Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Some common sense
  https://jvns.ca/blog/2024/11/26/terminal-rules/

  A couple of "rules" that we implicitly learn while using terminals.

• Manpages are Turing complete!
  https://codeberg.org/cve/mott

  ...And you can implement Conway's GOL in it.

• Xfce new release
  https://alexxcons.github.io/blogpost_14.html

  It's starting on it's route towards full Wayland support.

• Spring system
  https://web.archive.org/web/20100116211311/http://research.sun.com/features/tenyears/volcd/papers/mitchell.htm
  https://web.archive.org/web/20110718052403/https://labs.oracle.com/features/tenyears/volcd/papers/Mitchell.pdf

  An experimental project that was made to "reimplement UNIX in an object-oriented fashion".

• Adding objects in the Unix shell
  https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2024/12/objects.html
  https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2024/09/project-overview.html

  To be fair, it's a completely new shell language, it's not your POSIX shell script. The language is clean, I might give it a try.

• What is Vim?
  https://blog.jonas.foo/whats_vim.html

  That's a compelling meta-point about what vim is, I'll keep it in mind.

• Why Don't We Have a General Purpose Tree Editor?
  https://pcmonk.me/2014/04/01/why-dont-we-have-a-general-purpose-tree-editor.html?

  And obviously, commenters had a lot of answers with pretty good software. Mine is hnb.

• Eye Tracker Reviews
  https://thume.ca/2016/03/24/eye-tracker-reviews-pupil-labs-tobii-eyex-eye-tribe-tobii-x2-30/

  Ever heard of eye trackers, neither did I. Yet, it makes total sense in the context of an HCI research and I guess I indirectly read about it once.

• How fast are they talking?
  https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/talk-fast/

  Pretty impressive analysis, I never thought of doing it like this. I also guess that for the transcript, these days, AI would help quite a lot.

• NetBSD on IBM ThinkPad 380Z
  https://luke8086.dev/netbsd-on-thinkpad-380z.html

  NetBSD stays true to its motto: runs everywhere.

Life & Other

• Map of Github
  https://anvaka.github.io/map-of-github/#2/0/0
  https://paperscape.org/

  The Github relations map, reminded me of the amazing map of research papers, showing galaxies, and how to visualize references as if they were a living organism, constantly evolving and growing.

• RAM data remanence times
  https://blog.3mdeb.com/2024/2024-12-13-ram-data-decay-research/

  How long does data stay in RAM? You can jump to the measurement graph at the end for the conclusion.

Thoughts

The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance. — Alan Watts

What do you think: plunge in the change, or resist change?

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Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• The biggest shell programs
  https://github.com/oils-for-unix/oils/wiki/The-Biggest-Shell-Programs-in-the-World

  If someone reaches a certain number of lines in a shell script, others will start to frown and propose switching to another language. This list is about certain cases where they didn't listen, for a reason or another, be it portability, or simplicity.

• OpenWrt supply chain attack
  https://flatt.tech/research/posts/compromising-openwrt-supply-chain-sha256-collision/

  It starts with the usual catch of trusting user input, then to container escape, and finally hash collision and possible supply chain attack.

• We're not a museum anymore!
  https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-EFI-Zboot-Gzip-Zstd

  So it's passing from seven different compression types to only two.

• Accessing the DRM framebuffer
  https://embear.ch/blog/drm-framebuffer

  The old /dev/fbN interface is one we're familiar with and often seen when using the TTY, but what about cases where it's not available and a bit more complex.

• Conjuring a Linux distro from thin air
  https://blog.brixit.nl/conjuring-a-linux-distribution-out-of-thin-air/

  Sometimes we have to do this just for the sake of it.

• TCC and sandboxing on macOS
  https://bdash.net.nz/posts/sandboxing-on-macos/
  https://bdash.net.nz/posts/tcc-and-the-platform-sandbox-policy/

  See also "macOS sandbox" in issue 184.

• Making memcpy(NULL, NULL, 0) well-defined
  https://developers.redhat.com/articles/2024/12/11/making-memcpynull-null-0-well-defined

  It's not everyday that an UB gets removed from C, rejoice!

• Mac servers
  https://eclecticlight.co/2024/12/07/a-brief-history-of-mac-servers/

  Short-lived, they still were kind of niche and interesting.

Life & Other

• More powerful phones or not?
  https://www.androidauthority.com/phone-pc-performance-3504716/

  The car metaphor is a classic that I use because it discerns clearly between utility and appearances.

• Creating an AS
  http://blog.thelifeofkenneth.com/2017/11/creating-autonomous-system-for-fun-and.html

  This is epic, it reminds me of "Build your own anycast network" in issue 197.

Thoughts

"Freedom is the will to be responsible for ourselves." — Friedrich Nietzsche

Archive

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1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
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Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• sudo warning history
  https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/12521/when-was-the-famous-sudo-warning-introduced-under-what-background-by-whom

  I didn't expect to be so much trivia and history behind this.

• Mis-issued certificate
  https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1934361

  Since the Moz CA trust store is used in a lot of places, these discussions and related decisions are very important.

• Disillusioning the Magic of the fork System Call
  https://blog.codingconfessions.com/p/the-magic-of-fork

  Seems to be the trend these days to explain forking over and over again, see also "Linux threads and processes" in issue 264. This one has an emphasis on examples in assembly.

• Why your pipe gets stuck
  https://jvns.ca/blog/2024/11/29/why-pipes-get-stuck-buffering/

  It couldn't handle the pressure and go with the flow, some plumbing should fix it.

• Low maintenance password management
  https://tzcrawford.com/blog/secure-and-low-maintenance-password-management.html

  It's secure and low maintenance, but definitely not simple, it's now a whole distributed key management system (KMS) from scratch.

• git submodules
  https://www.cyberdemon.org/2024/03/20/submodules.html

  I got to say, it's the first time these make total sense to me, it's a great explanation.

• OCI containers on FreeBSD
  https://people.freebsd.org/~dch/posts/2024-12-04-freebsd-containers/

  Containers are coming to FreeBSD, you'll get your podman and companies.

• Linux TCP SO_REUSEPORT
  https://linuxjournal.rubdos.be/ljarchive/LJ/298/12538.html

  I finally understand why sometimes restarting my server quickly will fail and say that it's already binded, then I have to wait a bit to restart it again.

• Easier man pages
  https://kokada.dev/blog/praise-to-scdoc-to-generate-man-pages/

  This is really neat, I didn't know about scdoc before, it covers any simple man page creation (which are most man pages).

Life & Other

• Restaurant Menus
  https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20171120-the-secret-tricks-hidden-inside-restaurant-menus
  https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p028z2z0

  Who doesn't enjoy a good meal? Personally, I mainly look for a picture of the meal and the ingredient description.

• Security model of dark web markets
  https://boehs.org/node/dark-web-security

  There's so much to learn from that article and the dark web, give it a glance.

Thoughts

"Missing a train is only painful if you run after it! Likewise, not matching the idea of success others expect from you is only painful if that’s what you are seeking." ― NNT

Or in other words, we are hurt by our unfulfilled desires, whether they emanated from us or society.

Archive

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Contribute

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1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Getting in the shoes of others to understand them
  https://www.5snb.club/posts/2024/making-your-connection-bad/

  I wasn't aware this can be done with simple traffic control.

• Search in everything of every type
  https://phiresky.github.io/blog/2019/rga--ripgrep-for-zip-targz-docx-odt-epub-jpg/

  That's useful, I'll test it out, it's a wrapper over rg.

• You've built a kubernetes
  https://www.macchaffee.com/blog/2024/you-have-built-a-kubernetes/

  Things can quickly go the slippery slope argument with that type of articles.

• Freshly baked malware
  https://www.techradar.com/pro/security/linux-devices-hit-with-even-more-new-malware-this-time-from-chinese-hackers
  https://www.welivesecurity.com/en/eset-research/unveiling-wolfsbane-gelsemiums-linux-counterpart-to-gelsevirine/

  The second link is a deep technical analysis of the code and how the malware works.

• Tiny code but huge improvements
  https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linus-2.6p-Faster-Scale-Patch
  https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-Linux-3888.9-Performance

  It's always impressive when small changes lead to amazing outcomes.

• Advanced Wireguard
  https://sloonz.github.io/posts/wireguard-beyond-basic-configuration/

  Mainly two points, on NATing and IPv6.

• A week in the TTY 2024
  https://neilzone.co.uk/2024/10/could-i-cope-with-a-terminal-only-computer/
  https://neilzone.co.uk/2024/11/using-only-a-linux-terminal-for-my-personal-computing-in-2024/

  We should try this out again, there's a lot to learn and what people write after such experience is full of knowledge.

• Arch adds a license for PKGBUILDs
  https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/998778/aa5fd76c0574a311/

  After 22 years, it's just now that we see this happen.

Life & Other

• Nearest neighbor attack
  https://www.volexity.com/blog/2024/11/22/the-nearest-neighbor-attack-how-a-russian-apt-weaponized-nearby-wi-fi-networks-for-covert-access/

  Lesson of the story is to not trust login and skip MFA, even when authenticating at proximity.

• Human compiler?
  https://news.radio-t.com/post/i-m-a-developer-not-a-compiler

  Do you think we're moving away from memorizing facts and towards a more practical, creative, and hands-on way of learning?

• Beyond bcrypt
  https://soatok.blog/2024/11/27/beyond-bcrypt/

  This article has a lot to teach, especially if you've also used bcrypt in similar situations.

Thoughts

Peace cannot be kept by force; it can only be achieved by understanding.

Archive

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Contribute

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1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• bpftune
  https://github.com/oracle/bpftune

  It seems bpf is used more and more in everything these days, this specific tool is for Linux kernel tunables observability and calibration by relying on some for of control theory. See also "Tuning TCP" in issue 191.

• Mental model for links
  https://bhoot.dev/2024/on-linux-file-and-links/

  A simple explanation for inodes, soft and hard links.

• Losing NFS locks and the SunOS SIGLOST signal
  https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/NFSLosingLocksAndSIGLOST

  Some trivia and history about SIGLOST.

• Scan on FreeBSD
  https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2024/11/17/scan-on-freebsd/

  An everyday story of setting up something and getting it to work.

• Using find to solve a problem
  https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2024/11/12/find-file-names/

  I'm not sure I find the solution to be clean, but it works.

• gdb frontends
  https://begriffs.com/posts/2022-07-17-debugging-gdb-ddd.html

  A repost of "Less annoying gdb usage" in issue 154.

• traceroute isn't real!
  https://gekk.info/articles/traceroute.htm

  Now this might be news to some people that traceroute is a hack, but to others, it's a known fact. Yet a hack that consistently works is called a solution.

• Container 101, again
  https://maelstrom-software.com/blog/spawning-processes-on-linux/

  A summary of the difference between different ways to spawn processes on Linux.

• Safety in an unsafe world
  https://lwn.net/Articles/995814/

  A few examples from Fucshia OS about how Rust can be used to make things "safer" and "reliable".

• Why solene stopped using OpenBSD
  https://dataswamp.org/~solene/2024-11-15-why-i-stopped-using-openbsd.html

  Coming from one of the biggest online OpenBSD blogger, this is surprising, and interesting to read.

Life & Other

• DIMM vs UDIMM vs RDIMM vs SODIMM vs CUDIMM: What's the Difference?
  https://www.corsair.com/us/en/explorer/diy-builder/memory/dimm-vs-udimm-vs-rdimm-vs-sodimm-vs-cudimm-whats-the-difference/

  Apart from the obvious product placement, it's a good summary of the differences. Interestingly, every time I tried to find such a comparison article, it was also riddled with placements.

Thoughts

Some people live more in twenty years than others do in eighty. It's not the time that matters, it's the person. — Doctor Who

Now I got to add Doctor Who to my watchlist.

Archive

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1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
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3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• NetBSD on a ROCK64 Board
  https://simonevellei.com/blog/posts/netbsd-on-a-rock64-board/

  The usual "NetBSD will solve it".

• setenv and multithreaded envs performance
  https://ttimo.typepad.com/blog/2024/11/the-steam-client-update-earlier-this-week-mentions-fixed-some-miscellaneous-common-crashes-in-the-linux-notes-which-i-wante.html

  It doesn't answer why the setenv/getenv makes the threads crash, I'm curious.

• Macintosh Garden Library
  https://blog.persistent.info/2024/11/infinite-mac-macintosh-garden-library.html
  https://macintoshgarden.org/

  Now it's easier than ever to play around with retro Mac software.

• Shells again
  https://developer.ibm.com/tutorials/l-linux-shells/

  A repost, but worthwhile. Find when we initially posted this and you'll get a round of applause.

• zram tool
  https://github.com/eylles/zram-service

  We've explored "zram" in 227 and ram disks in a couple of issues. This tiny set of scripts should be helpful for those that want an easy management.

• An interview with Kernighan
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VloimYuCxBs

  Apart from the very repetitive questions that the speaker constantly gets, there's a lot of golden questions that dive deeper.

• Security Is A Useless Controls Problem
  https://securityis.substack.com/p/security-is-a-useless-controls-problem

  Catchy title, but it's a great explanation of security theater.

• Syncing shell history
  https://calebhearth.com/search-sync-shell-atuin
  https://atuin.sh/

  I'm not sure I'll rely on this particular tool, but I've always wanted to do something similar to this.

Life & Other

• Something light for this week
  https://neal.fun/

  Simply enjoy it!

Thoughts

"Common sense is for common people" — A random internet user

But what does it mean?

Archive

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Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Linux hardware info
  https://nixsanctuary.com/best-linux-hardware-system-info-commands/
  https://www.golinuxcloud.com/dmidecode-command-in-linux/

  A sort of listicle about commands that can be used to get hardware info.

• POSIX 2024 novelties
  https://blog.toast.cafe/posix2024-xcu

  A continuation of "A continuation on POSIX 2024" in issue 251. It's a much deeper and better explanation, going into the reason why the changes were made too.

• Dive into mseal
  https://blog.trailofbits.com/2024/10/25/a-deep-dive-into-linuxs-new-mseal-syscall/

  Now that's a true deep dive, within the kernel and with as many details as you want.

• ioctl and window size
  https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/WindowSizeIoctlAndSignal

  As usual there's some SunOS innovation in there.

• Useful built-in macOS tools
  https://weiyen.net/articles/useful-macos-cmd-line-utilities

  There's a bunch of these that could inspire some to create similar tools.

• systemd and embedded linux
  https://kevinboone.me/systemd_embedded.html

  If you happen to be developing on embedded systems, then this is relevant.

• a smaller getopt
  https://dotat.at/@/2024-11-06-getopt.html

  Revisiting basic constructs is a great way to enhance insights into how they can possibly be improved or seen with new eyes.

• wildcard expansion
  https://seclists.org/oss-sec/2024/q4/56

  We all know that wildcard expansion has devilish details that can often be abused. For some, this is a new bug, for others, it's why shell scripts are so messy.

Life & Other

• The last ones standing
  https://johnhawks.net/weblog/the-mystery-of-the-german-cockroach/

  The idea of them traveling on planes around the world, and on cruise ships is as old as time, and still a funny one.

Thoughts

"I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do." — Leonardo da Vinci

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
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Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Making FreeBSD more user-friendly
  https://gyptazy.com/freebsd-how-can-we-make-it-more-attractive-to-new-users/

  A follow up on "Laptop support NOW" from issue 263. There's an earthquake-like awakening within FreeBSD to focus on this.

• Switching from Linux to BSD
  https://it-notes.dragas.net/2024/10/03/i-solve-problems-eurobsdcon/
  https://www.theregister.com/2024/10/08/switching_from_linux_to_bsd/

  Boring, predictable, and low-maintenance sound like extremely good qualities in the world of software.

• OpenBSD is hard to show off
  https://atthis.link/blog/2024/16379.html
  https://dataswamp.org/~solene/2023-10-01-octopenbsd-2023.html

  A somewhat follow up on the stability topic: obviously OpenBSD also provides reliable and stable computing.

• macOS 15 is UNIX/POSIX certified
  https://www.theregister.com/2024/10/11/macos_15_is_unix/

  If you can pay for it, then get it. It seems to be the motto, even if another OS is UNIX-compatible, if it can't pay then it can't have the trademark.

• Plan9 and GNU Guix
  https://the-dam.org/docs/explanations/Plan9ListenOnLinux.html

  An implementation of a super-server-like system similar to Plan9's listen by relying on Guix' service mechanism.

• Updating the BIOS using Linux
  https://www.pixelbeat.org/docs/bios/
  https://superuser.com/questions/1683932/write-custom-nvram-entry#1683937

  Risky procedure, but good to know.

• The life of a container
  https://indradhanush.github.io/blog/life-of-a-container/

  This is your typical post about the components that make up a container, see also "What, why, and how of containers" in issue 239 and "Another look at containers from scratch" in issue 234, among others.

• JS tricks for polkit granular authorization
  https://www.timesys.com/security/linux-polkit-implementing-user-space-authorization-on-embedded-platforms/
  https://gist.github.com/grawity/3886114

  It's always good to have a refresher, even on topics you've already researched and think you know well, especially when it's someonene else explaining it in a different way.

• Multitasking in the kernel
  https://kukuruku.co/post/multitasking-management-in-the-operating-system-kernel/

  The formatting is a bit broken, but the content is gold. A big reminder of OS courses and basics.

• X11 selection sharing
  https://github.com/splitbrain/clipscreen

  This creates a virtual monitor to share only sections of the screen, pretty handy.

Life & Other

• The end of the pagerank era
  https://blog.kagi.com/age-pagerank-over

  Apart from walled-gardens, now I see so many people relying on AI instead of search engines for basic day-to-day questions. (I don't care much about Kagi and have never used it, this isn't an ad for them).

• DST evolution in pictures
  https://blog.scottlogic.com/2021/09/14/120-years-timezone.html

  ...and we're still to see the removal of DST in the EU.

Thoughts

"Peace begins with a smile." — Mother Teresa

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Comments over SSH
  https://blog.haschek.at/2023/ssh-based-comment-system.html

  That's a fun idea. It thwarts automated bots that rely on standard comment systems but won't deter any other attacker.

• RootAsRole
  https://lechatp.github.io/RootAsRole/
  https://lechatp.github.io/RootAsRole/chsr/file-config.html

  This is a new tool I had missed when doing research on access-control on Unix. It's neat but a bit cumbersome to use compared with relatively more simple mechanisms.

• Solaris profiles
  https://softpanorama.org/Solaris/Security/RBAC/profile_shells.shtml
  https://venam.net/blog/unix/2023/02/28/access_control.html#sunos-derivatives-profiles

  Now, this is something I do know and it's similar to the previous one, though it's a bit simplified yet requires a "keywords" learning curve to be able to configure it properly.

• Proxying CLI tools
  https://blog.ropnop.com/proxying-cli-tools/

  Now the big question is why the trust stores are not consolidated.

• Linux threads and processes
  https://pthorpe92.dev/programming/systems/common-misunderstandings/
  https://pthorpe92.dev/programming/systems/threads-async-runtimes-part0/
  https://learnlinuxconcepts.blogspot.com/2014/03/process-management.html

  These might sound basic operating system components but it's still good to go back and do an overview of key differences.

• Software supply responsibilities
  https://blog.liw.fi/posts/2024/swroles/

  Can you split this up even more, probably, but having a big idea of the usual persons or roles and responsibilities involved alleviate the planning when thinking about releasing your software.

• Cypto proto odds
  http://blog.bjrn.se/2016/08/cabinet-of-curiosities-bunch-of.html

  A list of protocols cryptographic operations that are a bit odd, according to the author.

• BGP endless AS paths
  https://vincent.bernat.ch/en/blog/2024-bgp-endless-aspath

  A combination of two features that might sound good separately then give rise to the worst outcome.

Life & Other

• Learning to fuzz by examples
  https://github.com/antonio-morales/Fuzzing101

  I've always been fascinated by fuzzers, how by mere bruteforce, constant trial and errors, one can find weak points in software. Now is a good chance to learn a bit about this.

• A few notes on indoctrination
  https://mosermichael.github.io/cstuff/all/blogg/2019/06/26/doctr.html

  "all incoming information has to be understood exclusively by the subject in terms of the main doctrine; also the school system has to actively instill the doctrine and expunge all doubts and heresies."

Thoughts

The indoctrination is so deep that educated people think they’re being objective. — Noam Chomsky

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Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• The network ate my font
  https://verticalsysadmin.com/2017/09/13/sysadmin-war-story-the-network-ate-my-font/

  ... I didn't expect caches at this level. But why not, always expect caches at all levels.

• The latest hyped attack
  https://www.evilsocket.net/2024/09/26/Attacking-UNIX-systems-via-CUPS-Part-I/
  https://ubuntu.com/blog/cups-remote-code-execution-vulnerability-fix-available

  It's a pretty neat attack, I got to say, I was pretty sure somehow zeroconf/multicast services would be like IoT and be full of holes and assumptions (though mostly limited to local network).

• Everything is a file
  https://ph7spot.com/musings/in-unix-everything-is-a-file
  https://web.archive.org/web/20180722143912/https://ph7spot.com/musings/in-unix-everything-is-a-file

  One of the few times I see this distinction explained in a well-put manner.

• trying a simple task
  https://virtuallyfun.com/2018/01/10/life-in-unix-v7-an-attempt-at-a-simple-task/

  An experience in masochism just to see if someone was right!

• What rm does
  https://blog.safia.rocks/post/173241985600/unraveling-rm-what-happens-when-you-run-it
  https://web.archive.org/web/20180424164514/https://blog.safia.rocks/post/173241985600/unraveling-rm-what-happens-when-you-run-it

  The type of learning I like, trying to reverse engineer something, reassemble it, dissect it, and see what every part does.

• Unix error messages
  https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/unix.errors.html

  Old school puns, might not be for everyone, but got a few laughs from me.

• Laptop support NOW
  https://freebsdfoundation.org/blog/why-laptop-support-why-now-freebsds-strategic-move-toward-broader-adoption/

  It's a move to be applauded.

• Picking the right terminal colorscheme
  https://jvns.ca/blog/2024/10/01/terminal-colours/

  I don't think I've seen the terminal colorscheme issues laid down like that before, but each of these hit a particular pain spot I've had and most people had before.

Life & Other

• Flow not force
  https://www.thepositivepsychologypeople.com/living-life-through-flow-not-force/

  Sometimes we need a bit of positivism.

Thoughts

"When a man is stung, he doesn't destroy all beehives." — proverb from Tanzania

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Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Another visual guide to ssh tunneling
  https://ittavern.com/visual-guide-to-ssh-tunneling-and-port-forwarding/

  This is very similar to a previous one I had linked: https://robotmoon.com/ssh-tunnels/.

• Linux on intel 4004
  https://dmitry.gr/?r=05.Projects&proj=35.%20Linux4004

  This is a continuation of "Linux on 8-bit microcontroller" in issue 125.

• More modern horror stories
  https://www.blopig.com/blog/2021/07/linux-horror-stories-and-protection-spells-volume-i/

  At least these ones are accompanied with remediation, can't say I haven't encountered the second scenario with a huge number of files in a single directory.

• self-contained exec
  https://brioche.dev/blog/portable-dynamically-linked-pacakges-on-linux/

  You've heard of nix, and container-based pkg managers, this is similar. See also "Portable Linux binaries" in issue 53 for fun.

• Container desktop, again
  https://container-desktop.com/
  https://rancherdesktop.io/
  https://orbstack.dev/
  https://docs.orbstack.dev/architecture

  As time passes by, it seems this tech and trend is here to stay.

• Rethinking the Unix shell in Lisp
  https://github.com/PuellaeMagicae/unix-in-lisp/blob/master/TUTORIAL.org

  Do you prefer this way? I'm not sure I personally do, but it is nice to think about.

• It lands in Linux 6.12
  https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.12-Lands-sched-ext

  A follow up on "PREEMPT RT support" of issue 260, it allows for an extensible scheduler in Linux that can have its policies implemented with BFP, which is pretty cool.

• A post-quantum world
  https://lwn.net/Articles/973231/

  The new FIPS is still in draft format but it's good to keep up-to-date.

• A simple explanation of io_uring
  https://matklad.github.io/2024/09/32/-what-is-io-uring.html

  I've seen a lot of convoluted blog posts about io_uring but this is probably the most concise and clear one.

• Stricted OpenBSD's ksh
  https://www.undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20240924105732

  It won't allow invalid NUL characters as part of the input string.

Life & Other

• Notre-Dame is back
  https://www.gq.com/story/the-miraculous-resurrection-of-notre-dame

  I've been following the reconstruction of Notre-Dame for a while, there are a few wonderful documentaries about the artisans and craftsmanship, which I'm sure lots of people would enjoy.

Thoughts

Families, when a child is born, Want it to be intelligent.
I, through intelligence, Having wrecked my whole life,
Only hope the baby will prove, Ignorant and stupid.
Then he will crown a tranquil life, By becoming a Cabinet Minister
Su Tung-Po (K. Rexroth's translation)

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Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Power management GUI for Linux
  https://github.com/TheAlexDev23/power-options/

  This is a somewhat GUI copy of powertop, see "Powertop" in issue 169.

• Raw socket different behavior across systems
  https://swagnik.netlify.app/posts/how-raw-sockets-behave-in-different-systems/

  "All this time. I repeat, all this time, I have been poring over the linux man pages while sitting comfortably on macOS." See also "Raw sockets" in issue 160.

• Falsehood about tcp
  https://lwn.net/Articles/990281/

  I think to better understand TCP, anyone should go back to the basics and take a few pages from "computer networking a top-down approach" and try to see how a from-scratch tcp-alike protocol would work.

