Author: Nayar

Published on by Nayar

The 3 Arrays of Life

Everything that happen to us can be classified as follows:

  1. Favour from God
  2. Test from God
  3. Punishment (Karma)

Favours

A favour is something good that happens to us. e.g. we have food in front of us. Or we get a promotion in our job. Or we have a healthy body.

Tests

A test is something which we consider as ‘undesirable’ such as property loss, getting sick, your children dying, getting a leg crushed under a truck. Theory says God is testing your patience and loyalty.

Punishment

Punishment (Karma) is a like a test but it is for people who have done a previous bad deed. For example, if one person steals then falls sick, it will be said that because he stole, he is paying for his action.

Is life fair?

By definition,

“God is good.” (Quran, Bible, etc)

If he created Satan means he created a testing tool.

Some tests end in ugly ways. Children getting exploded in Syria, Palestine; Women getting raped; Dying in famines; People born handicapped; People being mentally retarded.

How can God be still good? Different religions try to solve ‘the equations‘ by either saying: OK, there’s paradise in which the people will finally rejoice. Others say it is because they did wrong in their previous lives that karma is punishing them. Next life would be cool.

Ending…

Planet earth, if considered alone, seems to be unfair/unjust/cruel. Based on the discussion above, we see that an external entity such Paradise or Reincarnation is needed as a parameter to solve the equation of life and to be able to yet have a good God.

And for those who think the equation hasn’t been solved, theory says:

God’s wisdom is infinite (∞).

It should be enough to overpower any finite variables such as tests and punishments. Period.

Published on by Nayar

The People who Ripped our Beaches

Note from Nayar: This is a guest post by one of my fellow mates.
————————
Following a Linux event in the north of Mauritius, a couple of friends and I went for a troll to the beach. Hungry we were, we bought some food & drinks along the way. Oh! The north is a beautiful place. With the “flamboyant” trees shining orange, we know summer is knocking at the door.

Folks told me this cozy beach place, called Coden, might be the last time I am seeing it. I was puzzled and asked why? It appears that this beach will soon to barred to public since the land (owned by the Government) is being given to some group of Hotels for “development”. By development I assume that Mauritians will no more be able to access this cozy beach.

pic-01

pic-02

A sad moment it was for I mourned the state of our country once more.

A few bunch of small-brained people who never traveled standing in a bus, who never had water problems in their taps, who never walked the super-markets comparing prices before purchasing items, who never got excited when their salary is credited, who never had to run behind the last bus leaving the station, who never stopped on the side of the road to buy a pair of dhol-puri … they just pretend to know everything that’s good or bad for the country.

My heart urged to curse these people but I stayed calm and only prayed to Lord that intelligence, humility and righteousness be bestowed upon these lost souls. Amen!

– Ish Sookun
—————–
Note from Nayar: It is a very sad situation that people have to pay to huge prices to hotels in order to have some peace. Can’t “ti-dimoune” be allowed to enjoy the beach and the sea? Why do we need to pay for peace? Why can’t we use our beaches freely in full liberty to relax and have a nice time with our friends and family? Our national anthem has the verse:

“In peace, justice and liberty
(for those who have money)”

Can’t Mauritians live in peace with tourists? Is this the independence we voted?

Published on by Nayar

Ubuntu servers SHOULD be LTS

I was young. Bleeding edge was what i wanted. Little i knew that non-LTS Ubuntu releases become obsolete after 9 months (ref).

After reading a lot about the shell-shock, I tested whether my VPS was vulnerable to it. And it was! It was an Ubuntu Server 13.10.

I thought a simple apt-get update && apt-get upgrade would fix it. But no. The repositories were obsolete. I was getting errors like these:


W: Failed to fetch http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/raring-security/restricted/binary-i386/Packages 404 Not Found [IP: 91.189.88.153 80]
W: Failed to fetch http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/raring-security/universe/binary-i386/Packages 404 Not Found [IP: 91.189.88.153 80]
...

Following this guy’s advice on Askubuntu.com was life saving.


$ sudo sed -i -e 's/archive.ubuntu.com\|security.ubuntu.com/old-releases.ubuntu.com/g' /etc/apt/sources.list
$ sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
$ sudo apt-get install update-manager-core
$ sudo do-release-upgrade

All seemed to go fine until i got an error saying:

import apt ImportError: No module named apt

More googling led me to this post on stackoverflow. I ran the following command:

$ apt-get install python-apt

do-release-upgrade was able to continue then. After pressing yes to multiple questions, few reboots, my Ubuntu server was finally on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS 😀

Published on by Nayar

The Bash Patch

Logan made a little presentation titled “Shellshock: Survival guide” at the Univeristy of Mauritius (UoM).

Logan said that he was suggesting a patch that would consist of disabling certain “features” of Bash. According to Google and other people, it would break the internet as the patch would not be backwards compatible.

Personally, I feel a perfect patch would do these following 2 things:
1. Fix the shell shock bug
2. Not break existing applications

From the presentation, it seemed to me that the shell shock problem could be fixed by just fixing the parser or maybe in the future use a drop-in replacement parser.

Logan then mentioned that the parser is linked to a network interface which complicated stuffs. He suggested that the parser should be separated from the network interface and thus breaking lots of existing applications which does not fall into the category of perfect patch.

There was not enough demos of vulnerabilities in the presentation except the shell shock test which everyone is posting on the internet

$ env x='() { :;}; echo vulnerable' bash -c 'echo hello'

Logan was suggesting to use his hardened Bash patch inside Linux containers (LXC, docker) so as you can make only your application compliant to the hardened Bash rather than making your whole operating system compliant.

Anyways, due to lack of information on the subject, I can really decide whether Bash can be ever “fixed” or not.