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Symlinking MySQL data files 2012 January 19

Due to space issues, I had to move my MySQL data files (/var/lib/mysql) on a Ubuntu box to another file system. I did that and created a symlink, but MySQL would not start. It turns out to be an easy fix. I found a post on MySQL Forums from someone who had a similar problem, and someone named Richard Guy posted my solution:

Did you fix the apparmor config file for mysqld and restart apparmor?

first you need to edit /etc/apparmor.d/usr.sbin.mysqld and add the new fully qualified (ie, no symbolic link) path(s). [you may want to leave the original /var/lib/mysql entries intact ]

then “restart” apparmor:

sudo invoke-rc.d apparmor reload

for more info, see https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AppArmor

I edited the file as appropriate, and MySQL started fine and now I don’t have to worry about my disk space filling up again.

Is that annonymous e-mail annonymous? 2012 January 17

A friend on facebook posted a link the other day to an article about University of Illinois President Michael Hogan’s chief of staff resigning after an anonymous e-mail was sent to the University Senates Conference from a Yahoo! e-mail account. I don’t know much about what is happening at the University of Illinois but I was intrigued about the attempt at anonymous e-mail.

The article stated that a computer science professor, Roy Campbell, was able to determine that the emails may have been sent by someone in the president’s office. The initial article I read didn’t say how the computer science professor figured that out so I thought he might have looked at the e-mail headers. I did some checking with e-mails sent to my personal e-mail account from people with Yahoo! addresses and found that, indeed, Yahoo! e-mail does include the senders ip address in the header (actual IP replaced by XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX):

Received: from [XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX] by web112906.mail.gq1.yahoo.com via HTTP; Fri, 13 Jan 2012 12:11:28 PST

However, I came across another article that had a little more information and while I don’t know that Dr. Campbell didn’t look at the headers (I imagine he did), he also found some clues as to where the e-mail was sent from because the person who sent them composed the e-mail using Microsoft Word and then pasted the content into the Yahoo! Mail. A Chicago Tribune article noted Dr. Campbell as saying “One should also be careful writing anonymous email using (Microsoft) Word .”

I did some testing with cut and pasting from Microsoft Word and I wasn’t able to find any personally identifying information in the mark-up that comes across when you don’t send the e-mail as plain text via Yahoo! but I am sure that depending on your configuration and version of Word it could happen.

I think the take-away from this story in regards to e-mail is that you should never assume any e-mail you send is truly anonymous. It is true that you can make it “more anonymous” and harder to figure out depending on how you sent it and what tools you used, but unless you really take great lengths and know what you are doing, given enough resources if someone wants to enough where an e-mail came from thy can probably can figure it out or come close enough. Maybe not enough for a court of law, but enough that you’ll probably wish you didn’t send it. While it was a computer science professor that first figured out the e-mail was probably not from someone on the committee, it really wouldn’t have taken a computer genius in this case to figure out where it may have come from.