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Fairly recently I have updated my laptop to the latest Fedora Core. I also have several other Linux distributions on this laptop as well. I use the Grub installer from SuSE, since the GFX menu works across all of the menus I have. After installing Fedora I didn’t do much afterwards and I pretty much have had my laptop off for over a week. Today, I felt like finishing up and reinstalling Grub from the SuSE partition. I booted into SuSE and ran grub-install which completed successfully. I rebooted to boot into Fedora but I got a “Error 2: unknown file or directory type”. I thought maybe the partition wasn’t cleanly unmounted.

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Yesterday I finished up a project I was working on that I wrote in PHP. I created it on a Linux machine and I needed to test it on Windows. On the Windows system I tested it using the latest version of WAMP. I had it all setup ready to go when I got a nasty error message Fatal error: Call to undefined function money_format(). I thought it was rather strange but I figured that I didn’t have the correct PHP extension enabled. After looking for such a extension, I started to think about it more and realized that it wasn’t apart of an extension. I took a look at the manual for money_format and found that the function doesn’t exist on Windows.

Note: The function money_format() is only defined if the system has strfmon capabilities. For example, Windows does not, so money_format() is undefined in Windows.

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Recently there has been a serious security vulnerability with OpenSSL/SSH keys generated on Debian based systems. Since I use Ubuntu at home I wanted to check to see if any of my keys needed to be regenerated. I wasn’t sure if they update automatically regenerated them for you or just checked the keys against the blacklist. Since there are many applications that generate keys I thought it would be best to manually verify them. For more insight into the problem I’ve quoted the Metasploit article found here.

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Last week while I was programming with PHP I ran into a few bumps. I thought I understood the comparison operators in PHP and what NULL was in the language. I was sadly mistaken and it caused me a headache, which led me to write a bunch of truth tests. Yes I know…classic noob mistake. In PHP according to the manual a variable is considered to be null if, it has been assigned the constant NULL, it has not been set to any value yet, or it has been unset(). You would think that an variable with an empty string ( $var = ''; ) would be null but it is not (unless this is a bug, which I’m sure it is not). This was the cause of all the problems I was having.

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While initially setting up a kickstart installation on CentOS I needed to add additional repositories without having to worry about them overwriting base packages. Thankfully there are two options priorities and protectbase. Since I was only adding one extra repository that would conflict with anything (rpmforge) I used protectbase. It is really easy to setup all you need to do is add protect = 1 to the yum repositories that you want to protect located in /etc/yum.repos.d. Now everything works great and I don’t have to worry about a 3rd party RPMs effecting the stability of the base OS. I always assumed the process would be the same for RHEL too but this was a bad assumption.

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