blanket_cat's questions

I am (or was) running Ubuntu 14.04.05.

I've been noticing a lot of files titled simply = that appear above the . and .. when you inspect a directory with ls -al and another empty file called simply 0 in folders spread out across the file system, but primarily in my /home/user/ folder and it's subdirectories. I can remove 0 by inode with find . -inum $inode_of_equal_sign -exec rm {} \;. However I cannot delete the = file, using any technique I could find for getting rid of filenames with special characters, nor could I identify the process that keeps replacing them.

I can't stat a majority of files using lsof or stat or file or any other utilities as I keep getting an error can't stat /run/users/1000/gvfs if I unmount it, it gets remounted. It also appears to be owned by UID 999, which is the ubuntu live setup user. I looked through the devices folder, and there it seems that /dev/fuse is owned by root:pulseaudio, and refuses to stay deleted, or be unlocked.. This strikes me a somewhat suspect to understate it as dramatically as possible, as this is my development machine, and I have stripped it of all unnecessary packages and services, which includes all audio and printer packages, config files, and kernel modules. The pulseaudio group also owns a few files/folders in other parts of the system. I've traced it back to systemd which, as far as I can tell, only starts processes, which are already started by upstart. The config files in /etc/systemd are almost all symlinks back to /lib/systemd, I eliminated the systemd from upstart, restarted but it appears that systemd or whatever this actually is, is actually started by PID 2, D-Bus... Not exactly sure what to do about that, never manually configured anything in D-bus before. then noticed several .so files in /var/lib/systemd and /lib/systemd/ with names that seem like they were made with mktemp. A lot of them were binary, but the mimetype didn't match the shared object profile, a lot of them were symlinked to shared object files in the kernel library. There was also a folder /lib/xtables with a fistful of perl scripts for what I guess we can call "non-standard" network utilities, and some binaries that I didn't examine. A few of the these mystery files turned out be simple text files containing the PIDs of processes related to this ... I dunno, secret feature? Undocumented daemon? Loaded by systemd.

(I feel like it's pretty safe to say I'm not exactly the owner of this system anymore, like maybe I'm just borrowing it now) I identified that all of the suspect files were created at approximately the same time. 3:33 on April 19th. So I started digging through the files that had been created at that time. They all seemed off. Found one, I forget which one, but it had ? characters for it's inode, all of it's permission attributes, it's size, etc.. when you viewed it with ls -ial I've seen a fair amount of weird schiz in my directories, terminal going crazy from accidentally cating some binary file, graphics glitches, etc.. but that one was new one on me.

Anyways, I'm wondering if anyone has seen this before. It's a self-replenishing system of sockets, symlinks, and files that centers around locking /dev/fuse to /run/user/<Your UID>/gvfs, and appears to create a sort of mirror gvfs locked to the id of your user. It survives reinstalltion in the hard disk, and even stopped some attempts to dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sda it from a live disk on top. I also noticed the 0 files on a USB drive I was short-sighted enough to connect to try to save my work (which I did.) It assigns group ownership to files to groups that are common, (i.e. pulseaudio, alsa, but which are not necessarily in /etc/groups. Reading through the source of the live disc I installed, it seems that there are some perl scripts that set hooks for boot/installation events in place to load different efi files than the ones in the boot folder. This could be part of the secureboot thing though. I'm not sure. I'm downloading several other copies of ubuntu, and some other distros to compare against this which I have saved, but don't have a free isolated machine to use as a quarantine or a "clean room".

Just wondering if anyone else using ubuntu has seen this behavior before, and if this thing has a name already. Or.. you know.. If this is a hidden feature of the OS.. How do I disable it.

[UPDATE:] I found this: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/77453/why-cannot-find-read-run-user-1000-gvfs-even-though-it-is-running-as-root#77592 which explains not being able to stat the objects of my attention as root. However, I still can't explain the = & 0 why /dev/fuse would be locked and owned by root:pulseaudio when there is no trace of pulseaudio on the system, including a listing for it in /etc/group.

In ubuntu 14.04 NetworkManager stores the passwords for networks in the file /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections/<ESSID_of_AP> in plaintext.

I'm not sure if it relies on wpa_supplicant for making the handshake, which I've used to make wireless connections from the command line, and I know for a fact, allows you to store the WPA-PSK in cipher-text. I'm still doing the research now, (It's part of a larger effort) but was wondering if there was a known option, a boolean switch somewhere in the config that I could change to force it to negotiate the handshake with the encrypted value.

