find such initiatives both beautiful, useful, and humane. Maybe in the next weeks we can focus on a series of link about accessibility and internationalization. See also "Slowing down your internet" in 130 and "Website obesity" in 17.
Web Tracking and Fingerprinting
https://owasp.org/www-pdf-archive/OWASP_AppSec_Research_2013_-_Webfingerprinting.pdf
https://resources.infosecinstitute.com/topic/means-and-methods-of-web-tracking-its-effects-on-privacy-and-ways-to-avoid-getting-tracked/
https://www.usenix.org/system/files/sec21-laperdrix.pdf
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/330716497_A_Web_Browser_Fingerprinting_Method_Based_on_the_Web_Audio_API
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2976749.2978313
https://www.securitee.org/files/trackblock_eurosp2017.pdf

A stack of links about fingerprinting techniques research, yet this only covers a small subset of all the probably proprietary techniques out there. We were wondering on IRC if there was a comprehensive list of all the possible fingerprinting ways and the frequency of their usage, the last two links should give an approximate idea. There's a reason so much money is poured into this nefarious space.
Multicast Networking
https://www.firewall.cx/networking-topics/general-networking/107-network-multicast.html
https://myopsblog.wordpress.com/2016/07/11/how-to-enable-multicast-on-linux-network-interface/
https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/advanced-networking/
https://manpages.debian.org/testing/tstools/tsplay.1.en.html

I didn't find a command line tool similar to ipcalc but for mac address, showing vendors and other useful info. If anyone has a link let me know. I did find an online one though.
UX and scrolling
https://bootcamp.uxdesign.cc/natural-scrolling-mac-vs-reverse-scrolling-windows-e48656275081?gi=946b1f52038c
https://jessequinnlee.com/2015/07/25/natural-scrolling-vs-reverse-scrolling/
https://slate.com/technology/2011/09/apple-s-mousetrap-why-did-apple-reverse-the-way-we-scroll-up-and-down.html
https://tedium.co/2021/12/29/natural-scrolling-history/

Ever wondered about what "natural scrolling" means, or if it's even "natural"? Or just wondered why Apple always does their own thing, then these are for you. Generally, it's a philosophy on what the intent of the user is, pushing the page, or moving the text/viewport. See also "skeuomorphism" in 16. What setup do you have on your current machine, do you like it, and why?

Life & Other

Information Bias
https://sphweb.bumc.bu.edu/otlt/MPH-Modules/PH717-QuantCore/PH717-Module10-Bias/PH717-Module10-Bias6.html
https://sph.unc.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/112/2015/07/nciph_ERIC14.pdf
https://catalogofbias.org/biases/information-bias/

In a world of analytics, it's good to be aware that collection of information can be biased and sometimes not reflective of expectations.

Thoughts

A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for. — John A. Shedd, according to Quote Investigator

There's a lot of things we prepare for indirectly, unconsciously, but never actually practically do. Maybe because we're afraid of failure, consequences, or the unknown. This week, let's ponder on such scenarios, turning them from tacit to explicit and deliberate.

Archive

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

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
Share your point of view about the newsletter.
Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2022-04-29 00:00:00 | 142

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

A manager for env variables
https://direnv.net/

This has been posted everywhere, but worth sharing again. A tool that makes a lot of sense in retrospect and makes you wonder why this wasn't done before. The idea is very simple and intuitive too, so kudos for that.
Some shell scripting tips
http://cfaj.ca/shell/cus-faq-2.html

I appreciate that they included the behavior on at least 3 differnt shells, there's a lot of things I wasn't aware of. Take a look maybe there are things you'll find useful too.
Shell startup
https://blog.flowblok.id.au/2013-02/shell-startup-scripts.html
https://heptapod.host/flowblok/shell-startup
https://www.vanimpe.eu/2014/01/18/different-shell-types-interactive-non-interactive-login/

The first link was already posted in "Bash and shells" 57 and "The Janetsh project and other shell related things" 129 but I feel like it needs to be reviewed from time to time, especially the flowchart in the Implementation section.
FreeBSD POSIX compliance
https://people.freebsd.org/~schweikh/posix-utilities.html
https://people.freebsd.org/~mike/.c99/
https://wiki.freebsd.org/FreeBSD_and_Standards?highlight=%28POSIX%29

While quite old, and I couldn't find an updated version of this initiative other than the last wiki page, I'm wondering what it would look like today. Have we drifted more or not, and is that overall good to take more flexibility away from POSIX. I'd also be interested in seeing the same list of utilities compared with some other distros.
Container piece by piece
https://jvns.ca/blog/2016/10/10/what-even-is-a-container/
https://avatao.com/blog-life-before-docker-and-beyond-a-brief-history-of-container-security/
https://blog.lizzie.io/linux-containers-in-500-loc.html

Another topic that we've seen before in "Containers from scratch" in 51 and "Docker Internals" in 105. Yet, again, always good to take it apart to see the inner piece and not the brands/trends that were built on top of the basic components, a make-pretend. Next week we'll focus on jails.
Seccomp
https://code.google.com/archive/p/seccompsandbox/wikis/overview.wiki
https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/prctl/seccomp_filter.txt
https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/userspace-api/seccomp_filter.html
https://lwn.net/Articles/656307/

Since we're at it, seccomp was mentioned in the previous section, so let's have a look at the Linux secure computing mode. The two links in the middle are mostly the same, just differently formatted. We can also have a series on more security infrastructure/components which are sometimes mostly based on top of seccomp, MAC such as SELinux see also "LSM" in 139, and also e?BPF (since it seems to be used to implement seccomp).
Docker as a Universal Package Manager
https://dzone.com/articles/docker-as-package-manager-for-linux
https://alexander.holbreich.org/package-manager-vs-docker/

In continuation with the previous links and the series on containarized universal package managers, let's consider docker as an instance of that. Do you think it's a good idea, should it be used for particular programs that have complex setup only, for temporary testing, or for most things. What do you think?
More on Secure Distros
https://subgraph.com/
https://subgraph.com/sgos/graph/index.en.html
https://fuchsia.dev/fuchsia-src/concepts/principles/secure
http://isyou.info/jowua/papers/jowua-v12n3-3.pdf

Two different OS that are considered "secure": Subgraph (Linux based) and Fuchsia (custom with POSIX compatibility). See also "Immutable distros" in 137. Similarly, the same mindset is applied to Subgraph, applications are sandboxed from each others and the system, Fucshia adds a new concept of kernel object-capabilities.
PAM and OAuth2
https://warlord0blog.wordpress.com/2021/01/13/pam-and-oauth2/
https://github.com/shimt/pam-exec-oauth2
https://www.aplawrence.com/Basics/understandingpam.html

The first article uses the second link (repo) to achieve authentication using PAM via OAuth2. Having personally worked with OAuth2 implementation, and knowing we had a fascinating talk on that at the nixers conf, I think it's pretty relevant. I've also added a link on understanding some sequential PAM configs in general, it's a messy piece of software.
initramfs, ramdisk, initrd
https://landley.net/writing/rootfs-intro.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20150402090928/https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/initrd.txt

Read up on the small history of initramfs, why it's used, and its advantages over other solutions.

Life & Other

Since when have we been polite?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9qIwF5YcjA

There's a lot of things we take for granted because we're inundated with them and haven't experienced otherwise. This channel (with videos translated in multiple languages) offers a lot of valuable historical distance to these topics.

Thoughts

Friendship is always a sweet responsibility, never an opportunity. — Khalil Gibran

Be there for the people around you, this is something these past few years have made even more apparent. "A friendship isn’t a forced duty or responsibility, it’s a relation that we choose to keep out of love."

Archive

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

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
Share your point of view about the newsletter.
Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2022-04-22 00:00:00 | 141

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

CGI and x?inetd
https://github.com/xinetd-org/xinetd
https://developer.ibm.com/articles/au-spunix-inetd/
http://talby.rcs.manchester.ac.uk/~isd/_unix_security/unix_security_survey.8.html
https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/cgi/ch01_01.html
https://rickcarlino.com/2019/what-were-cgi-scripts.html
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3875

xinetd is an upgrade to inetd (a socket wrapper) with access control features and others added, nothing new here, it's been around for a long time. We've also seen it in issue 58 "Network and servers". Along with that classic piece of software, we can also wonder about the difference with CGI scripts. CGI scripts are similar, but have standardized params that they receive from the server (Blame or praise them for the advent of web 2.0).
Visualising routes
https://github.com/ocochard/graphpath

There are countless of these terminal tools to visualise anything. Let's try to highlight one every week. Send inspirations, especially those without dependencies.
TLS and crypto
https://blog.boot.dev/cryptography/elliptic-curve-cryptography/
https://tls.ulfheim.net/

Some content about TLS and elliptical curves. See also "NIST P-256" in issue 27. The TLS byte-by-byte explanation is very useful, at least one of the most useful I've seen.
A Story About Logging Caveats
https://www.uninformativ.de/blog/postings/2022-04-15/0/POSTING-en.html

On the first point about time, you also got to consider that the machine should not drift away, thus needs a solid NTP on it. On the context part, I'd also add that it's useful to have a context ID for related logs in the same "session" or whatever the equivalent is. I agree with the conclusion, logs are always more complex than we think, a rookie mistake is to underestimate their importance!
Linux Load Average
https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/linux/LoadAverageWhereFrom
http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2017-08-08/linux-load-averages.html

The load average metric is quirky, not easily understood by newcomers, but sort of useful for long-term vision on servers. On your daily-local-machine I'm not sure it's very useful.
Documentation Tips
https://documentation.divio.com/
https://www.heinrichhartmann.com/posts/writing/

There are many of these didactic articles about how to write for other devs, be it documentation or other tech-related article. Personally, I've enjoyed that first system, even though it's simplistic it's a good basis to start from. Valuable information, in the Shannon-Weaver model, is that which reduces ambiguity.
Dumps that everyone just glimpse at for 5min and forget
https://github.com/jlevy/the-art-of-command-line
https://github.com/trimstray/the-book-of-secret-knowledge

These types of GH pages that aggregate links and ideas from everywhere, that are somewhat related to a single topic, are not the cup of tea of everyone. Personally, I find that they're good to glimpse at quickly, maybe get inspired to dive into a thing that caught the attention, something new.
NetBSD kernel modules
https://saurvs.github.io/post/writing-netbsd-kern-mod/
https://www.netbsd.org/~lneto/bsdconbr15.pdf
https://www.netbsd.org/gallery/presentations/mbalmer/fosdem2012/kernel_mode_lua

NetBSD has multiple ways to write code that uses the kernel, modules or scripting using lua. In a way it's sort of similar to eBPF these days and in the presentation is shown as doing something like it.
AppImage, run a standalone application on Linux
https://appimage.org/
https://docs.appimage.org/introduction/quickstart.html
https://www.techrepublic.com/article/why-i-have-a-problem-with-appimages-on-linux/
https://github.com/rb6-cyber/awesome-appimage

In continuation with our series on standalone universal containarized package managers, this week we'll take a look at AppImage. Unlike Flatpak and Snap, AppImage isn't really a package manager but a format that let people distribute applications in a single binary, standalone, but that isn't containarizing them. In the "awesome" links there are some links to wrapper that create a package manager around it, fetching from different repositories.
Internationalization
https://linux.die.net/man/1/idn
https://www.gnu.org/software/libidn/manual/html_node/Invoking-idn.html
https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E23824_01/html/E26033/glmbx.html

This is in continuation with "Text on computers" of issue 137. Be sure to try the --debug option when issuing idn to see what happens in between. If you want to have more fun, also check iconv and dive into the sections of the last link to compare the different formats.

Life & Other

Google's Arts and Culture Exploration
https://artsandculture.google.com/

Yes, I know it's evil Google, but I'm personally enjoying that website quite a bit and thought of sharing. Tell me if it's worth it and whether you know other similar pages.

Thoughts

If you can't say something nice don't say anything at all. — Everybody's parents, friends, and teachers

I'd take this further and put it as: prioritize talking about what you love or learned instead of what bothered you, and if you absolutely have to, at least put in a constructive way. I'm definitely guilty of this too, and I know it's hard to get out when you start going down this spiral. In the age of the internet, toxicity is omnipresent. Take some time to revise your own Johari Window too, this might help.
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:

If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
Share your point of view about the newsletter.
Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2022-04-15 00:00:00 | 140

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

ACME Protocol
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8555
https://www.thesslstore.com/blog/acme-protocol-what-it-is-and-how-it-works/
https://letsencrypt.org/how-it-works/
https://man.openbsd.org/acme-client.1

Automated Certificate Management Environment is a pretty neat, simple, and flexible protocol that got created around letsencrypt. It is now ever present, with multiple clients found in most package managers.
Core War
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_War
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TIS-100 and redcode>
http://corewars.org/
http://vyznev.net/corewar/guide.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxFYva9lNzU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WqkXtWQwuTs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8DPfQL3uO0
http://corewar.co.uk/pmars/index.htm

I don't think I can ever write good core war code, but I find it really fascinating to watch and run locally (with pmars emulator).
Another way to make a tunnel to a home network machine
https://kiwiziti.com/~matt/wireguard/

The intro to the technical content is very approachable and entertaining. This solution still requires your home machine to have a fixed IP address, otherwise you'd need some private service like noip.
Udev
https://opensource.com/article/18/11/udev
http://jasonwryan.com/blog/2014/01/20/udev/
http://www.reactivated.net/writing_udev_rules.html
https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7/udev.7.html
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Mdev
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Udev

The first article is well-written, a fantastic intro to writing udev scripts. The reactivated.net article is dated, but the content still applies today. Addionally, I've added a link to the Arch wiki, and one to mdev on the Gentoo wiki, which can be used instead of udev.
WSLg Architecture
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/wslg-architecture/

WSLg is a feat of integration. Reading that blog gives insight in what can be done and what is needed to interface with a Linux when embedded within another system.
Boot Splash
https://people.freebsd.org/~rodrigc/doc/handbook/boot-splash.html
https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=splash&sektion=4
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootsplash
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/17439/creating-a-boot-splash-screen
https://man.openbsd.org/boot.8
https://codeberg.org/castagnini/bsdsplash/src/branch/master

I use PabloDraw for drawing ascii, I had no clue this could be used for splash screen on FreeBSD. Enjoy different ways to set this up.
Snap
https://hackaday.com/2020/06/24/whats-the-deal-with-snap-packages/
https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2022/01/canonical-announces-big-changes-for-future-of-snapcraft
https://phoenixnap.com/kb/snap-packages
https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/managing-ubuntu-snaps/
https://www.zdnet.com/article/multiple-vulnerabilities-found-in-snap-confine-function-on-linux-systems/
https://www.qualys.com/2022/02/17/cve-2021-44731/oh-snap-more-lemmings.txt

Last week we've taken a look at Flatpak now it's time for Snap. Snap is one of these software that gathers black and white thinking: it is either heavily criticized or really liked, I'll let you decide on your opinion on it.
A foray into Linux kernel exploitation on Android
https://mcyoloswagham.github.io/linux/
https://github.com/OWASP/owasp-mstg

Reverse engineering is amazing, the sequence of questions, seeking, and looking for ways around is so perfectly executed. It's like watching one of these movies where the protagonist put the clues of the mysteries together to finally solve it (However, here the author didn't actually find a real solutino).
A pause to read on signals
https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-is-there-a-v-in-sigsegv-segmentation-fault/
https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2018/04/16/signal/

Signals is the IPC mechanism that is the most feeble, yet the one that stood the test of time, whatever your opinion on them. See also "30s review of signals under Linux" in issue 129 (links dead, you can use archive.org to retrieve them) and "Signals for IPC? NO!" in issue 81.
Kernel Fastboot
https://lpc.events/event/4/contributions/281/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7N_O8pnyTw

It seems a lot of inovations and sponsorship these days is coming from the automotive industry and iot. This is coming with particular requirements for this specific environment. What's interesting here is that most of the optimization consist of just adding cmdline kernel params when booting. (PS Note that this is different than Android Fastboot protocol)
Extra: Dotfiles history
https://myme.no/posts/2022-04-11-a-dotfile-history.html

The iterative historical approach to story telling and learning is one of my favorite explanation technique.

Life & Other

Escapism
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Escapism
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/348327788_Are_There_Two_Types_of_Escapism_Exploring_a_Dualistic_Model_of_Escapism_in_Digital_Gaming_and_Online_Streaming

Tv Tropes is one of my goto website, it's a place that says outloud what we keep within. Since art often is a reflection of reality, these tropes are also a reflections of our humanity. What do you think of escapism?

Thoughts

Each picture has some sort of rhythm which only the director can give it. He has to be like the captain of a ship. - Fritz Lang

Coming from a film mastermind like Fritz Lang, this quote displays the difference in quality between craftmanship and mere industrial consumption. Do you feel the passion that you put in work, or that other put, shows up in the end?

Archive

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

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
Share your point of view about the newsletter.
Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2022-04-08 00:00:00 | 139

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Flatpak and critics
https://flatpak.org/
https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak
https://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/getting-started.html
http://flatkill.org/
http://flatkill.org/2020
https://ludocode.com/blog/flatpak-is-not-the-future
https://flatpak.github.io/xdg-desktop-portal/portal-docs.html

There are different standalone package managers technologies out there, some using the idea of containarized applications, some not. For this week, let's focus on flatpak and its philosophy and critics.
pipewire and video
https://pipewire.org/
https://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2021/10/01/pipewire-and-fixing-the-linux-video-capture-stack/
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/pipewire/-/wikis/home
https://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/

If you haven't heard of pipewire yet, check it out. It's a new multimedia server that covers both video and audio. Their homepage got a relooking some while ago, it's more straight to the point. While they had mainly focused on audio for the past years (the whole wiki is about that), they're now putting back efforts on the video side which, when I tested it and dived into the audio stack in general, it was still a bit immature. While you're at it, you can take a look at gstreamer too. Maybe a dive into the video and video-capture stack of different Unix-like systems is needed!
UnionFS
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UnionFS
https://www.unix.com/man-page/FreeBSD/8/mount_unionfs/
https://unionfs.filesystems.org/

A stackable unification file system. We saw it while reading during the book club, from Plan9 intro to OS, it' similar to union mount. It's pretty fascinating that the idea has been ported to so many places.
AWK fast
https://ketancmaheshwari.github.io/posts/2020/05/24/SMC18-Data-Challenge-4.html
https://lwn.net/Articles/820829/
https://blog.jpalardy.com/posts/why-learn-awk/

AWK is a must-known, even if just a little. It's so versatile and useful. See also "Special tejr" in issue 23, the link itself is dead but you can find it on archive.org.
Less confusion about terminal colors
https://github.com/termstandard/colors

A follow up on last week's issue 138 "Colorful scripts". This doc does a pretty good job at summarizing the different ways to display color on terminal and checking for support.
Smartcards
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Smartcards
https://ludovicrousseau.blogspot.com/2014/03/level-1-smart-card-support-on-gnulinux.html
https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/7/html/system-level_authentication_guide/smartcards
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/CommonAccessCard
https://tech.springcard.com/guides/pcsc-unix-with-pcsclite/
https://www.mutek.com/mutek-pcsc-readers-pcsc-lite-linux/

Smartcards are part of our everyday life, however they can be hard or intimidating to interface with. Yet, they're cheap to acquire along with a reader, and very common. The above links should get you started on this journey.
LSM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Security_Modules
https://docs.kernel.org/security/lsm.html
https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/sec02/full_papers/wright/wright.pdf
https://kernelnewbies.org/Documents/Kernel-Docbooks?action=AttachFile&do=get&target=lsm_2.6.29.pdf

The Linux Security Module was implemented by the initiative to create Mandatory Access Control (MAC) in the kernel. It was proposed by the NSA as a patch to include SELinux but wasn't directly accepted as is, and LSM was created as the more flexible base for layers of security modules that have hooks in specific kernel APIs. The paper introducing it is an easy read for anyone that wants to have a generic idea on the matter.
Threads
https://www.icir.org/gregor/tools/pthread-scheduling.html
https://papers.freebsd.org/2020/bsdcan/mckusick-scheduling_in_the_freebsd_kernel/
https://people.freebsd.org/~hsu/publications/dragonflybsd.asiabsdcon04.pdf
https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/aix/7.1?topic=processes-kernel-threads-user-threads

A list of linkes about threads and scheduling on different Unix-like systems. The first link is sort of dated but gives a good coverage of thread terminologies.
DNS unmystification
https://ariadne.space/2022/03/27/the-tragedy-of-gethostbyname/
https://venam.nixers.net/blog/unix/2020/11/01/resolving-a-hostname.html
https://tailscale.com/blog/sisyphean-dns-client-linux/

We posted some content related to DNS before such as "glibc and DNS" issue 123, "DoH implementation" issue 116, "Networking" issue 89. Here's some additional analysis of this essential piece of tech.
Rethink the shell
https://arcan-fe.com/2022/04/02/the-day-of-a-new-command-line-interface-shell/

The shell/TTY/terminal interaction is hard to replace because of legacy, yet the author of Arcan is putting forward a strong case for how to reinvent it.

Life & Other

Locality Bias
https://www.scmp.com/infographics/article/1810040/infographic-world-languages
https://www.lucasinfografia.com/Mother-tongues

Language shapes how we see the world and what information is accessible to us along with how it's interpreted. These infographic are but a small piece of the equation, think about all the other factors that make us pay attention to certain things and not others.

Thoughts

When a thing looks complicated, it's possible that we're looking at it wrong and missing some of the pieces of the puzzle.

I like this quote, it applies in multiple places. Sometimes the pieces of the puzzle are missed because they're out of our expertise, touching domains that weren't even in our concern when approaching the problem.

Archive

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

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
Share your point of view about the newsletter.
Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2022-04-01 00:00:00 | 138

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

systemd by example
https://seb.jambor.dev/posts/systemd-by-example-part-1-minimization/
https://seb.jambor.dev/posts/systemd-by-example-part-2-dependencies/
https://seb.jambor.dev/posts/systemd-by-example-part-3-defining-services/

Some people have an adverse reaction to systemd, yet it's always good to understand it, even if you have feelings about it. This series of posts is really informative, especially that there aren't that many like it.
Thinking about PID1 in containers
https://blog.phusion.nl/2015/01/20/docker-and-the-pid-1-zombie-reaping-problem/
https://petermalmgren.com/signal-handling-docker/
https://stackoverflow.com/a/32575543
https://blog.no42.org/code/docker-java-signals-pid1/
https://github.com/fpco/pid1
https://github.com/Yelp/dumb-init

When running random processes as PID1 you are bound to find issues, and that's what people have been doing, noticing and fixing. In the first article you can skip directly to the section "Relationship with Docker", the same idea is repeated in the second one.
Building at home
https://nullprogram.com/blog/2017/06/19/

Let's start slowly with the idea of installing in $HOME. Next we can dive into separate solutions, chroot, jails, nix, Flatpak and others, send me interesting links you got on these for next week. Somewhat related, to https://nixers.net/Thread-How-do-you-tidy-your-home-aka-tree-L2 on the forums. On the man page in home getting automatically picked up, man has the --path option on some systems, it's explained here, with additional content here. Basically it's something in either /etc/man_db.conf or /etc/manpath.conf. I personally never realized that man pages had such config files.
Check your FUSE
https://github.com/libfuse/libfuse/
https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/filesystems/fuse.html
https://www.kiebot.com/linux-fuse-the-most-underrated-linux-feature/
https://github.com/koding/awesome-fuse-fs
https://9fans.github.io/plan9port/man/man4/9pfuse.html
https://github.com/libfuse/sshfs
https://github.com/ChrisRx/dungeonfs

Filesystem in Userspace is fantastic feature of Linux (and others apparently). The libfuse even comes with an example, that is not so hard to read. Apart from this, we can think of why this is a good feature and take a look at different implementations of the concept, some more for fun than utility.
Shrinking the kernel
https://lwn.net/Articles/748198/
https://elinux.org/Kernel_Size_Reduction_Work
https://www.linux.com/news/shrinking-linux-kernel-and-file-system-iot/

A discussion on Linux kernel size reduction, which some points could be applied to other kernels too. "Linux on 8-bit microcontroller" of issue 125, was some quite amazing size reduction, check it out also.
Networking: Linux bridge
https://goyalankit.com/blog/linux-bridge

We often talk in networking about layer 3 and 4 (network and transport in the OSI). This time let's focus on layer 2, the data link, and how it can be interfaced with using Linux bridge. Think of it like getting programming access to a (virtual) switch.
Dmesg basics
https://blog.ycrash.io/2021/06/28/dmesg-unix-linux-command-beginners-introduction-with-examples/
https://man.openbsd.org/dmesg
https://www.unix.com/man-page/FreeBSD/8/dmesg/

A simple kernel buffer debug check, but that's a bit different from OS to OS. It's good to revisit and compare it.
Virtual memory cache control
https://hoytech.com/vmtouch/
https://github.com/caisonglu/cachemaster

A very useful tool to get info and manage fs virtual mem. The hot-standby possibility could be a useful one, but would it be more practical than to have a fs in mem like tmpfs or others. All and all, a wonderful and simple tool.
What's a platform, what does compatibility mean, and why a platform
https://www.jwestman.net/2021/10/26/platforms-compatibility-the-future-of-the-free-desktop.html

A meditation on the meaning of platforms and whether there are any in open source OS. This is a question that is relevant, but that often comes up and only makes sense when comparing one OS to another. What even is an operating system, what are its boundaries?
Colorful scripts
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/21/a-collection-of-linux-tools-on-steroids/
https://nixers.net/Thread-What-are-your-opinions-on-replacement-programs-for-core-utilities
https://nixers.net/Thread-Share-your-file-opener-script

Some posts to bring up the topic of core tools replacement and "colorization". Do you think it's worth it, do you prefer to have a separate colorization script or shell plugin?
Extra: On last week's random
https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/889452/953e190af78809a7/

A continuation to last week's newsletter. Well, that didn't last long, they found issues pretty fast.

Life & Other

The Joy of Perl
https://www.salon.com/1998/10/13/feature_269/

Getting into the human side of Perl, an expressive language.
Economic stuff
https://www.lynalden.com/what-is-money/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_AY4a3_-GQ
https://bam.kalzumeus.com/archive/moving-money-internationally/

I'm not an economist but I find it interesting to read about the above topics. Some of them related to abstractions in society such as money, another one is about a disruptive system and explanation of banking, and lastly an un-mystification of what it means to transfer money.

Thoughts

The best writing is rewriting.

It's good to have the newsletter back. Think about people, hobbies, and others that you haven't given much attention to lately, maybe it's time to rekindle, to re-form bounds.

Archive

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

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
Share your point of view about the newsletter.
Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2022-03-25 00:00:00 | 137

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Relational Pipes
https://relational-pipes.globalcode.info/v_0/index.xhtml

A project focusing on the pipe interface and principles plus sets of tools to convert from format to format. On that page there's a some good content about philosophy of pipes in general. Somehow this reminds me of a thread on the forums we had called "Interfaces of the future https://nixers.net/Thread-Interfaces-of-the-future which forced us to look at old problems and solutions with a set of new eyes.
STOP, shells BAD
https://pythonspeed.com/articles/shell-scripts/
https://utcc.utoronto.ca/%7Ecks/space/blog/programming/BourneShellLimitation

Shell scripts have their drawbacks, it's good to be aware of them. However, it does bring the old question of choosing at which point a script is too big to be written in shell (and which shell to run on also), and which language should be used instead. In my opinion Perl is a good option. Apart from this, we did discuss our personal opinions on the forums too here.
An obvious privilege escalation
https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2022/03/15/link/
https://lkml.org/lkml/2003/11/24/86

The bug presented is somewhat apparent, but as with a lot of security issues, it's only in retrospect that we realize how obvious it all is.
Learn sudo the pragmatic way
https://rtpg.co/2022/02/13/your-own-sudo.html

An introspective exercise to build sudo in a pragmatic manner as a way to learn its inner workings. I'm a fan of this type of article, a sort of Socratic question/answer dive into things, a public brainstorming session.
No more blocking random in the Linux kernel (LRNG)
https://portswigger.net/daily-swig/secure-development-new-and-improved-linux-random-number-generator-ready-for-testing
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DuhbwWkMQw&list=PLbzoR-pLrL6owx0I6v2MSwjxhtsRdtFzG&index=16
https://blogs.oracle.com/linux/post/rngd1
https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/2036923.9o76ZdvQCi@positron.chronox.de/T/

There's been ongoing work to merge /dev/random and /dev/urandom to have the same behavior and both be unblocking in the Linux kernel, and it has finally landed.
Certs, keys, and keyrings
https://blog.apnic.net/2022/03/22/whats-going-on-with-certificate-revocation/
https://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/pubs/Riv98b.pdf
https://nixers.net/Thread-Key-And-Trust-Store-on-Unix-like-OS
https://rtfm.co.ua/en/what-is-linux-keyring-gnome-keyring-secret-service-and-d-bus/

Some related articles, one on certificate expiry, the PKI and X509 format, another on how relevant that is, and the last two on keystores, keyrings, and Linux kernel secret storage. While you're at it, you can refresh your memory about OpenSSL commands by reviewing issue 122 "CheatSheet for OpenSSL".
Immutable distros
https://silverblue.fedoraproject.org/
https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/getting-started/
https://nixos.org/guides/nix-pills/
https://venam.nixers.net/blog/programming/2021/01/26/future-of-distros.html
https://earthly.dev/blog/lxc-vs-docker/
https://best-web-hosting.org/xen-vs-kvm-comparison-reviews/)

A long while back we had countless discussions on IRC about containerization, packaging and what it actually means to have a distribution these days. We also discussed the usual containers vs VM, advantages and disadvantages. So here are a couple of links on the topic, with some immutable distro based on fedora that uses sandboxed applications, another distro called qubes OS that uses a VM manager (xen in this case) to separate programs safely, the classic Nix Pills, and more discussions about some of the tech involved in both. When I wrote that post about the "future of distros" I've received multiple toxic comments interpreting it as if it was some sort of personal dream that should be reached, meanwhile my attempt was to document the emerging trends of the day to make them more obvious. These were not things I was hoping to or willing to use (I'm definitely not a fan of all that I listed, but you know: Internet). Let's have more discussion on these!
Power consumption control
https://www.neelc.org/posts/freebsd-speed-shift-laptop/
https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2018/11/28/the-power-to-serve-freebsd-power-management/
https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/admin-guide/pm/cpuidle.html

A series of articles on how to control knobs, mostly at the kernel level, to reduce power consumption. The first two are focused on FreeBSD, and the last one is a link to the Linux kernel documentation about what the CPU does when idle.
Linker scripts
https://mcyoung.xyz/2021/06/01/linker-script/

A new well-written addition to our list of linker related articles. See also, issue 131 "Demystifying firmware linker scripts", "Guide to linker" in issue 129, "Linker" in issue 106, "A simple linker example" in issue 93, and "And override libc" in issue 52.
Nixers Conf 2021
https://nixers.net/Thread-Nixers-net-Conf-2021

It's already been a year, but we didn't have the newsletter up back then. So for those who missed it, this is a link to the talks that took place at the Nixers conf 2021.

Life & Other

Text on computers
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYd2KkuZLbE

It's always fun to talk about the assumptions we have about textual representation on machines. This talk by Dylan Beattie does a pretty good job at going into historical tidbits and anecdotes. This is somewhat related to this forums thread on unicode.
Taking distance from war propaganda
https://venam.nixers.net/blog/internet_communication_narrative_control_booklet.pdf

This is a shameless plug of something I've written. Internet propaganda is thriving and everyone is attempting to drive others into their camp of vilification. This is a short research I did on the topic of narrative control on the internet, the first section is especially relevant today (The Artifacts And Spaces). Opinions are my own, so take everything with a grain of salt, and stay safe!

Thoughts

The newsletter is alive once more!
For the first edition, as you might have noticed, we're starting the easy way by sharing stuff you might have already seen on links aggregator websites. There's some re-contextualization, and extra content, and I hope it's enough to open an appetite for the newsletter again. In the next one we'll try to touch things that aren't stuck in the zeitgeist.
Let me know what you think, if it encourages you to read more, and get in touch on IRC, or help out.
Thank you!

Archive

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

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
Share your point of view about the newsletter.
Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2019-08-02 00:00:00 | 136

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Text shaping
https://blogs.gnome.org/mclasen/2019/07/27/more-text-rendering-updates/
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/pango/issues/386
https://developer.gnome.org/pango/stable/pango-Markup.html

A fantastic update to the Pango library brings us closer to true beautiful typography. Bitmap font support is dropped but I guess for those you don't really need Pango to begin with.
xargs, the one we fear
https://medium.com/@aarontharris/xargs-wtf-34d2618286b7

There are only specific cases where I would personally use xargs, usually something similar to what's described in this post. Do you have other usages? Let us know.
Containers, yes, again
https://tutorials.ubuntu.com/tutorial/introduction-to-lxd-projects

LXD is a cool management platform. I'm still new to all the virtualisation possibilities but I'm looking forward to trying some soon for the easy handling of future projects. I'll probably go for docker though.
Resuming ZFS send
https://oshogbo.vexillium.org/blog/66/

ZFS is one amazing piece of software, and now it's even more flexible.
What to do when it's too large
http://moo.nac.uci.edu/~hjm/HOWTO_move_data.html

In continuation with the previous link, how do you transfer large chunks of data on the wire. This is the goto article when it comes to transfer, it's more than complete and covers everything you need to know. We mentioned a lot of the tools in the newsletter before.
Google data sharing protocol
https://github.com/google/data-transfer-project/blob/master/Documentation/Overview.md

"Users should be able to easily transfer their data directly between online service providers." So are we finally going to get the real "digital identity" we've been waiting for, the one we own? Refer back to everything we've said about digital identity previously in the archive.
Streams and terminals
https://lucasfcosta.com/2019/04/07/streams-introduction.html

We've seen this blog before in "Terminal prevalence" of 119, the author is continuing on the quest of bringing knowledge about terminals. It's well done, quick and straight to the point, explanation of what terminal emulators are in relation to streams.
Legacy of war
https://jacoby.github.io/computer_history/2018/02/09/the-legacy-of-the-unix-wars-is-still-around-us.html

Recalling and telling tales of the Unix war through a bug that happened today. I like wise old words.
Making the old work again
https://tiffnix.com/blog/2014/10/19/refactoring-legacy.html

Who's reading this newsletter and feeling they are in the same position as the author? Well, it's not easy to maintain code over decades, through unexpected changes. This field fascinates me, how can you design a software so that it's resilient against time. Also give this game a try, it's terminal friendly!
Portability of Tar
https://invisible-island.net/autoconf/portability-tar.html

This isn't a new article, far from it, but I hadn't really taken the time to read it properly before. Reading through you can really grasp how standardization is important across platform, you can refer to the Unix war article above.
Haveged
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Haveged
https://issihosts.com/haveged/

In continuation with all the randomness talk we've had. A must have for virtual machines and docker.
Keys and truststores
https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=2269

A thread on the forums of some weeks ago about the hodgepodge of keys and certificates on your Unix machine.
Low level is beautiful, don't be afraid
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5JC9Ve1sfI
http://yosefk.com/blog/low-level-is-easy.html

In relation with most of the links in this newsletter, we are discussing the mental burden of understanding software, at every level and over time. Those links emphasize on the low-level part.

Thoughts

HE is lucky who realizes that "luck" is the point where preparation meets opportunity.

This is going to be the last newsletter in quite a while. I'm going to take a pause and free up time to study software architecture, a topic that captivates me. I'll foster my love of diagrams explaning complex software stacks.

vermaden will shortly send an email to the currently subscribed readers of this newsletter with a link to his to those who are interested.

I hope you 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:

If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
Share your point of view about the newsletter.
Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2019-07-26 00:00:00 | 135

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

A series on text rendering on Linux
https://mrandri19.github.io/2019/07/18/modern-text-rendering-linux-ep1.html

Just reading the title and I'm already a fan. I've been pushing this topic a lot, "Font rendering" in 118, Unicode in 116, "Another one about fonts" in 107, "Font rendering" in 105, "Designing a font" in 102, "Again in the world of typography" in 98, "Xft but for xcb" in 91, "Font shaping" in 82, "Choosing the right typography" of 74, "Unicode" in 72, "Chinese fonts" in 71, "More on typography" in issue 63, "Font editing done good" in 56, the "Xero's Weekly Ricing Tips" of issue 34, "Fonts on Unix" in 12, "The best font dialogs" in 11.
Arduino typewriters
https://makezine.com/2015/07/01/48-solenoids-transform-1960s-typewriter-computer-printer/
https://blog.arduino.cc/2017/07/05/hack-an-old-typewriter-with-arduino-for-digital-input/

Bring back life by combining mechanics with electronics.
Rundown on vim history
https://begriffs.com/posts/2019-07-19-history-use-vim.html

A really good quick overview of the history of vim and then a dive into multiple features and usage of vim.
Hey, look here, I know the hidden secret truth
http://www.ceri.memphis.edu/people/smalley/ESCI7205_misc_files/The_truth_about_Unix_cleaned.pdf

1981, that was quite a while ago and the paper is dated. There are some good points in it, mostly about the system not being so straight forward.
The evil gnome
https://www.intezer.com/blog-evilgnome-rare-malware-spying-on-linux-desktop-users/

Targeting the Gnome desktop on Linux is a pretty specific endeavour. It's the default on RedHat so that may be lucrative for this group. I'm not sure how difficult it is to attack a highly skilled group of sysadmin via phishing.
Audio on NetBSD
https://netbsd.org/gallery/presentations/nia/netbsd-audio/

A list of changes and great work done to use the native audio API of NetBSD instead of wrappers over wrappers.
Ansible or Puppet
https://www.upguard.com/articles/ansible-puppet
https://www.simplilearn.com/ansible-vs-puppet-the-key-differences-to-know-article
https://www.devopsgroup.com/blog/puppet-vs-ansible/

Those are not really fancy links, this is a common question asked in the world of sysop, deployment management, configuration management. If you've ever worked with a cluster of nodes you need to look into those, and also PaaS and IaaS.
What better way to learn about syscall
http://notes.eatonphil.com/emulator-basics-system-calls.html

If you don't know how a technology works, then try to check underneath, if that doesn't help then try to implement it yourself.
Letting the compiler optimize
https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/793253/6ff74ecfb804c410/
http://www2.rdrop.com/users/paulmck/RCU/whatisRCU.html

Compiler optimization is tricky, heck, those cases make me think of the gamma rays flipping bits. But compilers are allowed according to the specs, which I've just skimmed through. RCU, read-copy,update, is magic too. The world of the kernel space is full of super optimizations.
Random (2)
https://ericlippert.com/2019/01/31/fixing-random-part-1/
https://ericlippert.com/2019/02/04/fixing-random-part-2/

Following the previous week "Random oh random" of 132, we keep the talk about seeds and what are the best practices.
Signing a wobbly format
https://latacora.micro.blog/2019/07/24/how-not-to.html

I've dealt with something similar not so long ago, but in XML... Oh the horror, it's the one mentioned in the post. It's tricky to do right.
If you're curious
https://waitbutwhy.com/
https://what-if.xkcd.com/

Not Unix but definitely worth sharing. Two very popular blog about asking questions and doing research to find how deep it can go.

vermaden valuable news

Thoughts

Don't praise the knowledge, praise the thirst for knowledge.

Archive

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

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
Share your point of view about the newsletter.
Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2019-07-19 00:00:00 | 134

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Don't attack my storage
https://threatpost.com/linux-ransomware-nas-servers/146441/

I love how it's written as a true fight.
Gnu Parallel examples
https://vfoley.xyz/parallel/

For the people who have 40 cores to spare, it sure is going to speed things up. For me, I'm not really sure.
Making those object cli compatible
https://codeclimate.com/blog/your-objects-the-unix-way/

This is simple good software practice, I'm not sure it's even Unix specific. Prioritize simplicity.
If you've never done that do it now
https://ablagoev.github.io/linux/adventures/commands/2017/02/19/adventures-in-usr-bin.html

A lot of things get installed as dependencies sometimes, it's hard to track down what does what. In this article you'll find, maybe, some tools you haven't seen before. I personally hadn't heard of chrt.
PGP keys and the usual nag
https://latacora.micro.blog/2019/07/16/the-pgp-problem.html
https://magic-wormhole.readthedocs.io/en/latest/welcome.html
https://riseup.net/en/security/message-security/openpgp/best-practices

And if you want to use them please specificy and pay attention to the algorithm you support and their respected strength. Check the last article to set your personal cipher preferences.
The metadata talk we need to have
https://people.well.com/user/doctorow/metacrap.htm

A must read. Why is it hard to classify things, why can't we have metadata-utopia.
Process in-memory structure
https://manybutfinite.com/post/anatomy-of-a-program-in-memory/

We've seen this blog in issue 116 "Linux boot", it has great content. This one tackles a fundamental of computer science: virtual address space, process layout.
I'll try to convince you to buy something
https://fosspost.org/opinions/amd-on-linux

It's an ad-article but still fun to read, don't be too influenced when buying something.
Any disk image to virtualbox disk format
https://blog.sleeplessbeastie.eu/2012/04/29/virtualbox-convert-raw-image-to-vdi-and-otherwise/

I've always wanted to learn how to do this. It's quite easy now.
The conundrum of Linux to Windows
https://medium.com/microsoft-open-source-stories/when-linux-came-to-windows-204cf9abb3d6

The journey to do this weird feat of porting Linux to Windows. To be honest I'm not sure where this would lead, it's been a while since the release now. Does it turn people that are working on Windows to like Linux more and try it, does it make people that prefer Linux working on Windows bear with it and not complain as much. Maybe both, we'll see how it develops.
reproducible build of FF
https://glandium.org/blog/?p=3923

An extra popular topic these days, it seems like everyone is talking about reproducible builds. The FF builds are also PGO, see issue 60 for "Lots of C, or more precisely compiler, preprocessor, and linker features".

vermaden valuable news

UNIX (vermaden)

FreeBSD 11.3-RELEASE Available.
https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-announce/2019-July/001891.html
https://www.freebsd.org/releases/11.3R/announce.html
https://www.freebsd.org/releases/11.3R/relnotes.html
FreeBSD Adds Small Tool trim(8) to Delete Contents for SSD Blocks.
https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=343118

venam: I'm surprised the tool wasn't there by default, it's a must have for SSD.

FreeBSD - Lesson in Poor Defaults - (Updated 2019/07/07).
https://vez.mrsk.me/freebsd-defaults.html
GSoC 2019 Report - Incorporating Memory Hard ARGON2 Hashing Scheme Into NetBSD.
https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/gsoc_2019_report_incorporating_the
This Month in RabbitMQ - July 2019.
https://www.rabbitmq.com/blog/2019/07/09/this-month-in-rabbitmq-july-2019/
Exploiting FreeBSD-SA-19:02.fd Security Advisory.
https://secfault-security.com/blog/FreeBSD-SA-1902.fd.html
MapSCII is Braille & ASCII World Map Renderer for Console. % telnet mapscii.me
https://github.com/rastapasta/mapscii
https://asciinema.org/a/117813
FreeBSD as Desktop with Nvidia.
https://forum.admindev.tech/t/freebsd-as-a-desktop-with-nvidia/
Document Foundation Announces LibreOffice 6.2.5.
https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2019/07/04/tdf-announces-libreoffice-625/
OpenBSD Laptop with vmd/pf and OpenVPN.
https://gist.github.com/niamtokik/7bbf042b57af67b6ffe5d6692d875a4f
Illumos Makes Me Nostalgic.
https://nanxiao.me/en/illumos-makes-me-nostalgic/
Nextcloud 16.0.2/15.0.9/14.0.13 Available.
https://nextcloud.com/blog/nextcloud-16.0.2-15.0.9-and-14.0.13-available-now/
BSD Now 306 - Comparing Hammers.
https://www.bsdnow.tv/306
DragonFly BSD Upgrade Script.
http://lists.dragonflybsd.org/pipermail/users/2019-July/358224.html
Streaming Netflix on NetBSD Using Ubuntu Linux in VM.
https://www.unitedbsd.com/d/68-streaming-netflix-on-netbsd
Talospace - FreeBSD on POWER.
https://www.talospace.com/2019/07/freebsd-on-power.html
Talospace - Firefox 68 on POWER.
https://www.talospace.com/2019/07/firefox-68-on-power.html
Haiku Monthly Activity Report - 2019/06.
https://www.haiku-os.org/blog/pulkomandy/2019-07-11_haiku_monthly_activity_report_june_2019/
In Other BSDs for 2019/07/13.
https://www.dragonflydigest.com/2019/07/13/23170.html
The X New Developers Guide.
https://www.x.org/wiki/guide/

venam: They didn't change much from the look of it.

FreeBSD 12 Runs Refreshingly Easy on AMD Ryzen 9 3900X.
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd-3900x-freebsd
Testing OmniOSce on Real Hardware.
https://eerielinux.wordpress.com/2019/06/30/testing-omniosce-on-real-hardware/
OpenBSD Adds aggr(4) Driver.
https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20190710071440

Hardware (vermaden)

Easy SSD Guide - SATA/mSATA/M.2/U.2 - Explained.
https://rog.asus.com/articles/hands-on/easy-guide-to-ssds-sata-msata-m-2-and-u-2/
Raspberry Pi 4 B+ with PCI Express.
http://mloduchowski.com/en/blog/raspberry-pi-4-b-pci-express/
AMD Ryzen 3000 Post Review BIOS Update Recap - Mostly Gains.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/14632/amd-ryzen-3000-review-bios-update-recap
RISC-V Foundation Announces Ratification of RISC-V Base ISA and Privileged Architecture Specifications.
https://riscv.org/2019/07/risc-v-foundation-announces-ratification-of-the-risc-v-base-isa-and-privileged-architecture-specifications/

Life & Others (vermaden)

Research Finds That as a Group Only Men Pay Taxes.
https://motoristoppression.wordpress.com/2016/11/03/32/
Why Being Bored Is Good.
https://thewalrus.ca/why-being-bored-is-good/
It's Never Going to Be Perfect - Just Get It Done.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/07/smarter-living/its-never-going-to-be-perfect-so-just-get-it-done.html
Nobody Wants to Be Woken Up at 4 AM.
https://www.farfetchtechblog.com/en/blog/post/nobody-wants-to-be-woken-up-at-4-am/
Timeless Writing Advice From William Zinsser - On Writing Well.
https://medium.com/better-marketing/10-must-read-lessons-on-writing-from-literary-critic-william-zinsser-35f7a281250c
Firefox 68.0 Release Notes.
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/68.0/releasenotes/
Thaddeus Kosciusko - Polish Engineer You Never Heard of Who Saved America.
https://angrystaffofficer.com/2019/07/09/thaddeus-kosciusko-the-polish-engineer-you-never-heard-of-who-saved-america/

Archive

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

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
Share your point of view about the newsletter.
Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2019-07-12 00:00:00 | 133

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Playing with Linux in userspace
https://christine.website/blog/howto-usermode-linux-2019-07-07

I had no idea this existed before today. Kudos to the author for that super cool post and setup. The knowledge of old arcane tools left me breathless.
Fantasy development
https://people.kernel.org/monsieuricon/patches-carved-into-developer-sigchains

What would happen in a world of decentralize and secure development, everything signed, easily shareable. It's convenient, maybe the idea will take off, maybe not.
What's an idempotent script and how to make shell script that way https://arslan.io/2019/07/03/how-to-write-idempotent-bash-scripts/

Those are certainly tips to remember next time you write a script that could possibly, and most probably, fail in the middle and be restarted.
When you want to be a detective
https://bsdimp.blogspot.com/2019/07/the-pdp-7-where-unix-began.html

Pretty impressive to go to such extent to recollect history pieces, stitching them together and construct a possible lead to a question maybe no one thought of asking.
Will X11 get deprecated?
https://utcc.utoronto.ca/%7Ecks/space/blog/unix/XDeathwatchStarts

Might be a single developer talking, or it might be a way to show the world a stance on the topic. Regardless, we'll see what happens.
Jumping on the Rust train
https://nora.codes/tutorial/speedy-desktop-apps-with-gtk-and-rust/

As far as I'm concerned I have yet to try it. Sick of fat Electron apps, then this tutorial should be very enticing.
Having troubles getting used to your Windows machine sub-linuxy system?
https://timvisee.com/blog/fix-windows-terminals-use-linux-terminal/
https://www.analyticsindiamag.com/linux-vs-windows-which-is-the-best-os-for-data-scientists/

A post about setting up your favorite terminal on through Windows Linux sub-system and another, not so fancy, sort of listicle.
Gnuplot step by step initiation https://raymii.org/s/tutorials/GNUplot_tips_for_nice_looking_charts_from_a_CSV_file.html

It's kind of hard to use gnuplot compared to graph editors found in WYSIWYG editors. This is the kind of tutorial that let you build a script that you can rely on for automation, unlike with fancy editors.
But I already wake up at that time
https://www.farfetchtechblog.com/en/blog/post/nobody-wants-to-be-woken-up-at-4-am/
https://www.weave.works/blog/the-red-method-key-metrics-for-microservices-architecture/

Not necessarily related to Unix but to sysadmin in general. Monitoring is a wide topic see also "Log navigation" in 129 and "Monitoring" in issue 108.

vermaden valuable news

UNIX (vermaden)

FreeBSD Turns 26.
https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/791609/c9fb51359883f096/
Porting Wine to amd64 on NetBSD - First Evaluation Report.
https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/porting_wine_to_amd64_on
Quick Steps to Run i3wm on OpenBSD.
http://w00t.eu.org/m/station.html
FreeBSD Call for 2019Q2 Quarterly Status Reports.
https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hackers/2019-July/054827.html
FreeBSD Updates FUSE from Protocol 7.8 to 7.23 with New Functionality and Performance Improvements.
https://twitter.com/ed_maste/status/1146081918028591104
https://reviews.freebsd.org/D20805
FreeBSD bhyve Snapshot Save and Restore.
https://reviews.freebsd.org/D19495
FreeBSD Adds Protection Against Unlimited Atomic Operations from Userland.
https://twitter.com/ed_maste/status/1146090442158759938
https://reviews.freebsd.org/D20772
FreeBSD Security Advisories 2019-07.
https://www.freebsd.org/security/advisories/FreeBSD-SA-19:09.iconv.asc
https://www.freebsd.org/security/advisories/FreeBSD-SA-19:10.ufs.asc
https://www.freebsd.org/security/advisories/FreeBSD-SA-19:11.cd_ioctl.asc
DragonFly BSD Refactors Scheduler Weightings.
http://lists.dragonflybsd.org/pipermail/commits/2019-May/718947.html
http://lists.dragonflybsd.org/pipermail/commits/2019-May/718955.html
OPNsense 19.1.10 Released.
https://forum.opnsense.org/index.php?topic=13380.0
NetBSD Forking Code Support in ptrace(2).
https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/forking_code_support_in_ptrace
OpenBSD is Now My Workstation.
https://sogubsys.com/openbsd-is-now-my-workstation-operating-system/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20344766
https://lobste.rs/s/m8cxke/openbsd_is_now_my_workstation
Replacing (Silently) Failing Disk in ZFS Pool.
https://imil.net/blog/2019/07/02/Replacing-a-silently-failing-disk-in-a-ZFS-pool/
BSD Now 305 - Changing Face of Unix.
https://www.bsdnow.tv/305
Web Application Firewall (WAF) for Website Protection with OPNsense.
https://medium.com/@jccwbb/website-protection-with-opnsense-3586a529d487
How Much Has UNIX Changed?
https://adventofcomputing.libsyn.com/episode-5-notes-how-much-has-unix-changed
Running Arch Linux using OpenBSD vmd(8).
https://www.tumfatig.net/20190705/running-arch-linux-using-openbsd-vmd8/
FreeBSD Call for Testing - Package Base - Round 2.
https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-pkgbase/2019-July/000466.html
OpenBSD Amsterdam - rdist(1) - when Ansible is Too Much.
https://chargen.one/obsdams/rdist-1-when-ansible-is-too-much
DigitalOcean - Install FAMP (FreeBSD/Apache/MySQL/PHP (FAMP) on 12.0-RELEASE.
https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-install-an-apache-mysql-and-php-famp-stack-on-freebsd-12-0
FreeBSD Restructures cache_handle_range for 9% Time Reduce on Amazon EC2 a1.2xlarge Instance.
https://twitter.com/FreeBSDHelp/status/1147769563460694017
https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=349768
In Other BSDs for 2019/07/06.
https://www.dragonflydigest.com/2019/07/06/23152.html
OpenBSD Community goes Platinum for 2019!
https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20190707065226
https://www.openbsdfoundation.org/contributors.html
Per Project PostgreSQL.
https://jamey.thesharps.us/2019/05/29/per-project-postgres/
NetBSD LLDB - Watchpoints/XSTATE in ptrace()/Core Dumps.
https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/lldb_watchpoints_xstate_in_ptrace
The meli Pre Alpha Release.
https://meli.delivery/posts/2019-06-15-pre-alpha.html

Hardware (vermaden)

AMD Unveils Radeon Pro WX 3200 - Professional Graphics Card for $200.
https://www.anandtech.com/print/14609/amd-unveils-radeon-pro-wx-3200-a-professional-graphics-card-for-sub200
SilverStone CS280 Review - 8 x 2.5 Disk Bay DIY NAS Build.
https://www.servethehome.com/silverstone-cs280-review-8-bay-asrock-rack-diy-nas-build/
Mini STX Build from Scratch using Aluminium Plates.
https://www.fanlesstech.com/2019/07/from-scratch-build-mini-stx.html
ASRock 4X4 Box-R1000 - Ryzen Based 0.87-Liter PC - 110x119x68mm.
https://www.anandtech.com/print/14615/asrocks-4x4-boxr1000-a-ryzenbased-087liter-pc
AMD Adjusts Launch Price of Radeon RX 5700 Series.
https://www.anandtech.com/print/14616/amd-adjusts-launch-price-of-radeon-rx-5700-series-50-for-anniversary-xt-20-for-regular
How PINE64 is Creating Community to Compete with Raspberry Pi.
https://www.techrepublic.com/article/developers-how-pine64-is-creating-a-community-to-compete-with-raspberry-pis/
AMD 3rd Generation Ryzen (ZEN 2) Deep Dive Review - 3700X and 3900X Raising the Bar.
https://www.anandtech.com/print/14605/the-and-ryzen-3700x-3900x-review-raising-the-bar
AMD Radeon RX 5700 (XT) Review - Navi Renews Competition in Midrange Market.
https://www.anandtech.com/print/14618/the-amd-radeon-rx-5700-xt-rx-5700-review
AMD ZEN 2 Microarchitecture Analysis - Ryzen 3000 and EPYC Rome.
https://www.anandtech.com/print/14525/amd-zen-2-microarchitecture-analysis-ryzen-3000-and-epyc-rome

Life & Others (vermaden)

Why Remote Work is not Going Away Anytime Soon.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90318974/the-rise-of-remote-working-will-continue
China Forces Tourists to Install Text Stealing Malware at its Border.
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/7xgame/at-chinese-border-tourists-forced-to-install-a-text-stealing-piece-of-malware
Company Tracking Reach - Proportion of Web Traffic Tracked Their Trackers.
https://whotracks.me/companies/reach-chart.html
Google Youtube Ban on Hacking Techniques Threatens to Shut Down All of Infosec Content.
https://boingboing.net/2019/07/03/nobus-r-us.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20346865
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20350306
GitLab Ends Support for MySQL in 12.1. Just use PostgreSQL.
https://about.gitlab.com/2019/06/27/removing-mysql-support/

Thoughts

vermaden joins us again for this issue. Be sure to check his blog there's some awesome content out there.

Archive

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

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
Share your point of view about the newsletter.
Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2019-07-06 00:00:00 | 132

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

We didn't have the week in the TTY
https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/without-gui-how-live-entirely-terminal

I was out of the picture in June, maybe we should reschule it for this month. What do you say, bump the previous thread on the forums with your opinion (https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=2205).
Branch prediction
https://danluu.com/branch-prediction/

An overview of the algorithm used for branch prediction in the 90s.
Random oh random
https://flak.tedunangst.com/post/random-in-the-wild
https://lwn.net/Articles/686033/
https://blog.demofox.org/2019/05/25/generating-random-numbers-from-a-specific-distribution-with-the-metropolis-algorithm-mcmc/
http://qrng.anu.edu.au/

That first article is epic, a must read. The sort of stuffs you can come up with to create pseudo-random algorithms is insane. The other posts are related to randomness in general, feeding you the seeds you need for this week. That last blog has a lot of articles related to all kinds of RNGs.
All you need about eBPF
https://qmonnet.github.io/whirl-offload/2016/09/01/dive-into-bpf/

I'm new to bpf and started going through the resources provided here. It's a real gold mine.
Trusted BGP
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6480
https://medium.com/@jobsnijders/a-proposal-for-a-new-rpki-validator-openbsd-rpki-client-1-15b74e7a3f65
https://github.com/openbsd/src/tree/master/usr.sbin/rpki-client
https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-cvs&m=156078373619043&w=2

Validating route statements, origin validation, RPKI is fascinating. I love how we're moving in a direction of secure by default, at all layers, now IP included. Great job OpenBSD, making the internet, and by consequence, the world a better place.
Networking from the ground up
https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/2016/01/linux-networking-stack-from-the-ground-up-part-1/
https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/2016/01/linux-networking-stack-from-the-ground-up-part-2/
https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/2016/01/linux-networking-stack-from-the-ground-up-part-3/
https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/2016/01/linux-networking-stack-from-the-ground-up-part-4/
https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/2016/02/linux-networking-stack-from-the-ground-up-part-4-2/

We've seen this blog in issue 63 "Privacy, confidentiality, and anonymity", this time we're diving into the network stack. A really insightful series, plenty of information I had no idea about.
Replace ZFS disk
https://imil.net/blog/2019/07/02/Replacing-a-silently-failing-disk-in-a-ZFS-pool/

Probably the most humane way to explain how to replace a disk in a ZFS pool. A well written tutorial.
A debug story
https://rkeene.org/projects/info/wiki/173

Yet another debug story. Oh how it's funny when it ends with "it magically started working again".
Waypipe
https://mstoeckl.com/notes/gsoc/blog.html
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe/

Looks like it is quite tricky to implement a message and data passing/proxy way between Wayland client and compositor such that it can be used over sockets. Hint: Read from bottom up.
IRC is fine
https://drewdevault.com//2019/07/01/Absence-of-features-in-IRC.html

Also from someone contributing heavily to Wayland but unrelated. Ever used IRC? If you're reading this email then you must have. Do you agree with what's being said in this post?

Thoughts

https://theblog.adobe.com/the-half-life-of-your-skills-is-shrinking-heres-what-you-can-do-about-it/

Keep learning, whatever it is, keep moving.

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:

If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
Share your point of view about the newsletter.
Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2019-06-28 00:00:00 | 131

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Slow computer optimizations
http://www.akitaonrails.com/2017/01/17/optimizing-linux-for-slow-computers

A reminder of all our talk about real time, what it means for the desktop users. There are lots of great little tricks in this article, they'd need more in depth explanation but it suffices for the job. It's my first time hearing of Ananicy.
Desktop environment research
https://desktop.institute/

Still a WIP but I'm highly looking forward to what this could lead to. I know a lot of my readers could actually help by providing some content to the author of the website.
Another OS for phones
https://postmarketos.org/blog/2019/06/23/two-years/

You caught me at "Wouldn't it be great if you could take any obsolete smartphone from the past ten years and replace its outdated and insecure software with a maintained, modular free software stack". This sounds promising.
The CLI as a relational DB
https://spin.atomicobject.com/2019/06/16/unix-cli-relational-database/

It's the usual cli as a data manipulation tool talk but taken from the perspective and mapping with relational DB. Though there's a little misinterpretation of what sum(1) does.
Groups in namespaces
http://ifeanyi.co/posts/linux-namespaces-part-1/

A typical "build your own container to learn how they are made" type of article. This one emphasizes on cgroups and their utility.
Eyecandy for ssh-askpass
https://adi.tilde.institute/Customize%20ssh-askpass%281%29%27s%20appearance.html

I'm a fan of the old school blocky GUI. They are clean in my opinion. But if you want something more minimal you can get inspired by the config shared here.
File creation time
https://www.anmolsarma.in/post/linux-file-creation-time/

It's the normal writeup about why there's no creation time on Linux. The whole story behind why it took so much to add changes to the kernel, the filesystems, and libc.
libc using LLVM
http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2019-June/133308.html
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Google-New-LLVM-Libc-Thoughts

A team at Google wants to create their own libc, as an LLVM libc. Lots of ups in downs in the talk. I'm personally not sure it's a good idea, there are a lot of toy project libc that gets thrown away or live as historical monuments.
Demystifying firmware linker scripts
https://interrupt.memfault.com/blog/how-to-write-linker-scripts-for-firmware

Ever wondered what those linkers scripts with their weird syntaxes were about, this is for you. It's not a full coverage of the topic but it's a start, extra cool in my opinion, especially when speaking of embedded solutions.
Recovering corrupted zip files
https://www.7-zip.org/recover.html

Oh the world of formats and specifications. Want to fix your 7z archive manually, then here's the guide.
Deprecating a.out
https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/deprecating-aout-binaries

This is something we've already seen in "Removing a.out" of issue 118. This post adds the background story behind the change, the intricacies and discussions happening.
Fresh administrators
https://www.linuxforfreshers.com/

A blog dedicated to learning all sorts of topics for Linux administration. Some topics are super basic while others are kind of advanced. Take a look at the sidebar and see if something interests you.

Thoughts

Just go back from vacations.
This newsletter was super hard to put together but I did it.

Also, I'm surprised that after 2 weeks nobody has even started the scavenger hunt: https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=2275

Archive

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

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
Share your point of view about the newsletter.
Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2019-06-07 00:00:00 | 130

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Why does it have its current name
https://wiki.debian.org/WhyTheName

A little follow up on the pronunciation guide from last issue (129). Linguistic is important ladies and gentlemen, you got to get your things right. You'd be surprised by some of the names, most acronyms, most cryptic inside jokes, oh Unix.
Files
https://linuxmeerkat.wordpress.com/2011/12/02/file-descriptors-explained/
https://www.devever.net/~hl/objectworld
https://eklitzke.org/efficient-file-copying-on-linux
https://www.networkworld.com/article/2931534/what-are-unix-swap-swp-files.html
https://www.networkworld.com/article/2704805/unix---when-pipes-get-names.html
http://events17.linuxfoundation.org/sites/events/files/slides/fd_0.pdf

Getting sick already of always discussing about files, don't be because there's much more content to come. From discussions about file descriptors, to what a nexus is, to filesystem and HDD readahead cache buffer, to swap files, and much more.
File manip
https://medium.com/@jmsmistral/on-transposing-data-884a04a8c1bf

Data science fans will enjoy this article. It has a good rundown on all the solutions to a specific issue.
Chroot history
https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/ChrootHistory https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/ChrootHistory?showcomments#comments
https://lwn.net/Articles/252794/

Quite an old syscall that has arguably changed its original meaning and purpose over time. There's some argument that the security aspect of it was taken in consideration to begin with, others argue that it wasn't the point.
The design of find
http://doc.cat-v.org/unix/find-history

Following specs to the letter without discussion is one skill of its own. Until you can't change anything about it years later.
Graduating from vim school
https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/intermediate-vim/

I love how the author splits the article between purist vim users and exobrains vim users. Lots of great and useful content in there, I personally know that there's 2 tricks I'm going to start using from now on.
Still on the quest of DE/WM
https://bitcannon.net/post/pro-desktop/
https://www.cdevn.com/my-os/
https://hookrace.net/blog/linux-desktop-setup/
https://github.com/mikadosoftware/workstation

Everyone have their opinion about desktop environments, there's discussion about the lack in some sense and the advantages in others. One thing that is recurrent these days is using docker/immutable/nixOS as a base. Reproducibility is key.
GNOME profiling
https://feaneron.com/2019/05/31/profiling-gnome-shell/

An example of profiling Gnome shell using sysprof 3. This is cool, similar to the profiling tool found in popular web browsers.
Package management done the right way
https://www.getlazarus.org/apps/makedeb/
https://github.com/ceejbot/economics-of-package-management/blob/master/essay.md

I'd like to see a command line version of the makedeb program, it's simple enough that it doesn't require a GUI. That second post is about package management intermixed with ownership and money making.
Slowing down your internet
https://jvns.ca/blog/2017/04/01/slow-down-your-internet-with-tc/

That's what the bloated websites of today should try. Some of us are on awfully slow connections. Also, nice to remind us of HTTP2.
PCI devices on Linux
https://codeofconnor.com/2019/06/01/how-the-linux-kernel-detects-pci-devices-and-pairs-them-with-their-drivers/

A walkthrough some stacktrace to understand how the Linux kernel decides which device is handled by which driver.
Asking the time server
http://seriot.ch/ntp.php
http://yellerapp.com/posts/2015-01-12-the-worst-server-setup-you-can-make.html

Again, a continuation of the time and date series. A small command line implementation of an ntp client to fetch time and a recommendation for server admins.
Tech veganism
https://nolanlawson.com/2019/05/31/tech-veganism/

Here's a new term for you, like it or not.

Vermaden Valuable News

UNIX

OmniOS Installation in the Amazon Cloud.
https://omniosce.org/setup/aws
Golang Web Server in chroot(8) in OpenBSD.
https://vetelko.gitlab.io/openbsd-golang-web-server-chroot.html
Docker Bug Allows Root Access to Host File System.
https://duo.com/decipher/docker-bug-allows-root-access-to-host-file-system
Broken by Default - You Should Avoid Most DOCKERFILE Examples.
https://pythonspeed.com/articles/dockerizing-python-is-hard/
Running WordPress on OpenBSD.
https://besirovic.com/post/wordpress-on-openbsd/
FreeBSD 12-STABLE has Working Console on EC2 a1. and .metal Instances.
https://twitter.com/cperciva/status/1133499607835537408
https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=348342
BSD Now 300 - Big Three.
https://www.bsdnow.tv/300
FreeBSD Foundation 2019 Q1 Status Update.
https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/blog/freebsd-foundation-q1-2019-status-update/
Smartisan.com made $400,000 CAD donation to OpenBSD.
https://twitter.com/canadianbryan/status/1134442873716387840
https://www.openbsdfoundation.org/contributors.html
DragonFly BSD | FreeBSD | Linux Benchmarks on AMD Threadripper.
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=dragonfly-55-threadripper
Drupal on OpenBSD.
https://dev.to/nabbisen/drupal-on-openbsd-4n39
Jailer is simple Proof of Concept of build system for building FreeBSD jJails from Jailfiles.
https://gitlab.com/kwiat/jailer
FreeBSD 11.3-BETA2 Available.
https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2019-May/091227.html
GOG.com Summer Sale - OpenBSD Highlights.
https://www.reddit.com/r/openbsd_gaming/comments/bvagkt/gogcom_summer_sale_openbsd_highlights/
Check Hard Drive Health on FreeBSD.
https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/how-to-check-hard-drive-health-on-freebsd/

Hardware

USB Stick as SSD - New Silicon Motion SM3282 Single-Chip Controller for USB SSDs.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/14439/silicon-motion-sm3282-usb-ssds

Life & Others

Kids of 1% are 10 Times More Likely to Become Inventors.
https://bigthink.com/technology-innovation/lost-einsteins-which-kids-become-innovators
Twitter Bans Analyst Who Revealed AntiFa Connections with Journalists.
https://humanevents.com/2019/05/29/twitter-bans-analyst-who-revealed-journalists-antifa-connections/
Google uses Gmail to Track History of Things You Buy.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/17/google-gmail-tracks-purchase-history-how-to-delete-it.html
USA Demands Social Media Details from VISA Applicants.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-48486672
Why I Still Use jQuery in 2019.
https://arp242.net/jquery.html
Temporary Staging Ground for Firefox ppc64 JIT.
https://github.com/classilla/jitpower
Block Fingerprinting with Firefox.
https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/how-to-block-fingerprinting-with-firefox/
Switch from Chrome to Firefox in Just Few Minutes.
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/switch/
Google Just Gave 2 Billion Chrome Users Reason to Switch to Firefox.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kateoflahertyuk/2019/05/30/google-just-gave-2-billion-chrome-users-a-reason-to-switch-to-firefox/#1b219e42751f
Serious Google Cloud Platform Outage - Status Dashboard.
https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/compute/19003

https://vermaden.wordpress.com/

Thoughts

I'm going on a two week vacations, so there won't be any newsletter in a while. Let's wish everyone a sweet month of June.

Also, enjoy the scavenger hunt: https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=2275

Archive

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

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
Share your point of view about the newsletter.
Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2019-05-31 00:00:00 | 129

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

No more OS
http://www.fixup.fi/misc/usenix-login-2015/login_oct15_02_kantee.pdf

Is the OS layer deprecated? Can't we delegate the role to the hardware instead of having drivers? Why are we stuck?
pronunciation guide
https://ss64.com/bash/syntax-pronounce.html

When in doubt refer to this guide.
Getting pledge on Linux
https://notabug.org/rain1/linux-seccomp-pledge/

With all this talk about pledge on OpenBSD some people want to get it on Linux. Good news, it's already there, not the same but close enough.
Extra on containerization, security, and control
https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2430732
https://web.archive.org/web/20170315162651/https://learntemail.sam.today/blog/selinux-concepts-but-for-humans/
https://davmac.wordpress.com/2016/10/14/cgroups-v2-resource-management-done-even-worse-the-second-time-around/
https://landlock.io
https://www.linux.com/news/minijail-googles-tool-safely-run-untrusted-programs

This is a popular topics that comes in go time and time again. Containing, mitigating, enforcing rules. It seems like a lot is wasted on this, why not review what is said in the first link of this issue "No more OS" and ditch everything.
Libranet autobio
https://danieldk.eu/Posts/2010-10-31-Libranet.html
https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8290

Taking part in a project, investing yourself in it, to then see it crumble slowly or quickly. It's simply life, things happen, you gotta move on and learn from the experience.
The Janetsh project and other shell related things
https://acha.ninja/blog/road-to-janetsh-0.1/
https://janet-shell.org/
https://www.oilshell.org/
https://brennan.io/2015/01/16/write-a-shell-in-c/
https://blog.flowblok.id.au/2013-02/shell-startup-scripts.html
http://hoelz.ro/blog/finding-the-other-end-of-a-pipe-on-linux
https://seashells.io/

Why not write a new shell, we've seen in "A new shell, why?" of issue 87 and "the elvish shell" in 100 that this could be a fun endeavour. So take a look at those brand new ones, there are so many more online but those are the ones getting the most traction. Along with those links you'll find other shell related content.
Essentials
https://www.blockloop.io/mastering-bash-and-terminal/
http://cb.vu/unixtoolbox.xhtml
https://www.eriwen.com/productivity/find-is-a-beautiful-tool/
https://jvns.ca/blog/2015/03/05/how-the-locate-command-works-and-lets-rewrite-it-in-one-minute/
https://blog.extracheese.org/2010/05/the-tar-pipe.html

We've been sharing a lot of beginner's guides, back to square one type of articles. Maybe it would be a good idea to gather them in a list that could be easily given to someone starting out so that they can go through it and slowly learn.
30s review of signals under Linux
https://freethreads.net/2019/05/27/internals-of-linux-process-signals-2/
http://www.linuxprogrammingblog.com/all-about-linux-signals?page=show

I like the way this website is made, compressed and summarized explanation. Kind of like cheat sheet for explanations, the sort you'd take before an exam. The next one is the complete opposite, I used it for the research of the Unix signals podcast.
Scheduling optimizations
http://www.ece.ubc.ca/~sasha/papers/eurosys16-final29.pdf

NUMA, if you've never heard about this acronym then welcome to the world of big machines. The bug described in this paper (You can skim a bit if you're already aware of scheduling and go directly to section 3) reminds us of how tricky scheduling is and how depending on the hardware architecture it can be.
More on the time series and NTP
https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1967009
https://news.ntppool.org/2012/06/more-servers-please/

Back with the leap second issue we've seen in "Keeping time and date". The discussion for leap second abolishment didn't got so well. And we still lack some public utility servers.
FUSE and FUSE
http://engineering.facile.it/write-filesystem-fuse/
https://www.tagsistant.net
https://github.com/johang/btfs
https://github.com/immobiliare/sfs

FUSE can be so much fun, see "I Made MPD Index SoundCloud." and "DungeonFS" in 78. "Semantic filesystem for Linux, with relation reasoner, autotagging plugins and a deduplication service" that sounds better than tagsistant. Those are all fine examples of usage of FUSE.
Files are hard
http://danluu.com/file-consistency/

In relation with the previous links, it's tricky to keep file consistency over a long period of time. Read up to discover why, a bit dated though, but it makes you think about all those very Unixy tools that only rely on files, they may suffer from this condition on the long run, so beware!
Extreme programming
https://blog.dima23.de/post/2018-12-11-tmux-pair-programming/

I once thought, when picking up a book, that extreme programming what about cool skateboard tricks but with computers, I was wrong but gladly so. Pair programming is fun and a good learning experience when done right.
Profiling, server management, demo gods
http://poormansprofiler.org
https://sysdig.com/blog/50-shades-of-system-calls/
https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa13/technical-sessions/presentation/merlin

Those three links are legendary. From building your own profiler using gdb, to sysdig mega demo, to a live upgrade of thousands of servers.
Log navigation
https://github.com/tstack/lnav
http://goaccess.io

Next up after the links of above, pale in comparison, two cool fancy log and weblog navigator and display. They should help in debugging weird issues, or at least monitoring. See also "Monitoring" in issue 108.
Guide to linker
http://www.lurklurk.org/linkers/linkers.html

Still on the train with ELF, PLT, and GOT, we continue or probably should've started with this article. A well done and approachable summary of what linking is about, one of my recommended reading on the topic.
Shared Memory
http://blog.httrack.com/blog/2014/04/05/a-story-of-realloc-and-laziness/
https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/789153/b21b94232f0c84fc/

Read the section above before this one, and maybe also the malloc implementation links in the newsletter archive. We first take a look at an inspection of a specific use of memory allocation and then check what's new (or could be new) in Linux memory sharing between processes.
The Portable C Library book and others available online
https://archive.org/details/ThePortableCLibrary_May75/page/n16
https://archive.org/details/ADescriptionOfTheUNIXFileSystem_Sept75/page/n13
https://archive.org/details/@swieros

They are so fantastically well scanned that it feels like having them in front of you.
X11 stack
http://www.theresistornetwork.com/2013/12/a-testament-to-x11-backwards.html
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2011/03/the-linux-graphics-stack-from-x-to-wayland/
https://github.com/jcs/xbanish

X11 is a fun piece of software, full of features, really full. Those three links are a testament of this.
Reaching a dream environment for all
https://ploum.net/195-the-aristocratic-desktop-part-1/
https://ploum.net/201-the-aristocratic-desktop-part-2-home-is-desktop/
https://ploum.net/219-the-aristocratic-desktop-part-3-there-s-no-tray-icon-in-gnome/
https://ploum.net/kill-double-click/

A series of articles very in line with the ideas shared in "OpenBSD laptop @ BSDCan" of 128, "Ever installed a Unix-like system for a friend who's not technie?" with the aunt in 54, "Usability" in 71, and "When will be created great desktop experience for OpenBSD." in this same issue. Building a sensible, default, basic environment for non-tech-enthusiast that only want to use the computer as a tool, this sounds easier than it actually is.
Logical fallacies in development
https://artur-martsinkovskyi.github.io/2018/logical-fallacies-in-programming/

Not really Unix related, but there's some hint that could somewhat be associated to it. A straight forward list of behaviors we've most probably encountered in our day to day.

Vermaden Valuable News

UNIX

Xfce 4.14pre1 Released.
https://simon.shimmerproject.org/2019/05/19/xfce-4-14pre1-released/
https://simon.shimmerproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/xfce4-settings-4-14pre1-300x214.png
NetBSD 8.1 RC1 Available.
https://www.netbsd.org/releases/formal-8/NetBSD-8.1.html
LibreSSL 2.9.2 Available.
https://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/LibreSSL/libressl-2.9.2-relnotes.txt
OPNsense 19.1.8 Released.
https://forum.opnsense.org/index.php?topic=12787.0
Virtual Machines Manager for Bhyve. Made with <3 in Poland.
Linux kernel RDS flaw affects Red Hat/Ubuntu/Debian/SUSE.
https://betanews.com/2019/05/20/linux-kernel-rds-flaw/
Lucee Installation on Solaris 11 (SPARC).
https://youngmumpster.wordpress.com/2019/05/21/lucee-installation-on-solaris-11-sparc/
Signal on OpenBSD.
https://h3artbl33d.nl/communication/2019/05/20/signal-openbsd/
DragonFly BSD 5.4.3 Released.
https://www.dragonflybsd.org/release54/
BSD Now 299 - NAS Fleet.
https://www.bsdnow.tv/299
OpenZFS ZoL 0.8.0 Released.
https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs/releases/tag/zfs-0.8.0
FreeBSD adds Chacha20 mode to Encrypted Kernel Crash Dumps.
https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=348197
FreeBSD vm-bhyve config for CentOS 7.6.
https://davidpdischer.com/2019/05/23/freebsd-vm-bhyve-config-for-centos-7-6-1810/
Serenity - Graphical Unix-like Operating System for x86 Computers.
https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/awesomekling/serenity/master/Meta/screenshot-d727005.png
Applied FreeBSD - Basic iSCSI.
https://globalengineer.wordpress.com/2017/03/05/applied-freebsd-basic-iscsi/
Talospace - Firefox 67 on POWER.
https://www.talospace.com/2019/05/firefox-67-on-power.html
The zrepl 0.1.1 Available.
https://zrepl.github.io/changelog.html
OmniOS Community Edition r151030c/r151028ac/r151022da Available.
https://omniosce.org/article/030c-028ac-022da
HTTPie is command line HTTP client with intuitive UI/JSON support/syntax highlighting/plugins and more.
https://httpie.org/
Solaris SMF and FMA Notifications.
https://www.solaris.wtf/blog/solaris-smf-and-fma-notifications/
When will be created great desktop experience for OpenBSD.
https://marc.info/?t=155720553100001&r=3&w=2
FreeBSD 11.3-BETA1 Available.
https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2019-May/091210.html
https://www.freebsd.org/relnotes/11-STABLE/relnotes/article.html
FreeBSD adds AESNI optimized version of CCM/CBC cryptographic/authentication code for ZFS encryption.
https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=348268
In Other BSDs for 2019/05/25.
https://www.dragonflydigest.com/2019/05/25/22939.html

Hardware

Speculation Behaviour in AMD CPUs Against INTEL-SA-00233 (MDS).
https://www.amd.com/system/files/documents/security-whitepaper.pdf
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D67gdt_XsAA_UEB.png
Top 5 Raspberry Pi Alternatives in 2019.
https://www.cnx-software.com/2019/05/20/raspberry-pi-alternatives-2019/
Acromove ServerPack 35 SP3B Review with FreeNAS.
https://www.storagereview.com/acromove_serverpack_35_sp3b_review
Spectre/Meltdown/L1TF/MDS Mitigation Costs on Intel Dual Core Laptop.
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Spec-Melt-L1TF-MDS-Laptop-Run
Chinese AMD's Zen Based CPU on Sale - Sugon Workstation with 8-Core Hugon Dhyana Processor.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/14380/sugon-workstation-with-hugon-dhyana-cpu?
workstation.is - Explore and discover popular setups.
https://workstation.is/
AMD Confirms Zen 4 EPYC Codename and Elaborates on Frontier Supercomputer CPU.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/14419/amd-confirms-zen-4-epyc-codename-and-elaborates-frontier-cpu
AMD Teases First Navi GPU Products - RX 5700 Series with 25% Improved Perf-Per-Clock.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/14412/amd-teases-first-navi-gpu-products-rx-5700-series-in-july-25-improved-perf
AMD Ryzen 3000 Announced - Five CPUs - Coming 2019/07/07.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/14407/amd-ryzen-3000-announced-five-cpus-12-cores-for-499-up-to-46-ghz-pcie-40-coming-77
ARM New Cortex-A77 CPU Micro-architecture - Evolving Performance.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/14384/arm-announces-cortexa77-cpu-ip

Life & Others

What Happens When You Always Wear Headphones.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/05/what-happens-if-you-always-wear-headphones/589474/
JavaScript Sticker.
https://samdbeckham.gitlab.io/javascript_sticker/
Firefox 67.0 Available.
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/67.0/releasenotes/
Google Has Stored Some Passwords in Plaintext Since 2005.
https://www.wired.com/story/google-stored-gsuite-passwords-plaintext/
Static Web - Back to the Roots?
https://blog.callr.tech/static-web-roots/

https://vermaden.wordpress.com/

Thoughts

Software engineers live in a world of deep introspection. They spend most of the day solving complex problems, breaking problems apart and reconstructing them. Often, when they are distracted, their subconscious can make the most bizarre leaps, connecting half-baked ideas and partially solved algorithms. This can happen in the oddest of places, for example, in the shower, or cooking in the kitchen, or driving in a car.

Archive

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

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
Share your point of view about the newsletter.
Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2019-05-24 00:00:00 | 128

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Unveil @ BSDCan
https://www.openbsd.org/papers/bsdcan2019-unveil/index.html

A great overview of what unveil is about. If you never heard of it then it's time to take a look.
OpenBSD laptop @ BSDCan
https://www.openbsd.org/papers/bsdcan2019-accessible-openbsd-laptop.pdf
https://bharadwaj-raju.itch.io/textsuggest
https://simon.kde.org/

Why the hek it's so hard to give Maurice his basic laptop. A story of accessibility on OpenBSD.
NetBSD on VAX @ BSDCan
https://www.bsdcan.org/2019/schedule/events/1089.en.html

It runs everywhere! That's what we comically portray it as, but it really does.
Atari Linux
http://www.atari-wiki.com/index.php/Using_an_Atari_ST_as_Unix/Linux_Terminal
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Working_with_the_serial_console

In continuation with the previous link, it's really fun to run older machines as terminal. And it's how well it's supported that is impressive, so simple.
SGI Indy UNIX
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qk_JjfeChQA

The marketing around this machine is disturbingly awkward and cringy, but we love it. There are so many inputs to make you dizzy.
Monitors of performance/health
https://github.com/nokia/memory-profiler
https://www.openbsd.org/papers/bsdcan2019-perform-slides.pdf

It's a pain to track things over time, especially when it's to find out why something created a bug or how something impacted the system. These are two links with some approaches to monitoring performance.
COM
https://www.tablix.org/~avian/blog/archives/2016/08/linux_loader_for_dos_like_com_files/
http://www.dosemu.org/

Digging into binary formats is one of the best way to get accustomed to your machine and remove mystification. It's one of my favorite things.
No systemd
https://ungleich.ch/en-us/cms/blog/2019/05/20/linux-distros-without-systemd/

Talking about mystification, there's a lot surrounding systemd. However, this post isn't about this, it's about all the distros that don't have it included by default. A bit of a publicity for the datacenter of the author, so take this with a grain of salt.
Thinking out of the box
https://shenaniganslabs.io/2019/05/21/LXD-LPE.html

An attach to get out of the box using/privilege escalation using systemd.
Audio latency in OS
https://www.mindmusiclabs.com/audio-latency-demystified-part-1/
https://www.mindmusiclabs.com/audio-latency-demystified-part-2-4-real-time-linux-approaches/

A fantastic series of articles I'm going to follow about demystifying audio latency. Such expert content is delightful to read.
Remove duplicates shell
https://iridakos.com/how-to/2019/05/16/remove-duplicate-lines-preserving-order-linux.html

Golfing with awk, that line is a killer.
Explaining fork
http://mohit.athwani.net/unix/understanding-the-fork-system-call-in-unix/

A classic explanation of how fork works and the process tree on Unix.
Another unicode must read
https://begriffs.com/posts/2019-05-23-unicode-icu.html

Another link to add to our list about unicode, there's so much content written about it. This one is a must read too. See "Unicode" in issue 116 and "Plain text" in issue 57.