• Running 32-bit on 64-bit Linux
  https://sigma-star.at/blog/2024/02/aarch64-32-bit-compat-pitfall/

  If you're doing cross compilation, pay attention to this issue. Otherwise, you might infer runtime costs.

• A better UX for shell scripts?
  https://nochlin.com/blog/6-techniques-i-use-to-create-a-great-user-experience-for-shell-scripts

  For the color and progress report, be sure to include a way to disable those so that the script can be used in a pipeline.

• Installing Arch
  https://giacomo.coletto.io/blog/arch-amd/

  Good ol' blog post about notes taken during an installation, along with tips.

Life & Other

• Steganography technique
  https://diffusionillusions.com/

  A mix of optical illusion and steganography.

• Turns out it might be a scam
  https://theconversation.com/the-data-on-extreme-human-ageing-is-rotten-from-the-inside-out-ig-nobel-winner-saul-justin-newman-239023

  As they say "if it's too good to be true, it probably is".

Thoughts

"No star is ever lost we once have seen,
We always may be what we might have been
Since Good, though only thought,
Has life and breath -
God's life - can always be redeemed from death.
And evil in its nature is decay,
And any hour may blot it all away.
The hope that lost in some far distance seems,
May be the truer life, and this the dream."
― Adelaide Anne Procter

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Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• A guide to cronjobs
  https://ittavern.com/cron-jobs-on-linux-comprehensive-guide/

  See also the classic, and so helpful, "This is genius, why didn't this exist before" in issue 39.

• Gnome files
  https://www.datagubbe.se/gnomefiles/

  It's basically a dissection of the GNOME file manager.

• Fuzzing an X compositor
  https://trace.yshui.dev/2024-09-fuzzing.html

  And unsurprisingly, fuzzing uncovers countless bugs.

• NetBSD's kauth
  https://man.netbsd.org/NetBSD-9.3/kauth.9

  A centralized way in the kernel to manage all authorization requests.

• PREEMPT RT support
  https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-PREEMPT_RT-Close-Patches

  Linux has had some facilities for real-time scheduling for a long time, but it wasn't covering everything. Now, we're approaching this.

• Linux hibernate
  https://tookmund.com/2024/09/hibernation-preparation

  Yet, even when diving into the kernel code, it still might not work on too many machines.

• Copy-on-write archive
  https://github.com/teknoraver/car

  This is tar but without copying data, it's only support on BtrFS or XFS.

• A dive into NT
  https://blogsystem5.substack.com/p/windows-nt-vs-unix-design

  This is a really good overview of all the early features that came into windows NT and how it compared to different Unix-like OSes at the time.

Life & Other

• Against rereading
  https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2024/09/04/against-rereading/

  I've never pondered as much as the author about rereading a book. However, in cinema there are many critics who swear by rewatching and that its the only way to truly enjoy a movie. Yet, at the same time, like the author, I feel like something is lost when doing so.

• When security gets in the way
  https://cohost.org/mononcqc/post/3647311-paper-you-want-my-p0

  Software for the real world should be tested with real people in real scenarios.

Thoughts

If it costs you your peace, it's too expensive. — Paulo Coelho

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Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Copy instead of install
  https://battlepenguin.com/tech/copying-linux-between-machines/

  This seems very cumbersome, having an immutable distro, or just a list of packages with user files alongside would be easier to set up.

• Swap the cloud OS
  https://cloudbsd.xyz/main/

  I had heard of this risky procedure before, but I'm not sure I'd ever try it on one of my VPS.

• Why learn Linux
  https://opiero.medium.com/why-you-should-learn-linux-9ceace168e5c

  They mean by that to develop software using a Linux-based OS. Frankly, it seems like a pretty cliche and superficial article, but probably something worth sending to newcomers to Unix-like environments.

• SSH certificate authority with TPM
  https://linderud.dev/blog/ssh-ca-with-device-and-identity-attestation-ssh-tpm-ca-authority/

  This supersedes issue 175 "Using certificates for SSH authentication" by adding hardware keys (HSM/TPM).

• Yubikey got pwned
  https://www.zagaja.com/2024/09/yubikey-digital-seatbelt/
  https://www.yubico.com/support/security-advisories/ysa-2024-03/

  ..And when we were just starting to discuss hardware sources of trust. The attack requires physical access, but still.

• Debian is an easy target
  https://unix.foo/posts/insecurity-of-debian/

  See also "16 years anniversary of a CVE" in issue 244.

• WiFi auth using SIM cards
  https://kittenlabs.de/blog/2024/08/31/wifi-auth-with-osmohlr/sim-cards/

  You've all heard of WEP and WPA for WiFi auth, but get ready for this. I know this isn't everyone's cup of tea, but it's something I deal with professionally and when I saw the article pop-up, I couldn't resist adding it here. It can seem a bit complex with an HLR, a RADIUS server, custom firmware on the router, and configured sim card and device. Yet, it also the same sort of things used when doing tunnels towards the operator's core network for VoWiFi for example.

• TCP thin-stream on Linux
  https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.5555/2346888.2346891

  In sum, it reduces the latency by modifying the TCP retransmission mechanism (fast retransmitting on first duplicate ACK, instead of 3 if I'm not wrong, and to not apply exponential backoff, so not reducing the wait time between retransmission and possibly window size).

• Myths and controversial info
  https://itvision.altervista.org/

  A lot of miscellaneous articles you might find interesting.

• Missing BSD/Linux
  https://brainbaking.com/post/2024/05/i-miss-bsd-linux/

  The basic woes of someone who owns a macbook.

• ALSA bit perfect
  https://kevinboone.me/alsa_bitperfect.html

  Who needs a sound server when you can force yourself to use ALSA. Yet, I don't understand why not configure the audio server to simply not resample audio if it's under a certain bitrate.

• The dc calc
  https://howdytx.technology/unix-history-the-dc-calculator/

  RPN is one of the CS student's first weapon of choice.

• wak and awk implementation
  https://www.raygard.net/awkdoc/

  Ever wondered how awk works, let's write it from scratch.

• A shell rabbit hole
  https://zwischenzugs.com/2022/09/28/a-little-shell-rabbit-hole/

  That's one way to learn.

• Manual driver binding on Linux
  https://lwn.net/Articles/143397/

  It's nothing novel but one of the TIL sort of posts, you can bind/unbind device drivers through the /sys virtual fs.

• A beginner's guide to install from source
  https://moi.vonos.net/linux/beginners-installing-from-source/

  A very basic tutorial to get people initiate on what it means to download from source, how to check it was downloaded properly, extract, patch, and install software.

• Command line conventions over time
  https://blog.liw.fi/posts/2022/05/07/unix-cli/

  A summary of different techniques and conventions used on the cli that appeared over the years.

• SIGnal handling presentation
  https://sunshowers.io/posts/beyond-ctrl-c-signals/

  It consists of a basic review of signals, a few mentions of security, and mostly an how-to handle them in Rust.

• Steps to secure a Linux server
  https://kenhv.com/blog/securing-a-linux-server

  See also "Fail2ban: an enemy of script-kiddies" in issue 145.

• Porting systemd to musl lib
  https://catfox.life/2024/09/05/porting-systemd-to-musl-libc-powered-linux/

  As the title says.

Life & Other

• An InfoSec homelab
  https://www.archcloudlabs.com/projects/5-years-of-homelab/

  We tend to see a lot of posts about random homelabs, but never something specifically made with the intention of learning security.

• Internet hourglass again
  https://systemsapproach.org/2024/08/19/how-the-hourglass-won/

  Another perception of the hourglass, see also "Internet hourglass" in issue 194.

Thoughts

90% of the work is always maintenance, life is maintenance.

Enjoy the longer than usual newsletter this week!

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Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Android adding support for bigger PAGESIZE
  https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2024/08/adding-16-kb-page-size-to-android.html

  This won't appear until Android 15 is out and even then it'll only be as a dev option.

• Explaining any shell
  https://www.shell.how/

  The explanation isn't always extraordinary helpful but it's a start. It relies on fig.io docs (which seems to be soon deprecated).

• Removing Greek quiz for a ship quiz
  https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-cvs&m=172443408727088&w=2

  The Greek quiz appeared in 1995 but most people aren't learning Greek.

• OpenSSH Backdoors
  https://blog.isosceles.com/openssh-backdoors/

  The story of a 22yo attack on OpenSSH and how it related to today.

• netcat for IRC
  https://gir.st/ircpipe.html

  This reminds me of ii, the suckless irc client. I bet it could be used in the same manner.

• Linux pipes are slow
  https://qsantos.fr/2024/08/25/linux-pipes-are-slow/

  Why are they slow and how does vmsplice call help.

• Pong in bash
  https://0x0.st/XJg2.bash

  Pretty impressive that it takes as few lines as this.

• New malware on Linux
  https://thehackernews.com/2024/08/new-linux-malware-sedexp-hides-credit.html

  It basically adds a UDEV rules to run the malware at boot by executing it every time /dev/random is attached/loaded.

• Overengineered todo list
  https://taskwarrior.org/docs/start/

  Not dismissing the usefulness, but I personally prefer either a plain text file, or paper and pen if it's for something this simple.

Life & Other

• Something thought provoking
  https://readsomethinginteresting.com/

  A collection roulette of random ideas and thoughts in web articles.

• When you miss traffic
  https://driveandlisten.herokuapp.com/

  This is pretty entertaining if you put it on all day on a smart TV.

• Who's stuck in space
  https://www.howmanypeopleareinspacerightnow.com/

  Just a fun trivia website.

Thoughts

The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven — John Milton

Archive

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Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Building an embedded Linux system
  https://jaycarlson.net/embedded-linux/

  A comprehensive yet accessible guide to help build an embedded system that includes Linux.

• FreeBSD considers Rust
  https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/985210/f3c3beb9ef9c550e/

  As with anything Rust related, even rumors have a huge sensationalism online.

• The day /proc died
  https://dev.to/rkeene/the-day-proc-died-53ic

  A full storage always leads to the weirdest bugs.

• Cathedral vs Bazaar Design discrepancies
  https://j3s.sh/thought/trainwreck-design.html

  An argument that things don't have to be black and white, there could be a middle-ground.

• lyrebird
  https://github.com/lyrebird-voice-changer/lyrebird/

  Once upon a time, I used to have fun with these voice modifiers, some were amazingly good, others not so much. With a bit of fiddling these can sound convincing.

• OOM kill count
  https://medium.com/opsops/there-is-an-oom-kill-count-in-linux-e9936aa33102

  Well, today I learned something! My previous machine used to have a trigger happy OOM-killer, so I guess its kill count was quite high.

• epoll
  https://darkcoding.net/software/epoll-the-api-that-powers-the-modern-internet/

  See also "What can you epoll" in issue 168.

Life & Other

• A reflection on the matrix
  https://theconversation.com/the-matrix-20-years-on-how-a-sci-fi-film-tackled-big-philosophical-questions-114007

  One of the best piece discussing the topic.

• More cinema reflections
  https://www.openculture.com/2015/03/andrei-tarkovskys-message-to-young-people.html

  What does this mean in an always connected world?

Thoughts

"It is possible to commit no errors and still lose, that is not failure. That is life" — Captain Jean-Luc Picard, Star Trek

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Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• ML using pipes
  https://jott.live/markdown/ml_pipes

  Practically it's a command line tool relying on shumai (a tensor library), nothing too out-of-the-ordinary.

• Atomic Operations
  https://rcrowley.org/2010/01/06/things-unix-can-do-atomically.html

  A list of thing that POSIX-like/compliant systems should do atomically, and that you should trust.

• Modern or classic tools
  https://meetryanflowers.com/modern-linux-tools-vs-unix-classics-which-would-i-choose/

  In my opinion jq is now a classic, with the omnipresence of json, it's a must have tool.

• why is there a delay
  https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/335648/why-does-the-reset-command-include-a-delay
  https://invisible-island.net/ncurses/man/tset.1.html#h2-HISTORY

  As usual, the answer is because of archaic constraints.

• Writing a Unix clone in about a month
  https://drewdevault.com/2024/05/24/2024-05-24-Bunnix.html

  Interesting project, but the write-up about the experience could've had more details.

• Wayland finally merges a screen capture protocol
  https://www.phoronix.com/news/Wayland-Merges-Screen-Capture
  https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/merge_requests/124

  This has been cooking for more than 2 years.

• A new way to develop on Linux
  https://www.codethink.co.uk/articles/2024/A-new-way-to-develop-on-Linux/
  https://www.codethink.co.uk/articles/2024/A-new-way-to-develop-on-Linux-PartII/
  https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/systemd-sysext.html

  A set of tools built on top of systemd-sysext, system extension images. This is a sort of overlay filesystem that is used to test new component software.

Life & Other

• What one can learn from teaching
  https://claytonwramsey.com/blog/learned-from-teaching

  I think these are good general life advices.

Thoughts

Meet them where they are.

Archive

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Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Revisiting Linux CPU scheduling
  https://www.uninformativ.de/blog/postings/2024-08-03/0/POSTING-en.html

  Why does nice doesn't see to work as intended, this blog post answers this question by going through some linux scheduling, cgroup and slices. Everyone explains cgroups in their own way, I've also written a bit about them.

• A UX designer look at Linux
  https://www.chris-wood.design/resources/linux-for-ux-designers

  I'm not familiar with most of the tools mentioned, but that should come in handy for those in the know.

• The Burroughs ICON
  https://jasoneckert.github.io/myblog/icon-computer/

  The peculiar ICON system running with QNX. It was a system conceived by a government for educational purposes.

• Another tracer tutorial
  https://sh4dy.com/2024/08/03/beetracer/

  This one tries to simulate an strace-clone.

• Undo function
  https://www.theregister.com/2024/08/01/linux_rollback_options/

  We're all following immutable distros, reproducible builds, snapshots, but most of these are often in the fringes. Here we see that it's starting to appear in a more popular Linux distro.

• Userspaceification of POSIX
  https://www.redox-os.org/news/kernel-11/

  Redox is a Unix-like OS written in Rust. In its signals project it's doing a rewrite of signal handling in user-space.

• A screen tutorial
  https://linuxtldr.com/installing-screen/

  Someone asked me for a basic screen tutorial.

• Cat9 Microdosing: Each and Contain
  https://arcan-fe.com/2024/08/05/cat9-microdosing-each-and-contain/

  An update on the Arcan's side projects to experiment at making better CLI.

Life & Other

• Andy Warhol’s lost Amiga art found
  https://dfarq.homeip.net/andy-warhols-lost-amiga-art-found/

  Now, that's a type of computer art you won't see much these days.

Thoughts

Credula est spes improba.
He that lives on hope will die fasting.
He that lives on hope dances without music. — Latin proverb

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• In the Beginning was the Command Line
  https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs81n/command.txt

  A pre-2000s article about a generic history of computing from the author's personal point of view, it emphasises on the idea that we shouldn't take things at face value. Very entertaining!

• The ultimate guide to Linux network performance
  https://ntk148v.github.io/posts/linux-network-performance-ultimate-guide/

  Yet, it's more of an amalgam of random network info and configs than an actual guide.

• Path of a packet in Linux
  https://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~sergey/netreads/path-of-packet/Network_stack.pdf

  A bit old but it complements the previous link.

• Are find and mkdir together Turing complete?
  https://ogiekako.vercel.app/blog/find_mkdir_tc

  From that article, it's close to being, with some limitations.

• ed from less
  http://blog.syncpup.com/posts/calling-ed-from-less.html

  If you're into ed that's a great setup, as for others it's a neat party-trick.

• Debugging slow terminal
  https://lock.cmpxchg8b.com/slowterm.html

  This is similar to issue 171 "Debugging slow shell" but for terminals on WSL.

• Computer setup of blogger
  https://jnsgr.uk/2024/07/how-i-computer-in-2024/

  Your usual battle station/setup blog post, share yours and I'll add it to the newsletter next week.

• Vanilla OS
  https://www.theregister.com/2024/07/31/vanilla_os_friendly_radical/

  Another review of Vanilla OS, see also "A review of Vanilla OS" in issue 179. Their latest version works a bit differently than the previous one.

• A self-built system
  https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/983340/25f5b1f6b1247079/

  Impressive and quite useful.

Life & Other

• DnD teachings
  https://ericwbailey.website/published/dungeons-and-dragons-taught-me-how-to-write-alt-text/

  I've never actually tried dnd but that makes me want to, now I have to find a group of acolytes to join me.

• Just remove the plug
  https://computer.rip/2024-07-31-just-disconnect-the-internet.html

  Basically a reply to "we can isolate them from the web".

Thoughts

"You can avoid reality, but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality." — Ayn Rand

Now that's what news addicts will tell you, but then what are they doing with the info they get?

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• What's a stipple
  https://matttproud.com/blog/posts/x-window-system-boot-stipple.html

  Now I've learned a lot about something I didn't know I should know, nor will ever use, but it feels great.

• Another few websites for syscalls search
  https://syscalls.mebeim.net/?table=x86/64/x64/latest
  https://syscall.sh/

  See also "Syscalls list" in issue 160.

• CAMARA project
  https://camaraproject.org/

  I had read these specs before, however I wasn't aware this was a Linux foundation project. It defines a common api to interface with telcos to do things such as phone number or location verification.

• Secure boot on Gentoo
  https://www.setphaserstostun.org/posts/secure-boot-on-gentoo-with-shim-grub/
  https://www.linux.org/docs/man1/mokutil.html

  Having every step done from scratch is a great way to learn about secure boot.

• Reasons why someone might like NetBSD
  https://mccd.space/posts/netbsd-review/

  pkgsrc one of the first cross-platform package manager, you agree?

• Linux audio stack demystified
  https://blog.rtrace.io/posts/the-linux-audio-stack-demystified/
  https://venam.net/blog/unix/2021/02/07/audio-stack.html
  https://venam.net/blog/unix/2021/06/23/pipewire-under-the-hood.html

  A great post touching everything on the audio stack on Linux. As someone who has dived into this before on articles on my blog, I can assess that it's great content. I've never linked them in the newsletter, so I'll add them along.

• Dell UNIX brief history
  https://notes.technologists.com/notes/2008/01/10/a-brief-history-of-dell-unix/

  A pretty personal story in relation to Dell UNIX.

• Software supply chain sec according to RedHat
  https://www.redhat.com/en/topics/security/what-is-software-supply-chain-security

  There's nothing really new here, but it's a good summary.

Life & Other

• Evolution of Data Storage
  https://medium.com/predict/the-evolution-of-data-storage-from-clay-tablets-to-quantum-computing-c1d8cc3cf8df

  I watched a talk about this recently, and I thought I'd share something similar. Record keeping, storing information, is a fascinating topic. In this post you'll find a list of different technologies and future tech that are used to achieve this.

Thoughts

"You can be the ripest, juiciest peach in the world, and there's still going to be somebody who hates peaches." — Dita Von Teese

I don't know the author of this quote, but I felt it properly encompasses the idea that people have different likings and that we should be ok with it.

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• FAMF
  https://prma.dev/posts/files-as-metadata-format

  I like ideas like this, not because they're perfect but because they stimulate a lot of discussion around them.

• GNOME testing a new font
  https://www.omglinux.com/gnome-may-switch-to-inter-font/
  https://github.com/rsms/inter

  It's trying out Inter instead of Cantarell.

• Another TUI for wifi on Linux
  https://github.com/pythops/impala

  It relies on iwd backend to be installed.

• Bash dungeon
  https://github.com/wolandark/bash-dungeon

  This is similar to dungeonfs in issue 138 "Check your FUSE".

• terminal discipline and readline
  https://jvns.ca/blog/2024/07/08/readline/

  An exploration of different tools that rely on readline and others to input text and manipulate it.

• The background for file max and nr open
  https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/TwoFileDescriptorLimits

  So there's some historic reason for it, and also a limit per process and a global limit.

• Use the kernel as a bootloader
  https://pretalx.com/devconf-cz-2024/talk/W3AVCT/
  https://github.com/rhboot/nmbl-poc

  A WIP/PoC replacement for GRUB called nmbl, developed at Red Hat.

• One file linux
  https://hub.zhovner.com/geek/one-file-linux/
  https://github.com/zhovner/OneFileLinux/

  A Linux distro in a ~20MB file, it boots directly from the UEFI image.

• State of Text Rendering 2024
  https://behdad.org/text2024/

  A survey of all text rendering changes and advancement in 2024, written by a developer that has previously led and contributed to projects such as HarfBuzz, Cairo, and Pango among others. It discusses things such as OpenType adding support for colored fonts, variable fonts, and a Universal Shaping Engine. There's a good list of libraries, tools, toolkits, in the applications section.

Life & Other

• After the bankruptcy
  https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/09/business/synapse-bankruptcy-fintech-fdic-insurance.html
  https://archive.ph/LWmgP

  That's something not everyone in the world has in mind: What if the bank fails, then what, how much is insured, can it really be covered? In the USA $250k should be covered, in theory, meanwhile the European Central Bank covers €100k. However, in the case above, it's about the new "virtual" online banks, neobanks with the hype in fintech, that younger people are starting to use.

Thoughts

"A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for." — John A. Shedd

A classic quote to incite you to be out there this week.

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Bash strict mode
  http://redsymbol.net/articles/unofficial-bash-strict-mode/

  A couple of setups in a bash script that can help avoid common issues, however they all have drawbacks.

• A Linux CNA Case Study
  https://grsecurity.net/cve-2021-4440_linux_cna_case_study

  It's kind of alarming that multiple projects rely on these CVE notification schemes to fix their issues, and if this chain breaks they're unaware of them.

• Y292B bug
  https://www.dpolakovic.space/blogs/y292b

  That's the definition of solving a problem just because it's a problem, not because it's relevant.

• Linux is dead, long-live Docker monoculture
  https://antranigv.am/posts/2021/08/2021-08-13-13-37/

  A rant about porting a docker build script to a BSD system.

• Editors
  https://github.com/istoph/editor
  https://github.com/bisqwit/that_editor

  They're all looking to emulate that 90s or 16-bit DOS style.

• A continuation on POSIX 2024
  https://sortix.org/blog/posix-2024/

  This is a well made summary of all that changed in POSIX 2024.

• trurl
  https://github.com/curl/trurl

  A tool to help manipulate URLs, by the same lead dev as cURL.

• Sci-fi interfaces
  https://scifiinterfaces.com/

  This blog is epic, it regroups all sorts of futuristic movie props UI.

• Pixie in a dock
  https://www.linuxserver.io/blog/2019-12-16-netboot-xyz-docker-network-boot-server-pxe

  This docker image will help you mange your PXE.

• Booting Linux from Google Drive
  https://ersei.net/en/blog/fuse-root

  First boot from FUSE then from Google Drive.

• ed semantics
  http://blog.syncpup.com/posts/ed-semantics.html

  Getting into the right mindset helps understand the tool.

• Playing H.264 videos on a Raspberry pi
  https://www.downtowndougbrown.com/2024/06/playing-1080p-h-264-video-on-my-old-256-mb-raspberry-pi/

  And not any quality, but 1080p, which lags even on my laptop.

• Userland rootkits are lame
  https://grugq.substack.com/p/userland-rootkits-are-lame

  A list of all the evasion that userland rootkits can use, and a simple trick to avoid them.

• Job Control
  https://jvns.ca/blog/2024/07/03/reasons-to-use-job-control/

  A summary of shell job control.

Life & Other

• A new hex editor
  https://github.com/WerWolv/ImHex

  I've been looking for a better hex editor for a long time now, this one is better than most I've tried.

Thoughts

"Don't take criticism from someone you wouldn't take advice from." — Earliest attribution to a listener to The Minimalist Podcast during call-in

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• printing teeth
  https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2024/06/3d-printing-my-teeth/

  Ever wanted to convert a CT scan to a 3d print.. Here you go.

• run0
  https://news.itsfoss.com/systemd-run0/

  I knew about systemd-run to execute tasks that are cpu bound or within a cgroup, and other container tech, but that's the first time I saw someone making the relation with sudo.

• GNU coreutils to uutils coreutils
  https://www.joshmcguigan.com/blog/gentoo-uutils-coreutils/

  This is a project that tries to replace the GNU coreutils with rust utilities. There are a few things that need fixing for them to work inplace, that's what the post is about.

• Comment on mseal
  https://lwn.net/Articles/978010/

  Since that 6.10 Linux includes this it now needs to be propagated to users via glibc.

• Comparing cross-distro pkg managers
  https://github.com/AppImage/AppImageKit/wiki/Similar-projects#comparison

  I think it's a fair comparison. Usually, if a software writes their comparison doc then they're always better than the "competition" but here it's relative.

• shpool
  https://github.com/shell-pool/shpool

  Think dtach but modernized with rust.

• bhyve companion tools
  https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2024/06/23/freebsd-bhyve-companion-tools/

  Two helper scripts that can help while running bhyve.

• ChatGPT Linux
  https://incoherency.co.uk/blog/stories/chatgpt-linux.html

  Got enough AI articles in your reading list already? Is whatever the AI is spurting out to the author confabulated or is it real? "Jailbreaking" these LLM seems like a huge security hole.

Life & Other

• NASCAR problem
  https://indieweb.org/NASCAR_problem

  I'm sure you've encountered it but didn't know there was a name for this phenomenon.

• Curated Web
  https://rafichaudhury.com/site/blog/Freehand-Web

  A meditation on the state of the internet, what the web can be, and an emphasis on custom and "wilder" personal websites while making their creation available to anyone.

• 20 years of blogging
  https://blogsystem5.substack.com/p/20-years-of-blogging

  I just love reading about the path people have taken and the evolution they've had over the years.

