linux Archives - Page 4 of 4 - Michael Altfield's Tech Blog

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Trusted Boot (Anti-Evil-Maid, Heads, and PureBoot)

WordPress Multisite on the Darknet (Mercator .onion alias)

Detecting (Malicious) Unicode in GitHub PRs

Introducing BusKill: A Kill Cord for your Laptop

Crowdfunding on Crowd Supply (Review of my experience)

WordPress Profiling with XHProf (Debugging & Optimizing Speed)

Continuous Documentation: Hosting Read the Docs on GitHub Pages (2/2)

Nightmare on Lemmy Street (A Fediverse GDPR Horror Story)

Hardening Guide for phpList

ext3 journal recovery

By Michael Altfield, on August 11th, 2008

Every now and then, linux crashes (and consequently, hell feels a little cold). I’m not sure how to diagnose the issue, but I’m almost certain it’s a result of some unstable openGL screensaver, some faulty X app, or basically anything but hardened command-line driven applications (which is simply to say: linux is perfectly stable without a GUI).

Anyway, even fewer times than a crash occurs, I sometimes cannot boot my system following the crash due to a corrupt journal on my main, root partition. To fix it, I have to boot to a live-cd (typically my gentoo minimal install CD), and type one simple command that I have scrawled in huge writing, double boxed on a desk pad. I can’t tell you how many times this little command has saved my life.

Type this to fix an ext3 journal corruption:

e2fsck -b 32786 /dev/sda3

Michael Altfield

Hi, I’m Michael Altfield. I write articles about opsec, privacy, and devops ➡

About Michael

tech.michaelaltfield.net/

`ps` fail with sys-process/procps

By Michael Altfield, on August 11th, 2008

Today, I ran an `emerge -uDN world`, and mysql kept failing on the ./configure step because it couldn’t properly execute `ps`.

For as long as I can remember, my gentoo box has been unable to run `ps`. Every time I did, I’d get a “No such file or directory” error regarding /lib64/libproc-3.2.6.so

Upon further investigation, I found that an `ls /lib64/libproc*` showed two files:

/lib64/libproc-3.2.7.so /lib64/libproc.so

…so, `ps` was trying to access 3.2.6, and I had 3.2.7. Obviously something was out of whack–probably an environment variable. I tried creating a /lib64/libproc-3.2.6.so symlink back to the /lib64/libproc-3.2.7, but `ps` only failed with a different error.

So, naturally, I figured I would simply unmerge and re-emerge the package. An `emerge –search libproc` reveled only one package: dev-libs/libproccpuinfo. After unmerging and re-emerging this package a dozen times, I fell back to google. Turns out that the REAL package for the libproc.so file is sys-process/procps. When I got the…

!!! ‘sys-process/procps’ is part of your system profile. !!! Unmerging it may be damaging to your system.

>>> Waiting 10 seconds before starting…

…message, I was sure that I’d break my system, but I continued, finished the unmerge, re-emerged the package, crossed my fingers, and
. . . → Read More: `ps` fail with sys-process/procps

Re: The problem with wikipedia

By Michael Altfield, on April 24th, 2008

Alright, I’ve been working on my research paper (an attempt to document the history and differences, and an overall comparison between the Microsoft DirectX API and the SGI OpenGL API), so I’ve been caught in the inevitable wikipedia trap. Here was my path:

Michael Altfield

Hi, I’m Michael Altfield. I write articles about opsec, privacy, and devops ➡

About Michael

. . . → Read More: Re: The problem with wikipedia