Vermaden Valuable News

UNIX

BSD Handbook.
https://www.bsdhandbook.com/openbsd/
Unlimited Drive Storage on Google Docs by splitting binary files into base64 files.
https://github.com/stewartmcgown/uds
BSDs Get Promptly Mitigated for MDS Side Channel Vulnerabilities in Intel CPUs.
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=BSD-Mitigations-MDS
Running FreeBSD on Pinebook - Review.
https://blog.madadipouya.com/2018/12/19/running-freebsd-on-pinebook-a-review/
FreeBSD Updates KDE Frameworks to 5.58.0.
https://svnweb.freebsd.org/ports?view=revision&revision=501745
In Other BSDs for 2019/05/11.
https://www.dragonflydigest.com/2019/05/11/22888.html
In Other BSDs for 2019/05/18.
https://www.dragonflydigest.com/2019/05/18/22911.html
Make Linux Fast Again.
https://make-linux-fast-again.com/
BSD Now 297 - Dragonfly in the Wild.
https://www.bsdnow.tv/297
BSD Now 298 - BSD on the Road.
https://www.bsdnow.tv/298
Confusion with Used/Free Disk Space in ZFS.
https://oshogbo.vexillium.org/blog/65/
OpenPOWER BSD - Leading Edge Development of FreeBSD on OpenPOWER.
https://github.com/POWER9BSD/
Keep Crashing Daemons Running on FreeBSD.
https://www.babaei.net/blog/keep-crashing-daemons-running-on-freebsd/
FOSS Project Spotlight - Bareos - Cross Network Open Source Backup Solution.
https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/foss-project-spotlight-bareos-cross-network-open-source-backup-solution
GPU Passthrough Reported Working with Bhyve on FreeBSD.
https://passthroughpo.st/gpu-passthrough-reported-working-on-bhyve/
FreeBSD 13-CURRENT on Pinebook.
http://joancatala.net/node/1399
The 9front (Plan 9 fork) got DTrace in 2018/11 as dtracy command.
https://twitter.com/AmazingDim/status/1129790004153085952
http://man.cat-v.org/9front/1/dtracy
http://9front.org/
Recent Intel CPU Bug FreeBSD-SA-19:07.mds Security Advisory.
https://www.freebsd.org/security/advisories/FreeBSD-SA-19:07.mds.asc
NetBSD for ODROID-C2.
https://magazine.odroid.com/article/netbsd-for-the-the-odroid-c2/
OpenIndiana Hipster 2019.04 Available - Release Notes.
https://wiki.openindiana.org/oi/2019.04+Release+notes
Connecting Amiga 4000 to World in 2019.
https://chargen.one/steve/connecting-an-amiga-to-the-world-in-2019
Sending Big ZFS Snapshots over SSH.
https://cahuk.net/2019/05/19/sending-big-zfs-snapshots-over-ssh/
FreeBSD Implements PTRACE_O_TRACESYSGOOD which Makes Linux strace(1) Work.
https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=347971

Hardware

Following on from Meltdown and Spectre - TU Graz researchers discover new security flaws in Intel CPUs.
https://www.tugraz.at/en/tu-graz/services/news-stories/tu-graz-news/singleview/article/nach-meltdown-und-spectre-tu-graz-forscher-entdecken-neue-sicherheitsluecken0/
Gigabyte GA-IMB4100TN Mini ITX Motherboard.
https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/GA-IMB4100TN-rev-10
SanDisk First 1 TB microSD Card Now Available.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/14346/the-sandisk-extreme-1-tb-microsd-card-now-available
Operating System Compatibility List for Raptor POWER9 Based Hardware.
https://wiki.raptorcs.com/wiki/Operating_System_Compatibility_List
Spec'ing Out Blackbird POWER9.
http://www.mroach.com/2019/05/14/blackbird-power9/
How to Hack Expensive Camera and Not Get Killed by Your Wife.
https://alexhude.github.io/2019/01/24/hacking-leica-m240.html

Life & Others

Why Play a Music CD? - No Ads - No Privacy Terrors - No Algorithms.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/15/technology/personaltech/music-streaming-cd.html
Comments about Iceland Sentenced Bankers to Prison for Their Part in 2008 Collapse.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10915710
Can we all please stop using Medium now?
https://www.webdistortion.com/2019/05/16/can-we-all-please-stop-using-medium-now/
Mozilla Firefox - What we do when things go wrong.
https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2019/05/09/what-we-do-when-things-go-wrong/
Banned from PayPal after 12 years of business.
https://blog.niteo.co/paypal-ban-after-12-years/

https://vermaden.wordpress.com/

Thoughts

Haste Makes Waste.

Archive

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

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
Share your point of view about the newsletter.
Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2019-05-17 00:00:00 | 127

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Daemon restart from scratch on FreeBSD
https://www.babaei.net/blog/keep-crashing-daemons-running-on-freebsd/

How would you do a service manager if you didn't have one. A simple tale about rewriting something that checks for PID and restarting daemons on case of crash. As can be seen at the start of the article, things can be much easier.
Say this to my face
https://triosdevelopers.com/jason.eckert/blog/Entries/2019/5/12_The_Dark_Side_of_GNU.html

That's what I call taking a meme and extending it to a "serious" article. That's entertaining!
Kernel debug in minutia
https://www.anmolsarma.in/post/single-step-kernel/

You can't always add printing everywhere for debugging, I know we all do sometimes. You got to get a real debugger too. Is it possible with the Linux kernel, you'll discover how to setup a VM via QEMU and do the debugging it in this post.
Clear Linux OS
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2019/05/13/its-time-to-pay-attention-to-intels-clear-linux-os-project/amp/
https://clearlinux.org/

A Linux OS pushed and supported by a hardware vendor. That must mean that everything done by that vendor is optimized and fully working. What do you think? Their take on the package manager intrigues me.
Recursive mutexes
http://www.zaval.org/resources/library/butenhof1.html

The horror of multithreading applications, the headaches, why would you complicate it with recursive mutexes. In this email thread you'll find a wonderful explanation of how bad this can get.
Some bash scripting
https://raymii.org/s/snippets/Bash_Bits_Check_if_command_is_available.html
https://raymii.org/s/snippets/Bash_Bits_Find_all_files_containing_specific_text.html
https://raymii.org/s/tags/bash-bits.html
https://raymii.org/s/articles/Get_Started_With_The_Nitrokey_HSM.html
https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/ca-software-and-hsms-used/14600
https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/05/technical-details-on-the-recent-firefox-add-on-outage/

Bash bits are cool tips. You should never forget about the "command" command. The author needs to reformat the website code blocks a bit but the content is valuable. I've also added articles about HSMs.
Scratch files for the shell
http://blog.snailtext.com/posts/no-itch-to-scratch.html

Temporary files to take notes. Not a novel idea in my opinion. Was is similar to ctrl-x ctrl-e in most of today's Bourne shells.
NTP
https://networking.ringofsaturn.com/Protocols/ntp.php
https://securityintelligence.com/news/how-the-kiss-odeath-packet-and-other-ntp-vulnerabilities-could-turn-back-the-internets-clocks/
http://doc.ntp.org/4.1.0/ntpq.htm
http://doc.ntp.org/4.2.8/miscopt.html
https://support.ntp.org/bin/view/Support/AddingNTPServerVariables

I've dabbled quite a bit with NTP this week. Setting up a server for a basic use case is straight forward but once you want to do something a bit more complex the documentation lets you down and you have to figure things out by yourself.
Unix time and leaping
https://alexwlchan.net/2019/05/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-unix-time/

A reminder of our series about Keeping time and date, this one deals with Unix time and leap second.
Tiny Curl
https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2019/05/11/tiny-curl/

A toned down version of curl made for embedded and low end devices.
Transferring files for non-tech users
https://www.addictivetips.com/ubuntu-linux-tips/quickly-send-files-between-linux-computers-with-transporter/

What if you don't want dropbox, nor google drive, nor box, nor any of those but a simple quick and safe solution to share files locally.
WireGuard on OpenBSD
https://blog.jasper.la/wireguard-on-openbsd.html
https://www.wireguard.com/

I've never used WireGuard instead of OpenVPN but I think that after reading this maybe I've got to give it a try.
This world of ours
https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1401_08-12_mickens.pdf
https://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs513/2005fa/NNLauthPeople.html
http://collingreene.com/6_buckets_of_prodsec.html

A mad meditation about the state of security. Followed by the good ol' mantra of "something you know, something you have, something you are." Then a list of the encapsulated methods of finding vulnerabilities.
The game that was actually a tutorial
https://www.worldvideogamehalloffame.org/games/microsoft-solitaire

Not related to Unix but to HCI in general.

Vermaden Valuable News

UNIX

FreeBSD adds support for newer Lenovo ThinkPad models in acpi_ibm module. Tested on ThinkPad T480 and ThinkPad X1 Yoga 2nd Generation.
https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=346647
Install PyroCMS on FreeBSD 11.
https://www.vultr.com/docs/how-to-install-pyrocms-on-freebsd-11
Google Summer of Code 2019 FreeBSD Projects.
https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/organizations/6583387272249344/#5695528845705216
Writing Exploit Resistant Code with OpenBSD.
https://lteo.net/blog/2019/04/27/carolinacon-15-writing-exploit-resistant-code-with-openbsd/
https://lteo.net/assets/pdf/lteo-openbsd-carolinacon15-20190427.pdf
Packet Filter Rule Editor for OpenBSD pf Firewall.
https://github.com/sonertari/PFRE
https://github.com/sonertari/PFRE/wiki
Packer/Ansible Configuration for Generation of Immutable OpenBSD Image.
https://github.com/yannh/openbsd_immutable_router
ZFS vs XFS.
https://linuxhint.com/zfs_vs_xfs/
Google Summer of Code 2019 NetBSD Projects.
https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/announcing_google_summer_of_code1
Installing PostgreSQL 11.2 Server on OpenBSD 6.5.
https://dev.to/nabbisen/installing-postgresql-11-2-server-on-openbsd-6-5-4oh9
Science of Why You Hate Your Open Office.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90342214/the-science-of-why-you-hate-your-open-office
FreeNAS 11.2-U3 and 11.2-U4 Vulnerabilities.
https://www.ixsystems.com/community/threads/freenas-11-2-u3-vulnerabilities.75353/
OmniOS Community Edition r151030 LTS.
https://omniosce.org/article/release-030

Hardware

PINE64 PINEBOOK Pro Laptop Available. Rockchip RK3399/4GB RAM/1080p IPS/m.2 NVMe SSD Slot/USB 3.0.
https://www.pine64.org/pinebook-pro/
Seagate Ships 16 TB PMR Hard Drives.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/14297/seagate-starts-shipments-of-16-tb-hard-drives-preps-18-tb-smr-hdds
DDN Announces Intent to Acquire Nexenta.
https://nexenta.com/company/media/press-releases/ddn-acquires-nexenta-expands-ai-enterprise-footprint-enter-iot-5g-markets
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/05/07/ddn_is_buying_nexenta/
Intel (Hopeless) Process Technology Update - 10nm Server Products in 2020H1 and Accelerated 7nm in 2021.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/14311/intel-process-technology-update-10nm-server-products-in-1h-2020-accelerated-7nm-in-2021
28 Cores in Mini-ITX - ASRock EPC621D4I-2M Motherboard for Xeon Scalable.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/14299/the-asrock-rack-epc621d4i2m
ASRock EPC621D4I-2M Motherboard Review - Xeon Scalable Mini-ITX Motherboard.
https://www.servethehome.com/asrock-rack-epc621d4i-2m-motherboard-review/
Cray and AMD will build 1.5 Exaflop Frontier Supercomputer.
https://www.servethehome.com/cray-and-amd-win-big-contracts-for-1-5-exaflop-frontier-supercomputer/

https://vermaden.wordpress.com/

Thoughts

Every book you pick up has its own lesson or lessons, and quite often the bad books have more to teach than the good ones. Stephen King

Archive

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

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
Share your point of view about the newsletter.
Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2019-05-10 00:00:00 | 126

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

zfs from scratch in python
https://github.com/alcarithemad/zfsp

An impressive feat, a pure learning experience from analysing FS structure of ZFS.
Damn, it's irreversible
https://sabotage-linux.github.io/blog/6/
https://github.com/rofl0r/hardcore-utils/blob/de5a4ca/fastfind.c

I can't remember where I've read about that technique before, the good ol' saying that you should type your filename again at the top of the file in case you loose it. However, I hadn't really tried it before, nor seen a full post about actually recovering the file manually. This sounds simple enough.
Naming files
https://rasmuse.github.io/i-want-to-stop-naming-files.html

A problem we've all ran into, doing tests with something, outputting different files with different names depending on situations. You then get lost which file was used for what.
April 2019 review of reproducible build
https://reproducible-builds.org/reports/2019-04/

The magic of reproducibility is on its way. Lots of projects are interested in what this implies. Lovely to see this move across so many areas.
About the Mozilla addons outage
https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/05/technical-details-on-the-recent-firefox-add-on-outage/

Oh I love this read, the PKI is so entertaining. However, it annoys me that Mozilla, an entity that is maintaining one of the most, if not the most, used CA trust DB to not be aware of their own system for signing addons and not have anyone tracking the intermediate certificate expiry (and probably all other sensitive assets), not even having the thought of what would happen when this expiry date is reached. I'll let you read for more info.
CPU governor makes it to 5.1
https://lwn.net/Articles/775618/

TEO (Timer events oriented) governor made it to Linux 5.1. Predicting events to save up cpu usage is not an easy endeavour, from the benchmarks this is still a thing to try first hand before judging.
GPL rights or no rights
https://lkml.org/lkml/2019/5/3/698
https://lkml.org/lkml/2019/5/4/334

A huge discussion about the revocability of free licenses when those were not explicitly given to the licensee in exchange of some goods. Legal rights differ dependong on the country, the talk is very USA centered so keep this in mind.
Polkit and dbus
https://www.freedesktop.org/software/polkit/docs/latest/polkit-architecture.png
http://smcv.pseudorandom.co.uk/2015/why_polkit/
https://www.freedesktop.org/software/polkit/docs/latest/polkit.8.html
https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/logind.conf.html
https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/pam_systemd.html
https://www.freedesktop.org/software/polkit/docs/latest/
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Polkit
https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/writing-display-managers/
https://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/logind/
https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd-logind.service.html
https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/writing-display-managers/

Lots of documentation about polkit and logind, brace yourself for lots of dbus ipc.
Without javascript
https://an3223.github.io/Living-without-the-modern-browser/

The web has become so prevalent today it's unescapable. Take a lesson from this guy for our next week in the TTY that is coming soon, probably next month.
Did you know about this feature
https://www.anmolsarma.in/post/bash-net-redirections/

That's a nice feature, sort of like a simpler nc you can have for quick debugging.
VCF East 2019 interview with Brian Kernighan and Ken Thompson
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EY6q5dv_B-o

A lot of things are happenstance, listen to Ken recall his days at Bell Labs.

Vermaden Valuable News

UNIX

Uplod FreeBSD Image to Google Cloud Platform.
https://fabrik.red/post/google/
OmniOS Community Edition r151028z/r151026az/r151022cx Available.
https://omniosce.org/article/028z-026az-022cx
Amiga before Amiga - Amiga Development System.
https://www.osnews.com/story/129910/the-amiga-before-the-amiga-the-amiga-development-system/
https://learn.adafruit.com/build-your-own-sparc-with-qemu-and-solaris
https://cdn-learn.adafruit.com/downloads/pdf/build-your-own-sparc-with-qemu-and-solaris.pdf?timestamp=1556605181
Build your own SPARC workstation with QEMU and Solaris.
https://learn.adafruit.com/build-your-own-sparc-with-qemu-and-solaris
https://amigalove.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=1031
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfUVgHsPoNU
Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie will be inducted into National Inventors Hall of Fame for development of UNIX at Bell Labs.
https://twitter.com/InventorsHOF/status/1122962516341067776
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D5WQdP6XkAIuoCe.jpg:large
NomadBSD - BSD for the Road.
https://itsfoss.com/nomadbsd
NomadBSD 1.2 Quicklook - Installed on HDD.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqY8JlKjYpc
Run BSD - Request a Sticker.
https://runbsd.info/sticker/
OpenBSD - Setup Local Auto Installation Server.
https://www.codemadness.org/openbsd-autoinstall.html
Commodore 900 - Workstation with Coherent UNIX could happen instead/along AMIGA.
https://www.floodgap.com/retrobits/ckb/secret/900.html
https://www.floodgap.com/retrobits/ckb/secret/cbm-clip-900.jpg
Piping curl to S(hell).
https://0x46.net/thoughts/2019/04/27/piping-curl-to-shell/
FreeBSD nsysctl Version 0.9 Released.
https://alfix.gitlab.io/bsd/2019/02/19/nsysctl-tutorial.html
Upgrading OpenBSD from 6.4 to 6.5.
https://dev.to/nabbisen/upgrading-openbsd-from-6-4-to-6-5-43fa
FreeBSD adds sys/devices/system/cpu/{possible,present} to linsysfs(5) so Linux lscpu(1) now works.
https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=347015
FreeBSD 12.0 Installed on GPD Pocket.
https://adventurist.me/posts/0288
In Other BSDs for 2019/05/04.
https://www.dragonflydigest.com/2019/05/04/22865.html
Bad utmp Implementations in glibc and FreeBSD.
https://davmac.wordpress.com/2019/05/04/bad-utmp-implementations-in-glibc-and-freebsd/
Firefox Addons Broken. Use about:config and set xpinstall.signatures.required to false.
https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2019/05/04/update-regarding-add-ons-in-firefox/
OPNsense 19.1.7 Released.
https://forum.opnsense.org/index.php?topic=12611.0
BSD Now 296 - Its Alive OpenBSD 6.5.
https://www.bsdnow.tv/296
Hello OpenBSD My Old Friend.
https://westplaat-it.nl/2019/05/hello-openbsd-my-old-friend/
Straightforward Guide for Setting Up Poudriere on FreeBSD.
https://www.i-bsd.com/poudriere-guide/

Hardware

Backblaze Hard Drive Stats 2019 Q1.
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-hard-drive-stats-q1-2019/
AMD 7nm Navi GPU and Rome CPU to Launch in Q3.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/14286/amd-7nm-navi-gpu-and-rome-cpu-to-launch-in-q3

Life & Other

You should have personal web site.
https://writing.markchristian.org/2019/04/29/personal-web-sites/
Canada Border Services will Steal your Phone and Laptop.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/cbsa-boarder-security-search-phone-travellers-openmedia-1.5119017
Hackers went undetected in Citrix internal network for 6 months.
https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/30/citrix-internal-network-breach/

https://vermaden.wordpress.com/

Thoughts

Enter with the intention of growing as an individual.

You may not always enjoy your days but there can still be something that could help you grow. You may not always enjoy a conversation but it could help you grow.

Archive

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

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
Share your point of view about the newsletter.
Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2019-05-03 00:00:00 | 125

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Open Source stories
https://dirkriehle.com/
https://dirkriehle.com/publications/2019-selected/the-innovations-of-open-source/
http://the-mobile-network.com/2019/04/open-source-and-telco-standards-to-play-nicely/
https://www.etsi.org/newsroom/press-releases/1590-2019-04-etsi-and-the-linux-foundation-sign-memorandum-of-understanding-enabling-industry-standards-and-open-source-collaboration

Different blogs and articles about open source. A partnership between ETSI and the Linux foundation to have open source collaboration on network automation.
Recalling Unix
https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/back-day-unix-minix-and-linux
https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/why-linux-spelled-incorrectly

Fun recollection of first encounters with Unix-like operating systems followed by the most ridiculous argument I've ever read "I don't like it so I'll find some reasons to disavow it, whatever it is", the comments are priceless. I advice, if you feel a bit frustrated then avoid both articles, they're pretty basic.
Linux on 8-bit microcontroller
http://dmitry.gr/?r=05.Projects&proj=07.%20Linux%20on%208bit

This is a repost of "Following through with the low level hacks" in 52, just felt like revisiting it because I recently got into the world of embedded devices and microcontroller. See also "Reducing/Shrinking the Linux kernel" in 66.
Getting closer to good hidpi
https://pointieststick.com/2019/04/28/kde-usability-productivity-week-68/

The KDE UX team has been consistently pushing those posts every week for more than a year now. The consistency is fantastic for multiple reasons, it's a message to the world that things are moving and getting better, everyone can comment about possible changes that could be made so full fledge agile in play here, it's a message to possible devs that want to hop in and want to know what to work on, and finally it keeps the motivation for the team itself going.
GPU card for chromebook
https://www.androidcentral.com/will-somebody-make-me-chromebook-real-graphics-card

Chromebooks used to be that extremely light and low hardware specs, cheap laptop, thin client. Now you can find chromebooks that are more powerful than laptops, can't we stop calling them chromebooks then?
Misleading bug
https://news.sherlock.stanford.edu/posts/when-setting-an-environment-variable-gives-you-a-40-x-speedup
https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/bhvwvl/when_setting_an_environment_variable_gives_you_a/

You got to remove the fancy eye candies if you want your command line to be fast. My solution would've been way simpler than anything that was proposed in the above, just command ls instead, skip all aliases.
Less
https://www.lifewire.com/what-to-know-less-command-4051972
https://ss64.com/bash/less.html

Know your pager well, it's powerful, it has lots of features you might not know about.
Shell and more shell madness
http://250bpm.com/blog:153
https://0x46.net/thoughts/2019/04/27/piping-curl-to-shell/
http://cdaniels.net/shell_music.html

The true hardcore Unix philosophy, having all the pieces of the programming language be represented as a file! Plus, the usual "please don't paste commands from the interwebs into your terminal blindly". The freaky one I was not aware of is the "Partial content returned by the server". And finalizing with a touch of musicality.
Memsetting
https://www.anmolsarma.in/post/stop-struct-memset/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19766930
https://lobste.rs/s/7aqidd/stop_memsetting_structures

You probably have already seen it in tech news, I'll highlight the post here too. I like it when someone posts such "X considered harmful" or "Stop doing X" and then the flaming train falls upon the web.
IPSec
https://www.elastichosts.com/blog/linux-l2tpipsec-vpn-server/
https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-ipsec/index.html

Setting up a VPN isn't that hard, but the is it needed for your case. Is it enough to ssh and port forward instead? Isn't it faster according to "Tunneling/syncing data between machines securely" in 51?
rdist(1)
https://high5.nl/gist/rdist.html

We discussed that topic a lot, distributing files over machines, so here's another take on it.
IMSI catcher
https://harrisonsand.com/imsi-catcher/

Not really Unixy but it runs on Unix-like OS. Some of the equipment is hard to get your hands on in parts of the world but other than that it's nifty.
Oh the mobile world
https://textslashplain.com/2017/01/14/the-line-of-death/
https://jameshfisher.com/2019/04/27/the-inception-bar-a-new-phishing-method/

"Line of death", basically a bug because the UI is misleading. All of that to save screen estate.

Vermaden Valuable News

UNIX

Its now possible to use FreeBSD ASR in HardenedBSD 13-CURRENT.
https://github.com/HardenedBSD/hardenedBSD/commit/553b58b88ecd166c040c87d22ca1554361b0fad2
DragonFly BSD 5.4.2 Released.
https://www.dragonflybsd.org/release54/
Categorizing OpenBSD Bugs.
https://www.collicutt.co.uk/notebook/openbsd_bugs.html
The End of Scientific Linux.
https://lwn.net/Articles/786422/
OnionBSD aims at preserving your privacy/security/anonymity using OpenBSD as base.
https://gitlab.com/onionbsd/onionbsd
https://gitlab.com/onionbsd/onionbsd/wikis/home
https://gitlab.com/onionbsd/onionbsd/raw/master/etc/logo.png
Installing Bolt CMS on FreeBSD 12.
https://www.vultr.com/docs/installing-bolt-cms-on-freebsd-12
https://github.com/bolt/bolt
https://bolt.cm/
Reimplementation of Audio Subsystem on NetBSD.
https://mail-index.netbsd.org/source-changes/2019/04/21/msg105272.html
Intel Cascade Lake Windows/Linux/FreeBSD Benchmarks.
<https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=cascadelake-windows-linux >
Stunnel and Squid on FreeBSD 11.
https://www.vcloudnine.de/stunnel-and-squid-on-freebsd-11/
FreeBSD adds GRE-in-UDP encapsulation support as defined in RFC8086.
https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=346630
The Art of Command Line. Master the command line all in one page.
https://github.com/jlevy/the-art-of-command-line
OS108 pairs NetBSD with MATE desktop environment to provide nice desktop. OS108 name - "1 and 0 being binary bits when represented 8 bits forms a byte also the distance of Earth from the Sun is about 108 times the diameter of the Sun. hence the name."
https://os108.org/
https://github.com/OS108
https://forums.os108.org/
https://www.phoronix.net/image.php?id=2019&image=netbsd_os108_1_large
OpenBSD 6.5 Released.
https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20190424132429
https://www.openbsd.org/65.html
https://www.openbsd.org/plus65.html
QEMU 4.0.0 Released.
https://www.qemu.org/2019/04/24/qemu-4-0-0/
Seagate Shows Dual Actuator Speed Gains in Real World Setup on FreeBSD.
https://blog.seagate.com/craftsman-ship/seagate-shows-dual-actuator-speed-gains-in-real-world-setup/
FreeBSD ZFS/FreeBSD ZoL/Ubuntu ZoL Benchmarks.
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=freebsd-zol-april
FreeBSD Ports Got 500,000th Commit.
https://svnweb.freebsd.org/changeset/ports/500000
Netdata 1.14 Released.
https://www.reddit.com/r/freebsd/comments/bhdm0x/netdata_the_opensource_realtime_performance_and/
https://github.com/netdata/netdata/releases/tag/v1.14.0
Dream Come True - My Very Own AMIGA A3000.
https://amigalove.com/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=1026
GDB Dashboard - Modular Visual Interface for GDB in Python.
https://github.com/cyrus-and/gdb-dashboard
OpenBSD Jumpstart Updated to 6.5.
http://www.openbsdjumpstart.org/
BSD Now 295 - Fun with funlinkat().
https://www.bsdnow.tv/295
NomadBSD Handbook.
<nomadbsd.org/handbook/handbook.html>
Setup Replicated PostgreSQL on Tribblix.
https://ptribble.blogspot.com/2019/04/setting-up-replicated-postgresql-on.html
HA PostgreSQL on Tribblix with stolon.
https://ptribble.blogspot.com/2019/04/ha-postgresql-on-tribblix-with-stolon.html
Setup etcd Cluster on Tribblix.
https://ptribble.blogspot.com/2019/04/setting-up-etcd-cluster-on-tribblix.html
In Other BSDs for 2019/04/27.
https://www.dragonflydigest.com/2019/04/27/22827.html
Speedup ls(1) command by setting proper LS_COLORS environment variable.
https://news.sherlock.stanford.edu/posts/when-setting-an-environment-variable-gives-you-a-40-x-speedup
Docker Hub Hacked - 190k Accounts (5% of Users) with Usernames and Passwords Hashes.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19763413
https://success.docker.com/article/docker-hub-user-notification
FreeBSD adds nvme to arm64 GENERIC along with if_ena. These changes allow stable/12 to boot on Amazon EC2 A1 family (arm64) instances.
https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/svn-src-all/2019-April/179705.html
Pot is Container Framework Based on FreeBSD Jails.
https://github.com/pizzamig/pot
https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/event/pot_container_framework/attachments/slides/2128/export/events/attachments/pot_container_framework/slides/2128/pot_slides.pdf
Call for Testing: FreeBSD Package Base.
https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2019-April/073202.html
https://trueos.github.io/pkgbase-docs/
Call for Testing: FreeBSD with ZoL (ZFS on Linux).
https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2019-April/090915.html
Official OPNsense Security Platform for Azure.
https://azuremarketplace.microsoft.com/en-us/marketplace/apps/decisosalesbv.opnsense

Hardware

Compulab Airtop3. Fanless passively cooled server with up to 95W Intel Core i9-9900K CPU and 170W Nvidia Quadro RTX 4000.
https://www.fanlesstech.com/2019/04/compulabs-turbocharged-airtop3.html

Life & Other

Satanic Temple is Now Officially an IRS Approved Tax Exempt Church in USA.
https://friendlyatheist.patheos.com/2019/04/25/the-satanic-temple-is-now-officially-an-irs-approved-tax-exempt-church/
People Who Claim to Work 75 Hour Weeks Usually Only Work About 50 Hours.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/04/people-who-claim-to-work-75-hour-weeks-are-lying.html
Steve Jobs Never Wanted Us to Use Our iPhones Like This.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/25/opinion/sunday/steve-jobs-never-wanted-us-to-use-our-iphones-like-this.html
It Took 7 Years to Recreate Super Mario Bros on Commodore 64.
https://kotaku.com/it-took-7-years-but-now-you-can-play-super-mario-bros-1834172015
Google is Killing our Mail.
https://www.tablix.org/~avian/blog/archives/2019/04/google_is_eating_our_mail/
Google Index Coverage.
https://www.tablix.org/~avian/blog/archives/2019/02/google_index_coverage/
Contributing to Open Source Project - How to Get Started.
https://medium.com/mindsdb/contributing-to-an-open-source-project-how-to-get-started-6ba812301738
Future of Firefox for Android.
https://www.ghacks.net/2019/04/26/the-future-of-firefox-for-android/

https://vermaden.wordpress.com/

Thoughts

Experience is what you get when you didn't get what you wanted.

Archive

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

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
Share your point of view about the newsletter.
Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2019-04-25 00:00:00 | 124

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

The runtimes wizard
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtEIq7fe_KQ
http://atnan.com/blog/2011/11/04/blaine-runtimes-wizard-garst-retiring-after-21-years-at-apple/

An interview with Blaine Garst, such a wondeful person. If you don't want only to hear about the Unix related stuffs then jump at 1h.
Unexpected Coding
https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/EdDesignedForCookedInput
https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/EdDesignedForCookedInput?showcomments#comments
https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/EdV7CodedUnusually
https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/EdV7CodedUnusually?showcomments#comments
https://github.com/DoctorWkt/Apout

I like those articles about digging into old sources, someone replying with clarifications, the research intensifying, and in the end more truth coming out. It might confuse some, they might prefer a nicely polished post, but personally, I the intrigue in those keeps me reading. It's like uncovering knowledge.
ELISA
https://elisa.tech/
https://lwn.net/Articles/780493/rss
https://www.linuxfoundation.org/press-release/2019/02/the-linux-foundation-launches-elisa-project-enabling-linux-in-safety-critical-systems/
https://sdtimes.com/softwaredev/the-linux-foundation-launches-new-project-to-enable-linux-in-safety-critical-applications/

Oh we talked a lot about mission critical Unix-like OS, real-time OS, during our Keeping time and date series. Well, here's a new project that was launched called elisa (Enabling Linux in Safety Application), from the look of it this seems like a standardisation process with a set of tool to build a safety-critical application meeting specific requirements.
All those X configurations
https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=2271

So many dot files for different things, it's confusing. I've tried to compact some research into this post to make things more understandable. Maybe it does the job, let me know.
And another
http://zge.us.to/txt/unix-harmful.html

Unix got fundings because it was good at text editing, it moved in new directions since then. How does this relate to Electron apps these days? "The fact that we need to layer abstraction upon abstractions says more about what we see the need to abstract from than where we are abstracting towards." An interesting point of view on the topic, maybe you agree, maybe you don't.
Got and issue with sudo
https://fosspost.org/opinions/sudo-asking-hiding-password

This may seem like a meaningless issue to most of us (there's a vote button at the end of the article). It's a genuine point but I just don't see non-technical users spending time in their terminal typing commands as root... That's not a great combination there. Maybe display something not related to the count, anything that's a feedback, maybe a single character that changes at every key you enter.
File history
https://github.com/xorhash/fh

An interesting take at building incremental and browsable diffs between files. It's quick to run, easy to get, portable. Overall, a cool project. Not sure I'll use it, but still cool.
Are we there yet, are we there yet, where's my desktop year
https://www.slashgear.com/what-the-linux-desktop-must-have-to-become-mainstream-09572504/
https://funnelfiasco.com/blog/2019/04/22/the-linux-desktop-is-not-in-trouble/
https://robey.lag.net/2019/04/21/darter-pro-review.html
https://www.linuxlinks.com/foreignlanguagetools/

In my opinion, a lot of those Linux desktop article are badly misinformed, usually relying on the disparity of choices as a valid argument. Amongst those links you can also find a review from someone jumping from an OS to another, and a list of fascinating programs to learn languages.
Do you waddle the waddle?
http://www.tuxmachines.org/taxonomy/term/98

No idea what that motto means, forget it for a moment and check what Roy Schestowitz has been consistently posting for a while now. Every single day a big list of tutorials about many topics.

Vermaden Valuable News

UNIX

GhostBSD 19.04 Overview.
https://twitter.com/ribalinux/status/1117856218251517956
https://youtu.be/jFfVp_zfk1c
Prometheus Exporter for FreeBSD CTL Daemon (iSCSI Target).
https://github.com/Gandi/ctld_exporter
https://twitter.com/_bapt_/status/1118001231384010753
My Summer at Bell Labs (Part 1).
https://akapugs.blog/2018/05/16/belllabspart1/
Oracle Solaris 11.4 SRU8 Available.
https://blogs.oracle.com/solaris/announcing-oracle-solaris-114-sru8
FreeBSD adds initial version of DTrace support for ext2fs driver.
https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=346267
OpenSSH 8.0 Released.
https://lists.mindrot.org/pipermail/openssh-unix-dev/2019-April/037747.html
BSD Now 294 - SSH Tarpit.
https://www.bsdnow.tv/294
Shawn Webb (@lattera) minimizes diffrences between HardenedBSD (ASLR) and FreeBSD (ASR) implementations.
https://twitter.com/lattera/status/1119018409575026688
Crossmeta ZFS - Another ZFS Port on Linux.
https://www.crossmeta.io/another-zfs-port-on-linux/
Minio now can behave as HDFS Gateway. # minio gateway hdfs hdfs://namenode:8200
https://github.com/minio/minio/blob/master/docs/gateway/hdfs.md
Unleashed 1.3 Released - Fork of Illumos for the 4th Time.
http://lists.31bits.net/archives/devel/2019-April/000052.html
The docbook2mdoc 1.0.0 Released.
https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20190419101505
Call for Testing - FreeBSD with ZFS on Linux Images Ready.
https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2019-April/090915.html
https://github.com/zfsonfreebsd/ZoF
https://pkg.trueos.org/iso/freebsd12-zol/
https://pkg.trueos.org/iso/freebsd13-zol/
In Other BSDs for 2019/04/20.
https://www.dragonflydigest.com/2019/04/20/22797.html
FreeBSD adds support in psm(4) for 4 and 5 finger touches in synaptics driver.
https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=346455
LibreSSL 2.9.1 Released.
https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-announce&m=155590112606279&w=2
NomadBSD 1.2 Released.
http://nomadbsd.org/

Hardware

NSA-B-GONE - Sketchy Hardware Security Device for Lenovo ThinkPad X220.
https://hackaday.io/project/164343-nsa-b-gone
https://github.com/zakqwy/NSA-B-GONE
AMD Ryzen Embedded R1000 Family Launched.
https://www.servethehome.com/amd-ryzen-embedded-r1000-family-launched/
TSMC Reveals 6nm Process Technology: 7nm with Higher Transistor Density.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/14228/tsmc-reveals-6-nm-process-technology-7-nm-with-higher-transistor-density
Samsung Completes Development of 5nm EUV Process Technology.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/14231/samsung-completes-development-of-5-nm-euv-process-technology
Avalue EMX-KBLU2P Mini ITX Motherboard with Intel Core i7/i5/i3 and Passive Cooling.
https://www.avalue.com.tw/news/Avalue-introduces-EMX-KBLU2P%2c-the-thin-Mini-ITX-Embedded-Industrial-motherboard_2984
Whiskey Lake ZBOX is Official.
https://www.fanlesstech.com/2019/04/whiskey-lake-zbox.html

Life & Other

Paranoid Person Guide to Online Privacy.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90316917/the-paranoid-persons-guide-to-online-privacy
Facebook says it 'unintentionally uploaded' 1.5 million users email contacts without permission.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/18/facebook-reportedly-uploaded-people-email-contacts-without-consent.html
Unmasked: What 10 million passwords reveal about people who choose them.
https://wpengine.com/unmasked/
Evidence that Jesus ever existed is weaker than you might think.
https://www.rawstory.com/2019/04/evidence-jesus-ever-existed-weaker-might-think/
Former Mozilla Exec - Google Sabotaged Firefox for Years.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has-sabotaged-firefox-for-years/
Vendors must add physical on/off switch to devices that can spy on us.
https://larrysanger.org/2019/04/vendors-must-start-adding-physical-on-off-switches-to-devices-that-can-spy-on-us/
These 17 Firefox tips make it easy to switch from Chrome.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90333407/these-17-firefox-tips-make-the-case-for-ditching-chrome

https://vermaden.wordpress.com/

Thoughts

In science if you know what you are doing you should not be doing it.In engineering if you do not know what you are doing you should not be doing it.

Archive

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

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
Share your point of view about the newsletter.
Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2019-04-18 00:00:00 | 123

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Optimization, testability, and bug handling
http://akaptur.com/blog/2017/11/12/love-your-bugs/
https://microservices-on-my-mind.blogspot.com/2019/04/break-functional-and-orchestration.html?m=1
http://carlos.bueno.org/optimization/

Behind every bug there's a story, a learning experience. Bitrots, if you hear about them once, you can't forget them. Architecture issues, that's always something that morphs through time however we can apply some of the Unix philosophy to it. And finally a small book about optimization.
Persistent memory 3
https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/support-persistent-memory

Follow up with "DAX on Linux" of 115 and "NOVA fs" in 114. I like where things are going, hopefully in the future we'll take advantage of those even more.
glibc and DNS
https://jrl.ninja/etc/2/

A post that wonders about how DNS lookup works, for more info see "Networking" in 89 also "And an extra for the ride" in 93 for the series on DNS resolution.
SSH forwarding issues
https://defn.io/2019/04/12/ssh-forwarding/

A discussion on why ssh forwarding created the situation that happened with matrix.org and to use instead ProxyJump or ProxyCommand, which are neat.
Fixing web security
https://www.volkerkrause.eu/2019/04/14/kde-privacy-automating-finding-fixing-insecure-http-links.html

A nice initiative from the KDE team to fix HTTP url to HTTPS in an automated manner.
Disk usage
https://www.ostechnix.com/duc-a-collection-of-tools-to-inspect-and-visualize-disk-usage/

I didn't hear about duc before, after doing the test-drive with it I'm quite surprised. It's a great tool to dive into what's taking disk space.
Year of the Linux desktop or desktop in trouble?
https://www.zdnet.com/article/the-linux-desktop-is-in-trouble/
https://linux.slashdot.org/story/19/04/13/0151256/is-the-linux-desktop-in-trouble

"I'd love to see a foundation bring together the Linux desktop community and have them hammer out out a common desktop for everyone" Isn't that what the freedesktop organization is about? A fun discussion, an old topic.
Botnets
https://www.aboutchromebooks.com/news/chrome-os-75-adds-usb-device-adb-android-support-linux-project-crostini/
https://neonsea.uk/blog/2019/04/14/chroot-shenanigans-2.html

Take ownership of your devices. Install whatever you want on them. Support for connecting external devices to it is a must.
Jailbreaking the Subaru StarLink
https://github.com/sgayou/subaru-starlink-research/blob/master/doc/README.md

A continuation with the spirit of the previous links. Head units in cars have become smarter, mine is still old school but still. Now obviously the question becomes how do we run something else on that machine. Find out in this impressive post. HINT: "A follow up on this QNX Desktop" in 117, "QNX" in 114.
Another city trial
https://www.shareable.net/blog/deputy-mayor-moves-grenoble-toward-free-open-software

It's not really something new but it's nice to hear cities attempting openness approaches to solve their issues.
TempleOS, the life of Terry Davis
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6HlbpczpDM

Not Unix, but as we all love hobbyist OS I'll still share. This is a video, more of an eulogy to Terry Davis and his fabulous work with TempleOS.

Vermaden Valuable News

UNIX

The hey is tiny program that sends load to web application.
https://github.com/rakyll/hey
Handling Arguments in Bash Scripts.
https://dev.to/rpalo/handling-arguments-in-bash-scripts-3o5m
NetBSD - From Zero to NVMM.
https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/from_zero_to_nvmm
Introducing funlinkat() (on FreeBSD).
https://oshogbo.vexillium.org/blog/63/
Customizing OpenBSD xenodm (and xdm).
<https://www.tumfatig.net/20190208/customizing-openbsd-xenodm">
https://www.tumfatig.net/20190208/customizing-openbsd-xenodm
Stack Overflow Developer Survey Results 2019.
https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019
FreeBSD switches default version of Python to 3.6.
https://svnweb.freebsd.org/ports?view=revision&revision=498529
Dæmon Desktop - The High-Integrity Desktop.
https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/the-daemon-desktop.66322/
Portable ksh(1) Shell from OpenBSD 6.5.
https://github.com/ibara/oksh/releases/tag/oksh-6.5
ZFS without ECC is safer then most filesystems with ECC.
https://twitter.com/allanjude/status/1116112323549257728
https://twitter.com/allanjude/status/1116112323549257728
The illuminate (formerly SolView) is Java utility to display information about an Illumos/Solaris.
http://petertribble.co.uk/Solaris/illuminate.html
Installing Snort on OpenBSD 6.4.
https://functionallyparanoid.com/2019/03/18/installing-snort-on-openbsd-6-4/
HOWTO: HA Router/Firewall Using OpenBSD/CARP/pfsync/ifstated.
https://www.reddit.com/r/openbsd/comments/b33goi/howto_high_availability_routerfirewall_using/
https://www.reddit.com/r/openbsd/comments/b33goi/howto_high_availability_routerfirewall_using/
AWS OpenBSD Image Builder (AMI) and cloud-init Replacement.
https://github.com/ajacoutot/aws-openbsd
Install Mate Desktop on OpenBSD.
https://twitter.com/wesley974/status/1116061247248773120
https://twitter.com/wesley974/status/1116061247248773120
OPNsense 19.1.6 Released.
https://forum.opnsense.org/index.php?topic=12398.0
BSD Now 293 - Booking Jails.
https://www.bsdnow.tv/293
Lessons Learned Scaling PostgreSQL Database to 1.2bn Records/Month.
We have a lot better hardware than any of the cloud service providers could offer, point in time recovery (thanks to Barman) and no vendor lock-in, and (on paper) it is about 30% cheaper than hosting using Google Cloud or AWS.
https://medium.com/@gajus/lessons-learned-scaling-postgresql-database-to-1-2bn-records-month-edc5449b3067
https://medium.com/@gajus/lessons-learned-scaling-postgresql-database-to-1-2bn-records-month-edc5449b3067
In Other BSDs for 2019/04/13.
https://www.dragonflydigest.com/2019/04/13/22750.html
https://www.dragonflydigest.com/2019/04/13/22750.html
FreeBSD adds NUMA support to powerpc architecture Yields ~20% improvement in build times of LLVM on dual socket POWER9.
https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=346174
GhostBSD 19.04 Available.
http://ghostbsd.org/19.04_release_announcement
GhostBSD 19.04 Switches To LightDM - Uses FreeBSD 13.0-CURRENT.
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GhostBSD-19.04-Released
The pkgsrc-2019Q1 Released.
https://mail-index.netbsd.org/pkgsrc-users/2019/04/10/msg028308.html
Call for Testing - OpenSSH 8.0p1 is Almost Ready for Release.
https://lists.mindrot.org/pipermail/openssh-unix-dev/2019-March/037672.html
HardenedBSD Internals by Shawn Webb (@lattera).
https://twitter.com/krnlpnc_/status/1117504683881443329
https://twitter.com/krnlpnc_/status/1117504683881443329
Resize ZFS Pool on FreeBSD GELI Partition.
https://stderr.at/blog/freebsd/2015/09/20/freebsd-geli-resize/

Hardware

Supermicro M11SDV-4C-LN4F Review mITX AMD EPYC 3151 Platform.
https://www.servethehome.com/supermicro-m11sdv-4c-ln4f-review-mitx-amd-epyc-3151-platform/
https://www.servethehome.com/supermicro-m11sdv-4c-ln4f-review-mitx-amd-epyc-3151-platform/
ASRock Launches DeskMini A300 Barebones Mini-STX PC Supporting AMD RYZEN CPUs.
https://www.pcper.com/category/tags/mini-stx
AMD Launches 2nd Gen Ryzen Pro & Athlon Pro APUs.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/14185/amd-launches-2nd-gen-ryzen-pro-athlon-pro-apus
Intel Xeon Follows AMD EPYC Lead Offering Discounted 1P Only SKUs.
https://www.servethehome.com/intel-xeon-follows-amd-epyc-lead-offering-discounted-1p-only-skus/
https://www.servethehome.com/intel-xeon-follows-amd-epyc-lead-offering-discounted-1p-only-skus/

Life & Other

Case dropped against British facing jail in Dubai for calling ex-husbands wife 'horse' in 2016 on Facebook.
https://www.itv.com/news/2019-04-07/british-mother-faces-two-years-in-dubai-jail-and-50-000-fine-for-old-facebook-posts/
Moral Peril of Meritocracy.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/06/opinion/sunday/moral-revolution-david-brooks.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/06/opinion/sunday/moral-revolution-david-brooks.html
Urgent Quest for Slower and Better News.
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/the-urgent-quest-for-slower-better-news
Great Developers are Raised not Hired.
https://sizovs.net/2019/04/10/the-best-developers-are-raised-not-hired/
Life Satisfaction Boosted by Sense of Oneness - Regardless of Religion - Study Finds.
https://www.newsweek.com/life-satisfaction-boosted-sense-oneness-regardless-religion-study-finds-1391618
There are now as many Americans who claim no religion as there are evangelicals and catholics.
https://edition.cnn.com/2019/04/13/us/no-religion-largest-group-first-time-usa-trnd/
Protections Against Fingerprinting and Cryptocurrency Mining in Firefox.
https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2019/04/09/protections-against-fingerprinting-and-cryptocurrency-mining-available-in-firefox-nightly-and-beta/
https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2019/04/09/protections-against-fingerprinting-and-cryptocurrency-mining-available-in-firefox-nightly-and-beta/
It is your moral obligation to use Firefox.
https://0x46.net/thoughts/2019/04/09/use-firefox/
Amazon Workers are Listening to What You Tell Alexa.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-10/is-anyone-listening-to-you-on-alexa-a-global-team-reviews-audio

https://vermaden.wordpress.com/

Thoughts

https://jamesclear.com/deliberate-practice-theory

I was dumbfounded when I heard about this concept in the first link of this issue. Not because I didn't know about it but because it's something I'm doing instinctively, naturally. I couldn't even imagine having to write an article about it. And having it as a concept means that some people out there are not benefiting from this simple thing. So here we go, be it obvious to you or not.

Archive

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

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
Share your point of view about the newsletter.
Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2019-04-12 00:00:00 | 122

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Power UNIX
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uwW20odwEk

A quick overview/tutorial about interacting with Unix systems. It even has the cliché fork jokes and zombies things. Highly recommended for beginners. Add it to your list of good content to spam the people that start off with Unix.
A simple debugging story
http://johnbokma.com/blog/2019/01/05/info-fouseragent-rendered-page.html

I love those small blog posts tackling a simple issue. Light in nature but true to the spirit.
Anomalies detection
https://blog.floydhub.com/introduction-to-anomaly-detection-in-python/

Now this is something new for me. Not really Unix but data science, it's related somehow to "Auditing" in issue 95, and all the things related to differential privacy (see issue 45).
Network "BufferBloat"
https://www.pauladamsmith.com/blog/2018/07/fixing-bufferbloat-on-your-home-network-with-openbsd-6.2-or-newer.html

Congestion control is a tricky topic, it's nice to see easy solution like the one described in this post and especially when it's about setting up OpenBSD as a router. See also BBR in issue 33.
Sega NetBSD
https://youtu.be/ZAYgI1mfSd0

Obviously it runs NetBSD! It's impressive that it's as easy as "playing" a GD-ROM with NetBSD, Cool work from the NetBSD team.
Virtualization for NetBSD https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/from_zero_to_nvmm

We started the discussion on that topic since "Emulate the right way on NetBSD" in 117. The BSDs are on the virtualization race these days. In this article gives and overview of the nvmm programming API and finishes of with its usage/patch to be used along with Qemu. Cool work.
Gimp 2.10.10 release
https://www.gimp.org/news/2019/04/07/gimp-2-10-10-released/

Gimp new update is looking slick, two of the most cool improvements are the bucket filling for cartoons and the transformation tools.
Ricing from cars to computers
http://triosdevelopers.com/jason.eckert/blog/Entries/2019/4/7_How_ricing_shifted_from_cars_to_computers.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Co6FePZoNgE

Probably the best explanation to "what is ricing" that I've found. Nifty little article. Followed by a great intro to distros and gamin (See also "On the desktop" of the last issue 121).
CheatSheet for OpenSSL
https://github.com/trimstray/the-book-of-secret-knowledge#tool-openssl
https://why-vi.rocks/

The one thing that caught my attention in this page is the weird use of variables declaration right before calling the openssl command. I guess that's to plug the commands in a script and only meddle with the variables and not the specific line. I've also added another cheatsheet website that appeared in the tech news regarding vi.
Police Officer to OpenSource
https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/police-officer-open-source-devotee-one-mans-story

Not your usual "how did you get acquainted with Unix" type of article. Always fun to see people from all fields finding interests in something together.
Fast directory listing
https://github.com/romkatv/gitstatus/blob/master/docs/listdir.md

This is a topic I've encountered during my research for the "special files" podcast (https://venam.nixers.net/blog/unix/2017/06/04/special-files.html & https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=2052). A tale of optimization, maybe not portable everywhere, but super fun to read.

Vermaden Valuable News

UNIX

FreeBSD on HiFive Unleashed.
https://youtu.be/1rMNrfDu-uA
OmniOS Community Edition r151028v/r151026av/r151022ct Available.
https://omniosce.org/article/028v-026av-022ct
Valgrind Ported to NetBSD/amd64.
https://mail-index.netbsd.org/tech-toolchain/2019/04/01/msg003429.html
FreeBSD Foundation - FOSDEM 2019 Conference Recap.
https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/blog/fosdem-2019-conference-recap/
Hikari - Window Manager for FreeBSD and OpenBSD.
https://chaos.social/@raichoo/101858280176156092
https://hub.darcs.net/raichoo/hikari
https://chaos.social/system/media_attachments/files/003/012/109/original/4797d59e59ecb465.png
The ezjail FreeBSD Jails framework ported to HardenedBSD. Focus is on automating TOR Jail deployment using gibson.
https://github.com/emeraldonion/ezjail-hbsd
Configuring Default Resolution for FreeBSD 11 with UEFI.
http://www.codenicer.com/content/configuring-default-resolution-freebsd-11-uefi
FreeBSD HEAD became possible to build on EC2 ARM64 AMIs.
https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-cloud/2019-April/000215.html
Slides from 2019 BHYVECON are now available at bhyvecon.org page.
http://bhyvecon.org
How to Get Started with FreeBSD.
https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-get-started-with-freebsd
BSD Now 292 - AsiaBSDcon 2019 Recap.
https://www.bsdnow.tv/292
GhostBSD - Solid Linux Like Open Source Alternative.
https://www.linuxinsider.com/story/GhostBSD-A-Solid-Linux-Like-Open-Source-Alternative-85859.html
FUDO Security implements automatic online expansion of GELI providers on FreeBSD.
https://twitter.com/FreeBSDHelp/status/1113793688910458883
https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=345862
About ZFS recordsize Parameter.
https://jrs-s.net/2019/04/03/on-zfs-recordsize/
Silent Fanless FreeBSD Server - Redundant Backup.
https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2019/04/03/silent-fanless-freebsd-server-redundant-backup/
PostgreSQL Performance on Raspberry Pi.
https://blog.rustprooflabs.com/2019/04/postgrseql-pgbench-raspberry-pi
OPNsense 19.1.5 Released.
https://forum.opnsense.org/index.php?topic=12320.0
Blocking Ads Using unbound(8) on OpenBSD.
https://www.tumfatig.net/20190405/blocking-ads-using-unbound8-on-openbsd/
Building FFmpeg on Solaris 11.4 Using solaris-userland.
https://notallmicrosoft.blogspot.com/2019/04/building-ffmpeg-on-solaris-114-using.html
NetBSD Desktop Part 7 - Simple Performance Tweaks.
https://www.unitedbsd.com/d/43-netbsd-desktop-pt-7-simple-performance-tweaks
Installing Ghost on FreeBSD 11.1.
https://idontwatch.tv/installing-ghost-on-freebsd-11-1/
In Other BSDs for 2019/04/06.
https://www.dragonflydigest.com/2019/04/06/22736.html
Major Linux Problems on the Desktop - 2019 Edition.
https://itvision.altervista.org/why.linux.is.not.ready.for.the.desktop.current.html
TMUX Plugin tmux-battery adds support for OpenBSD apm.
https://github.com/tmux-plugins/tmux-battery/pull/77
Scripting FreeBSD Updates.
https://www.anserinae.net/scripting-freebsd-updates.html
Vagrant adds proper VirtualBox share folders support for FreeBSD guests.
https://github.com/hashicorp/vagrant/pull/10717
entr(1) - run arbitrary commands when files change.
http://eradman.com/entrproject/

Hardware

Story of the 3Dfx Voodoo 1.
http://fabiensanglard.net/3dfx_sst1/index.html
TSMC and OIP Ecosystem Partners Deliver Industry First Complete Design Infrastructure for 5nm Process Technology.
https://www.tsmc.com/tsmcdotcom/PRListingNewsAction.do?action=detail&newsid=THPGWQTHTH&language=E
Why AMD EPYC Rome 2P Will Have 128-160 PCIe Gen4 Lanes and a Bonus.
https://www.servethehome.com/why-amd-epyc-rome-2p-will-have-128-160-pcie-gen4-lanes-and-a-bonus/
How SolidRun aims to bridge ARM developer gap with 16-core workstation board.
https://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-solidrun-aims-to-bridge-the-arm-developer-gap-with-a-16-core-workstation-board/
Intel Xeon Platinum 9200 Formerly Cascade Lake-AP Launched. Including 56-core 112-thread dual-die 400W Beast.
https://www.servethehome.com/intel-xeon-platinum-9200-formerly-cascade-lake-ap-launched/
Hard Drive Temperature - Does It Matter?
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-temperature-does-it-matter/
Why 2019 Foreshadows Per Socket Licenseageddon.
https://www.servethehome.com/2019-foreshadows-per-socket-licenseageddon/

Life & Other

Ctrl-Alt-Delete: Planned Obsolescence of Old Coders.
https://onezero.medium.com/ctrl-alt-delete-the-planned-obsolescence-of-old-coders-9c5f440ee68
Privacy is Just the First Step - the Goal is Data Ownership.
https://thetoolsweneed.com/privacy-is-just-the-first-step-the-goal-is-data-ownership/
Picture shows anti ageing drugs really DO work.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-6880899/Fascinating-picture-shows-anti-ageing-drugs-really-work.html
Second Order Thinking -- What Smart People Use to Outperform.
https://fs.blog/2016/04/second-order-thinking/
Introducing Warp - 1.1.1.1 - Fixing Mobile Internet Performance and Security - Better VPN.
https://blog.cloudflare.com/1111-warp-better-vpn/
I tried creating web browser and Google blocked me.
https://blog.samuelmaddock.com/posts/google-widevine-blocked-my-browser/
Facebook secretly lobbied in favour of Article 13 of undesired EU copyright directive.
http://hacknews.eu/2019/04/02/facebook-secretly-lobbied-in-favour-of-article-13-of-undesired-eu-copyright-directive/
Serenity: New (x86) UNIX-like Operating System.
https://www.osnews.com/story/129716/serenity-a-new-unix-like-operating-system/
https://github.com/awesomekling/serenity
https://youtu.be/hE52D-zbX3g
Microsoft announces it will shut down ebook program and confiscate its customers libraries.
https://boingboing.net/2019/04/02/burning-libraries.html
Real Open Source - User Mindset.
https://medium.com/@MartinCracauer/real-open-source-the-user-mindset-6c1c7bf4695b

https://vermaden.wordpress.com/

Thoughts

Never be satisfied, that's the way you'll fall short. See past yourself.

A quote that may seem would lead to pessimism but that I think is about the contrary. I guess it goes along with the following:

Does the tournament make sense as you keep going?

or again:

There's no such thing as perfection.

It's not the end goal that matters, it's the path, the adventure on the way, the progress, the intention. Sometimes it has boundaries, sometimes it doesn't. However if you're satisfied with the status quo you'll stop your journey short.

Archive

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

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
Share your point of view about the newsletter.
Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2019-04-05 00:00:00 | 121

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Maddog history review
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZMA3Ge144U

Sort of old (a year) but I like how maddog reviews UNIX history and his perspective on it. The informal format helps a lot. It's similar to the talk he gave at FOSDEM last February (https://fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/keynote_fifty_years_unix/). Unfortunately filmed by the same "annoying" guy from this thread however in this video he's more laxed.
VMS vs UNIX
http://www3.sympatico.ca/n.rieck/docs/vms_vs_unix.html

I like the introduction with old maps of ARPANET where you can see the machines and institutions that ran them. It then continues with a great chart comparison of VMS and UNIX both history and technology wise.
x86 vs UNIX server
http://mo.bi/2019/03/29/x86-versus-unix-servers/

Another fighting round. What's better, a world of closed vendors optimizing for their operating system to fit exactly a piece of hardware or the open source Unix-like OS running on the well known x86 architecture. A fascinating article (and maybe also an indirect publicity for the Huawei server they mention at the end).
On the desktop
http://triosdevelopers.com/jason.eckert/blog/Entries/2019/3/4_Pop!_OS__The_first_real_Linux_desktop.html

An opinion pieces on the old topic of "Why Linux isn't that great on the desktop". This one focuses on the state of the desktop for developers that also need to access some specific "cloud" functionalities. It ends with a push for Pop, which is another UI over Ubuntu.
Linux Lite 4.4.
https://betanews.com/2019/03/31/linux-lite-44/

Remember the days of PuppyLinux, Knoppix, Slax, DSL, Tiny Core Linux, Slitaz (oh I love that one) well there's a new one in town that I discovered and it's called Linux Lite (But apparently from the look of it it doesn't seem so light). Already at its version 4.4
Firmware on Ubuntu
https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2019/03/lvfs-linux-firmware-service-success

Distributing binary blobs is a mess, welcoming more of this, we now have a full system in place to make this easier. Hey, at least there's going to be easy download of drivers and their updates. Things might get smooth for out of the shelf installs.
Tutorials
http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Teaching/Unix/index.html
https://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~kevin/unix-tutorial/toc.html

Add those to our ever growing list of great Unix beginner tutorials.
Neuroimaging, unix is everywhere
https://neurohackweek.github.io/advancedunix/01-first-part/

I just love seeing application of things, makers, especially with open resources. This link is similar to the previous one, as in it's also a tutorial/workshop on Unix basis but with an emphasis on its usage in the neuroimaging world.
Remember the series on /proc
http://www.linux-magazine.com/Issues/2018/217/Exploring-proc

Yes, we've had lots of content on proc, see "top, proc, containers, and scratch" in 97, and it's not over yet. If you didn't get it the first time you'll get it the second time.
Building a machine from scratches
https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2019/04/03/silent-fanless-freebsd-server-redundant-backup/

Vermaden does an excellent job at describing the steps he took to build this fanless FreeBSD server. It's impressive the length of details he go through and the benchmarks he has gathered.

Vermaden Valuable News

UNIX

Solaris - Network Configuration in SMF.
http://blog.moellenkamp.org/archives/57-Network-configuration-in-SMF.html
FreeBSD Mastery: Jails.
https://mwl.io/nonfiction/os#fmjail
https://i0.wp.com/mwl.io/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/fmjail-front-cover-2018-03-22.jpg?resize=200%2C300&ssl=1
Security Hole on OpenBSD in VMD/VMM.
https://twitter.com/m00nbsd/status/1109208948429725697
FreeBSD 11.3-RELEASE to be released on 2019/07/09.
https://www.freebsd.org/releases/11.3R/schedule.html
Coder's Bookshelf Humble Book Bundle.
https://www.humblebundle.com/books/coders-bookshelf-books
https://twitter.com/nostarch/status/1110240392363024384
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D2hdwIEWoAAjGmF.png
FreeBSD nsysctl Tutorial.
https://alfix.gitlab.io/bsd/2019/02/19/nsysctl-tutorial.html
FreeBSD deskutils/sysctlview Updated to 1.0.
https://gitlab.com/alfix/sysctlview
https://twitter.com/alfsiciliano/status/1111469513516728320
https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=236866
OpenBSD in Stereo with Linux VFIO.
https://jcs.org/2018/11/12/vfio
Let's Encrypt with Dehydrated on FreeBSD.
https://chargen.one/high5/lets-encrypt-with-dehydrated-on-freebsd
DTrace QuickStart.
http://www.tablespace.net/quicksheet/dtrace-quickstart.html
Sun Microsystems Business Plan.
https://www.khoslaventures.com/wp-content/uploads/SunMicrosystem_bus_plan.pdf
The ping.gg - world's simplest monitoring service.
https://ping.gg/
FreeBSD 12.0 VNET Jail Using bridge/epair and PF.
https://yom.iaelu.net/2019/03/freebsd-12-vnet-jail-using-bridge-epair-and-pf.html
Illumos Port of wireguard-go.
https://github.com/jclulow/wireguard-go-illumos-wip
The tilde.institute of OpenBSD Education.
https://tilde.institute/
OpenBSD on CloudSigma - Easy Installation with Wizard Menu.
https://dev.to/nabbisen/openbsd-on-cloudsigma---wizards-easy-installation-4k91
Obtaining Active-Passive ProxySQL on FreeBSD.
https://blog.pythian.com/obtaining-an-active-passive-proxysql-on-freebsd/
Stupid ZFS Tricks - Expanding RAIDZ.
https://medium.com/@MartinCracauer/stupid-zfs-tricks-expanding-zraid-79e716d41fad
SoloBSD 19.03-STABLE based on HardenedBSD 1200058.4 Available.
https://www.solobsd.org/index.php/2019/03/26/solobsd-19-03-stable/
https://github.com/HardenedBSD/hardenedBSD-stable/releases/tag/HardenedBSD-12-STABLE-v1200058.4
OpenBSD as Full Featured NAS.
https://www.vincentdelft.be/static/post/post_20190203/openbsd-as-nas.pdf
BSD Now 291 - Storage Changes Software.
https://www.bsdnow.tv/291
FreeNAS 11.2-U3 Available.
https://www.ixsystems.com/blog/library/freenas-11-2-u3/
Goal Services in SMF on Solaris 11.4.
http://blog.moellenkamp.org/archives/59-Goal-services-in-Solaris-11.4.html
FreeBSD Status Report 2018 Q4 is Available.
https://www.freebsd.org/news/status/report-2018-09-2018-12.html
Quake 1 and Quake 2 for ... AIX.
https://twitter.com/astr0baby/status/1112100008818548736
ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/aix/freeSoftware/games/
How to Use NetBSD on Raspberry Pi.
https://opensource.com/article/19/3/netbsd-raspberry-pi
Using OpenBSD Router with AT&T U-Verse.
https://jcs.org/2019/03/21/uverse
How I Created My First FreeBSD Port.
https://aikchar.dev/blog/how-i-created-my-first-freebsd-port.html
Interim Support Guarantee for FreeBSD 12.
https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-announce/2019-April/001872.html

Hardware

Pinebook - The $100 Laptop.
https://onecutreviews.com/2019/03/25/the-100-laptop/

Life & Other

How to Deliver Constructive Feedback in Difficult Situations.
https://medium.dave-bailey.com/the-essential-guide-to-difficult-conversations-41f736e63ccf
Oracle Swings Axe on Cloud Infrastructure Corps Amid Possible Bloodbath at Big Red.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/03/25/oracle_headcount_cut/
IBM purged 'grey hairs' and 'old heads' as it launched 'Millennial Corps' - lawsuit.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/03/27/ibm-purged-gray-hairs-and-old-heads-as-it-launched-millennial-corps-lawsuit/
FreeCS is free reimplementation of Counter-Strike 1.5 game.
https://sourceforge.net/projects/freecs-1-5/files/
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=FreeCS-Open-Counter-Strike
Open Source Game Clones.
https://osgameclones.com/

https://vermaden.wordpress.com/

Thoughts

I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something. - Richard Feynman

Archive

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

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
Share your point of view about the newsletter.
Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2019-03-29 00:00:00 | 120

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Blinking carburant
https://lwn.net/Articles/317922/

Much talk and fanciness over a blinking cursor to save power consumptions.
Follow up on touchpad
https://bill.harding.blog/2019/03/25/linux-touchpad-like-a-macbook-progress-and-a-call-for-help/
https://github.com/Coffee2CodeNL/gebaar-libinput
https://mouseaccuracy.com/

I have been thinking of writing a post on the forums about this but apparently I couldn't manage to pull it off yet. So for the moment it's going to be a series in the newsletter. All about touchpads on X11 and in Wayland compositors, how it's still tricky in 2019 to configure them properly. A reminder of issue 116 "Free Software UI", where too many configurations and possibilities are more of a burden for accessibility and usability. See also "Pushing ideas" in issue 84.
hwdb
https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/hwdb.html
https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd-hwdb.html

Udev is fantastic, it allows for a lot of flexibility when it comes to doing custom configuration and handling of devices.
The Olive video editor
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AvfMMjHX-M
https://www.olivevideoeditor.org/

A very modern video editor I'm looking forward to try out asap. See also "Free and open source softwares for video and audio" in 112.
Fuchsia OS
https://bzdww.com/article/163937/

It's not Unix but it has some scent of it all through, at least as an upgrade with containerization in mind. Lots of great technology coming together in the OS, new ideas are always refreshing.
Hello there!
http://ツ-ツ.com/
http://subgenius.com/bigfist/eyes/gallery.html
https://please.do.not.disturb.me/

Some low quality stuffs unrelated to Unix, but hey, I've ran out of time this week to put the newsletter together.
How it's made
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1Tmtd51clI

Ever wondered how USB3 type-c are made? This is how, enjoy!

Vermaden Valuable News

UNIX

OmniOS Community Edition r151028t/r151026at/r151022cr Available.
https://omniosce.org/article/028t-026at-022cr
Ghost in the Shell - Part 4.
https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2019/03/15/ghost-in-the-shell-part-4/
MATE 1.22 Released.
https://mate-desktop.org/blog/2019-03-18-mate-1-22-released/
LPAR2RRD 6.02 Available.
https://www.lpar2rrd.com/note600.htm?4.6.23
FreeBSD Desktop - Part 18 - Global Dashboard.
https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2019/03/20/freebsd-desktop-part-18-global-dashboard/
PuTTY 0.71 Released.
https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/changes.html
One click install and deploy FreeBSD.
https://www.digitalocean.com/products/linux-distribution/freebsd/
LLVM 8.0.0 Released.
https://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-announce/2019-March/000082.html
FreeBSD adds NVMe support to arm64 GENERIC kernel.
https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=345408
BSD Now 290 - Timestamped Notes.
https://www.bsdnow.tv/290
OpenRsync is a FREE easy to use implementation of the rsync program.
https://www.openrsync.org/
In Other BSDs for 2019/03/23.
https://www.dragonflydigest.com/2019/03/23/22671.html
Oracle kills @OracleSPARC and @OracleSolaris Twitter accounts. Follow @SolarisUpdate instead.
https://twitter.com/OracleSolaris/status/1109099516291100673
https://twitter.com/OracleSPARC/status/1109103107647201280
https://twitter.com/SolarisUpdate
ZFS Encryption is still under development (as of March 2019). On FreeBSD just use GELI encrypted setup for now.
https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/linux/ZFSEncryptionNotReady
OpenBSD adds audio on both speakers on Huawei Matebook X.
https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-cvs&m=155343827506953&w=2
Using Syncthing between OSX Laptop and FreeBSD Server.
https://dan.langille.org/2019/03/24/using-syncthing-between-my-osx-laptop-and-my-freebsd-server/
Developing WireGuard for NetBSD.
https://github.com/ozaki-r/netbsd-src/tree/wireguard
Curseradio - Command Line Radio Player.
https://github.com/chronitis/curseradio
Pretty PuTTY - Make PuTTY pretty and apply modern PuTTY settings.
https://github.com/jacktrocinski/pretty-putty
CBSD Got cloud-init Support.
https://www.bsdstore.ru/en/12.0.x/wf_bhyve_cloudinit_ssi.html
The zrepl 0.1.0-rc4 Available.
https://github.com/zrepl/zrepl/releases/tag/v0.1.0-rc4
FreeBSD bhyve got Snapshot Save and Restore Feature.
https://reviews.freebsd.org/D19495
OpenBSD RAID 10 Howto.
https://pluspora.com/posts/143322f02e8901370384005056264835

Hardware

AMD is Free from SPOLIER security exploit
https://www.amd.com/en/support/kb/faq/pa-240
Exclusive Look at Original Apple Red iPhone M68 Prototype.
https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/19/18263844/apple-iphone-prototype-m68-original-development-board-red
Creating Illumos Packages for Tribblix.
https://ptribble.blogspot.com/2019/03/creating-illumos-packages-for-tribblix.html
BSD Router Project 1.92 Available. Router distribution based on FreeBSD with FFRouting and Bird.
https://sourceforge.net/projects/bsdrp/files/BSD_Router_Project/1.92/
Nginx Quick Reference. These notes describes how to improve Nginx performance security and other important things.
https://github.com/trimstray/nginx-quick-reference

Life & Other

Even tech workers can’t afford to buy homes in San Francisco.
https://www.recode.net/2019/3/19/18256378/tech-worker-afford-buy-homes-san-francisco-facebook-google-uber-lyft-housing-crisis-programmers
Why is it always Polish women and foreign men, not the other way around?
http://streetwise.pl/2018/07/13/why-is-it-always-polish-women-and-foreign-men-not-the-other-way-around/
Firefox 66.0 Released.
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/66.0/releasenotes/
Firefox Aims to Reduce Your Online Annoyances.
https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2019/03/19/todays-firefox-aims-to-reduce-your-online-annoyances/
Google Announces Stadia - Game Streaming Service.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/14105/google-announces-stadia-a-game-streaming-service
Google hit with €1.5 billion fine from EU over advertising.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-47639228
Oracle Swings the Layoff Axe and Clear Cuts Teams of Engineers.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/at-work/tech-careers/oracle-swings-the-layoff-axe-and-clearcuts-teams-of-engineers
Oracle Quietly Held Round of Layoffs This Week.
https://www.businessinsider.com/oracle-layoffs-2019-3?IR=T
JavaScript Free Frontend.
https://dev.to/winduptoy/a-javascript-free-frontend-2d3e

https://vermaden.wordpress.com/

Thoughts

A cliched reiteration of issue 13:

Show me how you spend your day and I'll tell you what you care about.

Archive

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

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
Share your point of view about the newsletter.
Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2019-03-22 00:00:00 | 119

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

SSH as a hierarchy
https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/src/usr.bin/ssh/PROTOCOL.certkeys?annotate=HEAD
https://github.com/uber/pam-ussh

Additional information and links in continuation with "A how to on OpenSSH" of issue 99. Props to the OpenBSD team for making such wonderful documents and to maze for sharing these links with me.
Hardened Linux
https://hardenedlinux.github.io/

A continuation on the links from "Memory safety on Linux" in 110, this is a project regrouping security experts that want to demonstrate and elevate the security of the Linux kernel by taking the side of the offensive.
Reverse engineering ELF
https://medium.com/sector443/python-for-reverse-engineering-1-elf-binaries-e31e92c33732
https://ghidra-sre.org/

It's cool to build your own toolset for reverse engineering and debugging. It's even cooler to share it with the world, maybe a bit suspicious when it's coming from the USA NSA but still cool. You can review all the ELF, PLT and GOT, entries we've had before for more info.
Beginners tutorial
https://ryanstutorials.net/

A fantastic blog that deals with many introductory topics to Unix. Add it to your list of material to point friends or students that are starting out.
The definitive strace guide
https://nanxiao.gitbooks.io/strace-little-book/content/

A learn by example mini-book going over most of the facilities provided by strace. There's a lot to learn between the lines.
Terminal prevalence
https://www.lucasfcosta.com/2019/02/10/terminal-guide-2019.html

With the same mindset as "life is not a t43" in issue 5 or "Unix as an IDE" in 62, we discuss again terminal interfaces, their utilities in these days and ages. Why are they still relevant.
grep with /dev/null
https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/GrepDevNull

Glob matching can be a mess and such tricks emerge from this. Beware of expectations.
Libinput and Synaptics driver
https://www.x.org/releases/X11R7.6-RC1/doc/man/man4/synaptics.4.xhtml
https://wayland.freedesktop.org/libinput/doc/latest/configuration.html
https://github.com/bulletmark/libinput-gestures
https://github.com/iberianpig/fusuma
https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/input/input.txt

Synaptics is getting deprecated, it's good to learn what features it had and then match it against libinput. It's impressive how much you can configure and what's doable as a configuration nob from a GUI. I'd love to see a tutorial going step by step with images on how to set the touchpad properly, maybe I'll write it myself.
Normalization of unicode
https://github.com/begriffs/utofu
https://withblue.ink/2019/03/11/why-you-need-to-normalize-unicode-strings.html

We've had so many entries in the newsletter related to unicode "Unicode" in 116, "Plain text" in 57, "Unicode" in 72, even "Keeping thieves away" in 69 and "XIM and unicode" in 68. These links are simply a reminder that text is not really universal if we don't pay attention to use the right encoding everywhere.
Microkernel and history
https://tedium.co/2019/02/28/ibm-workplace-os-taligent-history/

See also the link below by vermaden "Microkernel Failure". Yet another example of "worse is better", basically anything that works and is usable will prevail. You can be as idealist as you want, in the end, what works works.
Social networking in 2011
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpB5q31pK2I

We've come a long way since 2011, the world has moved in the direction portrayed in this talk even more. Things are serious and the discussions we've been having the past 3 years are at a peak.
Just take a look at "What the Hell is Going On? Effects of Information Abundance." in this issue or "Keeping time and date (11)" of issue 116 to have an overview.
The trouble with human
http://jasonzweig.com/uploads/11.00Neuroeconomics.pdf

An example of the issues with overrationality. The name of an author comes to mind, a fellow countryman, that specializes in statistics and the topic of improbability.

Vermaden Valuable News

UNIX

Proper VirtualBox Shared Folders support for FreeBSD guests.
https://github.com/hashicorp/vagrant/pull/10717
FreeBSD 12.0 ZFS AMIs Now Available.
http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2019-02-16-FreeBSD-ZFS-AMIs-now-available.html
Booting FreeBSD now more secure with loader capable of authenticating/verifying kernel integrity with UEFI metadata.
https://twitter.com/Semihalf/status/1105052630810853376
https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=344840
How tracking storage issue lead to software change. NFS Ganesha fully ported to FreeBSD system.
https://news.gandi.net/en/2019/03/tracking-a-storage-issue-led-to-software-change/
https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/ports.cgi?query=nfs-ganesha
FreeBSD backported (MFC) their Address Space Randomization (ASR) implementation to 12-STABLE.
https://twitter.com/lattera/status/1105518473952849923
https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=345067
BSD Now 289 - Microkernel Failure.
https://www.bsdnow.tv/289
Thinkpad X1 Carbon 6 with OpenBSD.
https://flak.tedunangst.com/post/t6x1c
The FreeBSD's powerd++ 0.4.1 Power Daemon Released.
<https://github.com/lonkamikaze/powerdxx/releases/tag/0.4.1 >
FreeBSD - Unix I Always Wanted.
https://kissitconsulting.com/blog/post/freebsd-the-linux-i-always-wanted
In Other BSDs for 2019/03/16.
https://www.dragonflydigest.com/2019/03/16/22653.html
Falling in Love with OpenBSD Again.
https://functionallyparanoid.com/2019/03/13/well-its-been-a-while-falling-in-love-with-openbsd-again/
HardenedBSD Foundation 2019 Meeting Minutes.
https://hardenedbsd.org/article/shawn-webb/2019-03-16/hardenedbsd-foundation-2019-meeting-minutes
Moving Back to Lighttpd (from NGINX).
https://chargen.one/high5/moving-back-to-lighttpd

Hardware

Toshiba HDD Roadmap: SMR/MAMR/TDMR/HAMR Tecnologies.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/14077/toshiba-hdd-roadmap-smr-mamr-tdmr-and-hamr
Google quietly added DuckDuckGo as search engine option for Chrome.
https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/13/google-has-quietly-added-duckduckgo-as-a-search-engine-option-for-chrome-users-in-60-markets/
Gamer uses eight (8!) 3DFX Voodoo2 GPUs to play Half-Life game. Actually four (4) Quantum3D Obsidian 2 200SBi cards - each card contains two (2) Voodoo2 chips.
https://www.overclock3d.net/gfx/articles/2019/03/12051228136s.jpg
https://www.overclock3d.net/news/software/retro_pc_gamer_uses_eight_3dfx_voodoo_2_gpus_to_play_half-life/1
ASRock DeskMini 310 Mini PC Review - Cost Effective Mini-STX Platform.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/14089/asrock-deskmini-310-review
ASUS PRIME N4000T Launched.
https://www.fanlesstech.com/2019/03/asus-prime-n4000t-launched.html
Chinese Enthusiasts Make and Fit Modern Motherboards in Classic ThinkPads.
https://boingboing.net/2019/03/17/demand-signals-r-us.html
ThinkPad X210.
https://geoff.greer.fm/2019/03/04/thinkpad-x210/

Life & Other

Future You Masturbation.
https://www.howitactuallyworks.com/archives/future_you_masturbation.html
What the Hell is Going On? Effects of Information Abundance.
https://www.perell.com/blog/what-the-hell-is-going-on
Firefox Send - Free File Transfers while Keeping your Personal Information Private.
https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2019/03/12/introducing-firefox-send-providing-free-file-transfers-while-keeping-your-personal-information-private/
Look Back at the History of Firefox.
https://itsfoss.com/history-of-firefox/

https://vermaden.wordpress.com/

Thoughts

In today's world what people say about things is more important than what they really are. Truth is now about whatever is more popular. Like it or not.

Thought provoking, isn't it?
What can we do about it.
Let's fight information overload!

Archive

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

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
Share your point of view about the newsletter.
Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2019-03-15 00:00:00 | 118

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Distributed systems
http://josuah.net/blog/2019-01-10-distributed-system-overview.md

A beautiful piece of ASCII art by josuah to help you visualize the components required to build a full fledge distributed system.
Distributed permissions
https://stebalien.com/blog/dracl-thesis/static/thesis.pdf

Building a distributed system for sharing content that respects our privacy, that's a big endeavour. Also related to "Keeping time and date (11)" in issue 116 and the digital identity trend and discussions we've seen develop the past few years.
No reboot
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/226872/how-to-shrink-root-filesystem-without-booting-a-livecd/
https://github.com/marcan/takeover.sh

Ready to take it to the hardcore level, ready to risk it all, then this is the kind of thing that will grind your gears. Reboot is for sissies.
BSDs and their love for signal innovation
http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1411.0/03374.html
http://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=coreutils.git;a=commit;h=27d2c738

Why doesn't Linux implement the same behavior for SIGINFO as what the BSDs do. We are soon faced with the old cathedral vs bazaar and our dear friend the terminal line discipline.
We had that conversation on irc
https://dwheeler.com/essays/fixing-unix-linux-filenames.html
https://linux.die.net/man/1/detox

We had this talk before on irc and it was also in the newsletter too (Review "Let us never speak of it again" in issue 64). So here's an article (quite a long one) where the author proposes a solution.
Removing a.out
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=eac616557050737a8d6ef6fe0322d0980ff0ffde

With the availability of ELF everywhere a.out is finally being marked as expired in the Linux kernel.
Random enough
https://darakian.github.io/2019/02/17/on-java-securerandom.html
https://hackaday.com/2015/06/29/true-random-number-generator-for-a-true-hacker/

Remember "Lavarand" from 93, there is here yet another source of randomness you could possibly use. And another post about blocking issues caused by randomness.
Yubikey ssh auth
http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20190302235509

This is a repetition of "2FA using a USB" in our very first issue, a guide the use a Yubikey as an HSM device to store ssh keys and use them for authentication.
Writing a book on Unix
https://joecmarshall.com/posts/book-writing-environment/

Unix can be used as an IDE but also as a full fledged book editor. This isn't the best environment to do this, as it requires some technical knowledge to setup but it's interesting to put together.
Font rendering
https://pandasauce.org/post/linux-fonts/
https://mobile.twitter.com/tapbot_paul/status/1004361530018852864
http://www.antigrain.com/research/font_rasterization/

We're back to the topic of fonts on Unix. So far we've covered so much, from font fallback and unicode, from specific engines tricks, to the actual stack and font rendering, to designing a font and custom typefaces, to creating fonts that will cover languages, to choosing the right typography, to making art with text, and more. This time we attack the subjective perspective, which fonts look good and what are the best techniques to apply. Be aware that opinions differ on the matter.
Big words and new licenses
https://writing.kemitchell.com/2019/03/09/Deprecation-Notice.html

Another jump into the legal world this week, a popular topic of discussion. You might already have caught the train or maybe not. Take this as a reminder. Do you think this license is ambiguous? Do you think MIT and BSD deserve to be deprecated (See also "Signals for IPC? NO!" in 81).
Extra because we've already followed this stuff before
https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2019-03-10-debian-winding-down/
http://changelog.complete.org/archives/9971-a-partial-defense-of-debian

Way back, recall when we had multiple issues about that "Nagging about Debian" in 64, that "More on Debian ranting" in 65, "APT and https" in 60, "APT getting it again" and "Debian systemd maintainer will not maintain systemd anymore" in 111. Well folks, there's more this week, the internet couldn't leave Debian alone.