I'm looking to strip my system down to the bare essentials it needs to be a ".. well rather pretty.." place to get some dev work done. I'm digging through the ~# dpkg --list and am noticing a fistful of oddly named printer drivers for printers I will never use. Then there's the drivers for protocols for systems that as my research yields, were strictly in use in academia, and enterprise like, the late 80's... Basically there are a lot of packages, that I'm confident I'm not going to use cups and samba at the top of my list.

Is there a tried and true method, more sophisticated than removing the Meta-Packages, purging a package, and dropping to one of the ctrl+alt+f# terminals to reinstall it if I break something?

I've had incredible boot and shutdown time decreases, disabling unnecessary services daemon from auto starting, (ModemManager - good-bye), hoping I can get a boost in general file system performance from limiting the number of packages, and files that need to be indexed. I'm running an old system.

Any solid methodology that beats my go to, trial and error approach to gutting the bloatware, would be much appreciated.

I'm trying to do something relatively simple that most of us have wanted to do at one time or another: Save my gnome-teminal settings.

I'm running 14.04 (desktop obviously). I've realized from my research that dconf, gconf, and gsettings have over the course of the last couple version bumps, been designated to store the settings for different aspects of Gnome/Unity.

If I ask all of the questions I have about these tools. It would spiral out of control, and I don't want to learn the internals of 3 tools (8 if you count gconftool, gconftool-2, gconfd-2, dconf-service, dconf-ibus, and the dconf database as individual tools)

My new goal is consolidate all of the settings into gsettings, as it contains the most existing settings.

Has this been done?

I've determined that I can unregister gconf schemas.

I've determined that gsettings operates on the dconf database with a much friendlier interface (i.e. the finest tab completion anyone could ask for in a command-line tool.)

Would there be any major caveats, aside from the time investment, to moving config from gconf to dconf, and just creating gsettings schemas for those settings... So that I can easily save my gnome-terminal settings, and any other UI preferences I wish to adjust that come up?

[Edit:]

Thanks to the comment by @Rinzwind below, I have decided to ignore gconf and found the settings for gnome-terminal. However it consists of only 2 keys, exec-arg, and exec.

Where can I find a list of all the keys I can add?

I just noticed that in /usr/share/help I have the ubuntu help files in 70 different languages. I only speak 2, and I only really compute in one. I also noticed that it is full of broken symbolic links to /usr/share/help-langpack.

I want just want to get rid of all the languages I don't need. How can I do this without getting all rm -r happy? I'm preferably looking for a way to do this without installing any new packages, as my main goal is to get rid of excess stuff on my machine. I'd like to find a way to do this preferably with dpkg, or apt.

I enabled MTP on the Nexus 7 and Nautilus registers it and lets me browse the files, but ls /media/usbdrive/ shows me nothing. How do I mount it in such a way that I can explore the device's internal storage from the command line?

I took a practice test for a cert and one of the questions was "Limit root to no more 2 simultaneous logins, make this configuration persistent between restarts". I didn't even really know this was possible. Is this just for ssh or could you do this for all terminal access on the machine? If so, how?

In 14.04, I want to make a copy of my system settings (specifically my display), so that I can copy it into a virtual machine and have everything be the same every time I break and reinstall my sandbox system. All I really want to know is where are these config files located by default?

Tried to install a package after deleting some servers I no longer needed, and removing the deleted software package's users and groups. Went to fetch and install a new package, and got the following error.

user@localhost~$ sudo apt-get install any-package

... package installation output omitted for brevity ...

dpkg: unrecoverable fatal error, aborting:
syntax error: unknown user 'puppet' in statoverride file
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (2)

So /usr/bin/dpkg-statoverride has an option to remove a path, but the binary throws the same error when I try to run it out side of the whole apt-get install context.

So then I just added the user puppet, and i can download packages again, but I'm trying to remove any extraneous elements from my dev system, so as far as I'm concerned, this isn't a solution just because it works.

As far as I can tell, the statoverride tells the package manager to install certain stuff to a certain path, and messes with the setuid flag, so potentially, it could be opening up a bunch of security holes by installing programs co-owned by an unused user and group. Is there a reason dpkg-statoverride isn't updated with the rest of the system when a user is removed? And is there a way to circumvent this so that I don't have to :adduser -> install -> deluser: everytime I want to install a package?

My understanding is that the pr value is the nice +20. So how can a process have a pr value less than 0?

PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S  %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
619 root     -51   0     0    0    0 S   3.6  0.0   5:37.44 [irq/46-iwlwifi]