[sf-lug] Jit.se meeting notes for today Sunday, August 2, 2020

[Michael Paoli]

> From: "Bobbie Sellers" <bliss-sf4ever at dslextreme.com>
> Subject: [sf-lug] Jit.se meeting notes for today Sunday, August 2, 2020
> Date: Mon, 3 Aug 2020 08:02:50 -0700

>     Chris Peeples, a gentleman with EB Transit apparently.

AC Transit.  "with", as in
duly publicly elected member of the Board of Directors.
http://www.actransit.org/about-us/board-of-directors/

>     The chief activity was showing up for the meeting.
>     There was some discussion of the new so-called "Boothole"
> vulnerability.  This is mainly a danger to careless users of the
> Microsoft program launcher depending on Secure-Boot to
> keep them safe.  It can affect GRUB as well and the worst
> effect so far was an abortive attempt at fixing GRUB which
> resulted in unbootable computers.

Uhm, well, more generally, EFI + secure boot can be
compromised via a GRUB2 vulnerability (but requires root
or physical access to do so).
More details on, e.g.:
http://linuxmafia.com/pipermail/conspire/2020-August/011028.html

>     Chris Peeples was attempting to create a bootable Flash
...
> Michael Paoli got him all the way to the installed Ubuntu 20.04,
> when Mr. Peeples decided he could handle the rest of the
> configuration.  This took until 3 PM.
Well, to ISO successfully written to flash, and that successfully
then booted from said flash.
One of the complications we bumped into - bad(? - or suspect)
flash.  Verification after writing the first flash failed.
Wrote it again - it failed again - at same offset/location.
Pulled that one out, put another in, wrote again ... and
on that flash it verified just fine.  After that we
were essentially off and running.