Thoughts

"He who angers you conquers you." — Elizabeth Kenny

Seems like trolls on the web control a lot of people.

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
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Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• POSIX 2024
  https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10555529
  https://www.heise.de/en/news/Update-of-the-POSIX-standard-1003-1-2024-with-new-tools-and-functions-9764724.html

  A new specs of POSIX is out, want to read it? Got to pay or otherwise have access through an institution. Fortunately, I think I know someone part of an IEEE group that I could ask. I'll let you know if I get indirect access.

• An ls replacement
  https://github.com/arp242/elles

  The big difference is that it's a little bit more human readable

• But is it parsable?
  https://mywiki.wooledge.org/ParsingLs

  Listen to the advices and pitfalls on how messy parsing ls can be and what to do instead.

• diff and merge
  https://exple.tive.org/blarg/2024/06/14/fifty-years-of-diff-and-merge/

  An prose chanting how the patch/diff/merge mechanism are the building block of any community contribution project.

• a key expander
  https://github.com/jarusll/keydogger

  I'm not sure it's as useful as aliases.

• Building an embedded Linux system
  https://popovicu.com/posts/making-my-first-embedded-linux-system/

  A sort of guide or story about building a small breadboard system running along with Linux.

• Traces of honey
  https://blog.sofiane.cc/ssh_honeypot/

  These types of research gives us a good idea of the current automated attacks on the public internet going on these days. Apparently, they target a lot of IoT devices.

• OpenBSD on computer appliances
  https://hiandrewquinn.github.io/til-site/posts/openbsd-the-computer-appliance-maker-s-secret-weapon/

  This is somewhat a solution to what happens in the previous link.

• Packaging swift apps
  https://mko.re/blog/swift-alpine-packaging/

  Swift now runs on Linux, however it needs a couple of glib stuff, so what do you need to do to make it work on Alpine.

Life & Other

• Documentation Driven Development
  https://unicorn-utterances.com/posts/documentation-driven-development

  While nice in theory, and probably one of the best way to develop in my opinion, it still includes countless refining and ambiguity if you're unsure about what to initially write.

• Real-World Threat Modelling
  https://medium.com/sagefuturemakers/real-world-threat-modelling-fb14ef767c49

  Want to see a pragmatic example of threat modelling.

Thoughts

"The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper names." — Chinese proverb.

There's also the saying that the map is not the territory. Hence, maybe we should describe properly what we're talking about before even jumping to conclusion based on words that might carry meanings that were not initially intended.

Archive

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Contribute

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1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• What is PID 0
  https://blog.dave.tf/post/linux-pid0/

  A clarification on what PID 0 actually represents on Unix-like systems. See also issue 145 "It's Hard to Stay Idle".

• OpenSSH adds penalty mechanism
  https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20240607042157

  Now you might not have to install fail2ban, by default it'll give a somewhat similar behavior.

• A linter for make
  https://github.com/mcandre/unmake

  It should be useful for minor stuff you might have missed.

• Communication
  https://www.networkworld.com/article/968450/communicating-with-other-users-on-the-linux-command-line.html

  The days where this was useful have passed, but it's still good to know about how to achieve this.

• sudon't
  https://dotat.at/@/2024-05-02-sudo.html
  https://dmitry.khlebnikov.net/2015/07/18/should-we-use-sudo-for-day-to-day-activities/

  We've got a lot of previous content about sudo in this newsletter archive. So here's a common critiques.

• rm -rf /
  https://web.archive.org/web/20150512013857/http://justpasha.org/folk/rm.html

  Yes, a classic horror story, and legendary admins that put the system back up.

• 007
  https://web.archive.org/web/20180322180833/https://react-etc.net/page/james-bond-007-unix-permissions

  Just a pun...

Life & Other

• Reading an RSS feed
  https://hamatti.org/posts/what-does-it-feel-like-to-read-rss-feeds/

  A few points about what it feels like to curate and read your own RSS feed (in comparison with social media and the attention economy).

• ASCII-fy this
  https://meatfighter.com/ascii-silhouettify/

  This is a new auto-converter to ascii, it mostly works well for small logos which is cool to have in a terminal (but will never look as good as hand-drawn ascii).

Thoughts

"If you hate a person, then you’re defeated by them." — Confucius

Confusius, aka Kong Fuzi, had a much nicer way of saying "Living rent free in your head".

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Copying a file from an older laptop
  https://www.unterminated.com/random-fun/how-to-copy-a-file-from-a-30-year-old-laptop

  This turns out to be more interesting and complex than at first glance.

• A distro for digital painting
  https://www.davidrevoy.com/article1030/debian-12-kde-plasma-2024-install-guide

  This is a custom setup guide to help install what is necessary to get a good environment for working on graphic. Who could've thought that Wayland isn't ready for professional digital painters.

• kdenlive adds AI subtitle translation
  https://kdenlive.org/en/2024/05/kdenlive-24-05-0-released/

  ...And yes, the model is offline.

• Powershell
  https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/scripting/install/installing-powershell-on-linux?view=powershell-7.4

  Isn't that your favorite shell?

• Ebury Malware
  https://cyberinsider.com/ebury-malware-compromised-400000-linux-servers-for-financial-gain/
  https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/05/ssh-backdoor-has-infected-400000-linux-servers-over-15-years-and-keeps-on-spreading/

  When attackers are persistent they'll use lateral attacks, spread and infiltrate through internal networks in manners that couldn't have been done without the initial phase.

• State of sandboxing on Linux
  https://git.sr.ht/~alip/syd/tree/main/item/doc/toctou-or-gtfo.md

  A few show of race-condition attacks for different sandbox techs, the so-called time-of-check-time-of-use attacks.

• Implementing a cache on NetBSD
  https://indico.bsdcan.org/event/1/contributions/11/attachments/2/2/presentation_bsdcan_final.pdf
  https://bcachefs.org/

  The goal is to achieve something similar to bcachefs on Linux but simpler.

• autoconf and xz
  https://leahneukirchen.org/blog/archive/2024/04/what-autoconf-got-right.html

  It has nothing to do with xz though, but more of a summary of what a well-known and well-used build system is expected to have.

Life & Other

• Intellectual Obesity Crisis
  https://www.gurwinder.blog/p/the-intellectual-obesity-crisis

  Everything is a "crisis" these days, a crisis of being too dramatic. Anyway, this article is about infobesity, if you've heard of the term.

Thoughts

There is only one thing a philosopher can be relied upon to do, and that is to contradict other philosophers. — William James

Do you agree to agree, are you a contrarian, or others?

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• The evolution of ELF object format
  https://maskray.me/blog/2024-05-26-evolution-of-elf-object-file-format

  If you like Unix history, you might also like to dive into ELF history too. This is what this post is about, the different handover through time, additions, contributions, evolution, and new direction.

• mseal making its appearance in 6.10 Linux
  https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.10-Merges-mseal

  It is getting merged, see "mseal" in issue 230.

• tmux is worse is better
  https://hiandrewquinn.github.io/til-site/posts/tmux-is-worse-is-better/

  This post sums up a lot of ideas in software dev with a few words. Often, some people are so idealists that they break basic features for their users.

• Effects in the terminal
  https://chrisbuilds.github.io/terminaltexteffects/showroom/

  These are some of the best and cool visual effects I've seen achieved in the terminal, kudos. This is definitely going to be used on some movie set.

• open source TTS
  https://github.com/2noise/ChatTTS

  This is a life changing moment for text-to-speech. Once upon a time you had to install horrible libraries in a complex mesh of voice files to download, or pay a hefty sum, to have any voice that resembles a human. And it doesn't come close to what the "AI trend" can achieve these days, truly impressive!

• Wayland compositor on OpenBSD
  https://x61.sh/log/2024/05/27052024192206-sway_openbsd.html

  I wasn't aware of the progress of Wayland support on OpenBSD, but it seems like it's coming along fine.

• ZFR on SMR Drives
  https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2022/05/08/zfs-on-smr-drives/
  https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2024/05/29/zfs-resilver-smr-drives/

  SMR have their ups and downs, but how do we configure them for efficiency, can we resilver them if within a RAID?

• Writing a USB driver
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXBC85SGC0Q&ab_channel=BitsinsidebyRen%C3%A9Rebe

  I'm not a fan of livestream, but this time it seems like the kind of topic you can actually learn from, sort of like pair programming.

• A few reasons why Linux kernel bugs won't get replies
  https://linux-regtracking.leemhuis.info/post/frequent-reasons-why-linux-kernel-bug-reports-are-ignored/

  It's tough to fill bugs, but it's even tougher to handle them, in a way it's understandable that they'd put "a spoke in the wheel".

Life & Other

• file id
  http://pcmicro.com/getdiz/file_id.html
  https://web.archive.org/web/20240528063222/pcmicro.com/getdiz/file_id.html

  Want to learn a bit about old school BBS shareware distribution info format?

• Understanding Frappe's Scheduler
  https://frappe.io/blog/engineering/if-you-wish-to-truly-understand-frappes-scheduler-you-must-first-invent-the-universe

  Things that seem simple at first rarely are.

Thoughts

"My life has been full of terrible misfortunes most of which never happened." — Michel de Montaigne

As far as I'm concerned, I think this quote is about how worrying and anxiety is worse than the actual events. Do you agree, how would you interpret this?

Archive

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https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

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1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Terminal inner workings
  https://kevroletin.github.io/terminal/2021/12/11/how-terminal-works-in.html
  https://kevroletin.github.io/terminal/2021/12/11/how-terminal-works-out.html
  https://kevroletin.github.io/terminal/2022/01/27/how-tty-works-stty.html
  https://kevroletin.github.io/terminal/2022/02/05/how-tty-works-sessions.html

  Another one of these 'how terminals work' article, similar to a couple we've shared before. It's a good series, add it to your list.

• Infiltration in your terminal
  https://iterm2.com/downloads/stable/iTerm2-3_5_0.changelog

  People have not taken this sudden change very positively, that is to say the least.

• Patching binaries on the fly
  https://github.com/corsix/polyfill-glibc/
  https://github.com/corsix/polyfill-glibc/blob/main/docs/How_does_polyfill_glibc_work.md
  https://github.com/corsix/polyfill-glibc/blob/main/docs/The_Linux_loading_process.md

  This is a Linux tool to modify ELF executables to try to fix the libraries so that they work on older glibc versions.

• Linux on a small board
  https://www.bigmessowires.com/2014/11/17/68-katy-68000-linux-on-a-solderless-breadboard/
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRdLlaUmmpM
  https://www.bigmessowires.com/68-katy/

  This irks back to "A small linux computer" in issue 176, another impressive feat.

• Printing memory slots on Linux boot
  https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.10-Prints-Memory-Slots

  This is a minor informational update that will apply to Linux 6.10 to display when the DMI driver attaches the memory slots.

• lvm thin send/recv
  https://abbbi.github.io/lvm/
  https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/admin-guide/device-mapper/thin-provisioning.html

  Thin provisioning, as I recently learned, is about allocating storage only when needed (compared to thick/bare partitioning). The first link shows a trick to track changes on thin partitions.

• The state of X11 on NetBSD
  https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/x_org_on_netbsd_the

  Just a summary of how NetBSD handles the Xorg package, what they include, support, etc..

Life & Other

• Hustle Culture
  https://moneywithkatie.com/blog/to-embrace-hustle-culture-or-reject-it

  Work has a weird place in our lives today, the economy needs to go in a unique direction. The machines of society all run towards that unique goal, at all costs.

Thoughts

"Happiness is the feeling that power increases — that resistance is being overcome." — Nietzsche

Is that a control-freak quote, or do you see it in another light? Does freedom of action equal to power, and, "hence", happiness.

Archive

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4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
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Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Alpine for a 'BSD person'
  https://rubenerd.com/a-bsd-pserson-trying-alpine-linux/

  This was too shallow of a review for my tastes. The only thing that caught my attention was that it ran OpenRC, like Gentoo and others, which has a similar config to classic rc systems like OpenBSD.

• Another OpenBSD Desktop
  https://x61.ar/log/2024/05/06052024135732-openbsd_desktop.html

  A prototypical ricer's post, just like we like them.

• Dinit on Chimera
  https://chimera-linux.org/docs/configuration/services

  Dinit usage and service file looks similar enough to other init and service managers that it seems intuitive. Yet, it also has config dirs similar to traditional rc systems.

• version control lore
  https://dotat.at/@/2024-05-13-what-ident.html

  What about keeping the metadata in the binary too, so that you can investigate later. That is instead of adding a -v flag, obviously, yet it's simpler too.

• Keeping Netflix running
  https://freebsdfoundation.org/netflix-case-study/

  This consist of keeping up with CURRENT, a few kernel tweaks for networking and VM page caching, in-kernel TLS, all to improve throughput.

• 16 years anniversary of a CVE
  https://16years.secvuln.info/

  That's a continuation to "Debian security mishaps" in issue 241.

• super servers
  https://social.treehouse.systems/@ska/112417619168307725

  A social media post about super servers (inetd and others), ending in a bitter note about systemd (since it's a post from the author of the s6 init system).

• emacs wm
  https://karthinks.com/software/emacs-window-management-almanac/

  The best article you'll find explaining window management in emacs.

• Classic Mac
  https://www.macrelix.org/
  https://github.com/macminix/MacMinix

  Ever wanted to get back that oldies experience?

• Nvidia
  https://www.phoronix.com/news/NVIDIA-R560-Open-Default

  So NVIDIA is moving towards more open source drivers.

Life & Other

• We are what we do
  https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2024/you-are-what-you-read/

  If anything, this reminds us that what we interact with and ingest, either physically or mentally, will affect us.

Thoughts

"Well, I must endure the presence of a few caterpillars if I wish to become acquainted with the butterflies." — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

That's a beautiful quote, what does it remind you of? Growth, mentoring, children, early beginnings, etc..?

Archive

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Contribute

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1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
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4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• BSD on a PC
  https://michal.sapka.me/bsd/why-not-bsd/

  A series of points/rants on which BSDs, in general, lack features and desktop facilities.

• Lunatik
  https://github.com/luainkernel/lunatik

  I had heard of NetBSD adding Lua support in the kernel, now you can do something similar on Linux by relying on this device driver.

• Shared libs, rpath and the runtime linker
  https://carlosrdrz.dev/shared-libs-rpath-and-the-runtime-linker

  A troubleshooting session that leads to learning a bunch of things, the kind of stuff that's always nice to read about.

• Add JSON output to your CLI?
  https://blog.kellybrazil.com/2021/12/03/tips-on-adding-json-output-to-your-cli-app/

  What do you think? Is it modernizing the Unix philosophy, or is it something you wouldn't consider?

• NLP in Bash
  https://massimo-nazaria.github.io/nlp.html

  Have your own simpler "AI", aka text-generation, at home.

• Hyra
  https://osmora.org/cgit/Hyra/tree/README?h=main

  A new project for a modern POSIX-like OS mostly from scratch.

• Accurate metrics in containers
  https://dzone.com/articles/top-reporting-accurate-metrics-within-containers

  This is a simple issue, cpu usage is reported incorrectly within the container, so how do we get the right values?

Life & Other

• The end of the web
  https://archive.is/BF0lR

  An article putting into words the obvious: the state of the web with the advent of AI content.

Thoughts

"Every man is a creature of the age in which he lives and few are able to raise themselves above the ideas of the time." – Voltaire

In what age do we live in?

Archive

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Contribute

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1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
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3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Hidden Dependencies in Linux Binaries
  https://thelittleengineerthatcould.blogspot.com/2024/04/hidden-dependencies-in-linux-binaries.html

  This is showcase of sotrace a new tool to show share-object dependencies.

• Getting started with systemd
  https://hackaday.com/2024/04/11/linux-fu-getting-started-with-systemd/
  https://mysystemd.talos.sh/
  https://systemd-timer.havrlent.com/

  This is a great starter on systemd units, I wasn't aware that online generators existed, it's nice to know.

• bunkchat
  https://git.bunk.computer/bunk/bunkchat

  Everyone seems to want to show off that they can rewrite something in shell script.

• Can you grok it
  https://0xda.de/blog/2024/04/can-you-grok-it/

  How to make tunnel creation and management easier.

• Bubblebox
  https://www.ralfj.de/blog/2024/04/14/bubblebox.html
  https://github.com/containers/bubblewrap
  https://github.com/igo95862/bubblejail

  "The easiest sandbox to maintain is the sandbox maintained by someone else."

• sched-ext development
  http://arighi.blogspot.com/2024/04/getting-started-with-sched-ext.html
  https://github.com/sched-ext/scx/blob/case-studies/case-studies/scx_layered.md
  https://github.com/sched-ext/scx

  Want to test a Linux scheduler that is written in rust, here you go.

• An XZ backdoor story
  https://securelist.com/xz-backdoor-story-part-1/112354/

  Probably the most thorough analysis of the XZ 'mishaps'.

• purl
  https://github.com/catatsuy/purl

  This has no relatino to cURL and more in relation with sed and grep. Yes, it's yet another of these.

• How files in Linux work
  https://popovicu.com/posts/how-files-in-linux-work/

  That's a simple question, for a basic concept, however it's worth asking for anyone who has never wondered about this before.

• GestureX
  https://github.com/flying-pizza-69/GestureX

  We've all heard of touch-screen gestures, but what about doing hand gestures in front of the camera.

• TAI on Debian
  https://www.bortzmeyer.org/tai-on-debian.html

  Do you want more precise time and deal with atomic time? Then you'll need to constantly refresh your leap-seconds file.

• OpenBSD full text search and raw IP
  https://man.ifconfig.se/
  https://www.undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20240418050520

  Parallel processing at the protocol layer is fine, but now on OpenBSD you can finally do it at the network (IP) layer too. This can result in faster packet processing by utilizing multiple cores, sometimes most OSes have had for a long time already.

Life & Other

• Impossible to say
  https://www.thecollector.com/sense-nonsense-wittgenstein-language/

  Language is full of limits, it's a box which we're trying to expand beyond its boundaries. Learning a new language could help, but it's also limited in its own ways.

Thoughts

"No pressure, no diamonds." — Thomas Carlyle

That's a classic quote, part of the pop culture, and of the modern day myth. But does it stand true, is anything of value only coming out of pressure, why is pressure valorized as the impetus or the action giving rise to what is cherished. What are diamonds and why do we value them? Isn't it because of marketing campaigns originating in the 40s.

Archive

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https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• GNOME terminal improvements
  https://bxt.rs/blog/just-how-much-faster-are-the-gnome-47-terminals/

  This is more about VTE updates, yet the actual benchmarking method by relying on a hardware sensor is pretty cool.

• rsync new version
  https://download.samba.org/pub/rsync/NEWS#3.3.0

  rsync is one software that is essential and keeps on improving and getting bug squashed.

• Writing PAM software
  https://web.archive.org/web/20190523222819/https://fedetask.com/write-linux-pam-module/
  https://github.com/fedetask/pam-tutorials
  https://github.com/linux-pam/linux-pam/tree/master/examples

  Not everyone might want to rely on PAM directly these days, and might want to use polkit instead for more granular authorization. However, if you need a tutorial, this one is one of the best out there.

• sotrace
  https://pypi.org/project/sotrace/

  Some people rely on ChatGPT these days for the same behavior, but good ol' SO can be helpful too.

• Building BerkeleyDB
  https://transactional.blog/building-berkeleydb/

  Ever wondered what it takes to build a B-Tree based DB such as BerkeleyDB, then this series of posts is for you.

• Debian security mishaps
  https://www.hezmatt.org/~mpalmer/blog/2024/04/09/how-i-tripped-over-the-debian-weak-keys-vuln.html

  No, this isn't something new, but a recollection of an issue that happened back in 2008. I promise, this one is a captivating read.

• Google's public DNS protection
  https://security.googleblog.com/2024/03/google-public-dnss-approach-to-fight.html

  DNS cache poisoning is one of the most common DNS attack. It's my first time hearing of case randomization, but it's a smart trick.

Life & Other

• Calibrating a controller in the browser
  https://blog.the.al/2024/04/09/dualshock-calibration-in-the-browser.html
  https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/WebHID_API

  I knew lots of inputs were supported on browsers, mostly finger movements. However, I didn't know controllers could be. But beware, this will only work on Chrome-based browsers (or browsers that support WebHID).

Thoughts

"Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards." ― Søren Kierkegaard

These days even the past can be re-interpreted, what do you think of that?

Archive

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Contribute

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Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• LUKS key derivation issue
  https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/66429.html

  The author didn't answer the initial claim of how the person's laptop got broken into. Still it implies that it's from the KDF.

• I am not a supplier
  https://www.softwaremaxims.com/blog/not-a-supplier

  Let's discuss the "software supply chain", and how there's actually no "supplier" but just people, and that this sentence, as it needs to be reminded, is only doing a parallel with the industrial world.

• The xz attack
  https://research.swtch.com/xz-timeline

  Since everyone is talking about it, I had to add something related.

• A review of GNU autotools
  https://www.owlfolio.org/development/autoconf-swot/
  https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2024/04/02/autoconf/

  it's a strength and weakness analysis of autoconf, and how it relates to the "xz backdoor".

• Debian monorepo
  https://blog.liw.fi/posts/2024/monorepo/

  ...Will Debian now rely on a single/mono repo for their packages management, a single gigantic 500GiB chunk where everyone can work across any packages. Definitely no, it's an April's fool!

• CachyOS
  https://cachyos.org/about/
  https://cachyos.org/blog/2404-april-release/
  https://www.phoronix.com/news/CachyOS-April-2024-Released

  An ArchLinux-based distro that focuses on gaming and desktop performance tweaks.

• NetBSD new release
  https://www.netbsd.org/releases/formal-10/NetBSD-10.0.html

  It's always nice to follow the updates of different OSes and what each inspire the other.

• IPv4 Addressing
  https://blog.bytebytego.com/p/a-crash-course-in-ipv4-addressing

  A mini refresher on IPv4.

Life & Other

• GC for systems programmers
  https://bitbashing.io/gc-for-systems-programmers.html

  A basic overview of what can be considered garbage collection in OS (and system), how RCU (read-copy-update) can be seen as such.

• Winning the rat race
  https://www.linkedin.com/posts/alexxubyte_systemdesign-coding-interviewtips-activity-7149441688904638464-Cs0R

  And it's posted on LinkedIn for better effects.

Thoughts

"We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us." — Marshall McLuhan

Do you agree with the idea that the most prominent medium of communication of an era is what defines it? What about the internet and social media, how do they define this generation?

Archive

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Contribute

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3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Monado
  https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/news-and-events/monado-2100-officially-conformant-openxr-implementation.html
  https://monado.freedesktop.org/
  https://www.khronos.org/openxr/

  OpenXR is to VR/AR as what OpenGL is to 3D, Monado is an open source compatible implementation of this specs.

• Command line is cheap
  https://me.micahrl.com/blog/command-line-cheap/
  https://me.micahrl.com/blog/command-line-like-mobile-interfaces/

  The question of pricing is one that I never wondered about before. However, I'm not sure it makes a lot of sense if all devs are trained to quickly create web UI and all the tooling is there, meanwhile not everyone is familiar with the ins-and-outs of building a CLIs. Yet the hardware price restriction does make sense.

• Linux Crisis Tools
  https://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2024-03-24/linux-crisis-tools.html

  The wizard of performance optimization and debugging strikes again, here's a list of tools that you should print out and keep next to you in case you need to perform some outage action.

• What, why, and how of containers
  https://www.annwan.me/computers/what-why-how-containers/

  This is yet another "container from scratch" type of post, but its approach is technology oriented, gradually introducing the pieces needed to build a container on Linux.

• The worlds of telnet
  https://thenewstack.io/the-lost-worlds-of-telnet/

  A collection of openly available services and trivia over telnet.

• Marking sockets
  https://dengking.github.io/Linux-OS/Network/Programming/Socket/Socket-option/Mark-socket/

  Packet marking is something I wasn't familiar with before, but it's very useful while creating routing and firewall rules.

• Linux Kernel TLS offload
  https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/networking/tls-offload.html

  I'm sure I shared this before, but I can't find it, so I'm sharing it again.

Life & Other

• Explorative Programming
  https://blog.dziban.net/essays/explorative-programming/

  I like how this simple concept is presented, it's something we've all done and probably always do. Starting with miniature self-contained testable units is definitely a great way to explore things, and learn. It can be used as a teaching/mentoring tool too.

Thoughts

"Tourism, human circulation considered as consumption is fundamentally nothing more than the leisure of going to see what has become banal." ― Guy Debord

Do you agree with this quote, what's the difference between traveling, adventure and tourism? Does the reach of multi-media platform convert these into objects of consumption?

Archive

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Contribute

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1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
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3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• realmd
  https://www.freedesktop.org/software/realmd/
  https://www.freedesktop.org/software/realmd/docs/index.html

  This is a solution I wasn't aware of, usually people struggle with complex configuration in PAM, this seems to auto-discover them.

• Linux as a router
  https://blog.codefarm.me/2022/11/08/linux-as-router/

  That table with the mapping of deprecated commands is a blessing.

• TCP tuning
  https://blog.cloudflare.com/optimizing-tcp-for-high-throughput-and-low-latency/
  https://fast-data-transfer.github.io/doc-system-tuning.html

  Take these with a grain of salt and double check what each sysctl param does before applying them. Be sure to take stats and monitor the behavior. However, in general this should give you food for thought on what's possible to improve.

• Implementing SACK compression
  https://lwn.net/Articles/755078/

  Sending ack in bulk/compressed is a must-have feature when working over wifi.

