Scott Yang's Playground

(Update: Actually, there is no point setting up QEmu, playing around with VMX file, etc to try to bootstrap the disk image. There is actually no point getting VMWare Player. Just go an install the free VMWare Server — it is so much better.) Me. I am stuck. On Windows. Well, not really by choice. [...]

Apparently Gentoo Linux now has its own graphical user interface installer, so that n00bs do not need to type everything manually with one hand, and Gentoo Handbook on another. It has both Gtk and Dialog based front-end. Check out the screenshot. Initially I thought, “it is just so wrong! Gentoo and GUI installer?!”, but then [...]

Ryan Tomayko rebuked Daniel Sabbah of IBM’s claim where LAMP cannot scale and the model should “grow up”. He argued the traditional 3/n-tier design cannot scale due to its complexity, and a simple state-less design would be more scalable, faster and easier to develop. I am not really convinced, and I do hope that they [...]

Postgrey is a Postfix Greylisting Policy Server. It will drop the connection if the tuple of (client IP, sender, recipient) has never been listed, and hopefully the peer MTA will resend the mail required per RFC. Sounds like a wonderful idea to reduce spam/virii, but I wonder what the delay would be like.

Linux creator Linus Torvalds is now running a dual G5 2.0 PowerMac as his main desktop box, except that it does not run Mac OS X but Linux PPC. Important quote is “…Part of it is that I personally believe there are two main architectures out there: Power and x86-64 are what I think are [...]

“Linux kernel uselib() privilege elevation” vulnerbility demonstrated, exploit source code included to show how you can easily get a root shell. Another reason why it is a bad idea to provide shell access to your Linux box. Anyone with CSE login wants to give it a try? :) Updated: and more reported by LWN. Ouch.

GlobeTrotter – a 40Gb mobile hard disk with USB interface preloaded with Mandrake 10.0, so that you can use your favourite operating system wherever there is a PC. I wonder whether there is a Gentoo version with Firewire…

Right after the announcement of GNU/Bash 3′s availablility, I think it is time for me to take a change, leaving the comfy environment that I have got used to over the last 10 years, switching to something all the hard core command line users have been raving about – Zsh.

A trick to start courier-imap using xinetd, which is worth trying if you have the same frustration as mine wondering why every other daemon process has its own ‘super server’.

An easy way to crash a unpatched Linux kernel on x86 system with only shell access. This looks bad. Quite bad actually. But everyone should have known that Linux with shell access is just not secure – too many local exploits are out there.

Jeremy Zawodny talked about Linux as a work in progress. It has been a work in progress for as long as I can remember, and it seems to be an on-going problem (or benefit for some!)

Strangely, out of sudden I have been hit by Internet worms exploiting the IIS WebDAV security issue that has been documented over one year ago. Not that it is affecting me in anyway, as I don’t dare to run IIS as my webserver, but it is just plainly annoying to have this kind of rubbish [...]

… when you are dealing with RPM based Linux system.

I have just got Postfix on my Mandrake Linux box to talk to Clam AntiVirus via amavisd-new, which also does spam filtering as well. It uses Postfix’s content filtering interface to pipe the incoming emails through another SMTP server to quarantine potential viruses. Because AMaViS also integrates with Spam Assassin, I have thus dropped my [...]

It builds, and builds, and builds….