Made of Bugs

Basically anyone who’s used Linux for any amount of time eventually comes to know and love the strace command. strace is the system-call tracer, which traces the calls that a program makes into the kernel in order to interact with the outside world. If you’re not already familiar with this incredibly versatile tool, I suggest [...]

In response to my query last time, ezyang asked for any tips or tricks I have for finding my way around the Linux kernel. I’m not sure I have much in the way of systematic advice for tracking down the answers to questions about the Linux kernel, but thinking about what I do when posed [...]

Since I first discovered ratpoison in 2005 or so, I’ve basically exclusively used tiling window managers, going through, over the years, StumpWM, Ion 3, and finally XMonad. They’ve all had various strengths and weaknesses, but I’ve never been totally happy with any of them. This blog entry is a writeup of what I want to [...]

CVE-2007-4573 is two years old at this point, but it remains one of my favorite vulnerabilities. It was a local privilege-escalation vulnerability on all x86_64 kernels prior to v2.6.22.7. It’s very simple to understand with a little bit of background, and the exploit is super-simple, but it’s still more interesting than Yet Another NULL Pointer [...]

I’ve made two new interesting discoveries about wpa_supplicant since writing my last blog post on the subject. (Actually, I pretty much made both of them while reading documentation in order to write it, and have been lame about writing them up). Using wpa_gui It turns out that wpa_gui not only allows you to select existing [...]

I’ve been using wpa_supplicant to manage wifi on my Ubuntu laptop for a while, and have found that it’s pretty close to what I want for managing wireless — closer than anything else I’ve found, at least. I figured I should document my setup and experiences. Some Background You probably all know just how much [...]

For some time now, many of us around MIT have noticed just how awesome sshfs is. It gives a totally lightweight way to access the remote filesystem of any machine you have ssh to, without requiring any extra setup on the host. I’ve been running for at least a year now with my /data RAID [...]