audy / tbl2asn-forever

Use tbl2asn forever by pretending that it's still 2019

tbl2asn-forever

Proof of concept for tricking the infamous tbl2asn into thinking that it's less than a year old:

Replace /usr/bin/tbl2asn with a shell script that temporarily modifies the system time using libefaketime while running the real tbl2asn

Building this Dockerfile demonstrates that you can run a tbl2asn binary that is more than a year old without an error message.

docker build --tag tbl2asn . will run tbl2asn with and without faking the time. You should only see an error message printed to /dev/stderr on the first invokation.

The magic happens here:

LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/faketime/libfaketime.so.1 \
  FAKETIME="2019-01-01 00:00:01" \
  /usr/bin/real-tbl2asn $*

Currently, the Docker image will be built with tbl2asn version 25.6-3

Credit

Thanks to @milot-mirdita for showing me how to time travel with libfaketime.