Thoughts

Risk means more things can happen than will happen - Elroy Dimson

Archive

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

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
Share your point of view about the newsletter.
Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2019-03-08 00:00:00 | 117

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Emulate the right way on NetBSD
http://polprog.net/blog/netbsd-hax/
https://github.com/intel/haxm

The quest to porting Intel hardare acceleration to NetBSD, the world of VM opens up.
A follow up on this QNX Desktop
https://membarrier.wordpress.com/2019/03/03/screenshot-galore/

Everything seems to have fallen into place to build a desktop. There's even an hypervisor!
Kernel headers
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-In-Kernel-Headers-Proc
https://lkml.org/lkml/2019/1/18/975
https://www.tecmint.com/remove-old-kernel-in-debian-and-ubuntu/

If you need to build kernel modules you need those, but then when you upgrade kernel you have to get the new headers with it. It can get messy to clean. The idea brought up about using /proc is attractive however it has its own issues.
Pipelines
https://nanxiao.me/en/what-you-need-may-be-pipeline-unix-commands-only/
http://www.gibney.de/the_output_of_linux_pipes_can_be_indeter
https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/ShellPipelineIndeterminate

When simplicity is key to solve big problems instead of relying on complex spidery solutions. But the same terseness may lead to confusion in rare cases. It's fun to run through the problem in the second link by trying out mixing builtin echo with non-builtin.
OCaml for Unix
https://ocaml.github.io/ocamlunix/index.html
https://ocaml.github.io/ocamlunix/ocamlunix.pdf

We see a lot of system programming in Go, Rust, even NodeJS these days (maybe we should share those too), but not a lot of OCaml.
A quick history with dramatic music
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JuHpABL46a8
https://fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/keynote_fifty_years_unix/

Going over the history of Unix never gets old, add some drama music in the background, lots of events, wars, and you got a full movie.
Worse is better, or give me back that Unix haters handbook
http://yosefk.com/blog/what-worse-is-better-vs-the-right-thing-is-really-about.html

Why things get replaced in the market, why "worse is better", why some argue in opposite directions, what does this have to do with Unix. The author draws in the opinion piece a discussion on world views and how it affects the way we handle building things.
SRP
http://srp.stanford.edu/whatisit.html
https://bert-hubert.blogspot.com/2012/02/on-srp-some-implementation-notes-and.html
https://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/8245/why-is-srp-not-widely-used
https://matthewarcus.wordpress.com/2014/05/10/srp-in-openssl/
https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-announce&m=140711256104278

SRP is a nice protocol for secure exchange and verification of passwords, however it hasn't been widely adopted. In the links of this entry you'll understand a bit why and see that it has even been pushed out of libressl for instance. Zero knowledge proofs tie well with the topic of differential privacy (see issue 45).
Dropping Linux
https://dirkriehle.com/2019/01/15/why-did-munich-drop-linux-and-libreoffice-for-microsoft-windows-and-office/
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/07/27/lower_saxony_to_dump_linux/
https://dirkriehle.com/2019/01/16/should-the-public-sector-consider-open-source-only-for-new-purchases/

In the same vibe as the previous two sections, things get replaced for different reasons. All the arguments about worse and better are nil in face of public needs and things like habits.
User perspective
https://linuxmender.wordpress.com/2016/03/06/the-user-perspective/

The conundrum of having something the most used not being maintained by the most competent possible contributors. "Taking is easy and talking is cheap".
Extra on bots
https://www.akamai.com/us/en/multimedia/documents/white-paper/akamai-scrapers-and-bot-series-managing-professional-bots-white-paper.pdf
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/d33vpq/inside-the-wild-world-of-sneaker-buying-bots

With all the talk about fake internet this white paper does a good job at portraying the different methods used by bot programmers to do what they do best.

Vermaden Valuable News

UNIX

FreeBSD implements parallel mounting for ZFS filesystem.
https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=344569
FreeBSD imported OpenSSL 1.1.1b into base system.
https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=344602
Almost PHP 7.2 Composer with OpenBSD 6.4.
https://dev.to/nabbisen/almost-php-72-composer-with-openbsd-64-100o
Google Summer of Code - FreeBSD - Foundation of the Internet.
https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/organizations/6583387272249344/
Top 10 most popular Docker images each contain at least 30 vulnerabilities.
https://snyk.io/blog/top-ten-most-popular-docker-images-each-contain-at-least-30-vulnerabilities/
The pfSense 2.5.0 moving to FreeBSD 12.
https://forum.netgate.com/topic/140586/heads-up-snapshots-moving-to-pfsense-2-5-0-on-freebsd-12-expect-initial-instability
FreeNAS 11.2-U2.1 Available.
https://www.ixsystems.com/blog/library/freenas-11-2-u2-1/
BSD Now 287 - rc.d in NetBSD
https://www.jupiterbroadcasting.com/129591/rc-d-in-netbsd-bsd-now-287/
OPNsense 19.1.2 Released.
https://forum.opnsense.org/index.php?topic=11849.0
GhostBSD: Solid Linux Like Open Source Alternative.
https://www.linuxinsider.com/story/GhostBSD-A-Solid-Linux-Like-Open-Source-Alternative-85859.html
OmniOS Community Edition r151028q/r151026aq/r151022co Available.
https://omniosce.org/article/028q-026aq-022co
Solaris 11.4 - Filesystem Latencies with fsstat.
http://blog.moellenkamp.org/archives/36-Filesystem-latencies-with-fsstat..html
Solaris 11.4 - Latency Distribution with iostat.
http://blog.moellenkamp.org/archives/34-Latency-distribution-with-iostat.html
Building illumos-gate on AWS (2019 version).
https://ptribble.blogspot.com/2019/02/building-illumos-gate-on-aws-2019.html
NetBSD Foundation participating in Google Summer of Code 2019.
https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/the_netbsd_foundation_participating_in
OpenZFS Leadership Meeting - 2019/02/26.
https://youtu.be/EXstK9ckcZQ
Some Facts about why OpenBSD Rocks.
https://why-openbsd.rocks/fact/
Rich sh (POSIX shell) Tricks.
http://www.etalabs.net/sh_tricks.html
Looking at NetBSD from OpenBSD user perspective.
https://www.tumfatig.net/20190301/looking-at-netbsd-from-an-openbsd-user-perspective/
DTrace %Y print format with nanoseconds on Solaris 11.4.SRU6.
https://milek.blogspot.com/2019/03/dtrace-y-print-format-with-nanoseconds.html?m=1
In Other BSDs for 2019/03/02.
https://www.dragonflydigest.com/2019/03/02/22593.html
Tribblix - minimal plus pkgsrc.
https://ptribble.blogspot.com/2018/07/tribblix-minimal-plus-pkgsrc.html
LLDB from trunk is running on NetBSD once again.
https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/lldb_from_trunk_is_running
My FVWM BSD Desktop.
https://www.unitedbsd.com/d/35-my-fvwm-bsd-desktop

Hardware

Supermicro M11SDV-8C-LN4F with AMD EPYC 3251 8C/16T 50W Mini-ITX Review.
https://www.servethehome.com/supermicro-m11sdv-8c-ln4f-review-amd-epyc-3251-mitx-platform/
AMD Athlon 240GE/220GE Review - Retaking Low Ground.
https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-athlon-220ge-240ge-vega-cpu,5988.html
USB
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/02/usb-3-2-is-going-to-make-the-current-usb-branding-even-worse/
Lenovo 595 Gram Portable Display - ThinkVision M14 USB-C Monitor.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/14034/lenovo-unveils-thinkvision-m14-usbc-monitor-at-mwc-2019
Chuwi To Launch Core M Powered AeroBook.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/14038/chuwi-to-launch-core-m-powered-aerobook-and-ubook-models
<https://images.anandtech.com/doci/14038/ChuwiAerobook_678x452.jpg">
Supermicro A2SDi-8C+-HLN4F with Intel Atom C3758 Review.
https://www.servethehome.com/supermicro-a2sdi-8c_-hln4f-review/
No, ARM hasn't lost to X86... not yet.
https://geektillithertz.com/wordpress/index.php/2019/02/27/no-arm-hasnt-lost-to-x86-not-yet/
AMD Celebrating 50 Years of Innovation.
https://www.amd.com/en/events/50th-anniversary
AMD Ryzen V1000 and EPYC 3000 at Embedded World 2019.
https://www.servethehome.com/amd-ryzen-v1000-and-epyc-3000-at-embedded-world-2019/

Life & Other

Books I Recommend.
https://blog.jessfraz.com/post/books/
Senator Portantino Reintroduces SB 328 Landmark Bill on School Start Time.
https://sd25.senate.ca.gov/news/2019-02-19/senator-portantino-reintroduces-sb-328-landmark-bill-school-start-time
Top 10 Design Flaws in Human Body.
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/top-10-design-flaws-in-the-human-body
We Need Chrome No More.
https://redalemeden.com/blog/2019/we-need-chrome-no-more

https://vermaden.wordpress.com/

Thoughts

“I am not a pessimist but I am a realist” - Always coming from the pessimist in the room

I'm reviewing old articles on my blog and I'm surprised by how some ideas are even more true today. We live in a society that is increasingly attached to realism, that cannot take metaphors, abstract topics, and ambiguity. Maybe this is an idea worth sharing for those struggling out there.

https://venam.nixers.net/blog/psychology/2017/05/23/deliberate-positive-illusion.html

Archive

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

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
Share your point of view about the newsletter.
Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2019-03-01 00:00:00 | 116

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Keeping time and date (11)
https://venam.nixers.net/blog/psychology/2019/03/01/internet-time.html

This is the concluding article of the time and date series. A reminder that time is subjective, that even though we can accurately calculate it we still feel it differently. Does this matter?
Thiking in Csh, struggling like Csh
http://blog.obligd.com/posts/the-joy-in-csh-and-vi.html

A thought article praising the man behind a lot of good tech stil in use today. Softwares are like sysiphus, constantly fighting to stay relevant and kept alive. See also "Csh-ism" in 6.
Patents
https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/780078/e3ed9f6202d4b116/
https://www.eff.org/effector/32/3
https://letsknowthings.com/episode142/

Enter into the legal sphere this week. We're discussing patents, derivative works, patent exhaustion, and patent trolls.
Fear
https://linux.co.uk/pages/for-enterprises/fear-uncertainty-and-doubt/

FUD is a term that is thrown around a lot these days. This piece does a great job at demystifying this term.
Viruses !
https://news.sophos.com/en-us/2015/03/26/dont-believe-these-four-myths-about-linux-security/
https://www.unixmen.com/meet-linux-viruses/
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Linuxvirus

These articles will probably be read as cliché or too oldish thinking from the people that are reading this newsletter however I've chose to share them for the single reason that this is the mindset that a lot of persons still have. I kind of like how the mechanism of each of these malware is explained.
DoH implementation
https://c-skills.github.io/2019/02/11/harddns.html

The author of a DoH client goes over the current state of efficiency for each providers of DoH.
Mosh
https://mosh.org/
http://linuxpitstop.com/ssh-vs-mosh/
https://www.unixmen.com/mosh-an-alternative-to-ssh/

I'm surprised we haven't mentioned mosh even once in this newsletter. Those should cover the basic for those who are not accustomed to mosh.
linux-libre
https://www.fsfla.org/ikiwiki/selibre/linux-libre/
https://www.parabola.nu/

Want more than just a "Virtual Stallman" (issue 48) but not a full Libre laptop (issue 72) well this is for you, there are many distributions following the libre ethic. Parabola is one example of this.
Linux boot
https://manybutfinite.com/post/kernel-boot-process/

The story of what happens when booting the Linux kernel and ending with a small comparison with Windows kernel boot.
FuguIta
https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=fuguita
http://fuguita.org/index.php?Welcome

It's rare to see live CD for BSDs, especially OpenBSD, a treat to have.
Free Software UI
https://ometer.com/preferences.html

A memorable essay about how to design free software user-interfaces.
Unicode
https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html
https://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/font/index.htm

A quite tedious (a bit old) review of everything related to how to write characters in all languages and standards, see also "Unicode" in 72, "XIM and unicode" in 68, "Plain text" in 57, and all the other links we've shared about fonts.

Vermaden Valuable News

UNIX

The Scanned versus Issued numbers for ZFS Scrubs (and Resilvers).
https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/solaris/ZFSScrubScannedVsIssued
The rclone is command line program to sync files and directories to and from many cloud services.
https://rclone.org/
Make ZFS Snapshots work with Samba as Windows Shadow Copies (VSS).
https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs-auto-snapshot/wiki/Samba
Dynamically linked binaries will be built as PIE on FreeBSD.
https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=344179
Book of Secret Knowledge. Collection of awesome lists/manuals/blogs/hacks/one liners/cli/web tools and more.
https://github.com/trimstray/the-book-of-secret-knowledge
FreeBSD ZFS AMIs Now Available.
http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2019-02-16-FreeBSD-ZFS-AMIs-now-available.html
OpenBSD Desktop Using WindowMaker.
https://www.tumfatig.net/20190215/an-openbsd-desktop-using-windowmaker/
Wine Developers Release Hangover Alpha to Run Windows x86_64 Programs on 64-Bit ARM.
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Hangover-0.4-Alpha-Released
Unix Architecture Diagrams - Modern FreeBSD.
https://dspinellis.github.io/unix-architecture/arch.pdf
Hacker News Discussion - Why don't companies use FreeBSD as much in production as Linux?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12199394
Pinboard tags for various BSDs. Social Bookmarking for Introverts.
https://pinboard.in/t:freebsd/
https://pinboard.in/t:openbsd/
https://pinboard.in/t:netbsd/
https://pinboard.in/t:dragonflybsd/
https://pinboard.in/t:bsd/
Bastille - Quickly Create and Manage FreeBSD Jails.
https://bastillebsd.org/
https://freshports.org/sysutils/bastille
FreeBSD Starter Kit.
https://github.com/BastilleBSD/starterkit
FreeBSD nsysctl Tutorial.
https://alfix.gitlab.io/bsd/2019/02/19/nsysctl-tutorial.html
OpenBSD and iSCSI Part 1 - Target (Server).
https://dataswamp.org/~solene/2019-02-21-iscsi-server.html
OpenBSD and iSCSI Part 2 - Initiator (Client).
https://dataswamp.org/~solene/2019-02-21-iscsi-client.html
New Bhyve on FreeBSD vCPU limit will be 254.
https://reviews.freebsd.org/D18815
FreeBSD adds kernel support for Intel userspace protection keys feature on Skylake Xeons.
https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=344353
Looking at MySQL 8 with PostgreSQL Goggles On.
https://www.cybertec-postgresql.com/en/looking-at-mysql-8-with-postgresql-goggles-on/
FreeNAS 11.2-U2 Available.
https://www.ixsystems.com/blog/library/freenas-11-2-u2/
Free Algorithms book by Jeff Erickson.
http://jeffe.cs.illinois.edu/teaching/algorithms/#book
Mutatio is simple script to keep to date with OpenBSD updates and to download new snapshots.
https://github.com/joedicastro/mutatio
PXE Booting of FreeBSD Disk Image.
https://blog.cochard.me/2019/02/pxe-booting-of-freebsd-disk-image.html
XigmaNAS 11.2.0.4.6536 Available.
https://sourceforge.net/projects/xigmanas/files/XigmaNAS-11.2.0.4/11.2.0.4.6536/
XigmaNAS 12.0.0.4.6536 Available.
https://sourceforge.net/projects/xigmanas/files/XigmaNAS-Beta/XigmaNAS-12.0.0.4.6536/
HAXM in pkgsrc. HAXM is hardware-assisted virtualization engine (hypervisor).
https://mail-index.netbsd.org/netbsd-users/2019/02/13/msg022207.html
https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/the_hardware_assisted_virtualization_challenge
FreeBSD Imports Linux debugfs Support.
https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=344485
FreeBSD Find Out All Installed Hard Disk Information.
https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/freebsd-hard-disk-information/
In Other BSDs for 2019/02/23
https://www.dragonflydigest.com/2019/02/23/22569.html
In Other BSDs for 2019/02/16.
https://www.dragonflydigest.com/2019/02/16/22529.html

Hardware

Western Digital RISC-V SweRV Core Design Released for Free.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/13964/western-digitals-riscv-swerv-core-released-for-free
The Last POWER1 CPU on Mars is Dead.
https://www.talospace.com/2019/02/the-last-power1-on-mars-is-dead.html
Lasers vs. Microwaves - Billion Dollar Bet on the Future of Magnetic Storage. Seagate and Western Digital are pursuing rival technologies to push limits of hard disks.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/lasers-vs-microwaves-the-billiondollar-bet-on-the-future-of-magnetic-storage
AMD EPYC 3201 8-Core 30W Benchmarks Review and Milestone.
https://www.servethehome.com/amd-epyc-3201-8-core-benchmarks-review-and-milestone/
Samsung 983 ZET (Z-NAND) SSD Review.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/13951/the-samsung-983-zet-znand-ssd-review/
History - SUN Modular Data Center also known as Project Blackbox.
https://gigazine.net/gsc_news/en/20061018_blackbox/
http://data-centers.in/portable-data-center/
First Intel 4.0 GHz - Pentium Gold G5620 at Retail.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/13976/intels-first-40-ghz-pentium-pentium-gold-g5620-listed-at-retail
Journey to Next Gen ARM Neoverse N1 and E1 Cores.
https://www.servethehome.com/arm-neoverse-n-e-tech-day/
AMD Hiring 10 More People for Their Open Source Linux Driver Team.
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=AMD-Hiring-10-More-Open-Source
Samsung Galaxy Fold - First Folding Smartphone.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/13981/samsung-announces-the-galaxy-fold-the-first-folding-smartphone
Supermicro making push into high end gaming motherboards.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/supermicro-making-a-push-into-high-end-gaming-motherboards/
Intel believe that ARM Macs could come as soon as 2020.
https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/02/21/intel-officials-believe-that-arm-macs-could-come-as-soon-as-2020
Apple move to ARM based Macs creates uncertainty.
https://www.axios.com/apple-macbook-arm-chips-ea93c38a-d40a-4873-8de9-7727999c588c.html
Toshiba Collaborates with Showa Denko for MAMR 18 TB HDDs.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/13991/toshiba-collaborates-with-showa-denko-for-mamr-hdds

Life & Other

Why I hate the weekends...
http://www.cdahmedeh.net/blog/2017/4/15/why-i-hate-the-weekends
Study finds no evidence cough medicines work with 1/7 patients experiencing negative side effects.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/cough-medicine-work-help-persistent-symptoms-weeks-asthma-a8531286.html
How We Lost Our Ability to Mend.
https://dieworkwear.com/post/182126040434/how-we-lost-our-ability-to-mend
Four day week trial - study finds lower stress but no cut in output.
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2019/feb/19/four-day-week-trial-study-finds-lower-stress-but-no-cut-in-output
Google says the builtin microphone it never told Nest users about was 'never supposed to be a secret'.
https://www.businessinsider.com/nest-microphone-was-never-supposed-to-be-a-secret-2019-2?IR=T
How Jan and Martina Died.
https://www.occrp.org/en/unfinishedlives/how-jan-and-martina-died
By Summer 2019 Firefox will Block by Default All Cross-Site Third-Party Trackers.
https://twitter.com/jensimmons/status/1098335173089873920

https://vermaden.wordpress.com/

Thoughts

The internet is full of consequences now because real life is full of consequences. The membrane between online and real life has long since dissolved.

https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/18/17366528/snapchat-decline-internet-ghost-towns

Archive

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

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
Share your point of view about the newsletter.
Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2019-02-22 00:00:00 | 115

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

DAX on Linux
https://elinux.org/Kernel_XIP
https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/filesystems/dax.txt
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/349769/linux-dax-direct-access-details

A continuation of last week talk about non-volatile memory. This week we discuss DAX and XIP, what they're used for, the advantage, and the usual talk about data storage.
It's getting old at this point
https://www.linux.com/news/kernel-tuning-sysctl
https://sysctl-explorer.net/
https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/handbook/configtuning-sysctl.html
http://netbsd.gw.com/cgi-bin/man-cgi?sysctl+8.i386+NetBSD-8.0
https://man.openbsd.org/sysctl.8
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sysctl

Kernel tuning params has been discussed so much in this newsletter. It's surprising that it's still not part of POSIX though. Also it's interesting to see the different way that Linux and BSDs choose to implement it. See "Tuning the Linux kernel" in 112, and last week's "The sysctlview GTK tool to explore FreeBSD sysctl-mib-tree is now comited to FreeBSD Ports." of issue 114.
Remote work
https://www.instructables.com/id/Starting-your-linux-box-remotely/
https://www.suse.com/c/rdp-linux-managing-gui-displays-remotely/
https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E24628_01/em.121/e27046/appdx_pxeboot.htm
https://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/pdf/Remote-Boot.pdf

From wake-on lan, to ssh with X forwarding, VNC, to PXE, all about the remote stuffs.
Live synchronization
http://www.linux-magazine.com/Online/Blogs/Productivity-Sauce/Live-Sync-with-lsyncd
https://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/

I remembered having shared unison before, but I'm not sure anymore because I can't find traces of it anywhere. As for lsyncd it's a most know.
Syncing time in VMs and containers
https://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-50/index.jsp?topic=%2Fcom.vmware.vmtools.install.doc%2FGUID-C0D8326A-B6E7-4E61-8470-6C173FDDF656.html
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/276965/how-to-keep-a-vmware-vms-clock-in-sync
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/22800624/will-docker-container-auto-sync-time-with-the-host-machine
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/24551592/how-to-make-sure-dockers-time-syncs-with-that-of-the-host

This is closely related to the keeping time and date series. A note on how to sync, if it's necessary or not, the time on guest machines with the host.
Keeping time and date (10)
http://www.ni.com/white-paper/3938/en/
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1016/j.jala.2006.10.016
https://www.electronicshub.org/real-time-operating-system-rtos/
http://www.inf.ed.ac.uk/teaching/courses/es/PDFs/RTOS.pdf
https://www.intervalzero.com/real-time-2/the-many-challenges-of-real-time-linux/
https://www.linuxfoundation.org/blog/2013/03/intro-to-real-time-linux-for-embedded-developers/
https://vzaigrin.wordpress.com/2015/08/04/real-time-clock-on-raspberry-pi-with-freebsd-11/
https://www.freertos.org/FAQWhat.html
https://riot-os.org/
https://circuitcellar.com/cc-blog/tinkering-with-time/

RTOS on Unix, the overview of what it is about, examples, and with some of those generic thinking about time articles. There's lots of repetition, but it never killed anyone, on the contrary it makes it stick more. That last one is truncated but still interesting enough to read through. There's still one part to this series but it's not really about Unix, so this is it.
Numbering
https://www.datafix.com.au/BASHing/2019-02-17.html

Another one of those cool formatting pipelines articles. I like them because they add spices to your thoughts and keep your mind working about different ways to attack a problem on the command line.
Another week another puzzle
https://www.itworld.com/article/2811646/operating-systems/unix-tip--debugging-tales--ssh-command-failure.html

I can never get bored of such debugging stories. There's always something to learn out of them. And the more you learn the more you get used to it. I bet anyone reading this newsletter has encountered someone putting their hands in the air and saying "I give up", those stories teaches you not to and be more patient.
Shebang
https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/779997/11de2bdc8dbc0d69/

And old friend of ours "A thing which used to work stopped working, the unintended result of what should have been a harmless change. Ordinarily we’d call that a bug. Except this new behavior is actually what I wanted all along. So could the bug be a bug fix?", remember "OpenBSD doas update and virt" in 99 and "Kernel userspace boundary" in 108, we're at it again. While you're at it you can read those: "Do you need a blank line after the shebang?" in 36, "Magic bytes" in 100 and "Executables & default program" in 77.
ETA
https://github.com/aioobe/eta

A tool that might not be useful to many but that you still need to know about. It's probably good for long running processes, or maybe those already have a monitoring mechanism in place. What do you think?

Thoughts

It's not that we have too little time to do all the things we need to do, it's that we feel the need to do too many things in the time we have. - Gary Keller

Sorry, no vermaden valuable news this week, he switched the publishing schedule to Mondays and so we'll get the issue next week. Or maybe we could start publishing the newsletter on Mondays too. Tell me what you think?

Archive

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

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
Share your point of view about the newsletter.
Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2019-02-15 00:00:00 | 114

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

So many init systems, so much history
http://blog.darknedgy.net/technology/2015/09/05/0/
https://engineeringblog.yelp.com/2016/01/dumb-init-an-init-for-docker.html

The history of the trend and evolution of init systems along with an example of a choice of init for a certain scenario, here containers.
NOVA fs
https://lwn.net/Articles/729812/

Remember "Speed up tests without code" in 96 where the author uses an fs in the ram to speed up tests, well this is sort of similar but on nonvolatile memory. The filesystems are usually optimized for disks, but that concept doesn't apply to memory, so we have to build one from scratch so that it's optimized making it snapshot-able at the same time. A nifty idea to say the least.
Keeping time and date (9)
https://www.linux.com/learn/distributed-systems-quick-and-simple-definition
https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/en/SSAL2T_8.2.0/com.ibm.cics.tx.doc/concepts/c_wht_is_distd_comptg.html
https://www.unix.com/pdf/CEP_in_distributed_systems.pdf
http://www.cs.wichita.edu/~chang/lecture/cs843/homework/dist-os.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clock_synchronization
http://mathieu.delalandre.free.fr/teachings/dcomputing/part2.pdf
https://www.cs.helsinki.fi/webfm_send/1232
https://serverfault.com/questions/19257/distributed-storage-filesystem-which-one-is-there-a-ready-to-use-product
http://xtreemfs.org/

In this issue we continue talking about time sensitive systems and operations, things such as the importance of time synchronization (there's a summary of many things we've seen in that wiki article), distributed systems, relatedness of events, and distributed storages. When multiple machines are involved time because an important factor.
QNX
https://membarrier.wordpress.com/2017/04/12/qnx-7-desktop/
https://membarrier.wordpress.com/2018/01/08/a-quick-update/
https://blackberry.qnx.com/en
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QNX

A forced reading and learning about a commercial Unix RTOS. This sort of leads into the coming links of next week for the Keeping time and date series.
Building the networking stack
http://www.saminiir.com/lets-code-tcp-ip-stack-1-ethernet-arp/
https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/networking/tuntap.txt
http://www.saminiir.com/lets-code-tcp-ip-stack-2-ipv4-icmpv4/
http://www.saminiir.com/lets-code-tcp-ip-stack-3-tcp-handshake/
http://www.saminiir.com/lets-code-tcp-ip-stack-4-tcp-data-flow-socket-api/
http://www.saminiir.com/lets-code-tcp-ip-stack-5-tcp-retransmission/
https://linux.die.net/man/7/tcp
https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/networking/ip-sysctl.txt

A series of articles about coding the TCP/IP stack from scratch on Linux. This is super interesting and makes you think about all the wraping and packing going around. I wasn't so accustomed with that stack before, it's good to know the inside out of it, at least a little. See also "Tun/Tap" in 64, and maybe all the encoding type of sections we've had too.
Keeping time and date (9.5)
https://www.unixtutorial.org/atime-ctime-mtime-in-unix-filesystems/
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/109003/what-are-the-legitimate-uses-of-the-touch-command
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/02/12/current_gps_epoch_ends/
https://lobste.rs/s/6iemve/fun_fact_gps_uses_10_bits_store_week_means
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_formatting_and_storage_bugs

A topic that may sound simple to some but that still needs to be mentioned for the series of links about time and date, this is about files/inodes metadata, timestamps. We're not talking here about ultra precision time keeping though. Related to the discussion of mtime in "TIMEZONEs" of 101 and "The Big Bang" in 29. I added three links about GPS and time formatting bug as they sprouted in the news recently and we've been discussing that since the start of this series. Hope you're enjoying it, there are still two entries I'm going to add to close the series, the last one isn't really about Unix but tie things well together. Maybe in the end I'll put it all together in an article.
After 2 years of security improvements
https://archive.fosdem.org/2017/schedule/event/linux_desktop_versus_windows10/attachments/slides/1730/export/events/attachments/linux_desktop_versus_windows10/slides/1730/fosdem_linux_desktop_security.pdf
https://lwn.net/Articles/708196/
https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-70-percent-of-all-security-bugs-are-memory-safety-issues/
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Security
https://seclists.org/oss-sec/2019/q1/119

Comparing a single corporate OS against a panoply of Linux distributions, that's not really fair. Maybe there are secure by default designs out there. In the meantime we've got a lot of work done in containerization, work on MAC, after meltdown and spectre, all the hype about fuzzing (especially Chrome team). How do you think we've done so far?
Debugging ELFs
https://osandamalith.com/2019/02/11/linux-reverse-engineering-ctfs-for-beginners/

Tired of all the talk the past entries we've had about ELF, executables, LD, all sorts of formats, GOT and PLT. There's more in this one other than that talk, the thing I liked about this article is the thinking that goes into reverse engineering the executable, the whole process of dissecting it, this is the novelty here.
XRender, wayland, composition, and Window management
https://keithp.com/~keithp/renderproblems/render-title.html
https://cmpwn.com/@sir/101568767470758639
https://catfox.life/2018/07/31/exposing-the-wayland-lie/
https://drewdevault.com/2019/02/10/Wayland-misconceptions-debunked.html

I was about to share that presentation about XRender when those other posts and the flaming discussion about Wayland came up. I won't say much about the talking but let's just mention that there are some good points that were brought up, moreover the usual step needed for a new project hoping to replace something that has been there since forever, it'll take time and things will be missing and it'll take a lot of arguments to replace what is already working.
Plan9 on static binaries
https://9p.io/wiki/plan9/why_static/index.html

A popular link this week. We've talked a lot about static builds in this newsletter, see "Static linked" in 111, "What to use other than statically linked executables" in 61. There are many opinions on the topic, what's your take?
Glitches
https://www.rob-sheridan.com/
https://snorpey.github.io/jpg-glitch/
http://www.mrspeaker.net/dev/jpgcrunk/
http://ucnv.github.io/pnglitch/

Multiple websites playing with the art of glitching, finding beauty in the non-perfect. See also both "Glitch art" in 84 and "DataErase" in 11.

Vermaden Valuable News

UNIX

How to Secure FreeBSD (server minimal edition).
https://www.adminbyaccident.com/freebsd/how-to-secure-freebsd/
GCC 8/9 vs. LLVM 7/8 Compiler Performance on POWER9 Raptor Talos II.
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=power9-gcc-clang&num=5
FreeBSD Foundation - Love what FreeBSD has done for your organization? Send your testimonial to FreeBSD Foundation!
https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/about/testimonials/
SPARC and TOD Modules on Illumos .
https://ptribble.blogspot.com/2019/02/sparc-and-tod-modules-on-illumos.html
Customizing OpenBSD xenodm.
https://www.tumfatig.net/20190208/customizing-openbsd-xenodm/
Modern Data Lake with Minio.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1MhWE2C59L7A5Oyv6x_PL1JGltykWjS6s/view
Nord - arctic north-bluish color palette.
https://arcticicestudio.github.io/nord
https://github.com/arcticicestudio/nord
NetBSD Desktop Part 6 - vi Editor - tmux - Unicode ${TERM}.
https://www.unitedbsd.com/d/12-netbsd-desktop-pt-6-vi1-editor-tmux-and-unicode-term
Customized Resolution for OpenBSD in VirtualBox.
https://www.tumfatig.net/20190131/customized-resolution-for-openbsd-in-virtualbox/
The mblaze is Maildir focused command line mail client.
https://github.com/chneukirchen/mblaze
Sony Pictures releases OpenColorIO under BSD license.
http://opencolorio.org/
Tricks QNX Uses to Outperform Other Microkernels.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9872640
2018 LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Awards - Winners from 2018 Year.
https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/2018-linuxquestions-org-members-choice-awards-128/?daysprune=-1
2017 LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Awards - Winners from 2017 Year.
https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/2017-linuxquestions-org-members-choice-awards-126/?daysprune=-1
FreeBSD Implements ASLR (Address Space Layout Randomization).
https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=343964
HardenedBSD has ASLR while FreeBSD just got (only) ASR.
https://twitter.com/lattera/status/1094717146402377728
Thoughts on SPARC Support in Illumos.
https://ptribble.blogspot.com/2019/02/thoughts-on-sparc-support-in-illumos.html
Handy AT&T UNIX Quick Guide from 1982.
https://twitter.com/mattblaze/status/1092222055754489856
Setup QEMU with HAX Acceleration on NetBSD.
http://polprog.net/blog/netbsd-hax/
OpenBSD imported OpenRsync (with pledge/unveil support) into its base system.
https://twitter.com/openbsd/status/1094750961107697664
https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20190211081518
https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/usr.bin/rsync/
https://github.com/kristapsdz/openrsync/blob/master/README.md
FreeBSD on ARM64 on Scalable Cloud Platform.
https://community.scaleway.com/t/freebsd-on-arm64/6678
The gotop activity monitor inspired by gtop and vtop written in Go.
https://github.com/cjbassi/gotop
Thoughts on SPARC Support in Illumos.
https://ptribble.blogspot.com/2019/02/thoughts-on-sparc-support-in-illumos.html
OpenNebula 5.7.80 Beta Contextualization Packages for FreeBSD Guest. "With this beta version, we are excited to announce initial support for the FreeBSD guests!"
https://opennebula.org/beta-contextualization-packages/
OmniOS Community Edition r151028o/r151026ao/r151022cm Available.
https://omniosce.org/article/028o-026a0-022cm
First Impressions of Project Trident 18.12 from DistroWatch.
https://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20190211#trident
First Draft of FreeBSD Mastery: Jails by Michael W. Lucas is complete.
https://mwl.io/archives/4048
IBM Looks at Adding Support for LLVM/Clang to AIX.
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=IBM-Looking-At-AIX-LLVM-Clang
https://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2019-February/130175.html
Minio - Mminimalist Object Storage Technology.
http://storagegaga.com/minio-the-minimalist-object-storage-technology/
Deploying Kubernetes on SmartOS.
https://youtu.be/rA0pcmqpRx4
The sysctlview GTK tool to explore FreeBSD sysctl-mib-tree is now comited to FreeBSD Ports.
https://freshports.org/deskutils/sysctlview/
https://gitlab.com/alfix/sysctlview/raw/master/README-images/2_img_sysctlview.png
KDE Plasma in FreeBSD Ports is updated to 5.15.
https://svnweb.freebsd.org/ports?view=revision&revision=492811
https://www.kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.15.0.php
Arch Linux Easy ZFS (ALEZ) Installer - ZFS Boot Environments on Linux.
https://github.com/danboid/ALEZ
Middleton BIOS for ThinkPad X61/T61/R61/X300.
https://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Middleton%27s_BIOS
Long Slow Death of Commercial Unix. "Apple MacOS and iOS are both derived from FreeBSD - and that installed base isn’t going anywhere."
https://www.networkworld.com/article/3339381/data-center/the-long-slow-death-of-unix.html
Proposal for new RPKI validator - OpenBSD rpki-client(1).
https://medium.com/@jobsnijders/a-proposal-for-a-new-rpki-validator-openbsd-rpki-client-1-15b74e7a3f65
The dm-pkg is simple script to use dmenu on FreeBSD to install package.
https://github.com/nicholasbernstein/dm-pkg/blob/master/dm-pkg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBhFNLyu3TU
Red Hat Satellite choses PostgreSQL instead MongoDB.
https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/red-hat-satellite-standardize-postgresql-backend
PostgreSQL 11.2/10.7/9.6.12/9.5.16/9.4.21 Released.
https://www.postgresql.org/about/news/1920/
FreeBSD User Tries Out NetBSD 8.0.
https://youtu.be/OxB70pg5Tsg
BSD Now 285 - BSD Strategy.
https://www.bsdnow.tv/285
USE Method - FreeBSD Performance Checklist.
http://www.brendangregg.com/USEmethod/use-freebsd.html
In Other BSDs for 2019/02/09
https://www.dragonflydigest.com/2019/02/09/22487.html
Lazy Reading for 2019/02/10.
https://www.dragonflydigest.com/2019/02/10/22508.html

Hardware

Work on ARM - Issue 81.
https://www.worksonarm.com/blog/woa-issue-81/
Blackbird POWER9 Micro ATX Motherboard from Raptor.
https://www.raptorcs.com/content/BK1B01/intro.html
AMD Ryzen 5 2500X and Ryzen 3 2300X Review.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/13945/the-amd-ryzen-5-2500x-and-ryzen-3-2300x-cpu-review/
FOSDEM 2019 - Pinebook Pro - PinePhone Dev Kits.
https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=7093&pid=44316#pid44316
PINE64 Community.
https://twitter.com/thepine64/status/1021864868893405185
https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=7158
Why More Organisations Will Move Toward Offline Tape Based Storage Strategy in 2019.
https://www.comparethecloud.net/articles/why-more-organisations-will-move-toward-an-offline-tape-based-storage-strategy-in-2019/
New Hardware from PINE64.
https://blog.hackster.io/new-hardware-from-pine64-a7c95e26684d

Life & Other

Salary Negotiation - Make More Money - Be More Valued.
https://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/
People Who Struggle to Get Out of Bed Are More Intelligent. People who went to bed after 11 P.M. and got up after 8 A.M. earned more money and enjoyed a happier lifestyle.
https://www.housebeautiful.com/lifestyle/news/a7911/people-struggle-to-get-out-of-bed-smarter/
Why Childhood Indoctrination Messes Up Kids (feat. Sarah Rocksdale)
https://youtu.be/WHunC3Z-ccE
I Cut the 'Big Five' Tech Giants From My Life. It Was Hell.
https://gizmodo.com/i-cut-the-big-five-tech-giants-from-my-life-it-was-hel-1831304194
PKI for Busy People.
https://rehn.me/posts/pki-for-busy-people.html

https://vermaden.wordpress.com/

Thoughts

Talk about what you love.

Archive

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

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
Share your point of view about the newsletter.
Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2019-02-08 00:00:00 | 113

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Fast file system again, some slides
https://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse451/13sp/lectures/16-ffs.pdf

Something to go along with "BSD fast file system" from issue 109 and our never ending love of the data storage stack on Unix.
Unix and Beyond
http://lsub.org/iwp92007/IWP9-Ritchie.mov

Ritchie goes over a small overview of Unix history and then jumps into the innovation that Plan9 brings.
SSD optimization
https://www.thomas-krenn.com/de/wikiDE/images/c/c6/20111026-optimal-usage-of-ssds-under-linux-UPDATED.pdf
https://linux.die.net/man/8/hdparm
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Hdparm
https://opensource.com/article/17/1/solid-state-drives-linux-enabling-trim-ssds
https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/6/html/storage_administration_guide/ch-ssd
https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/optimize-linux-ssds/
https://askubuntu.com/questions/1400/how-do-i-optimize-the-os-for-ssds
https://www.leaseweb.com/labs/2013/07/5-crucial-optimizations-for-ssd-usage-in-ubuntu-linux/

Most of those articles repeat the same talk about optimization, which is also a reminder of "SSDs will mess you up" in 34, we learn from such repetition.
Keeping time and date (8)
ftp://ftp.iitb.ac.in/LDP/en/Clock/Clock.pdf
https://serverfault.com/questions/284638/what-consequences-implications-can-arise-from-a-wrong-system-clock
https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-Real-Time-Operating-Systems-RTOS-that-NASA-has-used-and-why
https://web.archive.org/web/20070418040642/http://users.wmin.ac.uk/~beusdul/papers/scsc-space.pdf
https://www.rapitasystems.com/blog/cooperative-and-preemptive-scheduling-algorithms

This week let's focus on the concept of clock (similar to the tldp article in the third part of this series), reliant systems, what could go wrong if the time isn't right on a machine. This all leads to discussions about distributed systems, real-time OS, and other sensitive domains that require the time to be accurate.
Anatomy of a shell
https://drewdevault.com/2018/12/28/Anatomy-of-a-shell.html

Are you thinking of implementing your own shell or get to know it better. This small post gives an overview of some thinking that goes into the parsing phase.
Numeric username
https://www.dampfkraft.com/how-to-make-a-numeric-username-in-linux.html

Unexpected usernames made out of numbers only, want to do that and get weird unsolvable bugs, get ready. We do it because we can, is there any better reasons?
Networking stuffs
https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/eve-online-bgp-internet

What about launching 8000 VMs to run a simulated game-like network environment, check up what's needed to achieve this. The true BGP genius at his craft again.
From the heap to the stack
https://thesquareplanet.com/blog/smashing-the-stack-21st-century/

Remember that series we did on the heap, well now let's tackle the stack a bit too.
The internet of nags
https://0x46.net/thoughts/2019/02/01/dotfile-madness/

Dotfile management is hard, it requires knowledge of everything you've installed, default locations, environment variables, maybe a repository or directory, symbolic links, and much more.

Thoughts

In the absence of information, opinions become facts.

Archive

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

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

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

id:24ec1e06-21b7cac4-48144cc6-e49e090d

nixers newsletter issue | 2019-02-01 00:00:00 | 112

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Audio arch
https://www.learndigitalaudio.com/how-linux-audio-works-vs-windows-audio-2017
https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/akhwyr/tutorial_changing_pulseaudio_defaults_and_getting/

In conjunction with "Bird eye over pulseaudio internals" from 105, we get another small overview of the audio stack on Linux and an extra tutorial to crank up your pulseaudio config instead of wasting hq headphones on lq resampled sound.
Free and open source softwares for video and audio
https://obsproject.com/
https://wiki.linuxaudio.org/apps/daw_apps
https://lmms.io/
https://ardour.org/

A list of well polished programs that are super useful when doing media creation on Unix.
How much freedom, my freedom
https://eerielinux.wordpress.com/2019/01/28/zfs-and-gpl-terror-how-much-freedom-is-there-in-linux/
https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=2240

This week we have strong opinion pieces about licenses and what it means to have freedom in an open source project. Is all open source equal?
FreeBSD direction
http://www.leidinger.net/blog/2019/01/27/strategic-thinking-or-what-i-think-what-we-need-to-do-to-keep-freebsd-relevant/

An opinion article about the FreeBSD project, its perception on the world, its direction, its possible improvements, and weak points.
Don't freak out
https://blog.regehr.org/archives/1483
https://github.com/tdkehoe/blog/wiki/UNIX;-or,-Yes,-I%27m-Afraid-It%27s-Terminal
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYDYSSOA2f8

A nice blog we've seen before in "Undefined behaviour (a relapse)" of issue 38, a while ago. I've recently had to explain hard CS concept to someone and it's always helpful to review the basic, make things less freaky.
Tools of automation
https://github.com/zevweiss/enthrall
https://gitlab.com/mort96/remotedotool
http://www.linux-magazine.com/Issues/2017/205/Tutorial-Devilspie2

You might not have a use for the tools listed in this section whoever there's no loss in knowing they exist, you never know maybe this knowledge will be valuable someday.
Checkpoint mode
https://access.redhat.com/articles/2455211

The fascinating topic of process state recovery. I forgot to mention it along with "Desktop Pausing" of 110, it's a better explanation of the "Cryogenic on Unix" in issue 24.
Terminal madness again
http://blog.robertelder.org/detect-keyup-event-linux-terminal/

A discussion that involves two topics that I love, the TTY and X11. It's about how it's not really possible, and is probably a bad idea, to intercept key events in the TTY, especially key up events.
Tuning the Linux kernel
https://docs.tibco.com/pub/ast/2.5.4/doc/html/tuningguide/ch04s06.html
https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/6/html/performance_tuning_guide/s-memory-captun
https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/6/html/performance_tuning_guide/s-memory-tunables
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/57890/finding-out-the-values-of-kernel-options-related-to-sysctl-conf-and-sysctl-d

A review on some common options that can be configured in the Linux kernel, see also "The mighty proc" in 52.
Keeping time and date (7)
https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-etymology-of-cron
http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/
https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V7/usr/src/cmd/cron.c
https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/how-do-i-add-jobs-to-cron-under-linux-or-unix-oses/
https://mjanja.ch/2015/06/replacing-cron-jobs-with-systemd-timers/
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/278564/cron-vs-systemd-timers

Tick-tock tick-tock, Chronos is ticking the clock making things happen whenever they need to happen. In this series we explore cron and scheduled execution of programs. From the explanation of the word, the standard, an early simple implementation, to examples and a new kind of system with a different thinking.
Websockets the Unix way
http://websocketd.com/

In the same style as stunnel and inetd (see "Network and servers" in 58), we now have a simple websocket implementation taking input from normal streams.
Your phone is listening
https://www.geekrant.org/2016/05/08/phone-scam-part-1/
https://www.geekrant.org/2016/05/12/phone-scam-part-2/
https://www.geekrant.org/2016/05/25/phone-scam-part-3a/
https://www.geekrant.org/2016/05/31/phone-scam-part-4/

Nasty bugs laying deep inside the core network, obviously on an Ericsson node... This is not really Unix-related but super interesting to share.
False news
http://ide.mit.edu/sites/default/files/publications/2017%20IDE%20Research%20Brief%20False%20News.pdf
http://www.public.asu.edu/~fwang25/poster/Davis2013.pdf
https://snopes.com
https://politifact.com
https://factcheck.org
https://truthorfiction.com
https://hoax-slayer.com
https://urbanlegends.about.com

Along with "7 items you won't believe are shockingly amazing!" in 85 those should arm you against hoax, false information, and all that nasty stuff propagating on the WWW.

Vermaden Valuable News

UNIX

FreeBSD powerdxx 0.4.0 Released.
https://github.com/lonkamikaze/powerdxx/releases/tag/0.4.0
FreeBSD ZFS vs. TrueOS ZoF vs. DragonFlyBSD HAMMER2 vs. ZFS on Linux Benchmarks.
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=bsd-initial-zof
Install FreeBSD 12.0 plus KDE Plasma and Basic Applications.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qq3H8pflU0
OpenBSD Escape Key with Puffy for Cherry MX Keyboard.
https://www.etsy.com/listing/190868529/custom-esc-keycap-for-cherry-mx-swtich
The sysctlview is GTK tool to explore FreeBSD sysctl-mib-tree.
https://gitlab.com/alfix/sysctlview
https://gitlab.com/alfix/sysctlview/raw/master/doc/1_img_sysctlview.png
The Laarc.io is new Lobste.rs and Hacker News companion. ... and it runs FreeBSD :)
https://laarc.io/
Thunderbolt 3 on AMD motherboard using FreeBSD Bhyve PCIe passthru on Linux guest.
https://twitter.com/michael_yuji/status/1089769779961851904
Strategic thinking, or what I think what we need to do to keep FreeBSD relevant.
http://www.leidinger.net/blog/2019/01/27/strategic-thinking-or-what-i-think-what-we-need-to-do-to-keep-freebsd-relevant/
Installing FreeBSD with Dual-Boot on ThinkPad X1 Carbon 6th Generation.
https://market-ticker.org/post=234936
HardenedBSD 2018Q4 Quarterly Update.
https://github.com/HardenedBSD/freebsd-quarterly/blob/hardenedbsd/2018q4/2018q4/hardenedbsd.md
ClonOS to be Rolled Out. ClonOS is web UI for controlling/deploying/managing FreeBSD Jails containers and Bhyve/Xen VMs.
https://hype.codes/clonos-be-rolled-out
Making OpenBSD Boot Logo with Spleen.
http://akpoff.com/archive/2019/making_an_openbsd_boot_logo_with_spleen.html
Setting the Boot Logo on ThinkPad.
http://akpoff.com/archive/2019/setting_the_boot_logo_on_a_thinkpad.html
FreeBSD Foundation Update - 2019/01.
https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/news-and-events/newsletter/freebsd-foundation-update-january-2019/
New ASLR code in review on FreeBSD.
https://reviews.freebsd.org/D5603
Credativ Group massively expands U.S. footprint with OmniTI acquisition.
https://omniti.com/remembers/2019/credativ-massively-expands-us-footprint.html
Alpine Linux moved back from LibreSSL to OpenSSL.
https://lists.alpinelinux.org/alpine-devel/6308.html
Avoiding Duplicate cron Jobs.
https://dan.langille.org/2019/01/13/avoiding-duplicate-cronjobs/
Upgrade Process Using GPT.
https://oshogbo.vexillium.org/blog/62/
BSD Now - Episode 283.
https://bsdnow.fireside.fm/283
Iocage 1.1 Release.
https://github.com/iocage/iocage/releases/tag/1.1
Bareos 18.2.5 Released.
https://www.bareos.com/files/press/english/bareos_18.2_final_en.pdf
OPNsense 19.1 Released.
https://forum.opnsense.org/index.php?topic=11398.0
FreeBSD CI Weekly Report 2019-01-27.
https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-testing/2019-January/001777.html
OpenIndiana Monitoring with Icinga.
https://community.icinga.com/t/openindiana-monitoring/248
Reimplement BIO_ORDERED handling in nvd(4) on FreeBSD. Sync write latency from ~2.0 ms to ~1.1 ms by not sleeping without reason till next HZ tick. ZFS pool with 8 ZVOLs writing 4KB blocks shows ~950 IOPS instead of ~750 IOPS before.
https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=343562
ZFS Feature Matrix.
https://zgrep.org/zfs.html
Setting Up Quick Minimal Jail on FreeBSD (ZFS).
https://markdownshare.com/view/981a46a3-8fba-4793-9b8f-b576760312bc
In Other BSDs for 2019/01/26.
https://www.dragonflydigest.com/2019/01/26/22439.html

Hardware

You can now get FreeBSD daemon on the WASD keyboards.
http://www.wasdkeyboards.com/index.php/products/keycap-mod-packs/os-cherry-mx-keycaps-set-of-2.html
New Pinebook Pro from PINE64. More powerful but keyboard layout still sicks.
https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=7093&pid=43850#pid43850
https://liliputing.com/2019/01/pinebook-pro-linux-laptop-coming-this-year-for-199-and-up.html
https://baldnerd.com/pine64-pinebook-pro-rk3399-laptop/
https://i.imgur.com/OxoxmRo.jpg
Intel to Discontinue Itanium 9700 'Kittson' Processor - Last of the Itaniums.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/13924/intel-to-discontinue-itanium-9700-kittson-processor-the-last-itaniums

Life & Other

Do they have work/life balance? Investigating potential employers with GitHub.
https://codewithoutrules.com/2019/01/31/does-company-have-worklife-balance/

https://vermaden.wordpress.com/

Thoughts

Culture is shaped by the best behaviour a leader is willing to promote.

Archive

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

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
Share your point of view about the newsletter.
Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2019-01-25 00:00:00 | 111

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

The design of Unix OS
http://160592857366.free.fr/joe/ebooks/ShareData/Design%20of%20the%20Unix%20Operating%20System%20By%20Maurice%20Bach.pdf

This is complementary to "The classic, the beautiful" of issue 105. Get your source from this issue and image from the next link. It goes in depth into the thinking needed to build an OS. As with this type of content, this is quite a big read so enjoy it over a long period or until you get bored, which hopefully will take some time.
Installing research Unix
http://decuser.blogspot.com/2015/11/installing-and-using-research-unix.html
http://simh.trailing-edge.com/

This is to go alongside with the previous link. The instructions are clear and simple to follow, enjoy! Kind of similar to "Doing it in V7" of 58.
An upgrade
https://github.com/hughpyle/ASR33

Or how to connect the old to the new, quite an adventure in terminal land.
A user's view of the OS
http://www.kean.edu/~gchang/tech2920/http___professor.wiley.com_CGI-BIN_JSMPROXY_DOCUMENTDIRECTORDEV+DOCUMENTID&0471715425+DOCUMENTSUBID&1+PRFVALNAME&pdfs_ch16.pdf
https://blog.simon-frey.eu/how-switching-my-parents-over-to-linux-saved-me-a-lot-of-headache-and-support
https://medium.com/@idarwin/openbsd-on-the-acer-aspire-one-at-ten-48e3e0caf243

To take the place of your user and give them what they need you first need to know who your users are. That first link lists everything that is required, and not so often thought about, to create a usable OS interface. A reminder of "Ever installed a Unix-like system for a friend who's not techie?" in issue 54. And finishing with yet another of those trendy OpenBSD on a laptop type of post.
Hey can you xerox this for me
https://haydenjames.io/finding-linux-compatible-printers/
http://www.openprinting.org/

I finally found how to use the printer at work, it wasn't that hard but it's nice to put the information out there for others.
rc.d on OpenBSD
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjHDvO_haQY

Let's see how an init and service/daemon manager could be implemented simply and effectively, are you interested in this, does it entice you?
Keeping time and date (6)
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/232767/does-ntpd-have-a-default-driftfile
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Systemd-timesyncd
https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/linux/SwitchingToTimesyncd
https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/linux/SystemdTimesyncdFailure
https://chrony.tuxfamily.org/comparison.html
https://www.eecis.udel.edu/~mills/ntp/html/discipline.html
https://www.ijs.si/time/temp-compensation/
https://blog.dan.drown.org/beaglebone-black-ntpgps-server-temperature-compensation-part-2/
https://www.maximintegrated.com/en/design/tools/calculators/product-design/rtc.cfm
https://forums.parallax.com/discussion/130410/timing-drift-how-do-you-read-ppm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision_Time_Protocol
https://www.cs.rutgers.edu/~pxk/417/notes/ptp.html
https://blog.meinbergglobal.com/2013/10/21/ieee-1588-clock-types/
https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2327884
https://events.static.linuxfound.org/sites/events/files/slides/lcjp14_ichikawa_0.pdf

This week we switch the focus to NTP (see number 5 again), have a discussion about things we may not directly think about that affect time precision, and that finally leads us to talk about PTP for when NTP is not enough. Some interesting things to keep in mind: ppm, parts per million of beats can be used to measure clock accuracy, normalized frequency offset is also called drift. This will take us next week on the journey of real time clock, real time Unix systems, and maybe the use of time in distributed computing or other time sensitive operations.
Static linked
http://s.minos.io/
https://github.com/minos-org/minos-static

Building static binaries isn't that easy, this project aims at making it easier by providing recipe to do this.
A post from that blog to follow
https://begriffs.com/posts/2019-01-19-inside-c-standard-lib.html

Remember the "New blog to follow" of 58, in this article we do a roundup of the C89 standard, a quick brief overview... Well brief but still quite thorough and entertaining.
Getting inspired by OpenBSD
http://austingroupbugs.net/view.php?id=1134
http://austingroupbugs.net/view.php?id=859

I find this case to be a convincing one, this is something that is required these days and that probably needs to be standardized across the Unix panoply.
APT getting it again
https://justi.cz/security/2019/01/22/apt-rce.html

Remember "Nagging about Debian" in 63 and "APT and https" in 60, this is an update on the topic.
Bonus
https://markplusplus.wordpress.com/2006/10/01/pitch-correct-play-speed-with-mplayer/

I've been listening to a lot of talks recently and speeding up the tempo changes the pitch, so if you don't want everyone to sound like a martian this will help. I've also learned that mpv has this behavior by default or through --audio-pitch-correction.

Vermaden Valuable News

UNIX

FreeBSD fixed pfsync change that break CARP.
https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=343130
Restoration of Early UNIX Artifacts.
https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/usenix09/tech/full_papers/toomey/toomey.pdf
Amiga 500 Papercraft Pattern.
http://rockybergen.com/whatsnew/2019/1/15/amiga-500-papercraft-design
https://www.docdroid.net/file/download/PE7D4vg/amiga-500-ver1.pdf
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/564229dee4b0d16067409cb0/t/5c3e9fb2575d1f82ff89dabc/1547779216745/Amiga+500+-+Papercraft+Pattern?format=750w
Ansible BSD Working Group.
https://github.com/ansible/community/wiki/BSD
Ansible Solaris Working Group.
https://github.com/ansible/community/wiki/Solaris
In Other BSDs for 2019/01/19.
https://www.dragonflydigest.com/2019/01/19/22394.html
Debian systemd maintainer will not maintain systemd anymore. "What's going on is just too stupid/crazy."
https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/systemd-devel/2019-January/041971.html
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/agna5n/debian_systemd_maintainer_steps_down_over/
AMIGA gets LZ4 for 68k CPUs.
https://github.com/arnaud-carre/lz4-68k
[POLISH] ZFS - Rewolucja w Systemach Plikow (Mariusz Zaborski).
https://oshogbo.vexillium.org/pdf/programista_zfs_2015.pdf
LiteCLI is user friendly command line client for SQLite database.
https://www.pgcli.com/launching-litecli.html
OpenBSD can now join any open WiFi network.
https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20190120142708
OpenBSD deletes vmm(4) on i386.
https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20190120142529
NomadBSD 1.2-RC1 Released.
http://nomadbsd.org/index.html#rel1.2-rc1
Open source Spotify UNIX client available on FreeBSD as audio/spotifyd port.
https://svnweb.freebsd.org/ports?view=revision&revision=490765
OpenBSD added support for 2TB of memory on amd64.
https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20190121081245
HardenedBSD 1200058.2 Available.
https://hardenedbsd.org/article/op/2019-01-20/stable-release-hardenedbsd-stable-12-stable-v12000582
SoloBSD 19.01-STABLE based on HardenedBSD 1200058.2 Available.
https://www.solobsd.org/index.php/2019/01/23/solobsd-19-01-stable/
OmniOS Community Edition r151028l/r151026al/r151022cj Available.
https://omniosce.org/article/028l-026al-022cj
Wayland Support on BSDs Continuing to Improve.
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Wayland-BSD-Improving-2019
Lumina from Project Trident will replace Fluxbox with their own WM after its finished.
https://twitter.com/q5sys/status/1087422097499062274
For the Love of Pipes.
https://blog.jessfraz.com/post/for-the-love-of-pipes/
FreeBSD adds trim(8) command for devices with wear leveling algorithms.
https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=343118
ClarityOS is Safe/Secure/Modern/Reliable HardenedBSD fork. Goal is to make BSD as open and customizable as possible, while keeping it easy, simple and accessible to as many people as possible!
https://clarityos.net/
https://clarityos.net/images/screen.png
MidnightBSD Developer Journal.
https://www.justjournal.com/users/mbsd/entry/33772
Out-of-the-Box 10GE Network Benchmarks on Linux Distributions and FreeBSD 12.
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=10gbe-linux-freebsd12&num=3
FreeBSD in top(1) will not now show swap line if there are no swap devices.
https://reviews.freebsd.org/D18928
Wine 4.0 Released.
https://www.winehq.org/news/2019012201
AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan.
https://github.com/GPUOpen-Drivers/AMDVLK
Kerberized NFS4 in Mixed Environment. FreeBSD 12.0-RELEASE as KDC/Kerberos/NFS4 Server with Windows/Ubuntu as Clients.
https://amoradi.org/public/kerberized_nfsv4.txt
XigmaNAS 11.2.0.4.6400 Released.
https://sourceforge.net/projects/xigmanas/files/XigmaNAS-11.2.0.4/11.2.0.4.6400/
FreeBSD utility nsysctl to show MIB tree in XML.
https://twitter.com/alfsiciliano/status/1087561685693427712
HOWTO - VNET Jails on FreeBSD 12 with ZFS.
https://www.reddit.com/r/freebsd/comments/ahdbbq/howto_jails_freebsd_12_vnet_zfs/
Building FreeBSD based home router.
https://kamila.is/learning/building-my-home-router/
Project Trident 18.12 Overview.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YizY1YblzU
What's Wrong with tar?
https://www.cyphar.com/blog/post/20190121-ociv2-images-i-tar
BSD Now 282 - Open the Rsync.
https://bsdnow.fireside.fm/282
ClonOS 19.01-RELEASE Available - First Public Release.
https://clonos.tekroutine.com/download.html

Hardware

Rock Pi 4 Review - Is this Raspberry Pi challenger you've been looking for?
https://www.techrepublic.com/article/rock-pi-4-review-is-this-the-raspberry-pi-challenger-youve-been-looking-for/
Freedom and Privacy in the Datacenter.
https://media.ccc.de/v/froscon2018-2170-freedom_and_privacy_in_the_datacenter
Introducing Ultra EPYC AMD Powered Sun Ultra 24 Workstation.
https://www.servethehome.com/introducing-the-ultra-epyc-amd-powered-sun-ultra-24-workstation/
Thin-ITX AMD AM4 Motherboard.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/13885/the-true-shortest-am4-motherboard-thinitx-comes-to-amd
Backblaze Hard Drive Stats for 2018.
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-stats-for-2018/
Double Height DDR4 - 32GB Modules Reviewed.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/13694/double-height-ddr4-gskill-zadak-2x32gb-ddr4-3200

Life & Other

Men's and Women's Brains.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQ9L9YBJkk8
Philip Zimbardo’s Response to Recent Criticisms of the Stanford Prison Experiment.
https://www.prisonexp.org/response/
50 Years Ago Sugar Industry Quietly Paid Scientists to Point Blame at Fat.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/09/13/493739074/50-years-ago-sugar-industry-quietly-paid-scientists-to-point-blame-at-fat
Students Learn From People They Love.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/17/opinion/learning-emotion-education.html
The Process of Mastering a Skill.
https://azeria-labs.com/the-process-of-mastering-a-skill/
Real Hardware for the FreeBSD BeaST Storage System.
https://mezzantrop.wordpress.com/2019/01/18/the-real-hardware-for-the-beast-storage-system/
Remote Code Execution in Linux apt/apt-get Commands.
https://justi.cz/security/2019/01/22/apt-rce.html
The Alarming Decline of Quality Youth Playtime.
https://houseoflawandorder.com/the-alarming-decline-of-quality-youth-playtime/
Quake 1.5 Refreshed FPS Classic with New Maps/Monsters/Mayhem.
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2019/01/18/quake-1-5-is-a-massive-mod-overhaul-for-the-fps-classic/amp/

https://vermaden.wordpress.com/

Thoughts

Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.

Archive

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

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
Share your point of view about the newsletter.
Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2019-01-18 00:00:00 | 110

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Reminiscence of the olden' days
https://apenwarr.ca/log/20190111
https://apenwarr.ca/log/20190114
https://medium.com/@bblfish/what-are-the-failings-of-pgp-web-of-trust-958e1f62e5b7

I like it when someone applies their expertise of the past to a problem that they find similar in the present. Here we're discussing containers and showing a demo while saving a lot in the size of the image. As an extra there's a deep well thought meditation about the topic of multi-factor authentication, highly recommended.
Desktop Pausing
https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2018/09/19/freebsd-desktop-part-16-configuration-pause-any-application/

One of the perfect and useful example of last week 109 "What's that wmutils thingish on suckless rocks list".
Looking for answers
https://unix.stackexchange.com/users/885/gilles

One of the top contributors in the Unix section of stackexchange, his replies are thorough and straight to the point.
Making things colorful
http://jvns.ca/zines

If you've never heard of this blogger this is your lucky day. There's a lot of book and helping sheets on the website in the same style as _why, no wonder the author is also involved in ruby.
Xenix tales
https://github.com/retrohun/blog/tree/master/dt/xenixtales

This jumped in the news recently, it's fun to have a blog hosted on github but inside of a readme instead of a github page.
Explaining what is FreeBSD without shooting yourself in the foot
https://www.fossmint.com/what-is-freebsd-why-should-you-choose-it-over-linux/

Actually, scrap that title aside, it's not a perfect article at all. See also "And BSD for the Linux guys and gals" of issue 40 which was a bit better.
FreeBSD malware
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bT_k06Xg-BE

Remember all that talk about PLT/GOT we had previously, well it's paying off, we're now able to understand what this talk is about. Also a continuation of "BSD hacking and security" in issue 63.
Memory safety on Linux
https://blog.araj.me/state-of-memory-safety-in-linux/
https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/security/self-protection.html
https://kernsec.org/wiki/index.php/Kernel_Self_Protection_Project

With all that talk about FreeBSD we're interested in a refreshment, let's see what's up in the Linux world. We could've checked OpenBSD but we're too used to jumping in that direction when it comes to security.
Keeping time and date (5)
http://www.oc.nps.edu/oc2902w/gps/timsys.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Positioning_System#Timekeeping
https://developers.google.com/time/smear
https://www.eecis.udel.edu/~mills/ntp/html/ntpd.html
https://www.masterclock.com/company/masterclock-inc-blog/network-synchronization-internet-ntp-servers-vs-gps-ntp-servers
https://linux.die.net/man/1/rdate
https://archive.li/l4A9J#selection-1131.46-1137.278
https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/sysadmin/NtpdToChrony
https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/sysadmin/NTPDaemonWhyAvoid
https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/sysadmin/NTPDaemonWhen
https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/making-every-leap-second-count-with-our-new-public-ntp-servers

Let's first review the first issue "Keeping time and date (1)" to refresh our memory about what is time and if days are really 24h. Are there instruments available to measure time precisely, how do they take into account the earth uneven speed. We want to still track time as a drift from that stable time but how do we propagate the changes, let's hear again about leap seconds and the new concept of smear time. And we finish with the introduction to the standard method to propagate external time, to sync up with the world and the sources of precise time, along with different examples on how to do that.
TTY, change?
https://lwn.net/Articles/343828/

Traveling back to 2009 to remind us of the state of the TTY infrastructure on Linux, and mostly in general what needs to be supported and expected from all platforms.

Vermaden Valuable News

UNIX

Installing and Updating FreeBSD 11.0 on Raspberry Pi.
https://solence.de/2017/03/15/installing-and-updating-freebsd-11-0-release-on-a-raspberry-pi/
ZFS on Linux Runs into Snag with Linux 5.0.
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=ZFS-On-Linux-5.0-Problem
Create your own video streaming server with Linux or FreeBSD.
https://opensource.com/article/19/1/basic-live-video-streaming-server
hexyl - command-line hex viewer for terminal. Colors different categories of bytes (NULL/printable ASCII/ASCII whitespace/other ASCII/non-ASCII).
https://github.com/sharkdp/hexyl
How Vim Shaped My Writing.
https://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2016/10/how-vim-shaped-my-writing.html
Debugging Rust with VSCode on FreeBSD.
https://venshare.com/debugging-rust-with-vscode-on-freebsd/
In Other BSDs for 2019/01/12.
https://www.dragonflydigest.com/2019/01/12/22379.html
How OpenBSD is secure compared to other operating systems?
https://www.reddit.com/r/openbsd/comments/af1s00/how_openbsd_is_secure_compared_to_other_operating/
FreeBSD adds bluetooth-config script to simplify setting up Bluetooth connections.
https://svnweb.freebsd.org/changeset/base/342945
The good and the bad of Linux's NetworkManager.
https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/linux/NetworkManagerGoodBad
Linux network-scripts being deprecated.
https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/linux/NetworkScriptsAndPPPoE
The CADT Model - mostly used in Linux environments.
https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html
We are now closer to the Y2038 bug than the Y2K bug.
https://www.jwz.org/blog/2019/01/we-are-now-closer-to-the-y2038-bug-than-the-y2k-bug/
FreeBSD adds support for Clang Coverage Sanitizer in kernel (KCOV).
https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=342962
Powersaving with DragonFly BSD Laptop.
https://www.dragonflybsd.org/docs/user/Powersave/?updated
Difference Between ZFS Scrub and Resilver.
https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/solaris/ZFSResilversVsScrubs
Risk that comes from ZFS on Linux not being GPL Compatible. Actually its GPL that is not compatible with CDDL (ZFS license). Not the other way around.
https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/linux/ZFSNonGPLRisk
FreeBSD takes vmm(4) towards multicore Bhyve AMD support.
https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=343075
Ansible plugin for remotely provisioning FreeBSD Jails separately from their Jail host.
https://github.com/austinhyde/ansible-sshjail
Update Intel Microcode on FreeBSD.
https://www.thomas-krenn.com/en/wiki/Update_Intel_Microcode_on_FreeBSD
Building spotifyd on NetBSD.
https://atomicules.co.uk/2019/01/17/Building-Spotifyd-on-NetBSD.html
Building my FreeBSD-based home router.
https://kamila.is/learning/building-my-home-router/
HardenedBSD 1100056.12 Available.
https://hardenedbsd.org/article/op/2019-01-18/stable-release-hardenedbsd-stable-11-stable-v110005612
BSD Now 281 - EPYC Server Battle.
https://www.jupiterbroadcasting.com/128846/epyc-server-battle-bsd-now-281/
OpenRSYNC - clean-room implementation of rsync with a BSD (ISC) license.
https://github.com/kristapsdz/openrsync
FreeBSD and UEFI Boot.
https://blog.tyk.nu/blog/freebsd-and-uefi-boot/
Synaptics Touchpad on FreeBSD.
https://wiki.freebsd.org/SynapticsTouchpad
OpenBSD Content Filtering Proxy HOWTO in One Tweet :)
https://twitter.com/ogmaconnect1/status/983813448504094721
Aphelia - minimalist window manager.
https://github.com/vardy/aphelia
The tinywm.c is a window manager in 50 lines of C code.
https://github.com/mackstann/tinywm/blob/master/tinywm.c
OpenDoas: Portable Version of OpenBSD doas Command.
https://git.duncano.de/opendoas/about/
OpenBSD Packages Statistics.
https://pkgstat-openbsd.perso.pw/
The Art of Unix Programming by Eric Steven Raymond reformatted by Martin Tournoij.
https://arp242.net/the-art-of-unix-programming/
Reproducible NetBSD!
https://tests.reproducible-builds.org/netbsd/netbsd.html
FreeBSD PR (Problem Reports) Stats.
https://people.freebsd.org/~miwi/gnats/
Using cloud-init with SmartOS.
https://shaner.life/using-cloud-init-with-smartos/
Shawn Webb (co-creator of HardenedBSD) started new project to rewrite FreeBSD bhyve in Rust.
https://twitter.com/lattera/status/1085711849469952000

Hardware

Flashing my Lenovo x230 with Coreboot.
https://www.chucknemeth.com/flash-lenovo-x230-coreboot/
POWER9 Scales Up To 1.2 TB/s of I/O.
https://fuse.wikichip.org/news/1653/power9-scales-up-to-1-2-tb-s-of-i-o-targets-nvlink-3-opencapi-memory-for-2019/
V-Raptor is 24-Core ARM Server Based on SocioNext SC2A11 SoC.
https://www.cnx-software.com/2019/01/08/v-raptor-24-core-arm-server-socionext-sc2a11/
AMD Opteron X3421 Benchmarks and Review Low Cost Atom Competitor.
https://www.servethehome.com/amd-opteron-x3421-benchmarks-and-review-a-low-cost-atom-competitor/
Computer for CyberSecurity BSD-OS (SecBSD).
https://www.gofundme.com/computer-for-cybersecurity-bsdos

Life & Other

Australia Becomes First Western Nation to Ban Secure Encryption.
https://www.extremetech.com/internet/281991-australia-becomes-first-western-nation-to-ban-secure-encryption
Facebook's 10 Year Challenge is Just a Harmless Meme Right?
https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-10-year-meme-challenge/
Łódź Revitalised - Poland's Third Largest City is Under Transformation.
https://uml.lodz.pl/files/public/dla_biznesu/investlodz/fdi-lodz-revitalised.pdf
Why Microsoft Word must Die.
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/10/why-microsoft-word-must-die.html

https://vermaden.wordpress.com/

Thoughts

Food for thoughts of this week.

"To maintain these strong counter-scientific consensus views, you kind of have to have a lack of knowledge." - Philip Fernbach

Archive

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

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
Share your point of view about the newsletter.
Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2019-01-11 00:00:00 | 109

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

The philosophy still matters
http://marmaro.de/docs/studium/unix-phil/unix-phil.pdf

We often hear the "what is" or "how to", this paper is about the "why is".
BSD fast file system
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uF_J-itJDwM

A really beautiful and approachable presentation about the BSD FFS, data storage on Unix is so much fun. A highly recommended talk.
Bitrot data integrity
https://dataswamp.org/~solene/2017-03-17-integrity.html

We might have mentioned bitrot indirectly in this newsletter so let's do it explicitly now. This article should cover the basic concept.
Remember university days?
http://fabiensanglard.net/floating_point_visually_explained/

Are you a university student and want to refresh your memory about how to encoding floats or maybe you've never seen those before, don't worry it's all explained in there. It's all about finding a way to represent and pack information in bits, just like what we saw in 71 "Let's play with encoding and formats" or 61 "ID3 tags" and many more issues before.
Process infection
https://www.tarlogic.com/en/blog/linux-process-infection-part-i/

How to hide your mischevious deeds without them being noticed spontaneously, this is what is tackled in this article. It's only the tip though, the first one in the series touching listing processes that can be ptraceable.
Keeping time and date (4)
https://www.uninformativ.de/blog/postings/2018-09-15/0/POSTING-en.html
https://lobste.rs/s/jeeq9d
http://strugglers.net/~andy/blog/2018/12/24/the-internet-of-unprofitable-things/

Let's take a small pause from the kernel stuff and start reviewing again DST, and slowly introducing the topic of NTP.
Fun guy
https://lukesmith.xyz/blogindex.html

You might or might not like what this person is doing on their platform but it still deserves some attention.
Console replacement
https://arcan-fe.com/2018/10/31/walkthrough-writing-a-kmscon-console-like-window-manager-using-arcan/

It's my first time cloning the Arcan project and trying it first hand by going through the tutorial, it's really nifty, give it a try. It gives that gaming framework vibe which is quite interesting and makes you wonder about what kind of user interfaces could possibly look like.
What's that wmutils thingish on suckless rocks list
https://venam.nixers.net/blog/unix/2019/01/07/win-automation.html

I wrote an article to clarify things to those who get confused about X11 window manipulation utilities and for everyone else who simply are looking for new ideas. This was principally made to cover only wmutils but I thought of making it broader.

Vermaden Valuable News

UNIX

In Other BSDs for 2019/01/05.
https://www.dragonflydigest.com/2019/01/05/22307.html
Devin Teske made sysconf(8) to safely edit system config files on FreeBSD. Another great tool after sysrc(8) that allows safe edit of system rc files. https://github.com/freebsdfrau/FrauBSD/tree/master/sysconf

New PEFS 2018.12.29 Release. http://pefs.io/blog/2018/12/release-20181229/?fbclid=IwAR2fPxLnl18rfAVcQ6OmMR7FhsRGuorHq84xYhQ-cnO2m7_7Z2aSFB65PLI Revive Cisco IDS Into Capable OpenBSD Computer. https://komlositech.wordpress.com/2018/12/30/revive-a-cisco-ids-into-a-capable-openbsd-firewall/ How I did start using FreeBSD. https://www.banym.de/how-i-did-start-using-freebsd.html MacBook Pro 9.2 Gets FreeBSD Support. https://twitter.com/FreeBSDHelp/status/1081395210259595265 New HardenedBSD 13.0 Image for RPI3. https://hardenedbsd.org/~shawn/rpi3/2019-01-05/HardenedBSD-aarch64-13.0-HARDENEDBSD-fa32a12f857-RaspberryPi3.img.xz https://twitter.com/lattera/status/1081919725611950082 FreeBSD gives sh(1) proper default prompt instead of just "$". https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=342812 More FreeBSD RFC Sendmail Deprecation Discussion. https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-arch/2017-December/018712.html DistroWatch - Feature Story - FreeBSD 12.0-RELEASE Review. "(...) this release feels like a polished and improved incremental step forward." https://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20190107#freebsd DistroWatch - Musings on Distros After Prolonged Use (2019). "FreeBSD is probably my favourite server-oriented operating system, mostly because it never surprises me. FreeBSD tends to do what you tell it to do, and just do what you tell it to do." https://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20190107#lookback New ZFS on FreeBSD Implementation Can Now Be Tested with TrueOS. https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=ZFS-On-Linux-Test-TrueOS-Spin https://pkg.trueos.org/iso/snapshot-zol/ OmniOS Community Edition r151028j/r151026aj/r151022ch. https://omniosce.org/article/release-028j-026aj-022ch FreeBSD Foundation - December 2018 - Development Projects Update. https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/blog/december-2018-development-projects-update/ Zackup - Backup to ZFS - Inspired by BackupPC. https://github.com/digineo/zackup POSIX Shell and Utilities. https://shellhaters.org/ OPNsense 18.7.10 Released. https://forum.opnsense.org/index.php?topic=10903.0 A wc clone written in Rust. https://crates.io/crates/cw FreeBSD as my Network Storage Server (Part 1). https://www.jasonvanpatten.com/2015/11/26/freebsd-as-my-network-storage-server/ FreeBSD as my Network Storage Server (Part 2). https://www.jasonvanpatten.com/2015/11/26/freebsd-as-my-network-storage-server-part-2/ Knightmare: DevOps Cautionary Tale. https://dougseven.com/2014/04/17/knightmare-a-devops-cautionary-tale/ IOCCC: Best of Show. https://www.ioccc.org/2018/mills/hint.html Quick Naive Benchmarks on AMD A8-5550M APU on FreeBSD (with and without AESNI). https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2018-December/072466.html Goal of GameBSD is to provide a place for students to learn about programming and technology. https://gamebsd.com/index.html AIX 7.2 running on AARCH64 (ARM) Pinebook with QEMU. https://twitter.com/astr0baby/status/1082811124897251328 https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Dwbq92OXgAAUZ7z.jpg OpenBSD Router. http://www.homeandofficeit.com/Main/OpenBSDRouter New console font Spleen made default on OpenBSD. https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20190110064857 https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Dwida_RW0AE9VOq.jpg Interactive VIM Tutorial. https://openvim.com/ ZFS on Linux does not work on Linux 5.0 kernels. https://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=154714516832389

Hardware AMD Ryzen Mobile 3000-Series Launched - 2nd Gen Mobile at 15W-35Wand Chromebooks. https://www.anandtech.com/show/13771/amd-ces-2019-ryzen-mobile-3000-series-launched AMD launches two new A-series 6W chips for Chromebooks. https://liliputing.com/2019/01/amd-launches-two-new-a-series-chips-for-chromebooks.html AMD Powered Acer Chromebook 315 Announced. https://www.anandtech.com/show/13783/acer-at-ces-amd-powered-acer-chromebook-315-announced Huawei claims its Kunpeng 920 ARM based processor is the industry’s fastest. 64 cores clocked at 2.6GHz with 8-channel DDR4 memory. Also two 100G RoCE ports and support for PCIe Gen4 and CCIX. https://venturebeat.com/2019/01/06/huawei-claims-its-kunpeng-920-arm-based-risc-processor-is-the-industrys-fastest/ Huawei Unveils Industry's Highest-Performance ARM-based CPU. https://www.huawei.com/en/press-events/news/2019/1/huawei-unveils-highest-performance-arm-based-cpu Samsung Plans 3nm Gate-All-Around FETs in 2021. https://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1333318 Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon 7th Gen Gets Thinner. https://www.anandtech.com/show/13833/lenovo-at-ces-2019-7th-gen-thinkpad-x1-carbon-gets-thinner Life & Other Amazon sent 1,700 audio recordings of Alexa user to a stranger. https://www.hackread.com/amazon-sent-audio-recordings-of-alexa-user-to-stranger/?fbclid=IwAR0B9CiTTpOxDClsNmfrlmRxyzP1nHzMYbCk2e8aAI8EgNkgKvyImJXGd-A Before you can be with others, first learn to be alone. https://aeon.co/ideas/before-you-can-be-with-others-first-learn-to-be-alone 10 Harmful Effects of Religion. http://sarahrocksdale.wixsite.com/blog/single-post/2019/01/08/10-Harmful-Effects-of-Religion System Down: systemd-journald Exploit. https://www.qualys.com/2019/01/09/system-down/system-down.txt The State Of Software Security In 2019. https://noncombatant.org/2019/01/06/state-of-security-2019/ The Developer Experience Bait-and-Switch. https://infrequently.org/2018/09/the-developer-experience-bait-and-switch/ LinkedIn violates privacy and detects usage of browser extensions. https://github.com/dandrews/nefarious-linkedin Classic Doom gets 3D/HD remaster - courtesy of the fans. https://www.pcgamesn.com/doom/doom-remaster RPG Codex Review: ATOM RPG (Remix of Fallout Story). https://rpgcodex.net/content.php?id=11080 Facebook is the new crapware. https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/09/facebook-is-the-new-crapware/ https://vermaden.wordpress.com/ Thoughts Whenever you learn something new it adds, mixes, and changes the way you perceive the world around you. Here's a fun Quora thread: https://www.quora.com/Does-programming-change-the-way-you-think-and-see-things Archive You can find the archive of past newsletters here: https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php Contribute There are many ways to contribute: If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter. Share it with your friends. Share your point of view about the newsletter. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter. 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 issue | 2019-01-04 00:00:00 | 108

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Kernel userspace boundary
https://lwn.net/Articles/571934/
https://wiki.freebsd.org/Releng/ABI
https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/what-about-gaming-on-freebsd.723/page-5#post-401401

A follow on "Stable API nonsense" from last issue (107) and also "OpenBSD doas update and virt" in 99. Versioning and setting the boundaries of what can be considered backward compatible is hard.
Namespaces
https://www.toptal.com/linux/separation-anxiety-isolating-your-system-with-linux-namespaces
https://medium.com/@teddyking/linux-namespaces-850489d3ccf
https://lwn.net/Articles/531114/#series_index

If you're not getting tired of containerization yet then this is for you, more content and explanation about namespacing on Linux.
Unix domain sockets vs internet sockets
https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-performance/2005-February/001143.html
https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-performance/2005-February/001144.html

Another case of wanting to optimize too early but an interesting discussion to have nevertheless. This reverbs back with the c10k and async problems ("Async IO" 105, "The C10K problem" in 52, "c10k follow up and a bit about flamegraphs" in 53).
NetBSD Kern modules
https://www.netbsd.org/gallery/presentations/mbalmer/fosdem2012/kernel_mode_lua.pdf
https://www.netbsd.org/~lneto/dls14.pdf
https://www.netbsd.org/~lneto/eurobsdcon14.pdf

Somewhat related to "Kernel module" 64, some presentations about the innovation (not so new though) of having a lua interpreter in kernel space making it an extensible operating system.
Keeping time and date (3)
https://access.redhat.com/solutions/18627
https://elinux.org/Kernel_Timer_Systems
https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/Documentation/admin-guide/kernel-parameters.txt
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Precision_Event_Timer
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Stamp_Counter
https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=eventtimers&sektion=4&manpath=freebsd-release-ports
https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=eventtimers&apropos=0&sektion=9&manpath=FreeBSD+9-current&format=html
https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=hpet&sektion=4&manpath=freebsd-release-ports
https://linux.die.net/man/8/hwclock
https://lkml.org/lkml/2005/10/19/46
https://lwn.net/Articles/223185/
https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/timers/highres.txt
https://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Clock.html#toc1

We started a bit last week with the types of hardware clocks the kernel can rely on, it's the point that we will focus on this time. Where is time stored on a machine, what actually ticks. As a bonus in this series and because it should be part of it, I'm adding again "What is time" from 85, this should include some ideas that will introduce future topics.
Why X Is Not Our Ideal Window System
http://www.std.org/%7Emsm/common/protocol.pdf
https://developer.gnome.org/wm-spec/
https://standards.freedesktop.org/wm-spec/wm-spec-latest.html

I got a bit back into the WM world the past days, especially reading icccm and ewmh format specs. That first link is an interesting paper about issues that can happen when implementing a WM.
IO Atomicity
https://pluspora.com/posts/654da0f0d6120136b4f6005056264835

In continuation with some topics from the previous research link such as race conditions, we review a tale from the old days about atomic writes. You can get "The classic, the beautiful" from 105 and tag along.
Raw TTY inputs
https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/RawTtyInputThenAndNow

A great article to add to your list of other great articles about terminal understanding, I'm not going to list them again here but you can search the newsletter archive for them.
Monitoring
https://docs.moodle.org/23/en/System_Monitoring_and_Server_Statistic_Software
https://www.linode.com/docs/uptime/monitoring/
https://blog.serverdensity.com/80-linux-monitoring-tools-know/

I'm not a fan of listicles in general but I thought it would be fun to share these. A follow up on all the performance articles we've shared before but that don't tackle or even mention "perf".
Next year upcoming
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-Looking-Forward-To-2019

A list of things to look forward to about Linus in 2019.

