Read-only Bind Mount

If you need to bind mount some directory in read-only mode (to securely access a backup dir, for example) it is necessary to first bind mount and then remount in read-only mode.

At least on Fedora, you can perform these two steps automatically using /etc/fstab. Just create a pair of entries like these:

/source/dir            /destination/dir    none  bind            0 0
/source/dir            /destination/dir    none  remount,bind,ro 0 0

I've tested this in a Fedora 14 box. YMMV.

Syndicated 2011-07-23 01:58:09 from Gustavo M. D. Vieira

World IPv6 Day

World IPv6 Day is upon us! Here is a very good article about preparing for it and for the unavoidable IPv6 future.

Syndicated 2011-05-31 19:42:40 from Gustavo M. D. Vieira

Complete Guide to Tap-to-Click in GNOME

Want to know everything that matters about tap-to-click and other touchpad configurations in GNOME. Look no further, go straight to the source.

Syndicated 2010-06-08 01:45:47 from Gustavo M. D. Vieira

Boot an Expert 1.1 in OpenMSX

Someone asked me recently how to run the Expert 1.1 with DDX-3.0 floppy in OpenMSX, as I described in this post.

It is very simple actually, as the configuration of a proper machine is already included in the OpenMSX distribution. If you are curious, look for these files: machines/Gradiente_Expert_1.1/hardwareconfig.xml and extensions/DDX_3.0/hardwareconfig.xml.

All that remains to do is to find the correct ROMs and use the correct command line options. Finding the ROMs is quite easy: ask Google. Put the ROMs in ~/.openMSX/share/systemroms/. The final command line should be something like:

$ openmsx -machine Gradiente_Expert_1.1 -ext DDX_3.0

Syndicated 2009-10-31 18:12:49 from Gustavo M. D. Vieira

GTalk TLS Handshake Bug

Since late February I stopped seeing my GTalk friends in my IM client. I use a personal Jabber server (jabberd2) and all its connections to the GTalk servers were being dropped. After some investigation in the web, I found that Google:

• Uses a buggy TLS implementation.
• Has activated encryption for s2s connections starting in February.

The end result was that my server could not establish an encrypted connection with GTalk servers. Here is a very informative bug report.

As GTalk connectivity is very important for any open Jabber server, many servers have published workarounds for the problem. Here is a patch for jabberd2. A new release (2.2.7.1) of jabberd2 was also made to address the issue.

I have jabberd2 2.2.4 in my server. For some reason, I could not make 2.2.7.1 work because of some problems with the Berkeley DB back end. I ended up applying this patch to 2.2.4 and it fixed the problem. I also created a bug report in the Fedora Bugzilla, so maybe a fixed package will be pushed as an update.

Syndicated 2009-03-04 13:45:51 from Gustavo M. D. Vieira