norbert's weblog

OpenBSD/i386 switches to gcc3

Its New Year's eve and also a new flag day for the OpenBSD community.

OpenBSD-current on i386 has recently switched to gcc3. Note that this is a FLAG DAY event. You cannot just 'make build' your sources. So it is better to wait the updated binary snapshots. But if you want to build it from source you must first delete the entire /usr/include/g++ directory, rebuild gcc, rebuild the kernel, reboot, and rebuild the base sources.

UPDATE: Also Marc Espie stated that "Updating ports from source will fail miserably on quite a few ports... this is due to libtool not looking in the right place..."

Going home...

I'm going home to Bicol this morning to spent my remaining vacation days there. I'm excited :-)

Merry Christmas!

Just got home. Spent my Christmas on my friend's house. Merry Christmas everyone!

Food, food, and food!

Just arrived. It feels so wonderful after dealing with the mouth watering seafoods at Dampa in Sucat. Well, I'm quite tired and I should be sleeping by now... But I have to finish something.

MCS 494, UNIX Security Holes

D.J. Bernstein, the author of qmail, djbdns and other tools has been lecturing a course at Universiry of Illinois at Chicago about Unix Security Holes. More information about the course at

http://cr.yp.to/2004-494.html

His students discovered multiple vulnerabilities in different open source software. The advisories has been published at:

http://tigger.uic.edu/~jlongs2/holes/

New FreeSBIE Live CD Available

FreesBIE, a LiveCD based on FreeBSD is now on version 1.1. This version is now based on FreeBSD 5.3. For more information visit http://www.freesbie.org.

Open* Tools

Seems the OpenBSD project are replacing and developing some non BSD-licensed tools into BSD-licensed counterpart. From OpenSSH, to OpenBGPD, to OpenNTPD.

They are also responsible for pf, a good packet filtering tool, and the CARP protocol, a redundancy protocol like VRRP with no patent issues to deal with.

Now here comes OpenCVS...

According to the OpenCVS website, OpenCVS was started after discussions regarding the latest GNU CVS vulnerabilities that came out. Although CVS is widely used, its development has been mostly stagnant in the last years and many security issues have popped up, both in the implementation and in the mechanisms.

Linux Integer Overflows

As found by Georgi Guninski, there are local integer overflows in the Linux kernel that can cause a possible denial of service attack. As described on Guninski's advisory, this bug affects Linux kernel <= 2.4.28 and Linux kernel <= 2.6.9. PoCs are now available on various security mailing list and on the advisory. The fixed version is Linux >= 2.4.29-pre2 and Linux >= 2.6.10-rc3-bk5.

Since the fixed version is on the snapshot version, I think the 2.6 prepatch version (2.6.10-rc3) is also affected. I'll test it later.

FFS driver for Windows?

I just stumble upon this site:

http://ffsdrv.sourceforge.net/

It enables you to read BSD(FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD) FFS partitions on Windows 2000/XP/2003.

NetBSD 2.0 released!

My New Weblog

My old weblog site is now officially abandoned (anyway its abandoned already for more than a year). Thanks to Teejay for the influence *lol*

The weblog generator, design, and the html code was based on the code of nanoblogger. It is a simple and small weblog generator written entirely in bash script. It is distributed under GPL license.

I simply edited the original nanoblogger code for my personal use. I am giving all the credits and my gratitude to Kevin Wood aka n1xt3r for the nanoblogger and to the html tidy project.