Vermaden Valuable News

UNIX

SSH Examples - Tips & Tunnels.
https://hackertarget.com/ssh-examples-tunnels/
OpenBSD Gaming Resource.
https://mrsatterly.com/openbsd_games.html
Unleashed 1.2 Released.
http://lists.31bits.net/archives/devel/2018-December/000033.html
Taming the Chaos: Can we build systems that actually work? Possible paths from today's ghastly hackery to what computing should be.
https://media.ccc.de/v/35c3-9647-taming_the_chaos_can_we_build_systems_that_actually_work
FreeBSD Ports unable to use multiple Github repos with the same name.
https://hashbang0.com/2018/12/28/freebsd-ports-unable-to-use-multiple-github-repos-with-the-same-name/
In Other BSDs for 2018/12/29.
https://www.dragonflydigest.com/2018/12/29/22262.html
F-Stack: FreeBSD TCP/IP stack on DPDK by Tencent.
http://f-stack.org/
NetBSD entering 2019 with more complete LLVM support.
https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/netbsd_entering_2019_with_more
Survey of ${RANDOM}.
https://nullprogram.com/blog/2018/12/25/
The pkgsrc-2018Q4 Announced.
https://mail-index.netbsd.org/pkgsrc-users/2018/12/30/msg027871.html
FreeBSD 12.0 Performance Against Windows & Linux on Intel Xeon Server.
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=freebsd-12-windows
GhostBSD 18.12 Available.
http://ghostbsd.org/18.12_release_announcement
Support for RTL8188EE chipset added in rtwn_pci(4) driver on FreeBSD.
https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=342682
PostgreSQL is the DBMS of the Year 2018.
https://db-engines.com/en/blog_post/79
BSD Now 279 - Future of ZFS.
https://www.jupiterbroadcasting.com/128671/future-of-zfs-bsd-now-279/
One year of flying with the Raven - Ready for the Desktop? [DragonFly BSD]
https://eerielinux.wordpress.com/2018/11/30/one-year-of-flying-with-the-raven-ready-for-the-desktop/
NES/Famicom: Visual Compendium.
https://www.bitmapbooks.co.uk/collections/all/products/nes-famicom-a-visual-compendium
I Made MPD Index SoundCloud.
https://polyfloyd.net/post/soundcloud-fuse-mpd/
The zackup Tool - Backup to ZFS.
<https://github.com/digineo/zackup>

Hardware

Fujitsu A64FX Post-K Supercomputer - World's Fastest ARM Processor.
https://connect.linaro.org/resources/yvr18/interviews/fujitsu-a64fx-post-k-supercomputer-worlds-fastest-arm-processor/
Does tape still have a place in my backup strategy?
https://www.cloudpro.co.uk/it-infrastructure/backup/7836/does-tape-still-have-a-place-in-my-backup-strategy

Life & Other

How Much of the Internet Is Fake? (...) less than 60 percent of web traffic is human.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/12/how-much-of-the-internet-is-fake.html
Apps Are Revealing Your Private Information To Facebook And You Probably Don't Know It.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/charliewarzel/apps-are-revealing-your-private-information-to-facebook-and
Thunderbird in 2019.
https://blog.mozilla.org/thunderbird/2019/01/thunderbird-in-2019/
OpenAGE - free (as in freedom) clone of the Age of Empires II engine.
https://openage.sft.mx/
Algorithms by Jeff Erickson.
http://jeffe.cs.illinois.edu/teaching/algorithms/
Hackers Bypassed Gmail and Yahoo 2FA.
https://www.hackread.com/hackers-bypassed-gmail-yahoos-2fa-to-target-us-officials/?fbclid=IwAR03OJTgck8MrJqD9MLcUMX3a2q9nTgcXoi1Gd0z6Ul01B3SkyKZCvi2hFE
Personal & Banking Data of 120 Million Brazilians Leaked Online.
https://www.hackread.com/personal-banking-data-of-brazilians-leaked-online/
Moving to Require Python 3.
https://python3statement.org/

https://vermaden.wordpress.com/

Thoughts

This is the first fressh issue of this new year. As cliché as it sounds let's emphasize some thoughts about change.

Remember those "Culture clash" from 86 and "Edge effect" from 84, let's start on this tone. Give yourself permission to make yourself a priority, at least for a while. Try out new things, or continue what you've left behind, or simply grow on the same path.

"We often underestimate our capacity to reinvent ourselves" - Shankar Vedantam

Archive

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

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
Share your point of view about the newsletter.
Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2018-12-28 00:00:00 | 107

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Keeping time and date (2)
https://superuser.com/questions/382568/relationship-between-hardware-clock-and-system-clock
https://docs.slackware.com/howtos:hardware:syncing_hardware_clock_and_system_local_time
https://serverfault.com/questions/850815/freebsd-how-to-syncronize-the-system-clock-with-the-hardware-clock-in-bash
https://www.computerhope.com/unix/udate.htm#01
https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/unix-set-date-command/
https://www.systutorials.com/1760/linux-setting-date-time-and-timezone/
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/110522/timezone-setting-in-linux#110529
https://www.jusfeel.com/2018/10/28/TimeZone-Explained/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_time
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_date_and_time_functions#time_t
https://en.cppreference.com/w/c/chrono/time_t
https://access.redhat.com/solutions/18627

Let's start this issue with a continuation of this series. Those should answer the following questions: What are the types of times: hardware and system (more on it later), how to get/set the current times, how to set the current timezone, what is this Unix/POSIX time we often hear about, what is one source of time (also more on it for next issues, leaving it ambiguous for now).
Another one about fonts
https://developer.apple.com/fonts/TrueType-Reference-Manual/RM02/Chap2.html
https://www.canva.com/learn/kerning/
https://www.freetype.org/freetype2/docs/glyphs/glyphs-4.html
https://www.freetype.org/freetype2/docs/tutorial/step2.html

Font engines are interesting, and kerning and glyph metrics too. That world is so deep there's always something to learn.
CV and Graphics
http://lodev.org/cgtutor/raycasting.html
http://www.themtank.org/a-year-in-computer-vision

Two somewhat unrelated articles about graphics and computer vision. I can barely grasp what's being explained but I love reading the content.
Exchange points
https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/bgp-battleships
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gOoPxGKKjA

It's BGP fun content now, a building block protocol still has some cool stuffs to offer.
Performance
https://jvns.ca/blog/2017/12/27/a-perf-cheat-sheet/
http://www.brendangregg.com/linuxperf.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbmEDXq7es0
http://www.slideshare.net/brendangregg/linux-systems-performance-2016

We covered a bit before what flamegraphs are about in "c10k follow up and a bit about flamegraphs" of issue 53, also about dtrace in some others, so let's continue with the whole performance suite.
A last one please
https://www.technovelty.org/linux/plt-and-got-the-key-to-code-sharing-and-dynamic-libraries.html

You know the drill, linking, GOT and PLT.
Stable API nonsense
https://dri.freedesktop.org/docs/drm/process/stable-api-nonsense.html#stable-kernel-source-interfaces

A well written piece of documentation for Linux driver creators, see also "Linux Kernel ABI reference" in issue 4.
Premature optimization
http://www.cipht.net/2017/10/03/are-jump-tables-always-fastest.html

This is quite an interesting case of "don't try to play it smarter than your compiler". An enjoyable read.
Law enforcement guide to Linux
https://cs.nyu.edu/~xiaojian/bookmark/linux/linuxintro.pdf

Linux for forensic, this reminds me of "Command line for the data scientists" in 72, Linux can be for anyone. This is really just introductory (and a bit outdated), touching the basis but could still be considered a follow up on "We discussed a lot of forensic..." in 56, "File system forensic" in 43, "A forensic version of dd" in 42, and "Data security" in 73.
Built with security in mind
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Security
https://web.archive.org/web/20060504192215/http://rentzsch.com/notes/virtualizationAsAnAntivirus
https://web.archive.org/web/20070621155813/http://jya.com/paperF1.htm
https://www.open-scap.org/
https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/4/html/SELinux_Guide/generated-index.html
https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/4/html/SELinux_Guide/selg-preface-0011.html
http://selinuxproject.org/page/Main_Page
http://tomoyo.osdn.jp/
https://gitlab.com/apparmor/apparmor/wikis/home/

I knew the Arch wiki was good but I'm still surprised by how thorough the security article is. As for all the rest of the content you can enjoy how security can be implemented in so many different ways, this covers a lot of ground. Maybe you can also read again about PAM, it's been a long time, "Everything you need to know about PAM" in issue 12.

Vermaden Valuable News

UNIX

The iocage 1.0 Released.
https://github.com/iocage/iocage/releases/tag/1.0
FreeBSD in Audio Studio. FreeBSD is usually not the first choice for music art, but it has quite a lot to offer.
https://fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/freebsd_in_audio_studio/
Install DragonFly BSD 5.4.
https://gitlab.com/jacekkowalczyk82/freebsd/blob/master/DragonFlyBSD.md
FreeBSD and USB MIDI.
https://meka.rs/blog/2017/06/17/freebsd-usb-midi/
In Other BSDs for 2018/12/22.
https://www.dragonflydigest.com/2018/12/22/22216.html
HardenedBSD 1100056.11 Available.
https://hardenedbsd.org/article/op/2018-12-22/stable-release-hardenedbsd-stable-11-stable-v110005611
HardenedBSD 1200058.1 Available.
https://hardenedbsd.org/article/op/2018-12-22/stable-release-hardenedbsd-stable-12-stable-v12000581
DragonFly 5.4.1 Released.
https://www.dragonflydigest.com/2018/12/24/22268.html
FreeBSD 2018/01-09 Status Report.
https://www.freebsd.org/news/status/report-2018-01-2018-09.html
FreeBSD Had Very Successful 2018 - Performance Improvements - Better Hardware Support.
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=FreeBSD-2018-Q1-Q3-Status
Blender 2.8 Released.
https://www.blender.org/2-8/
FreeBSD Foundation Created FreeBSD Timeline.
https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/freebsd/timeline/
Gitea On OpenBSD - Using Official Package.
https://dev.to/nabbisen/gitea-on-openbsd-using-official-package-2ogl
BSD Now 278 - Real McCoy.
https://www.jupiterbroadcasting.com/128586/the-real-mccoy-bsd-now-278/
FreeBSD switches mutexes to atomics in GEOM_DEV I/O path. IOPS increases from 600K to 800K+ on NVMe at 72-core systems.
FreeBSD Wireless Quickstart.
http://srobb.net/fbsdquickwireless.html
Haiku Beta - Release Heard Around the World.
https://medium.com/@andrewgreimann_62789/haiku-beta-the-release-heard-around-the-world-d776cae5f3e7
Mac OS X Kernel Programming Guide - BSD Overview. How much BSD is in the macOS system.
https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Darwin/Conceptual/KernelProgramming/BSD/BSD.html
FreeBSD on ThinkPad X240.
https://unrelenting.technology/articles/freebsd-on-the-thinkpad-x240

Hardware

Distrowatch.com - First Impressions of Pinebook.
https://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20181224#pinebook
Slimbook PRO2.
https://slimbook.es/en/pro-ultrabook-13-aluminium
Banana Pi to Launch 24-Core ARM Server.
https://www.cnx-software.com/2018/12/26/banana-pi-24-core-arm-server/

Life & Other

Sugar Sick Secrets: How Industry Forces Have Manipulated Science to Downplay the Harm.
https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2018/12/412916/sugars-sick-secrets-how-industry-forces-have-manipulated-science-downplay-harm
World's Newest Major Religion - No Religion.
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/04/160422-atheism-agnostic-secular-nones-rising-religion/
What is each country’s second-largest religious group?
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/06/22/what-is-each-countrys-second-largest-religious-group/
Evolution Is Finally Winning Out Over Creationism.
https://slate.com/technology/2015/11/polls-americans-believe-in-evolution-less-in-creationism.html
35 years ago Isaac Asimov was asked by Star to predict world of 2019.
https://www.thestar.com/news/world/2018/12/27/35-years-ago-isaac-asimov-was-asked-by-the-star-to-predict-the-world-of-2019-here-is-what-he-wrote.html
DOOMBA - Convert your Roomba tracking data into randomized DOOM map.
http://richwhitehouse.com/index.php?postid=72

https://vermaden.wordpress.com/

Thoughts

This week is a week of festivity in a lot of parts of the world. So let's share a piece that I've found helpful, maybe you'll find some value in it too.

https://www.theminimalists.com/understanding/

Archive

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

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
Share your point of view about the newsletter.
Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2018-12-21 00:00:00 | 106

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

How programs are loaded
https://lwn.net/Articles/630727/
https://lwn.net/Articles/631631/

Let's start with a question: How are programs loaded, what are they made of, and what's the link with the kernel.
What is an ELF
https://wiki.osdev.org/ELF
http://www.cirosantilli.com/elf-hello-world/

Alright, so now let's get a bit more accustomed with what ELF are about.
Weaponization
https://medium.com/@dmxinajeansuit/elf-binary-mangling-part-1-concepts-e00cb1352301
https://medium.com/@dmxinajeansuit/elf-binary-mangling-pt-2-golfin-7e5c82bb482c
https://medium.com/@dmxinajeansuit/elf-binary-mangling-part-3-weaponization-6e11971108b3
http://www.linuxsecurity.com/resource_files/documentation/virus-writing-HOWTO/_html/index.html

Those ones are easier to start with after diving into all the previous content, it wraps things cleanly together. As far as the last link is concerned, it's a bit of a hassle to read for me so far, not so well ordered and explained, but probably a must to bookmark it for later.
Tools to manipulate ELFs https://github.com/BR903/ELFkickers

There's nothing better than hands on experience to learn what we've been reading about. Other than using the usual tools such as readelf, objdump, and all the hex editors available, this repo offers much more.
Linker
http://s.eresi-project.org/inc/articles/elf-rtld.txt
https://eli.thegreenplace.net/2011/11/03/position-independent-code-pic-in-shared-libraries

What about libraries and linking in all that. A reminder of what we've seen in other issues about GOT and PLT.
Some of the standard reference
http://www.skyfree.org/linux/references/ELF_Format.pdf
http://refspecs.linuxbase.org/elf/elf.pdf

To wrap this up, this another week of long reads. In continuation with the dynamic linking articles series, we now tackle the body of concern: ELF. Also review "Magic bytes" in 100 and "Executables & default program" in issue 77. Maybe you should start with getting used to manipulating simpler byte structures, such as what we did before in issue 71 "Let's play with encoding and formats".
NO ram, just registers
https://emsea.github.io/2017/12/31/register-buffer/

An interesting try at using available registers as a buffer. This might be useless but pretty cool nevertheless.
Learn GRUB commands
http://dcjtech.info/topic/grub-commands/
https://askubuntu.com/questions/76309/play-a-sound-before-or-after-grub-loads
https://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-to-password-protect-your-grub-menu/

A quick and nice review of what the grub CLI offers. You probably can bookmark that when you're in a pinch and need to check them or maybe you just want to "play" a sound (that can't be muted), or add a password to your booting process, or boot from a network image.
Awesome blog, xlib, ephemeral ports
https://gavv.github.io/blog/ephemeral-port-reuse/
https://gavv.github.io/blog/xlib-usage-examples/

Two enjoyable articles, a tricky question of reuse and race-conditions over ephemeral ports, and the other a basic Xlib tutorial.
HTTP2 and X509
https://http2-explained.haxx.se/content/en/
https://http3-explained.haxx.se/en/
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1812.04959.pdf

Two quick books by Daniel Stenberg, the author of cURL, on HTTP2 and HTTP3 and what has been attempted the last few years to speed up the web. The last link is your weekly dose of crypto, a study of common crypto libraries and how they handle X509 parsing. OpenSSL might be written by monkeys as vermaden mentioned but it's still doing fine. As far as I'm concerned I've dealt my good share with BouncyCastle, and it's not that bad as far as the programming side goes.

Vermaden Valuable News

UNIX

First FreeBSD 12.0-RELEASE Errata.
https://svnweb.freebsd.org/doc?view=revision&revision=52685
OPNsense 18.7.9 Released.
https://opnsense.org/opnsense-18-7-9-released/
How to Install and Configure Basic OpnSense Firewall.
https://www.tecmint.com/install-and-configure-opnsense-firewall/
IPv666 - Address of the Beast.
https://l.avala.mp/?p=285
Let's Encrypt - Certbot for OpenBSD's httpd.
https://dev.to/nabbisen/lets-encrypt-certbot-for-openbsds-httpd-3ofd
FreeBSD ZFS vs. Linux EXT4/Btrfs RAID with 20 SSDs.
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=freebsd-12-zfs
FreeBSD Commit That Can Drastically Lower Load on gssd(8) on Large NFS Servers.
https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=342114
In Other BSDs for 2018/12/15.
https://www.dragonflydigest.com/2018/12/15/22185.html?utm_campaign=twitter&utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=twitter
HardenedBSD 13-CURRENT on Pinebook.
https://twitter.com/lattera/status/1073699720923615232
<https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DuaMM3wWwAEi3W6.jpg:large">
Rouge Legacy on OpenBSD using PS4 dual shock pad.
https://twitter.com/mulander/status/1074015714363826176
How to Install GNOME or KDE PLASMA 5 on FreeBSD 12.
https://www.osradar.com/how-to-install-gnome-or-plasma5-kde-on-freebsd-12/
Write your Own Virtual Machine.
https://justinmeiners.github.io/lc3-vm/
OpenSMTPD 6.4.1 Released.
https://www.opensmtpd.org/announces/release-6.4.1.txt
Fix boot/install hangs/panic on HPE ProLiant MicroServer Gen10 Servers.
https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=342160
HardenedBSD first to ship with LLVM Non-Cross-DSO CFI applied to entire base operating system.
https://twitter.com/lattera/status/1074807820959342593
HardenedBSD 12-STABLE v1200058 Available.
https://hardenedbsd.org/article/op/2018-12-17/stable-release-hardenedbsd-stable-12-stable-v1200058
FreeBSD fixes PCI shared interrupts during suspend and resume.
https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=342170
KDE ports on FreeBSD 12 (amd64).
https://euroquis.nl/bobulate/?p=2013
Aberdeen FreeBSD Hackathon on 2019/04/17-19.
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/2019-aberdeen-freebsd-hackathon-registration-53410505259
OPNids - Integration of Suricata IDS with purpose-built Machine Learning Scripting Engine Available.
https://www.opnids.io/
Running FreeBSD on Pinebook - Review.
https://blog.madadipouya.com/2018/12/19/running-freebsd-on-pinebook-a-review/
VirtualBox 6.0.0 Released.
https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Changelog-6.0#v0
Cartika ISP switches from Bacula Enterprise to Bareos. Clusterlogics - Backup as a Service (BaaS) with Bareos.
https://www.bareos.com/files/references/english/cartika-case-study-en.pdf
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/evolution-software-platform-importance-open-source-andrew-rouchotas/
The Future of ZFS in FreeBSD. FreeBSD will rebase its ZFS code from Illumos to ZFS on Linux (ZoL).
https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2018-December/072422.html
OpenRC on FreeBSD.
https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hackers/2018-December/053740.html
Bye Bye Mongo - Hello Postgres. The Guardian migrated from Mongo DB to PostgreSQL on Amazon RDS.
https://www.theguardian.com/info/2018/nov/30/bye-bye-mongo-hello-postgres
FreeBSD 12 Review - Used as My Daily OS on Bare Metal.
https://youtu.be/revOJcX2rLs
BSD Now 277 - Nmap Level Up.
https://www.jupiterbroadcasting.com/128526/nmap-level-up-bsd-now-277/

Hardware

ESXi VSAN HP MicroServer Homelab.
http://www.cheesyboofs.co.uk/esxi-vsan-microserver-homelab
IBM Partners with Samsung to Include 7nm Chip Manufacturing.
https://newsroom.ibm.com/2018-12-20-IBM-Expands-Strategic-Partnership-with-Samsung-to-Include-7nm-Chip-Manufacturing

Life & Other

FBI Secretly Collected Data on Aaron Swartz Earlier Than We Thought.
https://gizmodo.com/fbi-secretly-collected-data-on-aaron-swartz-earlier-tha-1831076900
99 Good News Stories You Probably Did Not Hear About in 2018.
https://medium.com/future-crunch/99-good-news-stories-you-probably-didnt-hear-about-in-2018-cc3c65f8ebd0
“How to Grow Old” by Bertrand Russell.
https://sites.google.com/site/gobenyan/essay
Ask Hacker News - How did you decide where to live?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18688647
Digital Dissidents - What it Means to be Whistleblower.
https://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/specialseries/2016/03/digital-dissidents-160323141254755.html
Firefox 64 built with GCC and Clang.
https://hubicka.blogspot.com/2018/12/firefox-64-built-with-gcc-and-clang.html
Johnson & Johnson Knew for Decades that Asbestos Lurked in its Baby Powder.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-johnson-johnson-cancer-special-report-idUSKBN1OD1RQ
Signal: We can't include a backdoor in our app for the Australian government.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/signal-we-cant-include-a-backdoor-in-our-app-for-the-australian-government/
The Best Programming Advice I Ever Got.
http://russolsen.com/articles/2012/08/09/the-best-programming-advice-i-ever-got.html
Logitech app security flaw allowed keystroke injection attacks.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/logitech-app-security-flaw-allowed-keystroke-injection-attacks/
How Peter Jackson Made WW I Footage Seem Astonishingly New.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/16/movies/peter-jackson-war-movie.html

https://vermaden.wordpress.com/

Random

Thoughts

This season needs elves, and this is what I'm giving you the most in this issue (actually this was so time consuming I couldn't give anything else).

I hope you enjoy it, and happy holidays!

Archive

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

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
Share your point of view about the newsletter.
Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2018-12-14 00:00:00 | 105

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

The classic, the beautiful
http://www.lemis.com/grog/Documentation/Lions/book.pdf
http://warsus.github.io/lions-/
https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~brewer/cs262/UNIX-annotated.pdf

The original papers with additional commentaries to help you read through them. As time goes by we're more impressed by how it's a breeze to read through such fundamental building blocks to the current ecosystem. The second link is fun because you have the source attached on the window on the right, though it's missing the name of the files/sheets. This is quite a big reading so take your time, I'm not done myself.
Exception handling in tricky code
https://binarydebt.wordpress.com/2018/11/16/try-catch-in-linux-kernel/
https://medium.com/@lduck11007/operating-systems-development-for-dummies-3d4d786e8ac

An explanation of the macros used within the Linux kernel to catch faulty code with an extra article about building an OS from scratch.
Network drivers in Rust
https://www.net.in.tum.de/fileadmin/bibtex/publications/theses/2018-ixy-rust.pdf

Everything can be rewritten in rust, that's the spirit we've learned from "How to for a Rust kernel" in 103. This fantastic and approachable paper (at least in the beginning) doesn't only cover how to translate a driver from C code to Rust but, as with the kernel one, gives a tutorial on how network drivers and on Rust in general work.
Async IO
https://jvns.ca/blog/2017/06/03/async-io-on-linux--select--poll--and-epoll/
http://aivarsk.github.io/2017/04/06/select/
https://github.com/aivarsk/misc/tree/master/select

A revisit of a basic topic under a new angle. Be sure to review the "The C10K problem" in 52 and "c10k follow up and a bit about flamegraphs" in 53
Keeping time and date (1)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_zone
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwich_Mean_Time
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinated_Universal_Time
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Time
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/locale

Keeping track of time is important for the activities humans do. Old mechanisms were based on the apparent sun position. However, appearances can be misleading, the earth speed is uneven and the sun is rarely at the highest point at noon. Not to mention that a day is not exactly 24h (we'll see the leap seconds in another issue)
Improvement in worldwide communication and travel required parties/entities to agree in a mutually comprehensible time reference/standard.
But time differs locally and so a synchronization mechanism needed to be adopted world wide, even if it differed from sun time. Many standards have been tried. The concept of time zones was put in place, an offset from the standard time, but had to be flexible depending on the people and especially countries and their economies. This is what UTC is about.
Most timezones are whole number of hours but a few of them are offset by 30 or 45min. Then to make it more complex, daylight saving time (DST) appeared for weird economic reasons. Which these days are being reconsidered in the EU (see "TIMEZONEs" in issue 101).
A nice start to the topic would be to know how we write time, the formatting. This is where the concept of locale on Unix comes in. The $LC_TIME where you specify one of the well known format you want to use for time.
For the next issue more questions arises: What is time exactly, a unit, how is it measured in computers and electronic devices these days, especially on Unix? What about errors, drifts? How do we specify the base standard time and our offset from it on Unix. And much more to come.
Bird eye over pulseaudio internals
https://gavv.github.io/blog/pulseaudio-under-the-hood/

Big projects, big planning and engineering, you need at least to have worked with one of those in your life as a programmer. Pulseaudio creates a lot of flamewars on the internet but it's still a nice humbling piece of engineering. This is quite a long read, so prepare yourself. It has everything, from the overview, to objects used within the code, to complex examples and applications.
Docker Internals
http://docker-saigon.github.io/post/Docker-Internals/

Another dive into a deep topic, similar to "Talking about fan base" of 92, "Containers management" of 91, "Contain and protect" 76, "Contain and protect" of 104, "Containers from scratch" of 51.
Font rendering
http://dcjtech.info/topic/fonts-gui-and-x11/
https://keithp.com/~keithp/render/Xft.tutorial
https://www.x.org/releases/X11R7.7/doc/xorg-docs/fonts/fonts.html#More_about_core_fonts
https://www.x.org/releases/X11R7.7/doc/xorg-docs/xlfd/xlfd.txt

Another exploration into the world of fonts on Unix, see "More on typography" in 63, fonts on Unix, and "Xft but for xcb" in 91. The first article is a review of the stack we've already encountered, the second one goes over the Xft library design and usage, the last ones are a bit more explanation about the core fonts XLFD format so that you can compare it with the fancier Xft matching features (which is fontconfig matching actually). I highly recommend them to anyone interested in fonts and that want to follow up on what we've shared before.
Building and interpreting
https://url.spec.whatwg.org/#url-parsing
http://www.craftinginterpreters.com/strings.html

You might think it's straight forward to parse URLs but it's not, have a look. And the representation of the strings themselves is not as easy either. We also talked about this in the article "How to implement strings" of "Programming tricks and knowledge" of issue 100.

Vermaden Valuable News

UNIX

For The Love Of UFS.
https://youtu.be/oqbc7ICylcw
Introspection of My Thoughts on GhostBSD 18.10.
https://youtu.be/ESAlQjEvEHo
Visual Defragmenter for the Commodore 64.
https://www.pagetable.com/?p=978
From Bedrooms to Billions.
http://www.frombedroomstobillions.com/about-the-film
From Bedrooms to Billions: Amiga Years.
https://vimeo.com/ondemand/amiga
10 of the Best Video Game Documentaries.
https://www.vintagewave.net/blog/2018/11/30/10-of-the-best-video-game-documentaries
I Told You So. Again! OpenSSL is Written by Monkeys.
https://www.peereboom.us/assl/assl/html/openssl.html
In Other BSDs for 2018/12/08.
https://www.dragonflydigest.com/2018/12/08/22175.html
Portability of tar features.
https://dev.gentoo.org/~mgorny/articles/portability-of-tar-features.html
How Douglas Engelbart Invented the Future.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/douglas-engelbart-invented-future-180967498/
More Cavium Thunder X2 Commits landed un FreeBSD.
https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=341742
https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=341743
https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=341744
The tuxmachines.org Reviews GhostBSD 18.10.
http://www.tuxmachines.org/node/118061
Awesome UNIX®. Exploration of the world of UNIX® including UNIX history and its relevance of today.
https://github.com/sirredbeard/Awesome-UNIX
FreeBSD 12 is Running Great On Dell PowerEdge R7425 EPYC Server.
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=freebsd12-dual-epyc
OpenSSH - Configuration To Keep Connection Alive.
https://dev.to/nabbisen/openssh-configuration-to-keep-connection-alive-to-suppress-timeout-3pa6
OPNsense Security Device Build.
https://cormier.co/post/opnsense-security-device-build/
OpenBSD on Laptop.
https://www.c0ffee.net/blog/openbsd-on-a-laptop/
Borg Backup 1.1.8 Released.
https://github.com/borgbackup/borg/releases/tag/1.1.8
FreeBSD Graphics Blog - Getting Started With drm-kmod.
https://freebsddesktop.github.io/2018/12/08/drm-kmod-primer.html
All HaikuOS kernel memory is now W^X.
https://git.haiku-os.org/haiku/commit/?id=cb0977326dd79327ff3e342816e0dd118019b058
FreeBSD adds ACPI based NUMA support for arm64.
https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=341744
Installing MariaDB Server on OpenBSD.
https://dev.to/nabbisen/installing-mariadb-server-on-openbsd-5lm
OmniOS Community Edition r151{028f/026af/022cd}.
https://omniosce.org/article/release-028f-026af-022cd
FreeNAS 11.2 - Whats New?
https://youtu.be/uAbEFqnRJz0
Unprivileged Linux Users With UID Greater Then INT_MAX (2147483647) Can Execute Any Command.
https://thehackernews.com/2018/12/linux-user-privilege-policykit.html
OpenBSD on Microsoft Surface Go.
https://jcs.org/2018/08/31/surface_go
Sunny Valley Networks sponsored netmap(4) support for vtnet(4) to make it functional on FreeBSD.
https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/stable/11/sys/dev/netmap/if_vtnet_netmap.h?revision=341478&view=markup
BSD Now 275 - OpenBSD in Stereo.
https://www.jupiterbroadcasting.com/128321/openbsd-in-stereo-bsd-now-275/
Oracle VM VirtualBox 6.0 RC1 Available.
https://blogs.oracle.com/virtualization/oracle-vm-virtualbox-60-release-candidate-1-now-available
KDE4 and QT4 Deprecated in FreeBSD. KDE4 will be removed at the end of this year (before 2019/01). QT4 will be removed in the middle of 2019/03.
https://euroquis.nl/bobulate/?p=2007
Clang updated to 7.0 in FreeBSD 13-CURRENT.
https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=341825
PowerVM iSCSI Support.
https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/community/wikis/home?lang=en_us#!/wiki/Power%20Systems/page/iSCSI%20Support%20on%20PowerVM
Support for MacBookAir 7.1/7.2/8.1 added in FreeBSD.
https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=341820
https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=341988
OPNsense 18.7.9 Available.
https://forum.opnsense.org/index.php?topic=10650.0
Why should I have written ZeroMQ in C not C++ (Part I).
http://250bpm.com/blog:4

Hardware

ARMed Attack - Intel And AMD Do Not See The Torpedo Headed Their Way.
https://seekingalpha.com/article/4227086-armed-attack-intel-amd-see-torpedo-headed-way
Gigabyte MZ31-AR0 Review Single Socket AMD EPYC Motherboard.
https://www.servethehome.com/gigabyte-mz31-ar0-review-a-single-socket-amd-epyc-motherboard/
Super Micro says review found no malicious chips in motherboards.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-supermicro-chips/super-micro-says-review-found-no-malicious-chips-in-motherboards-idUSKBN1OA12R
Why I'm usually unnerved when modern SSDs die on us.
https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/tech/SSDDeathDisturbing
First Pictures of 10nm Intel Ice Lake Xeon Server Chips.
https://www.servethehome.com/first-pictures-of-intel-ice-lake-xeon-server-chips/
Intel Architecture Day 2018 - Future of Core/Intel GPUs/10nm/Hybrid x86.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/13699/intel-architecture-day-2018-core-future-hybrid-x86

Life & Other

Reason Many Ultrarich People Are Not Satisfied with Their Wealth.
https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2018/12/rich-people-happy-money/577231/
Your Apps Know Where You Were Last Night and They’re Not Keeping It Secret.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/12/10/business/location-data-privacy-apps.html
Golden Age of Rich People Not Paying Their Taxes.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/12/rich-people-are-getting-away-not-paying-their-taxes/577798/
Qualcomm says native Firefox browser is coming to Windows on ARM.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/6/18129456/qualcomm-snapdragon-pc-firefox-web-browser-64-bit-native-mozilla
Browser Diversity Starts with Us.
https://www.zeldman.com/2018/12/07/browser-diversity-starts-with-us/
Firefox Dilemma.
https://blog.tawhidhannan.co.uk/tech-zoomed-out/industry/firefox-dilemma/
Firefox 64 Released.
https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/12/firefox-64-released/
Midori Browser 7.x Available.
https://www.midori-browser.org/2018/11/30/lorem-ipsum/
Google transfered ownership of Duck.com domain to DuckDuckGo.
https://www.namepros.com/blog/confirmed-duck-com-transfers-to-duckduckgo.1113728/
50 CVEs in 50 Days - Fuzzing Adobe Reader.
https://research.checkpoint.com/50-adobe-cves-in-50-days/

https://vermaden.wordpress.com/

Thoughts

As you may have noticed I've removed the Random section of this newsletter. There's already enough content, brace yourself for a long read this week. Sorry for the double email, I almost missed vermaden valuable news.

Archive

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

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
Share your point of view about the newsletter.
Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2018-12-07 00:00:00 | 104

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

A war of names
https://virtuallyfun.com/wordpress/2018/11/26/why-bsd-os-is-the-best-candidate-for-being-the-only-tested-legally-open-unix/

A review of the legality surrounding the UNIX name and which part of which UNIX system is open sourced, to which degree and what manner. This is probably the first article with as many German words as this one that I read, it's fun.
Shared lib how to
https://www.akkadia.org/drepper/dsohowto.pdf

This is the research paper I was talking about last week (103) in "ELF symbol resolution". As with anything written by Drepper, it's heavy content and emphasizes on things to do so that code is optimized by the compiler and when running. Be sure to read last week entry because you'll need it to understand this one.
Terminal block mode
ftp://ftp.invisible-island.net/shuford/terminal/block_mode_news.txt

I got reminded of this last week during our conversation on the forums about future interfaces. Maybe we'll got back to terminals that update per block depending on form filling, just like what we have today with web APIs.
Foundations and groups
https://www.linuxfoundation.org/the-linux-foundation/2018/11/the-linux-foundation-and-risc-v-foundation-announce-joint-collaboration-to-enable-a-new-era-of-open-architecture/

A new hardware mixing with software alliance has formed. Focused on RTOS that may be better supported on Linux in the future.
What's in a userland
https://tilde.town/~elly/userland.txt

A straight forward intro to the thinking that goes into building a user-space on Unix, from init to useful processes and putting it together.
Contain and protect
https://www.netmeister.org/blog/restricting-processes.html

A deep dive into all the techniques used on Unix to containerize, restrict, protect processes.
Scripting
https://blog.dalanmiller.com/2018/12/02/easily-removing-all-your-files-from-flickr/

I had no idea flickr was still a service. This post is another instance of replacing a paid service with another one and use a script to help you do that.
Makefile best practices
https://danyspin97.org/blog/makefiles-best-practices/

Another article about make best practices, see "Make" in issue 66 and "Makefiles, Ohoh those Makefiles" of issue 38. This one covers basic things such as variable assignment for specific parts of the Makefile, pkg-config to find libs, and more.
vi and vim
https://vimways.org/2018/
https://sanctum.geek.nz/arabesque/vim-koans/
https://vfoley.xyz/vi/
https://www.qemu-advent-calendar.org/2018/

With the third article from our friend tejr this ought to be an interesting advent calendar, a month of vi and vim tips. Lots of fun articles so far! Adding along the way the beautiful vim koans of tejr and another opinion piece about vi. There's also a qemu advent calendar now, checkt it out too.
Architectures and portability
https://begriffs.com/posts/2018-11-15-c-portability.html

A reminder of "Computers without binaries"in 79 and all the C related articles.
Linux on MacBook
https://int3ractive.com/2018/09/make-the-best-of-MacBook-touchpad-on-Ubuntu.html

And this one deals with the touchpad. One idea I could take from this post is to disable the touchpad while typing. Those are all pretty hard to configure and don't come out of the box, maybe in the future distributions can focus on making this easier.
NFS debug story
https://about.gitlab.com/2018/11/14/how-we-spent-two-weeks-hunting-an-nfs-bug/

As with other investigative stories in this newsletter we're so captivated by the story and the action, those are the movies of our world.
Another newsletter
https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2018/12/01/valuable-news-2018-12-01/

As you might have noticed we've linked vermaden's blog more than once in this newsletter, there's great content in there. On it the author also pushes more or less weekly/bi-weekly news/updates similar to this newsletter. You should check it out. I've contacted vermaden to see if it would be interesting to add a column in the newsletter with his/her content also. This is what we'll try out from now on. As you will notice there's a new section inserted here with links that will be as new for you as they'll be for me. Vermaden Valuable news is usually composed of Unix news&updates, some hardware related news, and a life&other section similar to the "Random" section. Let's hope you enjoy the Unix love. This week we have a lot of links about BSD desktops, lots of new releases, ext4 fs on FreeBSD, bringing back old Unix to life (you can even download the image), and much more. We also brought back Xero's ricing tips section.

Vermaden Valuable News

UNIX

In Other BSDs for 2018/12/01.
https://www.dragonflydigest.com/2018/12/01/22135.html
History of Dell UNIX.
https://notes.technologists.com/notes/2008/01/10/a-brief-history-of-dell-unix/
http://gunkies.org/wiki/Dell_UNIX
https://virtuallyfun.com/wordpress/2012/03/20/dell-unix-lives-again/
What makes BeOS and Haiku unique.
https://osvoyager.wordpress.com/2018/11/30/what-makes-beos-and-haiku-unique/
DragonFly 5.4.0 Released.
https://www.dragonflybsd.org/release54/
OpenBSD Desktop.
https://cryogenix.net/openbsd_desktop.html
Buying Commodore Amiga 30 Years Later.
https://www.vintagewave.net/blog/2018/11/30/buying-a-commodore-amiga-30-years-later
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5c01a45cf93fd4d1606252b1/5c01b1b04ae2373a235bbc4c/5c01b1b14fa51ac227153f1b/1543614905733/amiga-a1200-keyboard-logo-close-up.jpg
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5c01a45cf93fd4d1606252b1/5c01b1b04ae2373a235bbc4c/5c01b1b1898583f03afd882b/1543614906359/amiga-a1200-1084s-monitor-tank-mouse-joystick-.jpg
GhostBSD 18.10 Review by Distrowatch.
https://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20181203#ghostbsd
Using the GOG.com installers for Linux, on NetBSD.
https://dressupgeekout.blogspot.com/2018/12/using-gogcom-installers-for-linux-on.html
HardenedBSD 1100056.10 Available.
https://hardenedbsd.org/article/op/2018-12-05/stable-release-hardenedbsd-stable-11-stable-v110005610
FreeNAS 11.2 Available.
https://www.freenas.org/blog/freenas-11-2-has-arrived/
https://www.ixsystems.com/blog/library/freenas-11-2-release/
Running AIX 1.3 Inside VirtualBox.
https://astr0baby.wordpress.com/2018/09/14/running-aix-1-3-inside-virtual-box-5-2-16/
Running macOS Mojave 10.14 on VirtualBox.
https://astr0baby.wordpress.com/2018/09/25/running-macos-mojave-10-14-on-virtualbox-5-2-18-on-linux-x86_64/
Running AIX 7.2 TL3SP1 on x86_64 via qemu-system-ppc64.
https://astr0baby.wordpress.com/2018/11/04/running-aix-7-2-tl3sp1-on-x86_64-via-qemu-system-ppc64/
Reverse Shell on AIX 7.2.
https://astr0baby.wordpress.com/2018/11/05/reverse-shell-on-aix-7-2/
Get Smart with SmartOS.
http://www.admin-magazine.com/Articles/SmartOS-Cool-Cloud-Platform-Rises-from-the-Ashes-of-Solaris
OpenBSD on Dell Inspiron 1090 Duo.
https://grosu.nl/systems/inspiron-duo.html
NetBSD Desktop Part 3 - Simple Stateful Firewall with NPF.
https://unitedbsd.com/t/netbsd-desktop-pt-3-simple-stateful-firewall-with-npf/286
NetBSD Desktop Part 4 - X Display Manager (XDM).
https://unitedbsd.com/t/netbsd-desktop-pt-4-the-x-display-manager-xdm/292
FreeBSD 12 got full support for writing ext4 filesystems.
https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=341505
GhostBSD tested on real hardware ThinkPad T410.
https://panoramacircle.com/2018/09/23/ghostbsd-tested-on-real-hardware-t410-better-than-trueos/
MeetBSD California 2018 Talks Available.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLb87fdKUIo8Q41aoPE6vssP-uF4dxk86b
FreeBSD News and Links Roundup - Edition 2018-48.
https://www.freebsdbytes.com/2018/12/freebsd-news-and-links-roundup-edition-2018-48/

Hardware

Raspberry PCI.
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2720009
Seagate Reveals World Biggest HDD At 16 TB.
https://nexthive.com/seagate-biggest-hdd-16-tb/

Life & Other

Parents Guide to Protecting Kids Privacy.
https://techlife.asurion.com/feature/parents-guide-to-protecting-kids-privacy/
Designing cities to counter loneliness? Let’s explore possibilities.
https://theconversation.com/designing-cities-to-counter-loneliness-lets-explore-the-possibilities-104853
The Making Of: Dust (Counter-Strike de_dust map).
https://www.johnsto.co.uk/design/making-dust/
The Making Of: Dust 2 (Counter-Strike de_dust2 map).
https://www.johnsto.co.uk/design/making-dust2/
Everything you need to know about pointers in C.
https://boredzo.org/pointers/

https://vermaden.wordpress.com/

Xero's Weekly Ricing Tips

zathura is a vi{m,} like pdf and comicbook viewer.

besides having vi like bindings and a minimal ui, zathura is extremely "riceable" and has a awesome feature called "recolor". when set to true, you can define custom colors for bg and fg of textual documents, but it also sets images to greyscale and tints them in matching inverted hues. :set recolor is a toggle command, so if your set it to run by default in your ~/.config/zathura/zathurarc file, manually calling it from the ui will disable the feature.

here's my config for reference: https://github.com/xero/dotfiles/blob/master/zathura/.config/zathura/zathurarc

cite:

man 5 zathurarc
https://pwmt.org/projects/zathura/documentation/
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/zathura

____  ___
\   \/  /___________  ____
.\     // __ \_  __ \/ _  \
./     \  ___/ | | \( <_>  )
/___/\  \___  >__|---\____/
|     \_/   \/        |
| xero harrison       |
| xero.nu@gmail.com   |
| http://0w.nz        |
| http://xero.nu      |
| http://fontvir.us   |
`---------------------'

rocx rocks at skteches

2 years anniversary

Random

Am I smart enough
http://nautil.us/issue/65/in-plain-sight/your-iq-matters-less-than-you-think
https://publicdomainreview.org/collections/napoleons-englich-lessons/
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/11/psychologys-replication-crisis-real/576223/
https://lemire.me/blog/2018/12/06/asking-the-right-question-is-more-important-than-getting-the-right-answer/

The first link I've stolen from vermaden's "valuable news" and went on a spree of related ideas. We live in a society/world that loves to find clear causes to things, see "Development and learning" in 93, especially when it comes to finding out if we're doomed/fated/determined for a path. We want to find heroes and villains, distinctions and no ambiguities. In those 4 articles this is the topic that comes across.
Regulatory capture
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/regulatory-capture.asp

Yet again a topic that follows a train of thoughts from earlier issues, see "The Shirky principle" in 72 and the thought section of issue of issue 99.
Web engines
https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2018/12/06/microsoft-edge-making-the-web-better-through-more-open-source-collaboration/

I'll just leave this here, you can have the conversation you want about it.

Thoughts

Issue 104, yet another 52 weeks have gone by.
After passing the 100 issues mark we've finally made it to two years of Unix newsletters.

Thanks to everyone who contributed and to all the readers.

It's fantastic, spread the word around!

Archive

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

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
Share your point of view about the newsletter.
Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2018-11-30 00:00:00 | 103

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Capsicum wrapper
https://github.com/myfreeweb/capsicumizer

I love it when tools like this come out. While we could be satisfied with the default, usually not so user friendly, proof of concept the original developers have come up with, it's awesome when the community builds upon the starting block to create what they need from them.
ELF symbol resolution
https://0x00sec.org/t/linux-internals-dynamic-linking-wizardry/1082
https://0x00sec.org/t/linux-internals-the-art-of-symbol-resolution/1488

We've talked a lot about memory allocation, garbage collection, how to write your own malloc ("In memory layout and Go" in issue 96, "sbrk and malloc" in issue 53, "Malloc source" in 42, "Pointers, pointers, and pointers" in 25), linking parameters ("LD.SO" in issue 54), the heap (see "Heap, malloc, glibc" in issue 85), the ELF format ("In-memory-only ELF execution" in issue 69, "Tiny ELF" in issue 47, "The world most prominent virus has erased all the source code" in issue 52, "Diving into and ELF" in issue 44, and more) and whatnot in this newsletter, this is a continuation of the thought process. I've got an extensive PDF for next week also, let's hope I can finish it to put it in the next issue.
How to for a Rust kernel
https://dominuscarnufex.github.io/cours/rs-kernel/en.html

A complementary on "For all those people trying to rewrite a kernel" of issue 96. This is a tutorial on both kernel system calls and rust programming at the same time.
Data structures in the Linux VFS
https://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/linux/lk/lk-8.html

More and more on the VFS internals, continuation of "VFS, proc and root filesystems" in 58, and "VFS in more details" of 62, and certainly the podcast about "Data storage on Unix".
Fuzzing (continue)
https://irssi.org/2017/05/12/fuzzing-irssi/

This one is quite old compared to the other links I've shared about fuzzing in the newsletter before but I waited on it to be a full fledge popular topic. The article itself is a smooth introduction to fuzzing.
Big Opinions
https://github.com/JpOnline/Blog/blob/master/language.md
https://dpc.pw/the-faster-you-unlearn-oop-the-better-for-you-and-your-software
https://lobste.rs/s/l5hrk1/faster_you_unlearn_oop_better_for_you_your
https://github.com/kamranahmedse/design-patterns-for-humans

If you carry with you absolutes on the internet you'll certainly bring about discussions and arguments. "Every system is built from a DSL designed by the programmers to describe that system. The art of programming is, and has always been, the art of language design. Robert Martin". Having a lot of quotes in a piece and is a mark of an opinionated piece.
Open source and culture
https://gist.github.com/richhickey/1563cddea1002958f96e7ba9519972d9

Yet another instance of big opinions, this one I found quite interesting to read and it's written by a nice fellow you probably know. A follow up type of link for a sort of new series of ideas, see "Open internet/source/culture and the future of this all" in 101 and "A year of big acquisitions, big changes in priorities" from week 99.
Praising truth
https://cryptosumer.com/2018/11/24/free-software-messiah-richard-stallman-we-can-do-better-than-bitcoin/

Click-baity title but a pretty decent discussion by RMS on the Taler system and how it compares with cryptocurrencies. This is in contrast with the previous link, OSS vs FOSS.
More Emacs
https://ambrevar.xyz/emacs-everywhere/

We've shared that blog before in "Shells and pipelines" of issue 75. In this one we're being sold the idea of having emacs for everything with only benefits.
Oregano
https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!topic/comp.unix.wizards/kFdPoJBpcSA

A fun discussion I haven't heard about before that xero shared this week about the famous Unix wizard poster.
Extra cringy music
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHNKTlz1lps
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4YRPdRXKFs

Similar to "Unix Rap" in 7, enjoy this "nerd" music.

Random

One of those habit building blog
https://jamesclear.com/reset-the-room
https://thecreativeindependent.com/guides/how-to-balance-full-time-work-with-creative-projects/

But a good one, not an annoying listicle type. It gets 2M hits a month on the blog and I've just discovered it. The second post is also related to organizing yourself, the usual work-life balance, a quite popular topic on technology news website. It reminded me of the discussion we had on the forums about Scientifically Proven Digital Attention Helpers, things such as knowing the times in the day when you are more focused, finding what works when guiding yourself towards an intent, what keeps you focus or reminds you of what you need to do (environment or not), splitting big tasks into smaller achievable ones to be able to track them, going with the intent rather than a goal, etc.. See also "Time management and management in general" of issue 98. While also ending on a good note about the histrionic busy: see "Over-Productive" in 78, "Production" in 66, and "The busy trap" in 32.
Akira
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IqVoEpRIaKg

There was a time when anime wasn't associated with what it is today, a time of burgeoning. Probably one of the most impressive animated movie I've seen, along with the Studio Ghibli.
Information war
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2018/11/28/the-digital-maginot-line/

Complementary to "7 items you won't believe are shockingly amazing!" in issue 85 and to all our "state of the internet" kind of articles.
Custom typeface
https://www.arun.is/blog/custom-typefaces/

Also, yet again, a recurrent talk in this newsletter: fonts. This episode covers custom typeface, why companies do it, should they continue doing it, and if you should you pay attention.

Thoughts

Judgment is but a mirror that reflects the insecurities of the person who’s doing the judging.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PpBC_jyg-go

Some people live in a world where there are haters and lovers, people that get you and others that don't, everyone judging each others, scaling and measuring their behaviors, inspecting if everyone moves in their plastic manner, pantomime, and making sure they never diverge from their cookie-cutter molds otherwise we'd have to re-invent how we perceive them. It's a world where one move means everything, where you can't make mistakes.
The thing is this only exists when we are teenagers full of hormones living the school days life (or if you're a politician). Real life is much more complex, so get over it.

Archive

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

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
Share your point of view about the newsletter.
Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2018-11-23 00:00:00 | 102

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Unikernels
http://250bpm.com/blog:138

Unikernels are getting more popular in the world of containerization. Other discussions about kernel talks in the newsletter such as the classic "Monolithic vs micro" from 37 and "Not really unix but close and soon will be" in 41 come to mind.
Linux Redhat and kernels
https://next.redhat.com/2018/11/14/ukl-a-unikernel-based-on-linux/
https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/powering-its-future-while-preserving-present-introducing-red-hat-enterprise-linux-8-beta

While being corporate-ish Redhat is still one of the front face, along with Oracle and others, to Unix-like operating systems. That first link brings hope to the first entry of this newsletter.
Safe bash
https://vaneyckt.io/posts/safer_bash_scripts_with_set_euxo_pipefail/

Another topic that keeps showing up, see "POSIX shell and no bashism" in 93, "A new shell, why?" in 87, "One liners again..." in 79, "Shells and pipelines" in 75, "Using bash not only for small scripts" in 64, "Bash and shells" in 57, "Bash the bash for bash the bash" in 23, and "Expansion & Globs" in 17. That amount of articles on bash and shell tricks in general is an example of how tricky it is to use them safely.
Gnome history
https://www.bassi.io/articles/2018/10/25/the-history-of-gnome/
https://www.bassi.io/category/history/podcast.xml

I'll subscribe to this and listen to it during the week, I have a huge podcast list. The first episode sounds captivating. This should add some spices to all the recent news such as the drop of KDE in RedHat in favor of Gnome support, the shell extension and themes discussion, the hackathons follow up, and much more.
Designing a font
https://www.cambus.net/spleen-monospaced-bitmap-fonts/

Creating a font that looks nice in all situations is hard, and it's even harder when it's a bitmap font. Also, be sure to disable antialiasing, subpixel rendering, and hinting to keep the crispiness of the bitmaps.
Standards
http://www.columbia.edu/kermit/k95manual/arrow.html
http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/files/ECMA-ST/Ecma-048.pdf

Want to go deeper in the world of terminal codes, well this is your lucky day.
Celebrating Unix
https://unix50.org/

The anniversary was quite a while ago in internet time but we're still sharing and discussing it.
GCC arguments
https://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2001-07/msg02150.html

Should you care about the people that are relying on unintended behaviours to build software using your libraries. What about when you break/fix this behaviour. We've seen that a bit recently in "OpenBSD doas update and virt" of issue 99.
D'you have a problem?
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/a3mgxb/the-internet-has-a-huge-cc-problem-and-developers-dont-want-to-deal-with-it

A title that shouts "CLICK ME" with an article that is more or less fair. In my opinion switching from one language to another is only moving the problem from one space to another space, a whole lot of new security issues will arise. What do you think?
Gaming on FreeBSD
https://oshogbo.vexillium.org/blog/58/

We've done gaming on Linux ("Missing games?" in 50 and "Free games" in 10) and recently gaming on OpenBSD ("Extra" in issue 90), this time we're doing gaming on FreeBSD.

Random

Cringiest articles of the year?
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/11/tech-worker-organizing-google-union-walkout
https://www.jotform.com/blog/how-google-is-slowing-innovation/

I don't think I've read a more politically loaded articles this year, I'm not sure why but this is not a trend I'm found of and from the discussions on the forums and irc I know a lot agree that this is getting tiresome. Trying to paint a narrative over whatever is happening, especially a narrative that only applies in certain parts of the world. Keep away with your anti or pro capitalism talk from the 60s and let us enjoy the tech instead. Especially when it comes to the second article and the author nagging about Google being a corporate evil because their own product features are not supported in their pdf reader.
A world post-rest
https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2018/11/18/Post-REST

Lots of thinking about how the world will evolve, speculations.
It feels slow
https://www.inkandswitch.com/slow-software.html

Another revisit of the topic of "the slow feel", this one feels complete. Somehow related to "Learning From Terminals to Design the Future of User Interfaces" in issue 22, "Latency, second round" in 33, and "This is why NES games are awesome" in issue 28.
Spammy content
https://howwegettonext.com/how-bots-were-born-from-spam-62f6c621351f

The history of spammers and spam content.

Thoughts

The mind can be trained just like the body.

Thinking About Thinking

Meditation, learning psychology, taking the time to teach ourselves about cognitive biases, controlling our day to day intents and attention, leading our future changes and directions. All those are things that are possible and we live in the best time to try them. As much as a cliché as this is I still thought of putting this as the thought of 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:

If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
Share your point of view about the newsletter.
Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2018-11-16 00:00:00 | 101

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Fixing audio on OpenBSD
https://jcs.org/2018/11/12/vfio

It's hard to be on the same level of dedication as this person when it comes to debugging hardware drivers and making them work. Kudos for that.
Capsicum
https://oshogbo.vexillium.org/blog/57/

We're seeing this blog more in this newsletter and there's a reason for that. A follow up on "Contain and protect" from issue 76. It's the counterpart of pledge and unveil from OpenBSD on FreeBSD.
Openstack and debugging story
https://blog.codecentric.de/en/2014/09/openstack-crime-story-solved-tcpdump-sysdig-iostat-episode-1/
https://blog.codecentric.de/en/2014/09/openstack-crime-story-solved-tcpdump-sysdig-iostat-episode-2/
https://blog.codecentric.de/en/2014/09/openstack-crime-story-solved-tcpdump-sysdig-iostat-episode-3/

A new adventure of debugging using sysdig and others, checkout "Let's setup a honeypot" from issue 18. Beware of defaults!
Preventing sqli
https://tapoueh.org/blog/2018/11/preventing-sql-injections/
https://github.com/s0md3v/XSStrike

Diving into the internals of how sql injections are prevented in Postgres. I've also added one of the brand new XSS finding tool.
TIMEZONEs
http://joeyh.name/blog/entry/howto_create_your_own_time_zone/
https://www.timeanddate.com/news/time/europe-may-scrap-dst.html
https://apenwarr.ca/log/20181113

Timezones are complex, and adding DST to it doesn't make it easier. I wish I could live in my own timezone like that author, maybe my wish would come true using that trick. It's also my first time encountering the utility zic. As a bonus, because we've saved some hours with our custom timezone, we'll get a wonderful discussion about mtime, the modification timestamp set in the inode (see stat(1)). In my opinion only two or three of the issues brought are actually issues to care about, the others are some edge case outside of scope.
Open internet/source/culture and the future of this all
http://exple.tive.org/blarg/2018/11/09/the-evolution-of-open/
http://www.plausiblydeniable.com/opinion/gsf.html
https://the-pastry-box-project.net/ed-finkler/2014-july-6

Some meditation on topics some might be accustomed to: open source culture, geek groups, developers thoughts of their own future and balance of life. While I can't really get some of the discussion I can still sympathize with it and have seen it displayed in people I know.
The History of Unix, Rob Pike
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2NI6t2r_Hs

Another Unix history presentation.
vim for everything?
http://alangrow.com/blog/turn-vim-into-excel-tips-for-tabular-data-editing
https://emily.st/2018/11/13/vim-in-the-future/

That first post could be listed as a case of using the wrong tool for the task, shooting yourself in the foot at the same time. The second post has a discussion on vim usages across ages, a pretty basic one but something you can share with someone not knowledgeable about vim.
Gnu stow tuto
https://stevenrbaker.com/tech/managing-dotfiles-with-gnu-stow.html

A tool revered in our small corner of the internet. Along with Nix we got a good pair.

Random

How many computers are in your computer
https://www.gwern.net/Turing-complete#how-many-computers-are-in-your-computer

Gwern's articles are always well researched and usually get updated a lot over time. This section in his "Surprisingly Turing-Complete" one makes you think about how complex system stack up layers over layers with time.
Being unsaid
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/ambigamy/201110/the-silent-treatment-when-people-leave-you-guessing

How can the absence of a thing be a sign? And yet it is.

Thoughts

If you can't tell me what you'd like to happen it means you don't have a problem yet. It's simply nagging. A problem exist only if there's a difference between what is effectively happening and what you'd like to happen.

Going along with the last link of the random section, a thought that's been playing in my head for some time now is to "Make explicit what is implicit". We often assume wrongly that some things should go unsaid but it's always better to be clear about what we have understood, what we expect, what we would wish would be the best possible outcome, that's the only good way to avoid mistakes and misunderstandings. Also we need to add that this does not only apply to problematic scenarios but to any others, if we like something we should be explicit about what exactly what done right and what exactly we liked, this way everyone progresses.

Have a wonderful week everyone.

Archive

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

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
Share your point of view about the newsletter.
Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2018-11-09 00:00:00 | 100

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Dropping KDE
https://jriddell.org/2018/11/02/red-hat-and-kde/
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/11/02/rhel_deprecates_kde/

Media craze, maybe. I just don't think there need to be such silly reason behind the IBM acquisition, putting KDE in the loop along with conspiracy thinking. Gnome is getting lots of news as of lately also, see "Gnome shell extensions", "Themes and the past" in 87.
OpenBSD on a laptop (déjà vu)
https://www.c0ffee.net/blog/openbsd-on-a-laptop/

Same as some of the previous week posts: "OpenBSD on the desktop" in 97, "BSD on desktop and more GUI stuffs" in 80, and "BSD on desktop and laptop" in 72.
OpenGL over Vulkan
https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/blog/2018/10/31/introducing-zink-opengl-implementation-vulkan/

An herculean task that simply "needed to be done".
GUI for Radeon graphic
https://github.com/BoukeHaarsma23/WattmanGTK
https://i.imgur.com/m7vXaaU.png

We don't often see big graphical configuration tools like this on Unix other than proprietary ones. This is kind of refreshing.
Tiling WMs course
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Api6dFMlxAA

A well done and thorough presentation about tiling window managers, why use them, and how to use 6 of them. Highly recommended for anyone that has no clue on that topic.
the elvish shell
https://elv.sh/
https://elv.sh/learn/cookbook.html
https://danyspin97.org/blog/getting-started-with-execline-scripting/

"A new shell, why?" in 87 depicts why you should keep your hopes down but it's still fun to try out different things. It's very friendly to use, sorts of reminds me of fish. One annoying thing I noticed is that it doesn't respect ctrl-l to clear the screen but goes into history mode instead though it can be overridden. The last link is in the same mindset, a new tool to build pipelines.
The init systems war
https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/770093/cd322e1fedf67bbe/

We've all had our popcorn ready the last few years, this sort of articles reminds us that it's not all about stupid internet flame wars but that real works needs to be done to back up software projects otherwise they die out.
VM in a container
https://github.com/lattera/articles/blob/master/freebsd/2018-10-27_jailed_bhyve/article.md

Things get tricky when running dangerous code, this is the kind of security thinking we need.
Magic bytes
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_file_signatures
https://blog.netspi.com/magic-bytes-identifying-common-file-formats-at-a-glance/
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/30203586/do-linux-capabilities-work-with-binfmt-misc#30203690

A friend of mine was trying to find the file type of an unknown file, I thought of pointing him in the direction of magic byte/number (file signature). This kinds of remind me of binfmt_misc on Linux, see "Executables & default program" in issue 77.
Dump a process memory
https://github.com/Microsoft/ProcDump-for-Linux

A small and nifty tool to dump a core from a running process. Give it a try.
Programming tricks and knowledge
https://teaearlgraycold.me/xor-swap-explained-visually/
http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/strings.html
https://www.nayuki.io/page/creating-a-qr-code-step-by-step
https://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/VanRoyChapter.pdf

From swapping without intermediated variable, to the wonderful complex world of string implementation, to a walk-through on how QR codes are generated (the only thing bugging me here was how the format bits were not explained, so check it here instead, more fun in this link), and finally ending with a paper on generic paradigm.

Random

Working remotely
https://www.inc.com/bill-murphy-jr/people-who-work-from-home-are-happier-more-efficient-according-to-this-fascinating-study-theres-only-1-catch.html
https://www.zerocracy.com/2018/10/01/remote-work.html
http://sulami.github.io/posts/working-remotely-part-two/

Some thoughts, opinions, arguments, and researches on working remotely. What do you think of this, maybe it can be your subject of discussion for the week.
Password killers
https://www.troyhunt.com/heres-why-insert-thing-here-is-not-a-password-killer/

"If your product is so awesome, have you stopped to consider why no one is using it?", I've seen security advocates tell people to write down their passwords on paper, put it in a tamper safe envelope and store this envelope in a place that no one can reach easily.
This week we have fun in space
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnhflL7-I3I
https://lab.nationalmedals.org/gravity/
http://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.html

Many interesting videos and explorable explanation links to get you started on your space adventures.
Metadata
https://pspdfkit.com/blog/2018/whats-hiding-in-your-pdf/

This is not really news, but I thought of having a space for it here.

Thoughts

It's been a 100 weeks of Unix newsletters, congratulations everyone! 1763 Unix links, 569 random interesting links, all and all more than 2300 links.

Archive

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

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
Share your point of view about the newsletter.
Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2018-10-31 00:00:00 | 99

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

A year of big acquisitions, big changes in priorities
https://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/ibm-acquire-red-hat-completely-changing-cloud-landscape-and-becoming-world%E2%80%99s-1-hybrid-cloud-provider
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-28/ibm-is-said-to-near-deal-to-acquire-software-maker-red-hat
https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2018/10/26/microsoft-completes-github-acquisition/
https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/04/microsoft-has-acquired-github-for-7-5b-in-microsoft-stock/

I sort of avoided putting business-y articles in this newsletter but I guess it's good to discuss the big acquisitions of this year, this clearly shows the direction that the tech world is taking and is putting its bets on.
Linux hidpi
https://vincent.bernat.ch/en/blog/2018-4k-hidpi-dual-screen-linux

It's one of the thing I keep hearing about from people using Linux, the reviews are harsh but fair. I guess we should keep our expectations low and be surprised when something better happens.
Another week of systemd nags
https://blog.erratasec.com/2018/10/systemd-is-bad-parsing-and-should-feel.html
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/systemd/+bug/1795921

Hopefully it'll get patched soon, what can I say. I mean, I don't agree at all that we shouldn't use at all whatever is layed out in this article but there's a point.
Dependencies in services
https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/sysadmin/InitDependencyUnclear

As usual from this blog it's great content, in this post we see some very good thoughts about what sort of dependencies can exist between services.
/proc again but on another blog
https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2014/10/27/ps/

Also a blog we've seen before in this newsletter, in this episode we'll discover yet another intricate and edge scenario about running out of memory.
Cleaning the kernel
https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/internationalizing-kernel
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-Kills-The-VLA

Internationalizing the kernel sounds like a really bad idea... I'm not sure where and how anyone could think of this. However, removing all variable length arrays, that's something that is fruitful.
Notes about porting softwares to FreeBSD
https://github.com/shlomif/what-i-learned-from-porting-to-freebsd

A must read for anyone that wants to build packages and deploy them on multiple plaftorms.
OpenBSD doas update and virt
https://https.www.google.com.tedunangst.com/flak/post/commands-without-magic
http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq16.html

The first link reminded me of the binfmt on Linux, check "Executables & default program" in issue 77. It is related to unveil changes. I kind of like the conclusion "A thing which used to work stopped working, the unintended result of what should have been a harmless change. Ordinarily we’d call that a bug. Except this new behavior is actually what I wanted all along. So could the bug be a bug fix?"
A how to on OpenSSH
https://github.com/vedetta-com/vedetta/blob/master/src/usr/local/share/doc/vedetta/OpenSSH_Principals.md

You probably don't need to read this but it's kind of well done and I had no clue you could create a sort of PKI with ssh keys. See also "SSH ascii art" in 74, "You wouldn't believe what this ssh can do" in 72, "OpenSSH escape sequences" in 46, and much more content related to ssh and ssh keys.
Learning from rsync
https://blog.plover.com/prog/switch-case-optimization.html

A case of switch case optimization. One of those nifty tricks that you can show off to your coworkers, and maybe in future days somebody will wonder how the hek it works.
Ubuntu, DE, and other shells
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/zsh/+bug/1800280

It's fun when someone jumps on IRC with some weird bugs they found related to how desktop environment rely on too many factors.

Random

Report
http://www.ipcc.ch/report/sr15/
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/07/climate/ipcc-climate-report-2040.html?module=inline
https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2018/10/30/global-biodiversity-wwf_a_23575787/

A desolating report I haven't gone entirely through yet, it's so backed up by so many scientists all around the globe, so thorough. I'll give it a better read this weekend.
Much more light
https://meaningness.com/metablog/sad-light-led-lux
https://meaningness.com/metablog/sad-light-lumens

With the above you may be stuck inside because of the weather. So if you feel bad during winter days this could be a solution.
Helper with research papers
https://fermatslibrary.com/

A follow up on last week's (issue 98) "Short papers about papers, meta-papers".

Thoughts

"One of the worst things you can do is force people who don't feel pain to take your aspirin." - Dan Meyer

https://www.nctm.org/blog/ifmathistheaspirin/
A reminder of "The Shirky principle" in 72.

I'm sending the newsletter early this week because I'm taking some vacations as a birthay gift to myself, I've worked 3 months in the span of 2 months.

Archive

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

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
Share your point of view about the newsletter.
Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2018-10-26 00:00:00 | 98

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Unix in the old days
https://article.olduse.net/4737%40ethz.UUCP
https://www.meetup.com/UNIX-historians/?_cookie-check=b5KQMNxX3kQKSUDh

Far are the days where people lived on different computing islands. The first link reminds us of the days of discovery and the second one is an example on how nowadays connecting everyone through the web is easier.
Performance statistics
https://community.arm.com/tools/b/blog/posts/gnu-toolchain-performance-in-2018
https://community.arm.com/tools/b/blog/posts/update-on-gnu-performance
https://www.dragonflybsd.org/performance

The first two are closely related to "About memory" in 58, "A summary" in 64, and "CPU optimizations" in 73, lots of discussion about compiler optimizations, specifically targeted at arm cpu. I'm quite a fan of the graphical representation and code example of the improvements, this is radically different than Ulrich's old paper. As for DragonflyBSD, that page was without a doubt popular and has finally been updated with some newer statistics of 2018 using the brand new "Threadripper" everyone has been spamming so much about in all the tech media (You gotta admit it's good PR). See for yourself if the BSD known for using SMP the best stays true to its name on the 64 threads monster CPU.
OpenBSD management
https://chown.me/blog/upgrading-openbsd-with-ansible.html
https://kristaps.bsd.lv/slant/

When you run a box remotely, be it a VM or any other type of virtual or real machine, you sort of run into the issue of monitoring and managing that system. Here is some content to do this on OpenBSD.
Arcan
https://arcan-fe.com/2018/10/17/arcan-versus-xorg-approaching-feature-parity/

The start of a series of post about the difference between Arcan and Xorg, we talked a bit about Arcan before in "GUI" in 77 and "Awk for multimedia" in 44. This articles brings a lot of X related topics such as rendering, fonts, input management, clipboard (see "X11 Clipboard" in 9), etc..
A floating WM inside a term
https://gitlab.com/jD91mZM2/termwm

Tired of tmux, screen, or dvtm, then try this new kid in town. However, after 2h of trying to fix the compilation issues with Cargo I think I will just give up trying it first hand.
Fuzzing
https://www.informatics.indiana.edu/xw7/papers/p2139-you.pdf

We mentioned fuzzing a lot before, see "Now give me some BSD to balance" in 88 amongst others. This time it's about automating the creation of PoC based on CVE.
Using Xorg for privilege escalation
https://lists.x.org/archives/xorg-announce/2018-October/002927.html
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/10/25/x_org_server_vulnerability/
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/commit/50c0cf885a6e91c0ea71fb49fa8f1b7c86fe330e

An old school type of bug, bad command-line parameter validation and bad usage of setuid. Maybe fuzzing would've helped finding it earlier, what do you think?
Sandbox and VMs
https://david942j.blogspot.com/2018/10/note-learning-kvm-implement-your-own.html

A tedious tutorial on how to learn to use the KVM of Linux programmatically.
Still keeping up
https://ops.tips/blog/how-linux-creates-sockets/
https://ops.tips/blog/how-linux-tcp-introspection/

This series of articles has been magnificent so far. Even if the author insists that it's about procfs it is about way much more, it touches many interesting topics of the Linux kernel.
GC
http://paul.bone.id.au/2018/10/19/gc-falsehoods/

There's a bit of hype about GC these days, be it java 11 ZGC (see "Solaris 11.4 SRU and Java 11, everything Oracle" in 94), or Go GC (see "In memory layout and Go" in 96 and "For all those people trying to rewrite a kernel" in the same issue), or Mozilla Firefox JS updates on their GC, or Rust gc, or whatever, all are thriving for better memory footprint.
Not really sure what this is about
https://github.com/akavel/up

I can't find a use case for this, wouldn't tee(1) cut it?
Audio madness
https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2018/10/21/audio/
https://lobste.rs/s/2mru6l/hidden_complication_for_linux_desktop

When an article starts like this one you know what is incoming, yet another long debugging session.

Random

TLS session resumption and tracking
https://www.zdnet.com/google-amp/article/advertisers-can-track-users-across-the-internet-via-tls-session-resumption/
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/10/23/paul_vixie_slaps_doh_as_dns_privacy_feature_becomes_a_standard/

A nifty trick on how to track users using TLS session resumption and another series of arguments against and for DoH.
Websites the last few years
https://2018.bloomca.me/en

Enjoy a simulation of what today feels like. Remember "As if you were working" a long time ago in issue 31.
Time management and management in general
https://huytd.github.io/the-best-todo-list-method.html
https://blog.hubstaff.com/time-management-tools/
http://www.safetydifferently.com/why-do-things-go-right/
https://jasonevanish.com/

Different types of articles about to-do lists, time management concepts/tools, how to do things right (as generic as that sounds) sort of taking the opposite of survivorship bias, and ending with a blog about management in general.
They were all the same before this
https://reword.ca/different-types-of-dashes-and-how-to-use-them-in-your-writing/

Today we learned something new, but I think I'll stick to calling them all dashes.
The Fregoli Delusion
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pzv1BDdmqzM

A sad and complex condition that could be joined and linked with similar other conditions.
Again in the world of typography
https://betterwebtype.com/rhythm-in-web-typography

Typography is hard, this keep being said over and over again, and typography on a computer medium is even harder. This article is an expansion of "Vertical white space" in issue 63.
Short papers about papers, meta-papers
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/441f/ac7c2020e1c8f0d32adffca697bbb8a198a1.pdf
http://blizzard.cs.uwaterloo.ca/keshav/home/Papers/data/07/paper-reading.pdf

How to read a paper and how to write one, two very short and quick papers on those topics.

Thoughts

"There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult." ― C. A. R. Hoare

"At first I hoped that such a technically unsound project would collapse but I soon realized it was doomed to success. Almost anything in software can be implemented, sold, and even used given enough determination. There is nothing a mere scientist can say that will stand against the flood of a hundred million dollars. But there is one quality that cannot be purchased in this way - and that is reliability. The price of reliability is the pursuit of the utmost simplicity. It is a price which the very rich find most hard to pay." ― C.A.R. Hoare

https://www.innoq.com/en/blog/do-we-worship-complexity/, somewhat of a reminder of "Holding it in my head" in issue 94.

Archive

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

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
Share your point of view about the newsletter.
Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2018-10-19 00:00:00 | 97

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

You own terminal from scratch
https://vincent.bernat.ch/en/blog/2017-write-own-terminal

It's not really a terminal from scratch but this article shows well how you can build upon the VTE lib to create something.
FreeBSD amd64 syscalls
https://cryptoden.pw/downloads/Dive_into_syscall_handling_on_freeBSD_AMD64.txt

An advanced paper (written in the typical style of security researchers aka not-very-readable) about FreeBSD system calls. Sadly, unlike everything else in most of the newsletter even weird esoteric research, I couldn't finish the paper as it was too dense (or maybe it's me).
What you get from reading code instead of books
https://nanxiao.me/en/the-byproducts-of-reading-openbsd-netcat-code/

Just a quick review by the author on what was learned/found from reading the netcat OpenBSD code.
OpenBSD on the desktop
https://blog.gsora.xyz/openbsd-on-the-desktop-some-thoughts/

Also a thought article with points on what the author liked or not about the OpenBSD user experience. Sort of related to all the entries that touch the topic of desktop and UX such as "Themes and the past" in 87, "BSD on desktop and more GUI stuffs" in 80, "BSD on desktop and laptop" in 72.
Some lwn with Linux inspired by BSDs
https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/767630/594421f913c3d00a/
https://lwn.net/Articles/767258/
https://blogs.gnome.org/tbernard/2018/10/15/restyling-apps-at-scale/
https://lwn.net/Articles/767137/

The first article is about getting more idle (power wise too) in the idle state by stopping the kernel tick if it seems like a good idea. Second one is about the freedesktop group (fd.o) having a discussion about their past, current, and future and direction. I added after that one a link to the gnome redesigns which they've been working on, see "Hackathon and secure chats" in 76. The last article is about how to be inspired by OpenBSD's unveil which we mentioned multiple times in this newsletter.
Horrible Unix forms
https://czep.net/17/legion-of-lobotomized-unices.html
https://lobste.rs/s/opfkcr/legion_lobotomized_unices
https://czep.net/17/lfs-on-ec2.html

Lots of nostalgia in this article, but we've moved on. Is is rosy retrospection or is it not. The author dreads these new days as if they lack social network interaction... I'm not sure about that, more like there's too much of it, or maybe it's another kind of interaction. What's your take on that topic? A reminder of "Will Geocities websites make a comeback?" in 56.
top, proc, containers, and scratch
https://ops.tips/blog/a-month-of-proc/
https://ops.tips/blog/what-is-slash-proc/
https://ops.tips/blog/how-is-proc-able-to-list-pids/
https://ops.tips/blog/why-top-inside-container-wrong-memory/
https://ops.tips/blog/proc-pid-limits-under-the-hood/
https://ops.tips/blog/using-procfs-to-get-process-stack-trace/

A great series of in depth articles (it's going to be 30 in total!) on procfs and everything related, and much much more. You should follow up as the articles come out. Also related to "Procfs, capabilities, and netlinks" in 59, "VFS, proc and root filesystems" in 58 and "The mighty proc" in 52, maybe that first article in the series is somehow related to the data storage on Unix podcast..
MacOS hardening
https://blog.bejarano.io/hardening-macos.html
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/119627/why-are-interactive-shells-on-osx-login-shells-by-default

Lots of people praise Apple for being full of intent on security and privacy, some agree on that stance, some say it's only marketing. In this blog post there's a list of steps that could easily be taken by any non-technical user to ensure a bit of security. Somewhat related to "The Shirky principle" in 72 and "Differential privacy" 47. The last link is not really connected to the first one but it's an issue that I've encountered this week and found interesting.
Some security content
https://tls.ulfheim.net/
https://www.libssh.org/security/advisories/CVE-2018-10933.txt
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/10/bug-in-libssh-makes-it-amazingly-easy-for-hackers-to-gain-root-access/

A website to explore and get an explanation about everything in a TLS connection, plus a new vulnerability, this time in the libssh.
A poster from 1983
https://c1.staticflickr.com/1/188/420835186_08b2c2ea0e_b.jpg

Not much to say about this poster, it's pretty cool.

Random

A miniature world
https://www.theatlantic.com/amp/photo/572737/

These were some entries in a photography competition, let's hope you enjoy them.
Un-Mercator-ing projection
https://g.redditmedia.com/CsGjFy1rgy77CN_KYN7AFqeik4oYdUONVY6G5bZlZOM.gif?fm=mp4&mp4-fragmented=false&s=12cc46b1580f9e34e11256a4dc94fd1f

I already knew the Mercator projections were skewed but I've never realized how much and how to map the scales in my mind, this animation clarifies this.
Game programming hacks
http://blog.moertel.com/posts/2013-12-14-great-old-timey-game-programming-hack.html

Unrolling loops, something you must have heard many times before. A continuation on the series about old video games and video games in general, checkout last week (issue 96) "Sublime in video games", "Web adventures" in 93, "More game design beauty" in 88, "Camera in side-scroller games" in 88 also, and "Retro gaming" in 77.
Stress
https://www.prevention.com/life/a20508569/stress-makes-you-stronger/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3374921/

A made a research on stress some years ago (see it here and found so many research about the horrible long term effects it has on us that I might have started to be biased about what I read about the topic. This fun article, along with the fascinating research paper, go over to the opposite side, the side where stress is a helper depending on how you use it and perceive it, a part of growth and human life.

Thoughts

"Confusopoly"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confusopoly
http://dilbert.com/strip/2010-11-21
http://blog.dilbert.com/2011/12/07/online-confusopoly/

Archive

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

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
Share your point of view about the newsletter.
Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2018-10-12 00:00:00 | 96

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

In memory layout and Go
https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/programming/GoProgramMemoryUse
https://arjunsreedharan.org/post/148675821737/memory-allocators-101-write-a-simple-memory

Going over the memory chunks allocated by Go. You must also check "Heap, malloc, glibc" in issue 85 for an idea of the layout of the heap and how it's similar to Go structure. The second link is an extra because it has been covered multiple times before in a lot of other entries already such as "sbrk and malloc" in 53.
For all those people trying to rewrite a kernel
https://www.usenix.org/conference/osdi18/presentation/cutler

Whatever your preferred high level language this paper goes into the details, motivations, practicalities of writing a kernel with it. It has a big emphasis on memory/heap usage, things such as OOM and more.
CLI from the perspective of the "hype" industry
https://medium.com/@jdxcode/12-factor-cli-apps-dd3c227a0e46

Pale, even cringy and opposite, in comparison with "Yet again a Unix CLI discussion" of 77 and all the other Unix philosophy design talks such as the popular "The Art of Unix Programming" by ESR, but it still deserves a small mention.
Monitoring
http://tech.marksblogg.com/top-htop-glances.html
http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2018-10-08/dtrace-for-linux-2018.html

A great thorough overview of monitoring tools and another big post by Brendan Gregg's about tracing, this one is about the new powerful bpftrace, see also "c10k follow up and a bit about flamegraphs" in 53 and "So many tracing tools it makes me dizzy" in 43.
Writing a daemon
https://chaoticlab.io/c/c++/unix/2018/10/01/daemonize.html

A subject that has been discussed in depth in many places, including the nixers podcast: see here or here.
And the daemon manager
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=systemd-2018-Lennart

We covered a lot of the topics in this presentation in this newsletter already, some of the other content/features are also interesting: Portable Services, Boot Counting, OCI runtime support in nspawn, System Call Whitelist, DNS over TLS, and much more.
Speed up tests without code
https://www.gregnavis.com/articles/how-to-tune-your-database-to-make-tests-faster.html

A technique to use systemd mount unit to automatically start the database on a tmpfs when running test.
VMs
https://dan.langille.org/2018/10/02/running-freebsd-on-osx-using-xhyve-a-port-of-bhyve/
http://www.netzbasis.de/openbsd/vmd-debian/index.html

Two guides on running different Unix OS in VMs on different Unix hosts.
Indirect licensing
https://writing.kemitchell.com/2018/10/01/Indirect-Licensing.html

Open source and the joy of the legal world of licensing, the does and donts. In this article the author visits the different way licenses can be distributed.
Who's Senior
https://jvns.ca/blog/senior-engineer/

A small post about the author's own description of what a senior engineer is.

Random

Websites and interactions
https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/09/how-to-build-a-lowtech-website/
https://tinysubversions.com/notes/decentralized-social-networks/

Maybe this could be considered a continuation on the state of the web series, this time we emphasize on lightweight websites (even physically, see also "Ludites or not" in 72 and "Websites ideas" in 60) and a bit of digital identity with the topic of decentralization.
Stats about the web
http://www.internetlivestats.com/total-number-of-websites/

Those kinds of statistics are always interesting to see, checkout "Map of 802.11" in 78 and "State of..." in issue 65 too.
Sublime in video games
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wzj4h0R_ryQ

I'm not sure I agree with the description of the sublime that is portrayed here but I do certainly like the idea that it could be applied to some scenes or moments in video games.
Decision fatigue
https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/244395
https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/10/27/doctors-and-decision-fatigue/
http://www.slate.com/articles/business/productivity/2014/10/decision_fatigue_ego_depletion_how_to_make_better_decisions.html

A concept I thought of sharing this week, a sort of obvious one but that needs to be named.
Overrationalization
https://fs.blog/2017/04/mental-model-hanlons-razor/

Another link from the beautiful knowledge project, this time it's about Hanlon's Razor.

Thoughts

"Everyone is complex and made out of different parts. Those parts grow at different rates. Some parts of ourselves could still be teenagers while others mature more fully."

Archive

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

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
Share your point of view about the newsletter.
Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2018-10-05 00:00:00 | 95

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Yet another OpenBSD installation tuto
https://bsdboy.ml/posts/installing-hugo-and-hosting-website/

This seems like the trend of the moment, and a nice one at that, blog posts about setting up any kind of services on OpenBSD machines.
Terminal madness (continue)
http://xn--rpa.cc/essays/term
https://lobste.rs/s/zvawoa/on_terminal_control

Not much to say about this one other than to refer to "Terminal interface" from 92, "Alternative screen and the quirkiness of terminals" in 86, "Terminal madness once more" in 82, and also that when I started doing ascii arts with colors I was manually typing the color escape codes and it was time-consuming. Maybe refer to the terminals podcast found here https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=2108 or https://venam.nixers.net/blog/unix/2017/06/04/terminals.html.
Layering docker with Nix
https://grahamc.com/blog/nix-and-layered-docker-images

It's kind of hard for me to grasp this topic as I've not delve too much into it but I grasp the overall concept and it seems really cool.
More on device mapping
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGnFhmG8gT0
https://www.thegeekdiary.com/beginners-guide-to-device-mapper-dm-multipathing/
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Device-mapper

The first link is a presentation about the implementation of device removal of a top layer in ZFS. The second in the list is maybe not as low level as the ones from "Device Mapper" in '77' but still very refreshing, for more review on that topic you can check the podcast on data storage on Unix. Thegeekdiary blog may sound clickbaity but I was surprised by the quality of the content, time to add it to your list of places to follow up. The last link is a wiki that goes over dmsetup, the command line tool used to manipulate device mappers the internals of things such as the raid and crypt implementations. There's also a list of other very interesting device mapper implementation I had no clue existed. I'm sure there are some people around that are fan of volume management and fancy device mappers stacks.
Linux cache bug
https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2018/09/a-cache-invalidation-bug-in-linux.html

A dive (deep) into the Linux VMA to find an overflow bug.
A analysis of a crypto scheme
https://latacora.micro.blog/2018/09/30/analyzing-a-simple.html

Maybe a bit related to "Let's play with encoding and formats" in issue 71.
Auditing
https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/6/html/security_guide/chap-system_auditing
https://linux-audit.com/configuring-and-auditing-linux-systems-with-audit-daemon/

This week I was reminded of this tool, it sort of fit a business/security case we need. For those who wants to learn more about it those two links should get you started.
The never ending questions about C
https://words.steveklabnik.com/should-you-learn-c-to-learn-how-the-computer-works

A decent and fair article on this topic that comes out a lot, see also "Why C and not something else" in 89 and "More C, more C" in 78.
Paper vs screen
https://www.ischool.utexas.edu/~adillon/Journals/Reading.htm

I've read this research, which is a sort of meta-analysis, about a year ago when doing a brainstorm on scientifically proven digital attention helpers. I thought of sharing it again this week, as this is a recurrent topic of discussion.
Software development management
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/10/agents-of-automation/568795/?single_page=true

The urban legend of the programmers who've automated their jobs. Maybe also checkout "Useless jobs" in 74, and "Ludites or not" in 72.

