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UnixReview.com
May 2006
Security: More Adventures in Kernel Security
by Kristy Westphal
As promised, I took my own advice and started playing around with some of the improved kernel modules that I wrote about in a previous article. As the title of this monthęs article implies, getting to use the new kernel was an adventure in and of itself. My kernel module of choice for this exercise was grsecurity.
I wanted to use the latest kernel patch and needed a platform on which to try it. After searching around for a Linux distribution that was built on the most recent kernel, I settled on the latest Rubix distribution. Rubix is a distribution maintained by Joshua Rubin, who intended this to be a "Slackware-like, stable and supported distribution" with added security. It can be found at http://www.rubixlinux.org.
I ran into a couple of quirks with Rubix, the first one of which was that I couldnęt get the Live CD (the installation disk) to work in VMware (it would simply die). Secondly, Rubix wonęt detect which partition you've just installed it to, so you have to modify the grub menu manually. Luckily, I found a post on the Rubix forums that explained how to get around this:
ęthe install went fine until I rebooted and then it stopped after i selected the rubix off of the grub menu.
the error was 'file not found' meaning grub was trying to find vmlinuz on /dev/hda3 and I installed in /dev/hda5.
I only had to press the "c" key for the shell and then these grub commands worked for my situation:
root (hd0,4)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda5 ro quiet
bootę
You can go in and fix the grub menu once you have been able to boot up properly.
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