• TextSnatcher
  https://github.com/RajSolai/TextSnatcher
  https://tesseract-ocr.github.io/tessdoc/Home.html

  A neat tool that relies on tesseract (OCR) to extract text from screenshots. Pretty handy!

• It's the TTY week all over again
  https://punkx.org/jackdoe/tty.txt

  This is the same type of fun activity we used to do (and we should again organize new ones soon). It's funny that the author has a lot of the same conclusions we had here.

• Zero toil homelab
  https://blog.gripdev.xyz/2024/03/16/in-search-of-a-zero-toil-homelab-with-immutable-linux/

  Take notes if you're running your own homelab, maybe you'll consider an immutable distro.

Life & Other

• I thought I shared this before
  https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2024-03-14
  https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2023-08-09

  AI goes military (as usual)!

• For my perl loving folks out there
  https://jwgoerlich.com/we-were-wizards-learning-perl/

  They don't make such introduction to a language anymore...

Thoughts

"Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire." — Roland Barthes

Communication is frought with issues, remember the Shannon–Weaver model, among others, that portrays such things.

Archive

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Contribute

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Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Bustle
  https://gitlab.gnome.org/World/bustle

  If you've ever touched D-Bus then this is a must-have debug tool, it permits to see a trace of the flow of requests between services.

• Minimal initramfs
  https://blog.izissise.net/posts/initramfs/

  The reasons to build your own initramfs are varied, I don't personally have one, but I guess for iot systems it's a must.

• Losing control of your shell
  https://registerspill.thorstenball.com/p/how-to-lose-control-of-your-shell
  https://fasterthanli.me/articles/a-terminal-case-of-linux

  A tale of debugging a simple problem which turns into a messy rabbit hole.

• state of terminal
  https://gpanders.com/blog/state-of-the-terminal/

  Mostly a review of escape sequences and capabilities.

• Setup your own home lab
  https://linuxblog.io/home-lab-beginners-guide-hardware/

  "Home lab" is a broad concept, here it's about hosting a home server to be able to test networking features. It's a pretty cool setup.

• Latest Linux will drop old NTFS driver
  https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.9-Dropping-Old-NTFS

  The news isn't as frightening as the title makes it seem, it's more like updating the driver, swapping the old one with an improved one, it's not actually removing a feature but an improvement.

• Compact relocation format for ELF
  https://maskray.me/blog/2024-03-09-a-compact-relocation-format-for-elf

  Some deep optimization in ELF formatting to make them more compact.

• A refresher on MSS
  https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/network-layer/what-is-mss/

  This is a basic of TCP, the MSS and window sizing algo are the essential part of how it handles resending and congestion (which are not mentioned in the above article).

• TCP time wait assassination
  https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1337
  https://serverfault.com/questions/787624/why-isnt-net-ipv4-tcp-rfc1337-enabled-by-default
  https://stackoverflow.com/questions/39461090/tcp-time-wait-assassination

  It's nice to check a few networking (informational) RFCs that are lesser known and deal with certain issues you might not have encountered.

• Basics of Ethernet
  https://hackaday.com/2024/02/12/ethernet-for-hackers-the-very-basics/

  This is probably more than you wanted to know and more than what you expected the 'basics' to be.

• Lossless network audio
  https://interfacinglinux.com/2024/03/02/lossless-network-audio-with-netjack2/

  I hadn't heard of netjack2 before, along with multicast it makes for a deadly combo (probably also with pipewire).

• The thumbnail specs
  https://specifications.freedesktop.org/thumbnail-spec/thumbnail-spec-latest.html

  I like perusing through the freedesktop specs from time to time to remind myself of what is standardized and what isn't, or what won't be respected.

• nvtop
  https://github.com/Syllo/nvtop

  This is basically htop but for GPU, see also "Zombie processes using GPU" in issue 225.

• Linux system at a glance
  https://github.com/lsc4719/MyViewOfLinuxSystems

  A very generic diagram of the Linux system basic components.

Life & Other

• Numbers every programmer should know
  https://samwho.dev/numbers/

  This is an excellent showcase these numbers and giving the possibility of browsing through the changes over the years.

• Color spaces
  https://ericportis.com/posts/2024/okay-color-spaces

  One of the best demystification of color spaces.

• HTTP explained
  https://alexandrehtrb.github.io/posts/2024/03/http2-and-http3-explained/

  The differences between all http versions from 0.9 to 3.

Thoughts

"Postmodernity is said to be a culture of fragmentary sensations, eclectic nostalgia, disposable simulacra, and promiscuous superficiality, in which the traditionally valued qualities of depth, coherence, meaning, originality, and authenticity are evacuated or dissolved amid the random swirl of empty signals." ― Jean Baudrillard

Archive

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Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Differentiated services
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differentiated_services
  https://web.archive.org/web/20230701140203/https://linuxreviews.org/Type_of_Service_(ToS)_and_DSCP_Values
  https://stackoverflow.com/questions/48095837/setting-dscp-value-to-socket-using-setsockopt
  https://linux.die.net/man/7/ip
  https://www.iana.org/assignments/dscp-registry/dscp-registry.xhtml

  How to provie QoS on a normal IP connection, this comes in, but how do you apply it? As usual as part of the ip socket creation, but is it respected? Probably not by every router. There's the option in sysctl also of tcp_reflect_tos, reflect type of service to set the same service in response packets.

• TCP slow start, why?
  https://blog.donatas.net/blog/2015/08/08/slow-start-after-idle/

  You can also check IP-TCP_METRICS(8) for more info on what is tracked.

• Your pipes are too big
  https://medium.com/maverislabs/are-your-pipes-too-big-c3e78e769161

  We're talking of network pipes, not unix pipes, the issue of long fat networks.

• That's a new one, cat pipes
  https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/56307/can-cat-ing-a-file-be-a-potential-security-risk

  So yeah, escape sequences from runaway programs that get interpreted can be dangerous, this is very similar to issue 218 "Rogue escape sequence" which can appear in logs.

• Plus the classic don't internet to pipe
  https://www.seancassidy.me/dont-pipe-to-your-shell.html
  https://web.archive.org/web/20240228190305/https://www.idontplaydarts.com/2016/04/detecting-curl-pipe-bash-server-side/

  This is one topic that we've talked about a lot before.

• A trick everyone should know
  https://nuclearsquid.com/writings/edit-long-commands/

  I've used this quite a lot and people kept asking how I did that, so here we go, that's the inspired by emacs keybind for running list expression.

• Text UI and terminal UI
  https://aartaka.me/tui-is-not-tui

  This is kind of a follow up on last issue 235 "Linux accessibility".

• Bash scripting tips/debugs
  https://wizardzines.com/comics/bash-debugging/
  https://github.com/anordal/shellharden/blob/master/how_to_do_things_safely_in_bash.md
  https://robertmuth.blogspot.com/2012/08/better-bash-scripting-in-15-minutes.html
  https://www.davidpashley.com/articles/writing-robust-shell-scripts/

  Not everyone writes so many bash shell scripts, but when you do you could peruse a couple of these links to have a refresher.

Life & Other

• A single vendor is the new proprietary
  https://opensource.net/why-single-vendor-is-the-new-proprietary/

  A controversial point, but a fair one.

Thoughts

You only know me as you see me, not as I actually am. — Kant

What's identity, and are we only what we portray or do we all have a 'true' me inside of us. This is relevant in the age of the internet, everyone with one or multiple online persona that are puppet identities of us, molded how we want.

Archive

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Contribute

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1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
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4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Linux accessibility
  https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-2949-enhancing-linux-accessibility-a-unified-approach/
  https://blogs.gnome.org/a11y/2023/10/27/a-new-accessibility-architecture-for-modern-free-desktops/
  https://opensource.com/article/22/1/linux-accessibility-settings

  A couple of links about recent updates in accessiblity (mostly on Gnome desktop).

• FAMFS
  https://github.com/cxl-micron-reskit/famfs
  https://lkml.org/lkml/2024/2/23/1124
  https://openfam.org/

  This is a new shared-memory file system for FAM, fabric-attached memory (had to look that up). This kinds of harks back to the entry on DAX from last week.

• Remember Unity, gnome and gnome3
  https://liam-on-linux.dreamwidth.org/85359.html

  It's probably a story I missed at the time, maybe because nobody that read the news took it seriously. But if that's really the reason, then I'm shocked.

• Two different TCP buffer sysconfs
  https://stackoverflow.com/questions/62641621/what-is-the-difference-between-tcp-max-syn-backlog-and-somaxconn
  http://veithen.io/2014/01/01/how-tcp-backlog-works-in-linux.html

  Let's continue our dive into Linux networking stack. Sometimes having someone explain the scenario in which the settings are used is more practical than simply reading the description.

• Using Linux kernel key management
  https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-linux-kernel-key-retention-service-and-why-you-should-use-it-in-your-next-application

  This relates to "Relying on the Linux kernel keystore" in issue 226. This seems to be getting more in the open, however I'm afraid that if people start to rely too much on it then it might tie the code to be Linux specific.

• Rust in the Linux kernel
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CEznkXjYFb4

  Mostly an example and case of using Rust in the Linux kernel from an Android developer that ported "binder", the ipc mechanism in android, to Rust.

• Building Gentoo virtual hosts
  https://catfox.life/2024/02/23/experiences-with-building-a-gentoo-virtualisation-host/

  I guess most people rely on other OSes for virtual host but if you ever need Gentoo, then bookmark this.

• Review on Qubes OS
  https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/962787/35f1ff3af9031437/

  We had a couple of previous entries on Qubes OS before, so here's another one. In sync with the link about Gentoo, Qubes OS relies on virtualization.

• A history of TTYs
  https://computer.rip/2024-02-25-a-history-of-the-tty.html

  Brace yourself because this starts off with telegraph systems.

Life & Other

• Subjectivity of time
  https://invertedpassion.com/why-time-seems-to-pass-faster-as-we-age/

  This is a list of all the reasons we've read everywhere else, but it's good to have it summed up.

• What is cinematography
  https://www.studiobinder.com/blog/what-is-cinematography/

  Even though studiobinder is a product, it seems they're pushing so much educational content online that is high quality. If you're into movies, check this out.

Thoughts

We learn from history that we do not learn from history — Hegel

What do you think?

Archive

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https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

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1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
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3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• The meaning of Unix
  https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/16/what_is_unix/

  Probably one of the best review of what Unix is today that isn't just regurgitating what someone's read online.

• The BSD
  https://www.abortretry.fail/p/the-berkley-software-distribution

  The most detailed history of BSD you'll read about.

• Understanding the Linux kernel
  https://blog.codefarm.me/2017/11/12/understanding-the-linux-kernel-01-introduction/
  https://blog.codefarm.me/2017/11/26/understanding-the-linux-kernel-02-memory-addressing/

  This is a fantastic amalgam of info about the Linux kernel.

• Magika
  https://google.github.io/magika/

  This is a "AI" version of file(1), to determine file type. It does a lot of false positives, so it might not be "prod" ready, but it's very convenient.

• progman wm
  https://github.com/jcs/progman

  This is a WM that looks like early 90s desktop. It's not anything truly novel, but the look of it is appealing.

• A pure bash web server
  https://github.com/dzove855/Bash-web-server

  It's an impressive project but to get the accept built-in you need to patch your bash, which isn't practical.

• TCP keepalive overview
  https://tldp.org/HOWTO/TCP-Keepalive-HOWTO/overview.html
  https://tldp.org/HOWTO/TCP-Keepalive-HOWTO/usingkeepalive.html

  Again, this week we'll review a couple of networking-related links. We'll start with TCP keepalive mechanism, do you really understand it? Also, the author has a nice and light way of explaining the topic.

• SYN packet handling in the wild
  https://blog.cloudflare.com/syn-packet-handling-in-the-wild/

  If you think you know TCP handshake, think again. This article dives into the SYN/ACK and different params that affects it.

• Vector Packet Processor on FreeBSD
  https://ipng.ch/s/articles/2024/02/17/vpp-freebsd-2.html

  To continue on our networking discussion, here's a topic that merge software-defined-networking (SDN) and fast packet processing, which has become popular these days.

• Linux' proc fd is not the same as dup
  https://blog.gnoack.org/post/proc-fd-is-not-dup/

  Now this is surprising, TIL.

• Another look at containers from scratch
  https://ikouchiha47.github.io/2024/02/05/how-containers-work.html

  Similar to a couple of other posts, this is a rundown of all the tech used to make containers possible on Linux.

Life & Other

• Huffman code
  https://two-wrongs.com/huffman-codes-how-do-they-work

  A great and fun explanation of huffman coding.

Thoughts

"Words are where most change begins." — Brandon Sanderson

The words we use often reflect how we think, even implicitly. We say 'fake it till you make it', that doesn't work most of the time, but with language it has a big effect.

Archive

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https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

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1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• dm-multipath
  https://www.thegeekdiary.com/understanding-linux-multipath-using-dm-multipath/

  The dm layer on Linux allows for some fabulous innovation and abstraction. In the above, we see something similar to lvm, the usage of multiple physical disks as if they were a single virtual one, with different rules to decide where the data will be sent.

• dm-stripe and dm-linear
  https://pmem.io/blog/2018/05/using-persistent-memory-devices-with-the-linux-device-mapper/
  https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/filesystems/dax.html

  A continuation of the previous link, let's see two other device mappers. This one focuses on persistent memory, types of devices that are non-volatile and allow direct access.

• Shared library management and debugging under Linux
  https://blog.codefarm.me/2016/05/12/linux-commands-for-shared-library-management-and-debugging-problem/

  This is an excellent resource to learn about shared libraries. Heck, I've learned a few things too, I didn't know what was ld.so.conf before, I was only aware of LD_LIBRARY_PATH. Further, I've known people who literally search the whole system to find if a library file exists instead of relying on this or a well-known build system.

• Path MTU discovery in practice
  https://blog.cloudflare.com/path-mtu-discovery-in-practice/

  I'm back on a networking topics dive (I should also remove the dust from my books to re-read them), the above article was so insightful on the topic of MTU discovery! Aside: it truly seems like Marek is lifting the weight of Cloudflare by himself with his deep technical knowledge, though he's probably only the public facing part of that company.

• Time to bring Word to OpenBSD
  https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=170742832804260&w=2

  Now that's the kind of quarrel I want to read about.

• Making windows vanish
  https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/XOffscreenIconMistake

  This the kind of problematic that only happens when the windowing environment is as configurable as it is now.

• Fetching SSH keys from different sources
  https://git.sr.ht/~hauleth/fuk

  That's a solution to a problem we've recently invented, but yet a valid one.

• Search log files
  https://github.com/Textualize/toolong

  Kind of a neat too, but I don't think I'll even remember to use it to check logs though.

• Bootloader debug story
  https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2024-02-11-minimal-linux-bootloader-debugging-story/

  This was a rollercoaster of a debug session. Goes to show that maintaining anything at this level can quickly become insanely complex.

Life & Other

• The great GPT firewall
  https://github.com/samber/the-great-gpt-firewall

  Should we all do that on our websites?

• Body swap
  https://youtu.be/f7q8f6KMcac?si=pe2x7xv_RcDV-6Xz

  Hey I don't often link something truly off topic, but that channel's skits are really well made and full of fun twists on tropes.

Thoughts

Shit happens!

Hope everything is going fine in your life. Let's appreciate the small pleasures of everyday, we never know what tomorrow will bring.

Archive

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Contribute

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1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• OverlayFS and containers
  https://blog.codefarm.me/2021/11/26/linux-overlayfs-and-container/

  We've all heard of overlayfs/union-mount and how they are used to make containers space-usage more efficient, but how do they actually work. Read more to find out.

• Building an hypervisor
  https://iovec.net/2024-01-29

  A series about building a KVM based hypervisor from scratch.

• Kernel instrumentations
  https://linuxdevices.org/kurt-the-ku-real-time-linux/
  https://elinux.org/Kernel_Instrumentation

  These were mostly before the advent of eBPF.

• What's nice about zsh
  https://www.arp242.net/why-zsh.html

  A few things that zsh does better, from calculation, to null byte insertion in strings, and more.

• OpenBSD system-call pinning
  https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/959562/0578b8e463f790c1/

  The linux kernel is getting a lot of inspo from OpenBSD, for instance the latest mseal, here the lwn discusses the latest additions to OpenBSD.

• Deconstructing files
  https://danluu.com/deconstruct-files/

  Don't go to reddit for any serious answer, visit blogs instead.

• Reducing docker image size
  https://bhupesh.me/publishing-my-first-ever-dockerfile-optimization-ugit/

  I don't know how to feel about this, a shell script distributed as a docker image that is MBs big and calling it optimization.

• Visual overview of malloc
  https://silent-tower.net/projects/visual-overview-malloc

  See also "sbrk and malloc" in issue 53, "Malloc source" in 42.

• NetBSD in 2024
  https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-3508-netbsd-10-thirty-years-still-going-strong-/
  https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1ZzaW9eI4wmMRGOnJ1uo-kGk5b_UvIOuU9Zgur4au_8s/edit

  A historical review of BSD and NetBSD, the infamous toaster, and a look into the future.

Life & Other

• Learn the land
  https://www.namethatnation.com/
  https://travle.earth/challenge/
  https://www.geoguessr.com/

  I've always like these types of games, what do you think?

Thoughts

"Knowledge is power." — Francis Bacon

Do you agree that knowledge alone is power? What about taking action?

Archive

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Contribute

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4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Simple X Mobile
  https://sxmo.org/

  This is an environment for Linux-based mobile devices that has a suckless-style.

• niri compositor
  https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/releases/tag/v0.1.0

  A wayland compositor inspired by PaperWM, it's basically an infinite parchemin/scroll of windows.

• To learn we must admit
  https://j11g.com/2023/01/14/i-dont-understand-terminals-shells-and-ssh/

  The author realizes that they don't really know something, and shares ways to learn more.

• Mini guide to bash
  https://www.meetgor.com/bash-guide-p2/

  If you already know this stuff, then it's a good reminder, otherwise it's also a good practical introduction.

• Fun with device mapper (dm)
  https://blog.oddbit.com/post/2018-01-25-fun-with-devicemapper-snapshot/
  https://blog.codefarm.me/2021/11/29/device-mapper-and-linux-lvm/

  What fun is there with simple solutions when you can go around it and use that as an excuse to learn something new instead.

• setting up your pc for remote access
  https://ciesie.com/post/pc_remote_access/
  https://www.xmodulo.com/access-linux-server-behind-nat-reverse-ssh-tunnel.html

  That's a good start, however it doesn't address the issue of machines hidden under NAT, that would require a reverse SSH tunnel such as the second link.

• Phone audio towards pc
  https://bash-prompt.net/guides/pulse-audio-bluetooth-streaming/

  It's much easier than you thought, this should also work on pipewire.

• GNOME and gtk stuff
  https://blog.gtk.org/2024/01/28/new-renderers-for-gtk/
  https://vdwaa.nl/gnome-upower-charge-thresholds.html#gnome-upower-charge-thresholds
  https://alnvdl.github.io/2023/11/18/a-cloud-based-vs-code-workspace.html
  https://docs.gtk.org/gtk4/broadway.html

  A brand new renderer mechanism is coming up in gtk, and something for laptop users to make their battery last long: charge thresholds.

• Visually learning about binaries
  http://binvis.io/#/

  This is more or less a follow up on "What does ext4 look like?" in issue 228.

Life & Other

• Diving into DICOM format
  https://www.vladsiv.com/dicom-file-format-basics/
  https://www.vladsiv.com/dicom-file-processing/

  I thought we saw that one when doing the series on file formats, but apparently we didn't. It's a basic TLV format. This could've been parsed using kaitai also.

• What's in a private key
  https://cendyne.dev/posts/2021-04-16-private-key.html

  An indirect intro to ASN.1 encoding by looking at the format of private keys (PKCS#8).

• IPv6 over websocket
  https://www.nuke24.net/plog/15.html

  It's better to just open the page and test it out rather than spending the time explaining it.

• A full game in a PDF
  https://lucas-c.itch.io/undying-dusk

  This is some impressive work, have a look.

Thoughts

F U cn rd dis U mst uz Unix. — Tim Roberts

Archive

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Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• mseal
  https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/958438/d5f91f251b309612/

  A new proposed syscall to the linux kernel similar to OpenBSD's mimmutable.

• An admin guide to sysrq
  https://kernel.org/doc/html/latest/admin-guide/sysrq.html

  I've used this oh-so-many-times when in dire situations, but never went as far as understanding the nitty gritty details behind it. It seems it can be used for other day-to-day things too.

• Reversing an unfamiliar touchscreen
  https://laplab.me/posts/whats-that-touchscreen-in-my-room/

  This is a really fun rabbit hole of tidbits of reverse engineering and OSINT. Yet one thing I didn't understand is, if they got full write access to /etc/shadow, why couldn't they just add a line with the right encrypted password (plus the sshd fix obviously).

• COMMAND.COM
  https://github.com/alexmyczko/autoexec.bat/blob/master/COMMAND.COM

  Want to use your unix box like a DOS box, here you go.

• Note down your breaks for "productivity"
  https://github.com/svandragt/break-aware
  http://arbtt.nomeata.de/#what

  By taking a look at the code, this is definitely not portable, but it gives me a couple of ideas on projects. It reminds me a bit of projects like ActivityWatch and the classic arbtt.

• irq pressure stall information meaning
  https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/linux/PSIIRQNumbersAndMeanings

  Some clarifications on this new metric that can be used for accounting, however it might not be that useful.

• A weird hack
  https://www.tomshardware.com/software/operating-systems/driver-hack-lets-you-run-linux-after-windows-bsods-no-reboot-required

  In sum, someone was able to inject a tiny RISC-V Linux emulator in the Windows error handling function.

• Extending eBPF from Kernel to User Space
  https://eunomia.dev/blogs/bpftime/
  https://github.com/eunomia-bpf/bpftime

  bpftime is like eBPF but it runs in user space instead of kernel space. It doesn't support all features, but aims to be compatible, and to support older kernels that don't have eBPF. It can be useful for auditing, hot patching, stats, and others.

• dbus-broker vs dbus-daemon
  https://github.com/bus1/dbus-broker/wiki
  https://github.com/bus1/dbus-broker/wiki/Deviations
  https://dbus.freedesktop.org/doc/dbus-daemon.1.html
  https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/dbus/

  Fedora/RedHat and Arch Linux are switching to dbus-broker, what's the difference with the dbus-daemon. The dbus-daemon is the reference implementation that is multiplatform. The dbus-broker is a Linux-specific implementation, also written in C, that uses novel features of Linux to make itself faster, simpler, and more reliable (at least that's what's advertised). Does this mean that we might see discrepancies in what software expects of dbus or will they stick to the standard?

Life & Other

• Do lowercase letters save data?
  https://endtimes.dev/why-lowercase-letters-save-data/

  The answer is compression and probability, read to find more.

• Learning math as an adult
  https://gmays.com/how-im-relearning-math-as-an-adult/
  https://afaik.io/nebula?mode=nebula&category=blueprint&id=ed0mb7N4rYw3
  https://www.myopenmath.com/index.php
  https://mathispower4u.com/

  This is inspiring, it's been a long time since I dived into math, and I'm thinking maybe I should. The first link is referring to a paid service, but there are many others that are free and open.

• Is understandability the most important design goal
  https://ntietz.com/blog/the-most-important-goal-in-designing-software-is-understandability/
  https://github.com/zakirullin/cognitive-load

  While this is a very good point, I'd say the main goal of software is to actually do what it's supposed to do, to be functional. Understandability is a non-functional requirement, and is assumed within the professional setting, yet a user wouldn't care.

Thoughts

"When you come up with a theory, you fall in love with the beauty the simplicity and elegance of it. But then you have to get a sheet of paper and pencil and crack out all the details. Hundreds and hundreds of pages. Because you have to prove it." — Michio Kaku

Do you think the same applies to computer science and programming, simple programs are beautiful, but what does this imply on the proof?

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• CLI user experience case study
  https://www.tweag.io/blog/2023-10-05-cli-ux-in-topiary/

  When someone gets into HCI they start to rethink how they see the world. In this case the author tries to simplify the CLI by making a clear state separation by using sub-commands among other things.

• liquidprompt
  https://github.com/liquidprompt/liquidprompt
  https://liquidprompt.readthedocs.io/en/stable/install.html

  This is in the same vein as the previous link, making the CLI easier to use through a custom prompt.

• How fast is your shell
  https://registerspill.thorstenball.com/p/how-fast-is-your-shell
  https://tratt.net/laurie/blog/2024/faster_shell_startup_with_shell_switching.html

  A comparison of the processing speed of different shells, nothing really surprising, but there are a lot of tips on how to speed up zsh. See also this comparison by jkl on the forums.

• Ed is the standard text editor
  https://cs.wellesley.edu/~cs249/Resources/ed_is_the_standard_text_editor.html

  A classic post about ed, if you've never read it then now is the time.

• FreeBSD Desktop audio improvements
  https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2024/01/13/freebsd-desktop-part-29-configuration-audio-improvements/

  This article clearly shows the need for an audio server. However, instead of taking the hassle to write a script to automatically switch to the device when it is plugged, the only thing needed instead is to simply load the module module-switch-on-connect which will achieve the same thing.

• "Effortless" OpenBSD Audio and Desktop Screen Recording Guide
  https://www.undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20240115170740

  As someone said "I think OpenBSD folks and non-OpenBSD folks have a different meaning of the word effortless."

• Only a tablet for studying CS
  https://ezrizhu.com/blog/tablet-for-cs

  This is basically the "dream" of having a cloud-hosted dev environment you can take anywhere. But would you actually use that?

