I got nothin’…

Canonical Soundtrack:

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On February 24th, we find out what comes next; despite the boost it would produce for the Olympics, I suspect it won’t be the Nekomimi era.

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NYT McCain obit all about Trump.

When you’ve hired a top model for the whole day, but run out of photo ideas, of course you put her in the pantry. Although, honestly, I see a box of Jell-O in there, so if you need inspiration…

NSFW

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When booting OpenBSD 6.3 (at least), the /etc/rc startup script reads /root/.profile. This can produce some rather entertaining boot failures, including things like syslogd timing out on startup, preventing you from getting any log data about what might be wrong…

I’m quite certain this wasn’t the case in earlier releases, but I’m not sure when it crept in.

# Simple confirmation:
echo sleep 60 >> /root/.profile
reboot
# It will take an extra ~8 minutes to boot

It looks like they try to work around this by setting HOME=/ in /etc/rc, and having a separate /.profile, but it doesn’t work; it still reads /root/.profile.

Ah, there it is! /etc/rc.d/rc.subr:

...
rc_start() {
        ${rcexec} "${daemon} ${daemon_flags}"
}

...

[ -z "${daemon_user}" ] && daemon_user=root

...

rcexec="su -l -c ${daemon_class} -s /bin/sh ${daemon_user} -c"

So, anything executed from a proper start/stop rc script gets executed in a fresh su -l session (even if it’s running as root), and that resets $HOME.

The machine I was upgrading pre-dates the rc.d scripts, so it didn’t have the problem.

When L. Peter Deutsch first added the file I/O operators to Ghostscript (1992?), I submitted a security patch to disable them by default, requiring you to use -dUNSAFE to enable them. He accepted the patch but reversed the logic, enabling them unless you provided the -dSAFER option. I no longer remember precisely how he handwaved away my concerns in his email, but it doesn’t matter.

I was right then, and I’m still right.

(At the same time, I also submitted a patch to the crude -dASCIIOUT option to make it possible to extract the text correctly and post-process it into a document that preserved formatting pretty well, but he only accepted half of it, because he was concerned that adding a Perl script to the base distribution would impair its portability…)

Chinese model/chatgirl Faye Lau (刘飞儿) is extremely cute. That is all.

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