Random

The WWW is awesome (continue+)
https://youtu.be/wSn7CJ0cNZ4

Last weekend I had this discussion with a friend about this series I ran in this newsletter about the WWW awesomeness of niche found in there and why I was doing that. The sort of refreshment in the face of the never ending list of articles and debates about the online click-economy, privacy, and attention span issues that I've discussed so much in the state-of-the-web state-of-the-mind series. This link is from this same friend, it's quite interesting and well researched as are a lot of those sort of educational Youtube videos, maybe not as niche as the other kinds of videos I've inserted in this newsletter but still fun. This is entry is more of a reminder of the topic then being about the content of the video. So, readers, if you stumble upon things on the internet that makes you go "Waw, damn this is good" then hit me up with it and I'll happily share it in the newsletter.

Thoughts

"Whatever your strengths are, they will likely lead straight into your weaknesses."

A quote from the "Twelve Natural Laws of Business", see http://www.zingermanscommunity.com/2012/01/natural-law-10-whatever-your-strengths-are-they-will-likely-lead-straight-into-your-weaknesses/ for more info.
What I have been reminded by this quote is actually the total opposite, when someone is aware of their weakness it will often appear to others as their most polished attribute.

Archive

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

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
Share your point of view about the newsletter.
Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2018-09-28 00:00:00 | 94

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

More OpenBSD networking
https://www.openbsd.org/papers/asiabsdcon08-network.pdf
https://jonwillia.ms/2018/09/23/anycast-dns-openbsd

A well explained, quick, and approachable paper giving an overview of OpenBSD network stack. This is my highly recommended read for the week. This is followed by a guide to running anycast DNS on OpenBSD in the world of homecooked community-based meshed network.
Ed, my old friend
https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/EdNoLongerGoodEditor

Remember "Just ed" in issue 40, yeah so nothing unexpected here, welcome to another Unix rant about text editors, a toned down and fair version.
spawn() why isn't there something like that
https://tavianator.com/spawn-of-satan/

A sweet article going through the Unix way of starting new processes via already running processes and a "meditation" on the upsides and downsides of it.
dmesg
https://ops.tips/blog/dmesg-under-the-hood/

In this post we explore how dmesg and the Linux ring buffer works.
Testing the GNU coreutils
http://www.pixelbeat.org/docs/coreutils-testing.html

The whole logic behind the test suite used for the GNU coreutils, a well designed test suite in my opinion. You can use the tips mentioned in the article for your owns.
A marriage between package management and https
https://www.openbsd.org/papers/eurobsdcon_2018_https.pdf

The couple fight between pkg management and https, with a bit of a look at the shiny new TLS1.3 and finally giving the coup-de-grace showing how confidentiality here may not matter because it's not there so we should rely on something else. Related to "Nagging about Debian" in 63 and "APT and https" in 60.
Chrome and crypto
https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2018/09/23/why-im-leaving-chrome/
https://ha.x0r.be/posts/chrome-is-a-google-service/
https://www.blog.google/products/chrome/product-updates-based-your-feedback/
https://medium.com/@tejaas_solanki/understanding-pgp-by-simulating-it-79248891325f
http://blog.obligd.com/posts/everyday-crypto.html

Three links about the Chrome browser recent discussion and the last ones about crypto and security in general. The PGP one is related to "Spirit of the law" in 84, "Let's play with encoding and formats" in 71, "Why we should use plain text emails" in 75, and "Don't use PGP? Why?" in 42.
Vnc and remote
https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/qemu-monitor-socket-rce-vnc
https://benjojo.co.uk

We kind of had a trend to create home pages similar to our window managers, this person takes it further by running the entire OS and discovering the security issues with it. This is close to "Run everything on the web!" of 19 and "Emulators in JS" of 16.
Solaris 11.4 SRU and Java 11, everything Oracle
https://blogs.oracle.com/solaris/announcing-oracle-solaris-114-sru1
https://blogs.oracle.com/java-platform-group/oracle-jdk-releases-for-java-11-and-later
http://jdk.java.net/11/release-notes
https://blog.joda.org/2018/09/do-not-fall-into-oracles-java-11-trap.html

SRU or Source Repository Update, Solaris is still getting cool updates and support so far (see "Solaris is still alive" in 79), and with Oracle position on Java 11 this will all develop ""interestingly"".
Swap on Linux
https://opensource.com/article/18/9/swap-space-linux-systems

"Arrows cycle symbol for failing faster", I have no clue why this image was chosen in the article... This is a bit related to our usual "data storage on Unix" type of article, while just grasping the tip of the iceberg it's still a good tutorial article that explains most of the content related to swapping.

Random

Another series of posts about hiring and startups
http://vadimkravcenko.com/growing-your-interns
https://leonardofed.io/blog/startups-hiring.html

Some down to earth thoughts about new programmers to the world of work.
Holding it in my head
http://paulgraham.com/head.html

I never could put this into word as well as this article did but this is something that I can't help but try to do as much as possible when working on projects.
Love of the internet
https://youtu.be/01iDVrKmi9w

Get your hamsters ready to run because they'll have to power some houses.

Thoughts

"Different people define relationships in different ways"

Archive

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

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
Share your point of view about the newsletter.
Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2018-09-19 00:00:00 | 93

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Handling json in the shell
https://medv.io/json-in-bash/

We've had a discussion some days ago about scripts to be "quick and efficient" so we'll continue with it. This one is not really about wrappers around anything but helpers to manipulate json on the pipeline. The tools seem useful, if I had to work with json all day I think I'd give them a try.
Calendar for history
https://akr.am/blog/posts/today-in-history-brought-to-you-by-unix

The fortune of the day. Related to another recent forums discussion about keeping software alive and learning from them by reading their source code.
POSIX shell and no bashism
https://apenwarr.ca/log/20110228

A lot of those are normal tips but some are really good ones too, take it as a reminder/refresher on shell scripting habits.
Good docs
https://text.causal.agency/001-make.txt

A great small miscellaneous man page about some tips related to using Make.
SMTPD for humans https://www.bsdcan.org/2016/schedule/events/691.en.html
https://www.bsdcan.org/2016/schedule/attachments/377_smptd_tutorial.pdf
https://www.bsdcan.org/2016/schedule/attachments/378_smtpd_cheatsheet.pdf

I haven't found the video of this tutorial but there's still some good content in the presentation slides and cheetsheat.
The boot choices
https://oshogbo.vexillium.org/blog/53/
https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=bhyve&apropos=0&sektion=0&manpath=FreeBSD+11.1-RELEASE+and+Ports&arch=default&format=html
https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/virtualization-host-bhyve.html

Another post from the ashogbo blog. It's my first time learning about the bhyve hypervisor, at least under that name and not vmm, and I already like it.
Just replace it by systemd
https://mjanja.ch/2015/06/replacing-cron-jobs-with-systemd-timers/

Cron jobs are not perfect but they aren't complex either. There are many reasons to not use them but use something else instead, would you give systemd a try?
A simple linker example
https://sourceware.org/binutils/docs/ld/Simple-Example.html#Simple-Example

Ever wanted to manipulate the linker at a lower level, commanding it on how it should place the section of the executable. Well, I've wanted to, and this small section of this book is a start.
Alpine RCE
https://justi.cz/security/2018/09/13/alpine-apk-rce.html

A quick MITM attack on Alpine package manager.
UI NextStep
https://github.com/trunkmaster/nextspace

"NEXTSPACE is desktop environment that brings NeXTSTEP look and feel to Linux." Nothing more to say, enjoy.
And an extra for the ride
https://zwischenzugs.com/2018/09/13/anatomy-of-a-linux-dns-lookup-part-v-two-debug-nightmares/

This has been one of my favorite blog posts series in a while, so I'm still adding it to this newsletter. I hope you're enjoying it as much as I am.

Random

Lavarand
https://web.archive.org/web/19971210213248/http://lavarand.sgi.com/
http://www.lavarand.org/what/index.html
https://www.fourmilab.ch/hotbits/
https://blog.cloudflare.com/lavarand-in-production-the-nitty-gritty-technical-details/

In the last issue ("You certainly remember those" in 93) we talked about their history. Now we bring a subject dear to cryptography fans, sort of related to "A documentary about chaos theory" in 78 too. Shout-out to my coworkers, we should've bought lavalamps instead of a costly hardware security module.
Puppets
http://marwencol.com/
http://marwencol.com/documentary/

A beautiful story I was fascinated with this week. It's related to the other puppet master of "The WWW is awesome (continue)" in issue 78.
Development and learning
https://www.samba.org/ftp/tridge/misc/french_cafe.txt
https://putanumonit.com/2018/09/07/the-scent-of-bad-psychology/

The first post is a wonderful example of protocol reverse-engineering technique at its finest and the second just about the reproducibility chaos happening in the world of psychology the last few years.
Web adventures
http://www.web-adventures.org/

A bunch of old-school text-based game revived to be playable in a web-browser.

Thoughts

"Chess has shaped how I think. This idea that most chess moves are mistakes, even when made by very good players. Also, you can’t blame other people for your own problems, even though some of your problems may be their fault." - Tyler Cowen

You know the "Baader-Meinhof" effect, well it happened this week to. It seemed like everywhere I went chess made an appearance. From a series I'm watching with my significant other, to a podcast, to my coworker learning some new moves. Though I haven't got to play this week, ironically, but the concept that kept floating in my mind was the one found in this quote.

The newsletter is coming early this week because I'm taking some small vacations, have fun everyone.

Archive

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

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
Share your point of view about the newsletter.
Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2018-09-14 00:00:00 | 92

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Terminal interface
https://p.janouch.name/article-tui.html

A work-in-progress article about the magic (mess) of terminals we've been so fond of. See "Terminal madness once more" in 82 and what it refers in its description, also "Alternative screen and the quirkiness of terminals" in 86. We've shared a lot of content related to this.
Have you said magic
https://rhelblog.redhat.com/2018/01/12/linux-and-the-enduring-magic-of-unix/

The usual "what my journey has been" sort of article. This one differs a bit so it's interesting to go through. Beware for those sensible persons that get micro-aggression-post-traumatic-disorder from hearing Linux and Unix in the same sentence.
We have to compare it with something
http://blog.nullspace.io/batch.html

Let me just quote this eloquent way to put things: "Bash: a language that was neither designed, nor evolved. An adequate solution to a problem that has since become orders of magnitude harder. As arcane as it is useful, as dangerous as it is ubiquitous, Bash: the language that asks how much we are willing to give up for convenience’s sake?".
Talking about fan base
https://medium.com/s-c-a-l-e/how-containers-became-a-tech-darling-and-why-docker-became-their-poster-child-bfaf9ac87825

An interview with the old CTO of Joyent now head of tech at cloud system at Ericsson about containers, how they came to be and why they took off.
Bad processes
https://blog.xenproject.org/2018/08/01/killing-processes-that-dont-want-to-be-killed/

There's a subtle manner to do simple things the right way without getting yourself in trouble. Here we explore killing a process, especially when we want to have it containerized and not contaminate all the system.
Oldies
https://notes.technologists.com/notes/2017/03/08/lets-start-at-the-very-beginning-801-romp-rtpc-aix-versions/

If you're into that sort of recollection of the past with all the gritty details then you'll like this, otherwise it'll all sound like some boring corporate story telling without value.
Multithreading, multiprocess, coroutine, asynchronous, parallel, NUMA & SMP
https://oshogbo.vexillium.org/blog/50/

This article deals with writing code that doesn't lock or spin too much or use mutex everytime we have to read or write something in a multi-anything environment.
A Linux distro that is BBQ grilled
https://killx.linuxbbq.org/

Tired of having it grandma-easy with GUIs and binary installs then this is for you.
System programming
http://willcrichton.net/notes/systems-programming/

Another instance of pedantry related to name giving. A good definition in my opinion is "programming to maintain the system so that other applications can run better", close to the second definition in the first quote of the article.
New OpenSSL release
https://www.openssl.org/blog/blog/2018/09/11/release111/

This one finally brings the TLS v1.3 support we've been talking about for so long. This is the big feature of the release basically, enjoy and don't forget to keep doing security updates.

Random

For developers and software startup creators
https://github.com/cjbarber/ToolsOfTheTrade

Yet-another-big-list-of-links, this time it's about resources to build a software startup.
Decision, thinking, and understanding
https://fs.blog/mental-models/
https://fs.blog/2017/08/amateurs-professionals/

Another big list of content. Take your time to go through this wonderful blog about decision making, a sort of online think tank. Closely related to "Thinking in new ways" from issue 67.
In continuation
https://dnote.io/blog/how-i-built-personal-knowledge-base-for-myself/

Decisions can't be made without a knowledge base, this is why we tackle this in this post.
You certainly remember those
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/the-history-of-the-lava-lamp-21201966/
https://www.thoughtco.com/history-of-lava-lamps-1992086

No idea why I'm adding this but I'm adding it anyway. Fun history behind this weird contraption.

Thoughts

"does the tournament make sense as you keep going?"

Why are we striving for what we are striving for. Does it make sense to focus more on it or to stabilize, spread out, and balance efforts into other things. To keep going on in the tournament we have to put more of ourselves in it and so less into other things. Maybe this is a warped up way of saying "rat race" maybe it's not, it depends on how deliberate we are about our decisions.

Archive

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

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
Share your point of view about the newsletter.
Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2018-09-07 00:00:00 | 91

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Motherboard and BIOS update
http://lists.dragonflybsd.org/pipermail/users/2018-September/357883.html

I'm not a hardware guy so this kind of talk is hard to follow but it's still impressive to see the kind of testing and benchmarks that is happening.
Lots of OpenBSD
https://h3artbl33d.nl/blog/nextcloud-on-openbsd
https://chown.me/blog/2FA-with-ssh-on-OpenBSD.html
https://www.tedunangst.com/flak/post/hard-state-soft-state-confusion

Lots of projects and articles all with OpenBSD in mind as a platform. You can replace your cloud system provider with nextcloud and run it on OpenBSD. Or use 2FA with one of those external physical token authentication device. Or you can wonder about the state of security patching, from hardware to software (not really OpenBSD but very interesting).
A series on NetBSD pkgsrc
https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/gsoc_2018_reports_configuration_files
https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/gsoc_2018_reports_configuration_files1
https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/gsoc_2018_reports_configuration_files2
https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/gsoc_2018_reports_configuration_files3

A series diving into pkgsrc and how it handles configuration files, setting default values, merging, versioning, and more.
MacOs exploit
https://objective-see.com/blog/blog_0x38.html

Custom URL schemes, what did the standards say about that, check last week "The arch of the web" in issue 90. They're certainly allowed to extend the protocol but should you probably limit yourself to use the ones from the IANA: http://www.iana.org/assignments/uri-schemes/uri-schemes.xhtml?
Process title
https://oshogbo.vexillium.org/blog/51/

If you've ever wondered what was a process title, how it got set, and where you can read it then this article will answer those questions.
Debugging
https://codingagainstchaos.com/2018/07/21/testing-the-unthinkable.html
https://codewithoutrules.com/2018/09/04/python-multiprocessing/
http://blog.codetastrophe.com/2008/12/writing-cross-platform-elf-binary.html

Those are some nice blog names "coding against chaos", "code without rules", "codetastrophe", this shows how we perceive our domain of expertise. From testing code, to forking, and ending with building cross platform elf. I would've put every one of those in a separate entry but I couldn't resist mentioning the blog naming. The source for the last post can be found on Google code https://code.google.com/archive/p/codetastrophe/source/default/source, I've also posted it in a gist https://gist.github.com/venam/34b954db3ac78ab0d9d7d67f98423277.
paperTTY
https://github.com/joukos/PaperTTY

This week in awesome inventions we have TTY on e-paper/e-ink displays. The coolness can be summarized with this sentence "Running Nethack outside in the noon sun, powered directly by a solar panel, connected to a Bluetooth keyboard". Simulated paper with a simulated TTY on it.
Xft but for xcb
https://venam.nixers.net/blog/unix/2018/09/02/fonts-xcb.html
https://p.janouch.name/article-xgb.html

I'm shamelessly plugging one of my own articles. This goes into how to implement a font library, similar to how Xft works, using common building blocks. If you're interested in how the font stack is put together then this is for you. The second article is about thinking on how to build a UI from scratch using X11, it discuses in more depth about the components and libraries that are needed to plug everything together. It's a great resource.
Showing code
https://medium.com/@Fabinout/13-tips-to-show-code-on-screen-5d5a417aec88

We all have our favorite colorscheme, our favorite way of displaying text (see "Choosing the right typography" in issue 74), but when it comes to showing it to different persons, especially during presentations, there should be a standard pleasant way to do it. Kudos to the author of this article for putting some light on this subject.
Containers management
https://penguindreams.org/blog/my-love-hate-relationship-with-docker-and-container-orchestration-systems/

The author walks us through the edges of using Docker containers, some of the quirks of pulling prepackaged "official" builds, the security implication on keeping packages within containers up to date, and other things to know.

Random

Once more... About Identity
https://regularflolloping.com/posts/identity-in-the-wired/

Let's bring back an old topic that keeps resurfacing in this newsletter: Identity, and specifically digital identity. This short thought piece should get you back on those thoughts, plus you can always dig in the archive to find all that has been shared.

Thoughts

"Are they smart? Do they get things done? Do I want to spend a lot of time around them?" - Sam Altman

This week we have a quote related to work culture, more precisely partnering up aka having coworkers or hiring. I've noted that quote when the "How to Start a Startup" course at Standford in Fall 2014 came out and have kept it in my mind since then. How do we know that the team is holding well together. Some of the criteria are in that quote, what others do you want to add? This can be your conversation starter for next week.

Archive

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

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
Share your point of view about the newsletter.
Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2018-08-31 00:00:00 | 90

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Design of Unix prog
http://harmful.cat-v.org/cat-v/unix_prog_design.pdf

The paper that all cat-v lovers salivate for.
Scripts to be "quick and efficient"
https://github.com/huyng/bashmarks
https://github.com/jesseduffield/lazygit

We see a bunch of those pop up from time to time, script or interfaces with shorthand to make the typing on the shell quicker or easier, do they really help, I'm not sure but they are interesting. Related to "Is there a command that is as ingrained in our muscle memory as cd" in 69
Making use of USBs
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/LiveCD/Persistence
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_USB
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Multiboot_USB_drive

A topic that isn't unknown to any of us. I keep thinking about getting a dedicated harddisk that I would use and transport with me whenever I want to.(see Less ties with a machine) I'm also thinking of getting more hard disks and run my personal RAID but that's another story. In fact I'm just thinking of getting more storage devices in general, there's always an utility for those woudln't you agree?
Glibc, and Linux Kernel Memory
https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/vm/overcommit-accounting
https://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/Memory.html#Memory
https://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/Memory-Concepts.html#Memory-Concepts

Some memory interesting related documents, one about overcommit/overallocating configuration on Linux (Also see "In userspace OOM manager" in 85) and the other about generically how the libc memory allocation works. You can start with the last link and dig as deep as you want.
SMTP auth
https://grymoire.wordpress.com/2018/01/17/metasploitamazon-ses-or-debugging-sendmails-smtp-authentication/
https://www.headdesk.me/Postfix_virtual_hosting

Setting up a mail server is a PITA. I know we've all been there, stuck and not knowing how to debug the SMTP TLS login. This fist article walks you through the initial steps, let's not talk about having users stored in the db instead of using Unix auth, and virtual host.
Hey can I download the internet?
http://isticktoit.net/?p=1637
https://serverfault.com/questions/775728/create-a-multi-homed-linux-load-balancer-with-two-internet-connections-and-one-l#776705
https://www.linux.com/news/monitoring-network-performance-speedometer

I haven't actually tried that yet but the idea is enticing. As I have access to a home wifi and a 3g connection I'm thinking of getting my hands on a cheap router to achieve that. I'll plug my laptop ethernet to the router and let it connect and forward the home wifi and I'll use my phone in tethering to share 3g as a wifi connection to the laptop. Imagine yourself making "vrrrm" sound as your crappy internet suddenly nitrogen-speed up. What do you think, worth a try or not?
Why not overhype minor security bugs
http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2018/08/24/1
http://cve.circl.lu/cve/CVE-2018-15473

The last few years security researchers have done a lot of PR, here are some thoughts why minor bugs shouldn't be overhyped as security catastrophe by taking the example of CVE-2018-15473.
The arch of the web
https://www.w3.org/TR/webarch/
https://stephenmann.io/post/whats-in-a-production-web-application/

The architecture of the whole web and how a node on that web survives.
Socializination
https://thomask.sdf.org/blog/2018/08/19/from-gnu-social-to-mastodon.html
https://catalin.red/inspected-mastodon-social-website/

It's been quite some years since I've touched popular social networks. In this article the author walks us through the story he had jumping from one to the other.
Job interviews
https://github.com/trimstray/test-your-sysadmin-skills

Worried about your next job interviews or looking to polish your "skills" then this repository will contain some gold for you. It's a series of questions and some typical answers to what is usually asked in sysadmin interviews.
Extra
https://lobste.rs/s/zcvotg/openbsd_gaming_resource

Related to "Missing games?" in issue 50 and "Free games" in issue number 10. Now you have a full collection!

Random

Memories
http://paulgraham.com/know.html

Have you ever felt like you wanted to remember something but you couldn't and then entered a state of sorrow and grief about your lost and wasted memories. This short piece may change your mind on that topic.
More game design beauty
https://melmagazine.com/an-oral-history-of-goldeneye-007-on-the-n64-129844f1c5ab

A follow up on "Camera in side-scroller games" of issue 88. This week we dive into a specific game and the story behind its design.

Thoughts

"Commonality is worst habit of mind"

Archive

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

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
Share your point of view about the newsletter.
Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2018-08-24 00:00:00 | 89

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Dropbox is dropping support
http://wittchen.io/2018/08/12/poor-mans-dropbox/

Well, not really true, they're reducing what they want to focus on, namely what type of filesystem they will support. Read on to know how the author builds a mini alternative to Dropbox. In my opinion it would be better to sync the ~/Backup directory instead of deleting and copying everytime, deleting and copying is way too risky.
Keep the flame alive
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BlbQsKpq3Ak&t=0s&list=PL64C1C0401141D607&index=2
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLATO_(computer_system)
http://betaarchive.mrpijey.net/data/list_online/(Abandonware)%20Operating%20Systems.txt

Learn from the past. The last link is a community where you are only able to download if you share with them some abandonware, I'm adding it in case someone is interested in those kinds of things.
Allow changing uid in range
https://github.com/burrows-labs/chuid
https://blog.famzah.net/tag/cap_setuid/

As with anything related to setuid things quickly get confusing. We shared "Setuid... again!" in 28, "Bash is secure" in 13, and "Oh so confusing setuid" in 8. Review those content and continue reading those two links.
Building a DE, what does it take?
https://pythonfunblog.wordpress.com/2017/10/14/writing-a-desktop-environment-with-python/
https://www.uninformativ.de/blog/postings/2016-01-05/0/POSTING-en.html

Window managers and desktop environments, how do they get build, where to start, this is what this article tries to tackle. For more on that topic see: "Window managers" in 64, and "Display servers and graphic operations" in 73.
Why C and not something else
https://mortoray.com/2012/06/11/whats-to-love-about-c/
http://faehnri.ch/how-c-is-not-a-subset-of-cpp/

Everyone have their ways of justifying why they like what they like and why they do what they do, that's what happens in the first post. It goes over the reasons why C is still relevant. In the second one the author clarifies why c++ is not c & classes.
Everyday routine
https://greduan.com/blog/2014-09-10-gutsu.html

Thoughts on getting used to bleeding edge softwares.
Text, typewriters, Linux, and art
https://www.cambus.net/printing-ansi-art/
https://www.cambus.net/20-years-of-linux-from-typewriters-to-computers/

The type of pun is similar to the one in the video of "Retro gaming" in issue 77. This one is more simple and sweet though.
Networking
https://rhelblog.redhat.com/2015/09/29/pushing-the-limits-of-kernel-networking/
https://zwischenzugs.com/2018/08/06/anatomy-of-a-linux-dns-lookup-part-iv/
http://info.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/netmap/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_F-8HijfOA&list=PLeF8ZihVdpFfkICtA2HFsZecdC28_mrQh

From configuring and understanding bottleneck in the kernel related to networking performance, to a follow up on the anatomy of a Linux DNS lookup series, to a video about current issues with the network stack (using netmap for user-space networking).
The edge, what?
https://arcentry.com/blog/what-the-f-is-the-edge/

In a world of "cloud computing" and hyper-hype over keywords an ad-clicks, here's the new one that you need to attach yourself to: the edge.
Another ACM issue
https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3236388

A topic that is recurrent to this newsletter: Storage. We talk about it in different forms but it keeps coming back.

Random

Proving a point
https://pudding.cool/2018/08/pockets/

You know when you get in an argument and you feel like spending more time than usual to prove your point, end up doing a research about pocket in pants, then realize what you've done.
Novel way to produce electricity
https://qz.com/1355672/stacking-concrete-blocks-is-a-surprisingly-efficient-way-to-store-energy/

Hydroelectric dam are not a new thing but this is quite surprising, lifting and letting concrete blocks falls. What do you think, can it compete with category 2 energy storage?
On Bullshit
http://www5.csudh.edu/ccauthen/576f12/frankfurt__harry_-_on_bullshit.pdf
http://sebpearce.com/bullshit/

"This discrepancy is common in public life, where people are frequently impelled - whether by their own propensities or by the demands of others - to speak extensively about matters of which they are to some degree ignorant. Closely related instances arise from the widespread conviction that it is the responsibility of a citizen in a democracy to have opinions about everything". It would be nice to learn to say "I don't know".
Gambler's fallacy
https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/career-hot-streaks

When you're in the mood then everything falls together, you enter the trance mode.

Thoughts

"Trust breeds trust"

Maybe I don't need to say anything and gently leave those here:

Archive

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

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
Share your point of view about the newsletter.
Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2018-08-17 00:00:00 | 88

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Phenomenography
https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1273675
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download;jsessionid=4A302B0A84B9D881DC5888208EAFBB91?doi=10.1.1.86.5214&rep=rep1&type=pdf

I'm not sure if this paper is supposed to be freely available, so if you have university or library access to research paper better pass through that medium. However I can't discern any difference between the one I've linked and the one from the acm. This papers deals with approaches on teaching Unix and what can learned from it, "the purpose of teaching Unix" and why it's important to articulate it clearly to students. A very valuable paper indeed.
Unprivileged fs mount
https://lwn.net/Articles/755593/

What's the state of in-user-space file systems, and when it comes to automount as normal user, find out in this small lwn.
Catharsis with systemd
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AeWu1fZ7bY
https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/linux/SwitchingToTimesyncd
https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/linux/SystemdTimesyncdFailure
https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/linux/SystemdDynamicUserDangerous

One presentation at BSDCan 2018 about "The Tragedy of systemd" and 3 blog posts on a systemd adventure related to NTP, related to "Dynamic user allocation" and mounting in issue 44. That first presentation goes over what init systems and services are about, and daemons, maybe related to the podcast about daemons, find it here https://venam.nixers.net/blog/unix/2017/06/04/daemons.html or here https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=2111 maybe too booting on Unix: https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=1987.
Now give me some BSD to balance
https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/gsoc_2018_reports_integrate_libfuzzer
https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/gsoc_2018_reports_integrate_libfuzzer1
https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/gsoc_2018_reports_integrate_libfuzzer2
https://penguindreams.org/blog/openbsd-spampd-and-the-startup-bug/

Fuzzing in userland being integrated into NetBSD, this will add huge bug fighting capabilities. More about bugs with the last post.
GOT
https://www.exploit-db.com/papers/13203/

More on security. No this isn't an acronym for something else, this is the Global Offset Table. I've been trying this thing on multiple machines and OSs for days now but this doesn't seem reproducible anymore. Still a great way to learn about processes structure.
TLS X509 Certificates
https://blog.cloudflare.com/rfc-8446-aka-tls-1-3/
https://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/x509guide.txt

We've shared a bunch of stuffs related to the PKI in this newsletter before, see "Security and networking" in 77, "CAs are big and powerful -> bad?" in 73, "TLS 1.3" in 68, "TLS v1.3" in 56. This is a follow up on those, and as usual with cloudflare it's a good technical post. The second text file in the list is for the persons who have or are looking for explanations on the x509 format and extensions, as I've been working with those at my day job it's interesting to see all that unfolding and not sound like an alien language anymore.
Complexity rising in the DNS system
https://blog.powerdns.com/2018/03/22/the-dns-camel-or-the-rise-in-dns-complexit/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8N_PO3s_Z24&feature=youtu.be&t=1h20m4s

More on RFCs. You can implement stuffs by looking at pcap only or look through the 3000 RFCs of DNS. As things build in complexity the number of people that are knowledgeable about the ins and outs are gradually reduced to peanuts. Somethings needs to be done about legacy and the way the information is passed down. "Standardizers enjoy complexity but do not personally bear the costs of that complexity."
Building a stupid network for the best
http://isen.com/stupid.html

Continuing with the previous post but for the networking infrastructure. That's a topic that keeps emerging: backward compatibility and inheritance over years. Legacy becomes intelligent in a bad way. Closely related to "The world goes round and round" in issue 46.
"Documented Unix Facilities Over 48 Years"
https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3196476&dl=ACM&coll=DL
https://www2.dmst.aueb.gr/dds/pubs/conf/2018-MSR-Unix-man/html/unix-man.pdf

Diomidis Spinellis is the same author as the book linked in "Incorrect data initialization" all the way back in issue number 2. As with the first link in this newsletter, try getting access through your library or university first if you can. This is the research paper that the "Navigate the history of Unix tools" in 68 is based on.
Doing Unix in the world
https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20180810075449
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLkPeNJYbew
http://mchap.io/using-foia-data-and-unix-to-halve-major-source-of-parking-tickets.html

Two fun cases of Unix usage, one is about running X on very small devices and the other is similar to what we saw last week in "Everyday tools" (issue 87) about parsing humongous files.

Random

Camera in side-scroller games
https://gamasutra.com/blogs/ItayKeren/20150511/243083/Scroll_Back_The_Theory_and_Practice_of_Cameras_in_SideScrollers.php

The type of articles I love to read, a research on all the different ways games implement camera behavior in side-scrollers.
Philosoraptor
http://philosophycommons.typepad.com/flickers_of_freedom/2014/02/a-new-theory-of-free-will-and-the-peer-to-peer-simulation-hypothesis.html

Taking the Chinese room thought experiment a bit further and in a more complicated way. I'm not so convinced of the follow up on the thoughts but the author does a good job at defending it at least.
Visualization of markov chains
http://setosa.io/ev/markov-chains/

Visualization is a great way to learn.

Thoughts

Everything in life has an expiry date, especially for electronics. Some companies even plan ahead this expiry date and indirectly forces you to buy new. But also, most of the things can be repaired, the question is if it's worth the effort to repair it.

Archive

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

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
Share your point of view about the newsletter.
Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2018-08-10 00:00:00 | 87

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Getting it on with OpenBSD
https://bsdly.blogspot.com/2017/07/openbsd-and-modern-laptop.html
https://nanxiao.me/en/reflection-on-one-year-usage-of-openbsd/
https://bobstechsite.com/openbsd-on-an-ibook-g4/
https://www.bsdjobs.com/people/

Articles about using OpenBSD on a daily basis, installing it, or saving old hardware with it, and all the fun that can derive from that. The last one is all BSD.
Hey but NetBSD revives more hardwares!
http://mail-index.netbsd.org/netbsd-advocacy/2018/08/06/msg000780.html
https://www.embeddedarm.com/blog/netbsd-toaster-powered-by-the-ts-7200-arm9-sbc/
https://wiki.netbsd.org/veriexec/

A list of cool hardware from a NetBSD conference, plus the famous toaster as a bonus, and a reminder that NetBSD does care too about security too (certainly not as much as OpenBSD though), check its veriexec (see https://lwn.net/Articles/532778/ too, a bit different as it's using signature instead of hash check).
Quick tips to check memory
https://linux-audit.com/understanding-memory-information-on-linux-systems/

We've tackled resource usage and performance monitoring a lot in this newsletter but most of the tools we've put forward are very specific. One that comes to mind is "Memory and optimizations" in issue number 39 and "Desktop Management Interface (DMI)" in 18. Let's bring the tone down a bit and try something easier, while not necessarily 100% accurate, for once.
A new shell, why?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1m-WEZz46U
https://github.com/michaelmacinnis/oh
https://github.com/dylanaraps/pure-bash-bible#erasing-text

The answer is in the first minutes of the presentation, don't worry. The presentation is also a good review of shells in general, great presenter too. The last link is a reference guide to bash and shell tricks.
Everyday tools
https://intoli.com/blog/sitemaps-in-bash/
https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20180805/

Bash for the web, ready for some real Unix pipelines, this is what you're going to get. Parsing sitemaps using a single line and making SQL query faster by replacing them with Unix pipelines, sort of like that old Awk post "Special tejr" in issue 23.
I think I understand now
https://twobithistory.org/2018/08/05/where-vim-came-from.html

A revisit of the never getting old "where does vim originate" and "oh I've discovered what vi is". We sort of discussed that in the tools, glue, scripts, and automation podcast and there was a lot of insightful comments on that thread too.
Syscall reference
https://john-millikin.com/unix-syscalls
https://syscalls.kernelgrok.com/

Two good reference when looking for what the lower level system calls are made. That first one also adds a bit of very welcomed explanation. You can also refer to the podcast about that topic, I tried to present it the best I could.
Web web, more web
https://blog.ungleich.ch/en-us/cms/blog/2018/08/04/mozillas-new-dns-resolution-is-dangerous/
https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2018/8/229771-traceability/fulltext
https://www.reinterpretcast.com/open-hypermedia

In continuation with the previous links, if you remember from "Security and networking" in issue 77 Firefox is starting a new project to do DNS over HTTPs (DoH) and Trusted Recursive Resolver, that first article goes into depth why the author thinks it's a bad idea. The second one is also on the topic of anonymity (Maybe also digital identity). The last link is related to a remake of the web, see "You might have heard of gopher, what about Xanadu" in 76, and probably also related to all those "state of the web" links that were shared in the past. In my opinion, the web is already a web outside the browser.. And that also reminds me of are.na in "Connecting Ideas" of issue 15, a wonderful website.
Gnome shell extensions
https://eischmann.wordpress.com/2018/07/31/story-of-gnome-shell-extensions/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_patch

Why things are what they are, learning about the past brings the past into the present. You start to see everywhere the legacy it has left.
Themes and the past
https://samuelhewitt.com/blog/2018-08-05-moving-beyond-themes
https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/why-failure-conquer-desktop-was-great-gnulinux

In continuation with the previous link, this one goes into letting go of the past when it comes to theming... Or not really. This article also discusses Gtk, theming, and if it's right to leave the default core style instead of overriding it. Do we stop customizing the Gnome shell, and stop customizing Gtk themes, does the project go in a similar direction as Mozilla did with Firefox. Seems like a week with pondering over the direction of the project, good that this is being initiated. We end in a corporate note with how it's important (maybe) to pierce the desktop market.

Random

Subculture
https://weburbanist.com/2011/09/05/mechanical-animals-36-steampunk-sculptures-robots/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steampunk
https://www.bigriversteampunkfestival.com/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z97uQjMOq_I

Remember the weird music genra in "New genres outside of pop" of issue 78, let's dig into other subcultures, this one is in between comic-con fantasy and the burning man culture, but I'll leave that for you to judge. It's very entertaining to watch, for sure, especially the mechanical parts.
On my quest of the Cretaceous
http://dinosaurpictures.org/ancient-earth#66
http://www.dinosaurfact.net/

Don't know why they call it Jurassic Park if most of the dinosaurs are from the Cretaceous. Since last week I've been on a dinosaur hunt, back to my childhood encyclopedia, which I'm sure a lot of other kids have been into.
Haptic belts & language
https://360.here.com/2015/04/17/wearables-improve-sense-direction/
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21028185.800-haptic-soldiers-guided-by-buzzing-belt/
http://www.messagetoeagle.com/kuuk-thaayorre-language-uses-cardinal-direction-to-define-space/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guugu_Yimithirr_language

What do haptic belts and language have in common... Remember the extended mind we keep bringing up (I won't link it again, you can search the archive). This is another side of it, embrace the amazing flexibility of learning to defer tasks to our tools and become experts with them.
Pollution
https://undark.org/breathtaking/
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/11/world/china-recyclables-ban.html
https://phys.org/news/2018-07-trash-piles-china-door-recycling.html
https://www.epa.gov/recycle

Making the environment cleaner to live in, pure and pristine, should be on everyone's mind. Sad to think that for the ones who can make a difference this is all a business and when this business isn't viable anymore there's no reason to continue. There certainly are incentives and money is one, there should be a way to make this lucrative too. We can blame whichever body/systems/government we want instead of taking responsibilities but this doesn't change that we need to do something. Start with using less packaging and more reusable high quality containers, buy local it'll need less transportation.
I thought I wouldn't post about this anymore
https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-tech-backlash-we-really-need

Yes, another "state of the web, state of the mind" piece, a good summary. Tools are made to be used; when a knife is used to kill someone, or let's say it better "when someone uses a knife to kill someone", is it the knife that's at fault or the person? Should we have regulations that made knives harmless because of that? Can you enter anywhere with a knife on you? Wouldn't you be looked at funny if you were walking around with hundreds of knives in your pocket selling them to anyone passing by? What about building extremely dangerous knives with advertisements on how lethal they can be? This is an analogy, a bad one but a relatable one. "When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck.." Have fun remembering the awkward and uninformed questioning of Zuckerberg, the over-used-by-career-politician-to-gain-votes "What about the CHILDREN" arguments, and the unexpected surprise by the general audience over their unawareness over the choice of their digital tools usage "because they're free". Let's quote from the article "These are the broad outlines of the tech backlash. But against what, exactly, is the backlash? Is it against the ascendency of technology as the driving principle of modern society?"

Thoughts

"One theory says that man is a neoteny and is no longer able to evolve. If this is true, then what an absurd creature mankind has evolved into." - Eiri Masami

On a side note, we've broken the 240+ readers mark, congratulations everyone! I can't help but be happy at the thought that everyone deliberately chose to receive this newsletter, and that it only spread through word of mouth.

Archive

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

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
Share your point of view about the newsletter.
Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2018-08-03 00:00:00 | 86

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

A beautiful way to sandbox
http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20180728063716
https://man.openbsd.org/unveil

OpenBSD on its path to sandbox application from the ground up. A follow up on the presentation of Bob Beck in "In BSD land" of issue 79.
Alternative screen and the quirkiness of terminals
https://kevingoodsell.github.io/2011-05-20/the-trouble-with-terminals.html
https://www.xfree86.org/4.8.0/ctlseqs.html
http://shallowsky.com/linux/noaltscreen.html

Terminals are such weird beasts from the past, so many compatibility features, so many fallbacks, etc.. It never gets tiresome to read about new things you didn't know about in them.
extra BSD myths
https://people.freebsd.org/~nik/advocacy/myths.html

An old but still relevant myth buster kind of article, skip if you're bored of the typical discussions.
POSIX lock
https://www.sqlite.org/src/artifact/c230a7a24?ln=994-1081

A discussion about the limitations of POSIX lock within the same process and what sqlite uses to counter them.
Replacing part of the Linux system with a DB
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1807.05308.pdf
https://www.nextplatform.com/2018/07/23/replacing-linux-with-a-database-system/

32K cores supercomputer, that's a lot of cores and maybe some datastructures within the OS aren't flexible enough to handle that, maybe it would be cool to replace some with a DB, a sort of CRUD plus here associative array algebra. The paper is small (8 pages), a good quick read.
Detecting you've got your target
https://www.idontplaydarts.com/2016/04/detecting-curl-pipe-bash-server-side/
http://blog.rahme.info/user-agents-weird

It's a bad idea to pipe untrusted commands directly on your machines to be executed. Those posts discuss this a bit, the first one is an ingenious way to detect that something is executed on the other end.
TLD are useless?
https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/the-death-of-a-tld

Eh, not really but the death of unexpected funny corporately used top level domains is certainly dead.
Putting freedom zero under microscope
https://www.sicpers.info/2018/07/is-freedom-zero-such-a-hot-idea/

While starting on a hyper biased note, this article still poses a good question, and old one, which is again already answered from the GPL perspective in the comments. This is close to "math-washing" in "..State of the mind" of 75.
Text art
http://widerscreen.fi/numerot/2017-1-2/beyond-encoding-a-critical-look-at-the-terminology-of-text-graphics/

This paper should get you started with text art, it deals with all the types from top to bottom, categorizing them.
Pointy pointers
https://www.ralfj.de/blog/2018/07/24/pointers-and-bytes.html

More on the topics of "Pointers" we addressed in so many issues like 81.

Random

Blender and light
https://hackaday.com/2018/07/30/light-painting-animations-directly-from-blender/

A beautiful way to mix a sort of augmented reality using blender.
Another hiring critic
https://codewithoutrules.com/2018/07/29/getting-a-job-without-whiteboard-puzzles/

For those who don't like whiteboards this article should help.
That's not advertising!
https://nrempel.com/posts/what-we-have-now-is-not-advertising/
https://lobste.rs/s/mwlrof/what_we_have_now_is_not_advertising

An article in which the author redefines the term advertising as anything he sees too much of on a daily basis. I'm not sure what rock he's been under but even billboards and TV commercial meticulously study their target audience. When in doubt rely on "FAKE NEWSSSSS" from issue 81. If you want an internet black hole for "shitty" content I've written a script for that here: https://gist.github.com/venam/97a06e563161693d109b9d31152bab0b. NB: this newsletter itself is a "curated" feed, let me know what you think of that. You should also read up the comments on the blog and lobste.rs as they are insightful.
Clickbaity title from nautilus, NO...
http://nautil.us/issue/62/systems/this-man-says-the-mind-has-no-depths
http://nautil.us/issue/62/systems/there-is-no-such-thing-as-unconscious-thought
http://nautil.us/blog/many-of-our-beliefs-are-unconscious-a-response-to-nick-chater

So much of the content about consciousness, unconsciousness, awareness, mind, and brain have confusing and conflicting definitions (if any at all) which only brings up mysticism and fictions on the topic. In those articles we tackle those, the first two deal with the old mostly thrown away but still over-used in media concept of psychoanalysis, but also proposes a flat mind which is not something especially new but certainly a bit reductionist and contrary to the usual discussion. The last one is a reply to the first two, again with a clash of definitions, which in my opinion he doesn't use the same one so is attacking something entirely different... It might contribute to the mysticism or might not, I'll leave it for you to judge and take whatever value from them or get even more confused with this word jumble/war. Related to "The brain" in 78, "The Grand Analogy" in 66.
Culture clash
http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20180729-why-brazilians-are-always-late
https://www.npr.org/2018/07/12/628490776/watch-your-mouth
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithkuil

From culture habits to language, how is intermixing them opening our eyes to new concepts.

Thoughts

A truly open mind means forcing our imaginations to conform to the evidence of reality, and not vice versa, whether or not we like the implications. - Lawrence Krauss

Archive

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

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
Share your point of view about the newsletter.
Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2018-07-27 00:00:00 | 85

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Xterm features
https://lukas.zapletalovi.com/2013/07/hidden-gems-of-xterm.html

As much as we like minimalist terminals it's still nice to get some useful features, maybe you'll like them and it'll make you switch to Xterm or maybe it'll make you look for similar functions in your current terminal emulator.
What is time
https://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Clock.html#toc1

A timely series (not really, it's old) of tips about setting up your clocks properly. I'll soon try out that trick with the adjtime and the RTC drift.
environ or getenv
https://linux.die.net/man/7/environ
http://refspecs.linux-foundation.org/LSB_4.0.0/LSB-Core-generic/LSB-Core-generic/baselib---environ.html
https://linux.die.net/man/3/getenv

There are many ways to do this, all are mostly equivalent, which one do you prefer?
sourceforge
https://sourceforge.net/blog/brief-history-sourceforge-look-to-future/

Like it or not sourceforge is an oldie that made the path for other similar websites. This post is about a rebrand regarding the recent events that affected the website trustworthiness.
Distribute keys, distribute code
https://bridge.grumpy-troll.org/2018/07/git-aliases-shell/
https://drewdevault.com/2018/07/23/Git-is-already-distributed.html
https://asylum.madhouse-project.org/blog/2018/07/24/on-git-github-and-email/
https://nullprogram.com/blog/2017/03/12/
https://boats.gitlab.io/blog/post/signing-commits-without-gpg/

That first post is very heavy to read, the style the author has chosen is a bit foggy. The content is still fine, it's the way it's communicated that's the issue. Let me know if I wasn't the only one feeling that. The second one is still about git, a direct continuation of "Git and emails" in 82. The last two are about GPG, its usages, and trying to write alternatives. The last two posts are about GPG sort of mixes the implementation with the protocol by saying that the protocol has a "bad user experience and interface". The protocol doesn't say anything about how to implement the user interface, it's a specification document. Apart from that small note, it's a very cool post.
zpool and backups
http://oshogbo.vexillium.org/blog/46/
https://dataswamp.org/~solene/2018-06-26-openbsd-easy-backup.html

ZFS again with a new volume management feature called "checkpoint", it's fun and makes doing risky operations generate less sweat. TODO
In the cloud
https://community.online.net/t/freebsd-on-arm64/6678
https://push.cx/2018/nixos

Two posts about setting up FreeBSD on ARM64 in the cloud and NixOS respectively. Not personally my cup of tea but for anyone that loves this kind of posts this is gold.
Heap, malloc, glibc
https://sensepost.com/blog/2017/painless-intro-to-the-linux-userland-heap/
https://sensepost.com/blog/2017/linux-heap-exploitation-intro-series-used-and-abused-use-after-free/
https://sensepost.com/blog/2017/linux-heap-exploitation-intro-series-the-magicians-cape-1-byte-overflow/
https://sensepost.com/blog/2017/linux-heap-exploitation-intro-series-riding-free-on-the-heap-double-free-attacks/
https://sensepost.com/blog/2018/linux-heap-exploitation-intro-series-set-you-free-part-1/

This is a superb resource on learning about the heap/malloc. It's well explained though a bit hard to follow in some places. I've solved the two challenges in the second and third links (it was fun, PM me if you want them) however the second one about 1 byte overflow doesn't seem to work on newer glibc (seems to work on 2.23 but not on 2.27).
In userspace OOM manager
https://code.fb.com/production-engineering/open-sourcing-oomd-a-new-approach-to-handling-ooms/
https://github.com/facebookincubator/oomd

An interesting take at managing process over memory usage instead of letting the kernel handle it when it's in a dire situation. For the worried, this one is under GPL(kernel requirements probably) so don't worry. Related to issue 25 "malloc never fails on Linux... or does it?".
Another one about hiring
https://www.stilldrinking.org/interviewing-is-broken

We had that discussion earlier in "But didn't you write an embedded os" of issue 75. It's pretty hard to set up an interview process that correctly assess the potential of a would-be-future-employee, it's easy to do an interview process for someone who you'll hire only to work on a task and then move on, but asking random unrelated questions seems like a waste of time to both parties.

Random

Garden paths
http://www.fun-with-words.com/ambiguous_garden_path.html
https://allthingslinguistic.com/post/36385656700/my-favourite-garden-path-sentences

A beautiful way to have fun with words.
Man-Computer a reboot of the series
https://groups.csail.mit.edu/medg/people/psz/Licklider.html

Let's continue from "The brain" in 78, "Attention span" in 77, "Are we our tools" in 68, and "The extended mind" in 64, and more. This time it's about an old paper (1960) that we're sort of in the process of reaching. The process of cooperation and participation in thinking mentioned in the paper is still lacking a bit but still in the making, see section 5.1 5.4 and you'll know what I mean. You can check the next link for an example of the drawbacks.
7 items you won't believe are shockingly amazing!
http://www.iftf.org/statesponsoredtrolling
http://www.iftf.org/fileadmin/user_upload/images/DigIntel/IFTF_State_sponsored_trolling_report.pdf
http://www.iftf.org/fileadmin/user_upload/images/ourwork/digintel/IFTF_biology_of_disinformation_062718.pdf
https://www.ntd.tv/2018/02/21/memetic-warfare-spreading-weaponized-ideas-for-influence-and-control/

Long paper that you can skim through. That website also has a series of papers all about the topic of Digital Intelligence and disinformation. When in doubt refer to the infographic of "FAKE NEWSSSSS" in 81.
Hyperinflation
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-07-23/venezuela-s-inflation-to-reach-1-million-percent-imf-forecasts
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Zimbabwe_$100_trillion_2009_Obverse.jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation#Zimbabwe
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zsqa-YHE36A
http://ferfal.blogspot.com/2008/10/thoughts-on-urban-survival-2005.html

A sad thing we all fear. We don't want to be the person of that last post.

Thoughts

There are known knowns. There are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknown. There are things we don't know we don't know. - Donald Rumsfeld

A seemingly humble quote that should certainly be put in its context. Rumsfeld was a politician and this was something he said following 9/11 regarding "weapons of mass destruction" and the lack of evidence for them. There are multiple aspects to this, on one level it reminds us of our relation with our knowledge, on another it gives you a moment to stop and think before assuming or over-rationalizing, and finally it shows that cheesy quotes are often posted on social media without checking their background story (yet another week with cheesy quotes, I know!).

Archive

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

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
Share your point of view about the newsletter.
Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2018-07-20 00:00:00 | 84

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

A file, what's a file?
https://yarchive.net/comp/linux/everything_is_file.html

Sometimes exposing a kernel function via a file (VFS api) isn't very practical but only adds complexity to the mix.
PipesFS
https://research.vu.nl/en/publications/pipesfs-fast-linux-io-in-the-unix-tradition
https://www.cs.vu.nl/~herbertb/projects/streamline/index.html

For those who don't have access to a research database you can PM me for a link or simply search for it online (your responsibility). This is a paper about making pipes faster by using the power of multiple processors and mixing this with an intricate use of the VFS. This puts in question what was discussed in the previous link or actually confirms it. Maybe related to "Parallelism in any Bourne shell" in 17.
Http in asm
https://github.com/nemasu/asmttpd

You could write your web server using the pipesFS or you could do it with asm.
usr available at boot
https://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/separate-usr-is-broken/
https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/TheCaseForTheUsrMerge/
https://lists.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch-dev-public/2013-May/025003.html
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=64116#c3

A change that was also done on Arch a few years back (~2013), here we see the adaptive decisions that some distributions have to make to support specific programs that rely on this and also to make them more compatible with other systems. This is related to the discussion on file system hierarchy, https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=2006. The last link is extra content about the argument for binary logs.
The annoying driver interaction with ioctl
https://www.lifewire.com/linux-command-ioctl-4092621
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ioctl

I don't usually like to link to Wikipedia but this one is unexpectedly explained really well. If you've been confused about this whole ioctl then take a look.
Machine independent packing/format
https://github.com/pgniewek/learn_gbitx
https://9fans.github.io/plan9port/man/man3/fcall.html

A mini example on how to pack together some values to get machine independent format. Probably related to "On a roll with C" in 61 and "Packing bytes natively what does that mean" in 59.
BSD confs everywhere everytime
https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/report_from_pkgsrccon_2018
https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20180716193511
https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20180716202456
https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20180717074543

Those hackatons are great, they seem to push forward a lot of good engineering. PkgsrcCon and OpenBSD hackaton. One of our old member gave a talk there, hello yrmt! There's probably too much content to consume in a week, I only could check a few of those. Similarly to "Hackathon and secure chats" in 76, I'm still a huge proponent of those types of posts.
Pushing ideas
https://williambharding.com/blog/technology/linux-touchpad-like-a-macbook-goal-worth-pursuing/
https://zebmccorkle.u.asymptote.club/blog/nanix-an-idea-for-a-modern-small-unix-like-operating-system/

Just ideas by bloggers, one about how there's a need for a small but usable Unix-like system. This is related to sortix in "POSIX" of issue 65 and fuzix in "Very small Unix" of issue 15. Another about the state of the touchpad on Linux, also related to "The mouse is so fast on your machine" in 75.
Spirit of the law
https://medium.com/@mdrahony/are-pgp-key-servers-breaking-the-law-under-the-gdpr-a81ddd709d3e

Remember the whois thing in "State of the web..." of issue 75, well now it's bringing that stuff back at pgp servers. gpg --search-keys 'nothisrealaddress@someoneelses_emailaddress.notreal'
More features and customization or less
http://neugierig.org/software/blog/2018/07/options.html
https://lobste.rs/s/hs4gnj/tech_notes_why_not_add_option_for

No, just the right amount. This articles goes into the kind of thinking you should go through before deciding what to add as an option/configuration to your program.

Random

Have you showered?
http://www.homethingspast.com/vintage-antique-showers/

Because this is the trendy new thing in town, an unusual contraption called a shower. I stole that from HN and thought it was a nice article, similar to "Remote Control" in 82, "A history of the picnic table" in 77 and "A story on privacy" in 65. This is interesting to go back and time and trace the history of today's common ideas and things.
Social media craze
https://anildash.com/2018/07/13/unfollowing-everybody/

It's been a while since I've shared something with the "state of the internet", so here's one about quitting but not quitting entirely. The writer goes through a weird complex and filtering process (sort of related to the obsessive over-rationalization of "Goddess Spreadsheet" in 28). It's like the middle-ground between smoking 10 packs a day and saying 5 cigs a day won't kill you - The underlying reason why you smoke hasn't changed in both cases, you haven't tackled the issue.
Edge effect
https://deepgreenpermaculture.com/permaculture/permaculture-design-principles/10-edge-effect/

A phenomena that stay true across domains of life and inter-domains of life. Be sure to check the delightful comments at the bottom of the article.
Bring it on!
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/10/well/the-power-of-positive-people.html

Spend time with your friends this week. This is what I'm going to do and I hope this is going to be super fun for everyone! "In general you want friends with whom you can have a meaningful conversation. You can call them on a bad day and they will care. Your group of friends are better than any drug or anti-aging supplement, and will do more for you than just about anything."
Glitch art
https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/15/17564588/datamosh-youtubeartifacts-glitch-art-kraftsow

All cyberpunk unite! This post goes into a simple technique to create glitchy videos, a new but old trend on youtube. It's nice that this is coming back to life. This seems to be the thing these days: Remake whatever is old cool again. There's certainly a marketing idea behind that to target people based on nostalgia but still, I ain't got anything against that as long as we're deliberately choosing to revive memories.

Thoughts

How we spend our days is how we spend our lives - Annie Dillard

You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with - Jim Rohn

We become and attract what we think about most of the time - Jerry Bruckner

Three quotes that are pretty much encompasses the same idea, to do things deliberately because this is what this is, not a future concept of what could be. Hope this can enlighten your week, cheers!

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nixers newsletter issue | 2018-07-14 00:00:00 | 83

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Plumbing
https://www.karllhughes.com/posts/plumbing
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2009/09/23/the-duct-tape-programmer/

The classic question about hiring and actual work. Plumbers and duct-tapers vs craftmanships. Is it about ego in the end, who doesn't want to be hired as a creator?
Mommy where do greps come from?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTfOnGZUZDk

So... I've been pronouncing ed the wrong way all my life, does it change anything, I don't think so. Enjoy a mini-talk by Kernighan about the history of grep.
Renderer redirecter
https://www.brow.sh/

Render a browser in the terminal, kind of like libcaca is for video. There's also a browser front-end for a browser https://html.brow.sh/https://nixers.net which turns everything upside down. Related to "Fun in the console" in 61.
Networking load balancing
https://blog.cloudflare.com/how-to-drop-10-million-packets/
https://vincent.bernat.im/en/blog/2018-multi-tier-loadbalancer

Technical details about setting things up so that you drop packets rapidly or balance them.
Nftables vs iptables
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Zr8XqdET1c
https://www.garron.me/en/linux/iptables-manual.html

I never really got into iptables so those info are pretty new to me. If you feel the same way this should help, even though the presentation is a bit heavy to listen to, not in the technical sense but in a boring sense, it's still worth a listen.
Memory management
https://craftofcoding.wordpress.com/2015/12/07/memory-in-c-the-stack-the-heap-and-static/
https://www.iar.com/support/resources/articles/mastering-stack-and-heap-for-system-reliability/
https://sensepost.com/blog/2017/linux-heap-exploitation-intro-series-bonus-printf-might-be-leaking/
http://ourmachinery.com/post/virtual-memory-tricks/
https://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/technotes/guides/management/jconsole.html

A review of what was seen in "sbrk and malloc" in 53 plus much more interesting related topics on memory management like heap exploitable and virtual mem tricks (this one is close to the handle in "Pointers" of issue 81). The last link is for comparison.
Init system components
https://github.com/arsv/sninit/tree/master/doc
https://github.com/arsv/sninit/blob/master/doc/init.txt
https://skarnet.org/software/s6/

So the discussion about init system starts again. This time we'll take it even more seriously and technically. The first series of docs go into the nitty-gritty details of writing a PID1, you can start with the second link. The last link is somewhat like supervisord but split in many sub-programs.
Portable systemd services
http://0pointer.net/blog/walkthrough-for-portable-services.html

It seems we're talking too much about systemd but there's a reason for that: It keeps adding more features to itself. You can choose to ignore it or to read and learn about what's up with it and if you can get ideas (to do or not) for your own projects and research on init/system&service-manager/super-server-daemon.
***programmers
http://wiki.c2.com/?ThreeStarProgrammer

Pointers frighten many persons and many novice or advance programmers take it as a point of pride to shame newcomers by creating impenetrable code. I'll quote something from the newcomers podcast: "Those condescending persons might sound elitist but it’s a sort of wall of entry which may appear intriguing to new ones. They might want to get behind the wall with the others, it’s tempting to become yourself a condescending guy/gal. It could be in itself a drive to learn but it’s wrong to add fuel to the fire."

Random

More on identity
https://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2016/10/smarter-signatures-experiments-in-verifications/

What are the available work in progress, ideas, and solutions for smart signatures. This is a continuation on digital identity.
Art critics
http://www.tylerlhobbs.com/writings/intellectualism-and-generative-art

Let's resume with the "Organic art" from last week (issue 82). In this one we explore the tricky aspect of who's building all those arts we saw and how their perspective maybe affect their pieces.
The survival of design
https://www.imaginarycloud.com/blog/timeless-classic-ui-design
https://brutalist-web.design/
https://lobste.rs/s/lxbdu9/brutalist_web_design

Creativity with design, ditching templates and heavy pages, dance with the counter-culture of lightweight minimalist functional websites. There's an excellent discussion in the lobste.rs link.
Too much internet
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/20/opinion/chinas-web-junkies.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqctG3NnDa0

I agree that there's a video game addiction growing with young boys but I don't agree with the conflation that this is an "internet addiction". Video games are something, the internet in its entirety something else.
NIH
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqQQBSJj5yc

A phenomena that keeps being brought up in a lot of tech discussion, from scratch or not from scratch.
El libro de la familia
http://www.technologicaldisobedience.com/2016/05/16/el-libro-de-la-familia/
http://cubamaterial.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Con-Nuestros-Propios-Esfuerzos-reduced.pdf

Two books that were distributed in Cuba during its low time. I'll let you judge what to think of them.
Safety and checklists
https://rakhim.org/2018/07/software-shouldnt-fail
https://www.npr.org/2017/10/30/559996276/the-trick-to-surviving-a-high-stakes-high-pressure-job-try-a-checklist

Test driven development is super popular, RFCs are there too, we got ton of specifications that we have to adhere with, some people are crazy about formal verification, etc.. I guess the software tech field is more solid then he'd like to think. What's your opinion on this topic?

Thoughts

You may delay, but time will not. - Benjamin Franklin (can't find the source?)

Can't throw a cheesy quote without more context:
https://philosiblog.com/2013/02/18/you-may-delay-but-time-will-not/

This article takes it from the side of productivity (see "Over-Productive" in 78, "Production" in 66, and "The busy trap" in 32) however this is not really accurate as many of the most prominent inventors didn't have the mindset we today portray as overly obsessed with managing their time and work. The other side of it is that it's a reflection on paying attention to what matters to you, an appreciation of life.

Have a great week!

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nixers newsletter issue | 2018-07-06 00:00:00 | 82

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Listing processes in OpenBSD
http://www.kaashif.co.uk/2015/06/18/how-to-get-a-list-of-processes-on-openbsd-in-c/
http://bxr.su/OpenBSD/sys/sys/sysctl.h#331
http://bxr.su/OpenBSD/include/kvm.h#55
http://bxr.su/NetBSD/include/kvm.h#58
http://bxr.su/DragonFly/lib/libkvm/kvm.h#73
http://bxr.su/FreeBSD/lib/libkvm/kvm.h#74
http://cvsweb.netbsd.org/bsdweb.cgi/src/bin/ps/ps.c.diff?r1=1.37&r2=1.38&only_with_tag=MAIN&f=h
http://cvsweb.netbsd.org/bsdweb.cgi/src/bin/ps/ps.c.diff?r1=1.46&r2=1.47&only_with_tag=MAIN&f=h
http://cvsweb.netbsd.org/bsdweb.cgi/src/bin/ps/ps.c?rev=1.91&content-type=text/x-cvsweb-markup&only_with_tag=MAIN

An example of non-portability on Unix, but that is available on most BSDs (see links 3 to 6). Remember that NetBSD, for example, has had a procfs for a long time but if you inspect the code of ps(1) they switched to the sysctl/kvm interface starting from 1.38 (18 years ago) and deprecated the procfs in 1.47 (links 7 to 9).
Git and emails
https://drewdevault.com/2018/07/02/Email-driven-git.html

A blogger we already know from an articles in 29 "Rules are made to be broken". In continuation with last week fun with git, this week we're doing git from emails. These days most use interfaces to handle all this but it's good to do it from the command line too.
Core dumps
https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2018/04/29/core/

Another blogger we know from "Debugging issues on unknown boxes" in 69, this one is about using the core dump pattern feature of the Linux kernel and how it can have weird behavior when the pattern waits. Another user has commented that maybe using /proc/sys/kernel/core_pipe_limit as a safety could mitigate the many concurrent crashing processes piped to user-space.
Another week with posts about C and pointers
https://stefansf.de/post/pointers-are-more-abstract-than-you-might-expect/

An article where we turn pointer arithmetic into madness with C specification and compiler practices.
Study of filesystems evolution
https://www.usenix.org/system/files/login/articles/03_lu_010-017_final.pdf

An easy to read study that delves into answering questions like what kind of patches land in filesystems, what kind of bugs or other things do they fix, are they reduced over time, where exactly in the code those bugs appear the most, etc..
Terminal madness once more
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSnMoClPH2E&feature=player_embedded
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5zA5Xi_ph8

Terminals are intricate, you learn about them and are surprised by the mess of backward compatibility that lies underneath it. In continuity with "Signals for IPC? NO!" in 81, "Writing a terminal emulator" in 64, "Console codes" in 63, "Doing it in V7" in 58, "Following through with the low level hacks" in 52, "More terminal love" in 49, "What's that key for, why is that key used here?" in 37, "RS-232 and others" in 29, "A zoom into control characters and terminals" in 13, "Understanding the modifier keys in the terminal" in 1. So much content!
Font shaping
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1x97pfbB1gbD53Yhz6-_yBUozQMVJ_5yMqqR_D-R7b7I/present#slide=id.p
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/typography/script-development/devanagari

Just when you thought regex were a bit complex, check what shapers syntax is like for an Indic language used in India and Nepal amongst others like Persian and even Unicode "art", and what is required to parse them properly.
Compilers and bitcode
https://lowlevelbits.org/bitcode-demystified/

Another continuity with past links, this one goes into "Programming language theory", check issue 80. We dive into Fat binaries and what is being worked on to avoid them in the future for Apple devices, it's very messy.
Color biases
https://www.fastcodesign.com/90177573/how-blue-became-techs-favorite-color-and-why-it-shouldnt-be

Remember the "Green on black" discussion, well this is another aspect of light on computers.
Front-end, over minimalism, and UX
https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-246
https://medium.com/@caseorganic/why-do-we-keep-building-cars-with-touchscreens-alt-the-hidden-lives-of-touchscreens-55faf92799bf
http://www.breck-mckye.com/blog/2018/05/why-is-front-end-development-so-unstable/
https://medium.com/@jdan/i-peeked-into-my-node-modules-directory-and-you-wont-believe-what-happened-next-b89f63d21558

Most UI are made with JS these days, and it's hard to follow up, plus it's also hard to design something that has good user interaction.
MWL, who's that?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1GjP1Q_SG0

An interview with the super funny and knowledgeable author of "Erotic systemd" we had in 40 and others such as content related to PAM we shared before. "Good software let you sleep", a lesson to take from the above links. Though we're definitely not doing any advertisement for his books, I haven't read any of them yet so..

Random

Organic art
https://inconvergent.net/
http://www.complexification.net/gallery/
https://n-e-r-v-o-u-s.com/
http://latham-mutator.com

Enjoy those intricate pieces I've found laying on a wave while surfing the WWW.
Remote Control
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/08/how-the-remote-control-rewired-the-home/375214/
http://www.slate.com/articles/life/design/2012/06/the_history_of_the_remote_control_why_are_they_so_awful_.html

Remote control started as anti-ads then brought up the habit of channel surfing and slouching in the couch. Nowadays we're slowly seeing the rise of voice interfaces which are more integrated and less hindering to our dynamic lives, and the same goes for smart watches and phones that can remotely control all the IoT connected devices. It seems we've moved away and are somewhat repulsed by "laziness", we're on an ever growing trend of efficacy and production mania. However, a sentence of the first article caught my attention, it reflects a feeling about the emergent tech and most early adopters, a sort of signaling: "Remotes suggested that their owner was himself high-tech and in demand, so busy and important he could not possibly cross the room to change the CD himself."
Some philosophy
http://www.epsilontheory.com/sheep-logic/
http://www.jpe.ox.ac.uk/papers/twenty-questions/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTm-4O2a9dA

Big philosophy to justify being addicted to twitter, and some real nice website about ethics.
Is it dinner or supper?
https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/dinner-or-supper?page=1
https://blog.poormansmath.net/how-much-is-time-wrong-around-the-world/

Language evolves, something close to "Pedantic and semantic" in 66.

Thoughts

The less confident you are, the more serious you have to act. - Tara Ploughman

For context: https://www.quotes-clothing.com/less-confident-are-more-serious-act-tara-ploughman/

I've always liked this quote, I have no clue if it's true but from anecdotal evidence I can assert it. Aren't the advices about being "more confident" pullulating the online self-help trend trying to say indirectly that we have to take ourselves and things in general less seriously. Yep, cheesy social media quote that actually has more in it than it looks.

Have a wonderful week!

Archive

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nixers newsletter issue | 2018-06-29 00:00:00 | 81

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

HAMMER2
https://www.dragonflydigest.com/2018/06/20/21411.html

Amazing that these days with automation we can trigger rare unexpected bugs that happen in extreme cases.
Having fun with Qemu
https://www.cambus.net/booting-openbsd-kernels-in-efi-mode-with-qemu/

A mini-guide on setting up EFI for the Qemu environment so that you can run tests locally.
SED and windows path
https://www.fpcomplete.com/blog/2018/06/sed-a-debugging-story

It's cool to have some Unix tools available on Windows but the issue the author ran into shows how the different ways of thinking about system development can affect simple script execution.
Signals for IPC? NO!
https://blog.danielisz.org/2018/06/21/the-power-of-ctrlt/
https://lobste.rs/s/d6zgrr/power_ctrl_t

Remember that podcast about signals when we talked about BSD adding SIGUSR1 and SIGUSR2 for user defined signals (maybe we've also mentioned that when discussing terminals)? Well here's an example of how some programs choose to implement their handling for progress report.
Volatility
https://barrgroup.com/Embedded-Systems/How-To/C-Volatile-Keyword
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13341870/signals-and-interrupts-a-comparison
https://www.safaribooksonline.com/library/view/understanding-the-linux/0596005652/ch04s06.html

From embedded system to more on interrupts and signals, that last article is a bit beyond me but I can still hover the content.
Pointers
https://gist.github.com/shafik/848ae25ee209f698763cffee272a58f8
http://floooh.github.io/2018/06/17/handles-vs-pointers.html
https://wozniak.ca/blog/2018/06/25/Massacring-C-Pointers/index.html

Undefined behavior in C and C++ and type punning, aka some sort of casting by memcpy into other types, more on how to create a handle system to not mess up with pointers, and even more about a book about pointers.
Restart sequences
https://lwn.net/Articles/650333/
https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/d82991a8688ad128b46db1b42d5d84396487a508/kernel/rseq.c

Something called "restart sequences" just landed in the Linux kernel, remember Drepper's paper in issue 58, well this tackles the issue of process scheduling and CPU affinity in multiprocessor environment by restarting the sequence of important code. The limit is that it can only be a single operation.
GUI every week?
https://euroquis.nl/bobulate/?p=1915
https://blog.gtk.org/2018/06/23/a-gtk-3-update/

Right in the middle of the TTY week and we have to talk about the temptation of sumptuous graphical interfaces. Here we see updates on the work for KDE on FreeBSD and on the GTK team.
Git history
https://about.gitlab.com/2018/06/07/keeping-git-commit-history-clean/
https://henrikwarne.com/2018/06/25/6-git-aha-moments/

It's important to have a good history, maybe leaving some useless commits once in a while doesn't kill but overall you want to be able to narrow down what happened at what time and who did it for which reason. The other one is about git from the point of view of someone that comes from svn.
Reproducibility and security
https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/757118/f2f894279576c348/
https://isdebianreproducibleyet.com/
https://oxy-secure.app/
https://oxy-secure.app/protocol.txt

Torture your binaries to make them reproducible, make a soup in two widely different environments you've created. All of that sweat polishes them. That Oxy is a new tool the author uses as a replacement to SSH, as with anything new it comes with lots of critics and lots of cheers. Check out the protocol it's an interesting and simple one using asymmetric keys and ephemeral ones to derive a shared symmetric secret.

Random

A good explanation
http://habitatchronicles.com/2004/04/you-cant-tell-people-anything/

Communication is hard and this article is all about that.
Wedding season is here, buckled your belt
https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/laura-knowles/disney-delusion-relationships-_b_1235922.html?guccounter=1
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/23/fashion/weddings/chasing-the-fairy-tale-wedding.html

In continuation with "Fairy tales and sleep", as with that other topic this is a hot one left for your own judgement.
FAKE NEWSSSSS
https://www.ifla.org/publications/node/11174

The International Federation of Library Associations has setup and convenient infographic to educate and advocate critical thinking.
Internet and culture
https://irc.com/
http://www.openculture.com/

Bring IRC back, we're already on it! On the openculture one you'll find a lot of intricate topics, sort of similarto "A fascinating blog" in 66.

Thoughts

The S in IoT stands for Security

Archive

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nixers newsletter issue | 2018-06-22 00:00:00 | 80

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Writing services with systemd
https://blog.akerl.org/2016/05/26/systemd-services-are-easy/
https://davmac.wordpress.com/2018/06/21/escape-from-system-d-episode-v/

We've shared a lot of content already about systemd like "systemd gui" in 54, and many more like "Yet another systemd article" in 37. Take those ones as a complements to the others.
Dreaming about shells
https://rain-1.github.io/shell-2.html

Rethink the shell, think powershell. Do you like that? Why?
BSD on desktop and more GUI stuffs
https://medium.com/@probonopd/make-it-simple-linux-desktop-usability-part-1-5fa0fb369b42
https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2018/06/16/freebsd-desktop-part-5-key-components-status-bar/
https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2018/06/15/freebsd-desktop-part-4-key-components-window-manager/
https://www.kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.13.0.php

A continuation of the vermaden blog posts (which there are more at the moment but I won't link) plus another update of KDE and stuffs related to UX. The browser integration inside the desktop is an intriguing concept. Someone commented on the vermaden posts that they are too basic and not containing useful information however I disagree on that. I think it's a space that needs to be filled and whenever someone tries to write content for beginners explaining every component of a functioning desktop environment they are met with similar feedbacks. Two other projects that come to mind but that are still lacking are https://github.com/feroldi/ricing and https://github.com/nixers-projects/ricerous.
Parsing
https://medium.com/@indy_singh/strings-are-evil-a803d05e5ce3

"It's all just text", right, like we said last week, however text parsing can be consuming. This guy reduces the consumption from 7GB to 32KB.
Access to root TTY
https://j.ludost.net/blog/archives/2018/06/13/ancient_su_-_hostile_vulnerability_in_debian_8_and_9/

I had no clue of this privilege escalation trick. When you think about it it makes sense but it's a pretty big flaw.
Crack and debug
https://paleotronic.com/2018/06/15/confessions-of-a-disk-cracker-the-secrets-of-4am/
https://blog.asrpo.com/making_a_low_level_debugger

Reverse engineering software and a new lovely blogger to follow (it's the same person as the cool "Bootstraping issues" entry in 23, so not really new).
Deduplication on the command line
http://git.2f30.org/dedup/file/README.html

No need for that Virtual Data Optimizer layer of "VDO, A new layer to add to the data storage stack" in 71, you can get simple deduplication on the command line. It's harder to manage but it's simpler to setup. Give it a try.
Booting on Unix
https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/linux/LinuxBootOverview

I've tried myself at explaining the booting process on Unix before, as clumsily as I could. Here the author does it in a much more compacted and clean way with a focus on points of failures.
Programming language theory
https://mpc.sh/blog/a-gentle-intro-to-plt/

I started to dabble a bit with bison the past few weeks, checking what's the big deal. I wish I had this document before diving into the documentation.
DNS lookup part 2
https://zwischenzugs.com/2018/06/18/anatomy-of-a-linux-dns-lookup-part-ii/

We left off last week with part 1 so let's continue.

Random

The scarcity trap
https://www.npr.org/2018/04/02/598119170/the-scarcity-trap-why-we-keep-digging-when-were-stuck-in-a-hole

This happens with everyone of us, for each in different situations.
Many layers of messages
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/the-choco-pie-dividend-south-korean-firms-are-drooling-at-the-prospect-of-business-in-the-north/2018/06/17/3a6e7cc8-6f8b-11e8-bf86-a2351b5ece99_story.html

I don't usually share world news however in this one there's a lot to say on many levels and I think I'll leave it to you to have fun discussing it with your peers, there's a lot to discuss.
A math village
http://www.middleeasteye.net/in-depth/features/turkey-s-mathematics-village-changing-education-one-equation-at-a-time-1597523620

The school of Pythagoreanism is back to life and at an intricate location on top of it all.
'06
http://jimmyjonesphotography.com/p47158853
http://jimmyjonesphotography.com/blog/2012/12/my-uncanny-connection-to-the-06-female-wolf-832f

Discussion about '06 for the 6th month of the year. A wild and proud animal dominating its territory. I incite you to dig more on its subject.
Some dev stuffs
https://rclayton.silvrback.com/speaking-intelligently-about-java-vs-node-performance

Maybe related to those concurrency articles in "Concurrency" in

73. This time we're exploring Java and nodejs.

Thoughts

"Every choice we make allows us to manipulate the future. Do I ask Adrienne or Suzanne to the spring dance? Do I take my holiday on Corsica or Risa? A person's life, their future, hinges on each of a thousand choices. Living is making choices! Now you ask me to believe that if I make a choice other than the one that appears in your history books, then your past will be irrevocably altered. Well, you know, Professor, perhaps I don't give a damn about your past, because your past is my future. And as far as I'm concerned, it hasn't been written yet!" - Captain Picard about time travel

Archive

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

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
Share your point of view about the newsletter.
Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2018-06-15 00:00:00 | 79

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Your inner daemon
https://linoxide.com/how-tos/d-bus-ipc-mechanism-linux/
https://dbus.freedesktop.org/doc/dbus-tutorial.html
https://dvdhrm.github.io/rethinking-the-dbus-message-bus/

Dbus is hated so much as a message passing system, is that hate anchored in something? Let's learn the basics of dbus to clear things up and make our minds. There's also a repost of "And its ilk" in 42.
Making zsh faster
https://blog.jonlu.ca/posts/speeding-up-zsh

Shell fancy plugins and eye candies can stack up really fast, beware! Here's a story on un-doing this.
RAIDZ
https://www.delphix.com/blog/delphix-engineering/zfs-raidz-stripe-width-or-how-i-learned-stop-worrying-and-love-raidz

We discussed zfs and RAID separately more than once in this newsletter. This specific article is about optimising or for speed/IOPS or for space the raid layout of zfs.
Language support
https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/handling_non_utf_8_hebrew

"It's all just text", easy said, right, but it's not as simple as that. A reminder of "Plain text" in 57.
In BSD land
https://www.bsdfrog.org/pub/events/syspatch-fosdem-2018.pdf
https://hardenedbsd.org/article/shawn-webb/2018-06-09/june-hardenedbsd-foundation-update
https://www.ixsystems.com/blog/bsdcan-2018-recap/
https://www.openbsd.org/papers/BeckPledgeUnveilBSDCan2018.pdf
https://www.openbsd.org/papers/bsdcan2018-mininet.pdf

A presentation on the new and fascinating OpenBSD's solution on keeping their base system up to date and secure, syspatch. Other articles about hardnenedBSD trying to become a not-for-profit org, plus others about recent presentations on cool topics like pledge, minimet (software defined networking), etc..
One liners again...
http://www.bashoneliners.com/

As I've mentioned before, in "One liners" issue 20, I'm not a fan of one liners, but this time it's different, they come with their explanation. Kinda related to "Explain your pipeline" in 16.
Computers without binaries
https://medium.com/@bellmar/the-land-before-binary-cc705d5bdd70

Take whatever you know about computing and throw it out the window, enjoy!
DNS lookup from the inside
https://zwischenzugs.com/2018/06/08/anatomy-of-a-linux-dns-lookup-part-i/

Oh, I love this type of blog posts, insightful, tackling the topic from a top down approach, get ready!
Solaris is still alive
https://blogs.oracle.com/solaris/solaris-114%3a-10-good-to-know-features%2c-enhancements-or-changes

Even after the deprecation date being set Solaris still is alive and kicking, getting lots of cool updates.
C plus pluses
http://nullprogram.com/blog/2018/06/10/
https://nanxiao.me/en/why-do-i-recommend-learning-c-plus-plus/

Last week we had too much C, so let's tear that apart with C++.

Random

Who the hek is Graham?
http://www.meetgraham.com.au

A fantastic and powerful piece of art representing our weaknesses and bringing awareness.
Fairy tales and sleep
https://www.stuffyoushouldknow.com/podcasts/the-dark-origins-of-fairy-tales.htm
http://www.midorisnyder.com/essays/sleeping-beauty-dreaming-and-awake-ii.html
https://www.folio.ca/sleep-is-like-sexwe-arent-getting-enough/
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/4c9e/8c5d6e82dbfa2fdaa5583294decba15b0e59.pdf
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ueOqYebVhtc

Hands up for criticism! A series of ideas related to fairy tales and the slumber of women in them. I know a lot of persons regards those ideas with disdain but it never hurts to at least see what's up and if some of it makes sense to you.
Colors
https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/1202772/Color-Topics-for-Programmers
http://datagenetics.com/blog/may12018/index.html

Remember in issue 70 "Beauty is found in the detail2" how we've spent so much time learning the details of the bottom down process of how colors are transferred from a screen to our retina? Well this is the continuation.

Thoughts

Everything is a conspiracy when it doesn't suit us. When it does it's just the state of the world. We live in bubbles, when is the right time to question the state of affair and when is it not?

I've setup a new scavenger hunt on the forums, be sure to check it out: https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=2206.

Archive

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

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
Share your point of view about the newsletter.
Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2018-06-08 00:00:00 | 78

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

DungeonFS
https://github.com/ChrisRx/dungeonfs

A genius use of FUSE to play a game in your file system using basic Unix commands.
Only one OS
https://programmingmadecomplicated.wordpress.com/2017/08/12/there-is-only-one-os-and-its-been-obsolete-for-decades/
http://prog21.dadgum.com/159.html

A visit into the similarities between the currently popular operating systems which then turns into a critic of Unix designs, and then into new ideas for operating systems.
More C, more C
http://floooh.github.io/2018/06/02/one-year-of-c.html
http://mymicrocontroller.com/2018/04/03/what-happens-before-main-function-is-executed-in-c-and-why-is-it-important/
https://exez.in/conf-parser
https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3212479
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=7979
https://blog.erratasec.com/2018/05/c-is-too-low-level.html

C is fun, it's not the best language for everything, but it's definitely entertaining and satisfying to use when appropriate. Check out those fierce arguments thrown around when discussing the validity of usage or its qualifications or the current state. The last articles are related to "A summary" in 64.
Processes and signals
https://medium.com/@_neerajpal/openbsd-kernel-internals-creation-of-process-from-user-space-to-kernel-space-31a504389f87
https://ldpreload.com/blog/signalfd-is-useless

Two articles about the internals of processes and signaling to them, arguably signalfd isn't that useless.
Running on small machines
http://www.jcwolfram.de/projekte/mxe11_en/main.php

Another article about installing a Unix-like system in weird places this times it's Unix V6 on MXE11, Related to "Reducing/Shrinking the Linux kernel" in 66, also somehow related to "Doing it in V7" in 58.
Messing up with people
https://bernsteinbear.com/blog/how-to-mess-with-your-roommate/
http://johnloeber.com/docs/twitter-likes.html

Lovely articles about ingenious ways to fight using computers, taking pranks to the next level.
Abusing sudo?
http://touhidshaikh.com/blog/?p=790

This article discusses privilege escalation but in my opinion and the opinion of others those aren't flaws at all in sudo but normal usages where you can spawn shells. From the perspective of a deeply engrained infosec person maybe this is new, who knows.
Crypto patch
https://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-crypto/msg33291.html

The point of view of a crypto expert on an algorithm pushed forward by the USA's NSA and that has recently been added in the Linux kernel.
KSH and PWD
https://git.zx2c4.com/wireguard-go/commit/?id=a050431f2660d73e191ab8100d2f0934c8aedbf9

A lot of utilities rely on specific behaviors, once something is out and used in the wild it's hard to not keep backward compatibility.
Networking included
http://eradman.com/posts/networking-included.html

How to debug networking issues and inspect things on BSD and most Linux distro, somehow related to "So many tracing tools it makes me dizzy" in 43.
Make your own Gtk theme
https://gtkthemingguide.now.sh/

A guide on how to customize gtk themes.