• Preventing DNS Leak using OpenVPN
  https://blog.deepjyoti30.dev/openvpn-dns-leak
  https://github.com/jonathanio/update-systemd-resolved

  Nothing too fancy, but a reminder that your vpn conf will dictate how the traffic will be handled, and DNS shouldn't be forgotten. The second link is a solution for systemd, but openvpn works on multiple machines, and the DNS update also needs to happen there.

• Build Reliable Operating System Images
  https://www.osbuild.org/
  https://www.osbuild.org/guides/image-builder-on-premises/basic-concepts.html
  https://www.redhat.com/sysadmin/containers-build-once-run-anywhere-edge

  OSBuild is kind of like a high-level docker but more complex, and corporate. It's mainly an abstract format to run in the cloud and be converted to proprietary confs.

• Exploring Podman
  https://betterstack.com/community/guides/scaling-docker/podman-vs-docker/

  I've always wondered what the differences were between Podman and Docker apart from "Podman doesn't run as root".

• PineTime and InfiniTime
  https://blog.mlich.cz/2023/10/pinetime-experience/
  https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/PineTime
  https://github.com/InfiniTimeOrg/InfiniTime/
  https://www.pine64.org/pinetime/

  People often bring up the topic of open-source Unix-like system for mobile phones, but have you ever heard of it for smart watches?

• pam timestamp plugin
  https://ikerexxe.github.io/idm/2022/05/18/pam-timestamp.html

  This plugin is used to not have to type your password again if you've already done so in the last defined window frame, in a similar fashion to sudo.

• Hacking the OSS supply chain
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oEwBhwdLC3Y

  We keep hearing of supply chain attacks, well this is a practical example.

• binfmt for WSL
  https://kaashif.co.uk/2024/01/03/binfmt-misc-the-magic-behind-linux-windows-interop/

  See also "Magic bytes" in issue 100.

Life & Other

• Greenspun's tenth rule
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_tenth_rule

  So have you ever written such program, or discovered one like it?

Thoughts

Code never lies, comments sometimes do. — Ron Jeffries one of the founders of XP methodology

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Misconceptions about the unix philosophy
  https://posixcafe.org/blogs/2024/01/05/0/

  You could basically say "composability" and not "atomisation".

• Adélie Linux
  https://www.adelielinux.org/about/

  A libre OS, using musl and APK, in pursuit of POSIX® cert for stability. That sounds good.

• The state of Enterprise Linux
  https://crunchtools.com/the-state-of-enterprise-linux-in-2023/

  This is a bit different than how usual distributions operate. Take a look.

• How to build a lab
  https://labs.ripe.net/author/ondrej_caletka_1/hands-on-learning-how-we-built-the-ipv6-security-course-virtual-lab-activities/

  Take note, if you ever want to create one of these web-console virtual env.

• A modern implementation of traceroute
  https://github.com/catchpoint/Networking.traceroute

  This is traceroute but with more options and support.

• nmstate
  https://github.com/nmstate/nmstate

  This is sort of an alternative, centralized, and declarative way to manipulate host networking configurations (think dns, routes, interfaces, etc..).

• Streaming to chromecast
  https://linderud.dev/blog/stream-to-chromecast-with-resolved-vlc-and-bash/

  That's something I've tried to do too and usually fell back to the vlc plus renderer option, now I got an alternative. See also issue 208 "An mDNS primer".

• Hardening an OpenBSD workstation
  https://dataswamp.org/~solene/2023-12-31-hardened-openbsd-workstation.html

  A couple of useful tips to make your home station more secure.

• IaM on Linux in 2024
  https://ostconf.com/system/attachments/files/000/001/693/original/Alexander_Bokovoy.pdf

  This is mostly for Fedora/RedHat systems but the ideas are still relevant to other systems too.

• systemd through the eyes of a musl distribution maintainer
  https://catfox.life/2024/01/05/systemd-through-the-eyes-of-a-musl-distribution-maintainer/

  This is one of the most balanced review I've read so far.

• Linux & TPMs
  https://media.ccc.de/v/all-systems-go-2023-186-linux-tpms

  systemd is including some integration with TPMs, especially for boot process, credentials, and disk encryption.

• Dropping SLAB in favor of SLUB
  https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.8-SLAB-SLUB-Changes
  https://lwn.net/Articles/932201/

  The names are confusing but it makes sense when you read about it.

• Stopping a Linux thread
  https://mazzo.li/posts/stopping-linux-threads.html

  If you've never given any thought to this topic, this will mind blow you, and even if you have, you'll still be dumbfounded by the amount you didn't know about.

• How can stdout be faster than stderr
  https://blog.orhun.dev/stdout-vs-stderr/

  And this takes us on a rabbithole learning about pseudo-terminals, curses, terminal raw mode, rendering TUI via stderr, using firefox tools to take stack traces and debug, to then trace the chain from stdout to the terminal output.

• What does ext4 look like?
  https://buredoranna.github.io/linux/ext4/2020/01/09/ext4-viz.html

  That's the type of learning I love, reverse engineering and playing around to learn the format of something and what it means.

Life & Other

• Having fun with PNG format
  https://evanhahn.com/worlds-smallest-png/
  https://belkadan.com/blog/2024/01/The-Biggest-Smallest-PNG/

  These were highly entertaining and educational to read, recommended.

• ...and having fun with fonts too
  https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2015/07/one-font-vulnerability-to-rule-them-all.html

  This is an attack vector that we don't often hear about but that is very impactful, remember the emojis that crashed the iPhone?

Thoughts

That's a lot of Unix content for one week! It seems like there's a hype to write about anything related to OS since the start of the year, it's thrilling.

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• tm.tm_gmtoff why such a great offset
  https://gist.github.com/FeepingCreature/9d85ed1e716fe568e20e1074c117f7c8

  As with a lot of things, it comes down to backward compatibility and historical reasons.

• Forking SteamOS
  https://iliana.fyi/blog/build-your-own-steamos-updates/

  Even if you don't care about SteamOS it's a good rundown and dive into the architecture of a customized distro.

• Android data encryption
  https://blog.quarkslab.com/android-data-encryption-in-depth.html

  A really in-depth look at the file-based encryption mechanisms found on Android, from key derivation, encryption, PoC exploits, and more.

• Current directory
  https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/ShellsAndCurrentDirectory

  I've actually learned something from this! The ins and outs of how the current directory is interpreted differently in the kernel and in shells and differs among systems.

• Some stuff about ssh and shell
  https://blogsystem5.substack.com/p/ssh-agent-forwarding-and-tmux-done
  https://blogsystem5.substack.com/p/why-do-i-know-shell-and-how-can-you

  A fine looking blog. The issue of ssh sock being exposed when using the forwarding option and pointing to an invalid file on long-running tmux session is surprising but was already mentioned with a warning in the manpage (as shown at the end of the article).

• write your own terminal
  https://flak.tedunangst.com/post/write-your-own-terminal
  https://flak.tedunangst.com/post/terminal-smooth-scrolling

  A brainstorm guide to challenge yourself into writing your own terminal emulator. Followed by some cool feature the author implements.

• Spatial shell
  https://soap.coffee/~lthms/posts/SpatialShell6.html

  And this has nothing to do with shell but more with window management, a Sway plugin. It's a new way to interface with windows, I'm not a fan of it, but take a look anyway and make your mind.

• zram
  https://docs.kernel.org/admin-guide/blockdev/zram.html

  Nothing new, but it's great to present tech that not everyone uses all the time, good reminders. If you're looking for the actual value of this check section 6 of the doc "Activate".

• Why does ACPI exist
  https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/68350.html

  It answered the question, basically having something common via the bios, but then the argument would be "why not have it through a common hardware interface instead", but history has already played out.

• Gentoo goes binary!
  https://www.gentoo.org/news/2023/12/29/Gentoo-binary.html

  This requires a post, since not everyone is aware that Portage also has pre-built binaries, kind of like most other source-based distros these days too.

Life & Other

• Erasure Coding Demystified
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5kVuM7zEUI

  Ever wondered how erasure coding worked (think RAID and similar), then this video will help.

• Legal definitions aside – what makes you think you’re an adult?
  https://psyche.co/ideas/legal-definitions-aside-what-makes-you-think-youre-an-adult

  Lots to ponder on. What's your take on this?

• Writing a TrueType font renderer
  https://axleos.com/writing-a-truetype-font-renderer/

  An entertaining article tackling what it takes to render a font on the screen. There's a lot of intricate details we often don't think about when looking at text.

Thoughts

"Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the universe trying to build bigger and better idiots. So far, the universe is winning." — Rick Cook

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Unicode in terminal emulators
  https://www.jeffquast.com/post/ucs-detect-test-results/

  The author is definitely someone who knows their ways around unicode interpretation in terminals. This article particularly focuses on the respect of the width of unicode.

• Reforming Unix
  https://github.com/Ericson2314/baccumulation/blob/main/reforming-unix.adoc

  A living document about different ideas, mostly related to security, to "reform" unix. Most of them are on-their-ways.

• non-interactive ssh password auth
  https://vincent.bernat.ch/en/blog/2023-sshpass-without-sshpass

  A couple of shell wrappers to make ssh with password easier (but not safer).

• puzzlefs
  https://github.com/project-machine/puzzlefs

  A new filesystem dedicated and focused on containers. It's main emphasis is on deduplication because of the sharing of layers of containers. It is currently implemented as a FUSE.

• libvpoll
  https://github.com/rd235/libvpoll-eventfd

  A few additions to the Linux kernel to add new ways to perform polling more uniformly instead of having custom implementations.

• GPLv2 is routinely violated
  https://www.devever.net/~hl/linuxgpl

  And as everything regarding laws, interpretations differ and legality is nebulous.

• Guide to eBPF networking techniques
  https://who.ldelossa.is/posts/ebpf-networking-technique-packet-redirection/

  Using eBPF for packing filtering/redirection is all the craze these days. However, it's a tough topic that requires the latest kernel and latest tool, this guide is gladly welcomed.

• Relying on the Linux kernel keystore
  https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon23apac/presentation/korchagin

  This is a great presentation, it dives into what is a keystore and why we need it (different vulnerabilities). Then dive into the key-agent interface of the kernel, why it was created initially (LUKS/dm-crypt), goes into the structure (keyrings). It follows by multiple examples of the usage of the kernel keystore and how it could possibly be used with a TPM or HSM for storage.

Life & Other

• How to design Google Maps
  https://medium.com/google-design/google-maps-cb0326d165f5

  There's a lot of in-depth details about cartography in there, along with software design tricks that were used to make online maps possible.

• Cyber magicians
  https://theintercept.com/document/art-deception-training-new-generation-online-covert-operations/

  Probably nothing in this presentation is surprising to anyone reading this newsletter, but it's still appalling to see it displayed so obviously.

Thoughts

I don't know who initially created the joke, but it's been spread around so much.

A man is flying in a hot air balloon and realizes he is lost. He reduces height and spots a man down below. He lowers the balloon further and shouts:
"Excuse me, can you help me? I promised my friend. I would meet him half an hour ago, but I don't know where I am."
The man below says, "Yes, you are in a hot air balloon, hovering approximately 30 feet above this field. You are between 40 and 42 degrees North latitude, and between 58 and 60 degrees West longitude."
"You must be a programmer," says the balloonist.
"I am," replies the man. "How did you know?"
"Well," says the balloonist, "everything you have told me is technically correct, but I have no idea what to make of your information, and the fact is I am still lost."
The man below says, "You must be a project manager"
"I am," replies the balloonist, "but how did you know?"
"Well," says the man, "you don't know where you are or where you are going. You have made a promise which you have no idea how to keep, and you expect me to solve your problem. The fact is you are in the exact same position you were in before we met, but now it is somehow my fault."

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• SSH over HTTP/3
  https://github.com/francoismichel/ssh3

  A complete rewrite of ssh over HTTP/3 with addition of authentication via OAuth2 and OpenID Connect. Since it relies on this, it can possibly benefit from connection migration (when switching or changing network on the go) and multipath connections, similar to mosh in a way.

• Using ssh as sudo
  https://tim.siosm.fr/blog/2023/12/19/ssh-over-unix-socket/

  This is a quite convoluted security measure, and it might be counterproductive since you're opening the door to other issues.

• Gnome's Prompt
  https://blogs.gnome.org/chergert/2023/12/14/prompt/
  https://gitlab.gnome.org/chergert/prompt

  This is a terminal for a immutable/container-oriented desktop. Basically it tracks which containers are running or available and help you launch sessions over them, but this is limited to hosts that are Fedora based.

• Linux Cockpit
  https://cockpit-project.org/

  It might not be something that people reading this newsletter might want to use, but it still might be a tool that is interesting to get an overview and monitor a system at a glance.

• Simple tutorials on ACLs
  https://www.linuxquestions.org/linux/answers/Security/Quick_and_Dirty_Guide_to_Linux_File_Permissions
  https://www.linuxquestions.org/linux/answers/security/acls_extended_filepermissions

  We've had a few weeks in the past where we've dived into anything related to access control, let's refresh on the basics.

• Bluetooth keyboard injection on Android (and others)
  https://github.com/skysafe/reblog/tree/main/cve-2023-45866

  Well, for now I'll keep my bluetooth turned off while in public.

• Zombie processes using GPU
  https://theblackcat102.github.io/fixing-nvidia-gpu-zombie-process/

  We often talk of zombie processes using a tiny bit of memory, but have you ever wondered if they could hold GPU memory too?

• Setting up your own VoIP/SIP service
  https://allanrbo.blogspot.com/2023/03/peer-to-peer-voice-over-ip-call-with.html

  We've seen something similar in issue 197 "Your personal VoIP", this is another thing you could test out from the CLI. This could be useful to get away from IM proprietary software stack.

• The BPF-programmable network device
  https://lwn.net/Articles/949960/

  On Linux, the kernel 6.7 now includes a BPF-programmable network device. What does that mean? A new virtual network device called "netkit" that allow to load custom BPF programs in it to control the routing of packets and other modifications.

• First Impressions of the Yggdrasil Peer-to-Peer Network
  https://cheapskatesguide.org/articles/yggdrasil.html

  I've always been curious about what yggdrasil is and how to use it. Since I've played cyb.farm recently I got to try it first hand and test it. Read the above post to also get an idea from someone else. For me, it was relatively simple to setup, I found the list of public peers online, and added them using yggdrasilctl.

• The graphic stack on Linux
  https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/955376/b3fba3bbfabbc411/

  A rundown of all the pieces involved into drawing graphics on Linux.

Life & Other

• Sunk cost fallacy
  https://tidyfirst.substack.com/p/not-my-money-any-more-lessons-from

  A good lesson, sometimes we imagine we have more power over the world than we actually have, we appropriate things and behavior while in reality we don't.

• Hilbert construction
  http://bit-player.org/extras/hilbert/hilbert-construction.html

  A step by step explanation of the Hilbert curve, which is part of many algorithms.

• A fun magazine à la "poc || gtfo"
  https://pagedout.institute/download/PagedOut_003_beta1.pdf

  It's however, much more approachable and enjoyable to read, give it a go.

Thoughts

A gentle reminder:

Deleted code is debugged code. — Jeff Sickel

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Capturing Touch Events
  https://blog.owulveryck.info/2023/12/02/simplifying-complexity-the-journey-from-websockets-to-http-streams.html

  A pretty neat breakdown of a project about sending events from one Linux machine to a server, from the capture, serialization, sending, and more.

• What happened to the Linux zealots
  https://boilingsteam.com/what-happened-to-the-native-linux-zealots/index.html

  I'm not familiar with the gaming platforms available, however this post still poses a good debate about the progression of any community and its extreme through time.

• FreeBSD experiments
  https://notes.eatonphil.com/finishing-up-a-freebsd-experiment.html

  It's a type of post I enjoy but that we see less often, just day to day notes, issues, and findings about what someone uses.

• No real-life input looks like that
  https://sigwait.org/~alex/blog/2022/09/11/puYjYw.html

  Some fun trivia.

• Debunking btrfs
  https://swag.industries/debunking-btrfs/

  It's usually in debunking articles that you also find good info about a technology and insights about new things.

• SSH Hardening with ssh-audit
  https://thoughts.greyh.at/posts/ssh-audit/

  Scared that you haven't setup an ssh server properly, this tool should help.

• OpenBSD adds more mitigations
  https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=170205367232026&w=2
  https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=170234892604404&w=2

  Always on track to have program correctness and exploit mitigation, OpenBSD adds pinning of all syscalls.

• What does it mean to remove Xorg
  https://who-t.blogspot.com/2023/12/xorg-being-removed-what-does-this-mean.html

  This is a fair explanation of what's happening.

Life & Other

• Timezones in Postgres
  https://blog.untrod.com/2016/08/actually-understanding-timezones-in-postgresql.html

  And now I finally understand timezones, and I'll store everything in UTC.

• Systems design for advanced beginners
  https://robertheaton.com/2020/04/06/systems-design-for-advanced-beginners/

  A fun and easy article describing some basics of system design that you can send to your peers that are on their ways in this domain.

• Always learning, always teaching
  https://stephango.com/always-learning-always-teaching

  Just some motivational post about continual growth.

Thoughts

It might not be your fault, but it is your problem.

This could be a sentence you tell yourself, or that someone else tells you. Often things happen that aren't caused by us, but we still have to deal with them.

Archive

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Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Being pedantic about what immutable means
  https://blog.verbum.org/2020/08/22/immutable-%E2%86%92-reprovisionable-anti-hysteresis/

  "Reprovisionable infrastructure with anti-hysteresis properties" is a tongue twister, but trying to spend time to define the current marketing terms with more precise ones has the advantage of making us understand the mechanics.

• Patching Linux at Hyperscale
  https://thenewstack.io/how-meta-patches-linux-at-hyperscale/

  It's not the KLP in itself that's interesting but the complexity of doing this across so many machines.

• toolchain security features status update
  https://outflux.net/slides/2023/lpc/features.pdf

  Language compile- and run- time hardening is making some progress on Linux.

• Relative shell script includes with realpath on FreeBSD
  https://patmaddox.com/doc/trunk/www/2023-12-sh-relative-shell-script-includes-with-realpath-on-freebsd/

  An ingenious solution to make shell scripts includes work regardless of the path you're executing it from.

• makima
  https://github.com/cyber-sushi/makima

  This is a sort of Linux equivalent of autohotkey.

• The Origin of the word Daemon
  https://ei.cs.vt.edu/~history/Daemon.html

  The story behind the word from the people involved in its initial usage.

• Pipes vs FIFOs
  https://phala.isatty.net/~amber/hacks/pipefifo

  A post convincing you to not use named pipes (FIFOs) for process substitution, or at least point out certain discrepancies in it that could not fit certain use-cases.

• Why Unix kernels have grown caches for directory entries
  https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/KernelNameCachesWhy

  And obviously it's a solution to make things more efficient.

• A view on Wayland
  https://dudemanguy.github.io/blog/posts/2022-06-10-wayland-xorg/wayland-xorg.html

  The author presses some fair points about Wayland, make what you want of this discussion.

• Interview with pipewire's main creator
  https://fedoramagazine.org/pipewire-1-0-an-interview-with-pipewire-creator-wim-taymans/

  This interview is a great review of all the features and changes happening the past 2 years.

Life & Other

• Building stupid tools
  https://blog.stulta.dev/posts/stupid_tools/

  The author makes some very good points about building more tools.

• money first
  https://siliconvict.com/articles/1-choose-money-first

  A quite controversial article, but worth pondering on.

Thoughts

"Writing program code is a good way of debugging your thinking." — Bill Venables"

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Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• A NetBSD ramdisk kernel
  https://bentsukun.ch/posts/ramdisk-kernel/

  This is the type of post that should be added to the official documentation since it's so relevant to many people and is a standard procedure.

• Per-process capability-based restrictions on dragonflybsd
  https://lists.dragonflybsd.org/pipermail/commits/2023-October/922780.html

  This is not to be confused with capability-based access control, but it's more similar to OpenBSD's pledge and Linux' seccomp. A very nice addition.

• From Linux to FreeBSD
  https://it-notes.dragas.net/2023/10/25/migrating-from-an-old-linux-server-to-a-new-freebsd-machine/

  After 5 years of uptime you need to be really convincing to swap that system with another.

• An stty intro
  https://blog.robertelder.org/intro-to-stty-command/

  A quick explanation of he stty command along with a couple examples to grasp the concept.

• Understanding the Origins and the Evolution of Vi & Vim
  https://pikuma.com/blog/origins-of-vim-text-editor

  A piece about the history from ed to vim, and most things in between.

• Freezing in Style
  https://blog.broulik.de/2023/11/freezing-in-style/

  This is KDE's Plasma reimplementation of X's "your app is unresponsive" pop-up for their Wayland backend. It's not as simple to implement as it sounds and requires redesign and rethinking in a lot of places.

• The curse of docker
  https://computer.rip/2023-11-25-the-curse-of-docker.html

  An article about why the author thinks docker as a method of software distribution has many flaws. From the non-standard configuration, non-portability and bad practices, and more.

Life & Other

• Fun with DNS TXT Records
  https://thoughts.theden.sh/posts/dns-txt-record-fun/

  Basically using DNS as a small free storage, something we've recurrently seen around the web.

Thoughts

Consistency Is the Last Refuge of the Unimaginative — Oscar Wilde
I adore simple pleasures. They are the last refuge of the complex.
Ambition is the last refuge of the failure.

Challenging quotes, I'll let you ponder on them since Mr.Wilde was so adamant to repeat the same idea in many of his work.

On that note, let's mention this website: https://quoteinvestigator.com/, I find it fascinating to dive behind the origin of quotes. Even though most quotes are by definition extracted from their context and infinitely reinterpreted, I still like to shatter that and try to find even more meaning by doing so.

Archive

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Contribute

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1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Contextual CLIs
  https://garnix.io/blog/contextual-cli
  https://jmmv.dev/2013/09/cli-design-subcommand-based-interfaces.html

  This is the kind of ideas that shatters pre-conceived notion, but that could be so innovative they become the building stone of other ideas. The subcommand part reminds me of the second link.

• CLI to extract context from data
  https://blanchardjulien.com/posts/textract/

  While not technically Unix-related, it's a good basic example of building a simple script from scratch. Though the exercise would be on how to make it more Unix-like and following best practices.

• Navigating around the shell
  https://blog.meain.io/2023/navigating-around-in-shell/

  A couple of basic ideas and helpers (for zsh mostly), that you can use as inspo in your daily life.

• SSH Tarpits
  https://www.bentasker.co.uk/posts/blog/security/are-ssh-tarpits-still-effective.html

  I have to say I didn't know what ssh tarpits were before this post, but now I know that they're a sort of ssh honeypot. The stats are quite interesting.

• Gtk graphics offload
  https://blog.gtk.org/2023/11/15/introducing-graphics-offload/

  An update on the work of Gtk on Wayland Linux to rely on dmabuf for graphics offloading.

• VT320 terminal repair
  http://nuclear.mutantstargoat.com/blog/103-vt320_repair.html

  This is my first time reading about the loadable character set, however I can't find much information about it online. The whole post is amazing, from the terminal mingling to the keyboard fix. Aside: I do only use ctrl-[ to exit insert mode in vim, and I find it less annoying than pressing esc.

• setenv is not thread safe
  https://www.evanjones.ca/setenv-is-not-thread-safe.html

  I'm not a big fan of using environment variables to configure programs, I prefer them to really be only about the global environment, read first when a program start and then not read again nor changed. But I see a trend these days that abuses and overuses env.

• tmpout issue 3
  https://tmpout.sh/3/

  A new issue from this journal à la pocorgtfo and phrack. The content is mostly targeted towards Linux and Unix systems.

• Mess with dns
  https://messwithdns.net

  If you've ever wanted to try things with DNS but didn't want to go through the hassle of setting up a local DNS then this is for you.

• Fixing the bell tone
  https://cgit.freebsd.org/src/commit/?id=ba48d52ca6c8

  Such a simple change but with a whole story behind it.

• Test bracket
  https://jmmv.dev/2020/03/test-bracket.html

  One of the best explanation of what the test brackets are and the difference with the bash extension double brackets.

Life & Other

• Another one about writing
  https://offlinemark.com/2023/11/05/software-engineers-must-learn-to-write/

  ...just to keep you in the mood and write more often.

• Does it make sense to build new capitals from scratch
  https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-04-10/why-relocating-capital-cities-can-be-a-smart-move

  There are many pieces on the topic, here's one to get the convo going.

Thoughts

"People don't spend sixty bucks on a game they know they can beat." — George Wood

Archive

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Contribute

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1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• bcachefs
  https://bcachefs.org/

  It's not everyday that an advanced modern file system is created. It's still in beta version, but worth following its development.

• Snap without the Snap Store
  https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/10/snap_without_ubuntu_tools/

  Skip straight to the section "Distributing without the Store" to get to the core of the topic.

• My input hardware stopped working after a kernel update, FIX
  https://www.davidrevoy.com/article1002/how-a-kernel-developer-made-my-styluses-work-again

  The response from the kernel dev gives lots of insights into what is needed to make HID input devices work, and their logic.

• CET, control flow enforcement, shadow stack
  https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/next/x86/shstk.html
  https://clang.llvm.org/docs/ShadowCallStack.html

  The security protections these days are getting so advanced, at both hardware and software level. This one requires a mix of both new hardware capabilities being enabled and the software relying on it. It reminds me of CHERI in a way.

• List of fonts
  https://jdsalaro.com/note/best-programming-fonts/

  It's just some additional ones for inspo, to continue with this thread.

• Cgroup v2 Checkpoint
  https://blogs.oracle.com/linux/post/cgroup-v2-checkpoint

  Most people don't deal with cgroups directly, they often rely on them indirectly through some other software that uses them. In the above, I'm highlighting one of the maintainers of the tech.

