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Seccomp filters on the Ubuntu Phone

The officially-supported Ubuntu Phones run pretty old kernels. The Nexus 4 and BQ phones all run v3.4, and the Meizu MX4 runs v3.10. Device kernels typically lag a bit behind since so much effort goes into making them compatible with the hardware, but this posed a bit of a complication since the Click confinement model utilizes features of AppArmor v3, which isn’t even released yet. However, we like to push the envelope here at Canonical, so we backported it into our phone kernels anyway....

January 7, 2016 · 2 min · Kyle
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Snappy Scope: Progress Update

I’ve previously written about Snappy and Unity 8’s Snappy Scope, back when I was first getting started on it. Since then, both the scope and Ubuntu Core itself have come a long way, so I thought it was time for an update and a quick demo. When I was working on Snappy back when I wrote the other post I was running Ubuntu Core virtually, since I was using my embedded devices for other tasks....

August 20, 2015 · 2 min · Kyle
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Travis CI and Sauce Labs

I think we can all agree that testing one’s Rails project is a good thing. I think we can also agree that those tests should be run on a regular basis (i.e. after every change). I think it’s a logical conclusion then that having a continuous integration environment setup for one’s project would be considered ideal. This is really pretty easy for open-source projects, since a number of companies provide free support for them....

July 5, 2015 · 4 min · Kyle
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Rails: Writing Engine Tests That Depend on Main Application Models

When developing a new Ruby on Rails project, one doesn’t always start from scratch. Often one first searches for an open-source project that will at least get one part of the way there. For example, one might want to do something as simple a create a website with a blog as well as image galleries. The first step in this journey might be to find some open-source blog software for Rails, e....

June 2, 2015 · 5 min · Kyle
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VirtualBox: Internet Access With Host-Only Network

I ran into the need to access the internet from a VirtualBox VM via host-only networking. Of course, you’re saying “There’s a better way to do that!” And of course, I agree: with no other considerations, the best way to do this is to simply add another NIC to the VM configured as NAT instead of host-only. However, I’m trying to test out some new networking ideas for my OpenStack Network node, and it doesn’t have a NIC configured with NAT....

February 11, 2015 · 3 min · Kyle