September 4th, 2010 by Ewald
Just a short blog post: after merging OpenOffice.org on a Hardened Gentoo machine today, I was unable to boot OpenOffice.org Writer (or any of the other OOo programs). While the solution isn’t all that pretty, it is rather simple.
The problem has to do with OpenOffice.org throwing out the following error when trying to boot in Hardened Gentoo:
terminate called after throwing an instance of ‘std::bad_alloc’
what(): std::bad_alloc
Turns out this has to do with the way OpenOffice.org tries to work against the mprotect restrictions. You can lift those restrictions by using paxctl (emerge -av paxctl) in the following way:
# check for current PaX settings:
paxctl -v /usr/lib/openoffice/program/soffice.bin
# disable mprotect:
paxctl -m /usr/lib/openoffice/program/soffice.bin
Now OOo should finally launch. This enables you to write a polite letter to the OOo team asking them to allow us to run OOo with mprotect. 
Tags: Gentoo Linux, grsecurity, Hardened Gentoo, OpenOffice.org, PaX, paxctl
Posted in Desktop, Gentoo Linux, Security | No Comments »
June 21st, 2010 by Ewald
Lately, my Adobe Flash on Gentoo amd64 complained about being blocked by the Adobe Flash 10.0 license and since yesterday the 10.1 one. Blocked by a license? Had never seen that before…
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Tags: Adobe Flash, blocker, blocks, emerge, Gentoo Linux, license, update, upgrade
Posted in Desktop, Gentoo Linux | 3 Comments »
February 10th, 2010 by Ewald
After attending the keysigning party at FOSDEM 2010, I came home with a large list of PGP/GnuPG keys I needed to sign. At the conference, there was a brief mention of using caff to make this task easier and soon enough, the first emails sent using caff came rolling in. Problem was… I had no experience whatsoever using caff, and the documentation was rather brief. I did manage to figure it all out though.
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Tags: caff, encryption, FOSDEM, Gentoo Linux, Gmail, GnuPG, gpg, keysigning, PGP, SHA256, signing-party, sSMTP, TLS
Posted in Desktop, Gentoo Linux, Security | No Comments »
January 19th, 2010 by Ewald
As usual I had the desire to have a non-common set-up, which was presumably more secure or at the very least more fun to get working. In this case, after rebuilding my server, I wanted to recreate the sshfs setup I had going on in the past, but this time while using a separate IdentityFile, non-common portnumber and incorporated in my /etc/fstab file. Somehow I forgot how I managed to get that working in the past, so for my own sake and the sake of others seeking help with this, I wrote down the steps I took to get this working, below.
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Tags: /etc/fstab, fuse, Gentoo Linux, IdentityFile, mount, non-standard, passwordless login, port, remote filesystem mounting, ssh, sshfs, uncommon
Posted in Gentoo Linux, Security, Server | 1 Comment »
December 23rd, 2009 by Ewald
While equipping my fresh Gentoo server with NTP capabilities I was wondering why after a couple of minutes after starting ntpd, ntpq -p (or ntpq -c peers) was shouting “ntpq: read: Connection refused” at me… What is going on?
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Tags: date, Gentoo Linux, NTP, ntpd, ntpq, syslog
Posted in Desktop, Gentoo Linux, Server | No Comments »
December 11th, 2009 by Ewald
Had a rather unpleasant bug for about a week and could not figure out what the exact issue was. Problem: when booting KDE, the KSplash screen would load and when the KDE gears appeared, the whole system would lock up. As in freeze, not able to switch to different terminal, nothing.
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Tags: crash, Gentoo Linux, hardened-sources, KDE, kernel panic, KSplash, SELinux
Posted in Desktop, Gentoo Linux | No Comments »
October 12th, 2009 by Ewald
I know, I know, I’m a week late, but still: congratulations Gentoo on ten years of sweet compiling!
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Tags: anniversary, Gentoo Linux, Gentoo Ten, live DVD, Ubuntu
Posted in Gentoo Linux | No Comments »
July 27th, 2009 by Ewald
After Mozilla Firefox 3.5(.1) was finally unmasked in Portage, I upgraded from 3.0. Unfortunately, after the update, Firefox would not start anymore and when started from a terminal, it would leave me with a cryptic “Couldn’t load XPCOM.”.
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Tags: dependencies, Gentoo Linux, Mozilla Firefox, nss, revdep-rebuild, update, upgrade, XPCOM
Posted in Desktop, Gentoo Linux | 9 Comments »
June 21st, 2009 by Ewald
Less than a week after my previous post on blockers caused by poppler, perl-core/Compress-Zlib and perl-core/IO-Compress-Zlib pop up as blockers in my emerge -uDN world.
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Tags: blocks, Compress-Zlib, dependencies, emerge, Gentoo Linux, perl-core, portage, update, world
Posted in Desktop, Gentoo Linux | 3 Comments »
