I was thinking these days, and I guess now it is a good time to add my blog to PlanetMandriva. I think this would be a good way to keep in touch with the community, and post some things that are too detailed (or maybe not-so-detailed) to be posted to the wiki or cooker mailing list.

And, just to start, I’ll just share what I was working on for the last days.

For msec, I added support for localization (not only to gui, but also to command line app), and plugins. This was requested often, and it seems to be a good idea. In a few days, after I finish testing it all, I’ll write a quick guide on how this plugin system will work, maybe with a small example plugin.

But right now msec looks (at least, for me) really cool. It is almost completely modular now. There is a core library, which handles files, permissions, and core functions. There are several frontends to it: msec.py, which is the command line frontend to main msec functionality, msecperms.py, which is responsible for everything permission-related, and msecgui.py, which is the graphical frontend to everything. Furthermore, it is really easy to add new frontends. If you want to write a web interface for msec, you could do that with less than 20 lines of code :) . And maybe I’ll do it at some point in the future, it may come handy to control a remote server.

Besides the frontends, all msec functionality could be extended with plugins. For example, you could add your own security check which (just an example) would verify if all users with UID > 500 belong to a specific group, or if there are any suspicious processes running, and so on. All of that could be controlled by already existent frontends. And it would require just a bit of coding too.

Besides msec, I was also struggling with mandi/ifw/drakids. More specifically, the way it handles white and blacklists, and overall dbus scheme. It took me much longer than expected to do what I wanted, but mostly because of the parts written in perl. And my opinion about perl is quite similar to Godsmack’s “I f**ing hate you” song :) . But everything worked out in the end, I am mostly finishing the details now.

Besides all of that, I also digged around initscripts, drakfirewall, AppArmor, cups, sudo and shorewall. But nothing too exciting to talk about. And, apart from development, some security updates (the MDVSA ones) were also released by me in the last few days :) .

Well.. I guess that’s it for now. The first post is already long enough to get started. I have to leave something for next ones :) .