October 2010 - admins-discuss@lists.redbrick.dcu.ie

[Admin-discuss] blacklisting modules
by Cian Brennan 09 Nov '10

09 Nov '10

Hi, This came up today : https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=647416. It's the second vulnerability in the RDS (some crazy Oracle network protocol) code. As such, the admins have blacklisted the RDS module (since there's no patch for ubuntu yet, and Linus' comment was that the code is likely full of further holes). I'd like to suggest that in future when we find a bug in any of the kernel modules we have no reason to ever use (and there are almost certainly lots of these), we blacklist the module from then on. Someone should add a page to docs with a list of the modules we have blacklisted, and what they do then, so as to make it easier to keep the list across new installs, and so that people can figure out what's wrong when we do decide we need one of them. Thanks Cian

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[Admin-discuss] So many tickets so little time!
by kat farrell 04 Nov '10

04 Nov '10

Hey! As a lot of you know, there is a huge amount of weird and wonderful stuff that we want / need done. Due to the large amount I think it could be a good idea to create a priority list of what needs to be done first. Some may thing well obvously we do X before Y, but we can all at times act like squirrels and get detracted by shiny things. So let's create a list docs saying what we want to get done first maybe? Thoughts? -- sigless :( - 2010

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[Admin-discuss] Fwd: Installing lucid on carbon
by kat farrell 03 Nov '10

03 Nov '10

We should maybe wait for awhile longer, most of the vulnerabilities that our friend kees like to mail us about are for 10.10 . I know carbon is not a machine we aim for constant uptime, it's just a security update here and there is fine, but there seems to be a lot of them lately. On 27 October 2010 11:37, Sonic <sonic(a)redbrick.dcu.ie> wrote: > On Wed, Oct 27, 2010 at 11:25, Andrew Harford > <andrew.harford(a)redbrick.dcu.ie> wrote: > > On Wed, Oct 27, 2010 at 11:20:27AM +0100, Cian Brennan wrote: > >> On Wed, Oct 27, 2010 at 11:16:48AM +0100, Andrew Harford wrote: > >> > On Sun, Feb 07, 2010 at 03:26:50AM +0000, Andrew Martin wrote: > >> > > Yeah, sounds great, we should do it ..... > >> > > >> > Are we moving carbon to 10.10? If so, how quickly? > >> > > >> I was certainly under the impression that carbon was going to always be > on the > >> most recent ubuntu release, and that users could just put up with it (or > use > >> one of the 8.04 machines) if it was less stable. > > > > Aye, that was the plan. > > > > There's still a question of how quickly we move between releases. I'd be > > in favour of waiting at least one/two weeks after release until the usual > > collection of post-release fixes come out. Dunno if other people would > > like to see us wait longer. > > > > Regardless, these things still should happen on a case by case basis, > > there's no point in installing a new release just because it's out if we > > know there are still bugs that would affect us. > > ^^ This sounds like a very sensible way of handling it. No need to jump > the gun but move to the newest release as soon as we have a general > idea that it wont cause more harm than good. > > It seems to be generally better than 9.10 or so the lack of people bitching > about it would indicate. I've only used the server version on a redbrick > VM, > upgraded from 10.04, no issue during or since installation. > > > > > -- > > Andrew Harford > > > > You talk about vengeance. Is vengeance going to bring your son back to > > you? Or my boy to me? --Don Vito Corleone > > > > _______________________________________________ > > Admin-discuss mailing list > > Admin-discuss(a)lists.redbrick.dcu.ie > > http://lists.redbrick.dcu.ie/mailman/listinfo/admin-discuss > > > > -Alan > > _______________________________________________ > Admin-discuss mailing list > Admin-discuss(a)lists.redbrick.dcu.ie > http://lists.redbrick.dcu.ie/mailman/listinfo/admin-discuss >

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[Admin-discuss] UNSCD Testing
by Andrew Harford 27 Oct '10

