dgoodwin's blog

Some things I've been tinkering with lately:

I've had SELinux disabled for quite awhile, shortly after coming to the Fedora/RHEL world I was informed it's often more trouble than it's worth. Eventually I saw some articles come across RSS that made it look pretty appealing and eventually I figured I'd give it a shot and see how my system behaved. Earlier this week the first attempt didn't look good, piles of errors on boot and an unusable system, I set it to permissive so I could debug the log failures gradually but keep using the machine and left it be. Fedora updates brought in some policy changes a couple days later, tried again and this time everything seemed fine. Up and running with it for a few days now and it hasn't interfered yet.

EncFS is a userland encrypted filesystem using FUSE. Extremely easy to setup:

sudo yum install fuse-encfs
sudo modprobe fuse
sudo usermod -a -G fuse yourusername
newgrp - fuse

encfs ~/.crypt-raw ~/crypt
touch ~/crypt/this_file_is_encrypted
fusermount -u ~/crypt

I use dm-crypt for my /home partition on the laptop should it ever be stolen, not sure how well EncFS performs compared to that (probably not nearly as well) but it's nice to have the lightweight alternative when you'd just like a directory to store things more safely.

Spent several hours trimming 180 gigs of data on my /home partition down to about 100, then finding space to transfer it all on my 4 systems at home so I could finally convert the partition from reiserfs to ext3.

I've packaged up testoob and it should now be available in the Fedora 7 repositories. Great tool for any Python project with tests written against the standard unittest module. Testoob acts as a wrapper around it and provides a bunch of really great additions, --regex for limiting to a particular suite or test, --repeat, --timeout, --html --xml and --pdf for output, --randomize-order, etc. Really easy to use standalone without modifying your project so you can keep your suites runnable with or without it.

Still spending small amounts of time on Rounder every night when I can find the motivation. Some very minimal networking up and running with Twisted, now investigating the best way to move complex objects across the wire and I think it'll be either Json or Cerealizer. (although leaning toward Json) I wasn't aware that Python's pickle module was so dangerous. Also need to investigate the XMPP stuff being done for OLPC (as per this recommendation) and see if it looks like a suitable alternative to Twisted before I go too far down that path. Haven't had much luck finding specifics on it yet though. After that I think I'll throw together a very quick GTK GUI and roll up 0.0.1. Really looking forward to the day when I can actually use this thing.

Next up, probably playing with Snort intrusion detection. Seems like it'd be nice to have running at home and I'm also wondering if it might have some uses in future releases of our product at work.