[SWLUG] Nice meeting everyone.

[Dave Cridland [Home]]

Hiya,

Just a quick note to say it was nice to meet everyone, and put names to
faces. Or faces to names. Or, indeed, both. I'm looking forward to
Swansea on the 22nd.

URLs for stuff mentioned (at least, stuff that I remember):

ZOE, the spectacularly bizarre looking email thing I've yet to try:
http://guests.evectors.it/zoe/

RFC748, "Telnet randomly-lose option",
http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc748.html (Linux appears to conform to the
default settings, but the telnetd implementation normally shipped is
unable to negotiate the option.)

Alan's mention of having different stuff mounted for different processes
is to do with the CLONE_NEWNS you can send to sys_clone (or clone()).
Which has me wondering about mounting ~/.gnome_private from an encrypted
filesystem which uses a key of the authtok used to login, from some PAM
module. In any case, documentation is apparently in the latest and
greatest man2 pages which most likely none of us have. :-) Near as I can
figure out, just pass CLONE_NEWNS into the clone(2) flags, and
mount(2)/umount(2) calls in the new process will only affect processes
(and threads) created by it.

And finally while scouring the delights of the Linux source tree to
figure out what Alan might be talking about, I found a post from Al Viro
casually mentioning that you can mount --bind regular files too, not
just directories, as I'd previously assumed. (The mount point needs to
be a regular file to begin with, otherwise mount tells you it's not a
directory... I've no idea what it does with devices.)

I'm sure there's some really interesting use for both of these, but my
head is beginning to rather hurt after finding that out.

Dave.