Syscall auditing comes to Linux

Something that had been on my wishlist for a while is now available as part of the Linux 2.6.6 kernel release: Syscall Auditing. Syscall auditing allows for the selective logging of syscalls.

This means they you can define logging rules that let you more easily do things like track down what program is spewing crap files all over /tmp, watch suspicious users and see what files they are editing and what they are running, find out what exactly that temperamental long running processes does when it seems to die randomly at 4:32am in the morning, etc. Of course the given examples could be done with other tools but syscall auditing makes things signficantly easier.

Unfortunately the userspace tools are still rather raw and the auditing output isn’t very human friendly. I figure it is only a matter of time before more friendly parsing tools start popping up. The existing tools can be found here and the needed kernel support is already in recent Fedora 2.6.x kernel releases.

Celebration of Celts

I spent a few hours attending Celebration of Celts up in Chatham, NY. Spent the time with family and watched a few music shows and random events. It was rather small compared to your average Ren Faire but a good way to burn three or more hours on a saturday afternoon.

I picked up a Clann An Drumma CD after watching them perform at the event. Unfortunately the CD doesn’t do them justice unless you have a serious subwoofer and speaker set like they had at the show.

Fedora Project Progress

This post to the fedora-devel mailing list is an amusing summary in IRC chat form of the lack of progress in opening the Fedora Project to the general community. It was written by Konstantin Ryabitsev at Duke as part of a number of people venting at Red Hat for an apparent lack of progress. Funny stuff.

Everquest 2 Beta

Beta signups for Everquest 2 have opened. Certain individuals should sign up. You know who you are.

Automated Google News

Sometimes Google News picks a wrong picture for particular news items…

I’m bored enough to find it slightly amusing…

I’m Busy Breaking Things Again…

I’m in the middle of switching this blog from using pyblosxom to WordPress 1.2 Beta. pyblosxom works well for simply little pages but I’ve been trying to tinker around with it and some of the things I want to do would take too much effort. So I looked around again and WordPress seems to be the least obnoxious alternative.

The only major downside of the transition was the time I had to burn converting posts over and comments are going to be even more of a bitch. Dumping data stored in XML into an SQL database and not having a common unique identifier is not fun.

Update: Comments imported. One of you with a constantly changing name kept tripping up my scripts with new test cases. I hate you.

This new and improved blog brought to you by Fedora, Apache, WordPress, MySQL, bash, sed, awk, python, XML, PHP, and Firefox.

Oh My…

Normally I just laugh at PETA because their advocacy methods suck and end up causing people to tune out on their message. PETA as a whole is a worthless failure as far as an advocacy group goes.

But… They do manage to do something that is funny and entertaining every once in a while. And amazingly… This campaign is intentionally funny! Make sure to check out the video.

A Must Read…

A very long blog posting called Rhapsody in Yellow by someone who prefers to call himself “DrunkenBatman” has been making the rounds. The post is a must read for anyone remotely interested in Mac OS X‘s history and future. It also spends quite a bit of time in discussing developers and platforms and market trends. Prepare to set aside at least a good thirty minutes to an hour reading. I found it very informative and entertaining and it confirmed some of my understanding of the situation.

Also if you have not already read Andrew Grygus’s extensive 2003 and Beyond paper I would highly recommend reading it. It is already a tad dated but all the major points still seem very true.

Hmmm…

Speaking of satellite radio… An Opie & Anthony fan site has an interesting image. This photo is rather interesting in that it is apparently only a couple months old and the buzz last year was Sirius was trying to sign them.

Satellite Radio

I’ve been poking around various websites for information about Sirius Satellite Radio. I became interested after discovering they let subscribers listen to Internet stream versions for when they are at work in a dungeon and away from those pesky satellite signals.

I’m not too interested after checking out their selection which has no celtic, no new age and only one decent downtempo electronica channel. I also found this review which is quite detailed and a decent read even if you have no interest in satellite radio.