npulidomateo

FAQ on the xz-utils backdoor (CVE-2024-3094)

This is a living document. Everything in this document is made in good faith of being accurate, but like I just said; we don't yet know everything about what's going on.

Update: I've disabled comments as of 2025-01-26 to avoid everyone having notifications for something a year on if someone wants to suggest a correction. Folks are free to email to suggest corrections still, of course.

Background

This is a remainder for myself because I need to run Mathematica once a year. Often the version I use is different from nixpkgs.

First you find a copy of Mathematica_12.1.0_LINUX.sh or similar and find its sha256sum. Then you go to nixpkgs and copy all Mathematica files to a local directory. You need to modify default.nix and wrap its contents into

let pkgs = import <nixpkgs> {};
in pkgs.callPackage (

VSCode Remote: Connect to WSL2 from another machine

Do you want to do remote development on your WSL2 container in Visual Studio Code? Read this.

Proxy jump method

On the host set up OpenSSH for Windows
Run wsl --update to make sure you are running the latest WSL
Open WSL and install another SSH server inside WSL with sudo apt-get install openssh-server
Now run sudo systemctl enable --now ssh to automatically start ssh when WSL starts.

AFS Kerberos at CERN from inside WSL2 (Ubuntu 20.04)

Trying to get openAFS running on WSL2 following the regular guides from OmeGak and twiki ended for me in

aklog: a pioctl failed while obtaining tokens for cell cern.ch

Code is clean if it can be understood easily – by everyone on the team. Clean code can be read and enhanced by a developer other than its original author. With understandability comes readability, changeability, extensibility and maintainability.

General rules

Follow standard conventions.
Keep it simple stupid. Simpler is always better. Reduce complexity as much as possible.
Boy scout rule. Leave the campground cleaner than you found it.
Always find root cause. Always look for the root cause of a problem.

	import os
	from multiprocessing import Pool, cpu_count

	# function you want to run in parallel:
	def myfunction(a, b):
	return a + b

	# list of tuples to serve as arguments to function:
	args = [(1, 2), (9, 11), (6, 2)]

	import imaplib2, time
	from threading import *

	# This is the threading object that does all the waiting on
	# the event
	class Idler(object):
	def __init__(self, conn):
	self.thread = Thread(target=self.idle)
	self.M = conn
	self.event = Event()

	# ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
	# tlp - Parameters for power saving
	# See full explanation: http://linrunner.de/en/tlp/docs/tlp-configuration.html

	# dir: /etc/default/tlp

	# Hint: some features are disabled by default, remove the leading # to enable
	# them.

	# Set to 0 to disable, 1 to enable TLP.

	double mapf(double val, double in_min, double in_max, double out_min, double out_max) {
	return (val - in_min) * (out_max - out_min) / (in_max - in_min) + out_min;
	}