27 Oct '10

Hey, We've talked about this a few times over the last few months (years?), but it looks like unscd will finally make it into sid very soon. This would mean it should be in the next Ubuntu release (Natty/11.04) As long as this stuff is in debian we can build our own packages from the source with relativly little hassle, so I'd like to test on carbon when it comes out. Depending on how that goes we can discuss replacing nscd on everything. We would need to maintain binary packages for each arch/release we have (so, 4) which could be a pain depending on how often new versions (read: bugs) come out. Revevant reading: * http://ftp-master.debian.org/new/unscd_0.47-1.html * http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=513305 * https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/303986 -- Andrew Harford Your father wanted you to have this when you were old enough, but your uncle wouldn't allow it. He feared you might follow old Obi-Wan on some damn fool idealistic crusade like your father did. It's your father's lightsaber. -- Obi-Wan Kenobi

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[Admin-discuss] Installing lucid on carbon
by Andrew Harford 27 Oct '10

27 Oct '10

On Thu, Jan 28, 2010 at 11:20:02AM +0000, Cian Brennan wrote: > On Thu, Jan 28, 2010 at 11:14:20AM +0000, Andrew Harford wrote: > > Hi, > > > > I think that after the big storage migration we should move the stuff on > > fast-storage to worf (faster-storage, if you like ;) ). > > > > Once this is done there should be nothing at all left running on carbon, > > we can do a clean install to get rid of anything left over from the > > various things what ran there. > > > > There's two reasons for this: > > > > * If carbon is to stay as a 'development machine' then people are going > > want the newest development tools and libaries. Hardy isn't getting any > > younger. Unless carbon has software that we can't or won't run on the > > hardy boxes it doesn't make much sense to develop anything there. > > > > * Eventually we will probably have to upgrade everything to lucid. Given > > that there will be no more features released on hardy I think it's > > unlikely that 'the admins of the future' will be happy to wait until > > 12.04 is stable to move away from hardy, so we may as well get an > > enviroment where we can test it out properly for a while. > > > I second this excellent recommendation, but advise that it be sent to > admin-discuss. Having looked more into this, lucid is not ready yet, but I think we should move to karmic, and keep carbon on the most recent ubuntu indefinatly. This is def a tradeoff in terms of stability and availablity but I think it makes sense in this case. a. -- Andrew Harford You do not just avoid the Suzuki Wagon R. You avoid it like you would avoid unprotected sex with an Ethiopian transvestite. --Jeremy Clarkson

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[Admin-discuss] Thoughts on being an admin
by Sonic 23 Oct '10

23 Oct '10

Hi, I generally missed the boat on a few conversations that happened lately so decided to email off my general feelings on this whole 'Redbrick Admin' thing to any interested in improving their inbox read/unread totals. I always saw the main aim of being an admin for Redbrick was to teach yourself as much as possible but more importantly to teach as many other people too. Any and all effort should be done to impart whatever knowledge you have gained to the next generation of members. Anything that goes against that is wrong as far as I'm concerned and effort should be made to alter your practices, when at all possible, to make sure that your ability to teach and learn is maximised and regular members opportunities to teach and learn is also maximised. If someone wants to monitor what we do, I say great, they should invite a friend too if they are interested. The very bare minimum should be hidden from regular members and that list of things and the reasons for not sharing should be under constant review. If nobody wants to monitor what you do then it probably isn't important, or maybe people don't know it 's important, so you should tell someone that it is. A lot of what we think if easy/boring/mundane could be the spark of information that means 1-4 years later someone passes a Redbrick Admin exam and is then responsible for making sure in the future that the ssh access your old DCU friends still use long after facebooktwitter is a distant memory. That it folks, thanks for reading. -Alan

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[Admin-discuss] Test
by hauk 21 Oct '10

21 Oct '10

Yeah, a test.

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[Admin-discuss] Root Exploit
by Austin Halpin 20 Oct '10

20 Oct '10

There was an exploit released that affected carbon. The quick workaround didn't work so I've taken the machine down until we can patch it. http://www.vsecurity.com/resources/advisory/20101019-1/ lil_cain could still get a root shell after applying the workaround, so I thought it safest to just take it down.

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