The ramblings of a technomuse
Debian
CVE-2009-3547 (NULL pointer dereference and system crash)
Nov 9th
Synopsis: “Multiple race conditions in fs/pipe.c in the Linux kernel before 2.6.32-rc6 allow local users to cause a denial of service (NULL pointer dereference and system crash) or gain privileges by attempting to open an anonymous pipe via a /proc/*/fd/ pathname.”
Debian 5.x systems suffer from this vulnerability (with or without Wine installed), and the fix is easy.
At a root shell, do the following:-
sysctl -w vm.mmap_min_addr="1024"
# make it persistent cat <<EOF > /etc/sysctl.d/mmap_min_addr.conf # Prevent http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2009-3547 vm.mmap_min_addr=1024 EOF
Full details at http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2009-3547
Debian Debian Debian Debian
Mar 6th
Yes you heard me right, Debian. I used to hate it back before apt. Despite plenty of pressure from peers, I never got the “Debian” way, but with the release of Etch I decided I would give it another go; this time I would not be disappointed. Etch worked flawlessly, powering my server since late 2007. Mandriva is but a distant memory.
Now we have Lenny, and I may be at the point of not regularly running any other Linux distribution, save for trying them out. As I sit here making this post from my Debian server, I wonder has Lenny finally made my Ultimate Edition desktops all but redundant. Don’t get me wrong, I like Ultimate Edition & Ubuntu, but Lenny is all I need in a desktop Linux distribution, and these days my “desktop” boxes are rarely turned on.
I do all my mail, browsing, listening to music, and quite a bit of development using my “server”. A rock solid but desktop friendly Lenny has made it all but unnecessary to power up those desktop boxes, their sole purpose (having more powerful cpus) being development.
The “Universal Operating System” is no longer just for servers. 
Install ATI’s FireGL driver on Debian
Mar 5th
Kano (of Kanotix fame) provides this excellent script to install the latest ATI FireGL driver on yer Debian box. I have installed Debian Lenny x86_64 (5.0) on a new box with a AMD 780G chipset, that includes an on board HD3200 graphics processor.
Could I get the video working by installing the driver direct from AMD’s website?; eh no 
, and not only that but when I killed X with Ctrl+Alt+Backspace the box rebooted, and left my XFS filesystems in a bit of a state.
Kano’s script worked flawlessly, it did a variety of things:
- Installed build-essentials
- Installed GCC
- Installed dkms
- Downloaded the latest driver, built and installed a new .deb on my system
- Reconfigured X
- Restarted the login manager
/Me happy again
PS: you can see all of Kano’s excellent scripts here
Update: Power management seems to be broken with this driver, my monitor never turns off
Keeping the faith with Debian 4.0
Nov 26th
I have replaced my old Athlon64 3000+ server box, with an AMD Athlon64 X2 4600+, with 4G OCZ RAM, and 6x500G WD SATA drives in a RAID6 configuration.
The old server had been running Mandriva 2006.0 since sometime in late 2005. I never moved it to Mandriva 2007.0, mainly because after testing it I decided it was too unstable, even in the installer for me to bother going any further. I was quite happy with Mandriva 2006.0, and saw no reason to move to 2007.0 as it did not provide any significant (imho) improvements that I needed, or felt I could benefit from.
So as I approached the end of 2007, I thought it was time to upgrade the hardware, and with it investigate alternative distributions, especially seeing as Mandriva have eol’d 2006.0, and removed all existing updates from their mirrors .
I have been using Ubuntu on my desktop since early 2006, and seeing as it is a Debian derivative, I thought I’d give Debian another try.
I had tried Debian in the past (the distant past), and never liked it. I found dpkg bizarre, and always went back to the safety of my rpm based distros like Mandriva, and RedHat. Having now used Ubuntu for a considerable period, and setting up Ubuntu servers for friends, I gave in to the relentless pressure from my ILUG compatriots to switch to Debian.
Read the full article on my wiki (now Debian 5.0)