Random

Over-Productive
https://arbtt.nomeata.de/#what
https://habitica.com/

We don't need managers anymore, we entered and era where we consider ourselves production machines that constantly need to output more, achievement is not a question it's a must. Those are arguable topics, take them with a grain of salt, food for thought.
Math visualization
https://www.joshwcomeau.com/posts/dynamic-bezier-curves

When you let the readers interact or see illustrations of what you are describing it helps tremendously to understand. This is also related to "Awesome GAMES for kids!" in 23.
Map of 802.11
https://wigle.net/

Where in the world are the most Wifi hubs located?
Smallest animation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSCX78-8-q0
http://www.lofibucket.com/articles/64k_intro.html

A bit of a stunt/showcase by IBM, moving atoms to create the smallest animation. And a counterpart in the demoscene world.
A documentary about chaos theory
https://ihavenotv.com/the-secret-life-of-chaos

Order from chaos, and chaos from order... Does that remind you of documenting your code?
Rube Goldberg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rube_Goldberg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rube_Goldberg_machine

Known for his unusually complex contraption of chain reactions machines. Miniature metaphors for a world we live in.
The brain
https://nancysbraintalks.mit.edu/course/9-11-the-human-brain
https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2018/05/24/611609366/whats-going-on-in-your-childs-brain-when-you-read-them-a-story
http://time.com/3836428/reading-to-children-brain/

The brain itself is a chaotic system. Here I present an MIT open course lectures about the brain, and two articles mentioning a study done in 2015 and another done in 2018 about the effect of reading to children.
New genres outside of pop
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PrOTHl6Tldc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v43jn9VJzLQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvUU8joBb1Q
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7Dh5QoXv2c
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRg_8NNPTD8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZEKlp-H6FE

A lot of the pop/radio music these days all sound the same, remember "Connecting Ideas" the millenial whoop and others, well it's not really true there's a lot of ingenuity and creativeness, new genres, etc.. Check the three I've linked, you don't have to like them but just to appreciate the innovation as they are deeply connected to our generation, somewhat related to "Doom - behind the music" in 39. The last three are just for fun as youtube started recommending some weird videos similar.
The WWW is awesome (continue)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCNZy2bNRi8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUUtK9FFIt4

This week let's check out this guy who's passionate about puppets. The craft and details that goes into making those is impressive.

Thoughts

"From this moment forward all my writings are fish hooks: perhaps I know how to fish as well as anyone - If nothing was caught, I am not to blame. There were no fish." - Nietzsche

An idea similar to the thoughts in issue 74: Push your ideas out there in the wild, without spoon feeding people, without following the clickbait trend, all you have to do is prepare the content in the most appropriately consumable way for anyone that ever encounters it.

PS: I've beaten last week record by making this newsletter longer than the last one. If you really enjoy it be sure to share it with your friends that might be interested.

Archive

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

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
Share your point of view about the newsletter.
Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2018-06-01 00:00:00 | 77

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Hashes
https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/1225252/A-New-Hash-Function-ZobHash
https://pthree.org/2018/05/23/do-not-use-sha256crypt-sha512crypt-theyre-dangerous/

Making a good, secure, fast (or slow), hashing function is not easy, everyone is going to try to find flaws in it, break it. Side channel attacks aren't obvious. Be sure to check the comments on the second article, some of the original creator of well known hashes added their insights.
Yet again a Unix CLI discussion
https://monkey.org/~marius/unix-tools-hints.html
http://julio.meroh.net/2013/09/cli-design-series-wrap-up.html

Read up on some points the author brings up about making good unix tools.
In soviet Russia
http://www.jakepoz.com/debugging-behind-the-iron-curtain/
https://lwn.net/Articles/219983/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_rot

Sometimes bugs are caused by unexpected events, we tend to forget computers are physical things, especially in an era of "clouds".
On writing technical articles
https://chrisshort.net/writing-technical-articles/
https://lobste.rs/s/eiydww/writing_technical_articles

Regardless of the quality of the article itself, this should start up a discussion: We need more people writing technical, understandable, articles about their crafts.
GUI
https://pointieststick.wordpress.com/2018/05/26/this-week-in-usability-productivity-part-20/
http://daemonforums.org/showthread.php?t=10656
https://eklitzke.org/lobotomizing-gnome
https://arcan-fe.com/2018/05/31/revisiting-the-arcan-project/

Maintaining and building desktop environments from big ones to small ones requires the work of many. The last link isn't really a desktop environment (though Durden is a DE implementation using Arcan) but a mega graphic and input, and whatever multimedia building block library, we've shared it before in "Awk for multimedia" in 44.
Executables & default program
https://ownyourbits.com/2018/05/23/the-real-power-of-linux-executables/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binfmt_misc
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Binfmt_misc_for_Java

We've had three podcasts related to this topic (Unix Executables, Processes On Unix, and Default Programs) but never touched what the author of this article is talking about, binfmt misc: Setting default programs internally in the Linux kernel via the procfs interface.
Security and networking
https://lulucid.com/ssl_handshake.html
http://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/network_security_audit
https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/05/a-cartoon-intro-to-dns-over-https/

The first article is a rough simplification/introduction to TLS handshakes, somehow related to "TLS 1.3" in 68. The second is an audit of the NetBSD network stack. I admire the patience taken to do those security audi, perusing the code for days looking for typos, overflows, mistakes, ways to abuse it.
Meta build systems
https://codingnest.com/basic-cmake
https://github.com/edrosten/autoconf_tutorial
http://www.twigtechnology.com/blog/2013/05/09/type-safe-struct-wrappers-in-c/

In continuation with "I haven't covered cmake" in 65, let's add autoconf to the tool set. The last article is somewhat unrelated, it's a C programming tip so that gcc gives a warning when using generic pointers.
Stop buffering
https://blog.plover.com/Unix/stdio-buffering.html
https://blog.plover.com/Unix/stdio-buffering-2.html

When you run into a problem, curse at the world for not implementing a solution, think of a possible solution, and then finally find what you were looking for in the beginning. All the great phases of our everyday life that makes us humble.
Device Mapper
http://narendrapal2020.blogspot.com/2014/03/device-mapper.html
https://nnc3.com/mags/LM10/Magazine/Archive/2006/72/032-037_dmcrypt/article.html

Remember the podcast about data storage well I've been revisiting it on my personal blog and adding illustrations. One of the confusing part of the explanation was related to role of the device mapper and the various modules that implement it. Those posts, though old (distros now support full disk encryption), should clarify that.
Why replace netstat
https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/linux/ReplacingNetstatNotBad

Remember our adventure with netlink in issue 59 "Procfs, capabilities, and netlinks", well, we continue on, this is one of the reason according to the author why the deprecation of netstat and ifconfig were made. But here's the question: Will we replace all the tools that use procfs and replace them by netlink/binary-blobs/IPC&RPC-whatever everytime we think it might affect their performance.

Random

Don't be so hard on yourself
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/22/smarter-living/why-you-should-stop-being-so-hard-on-yourself.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YmzKmTIe_m4#t=8m29s

We're social animals, comparing one another is the drive that leads to progress. However in today's world interactions are leading to some harm when it comes to self-love. Somehow related to "..State of the mind" in 75. The following video is my response to the one thing I thought was enraging in the first article: It's nice to focus on bringing back self-worth however the article sounded like it was written for the management team of a business. Making people less judgemental of themselves shouldn't be about increasing their productive outputs, it should be about making them feel better and the rest is out of scope.
More on urban planning
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/09/this-is-what-happens-after-a-neighborhood-gets-gentrified/432813/
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/19/opinion/democrats-gentrification-cities-voters.html
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/does-gentrification-help-or-hurt-our-major-cities/

While those opinion pieces are by nature about an American centered issue, this topic still brings light to something I had never thought about when it comes to social movements. It is related to "Public transportation" 76, "The WWW is awesome, (continue)" in 71, and "Game theory" in 34 (also to http://ncase.me/polygons/ by the same author).
A history of the picnic table
https://placesjournal.org/article/an-illustrated-history-of-the-picnic-table/

There are things we overlook so much and beauty is found in their details, in the same spirit as "A story on privacy" in 65. And maybe also related to urban planning.
Attention span
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211368117301687

A quick easy to read, and open, research paper about the effect of delegating mental power to individuals around us or our tools. This is a must read after "Are we our tools" in 68, and "The extended mind" in 64.
Retro gaming
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ar9WRwCiSr0
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/870d5g/eli5_how_did_the_nintendo_game_duck_hunt_know/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tfh0ytz8S0k

A lot of excellent content about retro gaming, special techniques used, smart puns, and much more.

Thoughts

You never fully realize how inept mainstream media is until they cover a topic you know a lot of. - /r/showerthoughts

This was the longest newsletter I've compiled since the start of this project. I hope you're enjoying it as much as I am enjoying reading all those articles every week. Let me know if you find anything interesting to share with our close circle of readers. If you're intested in contributing in whatever form or way, there's always a list of ideas at the bottom of this newsletter on how you can do so.

Archive

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

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
Share your point of view about the newsletter.
Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2018-05-25 00:00:00 | 76

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Segmentation fault
https://jvns.ca/blog/2018/04/28/debugging-a-segfault-on-linux/

From using valgrind to check why your program failed to getting a core dump and analysing it with gdb, this article does a quick overview of those important topics.
More reasons to use BSD
https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/blog/guest-blog-what-i-learned-during-my-freebsd-internship/
https://sivers.org/openbsd

Pondering about what's so great or not so great about other OS, maybe even doing that before the first hand testing, then those articles are for you.
Contain and protect
https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/capsicum/
https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/blog/2018/tarballs-the-ultimate-container-image-format/
https://gregoryszorc.com/blog/2018/05/16/revisiting-using-docker/

Capabilities, packages, and containerization, those topics interlace in some way.
Becoming a UNIX admin
http://seann.herdejurgen.com/resume/samag.com/html/v07/i07/a6.htm

Oldschool magazine article on some steps to learn the skills necessary to administer a UNIX server.
Recursive make
https://ndmitchell.com/downloads/paper-non_recursive_make_considered_harmful-22_sep_2016.pdf

A follow up on #73 "Recursive make", here we get the not only recursive Make but "all Make are evil". Their solution is arguably more confusing than Makefiles, smells too much of Haskell fanaticism, and maybe is only suited for a paper and not practical usage outside the Haskell community. Interesting nevertheless!
More fanaticism with vim
https://matthias-endler.de/2018/ten-years-of-Vim/

A reflection on learning and using vim after 10 years. Vim users are always beginners/students even after 10 years of vim.
Printf in details
http://www.maizure.org/projects/printf/index.html

The past few weeks I've been teaching programming to a friend and he keeps asking questions that never end, going deeper and deeper, starting from a simple question about a for loop and ending up discussing cpu architectures. This is the kind of articles I'll link him to.
Hackathon and secure chats
https://blogs.gnome.org/tbernard/2018/05/16/fractal-hackfest-in-strasbourg/
https://blogs.gnome.org/tbernard/2018/05/16/banquets-and-barbecues/
https://blogs.gnome.org/jsparber/2018/05/15/fractal-hackfest-2018/
https://eishagsoc.wordpress.com/2018/05/19/internationalization-of-fractal-3rd-and-last-part/
http://danigm.net/fractal-hackfest1.html
http://bytesgnomeschozo.blogspot.com/2018/05/fracturing-fractal.html

It's nice to read the progress of open source team projects in blog posts like those. It is especially the case for fresh ones as it attracts eyeballs and incites contributors. It's also amazing to see everyone in the team writing their own experience of the hackfest, I never participated in anything resembling this but it makes me want to. If anyone knows of a hackathon or conference that would be interesting hit me up, I might join. Moreover, I'll try to write more about my own projects, and you should too.
The Love of learning
https://medium.com/@donhopkins/pie-menus-936fed383ff1
http://blog.rekawek.eu/2017/02/09/coffee-gb/

A deep research in the field of HCI about pie menu, their does and don't, and a wonderful blog post about writing a gameboy emulator and learning new things along the way.
Autotrace
https://zwischenzugs.com/2018/05/21/autotrace-debug-on-steroids/

A nice tool to automate the tracing of running processes.

Random

Public transportation
https://popupcity.net/estonia-to-become-the-worlds-first-free-public-transport-nation/
https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/05/the-amazing-psychology-of-japanese-train-stations/560822/

Makes you wonder about the state in your own city, wherever you are on the economic or political spectrum this can spark discussions.
Human-like
https://notesfrombelow.org/article/a-basic-lack-of-understanding

Larry Tesler puts it succinctly: "AI is whatever hasn't been done yet." I'd like to call it the AI of the gaps, for the believers.
How to disappear
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/may/19/exposed-how-to-disappear-from-the-internet

Related to "Privacy, confidentiality, and anonymity" in issue 63. How to disappear and what would be the reasons for that.
You might have heard of gopher, what about Xanadu
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyzgoeeloJA
http://xanadu.com/xuSampleXanadoc-D12.html

Quite an interesting concept I hadn't encountered before. Give it a go, there's a demo page. It's sort of similar to Wikipedia's interface when you think of it.

Thoughts

Much unhappiness has come into the world because of bewilderment and things left unsaid. - Dostoyevsky

Archive

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

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
Share your point of view about the newsletter.
Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2018-05-19 00:00:00 | 75

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Shells and pipelines
https://github.com/anordal/shellharden/blob/master/how_to_do_things_safely_in_bash.md
http://www.leancrew.com/all-this/2011/12/more-shell-less-egg/
https://ambrevar.bitbucket.io/emacs-eshell/

Lots of great ideas in those 3 posts. Here's a quote from the first one: "A variable in bash is like a hand grenade – take off its quotes, and it starts ticking." Related to "Emacs as PID 1" in 48 and "Bash the bash for bash the bash" in 23.
The power of ed
https://jvns.ca/blog/2018/05/11/batch-editing-files-with-ed/

The next thing to do is to put this in a pipeline using sed instead!
Manuals
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=7998
http://sircmpwn.github.io/2018/05/13/scdoc.html
http://pinfo.sourceforge.net/

Raymond's new article about his long term project of converting Unix manual pages to HTML and another article related to manpages.
"The mouse is so fast on your machine"
http://who-t.blogspot.no/2018/05/x-server-pointer-acceleration-analysis-part1.html

Pointer acceleration can mean almost nothing to a lot of users but it's the smallest differences that make the big ones. A four part series going in the depth of it.
Oh no a malware found in the "store"?
https://www.linuxuprising.com/2018/05/malware-found-in-ubuntu-snap-store.html

Before today I had never heard of the SnapStore (I've only used the official repo). Apparently there's no restrictions on who and what can be uploaded there, so it's not very surprising.
Sandboxes
https://www.morbo.org/2018/05/linux-sandboxing-improvements-in_10.html
https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/08/you-can-now-run-linux-apps-on-chrome-os/

"That means you could now, for example, run Microsoft’s Linux version of Visual Studio Code right on your Chrome OS machine." The world is mixing up a lot of stuffs, better build boxes to containerize them.
Flags you need to go faster
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/GCC_optimization

In issue 60 "Lots of C, or more precisely compiler, preprocessor, and linker features" we mentioned POGO, which is a nifty and rarely used compiler opimization trick. So here are more of those.
Composition
http://www.linusakesson.net/programming/pipelogic/index.php
http://www.tedinski.com/2018/05/08/case-study-unix-philosophy.html

Let's seriously talk about composition, what does it mean to put pieces together.
BSD papers
https://papers.freebsd.org/
https://www.openbsd.org/events.html

Presentations and papers for FreeBSD and OpenBSD.
But didn't you write an embedded os
http://www.tnhh.net/posts/but-didnt-you-write-an-embedded-os.html

Some programming jobs are like contractual job, or more like a temporary service offering. This type of work brings a management team that assumes possible workers will have a certain skillset to join in instantly and start fixing whatever they have or want to have. Other jobs are more long term, employee types of job where you're required to grow along the way and learn from senior to become an essential part of a team. Now what do we get when the requirements of one mixes with the other because of confusion emerging from the HR team.
A useful regex
https://dassur.ma/things/regexp-quote/

Directly related to "Fast regex" in 62 and "Afraid your regex won't work?" in 21.

Random

The internet is awesome (continue)
https://mapofmetal.com/

This week we get a map of the metal music genre.
State of the web...
https://medium.com/@cvitullo/a-brief-history-of-web-app-loading-ab8409e48812
http://nymag.com/selectall/2018/05/i-dont-know-how-to-waste-time-on-the-internet-anymore.html
https://blogs.harvard.edu/doc/2018/05/12/gdpr/
https://makefrontendshitagain.party/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/05/16/whois_privacy_shambles/
https://jacquesmattheij.com/gdpr-hysteria

Some thoughts about web technology, new laws affecting it (less than one week left for GDPR to take effect), the ad-revenue business model, and web content.
..State of the mind
https://librarianshipwreck.wordpress.com/2018/01/18/why-the-luddites-matter/
https://medium.com/@richardnfreed/the-tech-industrys-psychological-war-on-kids-c452870464ce
https://www.mathwashing.com/

Related to issue 72 "Ludites or not" and maybe even "Pedantic and semantic" in 66. I'll step aside and leave you to judge.
Why we should use plain text emails
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/05/attention-pgp-users-new-vulnerabilities-require-you-take-action-now
https://efail.de/
https://protonmail.com/blog/pgp-vulnerability-efail/
https://lists.gnupg.org/pipermail/gnupg-users/2018-May/060315.html
https://www.mailpile.is/blog/2018-05-14_PGP_Security_Alert.html

This newsletter is sent in multipart, both plain text and html. On a side note, this has been blown out of proportion and it seems to be out of a love for fame and creating cringy logo and websites.

Thoughts

"Yep, that's the point of public key cryptography, never share your privates in public" - A user on reddit

Archive

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

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
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Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2018-05-10 00:00:00 | 74

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

As Needed
http://www.bnikolic.co.uk/blog/gnu-ld-as-needed.html

I recently faced some compilation errors on certain machine only when the order of the source file was in a specific way. After some research this is what I found as the cause, libraries that aren't needed aren't included.
Whining
https://www.voidlinux.eu/news/2018/05/serious-issues.html
https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/753646/a6ebb50040c5862c/

Distributions and open source projects all have their internal political disputes, which seem to multiply in the past few years with the trend of drama and turning everything into controversial topics. The one of Void is that the project leader disappeared... Remember, two-man-rule. The one of glibc is that they want to remove jokes.
Network based backup
https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2018/05/01/bareos-backup-server-on-freebsd/

BareOS let's you do incremental backups over the network with a WebUI, compression, hardware and software based encryption, and much more.
Blocksize in ZFS
http://brian.candler.me/posts/the-importance-of-zfs-blocksize/

A dive into some parameters for the ZFS, which you can also use as good knowledge for other file systems and volume managers.
Notes to install Linux on a dead badger
http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/articles/installing-linux-on-a-dead-badger-users-notes/

Bookmark this for the next time you have an unused dead-badger around.
Leaks
https://blog.nelhage.com/post/three-kinds-of-leaks/

When working with a language that allows memory manipulation the programmer usually has to keep the memory management in mind so to not mess up with leaks. That's when frameworks like valgrind comes into play to help. However you need at least to understand what the terms that valgrind shows mean. This article should clear things up on much more than that.
SSH ascii art
https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/ssh-randomart-how-does-it-work-art

These days I've been working a lot with public/private key pairs. This article touches both my ascii art love and this.
zsh tmux & emacs
https://blog.d46.us/zsh-tmux-emacs-copy-paste/

"What a horrible hack" I've heard someone say... This is the state of clipboard, "Dear old vain teaches us yet again" in 34 and "X11 Clipboard" in 9, maybe even "Term emulators" with the "bracketed paste" in last week 73, also come to mind.
Redirecting standard output when the process is already running
http://sircmpwn.github.io/2018/05/04/Redirecitng-stderr-of-running-process.html

Yet another fun article from sircmpwn blog. This one is about redirecting stderr of a running process... A very hacky way.
How to do X11 compositing
http://www.talisman.org/%7Eerlkonig/misc/x11-composite-tutorial/

In continuation with last week's "Display servers and graphic operations" in 73 and "More on Xorg magic almost-no-documentation" in 69, to not read before you've gone through the previous content. Now that you've assimilated the basics, let's read this article and learn about a certain way of implementing a compositor.

Random

Access economy
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Access_economy

The world is moving in that direction so let's get familiar with the terms and what it implies.
Useless jobs
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2018/may/04/i-had-to-guard-an-empty-room-the-rise-of-the-pointless-job

When life gives you lemon, you make lemonade. When no one wants lemonade your job becomes to remind them that you may have lemons in stock or maybe not. "You’re making an active negative contribution to people's day".
Adblock & the web
https://medium.com/@trybravery/please-stop-using-adblock-but-not-why-you-think-13280e76c8e7

I'm not a fan of adblockers, not because I like ads but because of the whole drama and politics that happens behind them. I'd rather use a full only allow whitelisted cross requests addons.
Choosing the right typography
https://www.typography.com/blog/fonts-for-complex-data
https://alok.github.io/2018/04/26/using-vim-s-conceal-to-make-languages-more-tolerable/
http://dotsies.org/

The first article is aimed at graphic designers but can be read by anyone that is interesting in fonts. The second delves into another topic, replacing words by specific characters in source code. The third link is about even more obscure characters.

Thoughts

Sand mandalas are incredibly intricate works of art that take many people many days to construct. They’re very expressive, but fragile, works of art.

After a mandala has been constructed – and displayed – it is ceremoniously deconstructed – which is meant "to symbolize the Buddhist doctrinal belief in the transitory nature of material life."

_why’s entire online presence and code was presented in the sand mandala that was '_why'. The person behind '_why' simply decided to move on and close that portion of his life.

Archive

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

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
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nixers newsletter issue | 2018-05-04 00:00:00 | 73

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Display servers and graphic operations
http://blog.mecheye.net/2012/06/the-linux-graphics-stack/
https://keyj.emphy.de/files/linuxgraphics_en.pdf
https://seasonofcode.com/posts/how-x-window-managers-work-and-how-to-write-one-part-i
https://www.khronos.org/opengl/wiki/Programming_OpenGL_in_Linux:_Creating_a_texture_from_a_Pixmap
https://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2015/12/gaming-on-linux-move-to-next-generation/

There aren't a lot of good approachable articles explaining how to develop in the X windowing system. I'm currently planning on writing more on this topic myself and if you're able to then join in and also write. Other articles that were mentioned in the newsletter: "Explaining X11" in 3, "Dark is the history of X11" in 36, and the X11 section in "Low level graphics" in issue 42. However, even those can be quite confusing with terms like pixmap, rendering, redirecting, unredirecting, reparenting, composition, etc.. And so that's the reason I'm going to be writing the articles.
Fast file system
https://docs.freebsd.org/44doc/smm/05.fastfs/paper.pdf

A paper about how the original UNIX file system was optimized for throughput. Increase of block size, allowing block fragmentation, allocating on the same cylinder, long file names, symbolic links, and more.
CPU optimizations
https://dendibakh.github.io/blog/2018/04/22/What-optimizations-you-can-expect-from-CPU

Compilers optimize according to how the CPU may react to how the code is spread out, but the CPU also does it too, eliminating useless instructions. In this article there's some discussion about that, somehow related to "About memory" in 58 and "A summary" in 64.
mdoc
https://manpages.bsd.lv/mdoc.html

Writing man pages is not easy. This book is a guide on writing good manpages using mdoc, keep it bookmarked for the next time you have to use it.
Recursive make
http://aegis.sourceforge.net/auug97.pdf

Relates to the earlier "Recursive Make" in 71, the paper, which is smooth to read, goes into the crevasses of why this isn't such a good idea and how to remediate.
Term emulators
https://lwn.net/Articles/749992/
https://lwn.net/Articles/751763/

A big overview of the features, support, usability, and speed of different terminal emulators. It was the first time I hear about some of those features.
Unix philosophy
https://nedbatchelder.com//blog/201804/do_one_thing.html

It's not called "philosophy" for nothing, let's dig deeper in the semiotics. Taking the words too literally or not, having problems with ambiguity.
Concurrency
https://vorpus.org/blog/notes-on-structured-concurrency-or-go-statement-considered-harmful/

Exploring a new way of doing concurrent tasks. You may somehow find this related to "More Pike Wave?" in 30 and "PikeWave by jmbi/ibmj" 27.
CAs are big and powerful -> bad?
https://scotthelme.co.uk/the-power-to-revoke-lies-with-the-ca/
https://www.troyhunt.com/on-the-perceived-value-ev-certs-cas-phishing-lets-encrypt/

Are CAs too powerful, are they allowed to revoke certificates that they deem are dangerous to the security of the PKI, should CA pass moral or legal judgement, should the CA act when they have the opportunity, are EV certs really worth it as human control or they make no sense because they depend on the UI display, should the guy of the first article have been left with his cert, should we follow the letter of the law or the spirit of the law? I'll let you make your own opinion.
Data security
https://theintercept.com/2018/04/28/computer-malware-tampering/
http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23

The field of forensic is deep, and this is giving me new ideas for a scavenger hunt.

Random

Kopimi
https://kopimi.com/

A movement to spur more copying on the web.
State of the web (continue)...
https://0xadada.pub/2018/05/01/against-facebook/

One last article for the ride.

Thoughts

HTTPS & SSL doesn't mean "trust this." It means "this is private." You may be having a private conversation with Satan. - Scott Hanselman

Archive

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

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
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nixers newsletter issue | 2018-04-27 00:00:00 | 72

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Unicode
https://julialang.org/utf8proc/
http://benlynn.blogspot.com/2011/02/utf-8-good-utf-16-bad_07.html

Working with UTF is a bit of a pain. The first link is a mini lib to help you handle that. Personally I've recently used the fontconfig string utilities instead (https://www.freedesktop.org/software/fontconfig/fontconfig-devel/x103.html#AEN4792). The second article is an opiniated one, as usual the comments are insightful in this case.
Perl CGI, captchas, and just web related stuffs
https://perlhacks.com/2015/12/long-death-cgi-pm/
http://ezinearticles.com/?Captchas-Considered-Harmful---Why-Captchas-Are-Bad-And-How-You-Can-Do-Better&id=1104207
https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/scan-ping-the-internet-hilbert-curve

One article about how moving a "legacy" Perl package from core to external deps could break some web hosting because they'll forget to install it, another about captchas and how to do it better (we're already seeing a lot of companies ditch captchas), and mapping the whole internet.
GUIs
http://wormsandviruses.com/2018/03/the-menu-bar/
http://www.charlesetc.com/gui-development-is-broken/

The WIMP, the defacto UI design is fading in the trend, the first article discusses why. As far as the second one is concerned with the developer side of GUI devs, the author considers a bunch of very interesting options while not talking about others such as kivy, tk, shoesrb, etc..
BSD on desktop and laptop
https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2018/03/29/freebsd-desktop-part-1-simplified-boot/
https://www.romanzolotarev.com/setup.html

Why would you silence the boot process? IDK but this is what is explained, and also another an OpenBSD setup on a fanless box with a lot of hardware show off.
Libre laptop review
http://www.davidrevoy.com/article341/review-purism-librem13-laptop

This blog is dedicated to digital artists using completely open source softwares. A rather intriguing nice that deserves respect.
Command line for the data scientists
https://kadekillary.work/post/cli-4-ds/

Closely following "Unix commands from a data-scientist eyes" in issue 28, we got another set of commands and tricks for them.
You wouldn't believe what this ssh can do
https://zinovyev.net/blog/ssh-client-configuration-tricks
https://nero.github.io/2018/02/11/ssh-hidden-service.html

You can access ssh over tor, and cool simple beginner tricks to make your ssh sessions more pleasing.
Long term storage, keeping data alive
https://www.nongnu.org/lzip/xz_inadequate.html

Somewhat related to "Web literacy and more" in 68. We need standards for good formats that can be used for long term storage, the article tries to demonstrate why xz isn't one of those.
Firewalls on Linux
https://www.netronome.com/blog/bpf-ebpf-xdp-and-bpfilter-what-are-these-things-and-what-do-they-mean-enterprise/
https://cilium.io/blog/2018/04/17/why-is-the-kernel-community-replacing-iptables/

A continuation of the discussion happening in the KML about BPF. "ELF modules" in 69 and "So many tracing tools it makes me dizzy" in 43.
Public access Multics
https://ban.ai/multics/
http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/honeywell/multics/
http://www.multicians.org/multics-commands.html

After the public access UNIX we get the public access Multics. Great if you want to give it a try. Read up a bit of commands from the second and third links. It's surprising that it's Y2K compatible.

Random

CC music
http://cchound.com/

I find it hard to select a creative common song for the podcast, so this will be my next stop for the new one.
The Shirky principle
http://kk.org/thetechnium/the-shirky-prin/
https://www.macrumors.com/2018/04/20/apple-verizon-att-switching-collusion/

There were a bunch of news related to this in the past days. Fortunately this time some big player has opposed it before it came into actions. Also, the first blog is cool, add it to your list.
Ignosticism
http://www.control-z.com/czp/pgs/ignostic.html
https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2006/10/29/the-god-conundrum/

I've had an interesting discussion this week and this came up.
Signatures as biometric, probably not
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/08/business/credit-card-signatures.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0IZhqq2bmQ
http://hackingdistributed.com/2018/04/26/online-signing-broken/

Analysing signatures isn't a good mean to identify someone. As anyone that has ever listened to documentary about tracing history and how handwriting can be reassign to their original author knows, it's not as simple as it sounds. You need many pages of documents to be able to somehow, approximately, probably, say it was the right person. In the legal field this isn't even considered strong evidence anymore.
Ludites or not
https://nomasters.io/posts/dumber-phone/
https://vincent.bernat.im/en/blog/2018-more-privacy-blog
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/allinthemind/the-kids-of-today/9637570
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/17/magazine/what-good-is-community-when-someone-else-makes-all-the-rules.html
https://venam.nixers.net/blog/psychology/2018/01/16/online-convergence.html

The history of the word ludite is interesting by itself, and also the current definition. There are some persons that have difficulties with tech, or maybe those are difficulties with addiction and not the technology itself. Some others have a morbid fascination with efficiency and control of themselves. Maybe passionately, like the n=1 movement and nootropics, regardless of their validity or not. In the end it comes down to doing things deliberately. The second blog is about detaching yourself from "harmful to privacy" services. The last two articles come in pair, and I'm shamelessly pushing one of my own article because the NYT one reminded me of it. Also related to "Compartmentalization" in 62.

Thoughts

For they do not appear to me to have lost the faculty of reasoning, but having joined together some ideas very wrongly, they mistake them for truths; and they err as men do that argue right from wrong principles. For, by the violence of their imaginations, having taken their fancies for realities, they make right deductions from them.

An essay about epistemology by Locke. http://enlightenment.supersaturated.com/johnlocke/BOOKIIChapterXI.html

Archive

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

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
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Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2018-04-20 00:00:00 | 71

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

HardenedBSD World
https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2018/04/06/introduction-to-hardenedbsd-world/

A good summary on HardenedBSD against FreeBSD and OpenBSD.
More on BSD and POSIX related topics
https://www.romanzolotarev.com/openbsd/webserver.html

A quick article about setting up an OpenBSD web server, it's always useful to have those laying around the web as a reference. All until configurations are deprecated, keep that in mind, tag the software versions you are using in such tutorials to help your fellow web travelers.
Porting mksh to a Plan9 fork
http://www.mirbsd.org/permalinks/wlog-10_e20180415-tg.htm

Porting mksh to a Plan9 system isn't straight forward, the author had to study well the POSIX specs and implement a simulation/compatibility layer.
Everything is color
http://no-color.org/

Maybe related to "A colorful man" in 64. This page is clear: it wants to set a new standard for command line tools so that they respect this environment variable: $NO_COLOR.
Commands
https://monades.roperzh.com/tags/weekly-command/
https://iridakos.com/tutorials/2018/04/12/elasticsearch-linux-man-pages.html
https://github.com/bootandy/dust#overview

A series of articles about ideas and topics that can inspire you on your command line journey, or frighten you depending on your views about new toy-techs.
Recursive Make
https://owen.sj.ca.us/~rk/howto/slides/make/slides/makerecurs.html
https://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/html_node/Recursion.html

I've never really had to use recursive make before so I always thought there was some clean built in way to automatically do that. But that's not the case, so I've opted to simply not do it.
Let's play with encoding and formats
https://florianjw.de/en/octal_zero_considered_harmfull.html
https://davesteele.github.io/gpg/2014/09/20/anatomy-of-a-gpg-key/

These days I've been working so much with ASN.1 DER that it has become ingrained in me, I see it everywhere... So it's time to finally read up about the specific format of GPG keys.
Necessary jerks?
https://blog.eldrid.ge/2017/04/11/the-myth-of-the-necessary-jerk/

Another one related to "Assholes" in issue 15. I think the idea is clear but it's good to keep repeating it. I'm wondering, is it a social persona influence by the media, putting those caricatures on a pedestal, that creates this or are those people really like that from the get go?
Linux firewall & binding to all tcp ports
https://blog.cloudflare.com/how-we-built-spectrum/

Other than being an implicit technical marketing post, it explains a bunch of networking configuration tricks.
VDO, A new layer to add to the data storage stack
https://www.redhat.com/de/blog/look-vdo-new-linux-compression-layer

Remember the podcast about data storage (https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=2164), there were so many layers, right? Well this time we insert a new one between the block and partition/volume-management one that has for role to deduplicate and compress data sent or coming from the disk. As it's placed here it is thus file system independent but requires this VDO to be able to read properly from the physical SCSI layer.

Random

State of the web (continue...)
https://medium.com/@anildash/the-missing-building-blocks-of-the-web-3fa490ae5cbc
https://www.oreilly.com/ideas/its-time-to-rebuild-the-web
http://nymag.com/selectall/2018/04/an-apology-for-the-internet-from-the-people-who-built-it.html
https://www.feld.com/archives/2018/04/the-price-of-free-is-actually-too-high.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/15/fashion/before-the-web-hearts-grew-silent.html

I think I've shared so much related to this topic this year that I don't need to put a summary. I'm glad those conversations are taking place, this is a historical moment, I hope 2018 will be remember as a year that reflected this. The four articles stand in pair, the second ones in the pair are reply to the first. While the first pair is more or less technical, the second one is pungent with technology and social network mysticism. I'm inserting those links here but if you want relief check the series "The WWW is awesome" and "Beauty is found in details" I've started in the Random section. The last link doesn't seem directly encroached with the others but it is, a beautiful peace.
The WWW is awesome (continue)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yITr127KZtQ

In continuation with past weeks "The WWW is awesome!" in 70. Ever been stuck in graphic? Check what a bit of software simulation and civil engineering could possibly do in Eutopia land.
- Chinese fonts
  https://qz.com/522079/the-long-incredibly-tortuous-and-fascinating-process-of-creating-a-chinese-font/
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grapheme
"Beauty is found in the details", this time we're tackling Chinese fonts. Language is such a complex topic. The past month I've been working with fonts, discussing fonts with a graphic designer friend, etc.. A character, aka grapheme, are only a single aspect, logograph, phonograph. So much to learn, so much to respect!
Cognitive fallacies map
https://www.breakdown-notes.com/makemap

There's so many of them and some are obsessed with memorizing them all in the hope to never make any. However, it's not as simple as that.
Usability
https://www.w3.org/TR/UNDERSTANDING-WCAG20/visual-audio-contrast-scale.html
https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/399
http://mqtest.io/

It's quite hard to make a website that is accessible on all devices and by most persons, even the ones with disabilities. I've been lately checking this specification regarding contrast and text readability, the website should be accessible when zoomed at 200%, however not all browser's change, nor agree if they should, their screen.width when zooming. Firefox doesn't, Chrome does, I have no clue about others.

Thoughts

In the end it is those who derive consequences and seize the importance of the ideas, seeing their real value, who win the day. They are the ones who can talk about the subject.

Archive

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

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
Share your point of view about the newsletter.
Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2018-04-13 00:00:00 | 70

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Another sandboxing solution
http://www.plash.beasts.org/index.html

Related to issue 49 "Wrap it in a sandbox on Linux". Nothing novel, simply a mention.
Microcode
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Microcode

Until a while ago (spectre and meltdown), I had no clue the encoded instructions inside the processor could be upgraded. It still bugs me.
New public service in town
https://devnull-as-a-service.com/one-less-to-go.sh

In the land of useless we've got a new contender.
Regression and ports to other OS
https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs/issues/7401

Sometimes the price of using some technology is high but maybe the benefits are big enough to compensate. Filesystems are one of those, you don't want it to break. However without testing there is no polishing, here's a case of beautiful polishing.
Process tree
https://phoxis.org/2013/11/25/process-tree-of-linux-system/
https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=1925

An explanation on how to write a program to trace a Linux process tree and a discussion about finding the PID of the terminal a script is running on.
A myth about security
https://gettys.wordpress.com/2018/04/09/mythology-about-security/

And as with every myth it is debunked in the article.
UCLA Unix
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/55f7/e4d8719cbdfe8cdc9fa77ed7a5f62bfba784.pdf

A research paper about an OS built with demonstrable data security in mind. This OS, as old as it is (remember the previous link), already implemented and advanced version of the concept of process capabilities.
Network audio, mpd+sndio
https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20180410063454

Most readers of this newsletter have used mpd and so are familiar with the audio_output configuration. This articles goes into skipping the http output and replace it by a direct sndio output (it has network support).
Kernel lockdown and uefi secure boot
https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/50577.html

A discussion about a recent patch that would enable kernel lockdown directly when booting from UEFI with secure boot. The kernel built to look like an EFI executable.
New ways of thinking for devs
https://hackernoon.com/unconventional-way-of-learning-a-new-programming-language-e4d1f600342c
https://sonniesedge.co.uk/talks/dear-developer

Two new ideas to integrate in your learning experience as a dev or hobbyist. The last articles is a great segue into the random section.

Random

The WWW is awesome!
http://jjwargames.blogspot.co.uk/
http://jjwargames.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Books
https://www.theramenrater.com/

You can find anything on the web. Recently I've been into some pretty narrow subject and could still stumble upon those super cool and passionate blogs.
State of the web, again, why not?
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/04/dont-give-away-historic-details-about-yourself/
https://openspace.sfmoma.org/2018/04/your-pretty-face-is-going-to-sell/

In contrast with the above links.
Beauty is found in the detail2
http://jamie-wong.com/post/color/

Remember "Beauty is found in the detail" in issue 61, this article is an example of this. Colors are taken as the subject.

Thoughts

Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others.

Archive

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

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
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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 issue | 2018-04-06 00:00:00 | 69

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Debugging issues on unknown boxes
https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2018/03/26/w/

last, who, w, history, etc.. When checking why a system is suddenly failing for "no apparent reasons" it's smart to see who has done what on it.
Is there a command that is as ingrained in our muscle memory as cd
https://olivierlacan.com/posts/cd-is-wasting-your-time/

Moving from directories to directories isn't efficient enough, raise up your game skills by using this rad trick.
execpromises
https://medium.com/@_neerajpal/openbsd-pledge-1-vs-pledge-2-8313bb4d22b8

The article is of arguable (low) quality but does the job at introducing the concept of execpromises, pledge on the child of the pledged parent.
Filesystem discovery
https://opensource.com/article/18/4/ext4-filesystem

Let's keep going on our never-ending wannabe understanding of the data storage layers. This time we will revisit the history and features of ext4.
ELF modules
https://lwn.net/Articles/749108/

The introduction of a new kind of kernel module, inspired by the recent bpfilter proposal (standing as a replacement translation for iptables).
In-memory-only ELF execution
https://magisterquis.github.io/2018/03/31/in-memory-only-elf-execution.html

What kind of usage could this possibly have... What a fun article!
XIM
https://www.x.org/releases/X11R7.6/doc/libX11/specs/XIM/xim.html
https://sourceforge.net/projects/scim/
https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~little/OldSites/CSE_Uptime/v4.10/kanji.sidebar.html
https://fcitx-im.org/wiki/Input_method_related_environment_variables

Internationalization of input and languages is hard, it's not straight forward at all. This is the standard protocol for implementing it in X, though I've rarely seen it done properly.
More on Xorg magic almost-no-documentation
https://www.x.org/releases/current/doc/renderproto/renderproto.txt
https://keithp.com/~keithp/talks/usenix2001/xrender/

I've been reading about the render extension in the past days and I can clearly assess that this is a similar issue as with the font stack ("More on typography" in issue 63): It's the same small group of persons that know about this tech that is scarcely documented. So, read up, educate yourself about it and maybe we can turn this around.
The Association for Computer Heresy
http://sigbovik.org/

"Every year they hold some kind of conference named SIGBOVIK where the participants present absolutely absurd creations, many of them are funny and/or interesting, like the powerpoint punch card machine."
Futurist state of the internet
http://web.archive.org/web/19970702192520/http://www.thebee.com:80/bweb/iinfo31.htm

Can we predict the future, probably not but it's fun to go back in time and check what people were looking for.

Random

Naming a new machine
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1178

An actual rfc about how to choose a hostname.
About the newsfeed
https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2018/4/2/the-death-of-the-newsfeed

An insightful breakdown of why filtered and spammy newsfeed aren't meant for long-term usage, connection, and communication.
Keeping thieves away
https://medium.com/@umpox/be-careful-what-you-copy-invisibly-inserting-usernames-into-text-with-zero-width-characters-18b4e6f17b66

This blog post goes into a method to store username inside text using invisible (zero-width) unicode characters.
The world in colors
http://web-owls.com/2006/06/25/a-bit-of-color/
https://www.romaexperience.com/rome-blog/2016-the-colours-of-ancient-rome/
http://www.ancientworldalive.com/single-post/2015/06/23/Greeks-and-Romans-in-colors

We picture the past as we see it with today's eyes, but it's a flawed perception.

Thoughts

"GUIs normally make it simple to accomplish simple actions and impossible to accomplish complex actions." - Doug Gwyn

Probably one of the most cliché quote of all time, maybe it needs more pondering. Is it a limitation from the medium or from ourselves, what other types of media are we not using that could solve this?

Archive

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

Contribute

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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 issue | 2018-03-29 00:00:00 | 68

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Navigate the history of Unix tools
https://dspinellis.github.io/unix-history-man/

A very well made page that has a list of the appearance and history of most unix tools, something I should've had during this podcast: https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=2191.
Odd coments and strange doings in Unix
http://orkinos.cmpe.boun.edu.tr/~kosar/odd.html

The title says it all, it goes on to explain the stories behind weird behaviors and commands.
Void linux
https://michaelwashere.net/void/linux/culture/2017/09/18/into-the-void.html

What makes the void distribution special.
Nix Os
http://nmattia.com/posts/2018-03-21-nix-reproducible-setup-linux-macos.html

Another distro related (somehow) post. It's about managing dot files and reproducible setup. It is related to the podcast "less ties with a machine" https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=2051.
Are we our tools
https://codewithoutrules.com/2018/03/23/you-are-not-your-tools/

It might not look like it at first sight but this is related to "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). This one challenges both of those ideas, true or not this will make it a good subject of discussion for the week.
.Net Core dev on Linux
https://www.blinkingcaret.com/2018/03/20/net-core-linux/

Many don't like dotNet, but with it being now open source there's no reason not to give it a try. Also this should be of use for anyone going to a university that requires programming using dotNet.
Web literacy and more
https://mozilla.github.io/content/web-lit-whitepaper/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_dark_age
https://archive.org/about/

A Mozilla initiative related to literacy and contribution in the ever-changing world of technology we live in. This is related to "Digital and technological literacy" in issue 65.
The definitive resource for imagemagick scripts
http://www.fmwconcepts.com/imagemagick/index.php

Imagemagick has always been for me... Magical! There's so much you can do and so many tools that comes in the set.
XIM and unicode
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_input#In_X11_(Linux_and_Unix_variants)

There's the Altgr/compose key but there's also a way to insert unicode by entering their number via XIM, the X input module.
Macro expansion
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2224334/gcc-dump-preprocessor-defines/2224357
http://www.linuxtopia.org/online_books/an_introduction_to_gcc/gccintro_36.html

Macros can be confusing so here's the best way to debug them.

Random

20 years of cURL
https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2018/03/20/twenty-years-1998-2018/

A review of how cURL came to be, the state of mind of the author.
TLS 1.3
https://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf-announce/current/msg17592.html
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-tls-tls13/?include_text=1

If you're into sec/crypto/pki topics then this is for you. The standard is coming together, read the section about "major differences from TLS 1.2" or enjoy the whole document.
For my text art fans out there
https://archive.org/details/hackercons-notacon-2007-Building_Character_ANSI

Archive.org is doing something incredible by preserving history, do what you can to help this organization stay alive.
Dictatorship of the small minority
https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictatorship-of-the-small-minority-3f1f83ce4e15

This article brings to light a reality we don't always notice, I'm not going to spoil it for you.
Identity as a service
https://auth0.com/blog/identity-as-a-service-in-2018/

Remember all the articles about digital identity (I'm not going to link them, I've been doing it too many times with those, just check the archive for that), well this is the state of affair for 2018.

Thoughts

A good model makes reality look normal, not weird; a good model assigns high probability to that which is actually the case.

Archive

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

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
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Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2018-03-23 00:00:00 | 67

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Let's review this one more time
https://codeexplainer.wordpress.com/2018/03/01/have-fun-with-unix/

We've shared a lot of articles related to not-so-obvious C behavior, so here's one more. It's the same puzzle as in "Why does it do this?" of issue 45 but better explained.
sudo and setuid
https://rcoh.me/posts/sudo-science/

A walk through how sudo works by taking advantage of the setuid bit. Somehow related to "Bash is secure" in issue 13, "Oh so confusing setuid" in issue 8 and "Setuid... again!" in issue 28.
Extended attributes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_file_attributes
https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/CommonExtendedAttributes/
https://linux.die.net/man/1/chattr
https://linux-audit.com/using-xattrs-extended-attributes-on-linux/

I haven't seen any custom extended attributes being frequently used in the wild other than for ACL and SELinux. The second link gives a general overview of common usage they can have, as metadata outside the file itself. It also explains something I've missed during the "default programs" podcast, such as setting user.mime_type to explicitly state the mime type of a file, along with other "proposed" attributes that could possibly be respected by softwares (http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/). The last 2 links are about the usage of the command line tools that can be used on linux and BSD to change the attributes.
ACL
http://softpanorama.org/Access_control/acl.shtml
https://crypto.stanford.edu/cs155old/cs155-spring09/lectures/17-access-os-sec.pdf
https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/fs-acl.html
http://bencane.com/2012/05/27/acl-using-access-control-lists-on-linux/
https://www.linux.com/learn/how-manage-user-permissions-gui-linux

In continuation with the previous links, let's discuss another type of metadata used for security, the POSIX ACLs. This is related to "Securelevel" in issue 34, "And more on real security" in issue 45, and "Procfs, capabilities, and netlinks" where we discussed capabilities in issue 59. The eiciel gui can manage both ACLs and extended attributes.
Role based access aka rbac
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/systems/security/custom-roles-rbac-jsp-140865.html

Similarly, Oracle/Sun has their homebaked version of it they call rbac.
Controlling resource usage
http://coldattic.info/post/40/
http://blackbird.si/checking-limits-of-a-linux-process-ulimit/

In a world of ever growing bloatware how do we cope with it. One solution is to increase the machine capacity, the other is to limit what the software can have access to. I think from now on whatever bloat software I want to keep running on my machine I'll start with a wrapper shell script adding memory limit.
Checking all you did works fine
https://jaroslawr.com/articles/mastering-linux-performance-cpu-time-and-cpu-usage/

Monotoring CPU performance and usage isn't straight forward, this article tackles the topic.
Interactive Linux kernel map
http://www.makelinux.net/kernel_map/

The usual SVG showing a Linux system with zoomable and clickable text that sends you straight to the source. I've tackled the whole (or at least I've tried) storage one in the data storage on unix podcast (https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=2164), maybe we should do others about different layers.
Raw sockets on Linux
https://www.schoenitzer.de/blog/2018/Linux%20Raw%20Sockets.html

How to manipulate sockets so that you can receive them raw.
Building and mp3 decoder
http://blog.bjrn.se/2008/10/lets-build-mp3-decoder.html

Ever wanted to build your own mp3 mplayer, this is the start.

Random

Thinking in new ways
https://medium.com/the-mission/mental-models-how-to-train-your-brain-to-think-in-new-ways-ad538ca9052c

This is an article that sums up a lot of what I hold close to my heart, namely building a base, not limiting yourself to a single domain, being inter-disciplinary at a minimum level.
Facebook
All the clickbaity articles that have been spammed in the media the past few days

I don't think I have to say anything other then point you back to other issues in order, have fun going back in the archive: "SSI" 13 , "Social Networks" 20 , "It's leaking from everywhere" 26 , "Digital Identity" 27 , "More on digital identity" 36 , "In need of a website to understand a process that should be simple" 39 , "Well researched and timely articles" and "Differential privacy" 47 , "A continuation of last week "Random"" 48 , "Wear some colorful tight pants and continue on this crazy train with Ozzy!" 50 , "Propaganda" and "A timely article" 52 , "Are you tired of the articles of two weeks ago because there's more" 53 , "Create a category and people will get attached to it" 55 , "Will Geocities websites make a comeback?" 56 , "Compartmentalization" 62 , "A story on privacy" 65

Thoughts

Organisms organize. human organisms organize reality - William Perry

Archive

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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 issue | 2018-03-16 00:00:00 | 66

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

OpenBSD getting some work done in the VM field
https://www.openbsd.org/papers/asiabsdcon2018-vmm-slides.pdf

OpenBSD is getting its game up where it was lacking for years, its native hypervisor "vmm" is slowly getting better.
NetBSD sum up on meltdown and spectre patches
http://www.netbsd.org/gallery/presentations/mef/PDF/NetBSD-2018-AsiaBSDCon.pdf

Kind of boring to read through this presentation but it still has some important information.
A blogger's experience with Linux in the 90s
https://medium.com/@fun_cuddles/linux-of-the-90s-or-why-i-have-linux-desktop-ptsd-1f276a7887fb

Get ready folks for your "usual blog post"! This one makes you appreciate how far we've come.
Reducing/Shrinking the Linux kernel
https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/748198/6fa400001570fb39/

This article is more precisely about how to do all that for microcontrollers.
VDSO
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/19938324/what-are-vdso-and-vsyscall
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VDSO
http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7/vdso.7.html
https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/creating-vdso-colonels-other-chicken

Sort of related to the previous link. Those links should clear your mind about how system calls can be mapped and used in a process. The linuxjournal article should covert the implementation part, which is super fun.
Legalities
http://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-beats-internal-legal-threat/

A guy takes the laws in his own hands, for personal benefits or not. Check out what happens and make your own opinion, be it according to the law or according to moral.
Sync folklore
https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/TheLegendOfSync

One reason why learning about your system removes this sort of mysticism.
Some thoughts about init systems
https://nick.groenen.me/posts/2014/01/20/screen-is-not-a-process-control-system/
https://www.avidandrew.com/the-great-init-system-debate.html

I've been delaying the podcast about init system for a long time, maybe even avoiding it purposefully. The next episode is about the role of distros, it's not even related at all. In all cases, read up those old articles, maybe we'll be able to do something about init and daemon managers soon, we've done one on daemons already.
Make
http://gromnitsky.users.sourceforge.net/articles/notes-for-new-make-users/

Yet another great guide to make. Refer to "Makefiles, Ohoh those Makefiles" in issue 38 and others.
Extra content
https://nixwindows.wordpress.com/2018/03/13/ed1-is-turing-complete/
http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/articles/accidentally_turing_complete.html

The last podcast mentioned ed (https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=2191) and this article just came out. I couldn't resist sharing it.

Random

A subreddit for once
https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/

I don't usually link to reddit. This sub is great, I don't really like places that have one sided arguments and this is totally the opposite.
Production
https://jefffinley.org/our-obsession-with-productivity/
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/11/be-more-productive/415821/

Some thoughts about the productivity craze. Related to "The busy trap" in issue 32.
Pedantic and semantic
http://www.science20.com/science_autism_spectrum_disorders/pedantic_semantic_or_i_do_not_think_word_means_what_you_think_it_does
http://www.vistaseeker.com/2007/12/04/the-pedantic-programmer/

We all know someone like that, or at least we've met someone like that in our lifetime.
The Grand Analogy
https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25335

Related to "The extended mind" in 64. The current "invention of the century" will always be used as an analogy for how the mind works.
Corporate nightmare
https://foliovision.com/2018/03/why-not-buy-ibm

It's always a mess when big corps are trying to earn revenue and divide tasks.
A fascinating blog
https://www.atlasobscura.com/

The weird and obscure, all agglomerated in one place.

Thoughts

You need to be your own universe, to have your own dynamics, and only then there'll be a place for others to be part of. Relationships are stars in colliding universes.

Archive

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

Contribute

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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 issue | 2018-03-09 00:00:00 | 65

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

State of...
https://www.giantpockets.com/?p=5615
https://www.limelight.com/resources/white-paper/state-of-online-video-2017/

The state of handheld Linux devices and the state of online video. Both are interesting articles.
More on Debian ranting
https://tingping.github.io/2018/03/02/when-distros-get-it-wrong.html

Remember the past week series of nag about Debian, issue 64 "Nagging about Debian", it seems like there's a continuity there. The message has gone around and now people feel entitled to give their opinions. Read up, it's an interesting debate, is it ok to bring back to life old software projects. Is it more ok then to add new projects to the repo?
Bash completion
https://iridakos.com/tutorials/2018/03/01/bash-programmable-completion-tutorial.html

zsh has a reputation for its completion system, but we shouldn't forget bash has something similar and that it's the default on many systems.
XFS
https://lwn.net/Articles/747633/

You might have heard of XFS once as the fs for "big files", you might have read a bunch of articles in the past weeks about filesystems in general and how data is layed out. This is time to mix those together and see what's up these days with XFS in the Linux realm. There's a nice talk about what subvolumes actually mean.
POSIX
https://sortix.org
https://sortix.org/man/#system
https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.828/2014/xv6.html

It's nice to explore different OS that are POSIX compliant. sortix has a lot of interesting stuffs going on, apart from all the underlying base, it has its own editor, package manager and much more. Download it and try it out.
Wihtout libc
http://weeb.ddns.net/0/programming/c_without_standard_library_linux.txt
https://github.com/ericherman/eh-no-libc

On the topic of starting from scratch, very similar to "Tiny ELF" in issue 47 and "The world most prominent virus has erased all the source code" in issue 52, we're going to write executables without libc.
Virtuallyfun, once more
https://virtuallyfun.com/2018/03/01/fread-and-fwrite-demystified-stdio-on-unix-v7/

This is probably the blog I've shared the most so far but it's worth it. Related to the previous two posts, we again ask about the common root, this time we're taking a look at fread and fwrite.
Finally a new podcast
https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=2191

After a hiatus of 4 months here comes a new episode of the podcast. In this episode we're tackling scripts, glue code, the original Unix tools, and their history. We're going to see why it matters nowadays. Be sure to also check the comments on the thread, as picky as they might seem they still bring some new info to the topic.
I haven't covered cmake
https://github.com/pyk/cmake-tutorial

In the last section of the podcast I didn't cover any build tool, which there are way too many. I thought of mentioning cmake in this issue as I'm not familiar with it and this tutorial is good but cmake itself is kinda complex after all.
Xlib architecture and XCB
https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/usenix04/tech/freenix/full_papers/sharp/sharp_html/index.html

There aren't many documents about Xlib internals, this one is a must read for anyone wanting to understand it.

Random

The user agent war
https://webaim.org/blog/user-agent-string-history/

If you've ever wondered why there is a "Mozilla" in every single user agent out there then this is your answer. It's fun to think about how the technology has to squish itself to fit the current expectation of the users and not the other way around, even when sometimes it seems like the opposite.
Digital and technological literacy
http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-computers/

We had quite the discussion about this rant thread during the week so I thought of sharing it so that you can have the same discussion (once more) with your peers.
A story on privacy
https://medium.com/the-ferenstein-wire/the-birth-and-death-of-privacy-3-000-years-of-history-in-50-images-614c26059e

A continuation on issue 63 "Privacy, confidentiality, and anonymity". This article emphasize how the perception of privacy evolved through time.

Thoughts

"Our riches of information are in some deep and perverse sense a terrible burden to us. We have to artificially invent ways to forget..." - Bruce Sterling

https://w2.eff.org/Misc/Publications/Bruce_Sterling/comp_game_designers.article

Archive

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

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

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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Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2018-03-02 00:00:00 | 64

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Volume management, RAID, and FS
https://www.bsdnow.tv/tutorials/zfs
http://www.unixarena.com/2013/07/solaris-zfs-free-tutorialtraining.html
http://www.enterprisestorageforum.com/technology/features/article.php/11192_2026611_2

I haven't shared enough about ZFS in this newsletter. It's a great volume manager and fs, you gotta give it a try.
Kernel module
https://saurvs.github.io/post/writing-netbsd-kern-mod/

In continuation with issue 62 "DKMS", let's explore how to write kernel modules on NetBSD.
Tun/Tap
http://backreference.org/2010/03/26/tuntap-interface-tutorial/

What's the difference between tun and tap, what usage do they have, how to create them?
Writing a terminal emulator
https://www.uninformativ.de/blog/postings/2018-02-24/0/POSTING-en.html
https://github.com/vain/eduterm

Vain takes us on a journey to explore how to build a terminal emulator from scratch. Vain's approach at explaining is explorative, which brings it to life. As we all know this topic doesn't have many great articles and we're in need of more similar to this one. You can also check the nixers podcast about Terminals https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=2108 to refresh your mind about line discipline, escape sequences, and others.
A colorful man
https://russellparker.me/2018/02/23/adding-colors-to-man/

I like colors but I can't help but think of this https://www.gilesorr.com/vim/slides/vimSyntaxOn.jpg, it must be the meme invasion that is influencing me. Regardless, we're reminded of something related to the previous article, termcap and terminfo and how it affects other programs such as less. It was nice to learn about lesskey.
Window managers
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~bam/papers/WindowUITaxonomy.pdf
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/7b93/785d1d84b06d36badb59a0c6b779d76743c5.pdf

The ins and outs of window managers. Those are quite old papers, 1988 and 2003 respectfully, and shamelessly we didn't innovate that much since then. The papers also debunk a lot of misconceptions, some discussions we already had on the forums too: https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=2135 https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=2048.
Let us never speak of it again
http://boston.conman.org/2018/02/28.2
https://lobste.rs/s/ybw6tg/potential_way_have_spaces_filenames_not

What is a special character, what is not, how did we decide that? Why does it break everything. This is somewhat related to issue 59 "Procfs, capabilities, and netlinks".
Using bash not only for small scripts
https://oscarforner.com/2018/02/24/Software_development_using_Bash

The article goes over how to do good software engineering using the dreadful shell scripting languages. There's a lot to learn from this, open your eyes.
A summary
http://mosermichael.github.io/cstuff/all/blog/2015/12/11/wepskn.html

I found this amazing person who made a summary of two articles I've shared, the paper of Drepper in issue 58 "About memory" and Eric Raymond in issue 61 "On a roll with C". So if you've felt like you missed content from the previous two then here's your chance to get it back. Also, pay attention to the conclusion, some assumptions were wrong.
Everything you need to know about crypto in 1h http://www.bsdcan.org/2010/schedule/attachments/135_crypto1hr.pdf

Extravagant title and it holds it. This is a good overview of many crypto concepts.

Random

Recall this?
http://rekall.me/archive

An inspo wall.
Punching up
https://www.crummy.com/2013/11/27/0

Maybe a rule that we should follow on the internet. I'm not a fan of bots but this sounds legit.
The extended mind
http://cognitivemedium.com/tat/index.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Extended_Mind

I wanted to include this in the Unix section but I wasn't sure it fitted properly. On the topic of HCI, what makes an interface so good, are we too attached to technology, is it wrong. Similar topics have also been tackled on the forums: https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=1637, https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=2051.
Reading more
https://hackernoon.com/how-the-godfather-of-cyberpunk-would-write-software-aaaa0f2155c7

This is an article for both writers and software developers.

Thoughts

Many of us always think interesting things in their minds, but no one other than themselves get to hear them because we don’t say those things out loud, we don’t communicate them or sometimes can’t find the exact words to describe them.

The only places in the world where this is possible might be the internet.

A black box for anonymized speech which unfortunately is misused.

I'm going to link the archived newsletter from now on because it seems like not everyone sees them. I'm also going to use different email titles for every issues, including the issue number in it, which is something I should've done a long time ago. Thanks for all the feedbacks, we now have 197 subscribers.

Archive

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

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
Share your point of view about the newsletter.
Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2018-02-23 00:00:00 | 63

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Nagging about Debian
http://changelog.complete.org/archives/9317-has-linux-lost-its-way-comments-prompt-a-debian-developer-to-revisit-freebsd-after-20-years
https://blog.liw.fi/posts/2018/02/17/what_is_debian_all_about_really_or_friction_packaging_complex_applications/
http://joeyh.name/blog/entry/futures_of_distributions/
https://blog.packagecloud.io/eng/2018/02/21/attacks-against-secure-apt-repositories/

This week there's a surge (resurge) of "typical blog posts", this time the "internet mind" has chosen Debian. Get your popcorn ready because this is gonna be fun. Would you call it the package managers war? Where do you stand on this, to centralize package management or not, discuss on the forums https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=1883 and https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=2049 are relevant. The last post is the nail in the coffin, remember entry 60 "APT and https", well this guy is putting it down so badly it hurts.
Vertical white space
http://oceanpark.com/papers/vertical_white_space.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20120223181226/http://oceanpark.com/papers/vertical_white_space.html

I'm failing at this so badly, my life is shattering before my eyes. These days we have more control over all the parameters mentioned, no need to insert invisible images, so no excuses anymore. (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/white-space https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/line-height) However, this isn't as straight forward as it seems to do it properly using common markdown implementations.
More on typography
https://www.freedesktop.org/software/fontconfig/fontconfig-user.html#AEN36
https://keithp.com/~keithp/talks/xtc2001/paper/xft.html#fig-xft-name
https://www.freedesktop.org/software/fontconfig/fontconfig-devel/fcpatternformat.html
https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=2065
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=627088
https://github.com/jamesni/fonts-tweak-tool/

This is a fascinating topic that was shared multiple times, the links are not new, check issue 34 "Xero's Weekly Ricing Tips". However, I still felt like sharing them again. I've dig into fontconfig from a developer point of view last weekend and noticed that I was wrong about the following assumption: I thought it was the Xft library that had the job of parsing the string representing how to match a font but it's not, it's a feature of fontconfig, and this makes sense, and a lot of articles online are full of misinformation about this. Xft sits in the middle, as the glue code only. This reminded me, once again, that: The font stack isn't that well understood. That we're still missing tools to manipulate fontconfig, though some exists such as fontik and fonts-tweak-tool, both from fedora. That the fontconfig xml language isn't well understood either. That the persons that are heavily involved in the projects are now Google employees and might be busy, Raph Levien and Behdad Esfahbob for example. And finally that maybe we can start to bring awareness to this topic if only we push out more demystifying posts in the wilderness for others to read.
Viruses on Unix?
http://www.computerweekly.com/feature/White-Paper-Viruses-in-a-Unix-world

An "old" white paper about the advent of viruses in the Unix world, something we got accustomed to hear with the recent iot hacks and Ddos botnets.
BSD hacking and security
http://www.mit.edu/~xela/simsong_bsd_story.html
https://www.soldierx.com/news/libhijack-PoCGTFO-0x17
https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-8968-are_all_bsds_created_equally

From old to new, how the average blogger realized that BSDs are, like all, not-immune to security flaws. As was said in the previous article: "The promotion of the concept of magical immunity to computer viral attacks surfaces on a regular basis. This concept, while desirable, is misleading and dangerous since it tends to mask a real threat." Related to issue 60 "Cruncy click baity" (yes it's typo), the CCC presentation is what was discussed, it's a great presentation. The soldierx paper technical details are a bit beyond me but I could grasp the gist of the privilege escalation technique.
Emails
https://github.com/vedetta-com/caesonia
https://jamey.thesharps.us/2018/02/16/how-not-to-replace-email/

Setting up a mail server from scratch in 2018 is difficult, we need automation, like with iredmail and the likes. Does this mean emails are dead, probably not. The second article is about Wave a project that was meant to be a "revolutionary communication protocol". It didn't catch on and the author, which is also the creator of XCB, meditates on why.
Building a Wayland compositor from scratch
http://sircmpwn.github.io/2018/02/17/Writing-a-Wayland-compositor-1.html
http://sircmpwn.github.io/2017/06/10/Introduction-to-Wayland.html

The lead dev of Sway starts a series of articles about how to use the new lib wlroots to allow building compositor pieces more easily, so it's not really from scratch after all. However, even though you have a library get ready to be faced with a totally new world and learning curve (the author doesn't do that good of a job at explaining and throws specific words around assuming they are obvious).
Not so wget
http://libdill.org/tutorial-sockets.html

This isn't a copy of wget, not even close, it's an example on how to use libdill, a new C concurrent library for concurrency (go-like). The low-level stacking of protocols was nice to read, it couples well with tls wrapping.
Dtrace for Linux
https://gnu.wildebeest.org/blog/mjw/2018/02/14/dtrace-for-linux-oracle-does-the-right-thing/
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/solaris/dtrace-tutorial-142317.html

Dtrace is getting ported to Linux, this mean we'll get some new very powerful debugging and tracing tool to play with from now on other than perf.
Console codes
https://www.systutorials.com/docs/linux/man/4-console_codes/

I didn't know this was a man page, man 4 console_codes. It would certainly have been useful during the research about terminals. Check it out and test/refresh your knowledge of what you've learned.

Random

A discussion we most probably all once had
https://dev.to/ben/its-perfectly-fine-to-only-code-at-work-dont-let-anyone-tell-you-otherwise--25i3
https://lobste.rs/s/hebw9j/it_s_perfectly_fine_only_code_at_work_don_t

What is passion? This is a big question, should it be limited to work hours, 9 to 5? Should we be biased against the ones that don't work extra hours? Can we be passionate about something and not put the extra efforts into it, not choosing it as a priority? What's the effect of competition in today's world, is it a requirement to work more?
Privacy, confidentiality, and anonymity
https://breakthroughanalysis.com/2017/04/14/privacy-vs-confidentiality-vs-anonymity-who-knows/
https://www.soldierx.com/tutorials/Cyber-Ninjitsu-Art-Invisibility-Online
https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/2013/10/how-does-privacy-differ-from-anonymity-and-why-are-both-important/

For the average person those terms might not look like they have a different meaning but they do and this is quite important to put forward what exactly we're talking about. Related to issue 47 "Differential privacy" and all the digital identity related ones.
Locus of control
https://openpsychometrics.org/tests/SOC-3/

Free will and determinism, let's add "locus of control" in the mix. Take the test and see how much you score. How much do you think you are responsible for your own actions, who's to blame?
Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
http://bigthink.com/the-proverbial-skeptic/those-who-do-not-learn-history-doomed-to-repeat-it-really

Fancy, memorable quote, what lies behind it? Here's an article to start some discussion.

Thoughts

"Rationality worship is central to many, perhaps most, of the twistednesses of our culture."

This is a controversial quote but one that couldn't be more timely. Rationalizing our behaviors has become the everyday toy of many.

PS: There are some new changes on the forums, let us know what you think of them.

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
Share your point of view about the newsletter.
Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2018-02-16 00:00:00 | 62

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Predicting unix commands
http://papersdb.cs.ualberta.ca/~papersdb/uploaded_files/712/paper_korvemaker00predicting.pdf

HCI applied to the command line. We already have backward search, now think about a kind of way the shell could help you write the next command, not only complete it.
Performance tunning hasn't changed much
http://oceanpark.com/papers/gem01.html

Some excellent and valuable tips that passed the test of time. sar seems like the universal Unix logging tool.
Blocking processes
https://linux.die.net/lkmpg/x1052.html

I can't sum it up better than: If you're a human being and you're bothered by a human being, the only thing you can say is: "Not right now, I'm busy. Go away!"
DKMS
https://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/BuildingKernelModules#head-d313bd351f90d4f25a2143b7bbcff73f927731f0
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6896
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_Kernel_Module_Support

Starting on a series of articles related to kernel modules on Linux. Those first ones should cover how to add, build, install, uninstall, and remove the modules.
VFS in more details
http://www.linux.it/~rubini/docs/vfs/vfs.html

Technical implementation details on how to write a VFS compliant FS on Linux.
So much details in history...
http://multicians.org/unix.html

...That it doesn't really matter anymore. There is a group of persons that are fanatics about that sort of things, not missing any tiny bit of info. I personally think that it's interesting but that the importance is not in those overly narrow details.
Fast regex
https://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp1.html

Regular expressions are one of the trademark of Unix history, in this article there's a discussion on the theory of it: automatons, which you might remember if you've ever taken a CS class.
Unix as an IDE
http://sasamat.xen.prgmr.com/michaelochurch/wp/index.php/2013/01/09/ide-culture-vs-unix-philosophy/
https://mkaz.tech/geek/unix-is-my-ide/
https://sanctum.geek.nz/arabesque/series/unix-as-ide/

An idiom that is embraced by many of us, put together by the novel concept of software as tools that was brought by Unix and more precisely pipelines. I don't agree with most of the opinions expressed in some of those articles nevertheless they're worth a read.
Linux as a firmware
https://www.linuxboot.org/
https://trmm.net/NERF

Linux everywhere! Sounds good to some and bad to others. This still looks like a work in progress and not very accessible to anyone.
1995 and 1998 NT vs Unix in the IT world
http://www.itprotoday.com/management-mobility/unix-perspective
http://www.itprotoday.com/management-mobility/nt-vsunix-one-substantially-better

Those are timely articles, The Open Group was formed (by merging two other groups, OSF and X/Open) in 1996 and published the Single UNIX Specification: The end of the UNIX wars. Get ready for that second article because it's full of topics that were covered by this newsletter.

Random

Patience is a virtue
https://www.gilroygardens.org/play/circus-trees
https://www.treehugger.com/sustainable-product-design/living-bridges-in-india-have-grown-for-500-years-pics.html
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/vine-bridges-japan

At different scales of time we can still appreciate and live in symbiosis with trees.
Compartmentalization
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compartmentalization_(psychology)

Hello there people that like to read stuffs related to psychology (and those who don't). The topic of compartmentalization has been one of my "Baader-Meinhof" aka frequency illusion for some time now... Well, it's more of a temporary kind of focus on a certain topic and what relates to it, it's deliberate and not really and illusion (I've seen the idea repeated in multiple books and articles I've read). Compartmentalization is the fabric of everyone of us, there are extreme cases like when those separated parts are contradictory but even so our personality lies within the connections of the compartment (which might explain why when there opposites it leads to personality disorders). This has been proven by many psychological experiments. Without them we do not exist, boundaries with links between them are what define an individual as a self. We can't be everything at once, we can't fulfil all our roles in life at once, we can't be all of our personality traits at once. The father cannot be at the same time the lover cannot be at the same time the worker cannot be at the same time the friend, etc.. And those have to stay within their confined boxes. Some social platforms nowadays try to destroy those and put everything in the same box. This turns an individual into a single blob, flattening their existence, labelling, simplifying, breaking down, and leading to the destruction of the self. Take this as food for thought for the week (and let me know if going on a tangent like that in the newsletter is too much).

Thoughts

We might be fighting with someone, and in the midst of the fight the phone rings. After some heated argument as to who will pick it up, we finally answer the phone with a voice and attitude that are in total contrast with what we were just portraying of ourselves in the argument.

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
Share your point of view about the newsletter.
Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2018-02-09 00:00:00 | 61

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Copyrights
http://trillian.mit.edu/~jc/humor/ATT_Copyright_true.html

A ridiculous copyright claim from AT&T on an empty program.
Fun in the console
https://cmcenroe.me/2018/01/30/fbclock.html
https://cmcenroe.me/2017/05/05/linux-console.html
https://github.com/tombh/texttop

Some ideas that you might want to use during the TTY week we usually do in summer. The tip that surprised me was that compose keys are supported in the console!
On a roll with C
https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/?p=9705
http://www.catb.org/esr/structure-packing/
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4306186/structure-padding-and-packing#4306269

We discussed efficiency and optimization (pogo) in earlier issues, this time let's put an emphasis on C structures. This is something that is written in arguable depth in the paper of Drepper in issue 58 "About memory" but that I felt needed more articles and discussion (because it's a super long paper packed with info).
A tool to go along with the previous docs
https://github.com/jmesmon/pahole
https://lwn.net/Articles/335942/

I've had difficulties using pahole (which is also mentioned in Eric Raymond previous article but that he also hasn't tried himself either) so if anyone can figure it out properly and write a tutorial it would make the world a better place.
What to use other than statically linked executables
https://github.com/Intoli/exodus

Well, it actually rebuilds a statically linked executable, which is really nifty in my opinion. Let's quote: "Exodus works around these issues by compiling a small statically linked launcher binary that invokes the relocated linker directly with any hardcoded RPATH library paths overridden. The relocated binary will run with the exact same linker and libraries that it ran with on its origin machine." If you have no clue what that means you might want to read issue 54 "LD.SO".
Bring back to life using NetBSD
https://www.geeklan.co.uk/files/fosdem2018-retro/#1

NetBSD is supported on a lot of platforms that are marked as deprecated for other OSs, this presentation quickly goes over some of the reasons why and examples of this.
Writing filesystem drivers for Linux
https://www.uninformativ.de/blog/postings/2017-09-09/0/POSTING-en.html

There's a lot to learn about filesystems, what better way to do it than to have fun writing the interface to one. It's weird that I discovered this post after having done the research for the podcast about data storage on Unix, it could've been useful.
This week there are videos
http://www.ixbrian.com/blog/?p=192

Quick tutorials mostly about systemd real world sysadmin usages.
BSD from scratch, source to OS (NetBSD)
https://www.geeklan.co.uk/files/fosdem2018-bsd/#1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JctBMLQ_IdA

Flashy title, slow presenter (watch at least at 1.25x). To be fair the presentation is about teaching how to build and present BSD systems from scratch on boards (Raspberry Pi, BeagleBoard), though it goes a lot off topic with resources and OS ideas. Aka, "get a copy of the source, compile, build the OS, boot it on the ARM board, and work through some exercises".
OpenBSD as a VPN box
https://undeadly.org/features/2018/02/eurobsdcon2017-branch-vpn.pdf

OpenBSD has a good reputation as a platform that is to be put on the fighting lines of the network peripherals. The presentation goes over setting up a VPN solution using OpenBSD. Warning alert for the high amount of networking jargon (way more than I could grasp).

Random

Remember digital identity and self-sovereign identity?
https://ruben.verborgh.org/blog/2017/12/20/paradigm-shifts-for-the-decentralized-web/

Issue 44 "The new Face ID is already a meme", issue 36 "More on digital identity", issue 27 "Digital Identity", issue 9 "Identity", we've been discussing this topic over and over again and I hope this becomes more and more of a hot topic in the coming years.
Beauty is found in the detail
http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-amount-of-detail

An article about how the more we stop and look the more we can go deep down in details, deep down in thoughts, and maybe get in touch with reality.
Mistakes and happenstance
http://www.historytoday.com/alexander-lee/slips-tongue

The power of Chinese whispers and the repercussion over time.
Compiler madness
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~tom7/abc/
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~tom7/abc/paper.pdf

Fun DOS self-compilable chiptune player and research paper.

Thoughts

Have you ever noticed that when somebody says "That’s a good question?" it’s usually because they don’t yet have an answer?

That quote couldn't be more wrong.
Every single time I hear someone say "That's a good question" and remember the saying I pay extra attention to the discussion and realize that it's the total opposite.

What do you think?

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
Share your point of view about the newsletter.
Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2018-02-02 00:00:00 | 60

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

ID3 tags
https://phoxis.org/2010/05/08/what-are-id3-tags-all-about/
https://www.linux.com/news/manage-your-music-id3-tag-editors

A comprehensible explanation of what the meta tags on mp3 are, the ID3. Plus an article about their management under Linux (but it's more about using free software).
APT and https
https://whydoesaptnotusehttps.com/

This is something I had no idea about but that makes total sense. It's funny how nowadays "app stores" are learning a lot from package managers that have been there for years.
An hymn to tmux
https://medium.com/actualize-network/a-minimalist-guide-to-tmux-13675fb160fa
https://www.gnu.org/software/screen/manual/html_node/Default-Key-Bindings.html

Yet another starter guide to tmux, plus some screen.
Cruncy click baity
https://www.csoonline.com/article/3250653/open-source-tools/is-the-bsd-os-dying-some-security-researchers-think-so.html

Despite the title this article poses a question worth asking. Are BSDs truly more secure? Also, is security the only factor?
Lots of C, or more precisely compiler, preprocessor, and linker features
https://mort.coffee/home/obscure-c-features/
https://dom.as/2009/07/27/profile-guided-optimization-with-gcc/
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Developer_guide/Build_Instructions/Building_with_Profile-Guided_Optimization
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/vcblog/2008/11/12/pogo/

There are many links in there, some about tricks to use the preprocessor, some about optimization using the linker.
Even more C
https://davmac.wordpress.com/2018/01/28/understanding-the-c-c-memory-model/
http://c-faq.com/misc/xor.dmr.html

This time about some memory access concepts and locks (Which is also covered in the book/paper by Drepper that I've mentioned the past weeks), and about why there's no xor condition (which I found a pretty weird question to ask in the first place).
How the Linux kernel uses some C tricks to do initcall
http://www.compsoc.man.ac.uk/~moz/kernelnewbies/documents/initcall/kernel.html
http://www.compsoc.man.ac.uk/~moz/kernelnewbies/documents/initcall/ex_simple.html

The second link relates to constructor and destructor in C of last week, which is useful here. You're probably overdosing on C articles for now.
Fixing time on V7
https://virtuallyfun.com/2018/01/28/date-and-time-on-unix-v7/

We've already shared many articles from virtuallyfun, the name of the blog certainly stayed true to itself in all of them. I hope you're enjoying them as much as I am. Kudos for the great experimentations the author is doing. The article specifically deals with something we've discussed in the podcast about "bits and words".
Logos and artworks
https://sylviaritter.deviantart.com/gallery/59957223/Ubuntu-Animals
https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=1920

Artistic pieces of the Ubuntu logos.
Car dashboard running Linux
https://opensource.com/article/18/1/my-delorean-runs-perl

I'm probably not the only one that kept thinking throughout the article about the security implications, what about the crashes and laws regarding those.

Random

Owning your own DNS node
https://zwischenzugs.com/2018/01/26/how-and-why-i-run-my-own-dns-servers/
https://dns.he.net/

I've recently set adsuck on my machine, it's not really a full dns server but it does the job of filtering ads and unwanted traffic. What are other reasons for running your own DNS?
Websites ideas
https://thelocalyarn.com/excursus/secretary/posts/web-books.html
https://alternativebit.fr/posts/lightweight-blog/

The first article is about a direct application of nihilism into websites (sarcasm). Second one is about extremism in blog size. The common thread going through those articles: the love of blogging and sharing information.
Futuristic view of HCI
https://css-tricks.com/tools-thinking-tools-systems/

New ideas about how to design interfaces.
Typical online rant
https://www.rdegges.com/2018/please-stop-using-local-storage/

I wonder why those blog posts are so popular, a new technology comes out and someone nags about others taking advantage of it.
Hotel music
https://gkbrk.com/2016/05/hotel-music/

Beautiful reverse engineering of an unknown UDP packet.

Thoughts

"There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time." - Those don't necessarily happen in this order.

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nixers newsletter issue | 2018-01-26 00:00:00 | 59

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Code alignment (again)
https://dendibakh.github.io/blog/2018/01/18/Code_alignment_issues

Remember the post of last week (issue 58) "About memory", you certainly didn't finish reading it (I didn't either, there are 30 pages left) so keep this blog post queued for when you reach a point where you've grasped how alignment affects code efficiency (as crazy as this sounds).
Compiler features
https://phoxis.org/2011/04/27/c-language-constructors-and-destructors-with-gcc/
http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2006/n1966.html

More interesting compiler options that you may want to know about. There are ton of small features in C compilers for optimization to twiddle.
strace vs dtrace vs strace
https://sysdig.com/blog/sysdig-vs-dtrace-vs-strace-a-technical-discussion/

We've discussed sysdig in issue 18, let's talk about it again and about other process tracing programs. The tool itself is open source and the company seems to be making money from the web interfaces that it constructed around it, sort of added value benefits. There's also csysdig a very cool open source curses interface for it which resembles htop.
Packing bytes natively what does that mean
https://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2012/04/byte-order-fallacy.html

This article destroys misconception about byte ordering and how to do it properly.
grep your way to freedom
https://anniecherkaev.com/grep-your-way-to-freedom

In 2013 the Oxford dictionary added grep as a noun and a verb: https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/us/grep. In this article you learn about the magic of hardcoded values and adventures to dig them out of the ground.
Procfs, capabilities, and netlinks
https://lobste.rs/s/fjyy12/proc_pid_stat_is_broken
https://linux.die.net/man/7/capabilities
https://lwn.net/Kernel/Index/#Capabilities
https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/accounting/taskstats.txt
https://lwn.net/Articles/79185/
https://lwn.net/Articles/632520/

There was a fruitful discussion on https://lobste.rs last week about procfs formatting. It made me think of netlink and other interfaces to get the same information. Then I've started testing with taskstats which forced me to set capabilities on a copy of a python interpreter so that I can try out a script using the gnlpy library without making my system insecure.
vi modal way changed the UX world
http://blog.ngedit.com/2005/06/03/the-vi-input-model/

A story some of us might have lived first hand. Highly keyboard oriented editor in general give that liberty, not only vim.
Containers vs OS
https://dave.cheney.net/2018/01/16/containers-versus-operating-systems

Insightful discussion about the way that processes should be managed if containerized (or not?). A bit of a reminder of the podcast about processes intro sections. I love this kind of article, a monologue based on questions after questions, expanding into deeper topics.
Unix influence in history
http://www.columbia.edu/~rh120/ch001j.c11

A tool for human view of the history of unix. "The coupling between such a utility and the community it serves, is so strong that the community is actually a part of the system itself." The article is quite long but it's worth the read.
I've always wondered about those
https://github.com/leandromoreira/ffmpeg-libav-tutorial

Encoding, codecs, audio, video, container, etc.. This finally demystifies it a bit for me!

Random

Good search engine and quick documentation
http://symbolhound.com/
http://www.cheat-sheets.org/

If you're a software developer then those resources are super helpful.
Using the computer hardware to send radio waves
https://github.com/fulldecent/system-bus-radio

I wish I could test this but I didn't find a device that has AM bands.
Beware of rogue networks
https://thejh.net/written-stuff/want-to-use-my-wifi?

This is from the guy that warns about not copy pasting command from a webpage, and that also worked on the recent Intel CPU bug.

