Blinkenshell Planet

Posted on October 11, 2007 by independence

Today I set up Blinkenshell Planet. It’s using a software called just Planet, what it basically does is take multiple feeds (like RSS or Atom feeds) and aggregate them in to one “big blog”. All the latest posts from the different blogs will be displayed on the planet index page.

Right now, I’m the only one on this planet, but the idea is that more people can join in and have their blogs aggregated in to this one. Your blog doesn’t have to be about Blinkenshell or shell services, just blogs about anything from Blinkenshell members wolud be interresting in my opinion. If you want to have your blog included please contact me. If you don’t already have a blog, you can set one up on Blinkenshell! 🙂

I’m also starting up my own blog at the same time. My blog is mostly about Blinkenshell, a way for me to tell about new features or changes that I’m making to the system or decicions that I make regarding to the service. The wiki is not really suited for posting news etc, so I’m going to write about stuff like this on here instead.

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Allshells

Posted on October 11, 2007 by independence

The IRC network Blinkenshell is using has finally got it’s own name: Allshells!

Since Systemshells disappeared half a year or so ago, we haven’t really had a name, only the address: irc.overloadx.net Yesterday overload bought the name allshells.net, and the name has now been changed. Yay! 🙂

Also, Bushblow’s server is now linked, it’s available at irc.allshells.org (there might be some configuring stuff left to do here so you should probably stick to irc.allshells.net for the time beeing)

I’ve updated the website and the web clients to use the new names, if you find any references to the old name please report or update them yourself.

Happy IRC-ing! 🙂

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Snoopy, system reboot

Posted on October 10, 2007 by independence

Today I was trying to update a program called snoopy logger, which is a program to log all executed commands on a system. It does this by wrapping the function execve(), and it get’s called every time a program is started because it’s listed in the ld.so.preload file.

This update was however very unfortunate, I was trying to fix a bug and when I had compiled the new version without any compiler errors I replaced the old snoopy.so with the new one. Then, when I tried executing a command it just froze. This is where the panic starts 🙂

I realized that the new snoopy file must be the culprit, but what should I do about it? I can’t execute a single command. No ls, no mv or cp. Tough one. I had really fucked up the system, no one could start any new processes and if they tried the process would consume 100% CPU and make the system painfully slow.

I logged in to the vserver host and managed to get in that way, I guess it ignored the preload file or something since it’s not a regular login, and changed back to the previous snoopy-binary. However, all programs on the system seemed to have reloaded the bad version of snoopy and wouldn’t load back the old one. Therefore I had to restart all processes on the system (ie reboot). This is what caused your screen being dead! Sorry for any inconveniance! 🙂

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