Category: English

GPG insecure memory

Just a quick note to record the answer to a question that’s been bugging me for quite a while:

% gpg --list-keys 64EBE220  
gpg: WARNING: using insecure memory!
gpg: please see http://www.gnupg.org/faq.html for more information
pub   1024D/64EBE220 2006-11-11 [expires: 2009-11-10]
uid                  Dag-Erling Smørgrav 
uid                  Dag-Erling Smørgrav 
uid                  [jpeg image of size 3315]

The textbook solution is to chmod u+s =gpg, but this doesn’t always work on FreeBSD (especially on amd64). The reason is that the default limit on wired pages (which includes the unified buffer cache) is too low. It is initialized at boot time to approximately one-third of system memory. Increasing it to, say, half your system memory should fix the GnuPG issue:

% sudo sysctl vm.max_wired=524288
vm.max_wired: 333091 -> 524288

Remember that vm.max_wired is in pages, not in bytes. On i386 and amd64, a page is 4096 bytes, so the above allows for up to 2 GB of wired memory.

Coherent Light

Back to Spektrum, but far better seats this time, and far better sound. We were seated about fifteen meters from the stage, close to the center, and had an unobstructed view of Jean-Michel Jarre and his band.

This was not my first Jarre concert, but it’s my first in a long while. Last time was the Oxygène 7-13 tour in 1997, which (I believe) was the first time Jarre dropped the outdoor format in favor of smaller, indoor concerts. Obviously, he focused on the newly released album, and played several of the tracks in sync with dizzying animations which played on huge screens over the stage.

This time was different. Continue reading “Coherent Light”