• Storing authorized keys in LDAP
  https://sigillatum.tesarici.cz/2021-03-12-openssh-authorized-keys-in-ldap.html

  It mostly relies on the AuthorizedKeysCommand directive, and you're left wondering: why use ldap as storage and not something else.

• A subtle Python bug
  https://blog.nelhage.com/2010/02/a-very-subtle-bug/

  Often bugs are about silly things because we've already thought of all the hard ways that things could fail, but in rare cases we're faced with messy ones like the above.

Life & Other

• Just use cash!
  https://steelrods.hashnode.dev/the-importance-of-cash-in-a-technological-society
  https://www.wbur.org/npr/182309623/why-almost-no-one-in-myanmar-wanted-my-money
  https://www.mybanktracker.com/credit-cards/travel/crisp-clean-us-dollar-bills-travel-country-275899

  While that first article has an USA-centric vibe, it still brings up a lot of questions about the trend to digitalize economics around the world. However, cash doesn't always work everywhere, even currencies that are thought to be "stable" might be refused, especially when traveling and during uncertain times. Make what you want out of this info!

Thoughts

"A witty saying proves nothing." — Voltaire

Since we're always adding quotes here, let's add a quote criticizing quotes/sayings.

Archive

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Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• not knowing the /proc filesystem
  https://admccartney.mur.at/programming/idkproc/
  https://admccartney.mur.at/programming/idkprocii/

  People should write more about their about their learning process on their blog, even with simple exercises such as listing processes by relying on the /proc fs.

• Avoid Load-bearing Shell Scripts
  https://benjamincongdon.me/blog/2023/10/29/Avoid-Load-bearing-Shell-Scripts/

  Basically just a thought about scripts that grow out of size and eventually have to be rewritten.

• Useful shell functions
  https://muhammadraza.me/2023/shell-functions/

  There used to be a time when we shared and exchanged these on forums like some trading cards.

• Jails vs docker
  https://justanerds.site/freebsd-jails-vs-docker/

  A simple run down of a few differences between FreeBSD jails and docker.

• Bluefin distro
  https://projectbluefin.io/

  As I understood it, this is a custom version of Fedora Silverblue but made for devs and "cloud native".

• Porting Linux "version" of pledge to go
  https://flak.tedunangst.com/post/porting-linux-pledge-to-go
  https://flak.tedunangst.com/post/two-hackers-one-keyboard-two-ways

  Plus another post from that blog since I found it cool.

• Gentoo's package deprecation procedure
  https://artemis.sh/2023/11/05/gentoo-mask-process.html

  It takes an enormous amount of efforts to maintain a distribution, to make sure all packages are well-kept and that users are aware of the changes going on.

Life & Other

• Cyber Hunt
  https://cyb.farm/

  This is the scavenger hunt/CTF that z3bra has been working on for the past year. It's amazingly well made, enjoy!

Thoughts

The competence sufficient to produce sentences capable of being understood may be completely insufficient to produce sentences capable of being listened to, sentences capable of being recognized as admissible in all situations where there is reason to speak — Pierre Bourdieu

Archive

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Contribute

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1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• recover lost text by coredumping firefox
  https://j3s.sh/thought/recover-lost-text-by-coredumping-firefox.html

  This resonates so much, my only solution to this is that if I spend more than 2-3min writing I should write on a text editor outside the browser. I'm not sure if I'll try out the coredump next time.

• Image-Based Linux Summit 2022
  https://lwn.net/Articles/912774/

  This is basically the background story behind "UAPI — User-Space API" of issue 169, which was the result of this summit organized by Microsoft.

• Boot loader specs
  https://iliana.fyi/blog/kexec-systemd-boot-kernel-image/

  This is an example of how to implement the previous link's UAPI boot loader specs.

• Software Lasts WAY Longer than You Think
  https://mikeseidle.com/2022/04/02/software-lasts-way-longer-than-you-would-think/

  A simple reflection on how pieces of software can carry across time.

• Customization
  https://blog.thetrevor.tech/my-terminal.n.html

  It's quite an expressive way to describe a terminal with a bunch of pretty print messages. Your terminal could be your next social media post.

• A tale of /dev/fd
  http://phala.isatty.net/~amber/hacks/devfd

  As usual the behavior seems to only have quirks on Linux.

• Rogue escape sequence
  https://www.gresearch.com/blog/article/g-research-the-terminal-escapes/
  https://dgl.cx/2023/09/ansi-terminal-security

  I thought I had linked that first one when it came out. In sum, it's a vulnerability related to logs or output that accepts text that is valid terminal escape sequences, thus when displayed on a terminal they will execute or have a behavior that wasn't expected.

• Hey he's got wisdom, let's sit and listen
  https://blog.vito.nyc/posts/on-programming/

  This is the classic rant about learning to program, how it's a creative endeavour, etc..

• Server-side sandboxing on linux
  https://www.figma.com/blog/server-side-sandboxing-containers-and-seccomp/

  Think of the seccomp interface on Linux as something similar to OpenBSD's pledge (however a bit more complex to use, see). The article doesn't spend time on details but more on a generic view of different high-level things that relate to sandbox and their ups and downs.

Life & Other

• Amiga ASCII
  https://blog.glyphdrawing.club/an-outsider-s-journey-into-the-amiga-ascii-community/
  https://blog.glyphdrawing.club/amiga-ascii-art/

  This is the thesis and website of a friend, it's a great intro to the world of ascii art.

• Walking around with an opinion
  https://www.oblomovka.com/wp/2023/04/11/walking-around-without-an-opinion/

  Should we always have something to say about everything?

• Dreams of inter-connectedness
  https://daily.jstor.org/the-pan-american-highway-and-the-darien-gap/
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interoceanic_Highway
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairo-Cape_Town_Highway
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belt_and_Road_Initiative
  https://www.unescwa.org/news/escwa-devising-strategy-pan-arab-multimodal-transport-system
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_shipping_routes

  We all dream of big infrastructures and cooperation across continents, but the reality on the ground makes it so difficult that most of the above projects are only figment of what they could be.

Thoughts

"A game is over when you start to wonder if the game is worth it" — Pierre Bourdieu

"The battles were so ferocious because the stakes were so small" — Henry Kissinger

Archive

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Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Shell scripts as a poor man's AppImage
  https://www.gkbrk.com/2023/04/poor-mans-appimage/

  Basically it's a re-creation of the "makeself" see issue 14, or statifier scripts.

• Learning about Wayland
  https://gaultier.github.io/blog/wayland_from_scratch.html

  If you've read the Wayland Book see, this one should be interesting, it goes into finer and low-level details about the communication protocol from scratch.

• F-Droid version of KDEConnect uninstalled by PlayProtect
  https://discuss.kde.org/t/f-droid-version-of-kdeconnect-uninstalled-by-playprotect/5992

  Well, basically you're installing a RAT, so it's obvious it would get flagged.

• Linux on the Web
  https://linuxontheweb.github.io/
  https://linuxontheweb.github.io/docs/what-it-is.html

  I'm surprised by how well it works as a new tab.

• Porting proprietary apps from one OS to run on another
  https://lock.cmpxchg8b.com/linux123.html
  https://github.com/taviso/123elf

  Now this is a good mix of the scene world and Unix-like systems.

• MTU
  https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/why-is-ethernet-mtu-1500

  Where did 1500 come from and why are we still using it?

Life & Other

• Homesteading
  https://jackrusher.com/journal/homesteading.html

  A story that resonates deeply with many.

Thoughts

All advertising advertises advertising. — McLuhan

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Remote Dbus notifications
  https://nikhilism.com/post/2023/remote-dbus-notifications/

  It's a bit of a clumsy solution. I'm not sure what would happen with systemd unit management that communicates over dbus, will it show remote services too?

• How to (not) remember shell commands
  https://standard.dev/details/how-to-not-remember-shell-commands

  This is basically just an article that says to install tldr.

• Why is Debian
  https://blog.liw.fi/posts/2023/debian-reasons/

  A memorandum on Debian's raison d'être, its structure and philosophy.

• print json with printf
  https://j3s.sh/thought/shell-tip-print-json-with-printf.html

  Avoid double-quote swamp and heredoc and instead use printf.

• Emacs and shellcheck
  https://amitp.blogspot.com/2023/10/emacs-and-shellcheck.html

  In sync with the previous link, here's a helper to include shellcheck within emacs.

• The art of logging
  https://www.lelanthran.com/chap10/content.html

  This is one of the best quick high-level explanation of logging that I've seen.

• AWK is impressive
  https://livefreeordichotomize.com/posts/2019-06-04-using-awk-and-r-to-parse-25tb/index.html
  https://jeroenjanssens.com/dsatcl/

  It seems like AWK is always the undercover here of data scientists.

• Understanding TAP on Linux
  https://blog.cloudflare.com/virtual-networking-101-understanding-tap/

  A good explanation of the Linux tuntap devices, their difference, how to use them, create them, and more.

• Unix signals
  https://goodyduru.github.io//os/2023/10/05/ipc-unix-signals.html

  This is the first time I see such approach to explaining signals, novel and quite nice.

Life & Other

• Making Software Last Forever
  https://www.danstroot.com/posts/2023-05-25-making_software_last_forever

  The usual nag about software engineering practices declining, how we aren't craftsmen anymore. How hardware improvement has made it faster to develop software but not faster software. One of my favorite saying in life is "99% of the work is maintenance" and it's nice to finally have an article discussing this topic.

• Culture Jamming
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guerrilla_television
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_jamming

  I'll just leave these here and you do what you want with them.

Thoughts

The People are the workers, provided they are unorganized. The Public, and Public Opinion, are the consumers, provided they content themselves with consuming. — Jean Baudrillard

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• The pointing device on Linux
  https://monroeclinton.com/pointing-devices-in-linux/

  A review of pointing device peripherals, from hardware protocols, to kernel, libevdev, libinput, and finally a Wayland compositor.

• Mouseless
  https://vit.baisa.cz/notes/code/mouseless/

  A rundown of what the author is doing to have a good mouseless desktop environment.

• Building a CLI using python
  https://simonwillison.net/2023/Sep/30/cli-tools-python/

  All good tips and tricks, more in "CLI Best Practices" in issue 205 and "Another one of these CLI good pracices" in 149.

• Linux kernel hardening check
  https://github.com/a13xp0p0v/kernel-hardening-checker

  A neat tool, to not only check for custom kernel compile-time option, but also boot time and sysctl ones.

• A different container story
  https://jordemort.dev/blog/lwn-lxc-lxd-a-different-container-story/
  https://linuxcontainers.org/distrobuilder/introduction/

  Everyone focuses on OCI container, this articles meanwhile changes the pace by looking at LXC instead.

• GPT saves you from writing bash
  https://musings.yasyf.com/never-write-a-bash-command-again-with-gpt-3/

  I definitely knew things would come to this. Yet, I can't help but feel like this is a huge security risk, maybe it's better to always have it as an online doc, but not as a shell.

• A novel RAT
  https://www.trendmicro.com/en_us/research/23/i/earth-lusca-employs-new-linux-backdoor.html

  An analysis of this new APT that targets Linux.

• syscall interception using ptrace
  https://notes.eatonphil.com/2023-10-01-intercepting-and-modifying-linux-system-calls-with-ptrace.html

  This is mainly about implementing ptrace hooks in zig.

Life & Other

• Radio was the original overhyped technology
  https://techinch.com/blog/radio-and-the-technology-cycle

  A tale of overestimating change, of hype and trends. Yet change is change, whatever consequences it entails.

• Hardware Design and DIY tinkering
  https://transistor-man.com/

  I love these types of blogs, random projects and inventions.

• Building an aroma picker
  https://blog.jgc.org/2023/09/weekend-bricolage-aroma-picker-for-le.html

  In the same vein as the previous link, here's another wild project: building an automatic picker for category of aroma.

Thoughts

Don't assume that because somebody has one intellectual skillset, they have another — that those tools apply to all types of intelligence, thinking or claims. They don't. — Steven Novella

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Secure design and threat modeling
  https://blog.raymond.burkholder.net/index.php?/archives/1208-Principles-of-Secure-System-Design.html
  https://blog.raymond.burkholder.net/index.php?/archives/1207-Laws-of-Secure-System-Design.html
  https://www.malgregator.com/post/notes-on-threat-modeling/

  A few thrown ideas that you can use to mix in your security framework. See also "Threat modeling for developers" in 184.

• Linux in aviation
  https://tldp.org/HOWTO/Aviation-HOWTO/index.html
  https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/36853/do-safety-critical-avionics-systems-run-linux
  https://www.avilution.com/

  Some resources for anything related to aviation and Linux, from airlines, to pilots.

• Data Analysis Using AWK
  https://awk.dev/eda.html

  This is similar to "Unix for data scientists" in issue 206 and "Command line for the data scientists" in 72.

• Modern tools vs classic ones
  https://meetryanflowers.com/modern-linux-tools-vs-unix-classics-which-would-i-choose/

  This is a discussion we often have, should we embracing all the new gadgets with bells, whistles and colors, or should we stick with classic tools that are omnipresent. Personally, jq is one of the extremely few novel tools I've included in my arsenal, it has become a new classic for me. Kudos to the authors of it!

• Making a micro Linux distro
  https://popovicu.com/posts/making-a-micro-linux-distro/

  While the intro keeps asserting that this is a simplified view of distributions, it still covers a lot of ground and there's a lot to learn.

• A distro to run containers
  https://bottlerocket.dev/

  This distro focuses on running containers on top of it, it doesn't have a shell but is instead API driven. Currently it only supports installing over AWS, which is a pain.

• Re-imagining the CLI
  https://youtu.be/NxsaHxON350?si=e178BNvF7N8zUuiF

  While it has a slow start, the actual video content starts at the 5min mark. Somehow this reminds me a bit of fish shell but with more emojis and security features.

• Mastering curl
  https://antonz.org/mastering-curl/

  A massively well-written tutorial/guide on cURL, highly recommended to peruse.

• Up your networking knowledge
  https://freebsdfoundation.org/resource/an-introduction-to-packet-filter-pf/
  https://www.theregister.com/2023/09/24/tcp_congestion_control_internet/
  https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2018/10/22/introduction-to-linux-interfaces-for-virtual-networking

  A lot of links related to networking, from FreeBSD's PF, to TCP congestion control, to an explanation of different Linux virtual networking options.

• Use the right location for confs, pls!
  https://dotfiles-matter.click/

  A story retold again and again, see also "Not everyone likes standardization" in 188.

Life & Other

• Active imagination
  https://eternalisedofficial.com/2022/05/09/active-imagination/

  A great description of the Jungian method of active imagination which has been of tremendous help to so many. Let me know if you enjoy this type of topic.

• Walled gardens mean online writing is dead. Long live online writing!
  https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/walled-gardens-mean-online-writing

  Isn't it ironic that this was posted on substack, the author makes a difference between federated networks? Also, why is it assumed that the only value in writing is found in it going "viral" or writing in public?

• Digital pollution
  https://sive.rs/polut

  ...and just like littering on the street, it's not an easy problem to solve.

• Shanzhai
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanzhai

  A lot of cultures ridicule them probably because of insecurities, yet they're a source of innovation and creativity and of quick adaptation.

Thoughts

"If you don’t understand the basics of a subject, it’s easy to form conclusions that seem logical, but these same conclusions seem silly to those who have a deeper understanding of a subject." — Peter Lipson

Or said another way: https://m.xkcd.com/675/

Archive

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https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

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1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• GNU Readline tricks
  https://blog.peramid.es/posts/2023-06-10-readline.html

  We've seen a few of these in previous issues such as "Powerup your GNU Readline skills" in issue 174 and "Terminal tips" in the previous issue (212).

• Shell ancestry
  https://egopontem.com/blog/shell-ancestry

  A pretty clean graph showing the genealogy of shells.

• Linux process creation
  https://blog.yelinaung.com/posts/behind-hello-world-on-linux-notes/
  https://iq.thc.org/how-does-linux-start-a-process

  A run down of what the kernel do when doing execve. The interesting part for me is that last paragraph about how their tool, zapper, hides the process arguments from the process tree. As for the first link, we start even earlier than that, from the shell, terminal to the kernel.

• Upgrading your shell
  https://blog.tjll.net/load-bearing-shell-history/
  https://blog.tjll.net/practical-linux-pipelining/
  https://blog.tjll.net/ssh-kung-fu/

  I'm also a strong proponent of this statement "The notion of a command or shell history in our profession is a profoundly under-appreciated mechanism. Consider the fact that – if you retain all history and express all of your operational tasks in the form of terminal commands – you may have the entire history of your work (apart from coding artifacts) within a few seconds’ reach." Combined with the tip from last week to add a comment next to command, if you actually remember to, it's quite powerful. This blog has a lot of good stuff too, so check it out.

• Running your own CA
  https://wejn.org/2023/09/running-ones-own-root-certificate-authority-in-2023/

  For anyone who has to deal with internal PKI and certs, this is relevant.

• Libreoffice summer of code
  https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2023/09/15/libreoffice-and-google-summer-of-code-2023-the-results/

  It's nice to see these improvements every year during summer.

• 3D printing on OpenBSD
  https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20230914075444

  OpenBSD might not seem like the first OS you'd pick to perform 3D printing jobs, but it does support it!

• Modifying a memory allocator to rely on CHERI
  https://tratt.net/laurie/blog/2023/how_hard_is_it_to_adapt_a_memory_allocator_to_cheri.html

  This is a follow up on "A better explanation of CHERI" in issue 202. It's also a good idea to check back the entries "sbrk and malloc" in issue 53, "Malloc source" in 42.

Life & Other

• Getting used to microservices
  https://two-wrongs.com/getting-used-to-microservices.html

  This is a tale of microservices from the point of view of someone that has a lot of experience with monoliths services.

Thoughts

"Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards." — Kierkegaard

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Recover a rm'd file that's still open on Linux
  https://blog.raymond.burkholder.net/index.php?/archives/1234-Linux-recover-a-rmd-file-still-open.html

  This is probably a trick that should be aliased into a rescue command, what do you think?

• Decoded: GNU coreutils
  https://maizure.org/projects/decoded-gnu-coreutils/

  An amazing project that explains the algorithms, with flow-chart and all, of all gnu coreutils. This is extraordinary as a way to demystify and learn.

• how does linux NAT a ping?
  https://devnonsense.com/posts/how-does-linux-nat-a-ping/

  Let's continue our networking series, let's learn something every week. This time we see how Linux forwards a ping (ICMP) packet through NAT.

• Plan 9 that runs Linux apps
  https://liam-on-linux.dreamwidth.org/89039.html
  https://9p.io/wiki/plan9/Linux_emulation/index.html

  While this idea already exists, the conceptual easier method displayed doesn't. Would you give it a try if it was simpler to setup and keep your current software running?

• A discussion we've had multiple times on IRC
  https://evanhahn.com/how-big-is-a-kilobyte/
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octet_(computing)

  So basically marketers and sales people are going to abuse the notation, unless we rely on Kio, kibioctet, or KiB.

• Linux on Android phones
  https://dvdkon.ggu.cz/articles/linux-on-android-phones/

  A collection of notes and guide on how to run Linux on an Android phone. It's weird that we don't see more of these around, old phones repurposed to run a full-fledge lightweight linux distro, along with keyboard and peripherals. If you find someone who wrote on that topic, please link me.

• Terminal tips
  https://omartinez.co/useful-terminal-tips/

  For the first part you're better off reading "Powerup your GNU Readline skills" in issue 174, yet there's still some reminders that are nice in there. I like the idea of search tags using comments.

• Original homepage of the development of the C language
  http://cm.bell-labs.co/who/dmr/chist.html

  We've seen last week the homepage of dmr, now we go one page in, and check the page about the dev of C.

• Talking of homepages
  https://dustinbrett.com/
  https://github.com/DustinBrett/daedalOS
  https://davidbuckley.ca/?bashrc=ls%20blog
  https://l-o-o-s-e-d.net/

  Since we're on the topic of homepages, here's a few blogs that have cool designs.

• Keyboard mapping on Linux
  https://pulsar17.me/2023/09/keymapping

  Yet another article about keyboard mapping.

Life & Other

• Performance is not only Big O notation
  https://jmmv.dev/2023/09/performance-is-not-big-o.html

  This goes in sync with "A book on Algorithms For Modern Hardware" in issue 144.

• TIL
  https://nectarine.sh/posts/wifi-card-troubles/
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferrite_bead

  Well, now I can say I know what these blocks are for.

• Detox
  https://ednevsky.substack.com/p/i-went-offline-for-a-week-3-times

  It's the computer detox season, probably because people can afford to do that while on vacations/traveling, hashtag "productivity". Ironic isn't it?

• Thirty
  https://omartinez.co/thirty/

  We put so much emphasis on milestones like age number these days. Probably because we don't have "coming of age" ceremonies or important events anymore, many societies have eradicated them.

Thoughts

If we, the Web's users, allow these and other trends to proceed unchecked, the Web could be broken into fragmented islands — Tim Lee (13 years ago)

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Creating a custom keyboard layout on Linux
  http://alexey.shpakovsky.ru/en/i-accidentally-the-runes.html

  Technically this applies to X11 and not Linux. See also "Change your keyboard layout" in issue 11.

• Bypassing TPM and others
  https://pulsesecurity.co.nz/advisories/tpm-luks-bypass

  Implementing anything secure can always lead to unexpected consequences. Here a company has implemented a systemd password agent which misbehaves and conflicts with the normal one, then falls back to root shell when being spammed with the enter key.

• Implementing a transport protocol in the Linux kernel
  https://www.micahlerner.com/2021/08/15/a-linux-kernel-implementation-of-the-homa-transport-protocol.html
  https://www.micahlerner.com/2021/08/29/a-linux-kernel-implementation-of-the-homa-transport-protocol.html
  https://github.com/PlatformLab/HomaModule

  In sync with our series on networking, this week we take a deep dive into the Homa protocol, which aims to replace TCP for data center communication and how to implement it in the Linux kernel.

• Network performance tuning on Linux
  https://github.com/leandromoreira/linux-network-performance-parameters

  This is similar to what we've seen in "Tuning TCP" in issue 191, but with better explanation and details.

• Kernighan software tools in rust
  https://dannas.name/2022/09/08/Kernighan-tools-in-rust

  For all those that are trying to learn rust and also love Unix, this is a great series of exercises.

• dmr homepage
  http://cm.bell-labs.co/who/dmr/

  Aside from the legendary researcher, it's inspiring to see someone's blog long after they are gone, a little piece of internet left. It's also frightening...

• Making screen savers work across waylands
  https://www.jwz.org/blog/2023/09/wayland-and-screen-savers/

  Discussions around wayland attracts quite a lot of people, and has created rifts and fragmentation. Some of these discussions are lead by experts and others by armchair experts. In the above link we have one of the authority on the matter of screen savers.

• Everything about floppy disks
  https://thejpster.org.uk/blog/blog-2023-08-28/
  https://www.patreon.com/posts/78074244

  Ever wanted to learn more about storage tech, better start somewhere, and floppy disks are a good start.

• An exercise of bash scripting
  https://muhammadraza.me/2023/webscraping-in-bash/

  Just a bit of curl-ing and grep-ing and it works.

• The advantages of FreeBSD
  https://www.javacodegeeks.com/2023/09/adopting-freebsd-as-your-open-source-operating-system-benefits-considerations.html

  We often see these types of articles from the point of view of developers and technical team, but this one is more business oriented.

• Manually editing a PDF
  https://gist.github.com/senderle/8ad6aae251c4ddf9424f8a05dd0e8c18

  It's a painful job to perform all of this, scrubbing the pieces out from a PDF. Yet, it's great at getting us started with the PDF specifications and format, peering under the cover.

• ZFS for Dummies
  https://ikrima.dev/dev-notes/homelab/zfs-for-dummies/

  A swift explanation of ZFS concepts and how to use it.

Life & Other

• "The worst programmer…
  https://dannorth.net/2023/09/02/the-worst-programmer/

  …In the eyes of poor management metrics.

Thoughts

Nobody comes here anymore, its too crowded.

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Multiboot-compliant NetBSD
  https://jmmv.dev/2007/03/making-netbsd-multiboot-compatible.html

  NetBSD is now compliant with GRUB multiboot standard, I always thought it already was, but it seems I was wrong. See also "What you need to know about GRUB" in 190 and a lot of other entries about booting and multiboot.

• Using mainline Linux kernel builds
  https://stgraber.org/2023/08/24/stable-linux-mainline-builds/

  A case for building your own kernel with the features and fixes you need.

• Lots of Ubuntu
  https://ubuntu.com//blog/ubuntu-desktop-charting-a-course-for-the-future
  https://popey.com/blog/2023/08/i386-in-ubuntu-wont-die/

  The management came back from their beach vacations with a couple of ideas and are willing to write about it in pretty words.

• Ghostty
  https://mitchellh.com/ghostty

  It's a good exercise to write a shell to learn some Unix things, another good idea is to write your own terminal emulator like the above post. The code isn't public yet but it'll probably be shared soon.

• Finally terminated
  https://worldwidemann.com/finally-terminated/
  https://worldwidemann.com/final-term-a-modern-terminal-emulator/

  Another terminal emulator project, like above, this one has a couple of interesting features, like PID semantic menus, completion, etc.. However, like a lot of hobby project the author is discontinuing it.

• hello desktop
  https://hellosystem.github.io/docs/

  A desktop environment specifically targeted at FreeBSD users.

