Recent blog entries for alexm

rshd/rexecd patches

On December 2001 I reported a bug in rshd and rexecd to Red Hat. Basically, rshd and rexecd failed to change to user's home directory if it is mounted by NFS because chdir(2) syscall was performed before setuid(2) and user running rshd or rexecd (i.e. root) becomes nobody in NFS mounts (this is a common scenario). On September 2002 I reported the same bug to Inetutils, which implements a different (and probably more updated) version of rshd and rexecd.

Inetutils 1.4.2 was released on January 2003, and it included the fixes I suggested for rshd and rexecd. Since I found the new release of Inetutils last week, I downloaded the latest rsh RPM from Red Hat Linux 9 to check if it was still unpatched (my first report was on Red Hat Linux 7.0). It was, so I got back to Red Hat Bugzilla and added a comment. This time I was luckier and yesterday my patches were finally added into rsh-0.17-17, which should be publicly released soon.

FSF Europe

On May 29 I met Georg C. F. Greve (greve), Xavier Noria (fxn), Matthias Saou (Thias), Xavier Drudis and Kenneth Peiruza in Barcelona (ES). Georg was invited by the Univeristat Pompeu Fabra to discuss about Free Software with the officials of the university and he gave also a talk to explain the current issues of software patents in Europe and how the FSF Europe is working to stop them. People involved with the Free Software movement agreed with Georg that before starting a FSF Europe chapter in Spain, we should create an associate organization.

It was really easy to convince Georg to give another talk at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya on June 2. He talked about the benefits of Free Software and the drawbacks of software patents and I introduced him to some of the officials of my university, who seem very interested in promoting Free Sofware.

Brave GNU World

Published the Catalan translation of issue #50 at the same time as the English and German versions. This is the table of contents:

• LAoE
• Apvsys
• pyDDR
• Free Software Directory

Published the Catalan translation of the Brave GNU World issue #49:

• Skidbladnir
• Lush
• jMax
• Java dependencies
• pyMax

On March 5th 2003 was published issue #48 of the Brave GNU World, the first issue translated into Catalan:

• MagiConf
• Moon-Buggy
• cdcover
• GeniusTrader
• Fiduciary License Agreement (FLA)
• Free Software Laptops
• Four years Brave GNU World