Articles in the misc category

  1. Avoiding erroneous OpenPGP certifications

    i'm aware that people don't always take proper measures during mass OpenPGP keysignings. Apparently, some keys even get signed with no one at the keysigning present speaking for that key (for example, if the key was submitted to the keysigning via online mechanisms beforehand, but the keyholder failed to show …

  2. TCP weirdness, IMAP, wireshark, and perdition

    This is the story of a weirdly unfriendly/non-compliant IMAP server, and some nice interactions that arose from a debugging session around it.

    Over the holidays, i got to do some computer/network debugging for friends and family. One old friend (I'll call him “Fred”) had a series of problems …

  4. dd, netcat, and disk throughput

    I was trying to dump a large Logical Volume (LV) over ethernet from one machine to another. I found some behavior which surprised me.

    fun constraints

    • I have only a fairly minimal debian installation on each machine (which fortunately includes netcat-traditional)
    • The two machines are connected directly by a single …

  5. dealing with entropy on a virtual machine

    I've been using virtual machines (KVM, these days) as isolated environments to do things like build packages as root. Unfortunately, some of these activities require decent-sized chunks of random data (pulled from /dev/random). But /dev/random pulls from the kernel's entropy pool, which in turn is replenished from "hardware …

  8. Tools should be distinct from Services

    Modern daemon implementations can be run in a variety of ways, in a range of contexts. The daemon software itself can be a useful tool in environments where the associated traditional system service is neither needed nor desired. Unfortunately, common debian packaging practice has a tendency to conflate the two …

  9. xen etch to lenny upgrade serial console

    I maintain several xen machines. Most servers that i maintain use serial consoles (i should probably write another post in more detail about why serial consoles are the One True Way to manage a server).

    Trouble is, the way that xen works with the serial console has changed between etch …

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