February 2023 - Roundtable

Uh oh, Spectre redux
by Trevor Cordes 07 Feb '23

07 Feb '23

https://gruss.cc/files/prefetch.pdf CVE-2023-0597 The CVE's are empty (reserved) until people install the fixes. Fedora already has a fix, as I'm sure many other distros do. This looks like a bad one. Spectre-like in its scope. Another fundamental flaw in the design of modern CPUs in terms of side-channel attacks. But this one is on address-space knowledge, allowing the defeat of ASLR/SMAP. So in that sense it is not a direct attack vector, but one that could be leveraged by other attacks that can benefit from address space knowledge. (I think? Thoughts?) Yet another fix that is going to slow down our systems. The authors claim "only" up to 5% slowdown. All of these 5% slowdowns from the last 3 years are starting to add up... It's like the atomic bomb: at times one might wish no one had discovered it... :-/

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libvirt, vmware, and Windows 2000
by Scott Toderash 05 Feb '23

05 Feb '23

If the subject line doesn't scare you then maybe you can help me out with this one. Windows 2000 is its own punishment at this point, but it's part of the mission in this case. I have a working Windows 2000 server running on VMWare esxi. I downloaded the image as a vmdk file and attempted to import it into my Linux system as a KVM image. It mostly works. I did this successfully with 2 other machines that were Windows 2012R2 from the same source and same destination. Those work. W2k is having issues because it has C: E: and F: but only C: is recognized when I boot it up in the new environment. It shows that E: exists but it believes that it is corrupted. There are probably some parameters that I don't know about that I need to pass in order to make this work. The general process was download the vmdk image, use "qemu-img convert" to make a raw file and then try to boot that. I tried using virt-install and I tried some other manual config methods but this is as far as I have been able to get. Does anyone here have experience with this sort of scenario?

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How can one execute a script just before shutdown on Ubuntu
by vsankar＠foretell.ca 04 Feb '23

04 Feb '23

Sorry to bother you all with this question — can you please point me to a helpful document or give me some instructions on how to execute a script just before shutting down an Ubuntu system (Linux vijay-iMac 5.15.0-58-generic #64-Ubuntu SMP Thu Jan 5 11:43:13 UTC 2023 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux)? I created a simple script -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 51 Jan 30 11:46 /etc/init.d/before-shutdown Then did a link so that I had lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 25 Jan 30 11:47 K04before-shutdown -> ../init.d/before-shutdown Nothing happened!! So I wasted a lot of time reading up on systemd etc., and set up unit files to execute before shutdown.target, network.target, power off.target, as well as halt.target. Since these did not work either and life is too short, I went back to what I thought was the old way of doing things and did a lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 25 Feb 4 11:58 /etc/rc6.d/K99before-shutdown -> ../init.d/before-shutdown This was a complete fail as well. Would really appreciate any suggestions on how to make this work. Thanks very much, Vijay Vijay Sankar ForeTell Technologies Limited vsankar(a)foretell.ca

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MUUG Online Meeting, Tuesday, Feb 7, 7:30pm (Date Change) -- CheckMK
by Gilbert Detillieux 01 Feb '23

01 Feb '23

The Manitoba UNIX User Group (MUUG) will be holding its next monthly meeting online, on Tuesday, February 7th, at 7:30pm. Yes, that's a week early, i.e. the FIRST Tuesday of the month... CheckMK Alberto Abrao will present CheckMK, a great platform for monitoring various IT infrastructure components. It has powerful tools to monitor all different kinds of devices that comprises a regular Enterprise IT environment. Agents are available for Linux, *nix (AIX, Solaris), *BSD, Windows, VMware, AWS, Azure, Kubernetes, Docker, among others. These can be easily enhanced with plug-ins for custom functionality. It also allows for the monitoring of devices that support SNMP. Easy to get started with, but packed with features and infinitely customizable, CheckMK is an excellent choice for the monitoring of any IT environment. *Date Change* Please note the change in meeting date for this month, and for the rest of the current year (at least until the July/August break). We are now meeting on the first Tuesday of each month. This will once again be an online meeting. Stay tuned to our muug.ca home page for the official URL, which will be made available about a half hour before the meeting starts. (Reload the page if you don't see the link, or if there are issues with connecting.) The group now holds its meetings at 7:30pm on the *first* Tuesday of every month from September to June. (There are no meetings in July and August.) Meetings are open to the general public; you don't have to be a MUUG member to attend. For more information about MUUG, and its monthly meetings, check out their web server: https://muug.ca/ Help us promote this month's meeting, by putting this poster up on your workplace bulletin board or other suitable public message board, or linking to it on social media: https://muug.ca/meetings/MUUGmeeting.pdf -- Gilbert E. Detillieux E-mail: <gedetil(a)muug.ca> Manitoba UNIX User Group Web: http://muug.ca/

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