Archive for the ‘IT’ Category

bash file descriptors, pipes and … lockf.

Monday, June 14th, 2010

Bash and long-standing file descriptors is a pain, to put it politely. For example, I’d like to spawn a sub-process into which I can “write” stuff at arbitrary points in time by doing echo fneh >&4 … sounds simple enough right? But how to spawn that sub process?
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bash, lockf and flock

Sunday, June 13th, 2010

So after having had enough I decided it’s time to make torpage integrate better into the portage locking. The current state isn’t bad, it’s just not complete. The fact of the matter is that it is possible should torpage initiate the fetch that portage will (permitting it attempts to fetch the same file) ignore the fact that torpage is busy downloading the file and kick off a dual download. What’s happening is that torpage (currently) treats the mere existence of the file as a lock, whereas portage takes out a fcntl (lockf) based lock on the file. Using the existince/lack of existence of files as the basis for a lock is a bad idea anyway, so I decided it’s time I took what I learned in the last six years and fix it. (more…)

The Great Wall of Vodacom – FAIL

Tuesday, May 25th, 2010

Right, so Kevin (one of my staff) had the savvy to take a few tcpdump traces on both the client and the server side of a failed PPtP VPN connection over the weekend. The result? It seems the great firewall of Vodacom has yet again taken another victem. (more…)

We should be glad Darth Vader isn’t a spammer

Thursday, April 22nd, 2010

Right, so we’re busy doing some top secret email stuff in the office relating to client support and generally being more efficient when it comes to queries and stuff. And part of this testing involves the transmission of emails that needs to comply with RFC specifications, and generally having the correct headers and content in it, blah blah blah. All good fun. And then this gem landed in my inbox (tracing the Received headers reveals it was Stephen – perfectly spoofed in every other way from Darth.Vader.This.is.legit@gmail.com, quite a mean feat seeing that I haven’t yet received spam from professional fraudsters that managed this):
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