Cybermato Consulting - Miscellany

I'll expand this page as I have time and come across random bits that might be of use to someone.

A potentially useful one is my hack to allow Microsoft Frontpage 2000/2002 "extensions" to run under Apache on Linux without having to be setuid root.  (I am definitely NOT comfortable with running a Microsoft binary for which I have no source as root on my server with it fielding requests from the outside world.  Microsoft's security record is a bit short of stellar, and as they're clearly not motivated to make Linux look good, I rather doubt that they've put more effort into making the Linux FP support secure than they have on things like IIS and IE.)  The short version is that I configured Apache to run CGI's as the user who owned the site that was using Frontpage, and modified the FP version of suexec to know that if it came up already being the user it needed to be, it didn't need to do anything, and voila!  My users could have all the FP security holes they wanted without endangering the whole box or the other users.  I'll post the details when I have a chance, but if you come across this in the meantime and need them get in touch with me via the contact form (see the link at the bottom of the page).

vlc 0.8.6d (and probably before) runs into trouble with some USB webcams and cameras, where vlc prints "chroma selection failed" and you get no video.  I tracked it down and wrote this linux kernel patch for usbvideo.c to unbreak vlc, and this program (source, FC6+ binary) to help you work around the problem in the meantime, since the patch won't hit major distros for a while (and I only just submitted it on 16 February 2008).   The workaround is to set the "Video input chroma format" parameter (under advanced options) to the FOURCC corresponding to the format you want to use; the program (see link earlier in this paragraph) will tell you what that is.  You can also read a relevant vlc forum post about this.

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