April 2015 - wlug - University of Waikato Mail Lists

“*ERROR* pipe is still busy with an old pageflip”

by Lawrence D'Oliveiro

I’ve been hitting an occasional display freeze that matches this description <http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-7675146.html>. Looks like a known problem with the 3.16 kernel. I thought things had got better with a system update I did 11 days ago, but this afternoon the freeze recurred. Unlike the previous times, killing all my user processes succeeded in unfreezing the display, so I was able to log in again without rebooting.

5 years, 11 months

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New Multi-Core Raspberry Pi 2 Launches

by Peter Reutemann

'Coming in at the same $35 price-point that has come to be expected from the Raspberry Pi, it looks like the new Model 2 will be packing a quad-core ARM processor with a GB of RAM. From the article: "The Raspberry Pi Foundation is likely to provoke a global geekgasm today with the surprise release of the Raspberry Pi 2 Model B: a turbocharged version of the B+ boasting a new Broadcom BCM2836 900MHz quad-core system-on-chip with 1GB of RAM – all of which will drive performance "at least 6x" that of the B+."' -- source: http://build.slashdot.org/story/15/02/02/0134211 And also in the news: "Microsoft Announces Windows For Raspberry Pi 2 Microsoft is expanding their Windows Developer Program for Internet of Things by delivering a version of Windows 10 that runs on the Raspberry Pi 2. This release of Windows 10 will be free for the maker community through the Windows Developer Program for IoT. With an official partnership with the Raspberry Pi Foundation, Microsoft is bringing development tools, services and ecosystem to the Raspberry Pi community. More details will be shared in the coming months. You can already join the program and be amongst the first to receive product information and beta software releases." -- source: http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/15/02/02/1326225 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Waikato, NZ http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ Ph. +64 (7) 858-5174

5 years, 11 months

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Spam-blasting malware infects thousands of Linux and FreeBSD servers

by Peter Reutemann

"Several thousand computers running the Linux and FreeBSD operating systems have been infected over the past seven months with sophisticated malware that surreptitiously makes them part of a renegade network blasting the Internet with spam, researchers said Wednesday. The malware likely infected many more machines during the five years it's known to have existed." -- source: http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/04/30/spam-blasting-malware-infects-th… Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Waikato, NZ http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ Ph. +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

5 years, 11 months

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The Top 11 Best Linux Distros for 2015

by Peter Reutemann

"Linux is omnipresent, even if you don't realize it. I have been using Linux as my only OS since 2005 and with every passing year I come to realize that it has much more to offer than I initially, back in 2005, understood. There is something for everyone. In this article, I have picked some of the best Linux distros to help you get the job done." -- source: http://www.linux.com/news/software/applications/810295 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Waikato, NZ http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ Ph. +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

5 years, 11 months

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Old Ubuntu Bug Lets Malicious Users Gain Sudo Access

by Peter Reutemann

"Users can change the system clock without authenticating It appears that there's a bug in Ubuntu distributions which lets malicious users locally exploit sudo and gain access to the user's account without knowing their password. The bug was submitted to Canonical's Launchpad back in September 2013 by user Mark Smith." -- source: http://news.softpedia.com/news/An-Old-Ubuntu-Bug-Lets-Malicious-Users-Gain-… Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Waikato, NZ http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ Ph. +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

5 years, 11 months

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Hard Drive Failure Rates

by Lawrence D'Oliveiro

BackBlaze have been frequently posting notes on their experience with running large numbers of hard drives in their storage service. Some salient points: * “Enterprise” drives, while more expensive than “consumer” ones, are not significantly more reliable. (This has been borne out by other studies.) * Keep your drives running all the time, or switch them off when not in use? “Our vote is to keep them running.” * They do use SMART to keep an eye on their drives. Other studies I read reported that these only picked up a minority (around 30%) of failures, from which I concluded that SMART was not worth using. I suppose it’s different for these guys if it saves on costs to replace a drive *before* it actually starts reporting uncorrectable errors... <https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-stats-faq/>

5 years, 11 months

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meeting tomorrow

by Peter Reutemann

Hi everyone We have a meeting tomorrow: "Due to the positive feedback on Baden Delamore's demonstration of Kali back in February, there will be a follow up to, delving deeper into the world of (in-)security." http://www.meetup.com/WaikatoLinuxUsersGroup/events/221426689/ Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Waikato, NZ http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ Ph. +64 (7) 858-5174

5 years, 11 months

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Debian 8 Jessie Released

by Peter Reutemann

"After almost 24 months of constant development, the Debian project is proud to present its new stable version 8 (code name Jessie), which will be supported for the next five years thanks to the combined work of the Debian Security team and the Debian Long Term Support team. (Release notes.) Jessie ships with a new default init system, systemd. The systemd suite provides features such as faster boot times, cgroups for services, and the possibility of isolating part of the services. The sysvinit init system is still available in Jessie. Screenshots and ascreencast are available." -- source: http://linux.slashdot.org/story/15/04/26/0322241 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Waikato, NZ http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ Ph. +64 (7) 858-5174

5 years, 11 months

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The March Of (In)Security

by Lawrence D'Oliveiro

Bruce Schneier has said “Today's top-secret programs become tomorrow's PhD theses and the next day's hacker tools”. And not long after that, a graduate homework assignment. The NSA was desperate to prevent any exposure of its top-secret “QUANTUM” packet-injection technology. But all this effort was futile, because others had already invented the same thing, including China’s “Great Cannon”, which was used to attack GitHub recently. The only protection is end-to-end encryption. <https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/04/the_further_dem.html>

5 years, 12 months

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X2Go: An Open Source Remote Desktop Solution For Linux

by Peter Reutemann

"X2Go is an Open Source remote desktop application for GNU/Linux that uses NX technology protocol. The main difference between X2Go and other remote desktop applications is it provides secure standalone remote desktop sessions via SSH. So, each session connected using X2Go is strongly encrypted and safe. X2Go allows you mainly to connect to Linux systems from Linux, Windows, or Mac OS systems. Also, many clients can simultaneously connect and use single X2Go server. It comes with two components, namely X2Go server and X2Go client. X2Go server is a system that is being accessed from a client system. And, the X2Go is a system which can be used to access the X2Go server. This Client will be able to connect to X2Go server(s) and start, stop, resume and terminate (running) desktop sessions. X2Go Client stores different server connections and may automatically request authentication data from LDAP directories. Furthermore it can be used as fullscreen loginscreen (replacement for loginmanager like xdm)." -- source: http://www.unixmen.com/x2go-an-open-source-remote-desktop-solution-for-linu… Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Waikato, NZ http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ Ph. +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

5 years, 12 months

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wlug April 2015