LABS GALLERY: Fedora 12 Beta Boasts Security, Management and Virtualization Updates
by Jason Brooks
Sandboxing Abobe Reader
I used Fedora 12’s sandbox-X feature to run Adobe’s oft-attacked Reader in an environment isolated from the rest of my system.
Sandboxing Firefox
With Firefox sandboxed, I could browse to sites of questionable virtue knowing that the contents of my system remained off limits to the application.
Testing KSM
I fired up a few VMs, including two identical Ubuntu instances, to try out Fedora 12’s KSM (kernel shared memory) feature.
KSM Engaged
Enabling the KSM service on my host machine led to an immediate drop in memory use as pages duplicated between my Ubuntu VMs merged.
Checking Process Capabilities
A tool called netcap checks the capabilities that network-facing services enjoy. Services with excessive capabilities can be targeted for hardening.
PolicyKit Rewrite
Fedora 12 includes a version of the PolicyKit user permissions management framework that’s been rewritten to facilitate integration with networked resources such as directory servers.