Much of the information here is out of date. Please see my new page at: http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~peterb/.
I'm a member of Unix Support, a group that provides assistance to sysadmins in the University of Cambridge.
I have a rather nice Digital Piano (a piano you play with your fingers?) which I'm learning to play. I had piano lessons when I was young but lost interest at the time. I'm roughly at grade 3 standard now. I have a BCU proficiency award for canoing (in a kayak). I've flown a K-21 glider solo at the Long Mynd. I have a driving licence and have had skid pan training at High Ercall.
From time to time I write programs in 6502 assembler, C, C++, Perl, elisp and various other languages. I know a fair bit about the Linux kernel, libc and Xlib.
As an undergraduate, I did two years of maths and one year of EIST at Downing College, Cambridge. I helped to run The Archimedeans and CUCS. I worked in the Cambridge Engineering Design Centre for a year as a Research Assistant.
xhost -host does not (and can not) reliably remove a
host from the access control list, but xhost can return a zero exit
status and no error message anyway. remove_xhosts
attempts to turn on access control and removes all hosts from the
access control list. In the event that it fails, will reliably report
an error.
xterm is setuid root to open ptys, etc. This has
opened security holes. xterm-wrapper does secure pty
allocation and calls xterm as an unpriviledged child process. The
amount of trusted code goes down dramatically.
O_CREAT and
O_EXCL. This patch for Linux 2.1 allows /tmp races to be
detected much more easily.
xdm is the graphical login program for X. This patch
will allow Linux machines to show their Load average in the Chooser
instead of "Willing to manage".
patchsun is a replacement for SUN's patchdiag program
for detecting which patches are out of date or not installed.
To use it, you need a directory containing the public recommended and
security patches.
