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Cake day: May 8th, 2023

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  • A1kmm@lemmy.amxl.comtoLinux@lemmy.mlopen letter to the NixOS foundation
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    1 year ago

    I wonder if this is social engineering along the same vein as the xz takeover? I see a few structural similarities:

    • A lot of pressure being put on a maintainer for reasons that are not particularly obvious what they are all about to an external observer.
    • Anonymous source other than calling themselves KA - so that it can’t be linked to them as a past contributor / it is not possible to find people who actually know the instigator. In the xz case, a whole lot of anonymous personas showed up to put the maintainer under pressure.
    • A major plank of this seems to be attacking a maintainer for “Avoiding giving away authority”. In the xz attack, the attacker sought to get more access and created astroturfed pressure to achieve that ends.
    • It is on a specially allocated domain with full WHOIS privacy, hosted on GitHub on an org with hidden project owners.

    My advice to those attacked here is to keep up the good work on Nix and NixOS, and don’t give in to what could be social engineering trying to manipulate you into acting against the community’s interests.


  • Most of mine are variations of getting confused about what system / device is which:

    • Had two magnetic HDDs connected as my root partitions in RAID-1. One of the drives started getting SATA errors (couldn’t write), so I powered down and disconnected what I thought was the bad disk. Reboot, lots of errors from fsck on boot up, including lots about inodes getting connected to /lost+found. I should have realised at that point that it was a bad idea to rebuild the other good drive from that one. Instead, I ended up restoring from my (fortunately very recent!) backup.
    • I once typed sudo pm-suspend on my laptop because I had an important presentation coming up, and wanted to keep my battery charged. I later noticed my laptop was running low on power (so rushed to find power to charge it), and also that I needed a file from home I’d forgotten to grab. Turns out I was actually in a ssh terminal connected to my home computer that I’d accidentally suspended! This sort of thing is so common that there is a package in some distros (e.g. Debian) called molly-guard specifically to prevent that - I highly recommend it and install it now.
    • I also once thought I was sending a command to a local testing VM, while wiping a database directory for re-installation. Turns out, I typed it in the wrong terminal and sent it to a dev prod environment (i.e. actively used by developers as part of their daily workflow), and we had to scramble to restore it from backup, meanwhile no one could deploy anything.

  • more is a legitimate program (it reads a file and writes it out one page at a time), if it is the real more. It is a memory hog in that (unlike the more advanced pager less) it reads the entire file into memory.

    I did an experiment to see if I could get the real more to show similar fds to you. I piped yes "" | head -n10000 >/tmp/test, then ran more < /tmp/test 2>/dev/null. Then I ran ls -l /proc/`pidof more`/fd.

    Results:

    lr-x------ 1 andrew andrew 64 Nov  5 14:56 0 -> /tmp/test
    lrwx------ 1 andrew andrew 64 Nov  5 14:56 1 -> /dev/pts/2
    l-wx------ 1 andrew andrew 64 Nov  5 14:56 2 -> /dev/null
    lrwx------ 1 andrew andrew 64 Nov  5 14:56 3 -> 'anon_inode:[signalfd]'
    

    I think this suggests your open files are probably consistent with the real more when errors are piped to /dev/null. Most likely, you were running something that called more to output something to you (or someone else logged in on a PTY) that had been written to /tmp/RG3tBlTNF8. Next time, you could find the parent of the more process, or look up what else is attached to the same PTS with the fuser command.