Comments

Subscribe to the comments RSS feed.

Comment #1 posted on 2020-07-22 23:55:30 by an anonymous listener

security is hard

I think you overstated the security aspect of read-only filesystems. Even if you set it to read-only at the block device level, it won't stop a rootkit or kernel exploit from writing to the drive. Some USB drives, SD cards, and occasionally hard drives, claim to support device level read-only mode, but even then, they almost all have writable firmware that could be maliciously modified by software on the host (see BadUSB). The only consumer hardware I know of that supports anything close to physical write protection is the CD-ROM, and even most CD-ROM drives keep their firmware on a writable flash chip.

Most of these are advanced attacks that average person will ever have to worry about, but worth keeping in mind. Read-only root filesystems are mainly meant for resilience against power failures and simple unprivileged malware, but it's not meant to provide any true security against sophisticated attacks. That's why we have UEFI SecureBoot.

Comment #2 posted on 2020-07-29 12:54:32 by Gumnos

OpenBSD on a Mini10

I've got OpenBSD on a Mini10 as well (love it) but the graphics are slow on the GMA500 chip (no Polsulbo driver so it falls back to using VESA). Does yours have the same chipset and did you find accelerated drivers for it? Or do you just use it at the console (where it's pretty snappy).

I've upgraded mine to the maximum 2GB of RAM. put a newer SSD in it, and replaced the BCM wireless card (which never worked reliably) with an Atheros. But it's a wonderful little unit.

Thanks for the episode!

Comment #3 posted on 2020-08-13 05:50:54 by Zen_Floater2

reply back to Gumnos

I have a stock, from the factor Dell Mini 10. Never opened it up.
1 GB of memory Intel Atom N450 cpu and 250 GB Hard Drive. The Hard drive is so old, it shows up as wd0!!! But, when I run Fuguita 386 on it, it shows up as sd0, go figure. OpenBSD supports AMD64 variants of their OS will all the Intel DRM. I'm running the 386 version of OpenBSD and I"m afraid I really don't know if this notebooks FredFlintstoneLake Intel Graphics is actually supported on the 386 version. Things are slow but not horrible on this laptop. I still have the original WIFI chip in this notebook and mine is Atheros. Dell has been known to switch out hardware on production lines -mid-stream- for all their computers so it doesn't surprise me one bit you had a different WIFI from mine. I've still got the Original factory battery also. The Dell Mini 10 is fanless and quiet. OpenBSD doesn't PUSH the hardware into overheating. I need to look into expanding my memory, if that's even possible on this model as it was the very first of the Dell Mini 10 series, the first year they offered the Mini 10 Inspiron. I've always been told the ram is soldered in on this model and that I was screwed but, I need to open this up and look around. Maybe at least upgrade my hard drive also and put some fresh CPU paste on the heat sink. It's over 12 years old now. Still very reliable, and I use it very day. I'm using it now to type your message. Take care and bye..

Leave Comment

Note to Verbose Commenters
If you can't fit everything you want to say in the comment below then you really should record a response show instead.

Note to Spammers
All comments are moderated. All links are checked by humans. We strip out all html. Feel free to record a show about yourself, or your industry, or any other topic we may find interesting. We also check shows for spam :).