Thoughts

"It is really true what philosophy tells us, that life must be understood backwards. But with this, one forgets the second proposition, that it must be lived forwards. A proposition which, the more it is subjected to careful thought, the more it ends up concluding precisely that life at any given moment cannot really ever be fully understood; exactly because there is no single moment where time stops completely in order for me to take position [to do this]: going backwards." - Søren Kierkegaard, in his journals (1843)

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nixers newsletter issue | 2018-01-19 00:00:00 | 58

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Time shattering environment
https://idea.popcount.org/2013-07-19-how-to-sleep-a-million-years/

This is an ingenious idea and the sorting proof of concept blew my mind.
Package management
http://sircmpwn.github.io/2018/01/10/Learn-your-package-manager.html

A case against not mixing multiple package managers but to use the one of the distro. I'm in the favor of using a package from the repo instead of one from a pkg manager for a specific language.
Network and servers
http://rasp.sourceforge.net/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inetd
http://www.acme.com/software/micro_inetd/

Low bandwith and want to download something, let it be stopped by a proxy, saving the links to the usb, download on a computer with fast internet, put back on the first machine, and proxied again and downloaded from the usb. The other links are about inetd, which I just learned about. Proxying the connection and piping it to stdin to a program it will spawn on the fly to handle it.
dc online
http://pr0.uk/linux/dc/calculator/2017/12/07/dc-calculator-online-and-via-telnet.html

Ever wanted to have it online, now you do. This is an example of how inetd can be used.
Doing it in V7
https://virtuallyfun.com/2018/01/10/life-in-unix-v7-an-attempt-at-a-simple-task/
https://virtuallyfun.com/2018/01/17/teaching_an_almost_40-year_old_unix_about_backspace/
https://github.com/DoctorWkt/Apout
http://www.nordier.com/v7x86/

Simulating PDP-11 Unix a.out binaries and reliving Unix V7. Those are some really cool tasks to put things of today's world into perspective. Remember when we discussed line discipline in the podcast about Terminals?
Trying more old stuffs
https://sixcolors.com/post/2018/01/reading-disks-from-1988-in-2018/

Have you ever put back to life some old machine or data storage so that you can read your old work?
A view on digital minimalism
http://blog.zdsmith.com/posts/digital-minimalism-for-the-working-hacker.html

I like differing ideas about all subjects but be sure to take them with a grain of salt. Especially when the author seems a bit too enamored with being similar to and justifying his idols. Somewhat related to "Another old one that fires up arguments in the efficiency world" of issue 55. The usage of the terms "places" vs "tools" fits properly in my opinion.
Gdb, one of a kind
http://www.codersnotes.com/notes/something-rotten-in-the-core/

Lasagna softwares can be tricky when its base is an ed-like ui. This is related to the above, gdb being a "place" and not a "tool". Remember the GUI for gdb in "A gui for gdb" of issue 23, this is criticized here too.
About memory
https://people.freebsd.org/~lstewart/articles/cpumemory.pdf

I've been reading this book for about 2 weeks now and I'm halfway through. It is by Ulrich Drepper which is the infamous lead developer of glibc. There's a lot of low level discussion so beware (from how the cpu cache works, to how the alignment affects performance, to how code structure affects it, prefetching, etc..)
New blog to follow
https://begriffs.com/posts/2015-04-20-going-write-only.html
https://begriffs.com/posts/2017-04-13-longterm-computing-reading.html
https://begriffs.com/posts/2017-05-17-openbsd-workstation-guide.html

In the recent days it seemed like I was seeing his blog posts almost everywhere. They sure are quality posts.
VFS, proc and root filesystems
https://harrys.fyi/2015/03/31/vfs-proc-and-root-filesystems/

Another article about the basics of VFS, reminding me that even if you do a research about a topic "Data storage on Unix" you might still forget it after a while.

Random

You think it's a fad, you're not the only one
https://github.com/hwayne/awesome-cold-showers

Here's a list of tech that are trendy.
Review on what happened
https://cyber.wtf/2018/01/05/behind-the-scene-of-a-bug-collision/

The story behind one of the researcher that worked the spectre and meltdown papers.
The cool web is fading away from Google
https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2018/01/15/Google-is-losing-its-memory
https://www.google.com/patents/US9407661

I've noticed it first hand, it's getting harder and harder to get specific results from Google and the GoogleFu is getting removed from it.

Thoughts

The three golden rules to ensure computer security are: do not own a computer; do not power it on; and do not use it. - Robert Morris

Note: There used to be a bug related to gmail where links weren't clickable. This has been fixed with the help of mort.

Contribute

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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 issue | 2018-01-12 00:00:00 | 57

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Virtual memory, fork, and processes
http://sircmpwn.github.io/2018/01/02/The-case-against-fork.html
https://serverfault.com/questions/606185/how-does-vm-overcommit-memory-work#606193

Related to issue 25 "malloc never fails on Linux... or does it?" and the fork() part of the podcast called "Processes on Unix". After reading those you can continue with the new articles and learn about cloning and spawning paradigms like rfork, clone and spawn.
More on VM
http://go2linux.garron.me/vmstat-cpu-memory-monitor-linux-fix-low-mem/

A little article about tracking virtual memory on Linux.
On a roll with Make
https://github.com/qznc/annoying-build-systems

In the spirit of the last few weeks, let's continue on this series on articles about automating build. This is an ongoing public domain list of regrouping all annoying build systems (all of them basically) and why they are annoying.
Magnificent resource
https://linuxjourney.com/

I've seen that website a while ago but it has grown so much since then. It has become a beautiful resource that regroups a lot of the basic knowledge around Unix/Linux. I would definitely recommend it for anyone starting on their "journey".
Hardcoded strings horror
https://www.sigbus.info/software-compatibility-and-our-own-user-agent-problem.html

Yet another case of "the more I learn, the less I'm surprised by the stupidity". The author says it best: "This sad situation is simultaneously a bit funny to me."
Running the latest Linux on 486
http://yeokhengmeng.com/2018/01/make-the-486-great-again/
https://github.com/yeokm1/gentoo-on-486/

There was a lot of efforts going into putting this together. It takes 11min to boot even with a minimized kernel but it still runs.
Bash and shells
https://zwischenzugs.com/2018/01/06/ten-things-i-wish-id-known-about-bash/
https://blog.flowblok.id.au/2013-02/shell-startup-scripts.html
https://freebsdfrau.gitbooks.io/serious-shell-programming/

I don't usually click on articles that have numbers in their titles (the nasty "listicles") but this one was more or less good with some obvious content to many readers (though promoting the sale of a book - This was to be foreseen!). This is put in contrast with an unfinished mini book about shell portability, see issues 13 "Linters" with shellcheck, 49 with "josuah's shell tricks", 17 with "Expansion & Globs" for the Bash Beginners Guide. Actually there are so many issues discussing shell tricks and compatibility, I can't mention them all.
Plain text
https://blog.afoolishmanifesto.com/posts/a-love-letter-to-plain-text/
http://engineering.cerner.com/blog/the-plain-text-is-a-lie/
https://github.com/LuminosoInsight/python-ftfy

I'm not really sure how "plain text" has anything to do with the first post... But the author seems to imply what he's doing is plain text manipulation (inside a memory DB?). The other article is a case against plain text or a circular argument against encodings. The last project tries to fix unicode, it's impressive to see.
Egg hunting, what's that?
https://pentesterslife.blog/2017/11/24/x64-egg-hunting-in-linux-systems/

Thie pentester does a great job at explaining this concept.
Deduplication
https://www.borgbackup.org/
https://www.dragonflydigest.com/2017/08/21/20127.html

A backup that uses deduplication just like Hammer, this is truly fascinating. I don't know about many projects that uses this, maybe it would be nice to hear about them.

Random

How to read math
http://www.people.vcu.edu/~dcranston/490/handouts/math-read.html

A tutorial in the form of a paper for novice (like me) who'd like to learn how to read mathematic scientific paper amongst other mathematical documents.
I'm seeing it everywhere now
https://science.howstuffworks.com/life/inside-the-mind/human-brain/baader-meinhof-phenomenon.htm

It has a name, this phenomena that happens every time we open our eyes to something new.
Real-time and synchronicity
http://www.yodaiken.com/2016/05/11/synchronous-processors/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_I/O

Lots of CPU discussion after Meltdown and Spectre.
More esoteric content
http://www.codersnotes.com/notes/a-constructive-look-at-templeos/

Diving into TempleOS the right way, taking its OS designs seriously. For a cheesy quote "There's something worthwhile to be found in everything."

Thoughts

Idle hands are the devil’s workshop; idle lips are his mouthpiece. - Proverbs 16:27

We live in an age where we don't have to lift our fingers, so much that it has become an issue. This might be of religious origins but can easily be taken out of this context and applied to anyone.

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nixers newsletter issue | 2018-01-05 00:00:00 | 56

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

New year, new scavenger hunt
https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=2183

Some older issues of the newsletter are required to solve parts of the hunt. The next two links are also hints for two of the early steps, newsletter readers will have an advantage.
dig, nslookup, drill
http://imdjh.github.io/toolchain/2015/10/07/drill-if-you-can-dig-if-you-have-to.html

I had no idea what drill was until I wanted to use dig on ArchLinux. Just like with ss and netstat I'll have to relearn how to use the tool.
Font editing done good
http://fontforge.github.io/en-US/

Fontforge has the weirdest UI I've seen, it's gtk based it seems.
Without history nothing makes sense
http://www.lubutu.com/soso/a-history-of-sifmt

This is one of those "the more you know, the more everything seems strange and nothing is strange anymore". You can take that as an extension of the podcast about "Bits and words" https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=2071.
Sane default or not
https://vez.mrsk.me/freebsd-defaults.txt

Sec folks like to break the system so that it's rugged. It might not please everyone.
Ricing your lockscreen
https://www.devpy.me/the-best-linux-lockscreen/
https://geoff.greer.fm/2018/01/02/linux-laptop-locking/

I'm confused, since when did display manager start using HTML?
Linux running behind OpenBSD?
http://pythonsweetness.tumblr.com/post/169166980422/the-mysterious-case-of-the-linux-page-table
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/02/intel_cpu_design_flaw/
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux-415-x86pti
https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/03/kernel-panic-what-are-meltdown-and-spectre-the-bugs-affecting-nearly-every-computer-and-device/
https://spectreattack.com/
https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=118296441702631&w=2
https://security.googleblog.com/2018/01/more-details-about-mitigations-for-cpu_4.html

OpenBSD has something similar that it newly implemented https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/openbsd-will-get-unique-kernels-on-each-reboot-do-you-hear-that-linux-windows/, at each reboot you have a different kernel (Linux had it since 2013). Linux wants, KASLR, on the fly different memory mapping of the kernel, read up to know more... There's some weird conspiracy theory in the background which unfolded in the recent days. If you remember "JS is strong" from issue 33, it's related.
Another build system
http://gittup.org/gittup/
http://gittup.org/tup/

The tup build system is interesting http://gittup.org/tup/ex_a_first_tupfile.html, now mixing it with git to make a distro is impressive.
We discussed a lot of forensic...
http://linuxforensicsbook.com/code.html

...and here are some scripts that can help you do an analysis of your system.
The year was 2002
http://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html

Sweet story and I didn't know about the units tool used at the end, it's nifty.

Random

Will Geocities websites make a comeback?
https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/28/16795090/internet-community-2017-post-mortem-tumblr-amino-drip-tinyletter
https://flowerhack.dreamwidth.org/3230.html

State of the internet, again, nostalgia is growing. The cringiness aside I like this article.
Doesn't anyone care about those starving spams?
https://spa.mnesty.com/

Send them to spamnesty, they'll take care of them. Great idea, let's see if this grows. I love how you can take a peek at the email threads. Go post it on the forums https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=437 if I haven't already!
Cargo cults
http://www.softpanorama.org/Skeptics/cargo_cult_programming.shtml
http://www.jargon.net/jargonfile/c/cargocultprogramming.html

As usual. "Working in isolation from the mainstream community, attempts to reinvent the bicycle, abuse of jargon and re-implementing older technologies under the new fancy names."
Do you consider yourself a craftman?
http://manifesto.softwarecraftsmanship.org/

...I don't think so, I didn't sign it. It's a bit weird.
TLS v1.3
https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-tls-1-3-isnt-in-browsers-yet/

Cloudflare always has good articles about the PKI.

Thoughts

"Don't worry if it doesn't work right. If everything did, you'd be out of a job."

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nixers newsletter issue | 2017-12-29 00:00:00 | 55

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Those random bugs
http://mina.naguib.ca/blog/2012/10/22/the-little-ssh-that-sometimes-couldnt.html

This is the kind of issues that keeps you up at night, a nightmare.
Get some gdb under your belt
http://www.yolinux.com/TUTORIALS/GDB-Commands.html
http://unknownroad.com/rtfm/gdbtut/gdbtoc.html

We've shared a lot of articles related to gdb in the past but not about the basics of the basics. So here are some to fill your curiosity.
Complementary content
http://www.thrashing.com/thrashing-in-computer-science.html
http://www.firmcodes.com/memory-thrashing-in-operating-system/

Remember all those articles about optimization, well here's one bottleneck we're trying to avoid.
Kernel to userspace IPC
https://staaldraad.github.io/2017/12/20/netstat-without-netstat/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netlink
http://www.infradead.org/~tgr/libnl/
https://wiki.netbsd.org/tutorials/kqueue_tutorial/
http://www.kohala.com/start/papers.others/doors.html

There are many ways to pass messages between the earth and the moon, here I present procfs, sockets and message queues.
An old question
http://www.linfo.org/dot_slash.html

It comes down to shell interpretation and avoiding confusion and safety bugs.
Another old one that fires up arguments in the efficiency world
https://danluu.com/keyboard-v-mouse/

That's it, read this up and you won't have to enter the heated arguments anymore.
A backup solution
http://www.teejeetech.in/p/timeshift.html

I love the idea of incremental backups that use rsync only for system files. This is an interface to this mechanism making it painless.
Summarizing BSDs
https://eerielinux.wordpress.com/2016/08/20/how-to-choose-your-bsd-os-to-begin-with/

If you have no clue where to start in the BSD world this article does an excellent job at summing up the philosophy of the different choices.
Nagging about Makefiles
http://nibblestew.blogspot.com/2017/12/a-simple-makefile-is-unicorn.html

A continuation of "boilermake" of issue 53 and "Makefiles, Ohoh those Makefiles" of issue 38.
The love of Wayland
https://blogs.s-osg.org/wayland-zombie-apocalypse-near/

This is a tricky bug related to the C implementation of the Wayland protocol. It has to do with endless (fd) events going to non-existent objects which are redirected to a singleton object and never cleaned.

Random

Yet another horror stories
http://9tabs.com/random/2017/12/23/evil-coding-incantations.html

Learn to abuse the evil code that resides within some programming languages. Those C trigraphs and digraphs blew my mind! At least in gcc to enable trigraphs you have to add -trigraphs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digraphs_and_trigraphs#C
Waiting
http://duartes.org/gustavo/blog/post/what-your-computer-does-while-you-wait/
http://static.duartes.org/img/blogPosts/latencyAndThroughputFull.png

This is part of what we've discussed the past few weeks, optimization, caching, data storage. It shows where most of the time is spend while traveling through the computer.
Create a category and people will get attached to it
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_type_personality_theory
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_identity_theory
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-fulfilling_prophecy

Wikipedia links about interesting topics that can be linked together.

Thoughts

"It is a sad fate for a man to die too well known to everybody else and still unknown to himself" - Francis Bacon in The Essays (Of Great Place, referring to men in positions of power)

Contribute

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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 issue | 2017-12-22 00:00:00 | 54

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

LD.SO
http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man8/ld.so.8.html
https://cs.nyu.edu/~xiaojian/bookmark/linux/ld_so%20%20Dynamic-Link%20Library%20support.htm

The dynamic loader is a program in itself and has options, those are implicit most of the time but you can be explicit about them. Here are some links to learn more about the topic, follow along using objdump -x <program>. LD_DEBUG is my favorite new finding.
Ever installed a Unix-like system for a friend who's not technie?
https://freedompenguin.com/articles/how-to/poor-mans-guide-to-remote-linux-desktop-support/

Funny article about something we've all experienced and a solution to it. You can share your own experience in this old thread https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=307.
One of those big article about software comparison
https://snork.ca/posts/2017-03-04-the-quest-for-a-desktop-email-client/

This one goes over the list of Unix mail clients. I'm definitely a fan of those type of articles, Kirby wrote one on the forums about reverse engineering tools, and I did three, one about game emulators, another about UML, and the last one about mind map creators.
When life gives you lemons, make lemonade
http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/bits/Interdata/32bit/unix/univWollongong_v6/miller.pdf

What today seems like a gargantuan tasks were tasks that could actually be tackled.
In continuation with the previous post
https://dave.cheney.net/2017/12/04/what-have-we-learned-from-the-pdp-11

Let's read up more about how the PDP 11 influenced so many.
The omnipresent
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cache_(computing)
http://csillustrated.berkeley.edu/PDFs/handouts/cache-3-associativity-handout.pdf
https://www.cs.umd.edu/class/sum2003/cmsc311/Notes/Memory/fully.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cache_replacement_policies
https://www.open-mpi.org/projects/hwloc/
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/167038/is-there-any-way-to-know-the-size-of-l1-l2-l3-cache-and-ram-in-linux

They're everywhere, at every single level, hardware and software, everything is cache. Thus you need to know your share of info about them. In "Desktop Management Interface (DMI)" of issue 18 (Getting info from the bios and hardware) we discussed some of that topic too, hwloc is an amazing addition to the list.
Another fantastically deep article
http://careers.directi.com/display/tu/Understanding+CPU+Utilization+and+Optimization

Remember "Memory and optimizations" of issue 39, well this is from the same team called Directi, I'm not so sure what the company does but they do publish some amazing content online about optimization. It's probably more about the author, Bhavin Turakhia, also a founder of CodeChef amongst other companies. The article, which is really good, emphasises on processes scheduling and CPU utilization, you can read/listen to the podcast about processes before tackling it.
We use it everyday but do you know the small details
http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/cp.html

For example, do you know what's the difference between the -R and -r flags?
Automatic builds and reproducibility
https://reproducible-builds.org/
https://reproducible-builds.org/tools/

This is the paradise for anyone in QA. A lot of distributions (Debian, Fedora, Arch, NetBSD, FreeBSD, etc..) use this concept to ensure their packages are lean and clean. The documentation about it is more extensive than I had imagined and there are many tool to help with the process.
systemd gui
https://github.com/mmstick/systemd-manager
https://github.com/pentix/qjournalctl

Those are my first finds about systemd graphical service manager and log viewer (one in rust the other in c++). They look quite nifty, though a sorrow reminder of the Windows-like aspect of systemd internals.

Random

Again another ECC tutorial
https://www.royalfork.org/2014/09/04/ecc/

This is in continuation with "More Crypto?" of issue 31. This particular tutorial has an emphasis on the rudimental basics of signature.
A memento
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/15/AR2007061500492.html

"Many of us want to be influenced by corporations, by the government, by the media, so where there is that demand, there will be a supply."
Planned obsolescence
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence

A concept hardware manufacturer love.
Personal likes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_History_of_the_World_in_100_Objects

This is the podcast I've been listening to during the holiday traffic, I highly recommend it.

Thoughts

You need huge material wealth, acquired only through intense engagement with the affairs of the world, to build monuments that inspire us to abandon wealth and to leave the world behind.

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
Share your point of view about the newsletter.
Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2017-12-15 00:00:00 | 53

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Safely removing SATA
http://www.sakana.fr/blog/2009/05/04/linux-sata-hot-plug-unplug/
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/43413/how-can-i-safely-remove-a-sata-disk-from-a-running-system#43450

As far as I'm concerned I simply unmount the file system, I didn't know you could stop the disk this way, I'll try that next time.
C all the way
http://seenaburns.com/building-c-programs/
http://wiki.c2.com/?CeeLanguage

If you've ever had trouble understanding linking and compiling then the first article is for you. The second article (from the amazing c2) can be summed up in this quote: "The problem with C is the techniques that help it compete with modern dynamic languages are invariably the techniques that make it dangerous."
Portable Linux binaries
http://blog.gibson.sh/2017/11/26/creating-portable-linux-binaries/

To continue on the topic of linking. This is hacky... A bit related to last week's "And override libc" entry.
Resource for the {black,grey,white}hat
https://github.com/xairy/linux-kernel-exploitation

I'm no expert on kernel hacking, this is beyond me but might serve someone.
Data structures in OpenBSD
http://kindsoftware.com/documents/reports/Britt12.pdf

There's nothing particular about OpenBSD in this document, it does a good job at hovering the advantages and complexities (interface, computational, space, implementation) of one type over another. There's a tool to calculate interface complexity that is linked in the Appendix (I couldn't extract it from the document though so this remains to be tested).
c10k follow up and a bit about flamegraphs
https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/2017/09/optimizing-web-servers-for-high-throughput-and-low-latency/
http://www.brendangregg.com/flamegraphs.html
https://speakerdeck.com/mrfoto/what-are-flame-graphs-and-how-to-read-them

Optimization is a really thorough topic, with graphs and nifty little knobs you can tweak. The network stack expertise shows up in this post.
boilermake
https://github.com/dmoulding/boilermake/blob/master/MANUAL
https://github.com/igagis/prorab/

The first make boilerplate looks promising clean and simple, the second one looks confusing. Or you can opt for a nice from scratch make like this one http://git.nixers.net/libgbt/file/makefile.html.
tmux hooks
https://devel.tech/tips/n/tMuXz2lj/the-power-of-tmux-hooks/
https://robots.thoughtbot.com/a-tmux-crash-course
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3094946/move-window-between-tmux-clients

I'm going to get into tmux more and more, I've only used dvtm before: http://www.brain-dump.org/projects/dvtm/. It's great so far, I love the detach/attach part and the idea of sessions (unlike using something like abduco https://github.com/martanne/abduco).
Analysis of tee (not tea)
http://nanxiao.me/en/the-anatomy-of-tee-program-on-openbsd/

It seems like queue.h (man (3) queue) is used in a lot of softwares https://github.com/openbsd/src/blob/master/sys/sys/queue.h, make sure to look into that. The post is straight forward and does a decent job at explaining what the software does and how it does it.
sbrk and malloc
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sbrk
https://medium.com/@andrestc/implementing-malloc-and-free-ba7e7704a473
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_segment
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/19676688/how-malloc-and-sbrk-works-in-unix#19703860
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2079151/minimizing-the-amount-of-malloc-calls-improves-performance#2079182
http://www.inf.udec.cl/~leo/Malloc_tutorial.pdf

A lot of resources to get you started on the beautiful (or ugly) discovery of memory manipulation (and brainwash). Read those in the order posted, they are super fun.

Random

I'd like to interject for a moment
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ame2PH67gnk

If you've ever seen the "Mongo DB Is Web Scale" video then this will interest you.
Things we'd like to think are true
http://www.sicpers.info/2017/12/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-programming/

Sort of like the mythology of programming.
Are you tired of the articles of two weeks ago because there's more
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/28/break_up_google_and_facebook_if_you_want_tech_innovation_ever_again/
https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/11/16761016/former-facebook-exec-ripping-apart-society

Yes, I'm talking about the "state of the internet" type of articles. Tighten your belt because we've actually advanced in the discussion. We've now reached the Messiah stage where if someone has "insights" on the matter or "disconnects" they get a surge of visions of the world and are now entitled to extract facts from subjectivity. Kind of admirable how the interviewers and spectators are captivated by the paranoia and conspirational theories, I guess that's one deep dark perverse pleasure we have. Well done guys! (Please tell me if I'm stretching those too far...)
This is sooo hilarious
https://www.troyhunt.com/im-sorry-you-feel-this-way-natwest-but-https-on-your-landing-page-is-important/

I was reading in my head with a serious tone until I reached the part where they actually did buy that other domain...

Thoughts

One regular chatter noted that on the CB Simulator "you meet someone from the inside out. You judge them on their heart and values, not what kind of jeans they wear." - About the 1980 CompuServe CB Simulator.

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

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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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 issue | 2017-12-08 00:00:00 | 52

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

The most important files
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vmlinux
http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/view/svn/postlfs/initramfs.html

Sometimes we overlook them, let's take a moment of silence to commemorate their lives.
The mighty proc
http://tldp.org/LDP/Linux-Filesystem-Hierarchy/html/proc.html

More on Linux! Documentation about proc is scarce and the tldp makes a good at regrouping all the info. Going back to issue 41 "Almost everywhere but not POSIX" and the /proc/sys/kernel/ctrl-alt-del of last issue.
sshtalk
https://2ton.com.au/sshtalk/

The assembly madness team hits again with a new tool, a secure chat.
Following through with the low level hacks
http://dmitry.gr/?r=05.Projects&proj=07.%20Linux%20on%208bit
http://www.kernelthread.com/publications/gbaunix/

Those are impressive. The level of skills required for those is beyond my imagination. The second article is full of insightful information about early day Unix such as: "The ';' escape sequence put that terminal in full-duplex mode. Hence, the UNIX greeting message contained this sequence. A terminal that does not understand this sequence, such as our GBA TTY, would print the semi-colon.".
The C10K problem
http://www.kegel.com/c10k.html

The quest for optimization never ends, let's continue with the low level hacks for this issue. Surprisingly, the one thread per client paradigm isn't the recommended one.
Compare libc
http://www.etalabs.net/compare_libcs.html
http://www.etalabs.net/libc-bench.html

Most of the time you don't have a choice to which libc to use as it's imposed by your distro, but when you do check this list.
And override libc
https://rafalcieslak.wordpress.com/2013/04/02/dynamic-linker-tricks-using-ld_preload-to-cheat-inject-features-and-investigate-programs/
https://github.com/zardus/preeny

Be it for debugging purpose or malicious intent, this is a nifty trick. The blog is a wonderful one, add it to your list.
The world most prominent virus has erased all the source code
http://nullprogram.com/blog/2016/11/17/

And we have to write ELF from scratch (again?).
The total opposite of what we've been discussing so far
https://deftly.net/posts/2017-06-01-measuring-the-weight-of-an-electron.html
https://css-tricks.com/apps-command-prompts-now/

Every time I dig into those nodejs-like tech it seems I'm doing something similar to what is mentioned in this article.
Evolutionary scheduler
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:uupPOdmGukUJ:www.iit.edu/~elrad/esep.html+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=lb
http://mypages.iit.edu/~elrad/xesep.html

This is an original idea. It doesn't run out of the box, there are some patches in the archive that you need to apply to the kernel. If someone is up to the task then it could be interesting to test.

Random

The birth of online memes
http://www.montulli.org/theoriginofthe%3Cblink%3Etag

How whimsical ideas can become concrete and spread like fire.
Energy
http://www.drones.com/
http://www.drones.com/sitemap/

I love how this guy implemented his sitemap, and that not forgetting that he's putting forward some great content too.
It helps to do that
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_aloud_protocol
https://uwaterloo.ca/news/news/study-finds-reading-information-aloud-yourself-improves
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/thinking-aloud-the-1-usability-tool/

It's not only a common saying, it's proven and used in research.
Propaganda
http://250bpm.com/blog:108

"We've been influenced", "We're not in control of our minds". Blame the media all you want...
...But we all know we crave for control
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/02/the-martian-sherlock-holmes-and-why-we-love-competence-porn/
https://venam.nixers.net/blog/psychology/2017/10/28/will-for-control.html

I'm shamelessly hijacking one of my article in here.
A timely article
http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html

Maybe if every online arguments went that way.

Thoughts

Heavy and full of technical topics, this is the 52nd issue which completes a year worth of newsletters. Let's see what this new year has in store. Share with the world what you've thought of those past newsletters and what you're looking for in the future. Which issues were your favorite ones?

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

Congratulations everyone!

It's starting to get cold outside, keeping a Unix machine next to you and running :(){ :|:& };: is a great way to stay warm.

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
Share your point of view about the newsletter.
Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2017-12-01 00:00:00 | 51

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Some key accelerator I haven't considered
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Keyboard_shortcuts

Especially the "yanking" on the console and ctrl-alt-del to reboot systemd.
Most voted useful command-fu
http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/browse/sort-by-votes

There are some novel commands for me in the list. It's always good to learn new tricks.
Tunneling/syncing data between machines securely
http://blog.backslasher.net/ssh-openvpn-tunneling.html
https://github.com/apenwarr/sshuttle

What should you go for depends on your use case, this post dives into the intricacies of it explaining small differences of data packing between openvpn and ssh.
ARG_MAX https://www.in-ulm.de/~mascheck/various/argmax/
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/120642/what-defines-the-maximum-size-for-a-command-single-argument

This is a bit confusing, do we use the value in limits.h or 1/4th of the stack size? Read up to find out.
Xscreensaver and more
https://www.jwz.org/blog/2016/04/i-would-like-debian-to-stop-shipping-xscreensaver/
https://www.jwz.org/blog/

This blog is fantastic, I like how there are links to previously related ideas. Very imaginative! About the first post, this discusses the issue with licenses, the dilemma between morality and legality, this comes to mind: http://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/intel/).
Zram
https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/blockdev/zram.txt
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zram

"Yo Dawg, I herd you like RAM, so I put a RAM in your RAM so you can be fast while saving space."
'Security person' behavior
http://www.securityweek.com/what-can-philosophy-unix-teach-us-about-security

There's some good intentions in that article but it feels like the connection is forced.
Linux power management
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/powertop
https://01.org/sites/default/files/page/powertop_users_guide_201412.pdf

I knew about the tool for a while but I never took the time to read the extensive manual (pdf).
Containers from scratch
https://ericchiang.github.io/post/containers-from-scratch/
http://blog.z3bra.org/2016/03/hand-crafted-containers.html

This is where all the hype is and the kind of article I haven't shared much in this newsletter so far.
Running Unix V1 the easy way
https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/run-the-first-edition-of-unix-1972-with-docker
https://hub.docker.com/r/bahamat/unix-1st-ed/

Now that we've got those container things we can run V1 with a single line. There's not much to do with V1 but it's still an oportunity to have fun.
An extra because everyone has seen the horror
https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/28/astonishing-os-x-bug-lets-anyone-log-into-a-high-sierra-machine/
https://objective-see.com/blog/blog_0x24.html

How hasn't this been discovered before, this makes no sense, how can this even happen?

Random

Creepy pasta
http://www.scp-wiki.net/about-the-scp-foundation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCP_Foundation

If you like sci-fi, horror, and research papers then this is for you.
The BEST
https://thebestmotherfucking.website/
http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/
http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/
https://evenbettermotherfucking.website/

I only deal with the best. Arguably those are freaking fast to load and simple.
Where have we gone wrong?
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/persons-of-interest/the-case-for-not-being-born

Interesting philosophy but this falls short, like any fatalism or absolutism, you need to go beyond that, it's but a stepping stone on the way you need to conquer.
DRMs fight is coming to and end
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/10/drms-dead-canary-how-we-just-lost-web-what-we-learned-it-and-what-we-need-do-next

And this isn't looking good.
Awesome dude
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diogenes

If 4chan could be represented as a person.

Thoughts

"You and me are real people, operating in a real world. We are not figments of each other’s imagination. I am the architect of my own self, my own character and destiny. It is no use whingeing about what I might have been, I am the things I have done and nothing more. We are all free, completely free. We can each do any damn thing we want. Which is more than most of us dare to imagine." – Jean-Paul Sartre talking about how consciouscness is freedom but hell for most.

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
Share your point of view about the newsletter.
Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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 issue | 2017-11-24 00:00:00 | 50

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

More of "terminal recording"
https://intoli.com/blog/terminal-recorders/

This is a follow up of issue 48 "Capturing and debugging user interaction on the shell". This blog regroups a gigantic extensive list of all available options to record the terminal.
Food for thoughts
http://turnoff.us/geek/inside-the-linux-kernel/

This gets you thinking about the architecture... Anthropomorphizing our mystic view of the order of things. Hey, we might find ourselves in a future where we refer to computers the same way we refer to mythological gods!
Missing games?
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/

An addition to issue 10 "Free games", it seems like we're referencing a lot of old issues, right?
The year of the Linux desktop
http://itvision.altervista.org/why.linux.is.not.ready.for.the.desktop.current.html

More Linux specific topic for this newsletter! Self proclaimed: "the most comprehensive list of Linux distributions' problems on the entire Internet". On a side note, the person writing the article got other interesting ones on the blog such as a list of good fonts and more "this is best, this is worse"-kind of articles.
What's a thread
https://www.schneems.com/2017/10/23/wtf-is-a-thread/

This was mostly explained in the podcast about processes (https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=2141) however if explanation with BIG fonts and icons are your thing then this will really help.
About groups
https://jvns.ca/blog/2017/11/20/groups/

This is also related to the previous link.
More extra content related to the podcast
http://www.tavi.co.uk/phobos/fat.html
http://blog.wesleyac.com/posts/filesystem-recursion

Recently I found myself wanting to do a simple implementation of a FAT16 fs manipulation tool and this is the resource I looked into. FAT is easy to grasp and should get you started in the world of file systems (well, I say that but I didn't dig into the technical implementation of other file systems myself. The related podcast about data storage https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=2164).
Unix and Firefox 57
https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20171119/
https://dspinellis.github.io/unix-v4man/v4man.pdf
https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20171117/index.html

First post is cool, and I think a lot experienced what happened in the second post. Great blog too! Skim through that PDF of the man pages of V4.
X is considered harmful
https://meyerweb.com/eric/comment/chech.html

Let's get rid of this cliche and replace it by something more useful.
Wear some colorful tight pants and continue on this crazy train with Ozzy!
http://nautil.us/issue/52/the-hive/modern-media-is-a-dos-attack-on-your-free-will

Yet again on this railroad of "the state of the internet" articles. Like it or not it seems like a trend and it's fun to watch everyone going through the "Oh I just woke up to what the internet is about". You can't blame the trend, once you learn something you start to see it everywhere and want to shout your lungs out. Digital literacy is going up, non-technical persons are starting to be interested in the details. For us it's old news. It's also interesting how internet services are regarded as God-like entities that influences us and that we have to please, in the end the writers of those articles have to realize they can't anthropomorphize them, they can't consider them as carrier of the holy good will for the masses. Post hoc ergo propter hoc. This is not the internet this is their new religion; blaming it for the good days and bad days. But can we critic this behavior in a world that is frightening, slowly turning nihilistic, a world where its people are looking for a Leviathan to bring back the order.

Random

Computer stupidities
http://rinkworks.com/stupid/

Old school website with real life cringe-worthy computer stupidities scenario we can relate to.
Non-profit security organization book
https://www.honeynet.org/book/export/html/50

Your dose of security for the week, botnets and honeypots to analyze them. This small book gives a good overview of the topic for both experts and beginners.
Living off hacking online games
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/59p7qd/this-man-has-survived-by-hacking-mmo-online-games

AKA living the dream life of the Hollywoodian hacker.

Thoughts

Whatever requires a bit of effort without prestige isn't that popular

Contribute

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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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If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address or patreon page: 19suN5V6nyKBvaeuAhghSMCzyQcZLGVNRy or https://www.patreon.com/venam.

nixers newsletter issue | 2017-11-17 00:00:00 | 49

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

More terminal love
https://flisks.site/vt420.html

Resurrecting old terminals, it's yet another one of those, but do we really get tired of reading about this?
Web is dying (continue)
https://asininetech.com/2017/11/10/the-web-endures/

If you've been following the past 3 weeks or so I've been sharing articles related to this subject. This person reiterates over it, yet again. Nothing new but it's nice to know someone is there to publish an article about it.
Wrap it in a sandbox on Linux
http://www.morbo.org/2017/11/linux-sandboxing-improvements-in.html
https://www.nexlab.net/2016/08/06/desktop-laptop-privacy-security-of-web-browsers-on-linux-part-1-concepts-and-theory/
https://firejail.wordpress.com/
http://user-mode-linux.sourceforge.net/

Want to make up for not having jail, here's a bunch of ideas. UML is kind of old.
Some laughs
http://www.bbspot.com/News/2003/08/open_source_virus.html

I like the Onions-type of writing, it's lighthearted and kicks in your day. GPLdaemon... We've shared it the other day, it's the vrms software!
Myths buster
https://www.idontnix.net/tech/linmyth.html

It's fascinating how the vision changed with time, even if it's a mystified vision.
More myth busting
https://weirdfellow.wordpress.com/2015/12/15/the-myth-of-redundancy/

We've discussed a bit about RAID during the last podcast (Data Storage on Unix), here's a ridiculous myth busting article (refreshing your knowledge of probabilities).
josuah's shell tricks
https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=2169

Having difficulty doing peculiar text substitutions on the shell, then this is for you.
I still use netstat but I have to get used to ss
http://www.binarytides.com/linux-ss-command/

Great tool, I wish I'd learned its ins and outs earlier.
Permission the easy way
http://permissions-calculator.org/

It's already easy to understand them, for non techie this could help as an intro.
Linux ate my ram
https://www.linuxatemyram.com/
https://www.linuxatemyram.com/play.html

Another light-hearted website with a little bit of learning behind it. (Also related to the podcast about Data Storage on Unix).

Random

Intentionally blank
http://www.this-page-intentionally-left-blank.org/whythat.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intentionally_blank_page

We've seen those in books, what are they there for, do they exist on the web?
Dangerous food and explosions
http://www.pmichaud.com/grape/
http://www.pmichaud.com/toast/

Also genius at the same time. Think about it, it's one of the author of Rakudo, a Perl 6 implementation.
History of Ascii art
http://www.chris.com/ascii/joan/www.geocities.com/SoHo/7373/history.html

Old school websites walks us through the evolution of "modern" text art.
Our brains see patterns
https://www.makeartwithpython.com/blog/10-print-in-python/

So simple yet effective. No idea why there needs to be a video tutorial for this...
Google-Fus are breaking?
http://www.faganfinder.com/google/

Use this website instead (for example for the date search).

Thoughts

If it seems too good to be true it probably is.

if wishes were fishes, we'd all cast nets.

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
Share your point of view about the newsletter.
Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address or patreon page: 19suN5V6nyKBvaeuAhghSMCzyQcZLGVNRy or https://www.patreon.com/venam.

nixers newsletter issue | 2017-11-10 00:00:00 | 48

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Emacs as PID 1
https://www.informatimago.com/linux/emacs-on-user-mode-linux.html
http://perllinux.sourceforge.net/

We all made fun of this but it's possible. HEY! Why not Perl TOO!
A continuation of last week "Random"
http://www.filfre.net/2017/10/a-net-before-the-web-part-1-the-establishment-man-and-the-magnificent-rogue/
http://tttthis.com/rememberwebsites.php/

I wasn't sure last week if I should put the web rants in the Unix section or not. I think they fit somehow. Those two articles related to the "state and birth of the internet" + nostalgia kind of blog posts that are popular these days. Don't get me wrong, I love this kind of discussions, apart from the rosy retrospection there's some truth in them especially the kind of discoveries you make. The first link has a lot of politics and marketing topics, if you don't like that then skip it.
...And to complete this
https://wiby.me

Last week I was discussing on IRC about creating a sort of mini-version of the internet, a closely linked one, with a net-art or "tilde" style. Well, this does the job well already.
X11 forwarding and multiplexers
http://alexteichman.com/octo/blog/2014/01/01/x11-forwarding-and-terminal-multiplexers/

A trick to make this as seemless as possible. X11, terminals, etc.. So many pieces that bleed legacy into their mechanisms.
Virtual Stallman
http://vrms.alioth.debian.org/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vrms

Ever wanted to get a part of that dude inside your machine, your dream comes true. To be fair it's a good piece of software, I'm not sure if that's something they use to make a distribution "libre".
Schedulers
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14918797/difference-between-freebsd-scheduler-and-linux-scheduler#14925672
http://jeffr-tech.livejournal.com/12933.html

Scheduling processes is one of the core tasks of an OS, checkout some discussion about the implementation differences in the links. If you have no clue what this is about read up about processes in the podcast (https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=2141).
Terminal coolness
http://podstawczynski.com/retro/pics_big/P1200466.jpg
https://github.com/cylgom/ly
https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/2702526/32404792-886a820e-c14f-11e7-9994-f27a0d048e39.gif
https://github.com/p-e-w/ternimal
https://p.iotek.org/teb.jpg

Images and graphics that don't shame the terminal.
The novel idea of dependency injection boot scripts
http://www.atnf.csiro.au:80/~rgooch/linux/boot-scripts/

Not so novel discussion about the state of init system and boot scripts.
Remember that cdecl website
http://c-faq.com/decl/spiral.anderson.html

This is a simple technique to read c declarations until you're at ease with the language (instead of having to paste it in a web form).
Capturing and debugging user interaction on the shell
https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/aix/library/au-screenshots1/index.html

Forget asciinema and others, actually not, it's just a novel way of seeing redirection.

Random

The Origin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_forum

Sometimes things we take for granted have a deeper history and meaning.
DANGER
http://pages.swcp.com/~mccurley/danger/danger.html

Weekly dose of security related content.
All the world's money
http://www.visualcapitalist.com/worlds-money-markets-one-visualization-2017/

Great visualization of where the numbers go.
Not a site you should frequently visit
http://www.i-am-bored.com/

Kind of "buzzfeedish" with less click-baity titles (WHAAAaaAt).
Logical fallacies and biases of the week
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluralistic_ignorance
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_consensus_effect

Just some things to keep in mind and know about.

Thoughts

Nothing is so firmly believed as that which we least know - Michel De Montaigne

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nixers newsletter issue | 2017-11-03 00:00:00 | 47

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Tiny ELF
http://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/software/tiny/teensy.html
http://www.cirosantilli.com/elf-hello-world/
http://www.cirosantilli.com/elf101.png

Want to go hardcore and learn how executables are made from the bottom up, read those links. The next question is: Does it matter if an executable is smaller than the size of a page? Let's make room for discussion!
Learn git another cool way
https://learngitbranching.js.org/

Which is also a WM-like web page, go add it to this thread (https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=2142).
Survivability program
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.230.723&rep=rep1&type=pdf

Programming flaws, "coding defects", everywhere, this is a nightmare we still live in. Pledge(2) is a life saver.
Test suite for POSIX
https://sortix.org/os-test/

A "non-official" POSIX test suite. At the moment there's only the udp tests but I'm looking forward for more.
A rant about word processors
http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/wp.html

Could be a troll yet it has some legit claims.
Why Unix?
https://www.cs.odu.edu/~zeil/cs252/s17/Public/whyunix/index.html

Again another walk through the history of computers and how it lead to Unix, a good summary.
Crocker's rules
http://www.sl4.org/crocker.html

It seems like a lot of people need to apply this rule to themselves these days.
Same fashion as kmandla
https://kkovacs.eu/cool-but-obscure-unix-tools
https://github.com/alebcay/awesome-shell

...but not as cool! That second link is a huge list.
A weird one too
https://github.com/TheTomster/lwe/

Cursorless editing, as in you go in a mode (like vim) and then specify where to write. Kind of a weird concept, you have to try it.
The mighty and dreadful xargs. http://offbytwo.com/2011/06/26/things-you-didnt-know-about-xargs.html

find into xargs and other mischevious actions.

Random

A very cool initiative for Belgians
http://relearn.be/2017/

A sort of interdisciplinary hackaton in the spirit of the libre open source software culture.
Well researched and timely articles
https://staltz.com/the-web-began-dying-in-2014-heres-how.html
https://www.neustadt.fr/essays/against-a-user-hostile-web/

This summarizes what has been happening on the web the past few years.
Differential privacy
https://www.infoq.com/articles/differential-privacy-intro

Your dose of new security topic for the week - this one is fascinating.

Thoughts

Do not propose solutions until the problem has been discussed as thoroughly as possible without suggesting any.

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nixers newsletter issue | 2017-10-27 00:00:00 | 46

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Don't REBOOT IT!
https://www.infoworld.com/article/2623441/unix/when-in-doubt--reboot--not-unix-boxes.html

Why and when should you reboot, does it solve all issues? The article is a bit "buzzfeedy" but not that bad.
Video display terminals information website
https://www.vt100.net/
https://www.vt100.net/dec/vt_history

A web-encyclopedia about DEC terminals, I like the history and reference manual pages. Those manual are thorough, even documenting things such as the arrow keys and their functions which we take for granted today: "Cursor down (0138) causes the cursor to move down one line until the cursor reaches the bottom line. Once the cursor is in the bottom line, receipt of the cursor down code has no effect."
Still riding the wayback machine
http://www.righto.com/2017/10/the-xerox-alto-smalltalk-and-rewriting.html

The iconic pioneer of current UX brought back to life. We discussed a bit of the story in the following podcast about WMs and DEs https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=2048. This article focuses on the smalltalk aspect of it.
Set a full fledge plan9 network on OpenBSD
https://www.ueber.net/who/mjl/plan9/plan9-obsd.html

Trying to learn about what plan9 is all about, you've found the best way to do it by testing it on a Unix system.
ls, find, stat, du, all mixed together
https://github.com/chneukirchen/lr

Not very Unixy but worth mentioning. It lists files recursively using useful colors, has some filtering/finding-options in there too.
Mini alternative to gpg encryption
https://github.com/skeeto/enchive
https://github.com/adamierymenko/fenc

When you just want to encrypt a file and don't want to type gpg -c <file>.
Demystifying the PID 1
https://felipec.wordpress.com/2013/11/04/init/

I love demystifying topics, especially the ones that are complex - if it's complex it simply means you don't get it yet.
OpenSSH escape sequences
https://lonesysadmin.net/2011/11/08/ssh-escape-sequences-aka-kill-dead-ssh-sessions/amp/

Today I learned something new, not that useful but nice to add to my toolbox.
Interview with Dru Lavigne
https://bsdmag.org/dru_lavigne/

Some insights from a BSD maintainer, teacher, and founder of the BSD certifications. Are you certified, looking to be certified, or are you not, and why (not limited to BSD)? We can discuss that on the forums.
Uninterruptible sleep
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_(system_call)#Uninterruptible_sleep

We discussed that a bit in the podcast about signals (https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=2003), let's refresh our minds.

Random

Java SecureRandom
https://tersesystems.com/blog/2015/12/17/the-right-way-to-use-securerandom/

The source of entropy for the ones who use Java, would it be /dev/random or /dev/urandom?
A new blog to follow
https://tinyhack.com/
https://tinyhack.com/2017/09/05/mastercard-internet-gateway-service-hashing-design-flaw/

Ingenious hacks humbly called "tiny hacks", this deserves respect.
The world goes round and round
https://blog.wirelessmoves.com/2017/10/change-of-times-data-over-voice-to-voice-over-data.html

It's peculiar how evolution in technology always rotates and goes back to its root or make a total 180 turn.
The opposite of the enlightment movement
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato's_five_regimes>

However it's not as dark as the name implies it to be, food for thoughts.

Thoughts

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. - Antoine de Saint-Exupery

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nixers newsletter issue | 2017-10-20 00:00:00 | 45

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Why does it do this?
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/19210935/why-does-the-c-preprocessor-interpret-the-word-linux-as-the-constant-1
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/19298778/why-does-the-1987-korn-oneliner-print-unix

Nice puzzle where the key lies in the fact that arrays are pointers and can be written in different manners.
Convinced about nix and nixOS or not yet?
https://yakking.branchable.com/posts/what-and-why-nix/
https://nixos.org/
https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=2006

I'm starting to buy into the idea however just as a thought experiment I love it for how it renew the FHS or maybe I would just like it for developement work. I'm not sure if I'd use it as my everyday drive of if it's better than vagrant or docker for developement only purpose.
What would the world be without Unix
https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/what-would-your-world-be-without-nix.1364158/

Let's start a discussion on the forums after this newsletter is published.
The future of HDD
https://www.anandtech.com/show/11925/western-digital-stuns-storage-industry-with-mamr-breakthrough-for-nextgen-hdds

At the same time be sure to checkout the most recent podcast about data storage on unix (https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=2164). After a long hiatus I finally managed to put it together.
Free books and tutorials
https://github.com/EbookFoundation/free-programming-books
http://cslibrary.stanford.edu/102/

I can never and probably will never go through all this but if I ever need a book then I have a resource to go to.
And when having too much trouble with C
https://cdecl.org/

Use this website to "demystify" your unfamiliarness with C declarations.
Hacker's Wisdom
http://www.ee.ryerson.ca:8080/~elf/hack/index.html

"If one man asks another what a Hacker is And the other man answers him, Neither of them knows it." - Borrowed Zen Proverb
Mozilla doing weird stuffs yet again
https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/735973/17bdb163fddd41ae/

As much as I like them they are really going in another direction by trying to please the click-economy.
Project HowTo
http://webhome.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/General/project.howto/project.howto/project.howto-1.html

Follow this template to write a decent howto.
Git as a zip bomb
https://kate.io/blog/git-bomb/

Sort of a simple idea. Don't miss the updates at the bottom of the article.

Random

The daily life of a programmer
http://www.ilikebigbits.com/blog/2016/11/22/the-unfixable-bug

It's peculiar how every major bug turns out to be one of those stupid mistakes that makes us do a jaw dropping "AHHH, it was that" face.
TIL anti-rape condoms
http://edition.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/africa/06/20/south.africa.female.condom/index.html

This is ingenious but also sad that we have to use those for prevention.
Crypto doom
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/10/crypto-failure-cripples-millions-of-high-security-keys-750k-estonian-ids/?amp=1
https://www.krackattacks.com/
https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2017/10/16/falling-through-the-kracks/

If you haven't seen those already, October-November are going to be spicy for the crypto community. Though we've been through worse, it's ok, there are multiple layers of security and this is only one falling guard.
And more on real security
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-man_rule
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Need_to_know
https://mendafy.wordpress.com/2012/01/11/the-need-to-know-principle-and-its-various-methods-of-operation/
https://www.dwheeler.com/secure-programs/Secure-Programs-HOWTO/security-principles.html

Just some nice terms and principles that are cool to learn about.

Thoughts

Internet arguments in a nutshell:

ednos: technically, I'm not pedantic

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nixers newsletter issue | 2017-10-13 00:00:00 | 44

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Drop it in the public domain
https://licensezero.com/manifesto
https://writing.kemitchell.com/2017/09/12/The-License-Zero-Manifesto.html
https://perens.com/blog/2017/05/28/understanding-the-gpl-is-a-contract-court-case/

During my research for the podcast about licenses I've learned that you have to explicitly mention giving up some of your rights in the license. This is a try at creating a new license that has a set of tools to facilitate selling commercial licenses.
Dynamic user allocation
http://0pointer.net/blog/dynamic-users-with-systemd.html

Users ID are limited, how to cope with dynamic user allocation. Here's what systemd is doing to solve this.
A wiki for the ones who wants to run away
http://without-systemd.org/

This wiki regroups a lot of information about Linux system without systemd, how to run some without it, the pros and cons (mostly cons), and info about init systems.
Awk for multimedia
https://arcan-fe.com/2017/10/05/awk-for-realtime-multimedia/
https://arcan-fe.com/2017/04/17/one-night-in-rio-vacation-photos-from-plan9/
https://github.com/letoram/arcan
http://durden.arcan-fe.com/

This sounds highly surprising but it's true, though it's not really awk but Arcan, think image magic piping style-like. Arcan is a multimedia framework (lua like). It is an impressive project, manipulating media on the fly from different sources, Qemu, Xorg, Wayland, libretro, SDL2, etc.. This is definitely something I'm hoping to learn in the next few months.
Unix I/O
http://www.scylladb.com/2017/10/05/io-access-methods-scylla/
https://www.nextplatform.com/2017/09/11/whats-bad-posix-io/

Those are about files I/O and different ways to read/write them, the first post is specific to the drawbacks of page disk caching (why not buffer?) on Linux and the second about generic POSIX I/O. The first article confuses a bunch of terms together but it's still fine. The second one argues the basic POSIX as a bottleneck to speed (metadata and permission checks, file descriptors, etc..).
Drop Caches
https://linux-mm.org/Drop_Caches
http://unix.derkeiler.com/Mailing-Lists/FreeBSD/hackers/2010-03/msg00244.html

To go along with the previous (and apart from sync for buffer), clean the caches not in used.
Diving into and ELF
http://nanxiao.me/en/the-anatomy-of-ldd-program-on-openbsd/

This goes through the ldd program to analyze the ELF binary to find the linked libraries.
Leave that behind
http://turnoff.us/geek/super-power/
http://turnoff.us/geek/ghost-in-the-shell/

There are many reasons to use Unix, a lot of Linux users find themselves in a sort of primeval dichotomy, or they are with something or against it. The webcomic is fun, check it!
Antique C compilers
https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/primevalC.html

DMR goes over some relics of the past.
A guide to combining both screen and irssi
http://quadpoint.org/articles/irssi/

You can use this article as both an irssi tutorial or a screen tutorial or as a combination of both.

Random

Create a unique id
https://segment.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-the-uuid/

I like how they present the research, it's comprehensible and straight forward. They offer their own new implementation at the end.
The most cringy article I've read in a while
http://bostonreview.net/science-nature/cathy-oneil-know-thy-futurist

This article regroups the most cliche Silicon Valley-type fan base with the most erroneous definitions and conflations of subjects you can imagine. I wish it was a satirical newspaper but it's not. All that apart from completely missing the point of what futurists do with what New Age divinists do.

And while religious futurists, astrologers, occultists, New Age divinists, etc. use methodologies that include study, none of their personal revelation or belief-based work would fall within a consensus definition of futurology as used in academics or by futures studies professionals.
The new Face ID is already a meme
https://www.troyhunt.com/face-id-touch-id-pins-no-id-and-pragmatic-security/

Remember the biometric article I shared in issue 36 (2017-08-18) "More on digital identity", well consider this a continuation.
The behavioral effect of VR
http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/virtual-reality-as-moral-ideal

A very well put article about VR and our perception of free will/power over our environment.

Thoughts

Someone complaining on social media is free advertising.

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nixers newsletter issue | 2017-10-06 00:00:00 | 43

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Unix Papa
http://unixpapa.com/incnote/

YACB (Yet another cool blog), this one page I've linked focuses on Unix compatibilities in C programming. There's a lot of good content and myth busters in there.
A talk about bloat
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nbv9L-WIu0s&list=PL-F6yzP-Y8RV234eFdp0BKPLV19rk2g2k
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asmutils

Yet again a rewrite of GNU utils. If you've listened to the podcast about unix file hierarchy then you'd like to know that one of the speaker worked the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard.
File system forensic
http://www.campus64.com/digital_learning/data/cyber_forensics_essentials/info_file_system_forensic_analysis.pdf

I'm halfway through this book, it's wonderfully written and is helping a lot in my current research. I'm not so sure if it's freely available or not, if not then I'm sorry about that, I highly recommend getting it.
Linux sys call table
http://thevivekpandey.github.io/posts/2017-09-25-linux-system-calls.html
https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/arch/x86/entry/syscalls/syscall_32.tbl
https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/arch/x86/entry/syscalls/syscall_64.tbl

This is already in the docs but having it in a table with the list of registers is handy.
It's a UNIX System!
https://github.com/3dfsb-dev/3dfsb

A remake of the old 3d explorer. Not practical but a fun program to know about.
Did you have any idea?
https://insights.ubuntu.com/2016/02/16/zfs-is-the-fs-for-containers-in-ubuntu-16-04/

Support for ZFS is baked in Ubuntu 16.04 for server.
OSI for the web 3.0
http://davidad.github.io/blog/2014/04/24/an-osi-layer-model-for-the-21st-century/

I'm quite found of his proposal but standards are hard to shatter, but again, the OSI layers are about theory and not something that products depend on.
So many tracing tools it makes me dizzy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GsMs3n8CB6g
https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa16/conference-program/presentation/linux-4x-tracing-tools-using-bpf-superpowers
http://www.brendangregg.com/ebpf.html
http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2016-03-05/linux-bpf-superpowers.html

A walkthrough the countless tools for Linux tracing (sys/kernel/debug/tracing/). You certainly won't be able to remember them all so I've linked a blog post going through them.
ICCCM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inter-Client_Communication_Conventions_Manual
https://tronche.com/gui/x/icccm/sec-4.html
http://menehune.opt.wfu.edu/Kokua/Irix_6.5.21_doc_cd/usr/share/Insight/library/SGI_bookshelves/SGI_Developer/books/Motif21_PG/sgi_html/ch18.html

If you've never heard of that then it's time to read.
The magic system rescue keys
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_SysRq_key

If you've never knew about that then it's time to learn about this Linux kernel rescue mechanism (The kernel should be compiled with support for it).

Random

Remember the bullshit generator
http://www.andrewdavidson.com/gibberish/

So here's another one of those.
A processor specialized in special effects
http://www.cpushack.com/2017/09/30/processing-the-page-turn/

I never knew this had to be done this way.
The bittorent proto
http://jonas.nitro.dk/bittorrent/bittorrent-rfc.html
http://www.kristenwidman.com/blog/33/how-to-write-a-bittorrent-client-part-1/
http://git.nixers.net/libgbt/

The RFC is simple enough to grok and demystifies torrents, moreover this can get you started on helping with libgt.

Thoughts

"The Internet is not for sissies." -- Paul Vixie

Contribute

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nixers newsletter issue | 2017-09-29 00:00:00 | 42

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

What you can learn from systemd
https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/ProcessKillingTrick

This subtle trick to kill all processes, be sure to read the comment on the article as they are insightful. Also, be sure to follow this person's blog as it's always full of high quality content.
Systemd in user space
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Systemd/User

Running the well-known daemon manager to run your user-level automations.
And its ilk
https://dvdhrm.github.io/rethinking-the-dbus-message-bus/

But this article takes a brighter look and innovates this old dog tackling every bug in the 6yo (and more) tracker.
Live music by coding it
http://meta-ex.com/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MexnBunH_g
http://peisik.untergrund.net/engines/

"It's the website of an old SonicPi band. these guys used to make live music by coding it", I didn't like the music at all but the concept is interesting. If you don't know about the demoscene check the documentary.
A forensic version of dd
http://dcfldd.sourceforge.net/
http://www.forensicswiki.org/wiki/Dcfldd

It adds the ability to compute hashes of the data on the fly amongst other things, which is nifty when doing analysis. The dcfl stands for "Defense Computer Forensics Lab".
Malloc source
https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20170914/
http://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V7/usr/src/libc/gen/malloc.c

The origin and the literal source for V7.
Doing things the hard way
http://eradman.com/posts/screencasting.html

Screen recording is a pita and screen casting even more, it's slow and inefficient, let's see how to do it in a nifty way on obsd.
Don't use PGP? Why?
https://medium.com/@thegrugq/the-zen-of-pgp-6f55d44657dd

The confusion between the PGP and the GPG implementation aside this is not bad, though I don't quite agree with his point.
Low level graphics
http://betteros.org/tut/graphics1.php

fbdev from scratch, drm from scratch, X11 requests from scratch.
What kind of tools are new to the hacking distro
https://medium.com/hack-with-github/tools-on-github-that-have-made-it-into-kali-2017-2-fc2affc636e0

Time to find out about new script and nifty tools.

Random

Is that scenario possible
https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2017/09/12/the-backdoor-threat/

Not really, but it's a nice thought experiment.
Podcast on how to read a scientific paper
http://www.virology.ws/2012/04/06/how-to-read-a-scientific-paper/

If you've ever struggle with the details of a scientific paper then you need to listen to this.

Thoughts

Those are sentences that have resonated a lot with me the past few days.

To worship a phenomenon because it seems so wonderfully complex is to worship your own ignorance.
If a phenomenon feels complex, that is a fact about our state of knowledge, not a fact about the phenomenon itself.
Complexity is a property of questions, not answers.

Contribute

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nixers newsletter issue | 2017-09-22 00:00:00 | 41

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Unix Review Columns
http://www.stonehenge.com/merlyn/UnixReview/col01.html

From what I've seen those are exclusively related to using Perl for Unix administration. There are some cool tips to learn here.
A well known blog
https://zedshaw.com/2017/08/26/what-if-it-worked/
https://zedshaw.com/

A very opinionated blogger... I like the guy, he's straight forward!
Another unix horror recovery case
http://ghewgill.livejournal.com/30239.html

I never get tired of reading about how someone can get out of trouble.
Almost everywhere but not POSIX
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procfs
https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-fs/2011-February/010760.html

It's always fun to go back and read in depth about some basic concepts.
Rewriting from scratch original unix tools
https://learnto.computer/screencasts/bsd-cat

Quick screencasts going through some of the simple and original Unix tools (echo, cat, etc..)
What do you find under inode 2?
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/198673/why-does-have-the-inode-2

A little trivia question that leads to reading more about inodes.
More generic CS trivia
https://keon.io/cs/computer-scientists-trivia/

This one is about memory and size. Keep your mind up-to-date.
Related to the above... Filesystems
http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/OSTEP/file-implementation.pdf

This is a chapter of a larger book about filesystems and the details that need to be thought about when implementing one. It goes through some of the POSIX API needed and why cache is so important. It was a good read for my future podcast which has been, oh for so long, delayed.
Not really unix but close and soon will be
http://theembeddedboard.review/a-reimplementation-of-netbsd-using-a-microkernel-part-1-of-2/
http://www.minix3.org/

"An operating system is said to be reliable when a typical user has never experienced even a single failure in his or her lifetime and does not know anybody who has ever experienced a failure". Too good to be true.
Laptop support
http://www.pixelmonkey.org/2017/09/01/lenovo-linux
http://ww2.unixresources.net/linux/lf/16/list/200311.html

Finding the right laptop or getting a random one and hoping it works, whichever suits you.

Random

Know yourself via questionnaires
http://www.yourmorals.org

A website where you can find a lit of common and acknowledge personality tests.
Wiki interface
http://www.wikiwand.com/en/

This is a wrapper to modernize the wikipedia interface.
The empire strikes back
http://bradfrost.com/blog/post/facebook-you-needy-sonofabitch/

YAAFA: Yet again another facebook article.

Thoughts

I ran killall cat to kill all the stray cats (pardon the pun), which surprisingly took several seconds but cleaned everything up nicely.

Keep up with your projects, whatever those are, and if you don't have any then replace down time with one.

Have a wonderful week everyone!

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nixers newsletter issue | 2017-09-15 00:00:00 | 40

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

This dude loves to take metaphors too far
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/12/metaphor-for-the-day.html

...And yet he nails it... Wait... What?
Erotic systemd
https://blather.michaelwlucas.com/archives/3005
https://blather.michaelwlucas.com/

You may remember this guy from a previous newsletter. He was the one that opened a discussion about the assholes in Unix communities and also had a nice article about PAM. Well, this time, he's taking it a bit far. I haven't read that book and I won't spend a dime on it but just checking out what this achieved is hilarious.
Some Unix humor
http://rkd.zgib.net/3132/c0034.html
http://www.cs.uni.edu/~mccormic/humor.html
https://aphyr.com/posts/75-unix-wizard

Three great jokes related to Unix. That one in the middle is a treasure, I highly recommend to cheer you up.
More on jokes
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/26/business/media/26link.html?mcubz=3

Explaining that explaining a joke is killing the joke, imagine when you even have to say that!
High quality gem
http://learnlinuxconcepts.blogspot.in/

I've stumble upon this by sheer luck but oh boy I'm happy I did, it's full of well polished content.
Just ed
https://sanctum.geek.nz/arabesque/actually-using-ed/

I never really got to learn ed or ex the right way, and it turns out that it's not as mystic as I thought it would be.
A remake of make
http://bashdb.sourceforge.net/remake/

This is simple, this is straightforward, I like it. Give it a go.
Jingle bells
http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Terminal_control/Ringing_the_terminal_bell#UNIX_Shell

Many ways to ring it.
My bsd sucks less than yours (re)
https://www.bsdfrog.org/pub/events/my_bsd_sucks_less_than_yours-AsiaBSDCon2017-paper.pdf

A relapse of issue 20170415.
And BSD for the Linux guys and gals
https://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/rants/bsd4linux/01
https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/articles/explaining-bsd/comparing-bsd-and-linux.html

Put away the immature arguments and have a read at those sane documents.

Random

Opt out of ads
http://optout.aboutads.info/

I don't know if it works or not, it probably doesn't but it makes you feel good when those progress bar run and tell you that you aren't infected.
Aple UX design thoughts
http://asktog.com/atc/the-third-user/

Hey there Apple fan, this is for you, right in the random section.
To go along with UX...
https://www.theuncomfortable.com/

...we have real-life interfaces!
This saddens me
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/10/world/americas/brazil-amazon-tribe-killings.html

Other than humans doing inhumanes things to other humans what really bugs me is that we've lost a source of alternative reality, the "what ifs".

Thoughts

nobody needs to know but yourself

You can be content just within you.

Let's hope this newsletter makes you smile!

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nixers newsletter issue | 2017-09-08 00:00:00 | 39

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Linux instructor evel tricks
https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxadmin/comments/1x8s0b/evil_linux_instructor_tricks_or_how_to_torture/

Some teachers enjoy torturing/challenging students. Maybe it's pasrt of their job.
Solaris end of life
http://rabbs.com/uuasc/SOLARIS_PPC
http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2017/09/04/the-sudden-death-and-eternal-life-of-solaris/
https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=2156

That's it, no more Solaris development but only lifeline support.
Backup of the future
https://camlistore.org

This go project aims at syncing and backing up anything, it's a "content adressable file storage" (files named by their hash) that syncs with remotes and generate "views" (FUSE filesystems) of the storage based off searches of the content. Which sounds super cool.
This is genius, why didn't this exist before
https://crontab.guru/

Ever had trouble with cron syntax, then this is for you.
Filesystem buffer
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sync_(Unix)
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/336627/when-is-there-a-need-to-flush-caches-in-linux

Explicitly force to flush it all down but be sure to read about the drawbacks.
...And be sure to know the difference between a block and a sector
http://www.unix.com/man-page/FreeBSD/8/fdisk/
http://www.unix.com/man-page/All/8/blockdev/
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/14409/difference-between-block-size-and-cluster-size

Here are some good commands: blockdev --getbsz /dev/sda and fdisk -l.
Remember those talks about Unix forensic, well this is related
https://isc.sans.edu/forums/diary/Finding+Privilege+Escalation+Flaws+in+Linux/19207

This article points in the direction of a bunch of scripts that do some reconnaissance, fetch info in a system, to check if it has been compromised or if someone has done privilege escalation.
Automation
https://automatetheboringstuff.com/
https://www.learnenough.com/command-line-tutorial

The python book is for beginner but I love the interactive approach. The second one is: Learn Enough Command Line to Be Dangerous is an introduction to the command line for complete beginners, the first in a series of tutorials designed to teach the common foundations of "computer magic". I also love the fun way in which the command-line-tutorial book is written, it's very good for beginners.
Perl as init
http://tech-blog.cv-library.co.uk/2017/08/31/perl-as-pid-1-under-docker/

Under docker you can do a bunch of weird stuffs, this one is an example, then you have to clean up. It also brings back the discussion about init that is so recurrent on IRC.
Memory and optimizations
http://careers.directi.com/display/tu/Understanding+and+optimizing+Memory+utilization
https://blog.frankel.ch/you-not-compiler/

Is optimization evil? What if we become cyborgs, are we still not compilers? That first link is overwhelming, I've had it in my link-list for a while but was afraid to read it all until now. Good luck with that everyone! I highly advice listening to the podcast about processes before tackling this if you aren't familiar with memory. It's actually perfectly explained and I love the explanation of the tools and proc in the end.

Random

In need of a website to understand a process that should be simple
http://www.deletefacebook.com/

Soon we'll have groups that meetup anonymously to talk about their Facebook addiction... Wait, does it already exist?
Doom - behind the music
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4FNBMZsqrY

How a genius composer handles his work.

Thoughts

Sometimes I wonder if guests are present at the table when they are obsessing about photographing everything they eat, one time a guest suggested I change the colour of the plates (from white to black) because he said the photographs would look better. – Massimo Bottura

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nixers newsletter issue | 2017-09-01 00:00:00 | 38

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

This was fun
https://cmdchallenge.com/

It has been a long time since I've practiced my shell skills. Try this challenge to refresh your memory.
Tock-too - TOCTTOU
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_of_check_to_time_of_use

This is one of the oldest trick in the book. If you've been following this newsletter for a while you'd have already read a bunch of attack vectors based on this race-condition hack.
When you messed up there's someone to put you back on track
http://ohshitgit.com/

A small page to remind you that when you fuck up you can always fix things up. Big life lesson here!
Emulate straight on your phone
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.sourceforge.bochs
https://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1389700
https://github.com/lubomyr/bochs

OpenBSD, Plan9, HarveyOS, TempleOS... if they can run in a virtuallized environment, they can run on android too now.
Mini Heart attacks and small deaths
https://javascript.info/ninja-code

Maybe I should take the combination "small death" back as it's synonym with orgasm... Let's just say that it's the reverse in this case. Someone should definitely build a code obfuscator that uses everything mentioned in that article.
Makefiles, Ohoh those Makefiles
https://matthias-endler.de/2017/makefiles/
http://nullprogram.com/blog/2017/08/20/

One article that frightens you and another that calms you. Actually both aren't frightening and are very well explained, read them in sequence and you'll see.
Simple question but interesting answers
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/35851/whats-the-difference-of-dmesg-output-and-var-log-messages
https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-kernel-logging-apis/index.html
https://www.mjmwired.net/kernel/Documentation/trace/ring-buffer-design.txt

The Linux kernel documentation is a bit overwhelming but enjoyable to skim through. I should probably redo the podcast about logs with more depth. I particularly like how straight forward the ibm article goes through the Linux kernel logging mechanism.
Eric Raymond just being Eric
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=7427

Now brace yourself for next year week-in-the-terminal because this year didn't attract many. So standup soldiers and get ready from now, it's never too late.
Undefined behaviour (a relapse)
https://blog.regehr.org/archives/1520

Hek, the other day I was fixing a bug in a java code where there was an undefined behavior while casting from Byte to byte[], I just imagine how hard it can be to work on C projects that face the whole world in production-mod and not just hobby projects. Sure C is fun but it's hard to make it solid. This list is so extensive... and why do I know about most of those when I only do C for fun, this should be left to compiler developers, but in C-land it isn't (Just do sanitization with your compiler... Or maybe not, it might break).
All those parts of histories we don't know about
https://gist.github.com/MakeItGreatAgain/68dd92442c1f427f2edecc6c3135c892#file-motd-md

It's always enlightening when this happens, we use things daily but don't know why they are the way they are.

Random

Childhood to adulthood reminder
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acme_Corporation

This is used everywhere as the fake-corporation defacto name.

Thoughts

For even better randomness, let your cat walk on the keyboard.

On a side note, I've created a page that you can use to browse the old entries of the newsletter: http://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

I hope you're enjoying it as much as I'm enjoying putting this together!

Contribute

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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 issue | 2017-08-25 00:00:00 | 37

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Sed homepage
http://sed.sourceforge.net/

This is the first time I visit this wonderfully well made page. Too bad some of the links are dead.
Monolithic vs micro
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.os.minix/wlhw16QWltI/XdksCA1TR_QJ

A criticism and explanation of what microkernel do better than monolithic kernels.
Yet another systemd article
http://www.steven-mcdonald.id.au/articles/systemd.shtml

Learn from history and don't repeat the same mistakes. This is a continuation from the series of articles we've already shared about systemd so be sure to read all the content before attacking this one.
Updates, updates, they're hot and they sell fast
https://www.dragonflydigest.com/2017/08/21/20127.html
http://9front.org/releases/2017/08/01/0/
https://www.mirbsd.org/permalinks/wlog-10_e20170810-tg.htm#e20170810-tg_wlog-10

Some new stuffs are shipping, new mksh, USB3.0 support for 9front and HAMMER2 for dfbsd amongst others.
Do we really have to say it again?
https://www.tablix.org/~avian/blog/archives/2017/08/on_piping_curl_to_apt_key/

I've been seeing some of those pasted on IRC lately, watch out! He gives a remediation to one of the issue which is nice (checking a key before importing it, common sense?).
What's that key for, why is that key used here?
https://dave.cheney.net/2017/08/21/the-here-is-key

If you've been reading about the history of terminals this shouldn't be surprising to you.
Certificate revocation management
https://www.gnupg.org/documentation/manuals/dirmngr/

I didn't know this was part of the gnupg suite. This is quite nifty and the server is very Unix-oriented with SMTP-like syntax. Though I've had issues using it in a real setup.
The background "pixmap" is stored in an Atom
https://hamberg.no/erlend/posts/2011-01-06-read-current-x-background-to-jpeg.html

This code is so insightful and well written at that.
Permission quirks or feature?
https://ervinb.github.io/2017/08/16/casually-removing-root-files/

Was a bit surprising to me but it makes sense... Well, does it? Checkout the podcast about special files (https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=2052) maybe that can give a clue about hardlinks.
zsh configs from scratch
https://zanshin.net/2013/02/02/zsh-configuration-from-the-ground-up/

That's how you make the ricing legends rise up from their graves (IRC).

Xero's Weekly Ricing Tips

did you know there are multiple terminal multiplexers? features like persistence, multiple windows, and session sharing are the common features sets. the big three all can be customized with at least a statusbar.

screen - the prototype. hardstatus is the variable you want for customizing the statusbar.
tmux - the archtype. status-right and status-left configure it's statusbar.
dvtm - the leanest. uses dvtm-status is an add on statusbar.

if you like premade or configurationless setups:

mtm - as simple and streamlined as they get.
byobu - a suite of enhancements for screen and tmux
neercs - an ansi art style "windowed" multiplexer
twin - "Textmode WINdow enviroment" a full text only wm setup

Random

Learning a new language
http://morpho.cs.hi.is/
http://morpho.cs.hi.is/docs/Morpho.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fj%C3%B6lnir_(programming_language)

A "funny" (really) looking language along with its documentation and its predecessor. It even has pointers/references!
One inspiring talk a day keeps the psychologist away
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCvmsMzlF7o

I've enjoyed this presentation and maybe you'll enjoy it too.
Neuromarketing and AI
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuromarketing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuromancer

Is it really the best to give the users what they always prefer? Isn't like a mother distributing surveys to her children after every meal.. After a while they would only get "icanhascheezburger". I guess AI would do a better job than big data.
This is what it is called
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symmetric_multiprocessing

And be sure to listen to the podcast about processes if you have no clue what that is.

Thoughts

If you're dreaming or complaining, it's the same shit. It means you're just not doing shit.

Contribute

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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 issue | 2017-08-18 00:00:00 | 36

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

pr https://docstore.mik.ua/orelly/unix3/upt/ch21_15.htm

One of those wonderful classic unix command.
Linux internals on devices
http://www.makelinux.net/ldd3/chp-3-sect-2

This is targeted at device writers but can still be easily graspable by most.
Do you need a blank line after the shebang?
https://www.in-ulm.de/~mascheck/various/shebang/#details

The #! is a wonderful hack that still lives on to this day.
Badass C programmers
http://www.underhanded-c.org/_page_id_2.html

To think this was sponsored by the NTI (Nuclear Threat Initiative).
This is my best finding of the week
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Android_tethering

I needed to share a wifi-hotspot with my machine and didn't know that USB-tethering was possible. This is a big relief!
Vi and Vim
http://thomer.com/vi/vi.html
http://www.hugodaniel.pt/posts/2017-08-12-vi-is-not-vim.html

This is how written content on the internet has degraded over the years: From well polished and respected to rapid rants and attacks to "bloatwares" (but hey it's just my opinion).
One backup a day keeps the headache away
http://www.mikerubel.org/computers/rsync_snapshots/

A document discussing rsync and backups, commands we should already all have played with.
Dark is the history of X11
https://keithp.com/~keithp/talks/xarch_ols2004/xarch_ols2004.pdf

A paper regarding a re-architecture, or more like a generic review, of X11. I highly recommend it.
Doom to kill apps
http://psdoom.sourceforge.net/
https://gideonred.com/dockerdoom/

I like the idea and there's even an AUR package for it (https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/psdoom-ng/).
Don't be afraid of gdb
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PorfLSr3DDI

A small presentation about debugging using gdb. I really had no clue about the TUI...

Random

Science!
https://stanmed.stanford.edu/2017spring/how-mens-and-womens-brains-are-different.html

I just wanted to bump this because why not?
Beethoven kicks asses
http://www.classicfm.com/composers/beethoven/guides/daniel-steibelt/#
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qT8cBX893ic

An article along with a reconstitution of how the best in town shows the small dogs how to rule.
More on digital identity
https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2017/07/02/beyond-public-key-encryption/

If you've been following this newsletter for some time you would've noticed that I've been adding links related to digital identity, some philosophical and some technical. This one is about the crypto future.

Thoughts

Concentrate all your thoughts upon the work at hand. The sun's rays do not burn until brought to a focus. - Alexander Graham Bell

Contribute

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nixers newsletter issue | 2017-08-12 00:00:00 | 35

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Linux - Am I SSD or not?
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=1308835ffffe6d61ad1f48c5c381c9cc47f683ec

Here's the relevant commit adding a kernel parameter that shows if a storage device is rotational (HDD) or not (SSD).
A typical sys-admin story
https://www.ivankuznetsov.com/2010/02/no-space-left-on-device-running-out-of-inodes.html

This is the kind of subject that you need to grasp, otherwise when you run into the issue you are left wondering for hours why it's happening. Here the disk isn't full but it says it's full.
Store Bash history in Sqlite3
https://www.outcoldman.com/en/archive/2017/07/19/dbhist/

Not a fan of adding sqlite into the mix but I can sympathize with having large shell history files that you might want to keep track of.
Loop device
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loop_device
http://bochs.sourceforge.net/doc/docbook/user/loop-device-usage.html
https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?mdconfig
https://linux.die.net/man/8/losetup

An example of how to setup a loop device. The boschs project itself is interesting, this needs to be checked too.
udev rules
http://reactivated.net/writing_udev_rules.html
https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/udevadm.html

I've been creating simple udev rules lately and was studying how this could be done. So let's all refresh our memory together.
pthread scheduling on FreeBSD and Linux
http://www.icir.org/gregor/tools/pthread-scheduling.html

Get down to the low level scheduling you can apply to threads and learn how they differ between FreeBSD and Linux (threads as processes).
Pentesters need of interactivity through nc
https://blog.ropnop.com/upgrading-simple-shells-to-fully-interactive-ttys/

This discusses how to initialize a terminal manually using raw mode and terminfo so that you can have an interactive session through a simple telnet connection.
Guess who wrote this
https://www.wired.com/2000/04/joy-2/

It feels weird that this was written 17 years ago, the same discussions are still taking place today.
Github comic
https://0x0.st/9G
https://education.github.community/t/github-for-robotics-comic-book-soft-copy/6189

This is a strong PR move, so much investment in pulling this... Just the number of times the word "Github" is mentioned is insane.
Another demystification article
http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2017-08-08/linux-load-averages.html

Ever wondered what the number in the uptime meant?

Random

Click-Baiters
https://medium.com/the-mission/the-enemy-in-our-feeds-e86511488de

A must read article that leaves you pondering about the click-economy.

The terror was far more contagious than the virus itself, and had the perfect network through which to propagate — a digital ecosystem built to spread emotional fear far and wide.
A podcast I've been truly enjoying
http://letsknowthings.com/

Let's continue with the awesome content. I've been following this podcast for a while and it's been a great journey. Highly recommended.
Implementing your own crypto lib
http://loup-vaillant.fr/articles/implemented-my-own-crypto

A summary article of a personal project to implement a crypto library.
The busy trap
https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/30/the-busy-trap/

I was suppose to share this in an old issue but the link got mixed up.
Bring utf-8 to life
https://ianrenton.com/blog/adventures-in-emoji/

Now that's something I admire!

Thoughts

All models are wrong, some models are useful. Try to look at where the models converge. That's where I find the truth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_models_are_wrong

Contribute

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nixers newsletter issue | 2017-08-04 00:00:00 | 34

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

The algorithm behind rsync
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rsync#Algorithm

Ever wondered how rsync was so efficient. It uses a simple algorithm for calculating the difference and the chunks it has to synchronize.
File hierarchy trouble makers
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/99159/is-there-an-algorithm-to-decide-if-a-symlink-loops
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1897186/detecting-loops-in-symbolic-links-c-programming

The name of the error "thrown" is a bit hackish, that's the least I can say.
A crypto guy is memorized by escape sequences
https://corvuscrypto.com/posts/back-in-my-day

I didn't know RFCs where distributed like that, never payed attention, but it's amazing.
Dear old vain teaches us yet again
https://www.uninformativ.de/blog/postings/2017-04-02/0/POSTING-en.html

Yet another link discussing X-clipboard, this one approaches the technical side.
Don't be fooled by the domain name
http://www.economist.com/node/2724348

This is a small summary of the philosophy behind the success of Unix.
Allocating big blocks
https://source.tizen.org/documentation/reference/bmaptool
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14063046/fallocate-vs-posix-fallocate

Those are two tools/commands to manage/allocate "chunks of space".
Securelevel
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Securelevel
http://man.openbsd.org/securelevel.7

I keep getting impressed by the smart mechanism that some BSDs have in place for security/limitations.
Weird acronyms
https://kb.iu.edu/d/abnd

Yes, the names had to be short and obscure.
SSDs will mess you up
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trim_(computing)
https://wiki.debian.org/SSDOptimization
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Solid_State_Drives

No more spins means that you have to think about the whole logic in another way.
It's time to turn it off
https://github.com/alexanderepstein/Sandman

Having trouble sleeping, heavy eyes, then this is for you!

Xero's Weekly Ricing Tips

fonts: don't just install some magic font package, take the time to acutally grok how the fontconfig works:

venam: And be sure to read/listen to the podcast about fonts: https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=2065

Random

Game theory
http://ncase.me/trust/

John Nash would've been proud of this example.
Make it hard to comment
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/nrk-norwegian-news-site-comments-read-story-understand-post-quiz-questions-a7607246.html

In these days and ages it seems like trolls have it hard.
Boring
https://blogs.lt.vt.edu/ece2524/category/boring/

A student thoughts about his programming classes.
Small hack because of certificate transparency
https://www.golem.de/news/certificate-transparency-hacking-web-applications-before-they-are-installed-1707-129172.html

Could that be considered a side-channel attack?

Thoughts

It is easier to port a shell than a shell script. - Larry Wall

On a side note, the survey we started last week is over and I've compiled the results in this thread: https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=2149

So be sure to check it out and bump it with all your comments.

...And thanks for loving this newsletter so much!

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

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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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 issue | 2017-07-28 00:00:00 | 33

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Public-Secret https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/66468/are-ssh-keys-and-pgp-keys-the-same-thing
http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/zesty/en/man1/pem2openpgp.1.html

So, this works and you can do this.
I love the name lanana
http://www.lanana.org/docs/device-list/devices-2.6+.txt

Always wondered if there was some entity giving the major and minor numbers on Linux?
For the C fans
http://zserge.com/blog/c-for-loop-tricks.html

Macros are great, aren't they, but did you hear about commas?
Know thy enemy
https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/7/html/System_Administrators_Guide/chap-Managing_Services_with_systemd.html
https://www.loggly.com/ultimate-guide/linux-logging-with-systemd/
https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/systemd-essentials-working-with-services-units-and-the-journal

For some systemd is the end of the world, for others it's a window of opportunity. If you haven't got accustomed to what systemd is then you can't even side yourself on this argument. This series of links should get you started.
The Commute Deck: a homebrew Unix terminal for tight places
http://boingboing.net/2017/06/16/cyberspace-is-everting.html

Hardware hacker delights.
Latency, second round
https://danluu.com/term-latency/

Remember when we shared the article about snappiness(<isitsnappy.com>), this is the spiritual continuation.
Advantages of the Unix hierarchy
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/61659/what-are-the-advantages-of-the-unix-file-system-structure

Everyone can think of quirks and disadvantages (in sum: the internet) so it's nice to read about advantages and comparisons. Can you list your own?
Colossal Cave Adventure
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossal_Cave_Adventure
https://github.com/Giganitris/Colossal-Cave-Adventure-port/

Are you into old-school gaming?
Your cool blog to follow
https://boredwookie.net/
https://boredwookie.net/blog/ssh-statistics-gathering-project-2017-results

Another cool dude to keep an eye on (we have so many eyes).
BBR
https://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_4.9#head-1e42ba62fbcb6f54176e9e31c69bf22be06aab0f
https://lwn.net/Articles/701165/
http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3022184
https://www.cyberciti.biz/cloud-computing/increase-your-linux-server-internet-speed-with-tcp-bbr-congestion-control/

If you want to be the next Google (or dream by comparing your business to it). If you were wondering the full acronym is: Bottleneck Bandwidth and Round-trip time.

