S1E5: "Jthan + Sysbot = 4evr"

Posted 2016-04-25 03:59
Modified 2017-01-28 23:26
Comments 0

Effective ways of being involved in community support, hospital compromises, and Jthan shares some experiences with the CentOS 7 installer.

• News
• Notes
• Sysbadministration Award
• Errata
• Music

News

Starts at 03m39s.

• FreeBSD 10.3 was released, and supports 64-bit Linux ABI emulation in its jails.
  • …Which isn’t such a big deal to Linux users, because:
    • We had IBCS, which let us run SCO binaries (but has been deprecated since SCO is dead, lolz).
    • We also have binfmt_misc, which could allow for running FreeBSD binaries under the Linux kernel, but…
    • It’s not really needed because just about everything that runs under FreeBSD already has a Linux port (and not vice versa). So eat that, BSD.
• Snowden talks about the importance of F/OSS
  • But he suggests Tor (which is broken hard, so don’t rely on it) and TAILS (which its primary selling point is… Tor. So again, don’t even bother).
• Tor users can possibly be tracked based on mouse movements
  • But Tor is already broken and has multiple vectors, some of which we’ve tweeted about and mentioned on the show before.
• The “father” of China’s Golden Shield (“the Great Firewall of China”) managed to lock himself out of its backdoor path.
• WhatsApp’s messages are now end-to-end encrypted.
  • But just use Signal and Redphone from Open Whisper Systems instead.

Notes

Starts at 9m05s.

I was drinking Different Drum Rum from La Colombe Distillery again, Paden was drinking his Buckeye vodka again, and Jthan was drinking Balefire Irish Red by Echo Brewing Company.

• Jthan doesn’t know how to appropriately ask for help.
• FreeBSD has a great article on ‘netiquette’.
  • Make sure you do a good and thorough search before even asking.
  • Obligatory.
  • ALWAYS reply to your requests with the found solution for posterity’s sake.
  • Make sure to ask good, proper, and ‘answerable’ questions. Avoid phrases like “it’s broken”- say WHY/HOW it’s broken- what you expect to work, what doesn’t, etc.
    • I met ESR once. It went horribly.
  • Top-posting is evil. Don’t do it.
    • And when replying, remember to “crop” the original message to only the relevant parts.
  • Wikipedia has an interesting article on this.

• This reads like a Tales from the Crypt for IT. (33m55s)
  • Hospital infosec just terrible. It needs to get better.
  • I mention how far-reaching the CFAA is. This is a good example of that. I also mention Kevin Mitnick and Aaron Swartz.

• Jthan talks about CentOS 7 installation (1h11m50s)
  • We explain the intro tagline at 1h18m50s

Sysbadministration Award

We introduce a new segment! We refer to it in the show as Sysmisadministration but that doesn’t flow off the tongue well. In this segment, we’ll highlight system administration mistakes. Think of them as the IT equivalent of the Darwin Awards. (1h21m06s)

This episode’s winner was Marco Marsala, who wiped out his entire company with Ansible.

He claims it was a hoax (which is why the ServerFault now redirects to this. Users may be quick to notice that it isn’t “/*” or that --no-preserve-root isn’t specified. Note that there are some instances in which this actually is plausible despite that. First off, the Ansible command module (and shell module, if I recall) uses /bin/sh. In Ubuntu, this is symlinked to the dash shell, NOT bash. If his shebang starts is #!/bin/sh, dash would be used. He specifies the variables were {foo}/{bar} – normally these would be printed (in bash, at least) as literals- ‘{foo}/{bar}’. It’s likely the script actually had ${foo}/${bar} and they just weren’t defined (this is why set -e is a good thing).

Further “things that make you go hmm” is his original profile at the time of asking contains his name and a photo, whereas now it has been anonymized. This further suggests an attempt to “save face”.

Errata

• The “breakfast” reference is because I kept saying “breakfast” when I meant to say “breakage”
• We did it after recording, but Google has a podcast aggregation feature now and we’re on it!
  • Which I totally called, by the way.
• Flappy Bird was published by .GEARS Studios. No idea where Paden got a word starting with “v” from.
• We meant to mention Badlock, which (predictably) was overhyped anyways.
• Jthan never gave me the link for sw-RAIDed boot.
• Re: the restrictive channel, it has a rather strict CoC
  • And this is what he ended up sending by accident:

18:08 < jthan> Do you fuckers need time to sound test?
18:08 < jthan> Do you fuckers need time to sound test?
18:08 < jthan> Do you fuckers need time to sound test?
18:08 < jthan> Do you fuckers need time to sound test?

That’s not a typo. He sent it four times in a row.

Music

Author r00t^2
Categories Season One