• Linux on Commodore C64
  https://github.com/onnokort/semu-c64

  While you might not run such system, the challenge to make it work is impressive and it's always nice to know you can still port Unix-like systems.

• Keep it running NetBSD
  https://it-notes.dragas.net/2023/08/27/that-old-netbsd-server-running-since-2010/

  Let's reflect on the conclusion related to planned-obsolescence and how to get rich from it...

Life & Other

• CVEs are sometimes overblown
  https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2023/08/26/cve-2020-19909-is-everything-that-is-wrong-with-cves/

  If you're like me, you might follow CVE for projects and their dependencies, and you probably have a software bill of material too. However, what happens afterward requires reading what the vulnerabilities actually are, and if you skip that you might be misled.

Thoughts

"citizen journalism" is what we used to call rumour, gossip, and hearsay. It still is. — bregma a user on HN

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Turning a Keyboard into a Mouse
  https://suricrasia.online/blog/turning-a-keyboard-into/
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdgULBpRoXk

  One of the neat thing about having hardware event openly available and interfaceable is to be able to do whatever we want with them, be it for educational purpose or others.

• How to disarm a bomb
  https://evanhahn.com/mnemonic-to-remember-tar-commands/

  The mnemonic is straight forward, at least you'll remember caf and xaf flags.

• Do one thing and well
  https://medium.com/source-and-buggy/do-one-thing-and-do-it-well-886b11a5d21
  https://scribe.rip/source-and-buggy/do-one-thing-and-do-it-well-886b11a5d21
  https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-ification-of-everything

  The usual article about the "UNIX philosophy". I'm not sure why but it seems everyone is using the term "enshittification" these days. What's up with that? It even has a wiktionary entry but isn't yet on google trends.

• UNIX Edition Zero
  http://doc.cat-v.org/unix/v0/

  A very early draft document written by Dennis Ritchie of UNIX "v0", one that had run on PDP-11 for a few months already.

• Quick DBUS fix
  https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2023/08/19/quick-dbus-fix/

  just symlink it, it'll work. A simple fix.

• Quick vim project-wide swap
  https://elliotec.com/how-to-find-and-replace-in-project-with-vim/

  Such a common problem that is simply solved in modern IDEs but that requires a bit of a twist with vim.

• Error messages are important
  https://alexwlchan.net/2020/the-importance-of-good-error-messages/

  It's something we often dismiss but that has a huge impact.

• Thoughts on pkg management
  https://mckayla.blog/talks/zig-package-manager.html
  https://antonz.org/writing-package-manager/

  Package management is tough and there are so many things to keep in mind when designing it from the upstream, downstream, the backend storage, etc.. We've had a couple of entries in the past about this, you get a cookie for finding them.

• Throwing money at a problem doesn't fix it
  https://blog.merzlabs.com/posts/help-oss-projects/

  ...But it can help. Yet this isn't enough most of the time, as said, direct contribution from people deeply involved is better.

• OOM selection using BPF
  https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/941614/f873a0ec485e01c5/
  https://github.com/hakavlad/nohang

  If you're like me and get bug reports related to processes suddenly stopping, then you know that the OOM killer isn't lenient. What is proposed in this article is a good-enough solution, though it didn't pass yet. Afterward, to be useable, we'd need some user tools and services to manage the feature, maybe incorporated in something like nohang.

Life & Other

• Treating life as a game
  https://commoncog.com/dangers-treating-life-as-game/

  I'd use "gamification" but now that I know the "-ification" of everything linked in "Do one thing and well" above, I will restrain from it.

• The Doorbell in the Jungle
  https://medium.com/@komorama/the-doorbell-in-the-jungle-cca22fbd78d0
  https://scribe.rip/@komorama/the-doorbell-in-the-jungle-cca22fbd78d0

  Basically a business tale about looking at things in new lights, reuse, new doors, etc..

Thoughts

Don't allow anyone to feel humiliated in front of you.

Sometimes it's hard to do because we aren't aware of how people feel about things, most often we are wrong.

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Chrome OS Boot Design
  https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/chromiumos-design-docs/boot-design/

  As part of our series on init systems and service managers, let's look at another lesser-known one, the one of Chrome OS.

• Bazel and fzf
  https://blog.jez.io/fzf-bazel/

  I've never used the Bazel build system, but this article shows more of a great case of fzf usage.

• ioctl to detect memory writes on Linux
  https://lwn.net/Articles/941272/

  This sort of reminds me of OpenBSD's "systrace — if you haven't heard, it's not the same as strace" in issue 159. The parent message is missing here but it's still fun to read only the critique.

• Linux v0.01 internals
  https://seiya.me/blog/reading-linux-v0.01

  A quick dip into the internals of the first official Linux version.

• 20 years of vim
  https://www.contextualize.ai/mpereira/20-years-of-vim-ef9acae9

  A straight forward chart showing the evolution of vim over the years.

• An mDNS primer
  https://fabiensanglard.net/mdns/index.html

  Kind of in sync with our series on networking, a topic we've glanced at in issue "Multicast Networking" issue 143.

• Ytree another curses file manager
  https://www.han.de/~werner/ytree.html

  This specific one tries to mimic DOS Xtree.

Life & Other

• The retreat from reality
  https://brinklindsey.substack.com/p/the-retreat-from-reality

  Somewhat related to "Hyperstition, luxury beliefs, and hyperreality" in issue 204.

• OPP — Other people's problems
  https://skamille.medium.com/opp-other-peoples-problems-d7eb174724ee

  There are so many issues that it's hard to pick your battles properly.

Thoughts

A place that looks like any place is no place at all.

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Avoiding which
  https://mrkaran.dev/posts/dont-use-which/

  If a program hasn't been standardized it can have inconsistencies, instead use command -v, that's the gist of the article.

• Evaluating Plan 9
  https://liam-on-linux.dreamwidth.org/88538.html

  A piece about Unix-like OSes and evolution of time, Plan 9 and Inferno being noticeable.

• Android init language
  https://android.googlesource.com/platform/system/core/+/master/init/README.md

  In continuation with the series on init/service manager, we take a look at a lesser-known init system, the one for android (which might have changed since the doc, but it's still relevant to the discussion). The syntax is very particular, probably the first time I encounter an init system like this.

• Specfs, Devfs, Tmpfs, and Others
  https://www.linux.org/threads/specfs-devfs-tmpfs-and-others.9382/

  A description of a couple different virtual fs on Linux, nothing spectacular, but worth re-reading.

• IPv6 in the zeitgeist
  https://anisse.astier.eu/ipv6.html
  https://matduggan.com/ipv6-is-a-disaster-and-its-our-fault/
  http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/ipv6mess.html

  In continuation with the networking series, this week it seems that everyone has something to say about IPv6, so let's listen. Since everything is exposed, read up on "Getting ready for war zone" in issue 195.

• unix69 keyboard layout
  https://dotat.at/@/2023-08-04-unix69.html
  https://donatstudios.com/UNIX-Keyboards

  A keyboard layout inspired by unix and older keyboards layouts pre-IBM PC.

• Behing hello world on Linux
  https://jvns.ca/blog/2023/08/03/behind--hello-world/

  A classic deep dive puzzle, an exercise in how far you can go in debugging and understanding something.

• vim one liners
  https://muhammadraza.me/2023/vim-onliners/

  In relation with "One liners again..." in 69, "One liners" in 20, "AWK, a better understanding of field manipulation" in 164.

• A taxonomy of access control
  https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/08/a-taxonomy-of-access-control.html

  See also the full series we did on access control on unix and "A Compendium of Access Control on Unix-like Systems" in 184.

• Whitespace in shell (continue)
  https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/RcShellWhitespaceHandling

  A continuation of last's issue 206 "Messy whitespaces".

Life & Other

• Normal web thing
  https://heather-buchel.com/blog/2023/07/just-normal-web-things/

  A listicle of things that break the normal usage of the web but that are becoming more prominent these days.

• More about blogging and finding inspo
  https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/search-query

  A tale of how the internet allows to find niche communities to regroup around a particular topic, sometimes human-cured. However "if you pursue them too far you will end up obsessed with things that no one else around you cares about". This article also deals with other topics such as what it means to write in public, what to write about, how to write about it, how it spreads, etc..

Thoughts

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. — Goodhart's Law

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Unix for data scientists
  https://gregreda.com/2013/07/15/unix-commands-for-data-science/

  These types of articles never get old, they're the gospel of Unix. See also "Command line for the data scientists" in 72 and "File manip" in 130.

• Standardization of embedded dev
  https://sourceware.org/elix/

  This is an extension to POSIX for embedded systems.

• sudo in rust
  https://ferrous-systems.com/blog/testing-sudo-rs/
  https://jdebp.uk/FGA/dont-abuse-su-for-dropping-privileges.html

  A bunch of testing against sudo-rs to make sure it's compatible with the OG sudo, or to catch bug in sudo.

• ruptime
  https://wedonthaveaprivacyproblem.com/ruptime/
  https://github.com/alexmyczko/ruptime#never-heard-of-ruptime-what-does-it-look-like

  Basically a remote uptime to get a list of hosts, hardware, and some benchmark results.

• Messy whitespaces
  https://blog.plover.com/Unix/whitespace.html

  We've all had these moments where we were pissed of at shell's handling of whitespaces, and we swore we'd never use spaces again, and we also swore we'd always run our script with shellcheck, however we keep forgetting.

• QubesOS neat isolation
  https://www.sevarg.net/2023/07/29/qubes-os-silos-of-isolation/

  An praise of Qubes OS. Once upon a time people would have to run USB-bootable OS to achieve this, but now it's possible out of the box with meta-OS like Qubes OS which is basically a VMM of a sort. It's the first time I see a good review of actual day-to-day use and its challenges.

• GNU/Hurd strikes back
  https://mhatta.medium.com/gnu-hurd-strikes-back-4021433d506d

  "The GNU/Hurd is the Sagrada Família of the Software World", now that's the best comparison I've read about it!

Life & Other

• Encyclopedia of life
  https://eol.org/

  A truly impressive encyclopedia, regrouping geographic information, attributes, pictures, predator/competitor/prey, and so much information. Bookmark it!

• On the Loss and Preservation of Knowledge
  https://samoburja.com/on-the-loss-and-preservation-of-knowledge/

  We've talked about the digital dark age before, this topic is intertwined with the above: how do we preserve and transfer information and knowledge across generations. This is an excellent piece about exactly that.

Thoughts

• Without great solitude, no serious work is possible — Pablo Picasso
• Perhaps the primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone. — James Baldwin
• To be creative you've got to be unsociable and tight-assed. — Bob Dylan

But what is solitude in a world that's always connected, or are we even connected?

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Straight forward problem
  https://brett.coulstock.id.au/word-count-of-a-subtitle-file.html

  Let's say you have a subtitle file (srt), how would you go about counting actual words in it. I hear someone in the background shouting awk.

• Linux for power users
  https://xnacly.me/posts/2022/linux-for-powerusers/

  A pretty good rundown on desktop Linux.

• Writing to disk on Linux
  https://www.cyberdemon.org/2023/06/27/file-writes.html
  https://www.cyberdemon.org/2023/04/06/whats-writing-to-my-disk.html

  An approachable article that explains the write abstraction on Linux, buffer, and the layers above the disk.

• CLI Best Practices
  https://seirdy.one/posts/2022/06/10/cli-best-practices/

  How to make CLI accessible, what are some good practices.

• An OpenBSD sales pitch
  https://nxdomain.no/~peter/what_every_it_person_needs_to_know_about_openbsd.html

  While the article has a catchy title, it doesn't remove value from it, on the contrary, this is a good run down on a lot of features and aspects of OpenBSD.

• Why are things not working as advertised
  https://matduggan.com/why-are-containers-insecure-by-default/

  The churning is real, the tech cycle moves fast, the waves can easily takes you away and makes you dream of new lands. Eventually, you'll wake up and reality will set in. This is the premise of this post, mosty about docker and its insecurity and drawbacks.

• Better than Google fu
  https://gwern.net/search

  Searching online is tough, Google is dying when it comes to real search.

• Network and format
  https://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/994-Unconventional-Wisdom.html
  https://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/980-An-Itty-Midi-Mystery.html

  Two articles of the same blog that covers two of our series. The first is about a few best practices for hosting public servers that might possibly get attacked, but first would need to be discovered. The second one is about MIDI.

• Understanding NAT
  https://www.roxlu.com/2021/070/nat-types
  https://tailscale.com/blog/how-nat-traversal-works/

  There are many kinds of NAT and different ways to configure them. Someone has mentioned that the first article in this list has an oldschool description of the types available, while the second article does a better job at explaining what's really in use today, see the section "Naming our NATs".

Life & Other

• Deepfake
  https://futurism.com/the-byte/experts-90-online-content-ai-generated
  https://www.europol.europa.eu/cms/sites/default/files/documents/Europol_Innovation_Lab_Facing_Reality_Law_Enforcement_And_The_Challenge_Of_Deepfakes.pdf

  This is a follow up on the dead internet theory which I'm sure I've probably link here before.

• Counter-Culture
  https://www.documentjournal.com/2021/01/the-internet-didnt-kill-counterculture-you-just-wont-find-it-on-instagram/

  What does it mean to be counter-cultural, and can you really be in the age of social media?

• Manipulation
  https://youtu.be/p6aF5ma7BiM
  https://youtu.be/1JQE4YZS1Cg

  The second vieo is in French but fortunately it has subs in English, Spanish, and German.

Thoughts

The head that will become a skull is already empty. Madness is the déjà-là of death. — Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• On fonts
  https://notes.billmill.org/programming/text_shaping/harfbuzz.html
  https://zachbayl.in/blog/font-fallback-revery.html

  Harfbuzz is the logical brain, the text shaping layer, on top of fontconfig (selection and configuration) and freetype (actually using the font file glyphs) and rasterizers such as Xft/Cairo/Qt that rely on X RENDER or others graphic extensions. The second link shows a good example of a text rendering pipeline in practice.

• Immune to bruteforce
  https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/01/12/password-strength/

  Entropy is often hard to grasp, "a measure of how many configurations could yield the same macrostate, and thus how probable the macrostate is". It's nicer to say "if your password is more improbable then it's harder to bruteforce".

• A look at YAML
  https://www.arp242.net/yaml-config.html

  In relation to our series on formats, why not take a look at config formats too.

• Syncing files
  https://blog.rymcg.tech/blog/linux/rclone_sync/

  I'm sure I had previously shared similar content about file syncing, but it doesn't seem like I can find a past link on that. Maybe it's "The rsync series" in 150, or "Deduplication" in 57, or "Transferring files for non-tech users" in 127, or "What to do when it's too large" 136, etc.. Ok, it seems it was indeed covered!

• diet libc
  http://www.fefe.de/dietlibc/

  There's a few libc implementations out there, diet libc is on the smaller side.

• Following landlock development
  https://blog.gnoack.org/post/landlock-best-effort/
  https://blog.gnoack.org/post/landlock-truncate/

  On Linux landlock is the equivalent of OpenBSD's unveil, see also issue 161 "Landlock". It's currently experiencing a couple of changes, so you better follow them if you want to use this tech.

• Shell script compiler
  https://github.com/neurobin/shc/

  I had no idea such a thing existed. It's more like an obfuscator that encodes and encrypts the shell script and wraps it in a binary. Not sure if that's worth using in practice.

Life & Other

• Hyperstition, luxury beliefs, and hyperreality
  https://www.robkhenderson.com/p/status-symbols-and-the-struggle-for
  https://www.thecollector.com/baudrillard-philosophy-21st-century/
  https://www.orphandriftarchive.com/articles/hyperstition-an-introduction/

  A couple of ideas that, once understood, are enlightening. This is somewhat related to "Attention economy" in the previous issue,

  203. Let me know if you enjoy these philosophical topics.

• Eight O'Clock in the Morning
  https://pvto.weebly.com/uploads/9/1/5/0/91508780/eight_o%E2%80%99clock_in_the_morning-nelson.pdf

  A Plato's Allegoric tale that probably will remind you of a couple of memes involving a lizard at the top of a social media company and people sitting with virtual headsets on.

• That Deep Romantic Chasm
  https://www.uvm.edu/~tstreete/romantic_chasm.html

  Tech utopia in computer culture has influenced society just like so many other dreams and ideals.

Thoughts

A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving. — Lao Tzu wisely

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Troubleshooting on Linux
  https://tanelpoder.com/2013/02/21/peeking-into-linux-kernel-land-using-proc-filesystem-for-quickndirty-troubleshooting/

  I've been thinking, usually we train and study for generic knowledge and certain practical applicable ones. However, it's kind of rare to actually train in debugging and troubleshooting, yet the author of this website offers a seminar on this. I'm thinking it's actually a great idea. However debugging is often a case-by-case based on intuition, or is it, and can it be empirical?. Aside: I really like the blog formatting and style.

• Rethinking file systems
  https://one.mikro2nd.net/pages/rethinking-file-systems/

  A few thoughts about how file systems could, mainly, manage metadata and organization of files in a better way.

• Wayland and X11
  https://xenocara.org/Wayland_on_OpenBSD.html
  https://maxleiter.com/blog/X11

  Trying to make something work on systems where they haven't really been tested properly on. On one side making Wayland work on OpenBSD, and on the other X11 on iOS via Xvnc.

• Confiuring the touchpad on Linux
  https://cookie.engineer/weblog/articles/synaptics-touchpad-on-linux.html

  It's a topic we've covered multiple times. See also "Gestures Related Stuff" in 145, "Gestures Related Stuff" in 120, and "Libinput and Synaptics driver" in 119. On that: I've never understood the appeal of having a touchpad corner as something that activates an event. I even see certain touchpads with a corner containing a "web" logo, to launch the browser, is anyone ever using that? Let me know on IRC.

• Stream audio from one machine to another
  https://blog.kaetemi.be/2020/01/06/looking-for-a-way-to-stream-linux-laptop-audio-to-windows-desktop/

  This is similar to "Streaming audio on OpenBSD" in issue 201, however this time it's from Linux towards Windows.

• Fighting Back
  https://defn.io/2019/04/12/ssh-forwarding/
  https://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/974-What-doesnt-kill-you.html

  Following our network series, this week we take a look at how certain attacks take place, and what to do when they happen.

• The opposite of the previous link
  https://soupault.app/blog/mistaken-for-malware/
  https://susam.net/blog/sinkholed.html
  https://medium.com/thisiscala/the-duct-tape-holding-the-internet-together-12118be60ff1

  Basically, we're at the mercy of big entities that are the core of the internet, or private companies that can nuke us on whim or false-positive flagging.

• Is there a better way
  https://phili.pe/posts/is-there-a-better-way/

  A general tip of always seeking self-improvement, with an emphasis on macOS.

• systemd as tragedy
  https://lwn.net/Articles/777595/
  https://judecnelson.blogspot.com/2014/09/systemd-biggest-fallacies.html

  That first article is one of the few that actually does a good job at explaining part of the systemd ordeal/battle.

• GCC Frontends
  https://briancallahan.net/blog/20230626.html

  This is similar to llvm IR, GCC also offers different frontends to compile multiple languages.

• Demo hardware and art
  https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2023/07/stupidly-small-eink-font/
  https://www.amygoodchild.com/blog/computer-art-50s-and-60s

  Want to enjoy a good demo or look at old artwork to get inspired, then these are for you.

Life & Other

• Hobbies
  https://jamie.ideasasylum.com/2023/07/02/hobbies

  What's a hobby? Once upon a time this question might not have meant much, but today, with so much time on our hands, we can ponder about it.

• Attention economy
  https://www.visakanv.com/blog/attention/
  https://kortina.nyc/essays/kinky-labor-supply-and-the-attention-tax/
  https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2017/08/17/the-premium-mediocre-life-of-maya-millennial/

  This has become a cliché of a cliché at this point, and everyone tries to rationalize and understand it. Weirdly, now it can even apply to personal relationships too, everything seems to be capitalized and improved upon, yet economists are always like that... Indirectly, this is somewhat related to the previous link on hobbies.

• Half-life of knowledge
  https://parallelthoughts.xyz/2019/02/the-ever-increasing-knowledge-base/

  In this field everything always moves, either in circles or forward, but it's ever changing and the knowledge base growing.

• Interviews
  https://aphyr.com/posts/353-rewriting-the-technical-interview
  https://xeiaso.net/blog/sleeping-the-technical-interview
  https://joelgrus.com/2016/05/23/fizz-buzz-in-tensorflow/

  Somehow I always find these entertaining. It points out the absurdity in certain types of interviews.

Thoughts

"The existence of a nation (you will pardon me this metaphor) is a daily plebiscite, just as the continuing existence of an individual is a perpetual affirmation of life." — Ernest Renan in What is a Nation

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Don't run ldd on any binary
  https://jmmv.dev/2023/07/ldd-untrusted-binaries.html

  I learned quite a lot from this post, and while the vulnerability is mostly gone, you should still pay attention to the advice.

• Best way to learn is rewriting
  https://jjacky.com/anopa/
  https://github.com/jjk-jacky/anopa
  https://github.com/dnaeon/async-service-mgr

  Continuing our init/service/supervision manager series, we take a look at two different implementations. anopa is based on s6, a pretty good wrapper suite, while async-service-mgr is a truly innovative ømq socket communication system.

• Early Phrack
  http://www.phrack.com/issues/18/6.html#article
  http://www.phrack.com/issues/23/10.html#article

  Some of the early phrack articles related to Unix were full of lore and sometimes even misinformation, but still some nice tricks. Obviously, at the time it was probably harder to publish something and share it with a wide audience, or get it refuted, so that's understandable. Also added a "Big Brother" post, just for the lulz that online tracking started much earlier than we usually think of. Should we add the disclaimer everywhere?

• A better explanation of CHERI
  https://tratt.net/laurie/blog/2023/two_stories_for_what_is_cheri.html

  CHERI or "Capability Hardware Enhanced RISC Instructions" is a fascinating evolution in security tech that everyone should be closely following. See also "Going Further Into Attack Surface Reduction" in issue 184, "Ownership and capability, in language and hardware" in 171, and "A Compendium of Access Control on Unix-like Systems" in 184 also.

• New Grumpy
  https://serebit.com/posts/wayland-is-pretty-good/
  https://lobste.rs/s/acepul/wayland_is_pretty_good_actually#c_bzr8nr

  A follow up on "The Grumpy" in last issue (201). This time it's more novel and from someone that truly knows their craft, the author of Arcan. Take what you want from this online discussion.

• Another one about trying out nixOS
  https://ersei.net/en/blog/its-nixin-time

  This one is juicier than others as the author launches themselves without prior knowledge.

• File Format recommendation for long term storage
  https://www.dpconline.org/blog/file-format-recommendations
  https://openpreservation.org/resources/member-groups/international-comparison-of-recommended-file-formats/
  https://wiki.alopex.li/LossyImageFormats

  Somewhat related to last week deep time, we think about actual formats and what is recommended for preservation. This is a review of certain policies enacted by preservation institutes. I also added a link to a list of lossy image formats with a comparison.

• Integrated information theory
  http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Integrated_information_theory

  Extra content for the file format series. A deep philosophical article on the concept of integrated information theory. While not really about computer science per-se, it is still a good read to think about how to represent information or think about conceptualization in general if you ever wanted to store it. Can we store a full experience anyway?

• Network bridge
  https://developers.redhat.com/articles/2022/04/06/introduction-linux-bridging-commands-and-features
  https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/setting-up-a-network-bridge-in-openbsd/
  https://www.linux.com/training-tutorials/how-bridge-networks-openvpn/

  This is part of our networking series. There are many ways to create bridge networks on different systems and for different uses.

• Learning more about BGP
  https://bgp.tools/

  Additional content for the network series. Ever wanted to know more info about these autonomous systems that show up when you do traceroute, we'll this can help.

• A nice find
  https://eklitzke.org/lobotomizing-gnome
  https://eklitzke.org/binding-on-port-zero

  A great blog that suddenly got some online attention and that I felt is worth sharing.

Life & Other

• Flocks of humans
  https://www.psychologytoday.com/au/blog/the-athletes-way/201901/big-crowds-flow-water-in-amazing-and-terrifying-ways
  https://www.csail.mit.edu/news/improving-traffic-tailgating-less
  https://www.cbc.ca/radio/spark/380-phantom-traffic-jams-catfishing-scams-and-smart-speakers-1.4482967/sick-of-traffic-jams-stop-tailgating-1.4482984

  We're an interesting species, and we lack so much self-reflection as a whole.

• Selling your kids for social credits
  https://www.theprivacywhisperer.com/p/your-childs-privacy-is-worth-more
  https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-37858639

  It's the first time I hear the term "sharenting", but I'll definitely use it from now on.

Thoughts

"My Mama always said life was like a box of chocolates; you never know what you’re gonna get."

Good quote from a good movie. On that, have a wonderful week.

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Getting IP information on Linux from procfs
  https://medium.com/bash-tips-and-tricks/getting-the-linux-ip-address-without-any-package-ifconfig-ip-address-etc-7b1363077964
  https://labs.ripe.net/author/stephane_bortzmeyer/all-ip-addresses-are-equal-dot-zero-addresses-are-less-equal/

  It's something I've faced recently, maybe you'll find it useful too. The second link is a weird scenario in which zero ending addresses seem to be handled differently in CPEs.

• SysV init must die.
  https://busybox.net/~vda/init_vs_runsv.html

  Sneaky click-baity title, but full of insightful information.

• Easily find confs
  https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/sysadmin/ReportConfigFileLocations
  https://dot-config.github.io/

  It's something that somehow should be more obvious but that often isn't. Programs should report where the configuration file that is read was located and also report it's running configuration right afterward.

