Turning off DSN on sendmail to prevent backscatter

I sent that? One morning, I got a bounce message from my own mail sendmail server, saying that it failed to deliver a message I never sent. That’s red alert. It means that someone managed to provoke my mail server to send an outbound message. It’s red alert, because my mail server effectively relays spam [...]

When umount says target is busy, but no process can be blamed

A short one: What to do if unmount is impossible with a # umount /path/to/mount umount: /path/to/mount: target is busy but grepping the output of lsof for the said path yields nothing. In other words, the mount is busy, but no process can be blamed for accessing it (even as a home directory). If this [...]

LG OLED with a Linux computer: Getting that pitch black

Introduction So I got myself an LG OLED65B9. It’s huge and a really nice piece of electronics. I opted out the bells and whistles, and connected it via HDMI to my already existing media computer, running Linux Mint 18.1. All I wanted was a plain (yet very high quality) display. However at some point I [...]

Linux Wine jots

General These are just a few jots on Wine. I guess this post will evolve over time. I’m running Wine version 4.0 on Linux Mint 19, running on an x86_64. First run Every time Wine is run on a blank (or absent) directory given by WINEPREFIX, it installs a Windows environment. Which Windows version an [...]

Firejail: Putting a program in its own little container

Introduction Firejail is a lightweight security utility which ties the hands of running processes, somewhat like Apparmor and SELinux. However it takes the mission towards Linux kernel’s cgroups and namespaces. It’s in fact a bit of a container-style virtualization utility, which creates sandboxes for running specific programs: Instead of a container for an entire operating [...]

Microsoft’s outlook.com servers and the art of delivering mails to them

Introduction Still in 2020, it seems like Microsoft lives up to its reputation: Being arrogant, thinking that anyone in business must be a huge corporate, and in particular ending up completely ridiculous. Microsoft’s mail servers, which accept on behalf of Hotmail, MSN, Office 365, Outlook.com, or Live.com users are no exception. This also affects companies [...]

A few epoll jots

Just a few things I wrote down while getting the hang on Linux’ epoll working with a named pipe. There’s also a little test program at Github. Be sure to read this and this. An event list for a file descriptor can be added only once with epoll_ctl(…, EPOLL_CTL_ADD, …). Calling epoll_ctl for adding an [...]

Jots on named pipes (FIFOs in Linuxish)

Major disclaimer These are pretty random jots that I made while evaluating named pipes as a solution for project. I eventually went for a driver in the kernel for various reasons, so I never got to verify that anything written below is actually correct. I’ve also written a small post on epoll with named pipes [...]

usbpiper: A single-threaded /dev/cuse and libusb-based endpoint to device file translator

Introduction Based upon CUSE, libusb and the kernel’s epoll capability, this is a single-threaded utility which generates one /dev/usbpiper_* device file for each bulk / interrupt endpoint on a USB device. For example, /dev/usbpiper_bulk_in_01 and /dev/usbpiper_bulk_out_03. It’s an unfinished project, that was stopped before a lot of obvious tasks in the TODO list were done. [...]

FUSE / CUSE kernel driver dissection notes

What this post is about Before anything: If you’re planning on using FUSE / CUSE for an application, be sure to read this first. It also explains why I bothered looking at the kernel code instead of using libfuse. So these are some quite random notes I took while trying to figure out how to [...]