S0E2: "How do I Make it Longer? or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the 'Roids"

Posted 2015-03-12 06:06
Modified 2018-04-27 06:45
Comments 0

We took a nice leisurely stroll through several topics; it was a fairly laid-back evening. We had to stretch the show a little bit too (hence the title- sorry, no hints on how to elongate genitalia offered herein. IT’S LIKE WE’RE AN ARTICLE ON A VIRAL BLOGGING SITE!).

• Notes
• Errata
  • Kernel Statistics Report
• Music

Notes

• We give a quick yay (and a bit of a rant) about Net Neutrality. Yay!
• You can find the /r/sysadmin/ subreddit here, and our thread here. We also posted on /r/linux but didn’t get as much of a result. Special shout-out to JollyRgrs in #reddit-sysadmin on Freenode and ekul_ for hanging out in our IRC channel with us for a bit.
• The beer I was drinking is here.
• For the BeOS users/lovers out there, you can check out HaikuOS here.
• You can read about Anthem being total irresponsible pricks here.
• We mention the following GNU/Linux distros a lot in this episode: CentOS, Red Hat (sometimes referred to as RHEL), Arch Linux, SUSE Enterprise Linux (and openSUSE), Debain, Gentoo, Ubuntu, Manjaro, Fedora, and Slackware.
• Kernel 4.x is slated for “rebootless upgrades”. The Slashdot article is here. The kernel summit article I mentioned I can’t seem to find again, but I did a checkout of the mainline kernel repository and ran some stats. You can find my results in the Errata section.
  • We talk about Ksplice / Uptrack as well.
  • The two types of “rebootless” kernel mechanisms that were merged together to 4.x are RHEL’s kpatch (released under GPLv2) and SUSE’s kGraft (under the GPLv2 as well).
• FREAK is explained here, but because you’re all smart cookies, you’ll want the CVE (you may have better luck with the Mitre.org link).
• It turns out we managed to find our (Brent and Jonathan’s) first conversation on IRC in public logs for #ubuntu-us-pa on Freenode. You can view that specific log here, lines 248, 259-265 (nicks are mangled; mine is 6c659f0c and his is a42c5963). Way back to July 23, 2008. And yes, per my guess- I was indeed trying to help him. :P
• I plug Manjaro specifically, for newcomers to GNU/Linux that might not want the messy bullshit of Ubuntu.

Errata

• It turns out both Comcast AND Verizon were giving Netflix the shaft
• BeOS R5 was actually released in March of 2000(source).
• “Patch Tuesday” is still very much a thing.
• I kept referring to Tuesday (2015.03.10) as “tomorrow”. It was technically correct at the time of recording, but I had neglected to remember that it takes about 2-3 days to get these puppies edited.
• jthan has just told me that every University of Colorado employee was exposed in the Anthem attack. THIS WAS SO EASY TO PREVENT; YOU SHOULD HAVE JUST LET THE AUDITORS DO THEIR THING. WHY IS NOBODY ELSE AS ANGRY ABOUT THIS AS WE ARE STILL?!
• Ksplice is indeed owned now by Oracle. It was originally (first release in 2008) developed by Ksplice, Inc. until 2011 when Oracle took over, and was indeed (and still is) under the GPLv2. However, Oracle sucks because (among many other things) they aren’t very transparent with that source.
• I was wrong, again. FREAK is an attack specific to OpenSSL per the CVE: “before 0.9.8zd, 1.0.0 before 1.0.0p, and 1.0.1 before 1.0.1k”.

Kernel Statistics Report

There are, at the time of writing this, commits from 17,604 unique authors in the mainline Linux source since 2.6.11 (the first tag in the kernel’s Git repository):

[bts@workhorse linux]$ git log v2.6.11..v4.0-rc3 > commit.log
[bts@workhorse linux]$ ls -lh commit.log 
-rw-r--r-- 1 bts bts 319M Mar 12 03:08 commit.log
[bts@workhorse linux]$ grep Author commit.log | cut -d ":" -f 2 | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr > commit.authors
[bts@workhorse linux]$ wc -l commit.authors 
17604 commit.authors

The top 5 committers are:

[bts@workhorse linux]$ head -n5 commit.authors 
14533  Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
5239  Takashi Iwai <tiwai@suse.de>
5154  David S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
3948  Mark Brown <broonie@opensource.wolfsonmicro.com>
3567  Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>

Music

Author r00t^2
Categories (Pilot Season)