• CentOS Stream and internet open source drama
  https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/furthering-evolution-centos-stream
  https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2023/im-done-red-hat-enterprise-linux
  https://medium.com/@gordon.messmer/in-favor-of-centos-stream-e5a8a43bdcf8
  https://rockylinux.org/news/brave-new-world-path-forward/
  https://almalinux.org/blog/impact-of-rhel-changes/
  https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/red-hats-commitment-open-source-response-gitcentosorg-changes

  Basically RHEL source won't be shared freely anymore, only the stuff of CentOS Stream, which sits between the former and Fedora. So basically forget having a free RHEL, either pay to have it maintained the way it is, or switch to something else. Or simply said: open source != free lunch.

• Streaming audio on OpenBSD
  https://dataswamp.org/%7Esolene/2023-05-05-openbsd-sound-streaming.html

  A list of solutions to be able to stream audio from OpenBSD, especially to allow bluetooth.

• The Gnome and Its "Secret Place"
  https://www.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2023-May/028363.html

  There's a little gnome gathering your characters.

• The Grumpy
  https://lwn.net/Articles/433409/

  Well, if you needed a frank review, you'll get one. See also "Why windows registry sucks" in 156, unrelated, but if you know you know.

• An upgraded shell history
  https://atuin.sh/

  Command history is very precious if you don't want to remember everything or have to note it down. The above is one solution to that.

• Deep time clock and digital storage
  https://agilescientific.com/blog/2020/5/18/the-deep-time-clock
  https://gametyrant.com/news/whats-the-future-of-digital-storage

  For the format series, this week we'll only ponder about deep time and what it would imply for storage. See also "Preserving content for the future" in 171.

• FreeBSD VNET jails
  https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2023/06/28/freebsd-jails-containers/

  Apparently, this is a barely documented feature of jails, yet it's one that is essential.

Life & Other

• Nostalgia
  https://ravenmagazine.org/magazine/the-paradoxes-of-nostalgia/

  Isn't it a peculiar feeling, this piece beautifully expresses it.

• Implicit Biases
  https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/selectatest.html

  While some of these tests are very USA centric, most aren't and instead are very relevant. I encourage everyone to partake in a few tests to learn about themselves, it's by being aware of ourselves that we can act better.

• Anthropomorphism and anthropocentric
  https://www.jstor.org/stable/41208721
  https://sci-hub.se/https://www.jstor.org/stable/41208721
  http://www.philosopher.eu/others-writings/nagel-what-is-it-like-to-be-a-bat/

  Cross-species interaction is fascinating, here are two of the most popular essays on the topic, a must-read.

• Why Write
  https://bastian.rieck.me/blog/posts/2023/writing_why/

  See also 'Probably yet another follow up on "WRITE MORE"', 'Write more more', 'Selfish Writing', '100 days to offload', and many more.

Thoughts

It's always your own ass you sit on.

I'll leave you hanging with this.

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• A secure and accessible desktop
  https://arcan-fe.com/2023/06/15/the-quest-for-a-secure-and-accessible-desktop/

  Last week we had a link about accessibility, "A user describes the evolution they felt regarding accessibility on Linux GUI" in issue 199. This is a follow up but from the perspective of someone working on building a new desktop engine. Some of the philosophical aspects reminds me of a book called Sentient by Jackie Higgins.

• Escape sequence on terminal
  https://susam.net/blog/control-escape-meta-tricks.html

  This is nothing new to anyone who has spend time on a terminal, but for those that didn't, never too late to learn.

• WPS is it this or that
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi_positioning_system
  https://www.howtogeek.com/778832/what-is-wi-fi-protected-setup-wps/
  https://www.lifewire.com/disable-wps-on-router-4137379

  In continuation with our series on networking, we take a look at an AP feature that has double meaning, WPS, either Wi-Fi positioning system or WiFi protected setup.

• Pragmatic notes on ZFS on Linux
  https://wiki.alopex.li/ZfsNotes

  Nothing too fancy, only a few notes and practicalities from using ZFS.

• Another attempt at trying out nix
  https://mtlynch.io/notes/nix-first-impressions/

  I never really thought of infrastructure as code as a replacement for nix, think puppet and ansible, but that's a very good point. This review of the first try at nix is way more genuine than many others I've seen so far.

• Dependency management
  https://cpojer.net/posts/dependency-managers-dont-manage-your-dependencies

  I'm reading that article from the perspective of generic package management and how relevant it is to it. It is also related the often talked about supply-chain attack. The solution offered is a checklist of things to perform on dependencies: static analysis, cleaning of unused ones (often lots of package managers fail at that), etc..

• Basic information theory
  https://towardsdatascience.com/an-intuitive-look-at-the-basics-of-information-theory-2bf0d2fff85e?gi=91724a02cb57
  https://www.princeton.edu/~cuff/ele201/kulkarni_text/information.pdf

  To continue with our adventure with formats, this week we focus on information theory, the base of a lot of formats and a lot of things in computer communication.

• The init wars
  https://www.vitavonni.de/blog/201401/2014012201-the-init-wars.html
  http://www.troubleshooters.com/linux/init/features_and_benefits.htm

  2014 seems like a short while ago, but now it's been almost 10 years.

Life & Other

• The map is not the territory
  https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/maps-distort-how-we-see-the-world

  A redundant topic in this newsletter as of now, see also "Rituals, Consciousness, and Modern Mind Monoculture" in 187, "Culture Shock" in 184, and a lot of other links which I can't remember. Yet, it's definitely nothing of a surprise to anyone who took a geography course...

• Adapt and overcome
  https://jordankaye.dev/posts/flexible-systems/

  A cliché idea but that needs to be reformatted so that we pay attention to it.

Thoughts

I'm a big believer that what is easy to produce is generally less valuable than what is hard to produce. — internet randos

While this applies to most things in our current type of economic society, do you think it also applies to sentimental and knowledge value too. Comparing daily news articles, let's say, to books or journal articles.

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• TCP-Based VPNs
  https://blog.carldong.me/2023/05/03/why-do-vpns.html
  https://web.archive.org/web/20230310043036/http://sites.inka.de/bigred/devel/tcp-tcp.html
  https://www.ripe.net/publications/ipv6-info-centre/deployment-planning/transition-mechanisms

  In continuation with our series on networking. There's multiple ways to tunnel a connection, here a tcp-tunnel would put tcp segments within tcp segments, with all that it implies: congestion control, slow start, 3-w handshake, retransmission, checksum, etc.. "It turns out that the exact mechanisms that ensures delivery for TCP is what makes it such a terrible tunneling protocol." aka TCP-over-TCP meltdown. See also "IKEv2 and VPNs" in issue 159. This also reminds me of some IPv6 transition mechanisms that allow tunneling v6 within v4, see last link above.

• Interview with Fred van Kempen
  https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/2772

  A dated interview with one of the contributor to the Linux networking stack, in which the most interesting part are the two last questions regarding the evolution of Linux toward a more business-centric.

• A critique of D-Bus activation
  https://web.archive.org/web/20200526072921/https://jdebp.eu/Softwares/nosh/avoid-dbus-bus-activation.html

  Another series continuation, we're digging in the init/service manager series. In this one we see an argument against using D-Bus for services activation: when a dependency service is missing for a service, it launches it immediately. I'm not sure I buy the critique though.

• SoX
  https://sox.sourceforge.net/
  https://opensource.com/article/20/2/linux-sox
  https://linux.die.net/man/1/play

  Sox is in between ffmpeg, nc, and others, it's the Swiss army knife of audio files.

• Developers are lazy, thus Flatpak
  https://blog.brixit.nl/developers-are-lazy-thus-flatpak/

  This post is directly in contrast with last week's (198) "The distribution model is changing".

• Deco
  https://github.com/Enhex/Deco

  Following up with our series on formats, let's take a look at Delimiter Collision Free Format. It's a very simple format, but it should whet your appetite for more complex ones.

• Wide monitor argument
  https://lkml.org/lkml/2020/5/29/1038

  It's a long standing argument on both line length, and monitor size.

• A user describes the evolution they felt regarding accessibility on Linux GUI
  https://tech.lgbt/@xogium/110507457689374019
  https://samthursfield.wordpress.com/2023/06/07/state-of-screen-reading-reading-on-desktop-linux/

  We don't often get first-hand experience described like this, it puts things in perspectives.

• History and effective use of Vim
  https://begriffs.com/posts/2019-07-19-history-use-vim.html

  Rediscover vim from all angles. It's mostly about an explanation of configs location, loading behavior, backup, diffs, etc..

• Desktop Linux Hardening
  https://privsec.dev/posts/linux/desktop-linux-hardening/

  A big checklist that could be helpful to harden your machine.

• Doing whatever it takes to fix the bug
  https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2023/06/14/i-booted-linux-292612-times/

  ...and it only took 21h.

Life & Other

• Breaking Hegemony
  https://www.nthbrock.com/posts/americaless-internet/

  We tend to make a lot of assumptions based on many things. One of them is language, and because English is used a lot on the web, it creates a bias towards what we see. What if we could filter the origin of the websites instead, either by language or geolocation. I wrote a piece about this once (shameful plug).

• Reflections on Ten Years Past The Snowden Revelations
  https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-farrell-tenyearsafter-00

  A memo on the events that happened during and after the revelation of USA's NSA international tapping of communication (spying).

• Self-healing Code is the future
  https://stackoverflow.blog/2023/06/07/self-healing-code-is-the-future-of-software-development/

  I've heard that people post anything about LLMs these days to get upboots on social mediators websites. Get ready for the integration of these within software pipelines.

Thoughts

The first grand discovery was time, the landscape of experience — Daniel Boorstin

In view of all you have to do, when you waste an hour it seems to me a thousand... For I deem naught so precious to you, both for body and soul, as time, and methinks you value it too little — Letter to Francesco di Marco Datini

Memory's vices are also its virtues, elements of a bridge across time which allows us to link the mind with the world — Daniel Schacter

These days it seems we're always running for something, wanting to fill all gaps, not wasting anything. But aren't we wasting something precious while at it?

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• The distribution model is changing
  https://www.ypsidanger.com/the-distribution-model-is-changing/

  Should distros push the maintenance of graphical packages toward flathub/flatpak and focus on other "more important" stuff instead?

• The Eternal Mainframe
  http://www.winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Eternal_Mainframe.html

  We're diving into this classic blog post about cyclical history in computing. Are we bound to make the same mistake over and over again?

• Who does that server really serve?
  https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-serve.en.html

  A software freedom piece on internet Service as a Software Substitute.

• GNU Grep versus the (Linux) open source ecology
  https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/linux/GNUGrepVersusEcology

  Such change has a snowball effect everywhere. Why do it then, why not keep wrapper scripts instead?

• OpenDaylight and ONOS
  https://www.opendaylight.org/about/platform-overview
  https://opennetworking.org/onos/

  Two now widely used SDN controller and framework.

• PNG Glitches
  https://github.com/corkami/pics/blob/master/binary/PNG.png
  https://killscreen.com/previously/articles/vast-lurid-possibilities-png-glitches/
  https://ucnv.github.io/pnglitch/

  PNG is a solid image format, supposedly resistant to glitches and bit rot. However, some people found a way around it, maybe these shouldn't be called glitches though, as they're manually engineered.

• NixOS for the impatient
  https://borretti.me/article/nixos-for-the-impatient

  "I just want something that works." Then goes on to mingle with config files. Yet, this is a much simpler tutorial than a lot of the previous ones I've seen.

• fq is jq for binary data
  https://github.com/wader/fq/

  A new tool to add to your arsenal, and it's easy to install on most systems!

• eBPF for Cybersecurity
  https://blog.cloudnativefolks.org/ebpf-for-cybersecurity-part-1
  https://blog.cloudnativefolks.org/ebpf-for-cybersecurity-part-2
  https://blog.cloudnativefolks.org/ebpf-for-cybersecurity-part-3
  https://blog.cloudnativefolks.org/ebpf-for-cybersecurity-part-4

  A tour of eBPF but with an emphasis on security.

Life & Other

• I'm sure I had linked something similar before
  https://blog.qartis.com/decoding-small-qr-codes-by-hand/

  Every few months there someone that posts a similar blog post, and I've never added any of these to the newsletter, so here's one.

• Intelligent brains take longer to solve difficult problems
  https://www.bihealth.org/en/notices/intelligent-brains-take-longer-to-solve-difficult-problems
  https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-38626-y

  But how do they define intelligence, got to find the less sexier paper to find out "Intelligence is here defined as the performance in psychometric tests in cognitive domains like verbal comprehension, perceptual reasoning or working memory".

Thoughts

"Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you’re as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?" — Brian Kernighan, The Elements of Programming Style

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• su and sudo quirks
  https://dxuuu.xyz/sudo.html
  https://jdebp.uk/FGA/dont-abuse-su-for-dropping-privileges.html

  sudo has a lot of edge cases and special scenarios, the first post shows one change made to sudo that affects signal propagation. The second post is about how su now relies on libpam to perform certain operation, which might lead to privilege escalation and is a bad idea for privilege dropping. Instead it argues for a usage of the raw mechanism as a script such as setuidgid from daemontools.

• Linux Networking Shallow Dive
  https://im.salty.fish/index.php/archives/linux-networking-shallow-dive.html

  More networking series this week. This long form article touches a lot of things on most network layers. It starts with a simple task: giving access from a NAT server to a gateway so that it gets public internet access, to then dive into issues after issues, learning along the way.

• Apple's recommendation for writing daemons and agents
  https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/technotes/tn2083/_index.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/DTS10003794-CH1-SECTION31

  In this long documents you'll find a lot of fallback to avoid when writing daemons on macOS. One of them linked is to prefer UNIX domain sockets for local IPC.

• Jails on FreeBSD
  https://ogris.de/howtos/freebsd-jails.html

  A straight forward article about setting up jails from scratch on FreeBSD. These days it's much easier with wrappers such as bastille, iocage, pot, cbsd, and others.

• Back to the basics, let's talk about reliability and Linux desktops
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hn5xNLH-5eA

  A quite long rant about why reliable distros, image-based distros, are important to have.

• Modern storage is fast enough, it's the API that doesn't let us use it properly
  https://stackoverflow.com/questions/75697877/why-is-liburing-write-performance-lower-than-expected
  https://itnext.io/modern-storage-is-plenty-fast-it-is-the-apis-that-are-bad-6a68319fbc1a

  Two links that rotate around the title I've added. I've been trying to wrap my head around the io_uring for a while now, the concept is fine, however practically applying it properly in a program seems harder than it seems.

• I Didn’t Learn Unix By Reading All The Manpages
  https://www.owlfolio.org/research/i-didnt-learn-unix-by-reading-all-the-manpages/

  RTFM, how many times have your head this? I agree that manpages aren't the best way to learn, especially at first. They're good for the nitty-gritty details and as reference doc for when you need it.

• Style and Diction (the GNU version)
  https://www.gnu.org/software/diction/

  Just a link to two old Unix commands (readapted). Will these types of tools be deprecated with the rise of LLM or will these get a new life.

• Your personal VoIP
  https://www.sacredheartsc.com/blog/building-a-personal-voip-system/

  See also "Your own IM and VOIP" in issue 175.

• Where does my computer get the time from?
  https://dotat.at/@/2023-05-26-whence-time.html

  The slides from a presentation on where computer fetch time from NTP and its truthful sources of time, going back step by step. See also my old presentation see also "NTP" in 127.

• Azure Linux
  https://www.theregister.com/2023/05/26/microsoft_azure_linux_container/

  It's yet another "container" distro. I'm not sure what's the point to have all these new container distros, maybe it's more about the last point "Kubernetes Apps for sale at the Marketplace".

Life & Other

• Build your own anycast network
  https://labs.ripe.net/author/samir_jafferali/build-your-own-anycast-network-in-nine-steps/

  Somehow in sync with the series on networking, however I'm putting it in the "other" section 'cause why not. There are "only" 9 steps, but they're tough ones!

• A review of the Gemini protocol
  https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2023/05/28/the-gemini-protocol-seen-by-this-http-client-person/

  Some of the arguments put forward are great, however most of them are about how the protocol is overly simple, to an ambiguous degree, doesn't leave room for extensibility and only plain-text content.

• Some AI/LLM thoughts
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0962biiZa4
  https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/chatgpt-is-a-blurry-jpeg-of-the-web

  I'll let you digest this in any way you prefer, since the topic has probably been rehashed to much the past few months.

Thoughts

The purity means you have to sacrifice everything. Everything that makes it worth it. — Nile Blue YT Channel making the World's Purest Cookie

I truly enjoyed that video, search for it!

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Ubuntu's past tinkering with init system
  https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ReplacementInit
  https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FasterBootProcess?action=show&redirect=FasterBoot

  These two documents from 2005-2006 trace back the work Ubuntu planned and prioritized for the init system. The first doc list the design and what was prioritized in the design of a new init system.

• 20 years of gentoo
  https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2023/May/20-years-of-gentoo/

  A blog post about a user's history with gentoo and Linux in general, and most importantly, what they learned along the way and why they preferred gentoo.

• coLinux
  http://www.colinux.org/

  This allows running Linux on Windows natively. It doesn't make much sense now with WSL, yet it's still worth a look.

• A list of books on the topic of Linux categorized by purpose and level
  https://linuxstans.com/linux-books/

  There's a lot of these book reviews online, but this one is well made and compiles together a good list.

• The Linux Audio Drivers For MIDI 2.0
  https://www.phoronix.com/news/MIDI-2.0-Linux-Kernel-Patches

  For audio folks out there, this is big, the MIDI 2.0 interface is coming to the Linux kernel.

• A series of tubes
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_of_tubes
  https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/improving-performance-with-http-streaming-ba9e72c66408

  The first link is about the classic USA senator quote comparing the internet to a series of tubes, meanwhile the metaphor is extended with the second link, with the concept of streaming and pipelining.

• Fixing a FUSE bug
  https://netflixtechblog.com/debugging-a-fuse-deadlock-in-the-linux-kernel-c75cd7989b6d

  This is the sort of rabbit hole bug that never ends. Some of it is beyond my knowledge, but it's still a fascinating read.

• A great guide to memory allocation
  https://samwho.dev/memory-allocation/

  And it has visual helpers for those who enjoy explorable explanations.

• Awk but for tracing
  https://blog.lambda.cx/posts/openbsd-dynamic-tracing/

  It's the equivalent bpftrace but for OpenBSD.

• 50 years in filesystems (series continue)
  https://blog.koehntopp.info/2023/05/15/50-years-in-filesystems-vnodes.html
  https://blog.koehntopp.info/2023/05/17/50-years-in-filesystems-towards-2004-lfs.html

  A follow up on the filesystems blog posts series we've posted about in previous issues.

• A new look at XML
  https://www.sitepoint.com/really-good-introduction-xml/
  https://www.rojotek.com/blog/2009/05/06/choosing-a-data-storage-format/
  https://pythonspeed.com/articles/best-file-format-for-pandas/

  XML is often seen as old-corp tech, and also one that lacks proper and clean parsing tech. However, it can also be a great format in some cases. Bonus: extra link on picking a Panda format and comparing csv/json and parquet.

Life & Other

• American Self-Made Big Persona Clichés Incoming
  https://tim.blog/2020/02/02/reasons-to-not-become-famous/

  While the title I put on that link can put you off, the content is true to the heart, and honest. It can shift your outlook on what it means to be under the public eye, even to a low degree, and what it means when a community around a topic of discussion grows.

Thoughts

The first grand discovery was time, the landscape of experience. — Daniel Boorstin

Computer scientists were confused by such statement.

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.

Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• Knuth and McIlroy Approach a Problem
  https://matt-rickard.com/instinct-and-culture

  A tale you've probably read about before. Yet, in hindsight, I keep wondering the clash in what these two persons were optimizing for: readability or efficiency.

• find as a programming language
  https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~pmaydell/find/

  Is it Turing complete? Then you can do whatever you want in it (but it might be complex).

• GStreamer Updates
  https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/news-and-events/gstreamer-122-bigger-better.html

  GStreamer is a must-have tool and library in your multimedia arsenal. I'm also impressed by how much collabora is contributing to the multimedia stack on Linux.

• Distros Updates
  https://archlinux.org/news/git-migration-announcement/
  https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2023/05/msg00001.html

  Arch is fully moving from svn to git, and Debian is fixing/improving for their new release of their installer.

• Process supervision is a solved problem
  https://web.archive.org/web/20200721180714/http://jtimberman.housepub.org/blog/2012/12/29/process-supervision-solved-problem/

  The first point and the rest are relevant to our series on init system and service manager. Process supervision isn't service management, but it can be part of it.

• Multi-homing
  https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/what-is-multihoming-and-what-do-you-need-to-set-it-up/
  https://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/linux-how-to-setup-multi-homing-networking.html

  I know these aren't great links, but they're still good at explaining. The comments are also insightful in pushing aside some language confusion.

• Human readable vs machine readable Format
  https://stackoverflow.com/questions/568671/why-should-i-use-a-human-readable-file-format/568782#568782
  https://control.com/technical-articles/machine-readable-vs-human-readable-data/
  https://web.archive.org/web/20100305045500/http://plone.org/products/plone/features/3.0/existing-features/human-readable-urls

  In sync with our series on formats. This is one of the most frequent question that comes up when deciding on a new format. The third link takes a whole different approach to what "human-readable" means. It's also somewhat related to a change I did on the forums a few years ago to make the URLs human readable.

• Getting ready for war zone
  https://events.ccc.de/camp/2019/wiki/How_To_Survive
  https://security.googleblog.com/2023/04/securely-hosting-user-data-in-modern.html

  A great guide from the CCC team to survive at the camp, along with one from Google security team to protect your web services.

Life & Other

• Megastructures
  https://yarchive.net/space/exotic/bubbleworld.html
  https://larryniven.fandom.com/wiki/Ringworld

  I've been fascinated by big constructions lately, do you enjoy that too?

Thoughts

"We must not allow the clock and the calendar to blind us to the fact that each moment of life is a miracle and mystery" — H.G. Wells

I've finished reading the Time Machine, and kept wondering about this, especially in the context of the writing.

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Nixers Newsletter

Unix

• The plumbing layer as the new kernel
  https://lwn.net/Articles/495516/

  In continuation with our series on init/service manager, we ponder and take a step back, imagining the layering of what composes a system and a standard base. (The comment section is explosive)

• macOS Internals
  https://gist.github.com/kconner/cff08fe3e0bb857ea33b47d965b3e19f

  A bunch of links and info (not all very deep, but breadth of knowledge) to better understand macOS different blocks, from display tech, compositing, memory management, init system, sandboxing/security, and more.

• Internet hourglass
  https://phys.org/news/2011-08-internet-architecture-hourglass-future.html
  https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1958

  The internet architecture is fascinating, there is so many discussion around the organic process that gives rise to it. The first link takes this matter seriously and uses evolutionary algorithm to show that the hourglass shape is something inevitable.

• Linux Network Namespaces
  https://blog.sigma-star.at/post/2023/05/sandbox-netns/

  Another networking-related link! It's good that there are more articles on the topic of namespaces too, as it's a topic that's tough to grasp properly. I've also written on this too.

• Save-state
  https://fantasyanime.com/game-saves-tutorial
  https://github.com/OpenEmu/OpenEmu/wiki/User-guide:-Save-states
  https://web.archive.org/web/20211117084748/https://dspace.library.uu.nl/bitstream/handle/1874/351188/Dissertation_Final_FLGEERTS_2017_Final.pdf
  https://mytechnologyblog532.wordpress.com/2016/11/13/reverse-engineering-save-game-files/

  In sync with our series on formats, this week we dive into game "save-state", how to store it, the difference with saved-ram, etc.. Most of the links aren't technical, but about the importance of save states.

• A kernel without buffer heads
  https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/930173/c1a1f68dc4e20191/

  When the cruft of past decision is still lingering, refactoring is hard!

• Unix Koans
  https://prirai.github.io/books/unix-koans.html

  For some, these little koans might be worthless, but to others they might carry much value.

• A blog on the web
  https://www.devever.net/~hl/pics
  https://quii.dev/HTMX_is_the_Future

  This first article is on IE and its content rating system. While the other is about the evolution of application development toward hypermedia.

• 50 years in filesystems: 1984
  https://blog.koehntopp.info/2023/05/05/50-years-in-filesystems-1974.html
  https://blog.koehntopp.info/2023/05/06/50-years-in-filesystems-1984.html

  A series of posts on the historical evolution of file systems, focusing on the multiple improvements over the years.

Life & Other

• On God, Turtles, Balloons, and Sandboxes
  https://xtclang.blogspot.com/2019/04/on-god-turtles-balloons-and-sandboxes.html

  Sometimes a good metaphor helps picture things.

• Monoliths are not dinosaurs
  https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2023/05/monoliths-are-not-dinosaurs.html

  If you've been following tech aggregators and news, then monoliths might seem like something nobody uses, yet this couldn't be further from the truth. "There is not one architectural pattern to rule them all."

• Learning DNS
  https://jvns.ca/blog/2023/05/08/new-talk-learning-dns-in-10-years/

  The most practical and pragmatic way to learn.

Thoughts

"He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it." — Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Archive

You can find the archive of past newsletters here:
https://newsletter.nixers.net/entries.php

Contribute

There are many ways to contribute:

1. If you find anything interesting you can contact venam on the forums and that may be featured in the next newsletter.
2. Share it with your friends.
3. Share your point of view about the newsletter.
4. Open a thread on the forums to discuss one of the topics that has been brought by reading this newsletter.
5. If you want to help with the forums server fees or simply donate then you can send something to my btc address (ask for it) or patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/venam.