Xero's Weekly Ricing Tips

tmux: programmatically change tmux tab names in your shell aliases

alias tshrug="printf '\033k┐(\`-\`)┌\033\\'"
alias tlol="printf '\033k\(^0^)/\033\\'"

Random

JS is strong
https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2017/02/15/bypass-aslr-protection-javascript/

This isn't directly related to Javascript though. It discusses how ASLR can be bypassed by finding the location of the page that holds the MMU cache hierarchy.
Firefox is proud
https://metafluff.com/2017/07/21/i-am-a-tab-hoarder/
https://lobste.rs/s/spnuin/new_firefox_ridiculous_numbers_tabs

The article and the interesting related discussion.

Thoughts

Figure 3.3: On-disk layout of a typical UNIX file system. Figure is not drawn to scale, and files may appear larger in your rear-view mirror than they do in real life.

On a side note, we're running a the first <nixers.net> self assessment after 6 years: https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=2144

The answers so far are captivating. If you haven't answered it, please do before the end of next week.

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

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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Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
If you want to help with the forums server fees you can send something to my patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

nixers newsletter issue | 2017-07-21 00:00:00 | 32

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Why are dotfiles hidden?
https://linux-audit.com/linux-history-how-dot-files-became-hidden-files/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_file_and_hidden_directory

Just a hack, as with everything...
Safety & Daemons
https://davmac.wordpress.com/2017/06/29/safety-and-daemons/

An enlightening discussion about daemons, init, and safety.
Dev lifecycle
http://www.davidlubar.com/cycle.html

Those jokes never get old.
zsh customization
https://medium.com/@NikitaVoloboev/pretty-and-fast-shell-97ea870f2805

He says it's fast but I'm not really sure about that.
Unix in the library
http://litablog.org/2014/11/why-learn-unix-my-two-cents/
http://www.alandmoore.com/blog/2011/11/05/creating-a-kiosk-with-linux-and-x11-2011-edition/

After reading those two links I've got a lot of respect for librarians.
If you're into petite
https://www.tecmint.com/petiti-log-analysis-tool-for-linux-sysadmins/

This might be better than jounalctl.
This will blow you away!
http://relax-and-recover.org/

But you'll be able to recover.
HN-like controversy
http://lemire.me/blog/2017/07/15/what-is-modern-programming/

We know but still, why not share it?
Maturity
http://linuxcodemonkey.blogspot.com/2016/10/sheep-and-goats-bullies-and-allies.html
http://blog.aurynn.com/contempt-culture-2
Cool projects
https://github.com/naelstrof/slop
https://github.com/cosmos72/twin

Two fascinating projects you should checkout.

Xero's Weekly Ricing Tips

compton: add a subtle fading effect to your windows in your ~/.config/compton.conf

fading = true;
fade-delta = 5;
fade-in-step = 0.03;
fade-out-step = 0.03;
no-fading-openclose = false;

Random

If you haven't seen it
https://blog.haschek.at/2017/how-to-defend-your-website-with-zip-bombs.html

This is a great hack.
The busy trap
https://medium.com/@NikitaVoloboev/pretty-and-fast-shell-97ea870f2805

Histrionic exhaustion.

Thoughts

2007: “You are the product.”
2017: “You are the training data.”
j_s

Contribute

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nixers newsletter issue | 2017-07-14 00:00:00 | 31

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Like the Darwin Award but for Unix
http://porkmail.org/era/unix/award.html

Those times when we get pedantic.
Core Utils
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/core_utilities

There's everything in the ArchWiki, isn't that nice?
Cache and virtual mem stuffs
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16365440/how-to-prevent-c-read-from-reading-from-cache
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/36907/drop-a-specific-file-from-the-linux-filesystem-cache

This is rather fun to think of.
And virtual mem stuffs too
https://hoytech.com/vmtouch/

This is also rather fun to think of.
SUDO_PROMPT
https://www.computerhope.com/unix/sudo.htm

Sudo has a lot of nifty configs, refresh yourself about them.
Those 1337 kids with their nmap
https://blog.cagedmonster.net/avoid-os-detection-openbsd/

Avoid getting blast away by some OS exploit using this trick.
Remember when we mentioned ninja builds
https://euroquis.nl/bobulate/?p=1600

Well, this is the answer why they are so cool.
Jokes
http://unixgeeks.org/humor/cyberlegends.html
http://unixgeeks.org/humor/mightbehacker.txt

To lighten up the mood in-between online arguments.
This is how you get HN and Reddit karma
https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2014/09/msg00782.html

Sadly, yes, it's through click-baiting.
Real men and real Unix
https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2014/09/msg00782.html
https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/articles/explaining-bsd/what-a-real-unix.html

The legend says the argument still rages to this day.
Extra extra
https://arcan-fe.com/2017/07/12/the-dawn-of-a-new-command-line-interface/

Again because everyone has seen it already.

Xero's Weekly Ricing Tips

shell: colored hexdump

hexdump -C <filename> | GREP_COLORS='mt=01;33' grep '^........' |
GREP_COLORS='mt=01;34' grep ' ..' | GREP_COLORS='mt=01;33' grep '|*.|'

Random

Hey they at least speak two languages
http://www.engrish.com/

...But that doesn't mean it isn't hilarious.
More Crypto?
https://www.johannes-bauer.com/compsci/ecc/

Someone asked for more crypto stuff, and I also enjoy those.
This freaks me out!
https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-examples-of-games-or-movies-funded-by-the-US-military

I'm sure there are more but I can't find them, help.
As if you were working
http://www.pippinbarr.com/words/2017/06/14/narrative-framing-in-it-is-as-if-you-were-doing-work.html

Best flight simulation ever.
Git crypt
https://www.agwa.name/projects/git-crypt/

Ever wondered if binary files (git-lfs) wasn't enough?

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)

Contribute

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nixers newsletter issue | 2017-07-07 00:00:00 | 30

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Let me put my finger on that
https://i.redd.it/w33bxfl6bu6z.jpg
http://www.rajivshah.com/Case_Studies/Finger/Finger.htm

Times when it has to get physical.
Remember that dude who had the booting jingle at the library?
https://freedompenguin.com/articles/how-to/sound-effects-linux-application-launchers/

Well now you can be just like him!
Block ads
https://fattylewis.com/blocking-ads-by-dns-using-bind/
https://github.com/conformal/adsuck

This doesn't always work but it's better than nothing.
Come on, everyone saw it
https://ma.ttias.be/giving-perspective-systemds-usernames-start-digit-get-root-privileges-bug/

Still, we never know, someone might be living on his own island.
Blit
http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/blit/blit.pdf

The research paper presenting the Blit interface.
Before the pretty face
http://basalgangster.macgui.com/RetroMacComputing/The_Long_View/Entries/2010/9/25_A_UX.html

Great article.
Evolution Diagram
https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20170510/

This was posted a while ago, it's for those who haven't seen it.
Interesting concept
http://www.popcornlinux.org/

A bit tedious to setup (according to the installation guide) but very cool.
More Pike Wave?
https://www.reddit.com/r/catvhurtssogood/comments/43hdqo/catv_hurts_so_good/

You know, we know!
Unix Ricing
https://github.com/BenjaminHCCarr/PropagandaTiles
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_(desktop_backgrounds)

The best walls are blurred or tiles, those are some epic ones.

Xero's Weekly Ricing Tips

vim: change the style of the vertical split in your ~/.vimrc

set fillchars=vert:▒

some interesting values: │┃┆┇┊┋╎╏!|╿╽║█▓▒░

Random

More retro stuff
http://koney-scanlines.tumblr.com/

For all those who enjoy this.
Best 404
http://www.plinko.net/404/tribute.htm

That's imaginative.
Cool blog about game dev by an old member
https://blog.scrimpycat.io/

If you're into graphics and games then this will captivate you.

Thoughts

Code is not sentient, nor does code have a spiritual presence... yet. - Haden Odom

Contribute

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nixers newsletter issue | 2017-06-30 00:00:00 | 29

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Keeping track of the CVEs
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/5m2u7n/packages_vulnerability_scanner/

When you don't (or can't) trust the updates from your packagers.
RS-232 and others
http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/things-every-hacker-once-knew/

Eric Raymond discusses old and interesting stuffs. We mentioned RS-232 and other terminal quirks in the related podcast about terminals.
The Big Bang
https://lwn.net/Articles/397442/

Hey, for some the Earth was created 6K years ago, so let's not make them sad by including the real creation time.
A week in the TTY
https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=2134

Leave your DE and WM behind just for a week.
Rules are made to be broken
https://drewdevault.com/2017/03/15/How-I-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-C.html

Some tips for writing in C, take whatever tips suits you.
Pledge(2)
http://man.openbsd.org/pledge

Wonderful and fascinating system call I wish was available on more platforms.
COBOL giving rise to nice poems about turture and hate
http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/ewd498.html

This list will shock you, you won't believe number 18 is true!
Sorting things is an art
http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/tinysort.html

...And here are some beautiful pieces by a respectable artist.
A journey to write a Unix shell
https://indradhanush.github.io/blog/writing-a-unix-shell-part-1/

Follow this blog to progressively learn about how to build a shell from scratch.
Screensavers literally saved screens from burning/decoloring
https://kmandla.wordpress.com/2009/05/05/at-long-last-a-console-screensaver/

...But it's not very true today.
Bonus one
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/base-files/+bug/1701068
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/base-files/+bug/1637800/comments/10

Ubuntu is weird!

Xero's Weekly Ricing Tips

shell: xero's disks alias

alias disks='echo "╓───── m o u n t . p o i n t s"; echo "╙────────────────────────────────────── ─ ─ "; lsblk -a; echo ""; echo "╓───── d i s k . u s a g e"; echo "╙────────────────────────────────────── ─ ─ "; df -h;'

Random

History is weird
https://resobscura.blogspot.com/

The blog of a researcher.
Let's think about design in a postmodernist way
http://www.pierrebuttin.com/work/brutalist-redesigns/

And this is the result!
Get pwned real easy
https://github.com/berzerk0/Probable-Wordlists

Build your combo lists with those.
Digital passports
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/283473746_The_magic_passport

Great paper.

Thoughts

They have computers, and they may have other weapons of mass destruction.

On a side note, this newsletter should now go straight to your inbox and not be flagged as spam anymore. I've fixed some issues related to the domain name.

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
Share your point of view about the newsletter.
Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
If you want to help with the forums server fees you can send something to my patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

nixers newsletter issue | 2017-06-24 00:00:00 | 28

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Setuid... again!
https://mattmccutchen.net/suidperl.html

Those stories are always fun.
wmutils but different
https://github.com/mlde/lead
https://github.com/mlde/californium

The mlde project aims at creating blocks for an XDG/freedesktop compliant desktop environment. The sub-projects have the name of chemical elements, which is nice. It's still a WIP, so keep your eyes on the progresssion or contribute to it.
jkl special
https://github.com/nikolas/github-drama

This is love, this is life.
This is why NES games are awesome
http://isitsnappy.com/

We used to fight for framerates.
Makefiles or Ninjafiles?
https://github.com/ninja-build/ninja
https://ninja-build.org/

I didn't quite get what are the advantages of ninja builds but they still seem cool.
When experts answer stupid questions
http://unix.ittoolbox.com/groups/technical-functional/unixadmin-l/create-a-new-text-file-with-a-standard-header-5964500

This happens all the time, experts take stupid questions seriously and it gives some awesome results.
C standards
https://lobste.rs/s/xclqh2/c_standard_committee_continues_its
http://www.yodaiken.com/2017/06/16/the-c-standard-committee-effort-to-kill-c-continues/

When you rely on unexpected behavior and that unexpectation becomes expected - what can go wrong?
Adventures
http://fluca1978.blogspot.com/2013/02/my-story-about-using-linux.html

This guy's path to using Linux.
You need a name to compete
http://www.learnbchs.org/

This is an alternative stack to the popular LAMP (Linux , Apache, MySQLI, PHP), the BCHS (BSD, C, https, SQlite.)
Unix commands from a data-scientist eyes
http://www.gregreda.com/2013/07/15/unix-commands-for-data-science/

It's always interesting to know how others explain things you handle daily.

Xero's Weekly Ricing Tips

figlet/toilet: if you plan on creating your own figlet fonts, step one is reading the spec : http://www.jave.de/figlet/figfont.html

there are lots of requirements people often miss (e.g. headerline values, required characters, etc)

Random

Gods of garbages
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2017/jun/16/gods-of-garbage-fabrice-monteiro-the-prophecy-polluted-environment-in-pictures

What have we become.
Goddess Spreadsheet
https://putanumonit.com/2017/03/12/goddess-spreadsheet/

This issue is related to gods.
This is not clickbait
http://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/wildideas.html

This smells and look like it but it's not it.
SID
http://simulationcorner.net/Sidplayer/
http://impulseproject.info/

If you're into demoscenes and chiptunes then you'll love those.

Thoughts

any sufficiently advanced kind of work is indistinguishable from play. - Seb Paquet

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
Share your point of view about the newsletter.
Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
If you want to help with the forums server fees you can send something to my patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

nixers newsletter issue | 2017-06-17 00:00:00 | 27

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Can you feel the love of Unix
http://www.joewright.org/uft/index.html

This ought to be better than the guy from templeOS.
ArchLinux satisfaction survey
http://rsbsd.org/~andrewb/ArchFuckup.pdf

Ever felt like you had something to say.
Shell hacks
https://www.shellhacks.com/

To be fair they aren't really hack but a bunch of quick articles about simple howtos.
Multiseat
https://www.x.org/wiki/Development/Documentation/Multiseat/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiseat_configuration

Just look at that setup, don't you want to be as cool?
You've got the style
https://stuff.mit.edu/afs/athena/astaff/reference/4.4lite/usr/src/admin/style/style
https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/standards.html
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/5780

Well... Everyone nags about their own prefered styling.
Daily dose of OpenBSD
http://blog.tintagel.pl/2017/06/09/openbsd-daily.html

This person got dedication and is pushing his skills forward. If you've got some time pass by and say hi or even participate in the code reading session, I'll definitely try, on #openbsd-daily on the Freenode server.
PikeWave by jmbi/ibmj
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvMx5umwtXc

That's... not bad at all!
Why can't I remember the keybinds
https://linux.die.net/man/1/top
https://www.lifewire.com/linux-top-command-2201163

Top is one of those commands I just can't remember the keybinds of. This week let's force ourselves to remember it. Also the newest version of top has some nice fancy bars and colors.
NIST P-256
http://credelius.com/credelius/?p=97

Don't worry, you don't have to know much about crypto to enjoy this. France has their own curve too: FRP256, and the next version of openssl has brainpool (openssl ecparam -list_curves).
Your weekly blog
http://zork.net/~st/jottings/all_pages.html

Here's a nice weblog so that you can have your weekly dose of fun discovering.
One extra because everyone has seen it
https://www.reddit.com/r/unix/comments/6gxduc/how_is_gnu_yes_so_fast

Probably the most upvoted post on /r/unix since its inception.

Random

Implicit
https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/

Fire up your inner SJW.
General purpose computing
http://opentranscripts.org/transcript/coming-war-general-computation/

A fascinating talk.
Digital Identity
https://pages.nist.gov/800-63-3/
https://www.forgerock.com/

Big and important words in there and the concept is being brought to life as we speak.
Looking for some 1337 3P34K?
http://c0ffee.surge.sh/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexspeak
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_number_(programming)#Magic_debug_values

People were generating custom PGP keys the other days, they should've gotten some inspiration from here.
Internal security audit
http://www.verelox.com/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14522181

Those guy certainly didn't pass the ISO27K wink wink.

Thoughts

You are not your ideas

https://joneaves.wordpress.com/2014/11/20/you-are-not-your-ideas-a-strategy-to-lessen-the-blow-of-rejection/

A reflection on ideas and why some don't feel rejection.

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nixers newsletter issue | 2017-06-10 00:00:00 | 26

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Special files and perl
http://www.perlmonks.org/index.pl?node_id=244368

Great story about why you need to take the time to document yourself before doing anything. (related: https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=2052)
"Everyone loves Benchmarks"
http://www.osnews.com/story/4867/Sun_Versus_Linux_The_x86_Smack-down/page3/
http://phoronix.com/
https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E18752_01/html/817-5093/fsoverview-43247.html
https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/7/html/Migration_Planning_Guide/sect-Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux-Migration_Planning_Guide-File_System_Formats.html

A benchmark from 2003 comparing Solaris UFS and RHEL ext3. Both of those OS have switched their default filesystems today, so it's interesting to look at the past. Usually Phoronix is the place to go when it comes to benchmarking but they used their own suite which doesn't always give some insights about how to do benchmarks yourself. The article also teaches you some benchmarks tricks, which is neat.
she bang!
http://www.unix.com/tips-and-tutorials/36711-whole-story-usr-bin-ksh.html
http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2017/05/30/16

What's up with that #! at the top of files? This is a highly recommended article. The exploit listed in part3 is still very usable but inside sudo check that second link to make sure (We shared a previous link in issue 20170311 related to this under the name "Bash is secure")
Shells again
https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-linux-shells/

Yet another discussions about the history of shells.
PHP shells used the right way
http://blog.malwaremustdie.org/2014/05/a-journey-to-ftp-abused-sites-story-of.html

Special xero. The website is phenomenal.
Visualize and debug
http://pythontutor.com/visualize.html#mode=edit
https://github.com/vim-scripts/Conque-GDB

It's nice to step through what is going on.
All in one page
http://devdocs.io/

This website regroups the documentation from many places, think zeal but in a browser (Which removes the point but why not).
Awesome persons
http://norstrulde.org/
http://blog.plover.com/oops/three-errors.html

Time to follow some new blogs.
Screen vs Tmux
https://wtanaka.com/node/8136

Terminal multiplexers and "reattacher" are fun topics.
Git scavenger hunt
https://www.git-game.com/

That's to complement the current one on the forums. I've played it a bit and am currently at level 8.

Random

It's leaking from everywhere
https://robinlinus.github.io/socialmedia-leak/

Fast close the sink.
Dockercraft
https://github.com/docker/dockercraft/blob/master/README.md

How insane and meta can it get?
Nature & algorithms
http://www.cleveralgorithms.com/nature-inspired/index.html

I read that book a long time ago (and forgot most of it now). It's a great read or "skim through".

Thoughts

The June events started so don't be lazy and join in.

Standards and specs are hard to read but repeat after me:
"Specs are good." - A random user on stackoverflow

Why a coding standard at all? Because of your brain - A shell script

Contribute

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nixers newsletter issue | 2017-06-03 00:00:00 | 25

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

The June Events!
https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=2114

Come on, check this out.
malloc never fails on Linux... or does it?
https://scvalex.net/posts/6/

This is the kind of article where someone digs into a question they've been asking themselves and then slowly find an answer.
Pointers, pointers, and pointers
https://talloc.samba.org/talloc/doc/html/group__talloc.html
https://github.com/blog/1422-tcmalloc-and-mysql
https://www.design-reuse.com/articles/25090/dynamic-memory-allocation-fragmentation-c.html
http://www.hboehm.info/gc/simple_example.html
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/39945334/c-alternative-to-malloc

Memory allocation, heap, stack, local variables, alternatives to malloc, memory fragmentation, garbage collection. If those are the things you find interesting then be sure to checkout the links above.
Communication is key
https://www.martinfowler.com/bliki/UbiquitousLanguage.html

A quick thought article about something we do everyday but may not pay attention to: socially conceptualizing together.
The Tizen OS
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tizen
https://developer.tizen.org/documentation/ux-guide/ui-overview

This is popular in some countries, take a look if you don't know about it.
Variadic and exec family
https://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/How-Variadic.html
http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man3/stdarg.3.html
http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man3/exec.3.html
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4204915/please-explain-exec-function-and-its-family/37558902#37558902

I used to have a bit of difficulty memorizing what every one of the exec function did, now that I get the thing about environment variables, path, and variadic functions I totally get it.
Linux kernel .config file
https://stackoverflow.com/a/27322524
https://superuser.com/questions/287371/obtain-kernel-config-from-currently-running-linux-system

Every Linux distro chooses to store their kernel config in a different place, learn about them.
WIP
https://halfwit.github.io/2017-05-18/Log.html
https://github.com/mortie/hconfig

Community members project highlight!
It's cool to build your own hardware piece. Half has been working on one and I thought I would share. mort on the other side has been working on a new style of config to json.
Another WIP?
http://runbsd.info/

This showed somewhere on the net. It's someone preparing resources and history of the BSD systems.
D'you like LFS and busybox?
http://landley.net/aboriginal/

Well this mini project I just discovered has moved to mkroot. If you're into building minimal toy environment then you'll enjoy those scripts.
To BSD ascii or not BSD
https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-questions/2015-February/264356.html
https://wiki.freebsd.org/OliverFromme/BootLoader
http://bsd.ascii.uk/

That email thread is fun to read, highly recommended.

Random

Practical color theory
https://tallys.github.io/color-theory/

In need of a new terminal colorscheme, this might help.
This proves BSD is not UNIX
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mereological_essentialism

wink wink
We all crave for the patterns and blurs
http://cs.gettysburg.edu/~duncjo01/archive/patterns/
https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=78

Whatever suits you.

Thoughts

"That's what it feels like when debugging your code."
- Suddenly sputtered someone

Contribute

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nixers newsletter issue | 2017-05-27 00:00:00 | 24

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Awk2Perl
http://perldoc.perl.org/a2p.html
http://perldoc.perl.org/index-utilities.html

Any fan of Perl around? There are a bunch of useful utilities in there.

Against DRM & Privacy tips
https://spreadprivacy.com/privacy-tips/home
http://www.defectivebydesign.org/

We've got your back... I think so.

Big O cheat sheet
http://bigocheatsheet.com/

I've been refreshing my algo skills and stumble upon that link.

C wizardry and sweet programming hacks
http://nullprogram.com/

I keep this guy's blog bookmarked and keep peeking at it from time to time. He's always up to something astonishing.

Another blog
https://linuxtidbits.wordpress.com/

Here's another blog. There are articles about fun shell scripts and others about test with hardwares.

Decentralized internet
https://blockstack.org/

Apparently it had some papers backing its theory on the site. Let's see where this goes.

Short commands, but why?
http://www.catonmat.net/blog/why-unix-commands-are-short/

The answer is simple, ergonomics.

Cryogenic on Unix
https://criu.org/Main_Page

This tool is Linux only. It's for checkpoint and restore of program states. Imagine it as a "longer" suspend.

Moreutils
https://joeyh.name/code/moreutils/

Coreutils but on steroids. My favorite amongst those is vidir.

Everything dies!
http://royal.pingdom.com/2012/04/24/irc-is-dead-long-live-irc/
http://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2017/05/11/527829909/the-mp3-is-officially-dead-according-to-its-creators
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0C1p5pL01I

Those "this tech is dying" articles are a bit abhorent. Mp3 isn't dead, it's free now. IRC is not dead, it's niche now.

Random

Welcome to the palace of the mind
http://codon.com/a-lever-for-the-mind

A long & extremely interesting article about the mathematical constructs in our heads.

That weird dude with a lot of electronics in his house
http://gadgetzz.com/

The latest article is about an automatic "babel fish"-like translator, check it out.

Embarrassment and knowledge
http://amasci.com/amateur/physerm1.html

Why we should all accept that we might be wrong.

Related to the above
http://www.pointerpointer.com/

I showed that to someone and they said it was "lame".

Thoughts

"Someone that cannot respect another's journey hasn't traveled very far himself." - A random guy on youtube

Contribute

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nixers newsletter issue | 2017-05-20 00:00:00 | 23

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Meet your soul mate today
https://distrochooser.de/

This questionaire might help you choose the best "distro" for you. Now imagine if Google could do that with all the tracking information it has accumulated over the years!

More .de domains
http://homecomputer.de/pages/f_gallery.html
http://8bit-museum.de/

A fan of retro museums?

Another rant?
https://opensourcehacker.com/2012/07/10/whats-wrong-with-unix-people/

Yes and this one is small so you can read it.

Skeletons in your closet
http://www.linfo.org/etc_skel.html
https://www.linux.com/blog/whats-wrong-etcskel

I keep wondering at which point this was added in useradd but can't find any date, it's in POSIX. In older Unix accounts were created using passwd (http://man.cat-v.org/unix-6th/1/passwd) or by changing the /etc/passwd directly.

Mommy where do manpages come from?
https://manpages.bsd.lv/history.html

When your child asks the question.

Unix and reading
http://theody.net/elements.html

A wonderful article pondering about a common state of mind, intellectual view of the world, between Unix users.

Bash the bash for bash the bash
http://redsymbol.net/articles/unofficial-bash-strict-mode/
https://blogs.janestreet.com/when-bash-scripts-bite/

Lots of talk, a lot of it.

Bootstraping issues
https://asrp.github.io/blog/bootstrap_chicken_or_egg

Not directly linked to Unix but makes us think of the conundrum.

Special tejr
https://aadrake.com/command-line-tools-can-be-235x-faster-than-your-hadoop-cluster.html

"Everyone" knows that awk kicks asses - Everyone should!

A gui for gdb
https://github.com/cs01/gdbgui/

The hate of GUI on the side, this is really nifty.

Xero's Weekly Ricing Tips

it's a .vimrc file that makes you look like a ninja. it's the absolute minimal setup. no colors, no highlights, no messages, no status bar, nothing. just text.

"ninja vimrc http://xero.nu set nocompatible set modelines=0 set shortmess+=I set noshowmode set noshowcmd set hidden set lazyredraw set noruler set laststatus=0 syntax off filetype off

Random

Face recognition
https://face-api.sightcorp.com/demo_basic/

It's interesting how you can have a "default" emotions when not having emotions... And a bit frightening. That explains first impressions.

Gallery of programmer interfaces
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1MD-CgzODFWzdpnYXr8bEgysfDmb8PDV6iCAjH5JIvaI/preview#slide=id.g1da0625f1b_0_56

Different way of interacting and programming a machine.

Awesome GAMES for kids!
https://codecombat.com/
https://github.com/michelpereira/awesome-gamesofcoding
http://worrydream.com/LearnableProgramming/

I'm glad we can have those these days, excellent way for a 8-12yo to have fun and learn something along the way. It's fascinating that this generation of kids and beyond will learn programming just like learning to read and write. We'll see how it changes how people perceive life. The last link is about explorable explanation.

In need of farts?
http://theonion.github.io/fartscroll.js/

We've got your back with this fart generator.

Star Wars intro creator
https://brorlandi.github.io/StarWarsIntroCreator/

Now that we have skew incorporated in css3.

Thoughts

Solving today's problems with yesterday's technology, someday.

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nixers newsletter issue | 2017-05-13 00:00:00 | 22

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Desktop poptarts specs
http://www.galago-project.org/specs/notification/

Ever used notify-send and wondered how it worked. Now you wish you didn't know.

CHAOS MONKEY!
https://github.com/Netflix/SimianArmy/wiki/Chaos-Monkey

"When in need of a system to randomly fuck you up" - Quote writen by a non-sentient being stuck inside the infinite monkey theorem.

translate("douane") == "customs"
https://github.com/evilsocket/opensnitch
http://douaneapp.com/

Regulate the traffic between your softwares and the world.

arc4random
http://arc4random.com/
http://www.openbsd.org/papers/hackfest2014-arc4random/mgp00001.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RC4

I'm not a crypto expert but I sort of get how arc4random works now... or maybe just a bit. Always belittled by the crypto gods of OpenBSD!

A long rant on Unix
https://kukuruku.co/post/the-collapse-of-the-unix-philosophy/

Yet another rant, a good one though a bit immature. I agree with most of the points he put forward. I guess the more you understand something the more you see its faults and the more you can expect the unexpected from it. That's still better than a black box.

The computer chronicle - the rebirth of UNIX
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yas19evqcT8

That nasty old operating system that used to be considered too difficult for most people to use.

Alliances
https://books.google.com.lb/books?id=tRIEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA38&lpg=PA38&dq=hp+sun+dec+at%26t&source=bl&ots=d6iCWqomzX&sig=VzVD5dgtEgnnPKakFFFvG8qI0og&hl=en&sa=X&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=hp%20sun%20dec%20at%26t&f=true

Related to the previous video, it's funny when you look at the marketing aspect of Unix, the feud (Unix) wars and partnership between companies, some partnering with others you wouldn't guess. For example in the last video you had the Sun386i which ran DOS and UNIX on the same machine and using the OpenLook design by Sun partnering with AT&T plus some licensed technology from Xerox corporation. You also had the HP360 using the OSF Motif tech from both DEC, IBM, and HP. Then the Mac2cx by NextStep with the MAC user interface which was the cheapest of them all, unlike today's Apple product.

Smart computer related comic that is not xkcd
https://consolia-comic.com/

Where are you rocx, you can draw better than that dude.

Hey, why not?
http://rahme.info/advanced-cd-commands

A simple command which also has advance usage.

"Learning From Terminals to Design the Future of User Interfaces"
https://brandur.org/interfaces

The title says it all, this is an article about UX.

This is life
http://imgur.com/a/JzeK3

Yo!

Random

Death to bullshit
http://blog.deathtobullshit.com/

Such a nice website.

Defcon docus
https://media.defcon.org/Hacking%20Related%20Documentaries/

A bunch of free documentaries from the defcon guys.

Map of the world

Ascii is great.

In need of a notepad?
https://notepad.pw/abl6wun1

We've got your back + spellcheck.

Generate a diceware password http://world.std.com/~reinhold/diceware.html

This was shared in a discussion.

Thoughts

By the way: I was a mediocre writer whenI started out. Explaining technical concepts is hard. Coming up with good examples takes time, and explaining a diicult concept takes time. So it’s easiest to gloss over the hard stuf. I thought I was doing a pretty good job, until ater one of my posts got popular, a coworker came up to me and said, “I read your post and I still don’t understand this.” I still had a lot to learn about writing.

Aditya Y. Bhargava

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nixers newsletter issue | 2017-05-06 00:00:00 | 21

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Afraid your regex won't work?
http://regexr.com/

...Then test it on this website!

A rationale on what's wrong with tiling wms
http://xahlee.info/linux/why_tiling_window_manager_sucks.html

This guy puts into words the whole reason why I've switched away from tiling. And also his blog is pretty amazing too, so check that out.

Manage your ssh config
https://github.com/thcipriani/sshit

This is a nifty little script, and the animation on the project page is hilarious.

Another programmer's parable
http://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks

Yet another one, and a good one at that.

Trillions of dollars depend on a rickety cobweb of unofficial agreements and...
https://www.ietf.org/tao.html

Well, but we have some sort of standards too, you know.

Before ddos was common
http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/back-dead-simple-bash-complex-ddos

A shell script that saved the day - the comment section is gold.

A better way to remember them
https://www.pixelstech.net/images/fun/normal/http-return-code.jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HTTP_status_codes

Having trouble remembering the HTTP status?

Unix Nuts
https://docstore.mik.ua/orelly/unix3/unixnut/index.htm

"Unix in a nutshell", a reference book about Unix stuffs.

UGU - Unix Guru Universe
https://web.archive.org/web/20090527133758/http://www.ugu.com/sui/ugu/show?help.beginners

A lot of the links are dead but some are not, and that's important. I love those oldies, check this one for example: https://web.archive.org/web/20090302112430/http://freeengineer.org:80/learnUNIXin10minutes.html it's another one of those "learn everything in one page".

Breaking Smart
https://breakingsmart.com/en/

A wonderful online book about why we are where we are today and how to continue moving forward.

Random

Polish your "cyber" skills
https://github.com/joe-shenouda/awesome-cyber-skills
http://wechall.net/
https://sourceforge.net/projects/mutillidae/

A bunch of safe resources to practice.

When you're expecting the weird
https://eukaryotewritesblog.com/2017/02/03/when-youre-expecting-the-weird/

When you become expert in a domain you loose the ability to be surprised.

Hey, if you've read the above visit this one
http://en.inkei.net/tits/

Sometimes it's worth it to pursue random ideas.

Thoughts

"Chris Dixon captured this guerrilla pattern of the ongoing shift in political power with a succinct observation: what the smartest people do on the weekend is what everyone else will do during the week in ten years."

Contribute

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nixers newsletter issue | 2017-04-29 00:00:00 | 20

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

The Ubuntu casper fs
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2566121/what-is-casper-rw-loop-file-and-why-do-i-need-it-to-make-saving-persistant-on-us
<http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/zesty/man7/casper.7.html

Read up about how they approached the live USB problem.

The initrd/initramfs conundrum
http://www.landley.net/writing/rootfs-intro.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initrd
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initramfs
http://www.landley.net/writing/rootfs-howto.html
http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/view/svn/postlfs/initramfs.html
https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/filesystems/ramfs-rootfs-initramfs.txt

Let's educate ourselves about how to utilize the ram as a filesystem on Linux.

tmpfs/ramfs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tmpfs
https://www.jamescoyle.net/knowledge/951-the-difference-between-a-tmpfs-and-ramfs-ram-disk
http://netbsd-soc.sourceforge.net/projects/tmpfs/
http://www.softpanorama.org/Solaris/Disks_and_filesystems/solaris_tmpfs.shtml
http://www.thegeekstuff.com/2008/11/overview-of-ramfs-and-tmpfs-on-linux
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.92.707&rep=rep1&type=pdf

That is to link the last entry from the previous list of links adding some links that are generic about ramdisks.

And the classic cpio
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cpio
http://www.computerhope.com/unix/ucpio.htm
http://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/filearchiv.html
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/1213

The very simple and elegant Unix tape archiving program.

The joys of code
http://thejoysofcode-blog.tumblr.com/random

In need of a programmer meme to lighten up the mood?

How the SSH port number got assigned
https://www.ssh.com/ssh/port

This small article from the author of ssh was in the news and it deserves the reading.

"A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace"
https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence

If you haven't read it already.

One liners
http://pement.org/sed/sed1line.txt
http://www.pement.org/awk/awk1line.txt
http://www.catonmat.net/download/perl1line.txt
http://zzapper.co.uk/vimtips.html
http://www.bashoneliners.com/

I'm not a particular fan of one liners as I always get lost in the list and don't find what I need from them but it might be useful to others.

If it works why change?
https://kmandla.wordpress.com/2010/07/11/as-long-as-it-works-keep-using-it/
http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/plan9.html

The whole reason why plan9 hasn't taken off...

For the retro fans
http://www.typewritten.org/Articles/

This website has a lot of interesting manual and documentation of old machines and softwares.

Random

Another newsletter
http://theskimm.com

This is a newsletter I recently signed up to, it summarizes recent events that have been happening in the world.

Social Networks
https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/04/22/against-facebook/
https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/04/22/against-facebook-comparison-to-alternatives-and-call-to-action/
http://particularvirtue.blogspot.com/2017/04/on-social-spaces.html
https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/04/23/help-us-find-your-blog-and-others/
http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20170417-the-addiction-thats-worse-than-alcohol-or-drug-abuse
https://blog.mrtnrdl.de/why-i-quit-facebook-and-why-im-keeping-the-account-activated/
https://stallman.org/facebook.html
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2015/04/08/the-essence-of-peopling/

This keeps popping up everywhere! Are you on social networks? Why? Let's discuss that. What's a social network?

The party parrot cult
http://cultofthepartyparrot.com/
https://github.com/jmhobbs/terminal-parrot

Everyone wants to join it, I've heard they're distributing free beers.

The malware museum
https://archive.org/details/malwaremuseum&tab=collection

Bring your family and friends on weekends, I'm sure they'll enjoy!

Thoughts

"That which can be destroyed by the truth should be." — P.C. Hodgell
http://lesswrong.com/lw/o2k/flinching_away_from_truth_is_often_about/

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

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

nixers newsletter issue | 2017-04-22 00:00:00 | 19

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Goosebumps - Linux version
https://www.linux.com/news/spooky-linux-urban-legends

Brace yourself for some horror stories.

I HATE Linux!
http://whylinuxisbetter.org/
http://boycottlinux.org/

To continue with the horror stories, there are many arguments on the internet about Linux and it's purity as a Unix system. Some of those arguments are just to be discarded, others are serious. Like any criticism if it's not constructive you have to take it lightly.

But then Linux can be UNIX if you take it seriously
https://blog.opengroup.org/2017/02/14/do-one-thing-and-do-it-well/

All that is required is that it stays stable for the enterprise world by following the POSIX and Open Group standards. The EulerOS 2.0 and K-UX 3.0, derived from Red-Hat prove that, even though they aren't derived from the original UNIX and under the hood have a different architecture.

And UNIX can be not so UNIX too
http://mkremins.github.io/blog/unix-not-acceptable-unix/

An article that goes to the root of the issue.

Cool admin scripts
http://www.brendangregg.com/specials.html

Some hilarious oldies scripts that could possibly be useful, such as this one: http://www.brendangregg.com/Specials/mkzombie_example.txt

Turbo button
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_button
https://superuser.com/questions/630769/why-do-some-old-games-run-much-too-quickly-on-modern-hardware
http://www.cpukiller.com/

The turbo button was one of those weird thing of the past that doesn't mean much these days.

Run everything on the web!
http://paradoxxxzero.github.io/2014/02/28/butterfly.html
http://www.admin-magazine.com/Articles/Shell-in-a-Browser
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rcm/papers/usenix00/usenix00.html
https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/usenix99/full_papers/miller/miller_html/node3.html

To continue on with our series of links about JS and the web, here's one that's not about emulation but about running a shell in the browser. Last time I've heard of that it was about pwning websites through web-shells. The last link, the research paper, gives another interesting side to the story.

Programming Gods
http://kingjamesprogramming.tumblr.com/

Programmers get pissed off a lot by useless semantics, etymologies, and epistemology. This is a fun way to put things back in perspective, which reminds me of the new-age bullshit generator (http://sebpearce.com/bullshit/)

Vim adventure!
https://www.passweird.com/

Last week I mixed up two links.. https://vim-adventures.com/ and passweird, sorry 'bout that fellows. Vim adventure is a great and really addictive way to learn about vim. Though, it's only free until lvl3.

Special OlaHughson
http://www.ponyos.org/

Please come back on the forums, we love you!

rocx rocks at skteches

A sketch related to one of the above links:
http://imgur.com/a/OBjVR

Random

Weird secrets
http://www.wtf-secrets.com/

Share the most wtf secrets you have.

Source code in movies
https://moviecode.tumblr.com/

Ever wondered what the code in movies really was.

This is for the lurkers out there
https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/04/09/youre-good-enough-youre-smart-enough-and-people-would-like-you/

Don't be shy to ask questions or contribute to conversations.

Thoughts

The art of not giving a fuck, "Ever watch a kid cry his eyes out because his hat is the wrong shade of blue? Exactly."

https://markmanson.net/not-giving-a-fuck

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

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

nixers newsletter issue | 2017-04-15 00:00:00 | 18

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Let's try to obfuscate shell script and de-obfuscate them back
http://www.datsi.fi.upm.es/~frosal/sources/shc.html
http://www.datsi.fi.upm.es/~frosal/sources/
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8256

Security through obscurity.

Wayland networking support
https://blogs.s-osg.org/wow-wayland-over-wire/

The big question of "should the Wayland protocol include networking support or should the Wayland compositor implement it?"

Desktop Management Interface (DMI)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desktop_Management_Interface
http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/linux-and-open-source/get-linux-and-freebsd-hardware-info-with-guide-to-commands/
http://www.thegeekstuff.com/2008/11/how-to-get-hardware-information-on-linux-using-dmidecode-command/
http://nixdoc.net/man-pages/FreeBSD/atacontrol.8.html
https://linux.die.net/man/8/dmidecode
https://linux.die.net/man/8/biosdecode
https://linux.die.net/man/8/vpddecode

atacontrol, vpddecode, biosdecode, dmidecode, get the info you want from the BIOS.

Milking a system
https://github.com/michaelforney/oasis
http://minimal.idzona.com/
http://linuxbbq.org/bbs/viewtopic.php?p=58540#p58540

So many minimal system, here are two new ones you can add to your list, and a link to pidsley from the linuxbbq community who always impresses us with his ricing. On a side note, Linuxbbq has a wonderful and thriving community.

The jurassic park OS
http://www.jurassicsystems.com/

Have fun trying this new Unix-like OS.

Public newsgroup
http://compgroups.net/groups/

"compgroups give users free access to computer public newsgroups."

Wotsit
https://web.archive.org/web/20090822014641/http://www.wotsit.org/
https://fileinfo.com/
http://filext.com/

Databases of file extensions and information.

A talk about FreeBSD and OpenBSD
https://fosdem.org/2017/schedule/event/my_bsd_sucks_less/

"My BSD sucks less" a talk that dives inside technical differences between FreeBSD and OpenBSD.

Let's setup a honeypot
https://sysdig.com/blog/fishing-for-hackers/

I always find those kind of reverse hacking/(script kiddie ddos botnet) post interesting, even though his post is more or less of a bragging about the sysdig utility, which is not that bad (http://www.sysdig.org/wiki/sysdig-examples/), you can get it from your distro's repo.

Building a text editor from scratch
http://viewsourcecode.org/snaptoken/kilo/

This goes along well with the book we shared some weeks ago "The Craft of Text Editing" (https://www.finseth.com/craft/), I read only half of that book, it was too much indepth for me. However some readers might find value in this and so I'm sharing!

Random

Get your own unique password
https://vim-adventures.com/
http://www.passweird.com/ (it was suppose to be that link)

Ever dreamt of having to remember a password and tell yourself "If only someone knew this."

Want to impress your coworkers?
http://www.dack.com/web/bullshit.html

Generate some "Web Economy Bullshit".

Your guide to the Gods!
http://www.godchecker.com/

Want to meetup with other compatible Gods in your region, checkout this website, it's the next-gen meetup.com.

The internet of ransomeware things
http://www.geekculture.com/joyoftech/joyimages/2340.png

A play on word with how the internet of things is "secure".

Thoughts

Yeah, but people still use this stuff - Tony Lawrence

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

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

nixers newsletter issue | 2017-04-08 00:00:00 | 17

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Parallelism in any Bourne shell
http://catern.com/posts/pipes.html
http://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/Pipe-Atomicity.html
https://www.gnu.org/software/parallel/

Mind boggling post about parallelism in shell pipelines.

Physical access security
http://mmit.nl/weblog.php?entry_id=1221578869&title=10-immutable-laws-of-security
http://askubuntu.com/questions/842070/how-is-being-able-to-break-into-any-linux-machine-through-grub2-secure
https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=1983

The ten immutable laws of security and why physical access means game over.

Space cadet keyboard
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-cadet_keyboard

The keyboard for the MIT LISP machine that inspired EMACS.

Interfaces for blinds
http://edbrowse.org/
<https://rawgit.com/CMB/edbrowse/master/doc/usersguide.html https://github.com/CMB/edbrowse/wiki
http://www.mathreference.com/

An ed-like interface to do many things. Mathreference is also edbrowse-friendly.

Stenography
http://www.openstenoproject.org/plover/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shorthand
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62l64Acfidc

On the topic of inputs, here's a writing method you should know about.

I'm under 20 jump points
http://dmitry.khlebnikov.net/2015/08/transparent-ssh-host-jumping-advanced.html

It's a pain to transparently jump through ssh hosts, this article discusses a method of removing some of the hassle.

Expansion & Globs
http://wiki.bash-hackers.org/syntax/expansion/globs
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~rc/classes/ksh/command_line_opts.html
https://www.mkssoftware.com/docs/man1/sh.1.asp#Word_Expansion
http://www.tldp.org/LDP/Bash-Beginners-Guide/html/sect_03_04.html
http://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/globbingref.html

Check your shell options and differences in expansion and globing.

Knowing your shell
https://hackernoon.com/usr-bin-time-not-the-command-you-think-you-know-34ac03e55cc3#.9wzkp52ak

which -a time, take some time to check the list of built-in commands in your shell.

Tony Lawrence
http://aplawrence.com/index.html
https://plus.google.com/113844487094333569134?rel=author

Yet again an oldschool wizard with a phenomenal blog.

The Z3
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z3_(computer)
http://www.nytimes.com/1994/04/20/news/20iht-zuse.html

"The world's first working programmable, fully automatic digital computer."

Random

Website obesity
http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm

A presentation about the modern web.

On a streak?
https://streak.club/

If you're the kind of person that needs accountability to continue their streak this website may help.

Minesweeper
http://nothings.org/games/minesweeper/

Advanced minesweeper tactics.

0days?
https://blog.hboeck.de/archives/882-Zero-Days-and-Cargo-Cult-Science.html
http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RR1700/RR1751/RAND_RR1751.pdf

Different views on 0days.

NO GOOGLES IN MY HOUSE!
https://www.google.com/settings/u/0/ads/plugin?hl=en

...and it's a dead link! But don't worry there are Firefox addons (Hey, you're getting away from Google so you're certainly not gonna start using Chrome) that can disable tracking such as beef taco, the builtin "opt out" mechanism in the settings, privacy badger, disconnect, or any EFF approved addon..

Thoughts

If you understand something, it is probably already obsolete - James Burke

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

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

nixers newsletter issue | 2017-04-01 00:00:00 | 16

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Linguistic view of the world
http://stts.se/egrep_for_linguists/egrep_for_linguists.html#SECTION00020000000000000000
http://world.std.com/~swmcd/steven/perl/linguistics.html

Manipulating language is an extensive subject, and unlike the researches in NLP those links are truly "Unix-relevant".

The mother of all demos
http://www.dougengelbart.org/firsts/dougs-1968-demo.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5PgQS3ZBWA

Doug Englebart is the father of HCI, go and raise up those poor 89 YT views.

A true beginner approach to Unix
http://rwet.decontextualize.com/book/unix/
http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Teaching/Unix/

The first link here is probably the best gradual approach to Unix I could ever find. Share it with your friends to see how it goes.

Unix in movies
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jeIA42Zwzz0

A collage of Unix clips found in various movies.

Emulators in JS
https://www.cambus.net/emulators-written-in-javascript/
<http://pdp11.aiju.de/ http://pigshell.com/v/0.6.4/

These days it seems like javascript is eating up everything, so why not emulate what could run on bare metal over javascript instead.

Having difficulties writing a manpage?
http://manpages.bsd.lv/

This is a beautiful, extensive, and visual guide/book to writing manpages. Keep this bookmarked so that you can use it as a reference next time you need it.

A 2017 paper about a precursor to pipes
http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/DTSS/commfiles.pdf

Doug McIlroy recently released a paper, it discusses communication files, which were a not well known and complext IPC tech. He also mentions the directed shell: https://www.dmst.aueb.gr/dds/sw/dgsh/

The Chinese got all metaphors right
https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&hl=en&ie=UTF8&prev=_t&rurl=translate.google.com&sl=auto&sp=nmt4&tl=en&u=http://www.unixreference.net/articles/misc/2009/0219/653.html&usg=ALkJrhgZkkFnqjuVFVAHIGcSCnb4Jd_X_A
http://www.holosonics.com/PR_TR100.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_from_ultrasound

You might enjoy this article if you're able to make sense of it.

Is there a hier standard for Android?
http://androidforums.com/threads/is-there-a-filesystem-hierarchy-standard-for-android.915347/

Read up to find the answer...

Explain your pipeline
http://explainshell.com

This website disects your command line into a human readable format.

Random

Dynamic Directed graphs http://ncase.me

A follow up on last week sharings about creativity, this website allows you to create dynamic directed graphs where you can explore the relation between the nodes live.

the phrack magazine
http://phrack.org/

The phrack hacking magazine has been ongoing since 1985 and still uses the same ascii format for releases, which is perfect for us. Most of the articles are technical ones but you can find philosophical ones such as: http://phrack.org/issues/69/6.html#article

Reverse engineering Tamagotchi
https://www.kwartzlab.ca/author/natalies/

Have you ever wondered what kind of softwares run on a Tamagotchi?

skeuomorphism
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5teG6ou8mWU

Thanks josuah for that wonderful link.

Thoughts

We all feel like newbies... and if you don't you're nuts!
Peanuts peanuts peanuts.

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

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

nixers newsletter issue | 2017-03-25 00:00:00 | 15

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Unix family tree
https://www.levenez.com/unix/unix.png
https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd/blob/master/share/misc/bsd-family-tree
http://www.gilesorr.com/images/blog/2015-12-02.wm.dot.svg
http://www.gilesorr.com/images/blog/2015-12-02.wm.neato.svg

Here's a Unix family tree, a FreeBSD family tree, and as a bonus, a window managers family tree.

The Metisse Project
http://insitu.lri.fr/metisse/
http://insitu.lri.fr/metisse/screenshots/
http://insitu.lri.fr/metisse/videos/

I've shared this project during the podcast about window managers (https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=2048), I keep coming back to it and want the readers to at least give it a glance if they didn't already. A lot of the videos are dead but the concepts still live.

Very small Unix
http://www.fuzix.org/
http://cowlark.com/2015-10-27-fuzix/index.html
https://www.linux.com/learn/intro-to-linux/2017/3/intel-edison-linux-maker-machine-matchbox

Small is beautiful... Now compare that 64KB with the 1GB in this 1x1.5inch machine.

FAQ on Unix
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/unix-faq/faq/part1/

A series of 7 parts on frequently asked questions about Unix, there's a lot of interesting ones in there.

Funny jokes about Unix
http://linuxshellaccount.blogspot.com/2009/06/bourne-shell-war-on-terror.html
http://linuxshellaccount.blogspot.com/2011/01/updated-post-arbsorption-of-knowledge.html

The whole blog is hilarious and well made, I applaud the guy who made it.

Unix Gallery
http://www.computerworld.com/article/3177286/linux/unix-computers-and-art-meet-face-to-face.html
http://www.unixgallery.com/

Unix can be art too - this is not what you think it is.

The craft of text editing
https://www.finseth.com/craft/

A book I started reading about the concepts behind building a text editor.

When proprietary software turns bad
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/why-american-farmers-are-hacking-their-tractors-with-ukrainian-firmware

A story why closed source can be dangerous to society.

The sysadmin Unixersal translator
http://bhami.com/rosetta.html

So many Unix flavors/distros that you need a translator between them.

Assholes
https://jacobian.org/writing/assholes/

An article about those guys... You know.

Returning a value from a shell function
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8742783/returning-value-from-called-function-in-shell-script

This is a very frequent question.

Another fantastic individual
http://roxlu.com/

This is yet another of those random stumbled upon website.

Random

Connecting Ideas
https://www.are.na/
http://qz.com/767812/millennial-whoop/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=coGpmA4saEk
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Century_Of_The_Self

Creativity is about mixing new stuffs together in interesting ways.

The internet Oracle
https://internetoracle.org/

Another one of those magnificent golden websites.

Eyeballs
http://jouire.com/eyeballs/

Finally a useful js library!

Matrix protocol
http://matrix.org/

No, this isn't the matrix you know but it's related. The matrix protocol tries to create a ubiquitous standard for anonymous communication.

Thoughts

"What we see depends mainly on what we look for." - John Lubbock

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

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

nixers newsletter issue | 2017-03-18 00:00:00 | 14

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Unix all the way
http://www.hioreanu.net/cs/cs552-unix.html

Probably one of the best document I've read about "Explaining the whole of Unix in one shot", he even uses the prompt "GREENSCREEN". I can't emphases how good this page is. The author is a Google Engineer and has also written a beautiful window manager ahwm ( http://www.hioreanu.net/cs/ahwm/ ) which is especially well documented.

Unix system call timeout
https://eklitzke.org/unix-system-call-timeouts
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13854530 (Dicussion on HN)>

Creating a timeout for a system call on Unix isn't very clean but isn't very necessary either.

Hacker Public Radio
http://hackerpublicradio.org

I've linked to anonradio.net before and this one is similar but technology oriented. You'll find a bunch of episodes on Unix there.

Internet scavenger hunt V3.0
https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=2074

z3bra started the third edition of the scavenger hunt.

Down to earth linux
http://downtoearthlinux.com/

A hilarious and well written blog about explaining "complex" Unix and Linux topics to newcomers.

Digital data hypochondriac
http://usefulstuff.io/2016/03/backup-strategies-for-digital-hypochondriac/

A story about digital data PTSD. we all cherish our data - so run your backups and think about having less ties with your machine. The author is a MacOS user so it'll only be relevant to the readers who are on this OS however I really like the description of the state of mind he got into which is the main reason I am sharing it.

Want to replace the Unix shell?
http://sange.fi/~atehwa/cgi-bin/piki.cgi/virtues%20of%20the%20unix%20shell

A great post about the virtues of the Unix shell and why it is the way it is.

Self extracting directory
http://makeself.io

A cross-Unix shell script which creates a compressed file (many format available) which can extract itself.

The legendary Unix hacker
http://www.lemis.com/grog/

He's got the beard, he got the years, here's an impressive fellow.

Original vi
http://ex-vi.sourceforge.net/

The original vi was based on ed, which was closed source. Now that ed was released under the BSD license we can test the original vi code.

Random

Why choose Unix?
http://www.unix-japan.co.jp/why-unix/

You would never guess why...

Interdisciplinary researches
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_Media_Lab
https://www.media.mit.edu/
https://www.santafe.edu/

To innovate you have to see beyond your closed field of study.

Thoughts

This is the issue number 13.

It is weird that we associate so much with numbers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/13_(number) some use it as a lucky number and others as an unlucky one. Many benign things are culture dependent.

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

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

nixers newsletter issue | 2017-03-11 00:00:00 | 13

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Android rewrite of libc
http://codingrelic.geekhold.com/2008/11/six-million-dollar-libc.html

If you were paid to rewrite glibc for embedded devices, how would it be. Staying away from GPL is a big thing for corps.

Staying POSIX shell compatible
http://www.etalabs.net/sh_tricks.html

Writing shell scripts is hard when you have to support POSIX shell, here are some tricks to make it easier. Keep that bookmarked.

Linters
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lint_(software)
http://www.shellcheck.net/
http://perlcritic.com/
https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/

In a previous issue we linked to the checkbashisms tool. Let's widen the scope to all cool linters.

Rules!
http://daemonforums.org/showthread.php?t=10
http://www.unix.com/misc.php?do=cfrules
http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/linux-forums-site-news-info/72476-linux-forums-rules.html
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Code_of_conduct
http://www.perlmonks.org/?node=How%20%28Not%29%20To%20Ask%20A%20Question#rules
https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/38922/

Code of conducts, rules, FAQ, README_BEFORE_FREAKING_POSTING, so many documents writen to deter people from doing stupidities (or what that group considers stupidity). Why not cat | sort | uniq those and take the best? Would it amount to "Don't be a jackass"?

The good, the bad, the ugly
http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/good_bad_ugly/slides.pdf

Slides of a presentation by Rob Pike about the Unix heritage.

A zoom into control characters and terminals
http://catern.com/posts/terminal_quirks.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_character
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc20

...And adding to this, before reaching the TTY the keybind has to pass by maybe some program, some terminal emulator plugins, and the shell. You can use the RFC as a reference for when you don't know what a control character is suppose to do. Use infocmp and script to debug those.

Terminals, mechanical keyboards, and mice
http://terminals-wiki.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
https://deskthority.net/wiki/Main_Page

Those wikis will fancy your exotic hardware needs.

Before free browsers
http://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/enabling/mosaic
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_(web_browser)
http://www.viola.org/viola/violaIntro.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ViolaWWW

Before Netscape all browsers were proprietary. Both of the ones I linked worked on Unix platforms.

Professional video editing on Unix
https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve
<https://www.lwks.com/index.php?option=com_lwks&view=download&Itemid=206&tab=1 https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/5o3hsw/the_current_state_of_video_editing_on_linux_2017/
https://screenlight.tv/blog/2014/09/01/what-is-the-best-video-editing-software
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_video_editing_software

Davinci Resolve 12.5, a professional and proprietary software for video editing, was recently ported to CentOS 6.x (Yeah, only one specific distro). I'm not into video editing but as I've read the state of professional video editing softwares on Unix is not so good.

Bash is secure
http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/74527/setuid-bit-seems-to-have-no-effect-on-bash#74538

zsh, sh, and ksh don't do that. bash is protective and I personally like that.

Random

Modular living
http://apis-cor.com/en/about/news/first-house
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpWjyZO2lPU
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seasteading
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modular_building

It really makes you think about how automated an free the world can become. From 1946 to today where we're dreaming of seasteading and modular houses built with 3d printers. What do you think?

Thoughts

Show me how you spend your day and I'll tell you what you care about.

http://ewanvalentine.io/how-to-never-complete-anything/>
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13816627
https://business.linkedin.com/sales-solutions/blog/g/get-your-score-linkedin-makes-the-social-selling-index-available-for-everyone

Why complicate things? The software industry and programmers of today are looking for too much achievements, stacking the "green blocks" on GH, looking for confirmation of their existence, checking graphs and statistics about their "progress", wanting to raise on the "SSI", social selling index.

Let's slow down a bit! Small changes for a small group is more valuable than running against titans

If it is useful to someone and kind of serves the purpose then that is enough for a start.

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

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

nixers newsletter issue | 2017-03-04 00:00:00 | 12

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Unix goes wild
http://www.defensecode.com/public/DefenseCode_Unix_WildCards_Gone_Wild.txt

A timeless piece about the misusage of the glob and shell expansions.

Gigantic resource for free progrmming books
https://github.com/vhf/free-programming-books

Isn't it wonderful that we live in an age where there are so many free information at our fingertips that we can't make sense of them.

In need of some ricing inspiration?
http://homescreens.org/

This websites regroups, in an artistic fashion, many original phone homescreens.

Fonts on Unix
https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=2065

There are not many articles going through the font stack and I think it's worthy to mention the podcast we had last week.

Ryan C. Gordon
http://icculus.org/

I don't really know who this guy is but he's earned my respect. His resume is orgasmic http://icculus.org/resume and he even taught me how to make mushroom burgers http://chef.icculus.org/ ... who knows it might be Gordon Ramsey's relative.

Why I switched X to Y
https://jeena.net/why-i-switchedfrom-osx-to-linux
http://rfwilmut.net/notes/palmtomac.html

Funny isn't it?

Shelldorado
http://www.shelldorado.com/shelltips/

The place to go to get your shell tricks.

File physical weight
https://github.com/dertuxmalwieder/fileweight

jkl won a bet by creating a tool to estimate the weight of a file.

Powerline - The ULTIMATE prompt/shell/whatever
https://powerline.readthedocs.io/en/latest/overview.html
https://github.com/banga/powerline-shell

Maybe you've heard the term "powerline" but had no idea what it was about. Now you know, is too much not enough?

Everything you need to know about PAM
https://blather.michaelwlucas.com/archives/2811
http://www.tuxradar.com/content/how-pam-works
http://wpollock.com/AUnix2/PAM-Help.htm
https://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/tag/pam
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-pam/index.html
https://lyngvaer.no/log/u2f-pam

The first link might be enough for you but you can go on with the rest if you wish to.

Secret softwares for productivity
https://web.archive.org/web/20071121013216/http://simon-cozens.org/programmer/secret-software.html

Some times ago it wasn't as frequent to share your special dots and scripts. Those are the one of the author of "Beginning Perl" and "Advanced Perl Programming".

Random

Exactitudes
http://www.exactitudes.com/index.php?/series/overview/

We are all similar in some sense, all following trends.

Spamminess
http://www.mail-tester.com/

Apparently not everyone knows about this wonderful service.

the oldest remaining webcam online
http://www.fishcam.com

Who'd thought that fish (cam) would live for so long...

Thoughts

Have you ever heard of futurists?

https://research.fb.com/prophet-forecasting-at-scale/?
https://venam.nixers.net/blog/philosophy/2015/08/12/futurists.html

That thought alone can lead you to cognitive dissonance.

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

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

nixers newsletter issue | 2017-02-25 00:00:00 | 11

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Need to plan your day?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_%28Unix%29
https://github.com/mank319/Go-For-It
http://todotxt.com/
https://projecthamster.wordpress.com/about/ (this is not pr0n)
https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Planner/

Some many programs to help you keep track of what you want to do. As for me a simple at(1) combined with notify-send is enough, what about you?

Markdown Previewer & Editors
http://www.mdcharm.com/
https://sourceforge.net/projects/retext/
https://github.com/axiros/terminal_markdown_viewer
https://github.com/joeyespo/grip
https://typora.io/
https://wereturtle.github.io/ghostwriter/

Again so many softwares doing the same thing, we need more comparative reviews/articles about them. I don't have any personal favorite, I would've liked to use terminal markdown viewer mdv but it doesn't seem to respect everything I'm looking for. Hopefully there are many in-browser markdown viewers.

Soviet Unix clone demo
https://astr0baby.wordpress.com/2016/10/17/soviet-unix-clone-demos/

In the 80s the URSS had their own DEC’s PDP11 compabible cpu and thus could run their own version of Unix-like OS derived from Unix Version 6.

The International Obfuscated C Code Contest
http://www.ioccc.org/

I can't read any of those but I enjoy the thought of it.

Want those OG gpg short keys
http://www.asheesh.org/note/debian/short-key-ids-are-bad-news.html

You may want your cool short key but beware of collision.

PAM Custom module
http://www.semicomplete.com/projects/pam_captcha

pam_captcha is the simplest pam module I've found and probably the easiest one that can be used to understand PAM.

The art of the command line
https://github.com/jlevy/the-art-of-command-line

"Master the command line, in one page", ostentatious title but worthy article.

Change your keyboard layout
http://hack.org/mc/writings/xkb.html
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/X_KeyBoard_extension
https://www.x.org/releases/current/doc/kbproto/xkbproto.pdf

The keyboard layout is handled at the X11 layer, I haven't been through the pdf about the protocol but you can still glance through it rapidly.

The best font dialogs
http://unifont.org/fontdialog/

I had never wondered about this topic before, are our current font dialogs designed in the most efficient manner? Now that the topic is brought to light I can't help but think of it everytime I choose a font in an application.

Unix History
https://www.levenez.com/unix/

A Unix history website, even though look oldish, that is still maintained (Last Update: January 29 2017).

Random

More Net-art
http://entropy8.com/

Another one of those cool net-art website.

The classic textfiles
http://textfiles.com

Unix is all about text files, so many text files to browse on that website.

DataErase
http://dataerase.tumblr.com/

The best of glitch art.

Offline Documentation
https://zealdocs.org/

No need to rely on the internet anymore.

Thoughts

We're brainstorming on the topic of "digital focus/attention studies and tools, stuffs that are truly scientifically proven"
https://titanpad.com/digital-focus-scientifically-proven-wiki
If you have some thoughts on that they would be greatly appreciated, hop in and edit the public pad.

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

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

nixers newsletter issue | 2017-02-18 00:00:00 | 10

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Freedom comes with a price
https://opensource.com/life/15/8/interview-ken-starks-texas-linux-fest

What happens when you loose the ability to speak and need free software.

Using find
http://mywiki.wooledge.org/UsingFind

A walkthrough the find utility.

Dates in calendar are closer than they appear!
http://maul.deepsky.com/%7Emerovech/2038.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Atomic_Time

In depth into 2038.

Choose firefox now?
http://robert.ocallahan.org/2014/08/choose-firefox-now-or-later-you-wont.html?m=1

Firefox is undergoing a lot of changes lately. Are those changes influenced by competition, do you like what is happening, are the addons support left out of the plan? Whatever the case, it's still free software.

Git stash
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20409853/git-stash-and-apply#20412685

A comprehensive overview of how git stashing works.

Justin Bieber's blog
http://blog.luke.wf/2014/01/unstandardized-standards-are-worst.html

Regardless... The article is amazing.

text/markdown
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7764

Talking about unstandard standards, here's our last one that has finally been christened (after so many years of being a lonely unamed orphan). Prepare your mimedb because you'll need to add text/markdown.

How I Explained Heartbleed To My Therapist
https://medium.com/message/how-i-explained-heartbleed-to-my-therapist-4c1dbcbe1099#.j0e7mu1oe

Software developers depression is a real thing, don't take it lightly.

Free games
https://bronevichok.ru/ttygames/
http://osgameclones.com/

Here are some websites with free versions of popular games.

IRC all the way
http://noswap.com/articles/irc

Checkout this dude's irc setup, it's worth your time and patience.

Random

Are you cool enough?
http://swain.webframe.org/tshirts/conway_life_zoom.jpg/

We're also trying to find inspiration for our own internet badge: https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=2056

John Titor
http://www.johntitor.com/

If you haven't heard of this internet phenomena you should look it up now.

Exit the matrix
https://billstclair.com/matrix/ar01s02.html

A chapter on a book about network forensics evasion.

Futurist artwork
http://www.simonstalenhag.se/

Looking for inspiration, here's a phenomenal website.

Thoughts

You can learn from anyone, you simply have to approach the situation with this intent and keep reminding yourself of this.

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

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

nixers newsletter issue | 2017-02-11 00:00:00 | 9

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Identity http://www.moxytongue.com/2016/02/self-sovereign-identity.html http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2016/04/the-path-to-self-soverereign-identity.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_identity Those are deep discussions about the nature of online identity and identity in general.
Unix haters handbook http://www.mindspring.com/~blackhart Ever wanted to know about what the haters thought?
Digital Minimalism http://calnewport.com/blog/2017/01/28/on-value-and-digital-minimalism/ Another article that takes the approach of value.
How to ask a question http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html An extensive guide on how to ask a "smart" question in the most appropriate manner.
Frequently asked questions http://www.unix.com/answers-to-frequently-asked-questions/ The unix.com frequently asked questions, most related to shell scripting.
A story about cron https://blog.notfoss.com/posts/a-tale-of-two-crons-or-how-cron-helped-me-spot-an-infection-on-a-server/ I just love reading stories about real life scenarios.
Corporate Unix conference https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYtMWfyYWIU Thanks a-109-107 for reminding us that Corba used to be the standard corporations loved in 1993.
X11 Clipboard http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/136229/copy-paste-does-not-always-work-from-firefox-to-terminal http://superuser.com/questions/68170/how-can-i-merge-the-gnome-clipboard-and-the-x-selection https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=144741 Some info about the clipboard and as bonus an hilarious renaming of a clipboard manager by an Arch user.
One Thing Well http://onethingwell.org In the same fashion as the kmandla blog, this blog lists multiple softwares that do one thing well.
List of debug/analysis tools https://remnux.org/docs/distro/tools/ Again a list of cool softwares used in the remnux distro, it's worth taking a look at.

Random

"the end of the internet http://hmpg.net That's it you've found it!
Wormholes https://fauux.neocities.org http://jodi.org http://0100101110101101.org/files/hell.com/ Net art is amazing.

Thoughts

The last episode of the nixers podcast took me a huge amount of research unfortunately the audio recording didn't turn out as good as I wanted (I was too tired.) You can read the transcript on the forums: https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=2052&pid=17479#pid17479 I've learned quite a lot of things during the preparation and you might too.

The thought of this week is: A community is a community because it's community driven. Share your knowledge and your time with others, you're running the show!

I love you guys.

Contribute

(Thanks to everyone who contributed with links.)

There are many ways to contribute:

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

nixers newsletter issue | 2017-02-04 00:00:00 | 8

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Star is Unix
https://jacobian.org/writing/star-is-unix/

Multiple implementation of simple webservers.

Implementation of timeout in busybox
https://github.com/pclouds/busybox-w32/blob/2762242f30d0d046a80abe41fd78415052bbe95f/miscutils/timeout.c

This function may also help understand it: https://github.com/pclouds/busybox-w32/blob/2762242f30d0d046a80abe41fd78415052bbe95f/libbb/executable.c#L100 This is a nifty way to implement timeout.

Why is Unix so revolutionary
https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3qksyh/why_is_unix_so_revolutionary/

A discussion about the real innovations that were brought, take whatever you want from it.

A blogger's thought on minimalism
https://al3x.net/2008/08/08/computing-simplicity-minimalism-and.html

Some thoughts about minimalism in the computing world.

Minimalism in computing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimalism_(computing)

This was linked in the previous post but I think it's worth it to link it again here so that you are more enticed to read it.

M4 and preprocessors
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M4_(computer_language)
http://iotek.github.io/m4/
http://rocx.rocks/lessons-on-automation.htm
https://lyngvaer.no/log/static-page-generator

We had a discussion about static blog generation and those came along.

Different runlevels
http://www.unixnote.com/2012/06/check-runlevel-on-unix-servers.html

Here's a list of the runlevels on different Unix-like OS.

Oh so confusing setuid
https://www.osso.nl/blog/setuid-seteuid-uid-euid/
https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~daw/papers/setuid-usenix02.pdf
http://yarchive.net/comp/setuid_mess.html

This system is so misunderstood and differently implemented. Also check credential(7).

Useful stupid Unix tricks
https://ask.slashdot.org/story/08/11/05/2027234/Useful-Stupid-Unix-Tricks

Share your tricks (and horror stories along the line.)

Random

Useless
http://www.theuselessweb.com/

Welcome to the internet!

EVIL
http://toastytech.com/evil/fof.html

Again one of those trollish websites we all love.

Thoughts

There are things we only learn when we have to face them.

Don't be stagnant.

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

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

nixers newsletter issue | 2017-01-28 00:00:00 | 7

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Unix Rap
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fow7iUaKrq4

This is what happens when white unix geeks try to rap around an "excited" crowd.

Horror Stories
http://www-uxsup.csx.cam.ac.uk/misc/horror.txt

A mailing list about Unix system administrators horror stories. If you've had one, you can share it on this thread: https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=1882

Why doesn't this boot up already!
https://unix.se/

The blogger maybe just wanted to annoy you before reaching his wonderful blog: https://anders.unix.se/

The Linux Information Project
http://linfo.org/main_index.html

A glossary of multiple subjects.

What does Hole Hawg have to do with Unix?
http://www.team.net/mjb/hawg.html

Very nice comparison.

Just some BSD guy
http://www.baldwin.cx/~john/

The homepage of a great dude.

Myths about urandom
http://www.2uo.de/myths-about-urandom/

There's a lot of talk about "true randomness" and random pool but does it hold up.

The advent of C
https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/chist.html

Here's dmr discussing the development of the C language.

Click baits...
http://idlewords.com/talks/what_happens_next_will_amaze_you.htm

A wonderful presentation about today.

Weev
http://weev.livejournal.com/409835.html

You are all MONSTERS! Written by this dude: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weev and to judge accordingly.

Random

Going berserk?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berserker

We were discussing street riots and I pointed out how berserk they were and acted out fearing their annihilation. We'll that's exactly what berserker are about.

Anonradio
http://anonradio.net/

We should also start our own icecast stream.

Thoughts

Here's a typical blog post: http://ttimo.typepad.com/blog/2006/06/rant.html

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

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

nixers newsletter issue | 2017-01-21 00:00:00 | 6

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Mommy says I'm big and strong
http://stop-irc-bullying.eu/stop/
https://thenextweb.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/2015/02/keyboard_surfing_the_internet2-406x450.jpg

Irc culture, flamming, and trolls, does that ring a bell?

Break Bashism (again)
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bashism
https://sourceforge.net/projects/checkbaskisms/

Going with the recent podcast about shells https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=2047 , here's a software to fight the Bash specific syntax.

Csh-ism
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/unix-faq/shell/csh-whynot/
http://www.grymoire.com/Unix/CshTop10.txt

Why bash on bash when there's csh instead!

You are not expected to understand this
http://thenewstack.io/not-expected-understand-explainer/

A backstory on the misquoted famous comment of the Unix V7 source.

...Talking about scheduling
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Processor_affinity
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nice_(Unix)

Here are some concepts you should definitely know when dealing with process management.

Not a fan of those type of articles
http://blog.professorbeekums.com/2017/01/software-developers-should-have.html

I don't really get the "what you need to do to get a job in 10 steps"-kind of articles but I'll still feature this one.

IPC on Unix
http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/ch07s02.html

Let Eric Raymond take you on a journey through the means of IPC on the unix-like platforms.

Using SSH to sign-in
https://vtllf.org/sshweb.html

We usually enter a username and password as credentials but what if we could ssh instead?

Don't... NO, just don't!
https://thejh.net/misc/website-terminal-copy-paste

Are you a sysadmin?

Spaces in filenames
https://debianjoe.wordpress.com/2014/11/20/why-i-hate-spaces-infilenames-v1/

We featured in the last newsletter the detox program, now you get the "why" it's annoying.

Random

A free as in freedom 3D printable lego
http://fffff.at/free-universal-construction-kit/

Checkout what those rms-like free artists are doing.

Need to setup your own private gateway?
https://dn42.net
https://falz.net/wiki/OpenBGPD_configuration_notes
A dynamic VPN one can use to practice internet level technos like BGP, top-level DNS, whois databases, ..

Thoughts

When we copy we justify, when others copy we vilify.

What does it mean to have a copy-left license? What does open source mean?

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

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

nixers newsletter issue | 2017-01-14 00:00:00 | 5

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Subpixel Layout
http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/subpixel.php

Ever spent time configuring X and wondered what those subpixels were?

Early UI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pr1XXvSaVUQ

Xerox has influenced so many of today's graphical interface concepts.

Time
https://unix4lyfe.org/time/
http://www.total-knowledge.com/~ilya/mips/ugt.html

You know the times in the first link but have you heard of the one in the second?

Detox your directories from infections
http://detox.sourceforge.net/

Automated cleaning of spaces.

Gopher
https://www.minnpost.com/business/2016/08/rise-and-fall-gopher-protocol

Gopher preceded the internet, here's its story.

Image magick tricks
https://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/canvas/#random_specks

Are you fan of those nice patterns?

Interview with Dennis Ritchie (2011)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umF6SNYaJNw

One of the rare interview with dmr.

Middle mouse scrolling
http://www.conrad.id.au/2011/08/middle-mouse-button-scrolling-on-linux.html
http://askubuntu.com/questions/49310/is-there-any-way-of-enabling-middle-click-scrolling
http://askubuntu.com/questions/217786/scroll-with-middle-click

I've never thought about it before because I'm not a big mouse user but that's how you enable middle mouse scrolling.

life is not a t43
https://debianjoe.wordpress.com/2014/10/28/when-life-doesnt-reflect-art/

Some philosophy written by a master of minimalism.

Random

Universities...
http://monstersuniversity.com/edu/

We rather ofter hear stories from our fellow members about their universities and so I'd like to share mine.

Trippie
http://shanenj.tripod.com/stereo.html

We used to have fun at the libraries with those when we were young.

Thoughts

"z3bra: it's the curse of the nix community everyone takes it as a personal attack when they're told their wrong"

From the dbag (https://github.com/iotek/dbag)

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nixers newsletter issue | 2017-01-07 00:00:00 | 4

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Milking a Unix box
http://linuxbbq.org/bbs/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=1687

A post from stark/abhx that lists ways to reduce memory and processor usage.

Introduction to operating systems abstractions
http://lsub.org/who/nemo/9.intro.pdf

This book uses plan9 as an avatar to describe the principles of abstraction that most operating systems have. It isn't a hard read.

Practical introduction to functional programming
https://maryrosecook.com/blog/post/a-practical-introduction-to-functional-programming

A gradual and practical introduction to functional programming. It is lightly and nicely written.

Ctags, a must for any big projects
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ctags
http://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse451/10au/tutorials/tutorial_ctags.html

Ctags incorporates with most text editors and IDEs... If you have no clue what it is I urge you to check it out.

Authentication, passwords, encryption
https://sanctum.geek.nz/arabesque/series/linux-crypto/

An article written by tejr going through must known privacy softwares and parts on Linux (though most apply to any Unix flavors.)

i2p
https://geti2p.net/en

Strong privacy, is it still possible?

TCP & UDP
http://gafferongames.com/networking-for-game-programmers/udp-vs-tcp/

A series of articles about network programming. Let's wait until z3bra releases his next course https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=1928.

Linux Kernel ABI reference
https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/ABI/testing/

/sys on Linux is well documented and this is where you will find the documentation for whatever you can dynamically tweak in your Linux kernel.

BSD stats project
http://www.bsdstats.org/

Wanna give BSDs a try in 2017 to up those stats?

Mumble client from the console
https://blog.natenom.com/2014/12/barnard-ein-neuer-mumble-client-fuer-die-konsole/

A tutorial on getting mumble running in the terminal. (You may need to translate the article)

Random

BBS the documentary
https://archive.org/details/BBS.The.Documentary

A great documentary about BBS.

Thoughts

Woah, this newsletter packs up a lot of content. You won't be able to consume it all but don't worry you have all of 2017 to do so.

Let's make 2017 a dynamic year, full of projects, interactions, and new phenomenal people joining in.

Stay updated!

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
Share it with your friends.
Share your point of view about the newsletter.
Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
If you want to help with the forums server fees you can send something to my (new) patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam or you can ask dcat how you can help with the IRC or any other services.

nixers newsletter issue | 2016-12-31 00:00:00 | 3

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Faster internet by balancing
http://isticktoit.net/?p=1637

Use the speed of multiple interfaces together.

TTY demystified
http://www.linusakesson.net/programming/tty/index.php

The tale of the teletype printer.

The Jargon File
http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/index.html

Need I say more...

Walkthrough strace usage
https://jorge.fbarr.net/2014/01/19/introduction-to-strace/

A fairly simple and straight forward introductory tutorial on using strace.

A system health visualizer
https://www.nagios.org/
https://github.com/firehol/netdata/

netdata only work on Linux and seems to be a memory hog but it's still interesting to look at what the next-gen ui look like (until we can afford to run them.)

Firewalls
https://calomel.org/pf_config.html
http://sharadchhetri.com/2013/06/15/how-to-protect-from-port-scanning-and-smurf-attack-in-linux-server-by-iptables/

Protect yourself from port scanning or attacks using PF or IPtables.

Explaining X11
http://magcius.github.io/xplain/article/index.html

An interactive series of article going in depth into the X11 protocol.

Public access UNIX system
http://sdf.org/?signup

Signup for a free shell account on a public access UNIX system.

Teachers web pages
http://linuxfinances.info/info/total.html

A Harward teacher reference web page. http://www.in-ulm.de/~mascheck/ And yet another university teacher reference page, this one follows the old Unix tilde homepage url formula, which reminds me of...

Tilde Club
http://tilde.club/

Launching back the early days where almost every web server ran some version of Unix and things went wild.

Random

The chaos communication congress talks
https://media.ccc.de/c/33c3

If you have time for some technological talks those are still fresh.

Write an email to your future self
https://www.futureme.org/

This website let's you send an email to your future self. I've tried it myself and it's surprising. With the new year arriving it might be a great way to tell your future self if you've achieved what you wanted to.

Thoughts

http://www.unixtimestamp.com/
Happy 1483228800 unix timestamp!

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

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

nixers newsletter issue | 2016-12-24 00:00:00 | 2

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

A tale we can all be empathic with
http://www.loomcom.com/blog/2016/12/18/an-ode-to-the-cruxen/

The university days of a student and how a simple event can impact a life. We all live in a world where traffic is thought to be a positive word, but traffic is looking at a car accident an forgetting the next second. What about less people and more value.

Incorrect data initialization
https://books.google.com.lb/books?id=vEN-ckcdtCwC&pg=PA69&lpg=PA69&source=bl&ots=sH7l73-NxF&sig=uwWQSF6iriZrC71aGrjhdcuxBmo&hl=en

A section of a book, "Code Quality: The Open Source Perspective", analyzing the source code of the banner program. banner was the predecessor to figlet. It's interesting how the characters were printed. You can find the source code here: https://packages.debian.org/stable/sysvbanner It's very small, and it uses one character variables.

How Unix made it to the top
http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2016-December/007519.html
Promises to the corporates can have a big influence on history.
Bringing a PDP-7 with Unix back to life
http://wiki.tuhs.org/doku.php?id=blog:pdp7-unix-pt1

A project to make a pdp-7 run again.

0verkill
https://artax.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~brain/0verkill/

0verkill an oldish-like game you will like. Source can be found here: https://github.com/hackndev/0verkill.git To install simply run: ./rebuild

Stroustrup's Rule
https://thefeedbackloop.xyz/stroustrups-rule-and-layering-over-time

In relation with this discussion: https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=2024

How to tell if it's a symlink
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/331208/how-to-tell-if-im-actually-in-a-symlink-location-from-command-line

A simple question with a simple answer.

Which scripting language (other than the shell) is installed by default on most systems?
https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-announce/2002-May/000823.html
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/49144/the-most-universal-scripting-language-for-linux-is
http://www.perl.com/pub/2007/12/06/soto-11.html

Have you ever wondered?

ELI5 Linux vs Unix
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/207zam/eli5_linux_vs_unix/

To explain to any of your non-technie friends.

Full specs of the shell language
http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/V3_chap02.html

Go through this once, it's an agglomeration of all the man pages related to the shell language.

Random

Remember to open this on xmas
http://0w.nz/nixmas

This is a gift from xero

Thoughts

Happy Hacky-Holidays nixers!

For those with x11: repeat 3 xset led on sleep 1 xset led off sleep 1

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

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

nixers newsletter issue | 2016-12-17 00:00:00 | 1

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

Don't Be a Computer Wimp
https://books.google.com.lb/books?id=e-gI2W-3JwkC&lpg=PA385&pg=PA261

Entertaining article from 1984...
The Legendary K.Mandla's blog
https://kmandla.wordpress.com/software/

Kmandla could be said to be the collector of intriging command line tools, if you're looking for new softwares to try, this is the goto place.
Automating tasks using expect
http://blog.robertelder.org/don-libes-expect-unix-automation-tool/

This is an unfamous tool that has history engrained in TCL. However it can still be useful to script command line programs that only have an interpreter like interface and nothing else.
Ratox - A client implementation (FIFO) of the tox protocol
http://git.z3bra.org/ratox/file/README.html

Two of our community members, pranomostro and z3bra, are working on a secure messaging application built on top of tox core. Read the manpage, and give it a try by send a request to the id AA72C255E14A6214E0E368F5882A6B7CF235F8F3CCE0321EDBFBC5F2C065E3173337CFD9B594
Creating a fake input device on Linux
https://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2016/12/how-input-works-creating-a-device/

We've discussed input devices on Unix during a previous podcast episode, found here https://nixers.net/showthread.php?tid=1970 and this blog post is a great way to exercise your knowledge.
Understanding the modifier keys in the terminal
https://lyngvaer.no/log/understanding-modifier-keys-in-terminal

A progressive and insightful analysis of modifier keys along with control characters and their effects.
Bashish
http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashPitfalls#for_i_in_.24.28ls_.2A.mp3.29

The glossary of bash pitfall. It lists common errors programmers who use Bash make.
Drawing computer concepts
http://jvns.ca/blog/2016/11/27/more-linux-drawings/

Cute drawings representing many computer topics, many of which are Unix related.
2FA using a USB
https://malcolmsparks.com/posts/yubikey.html
https://www.preining.info/blog/2016/04/gnupg-subkeys-yubikey/
https://alexcabal.com/creating-the-perfect-gpg-keypair/
https://blog.josefsson.org/2014/06/23/offline-gnupg-master-key-and-subkeys-on-yubikey-neo-smartcard/
https://linuxconfig.org/linux-authentication-login-with-usb-device
https://duo.com/docs/duounix

Setting up 2FA using another hardware device you plug in, a USB, a yubikey, or anything else, is an interesting concept. Here are some links about the procedure for usb and yubikeys.
nixers holiday colly (by xero) DONT OPEN TILL XMAS!
DONT OPEN TILL XMAS!
http://0w.nz/nixmas

Random

Post Apocalyptic Comic
http://romanticallyapocalyptic.com/0

You're gonna enjoy this delirious destroyed world.
Holiday hacking challenge
https://www.holidayhackchallenge.com/2016/

A wargame setup by SANS, interesting for those who like those kinds of challenges.

Thoughts

It's starting to get cold outside, keeping a Unix machine next to you and running :(){ :|:& };: is a great way to stay warm.