Search Results: "ed"

17 March 2013

Andrew Cater: Kali Linux - Debian derivative for penetration testing/security

New Debian-based security distribution. The company behind BackTrack (Offensive Security) have just launched Kali Linux which will be tightly coupled to Debian and use Debian security updates, for example.

See also: http://www.kali.org/ and Raphael Hertzog's more informative post on Planet Debian.

Soeren Sonnenburg: Shogun Toolbox Version 2.1.0 Released!

We have just released shogun 2.1.0. This release contains over 800 commits since 2.0.0 with a load of bugfixes, new features and improvements (see the changelog for details) that make Shogun more efficient, robust and versatile. In particular, Christian Montanari developed a first alpha version of a perl modular interface, Heiko Strathmann did add Linear Time MMD on Streaming Data, Viktor Gal wrote a new structured output solver and Sergey Lisitsyn added support for tapkee - a dimension reduction framework. Read more at http://www.shogun-toolbox.org

Benjamin Mako Hill: Conversation on Freedom and Openness in Learning

On Monday, I was a visitor and guest speaker in a session on Open Learning in a class on Learning Creative Learning which aims to offer a course for designers, technologists, and educators. The class is being offered publicly by the combination surprising but very close to my heart of Peer 2 Peer University and the MIT Media Lab. The hour-long session was facilitated by Philipp Schmidt and was mostly structured around a conversation with Audrey Watters and myself. The rest of the course materials and other video lectures are on the course website. You can watch the video on YouTube or below. I thought it was a thought-provoking conversation! <iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/l9HM80cv160" width="560"></iframe> If you re interested in alternative approaches to learning and free software philosophy, I would also urge you to check out an essay I wrote in 2002: The Geek Shall Inherit the Earth: My Story of Unlearning. Keep in mind that the essay is probably the most personal thing I have ever published and I wrote it more than a decade ago it as a twenty-one year old undergraduate at Hampshire College. Although I ve grown and learned enormously in the last ten years, and although I would not write the same document today, I am still proud of it.

Petter Reinholdtsen: Skolelinux 6 got a video review from Pcwizz

Via twitter I just discovered that Pcwizz have done a video review on Youtube of Skolelinux / Debian Edu version 6. He installed the standalone profile and the video show a walk-through of of the menu content, demonstration of a few programs and his view of our distribution. There is also some really nice quotes (transcribed by me, might have heard wrong). While looking thought the Graphics menu:
"Basically everything you ever need in a school environment."
And as a general evaluation of the entire distribution:
"So, yeah, a bit bloated. It kept all the Debian stuff in there, just to keep it nice and GNU. So, I do not want to go on about it, but lets give it 7 out of 10. I am not going to use it. That is because I am not deploying a school network. There may be some mythical feature to help you deploy Skolelinux on a school network."
To bad he did not test the server profile, and discovered the PXE installation option. It make it possible to install only the main server from CD, and the rest of the machines via the net, and might be considered the mythical feature he talk about. :) While looking through the menus, there is also this funny comment about the part of the K menu generated from the Debian menu subsystem:
"[The K menu] have a special Debian section for software that no-one is going to look at, because it contain lots of junky stuff that you actually don't need in the education distribution, but have just been included because it isn't stripped out for some reason."
I guess it is yet another argument for merging the Debian menu and Gnome/KDE desktop menu entries into one consistent menu system instead of two incomplete and partly inconsistent menu systems. The entire video is available below for those accepting iframe embedding: <iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/wPzTZ61Pcuc" width="560"></iframe>

16 March 2013

Lars Wirzenius: Obnam 1.4 (backup software) release

I've just pushed out the release files for Obnam version 1.4, my backup application, and Larch, my B-tree library, which Obnam uses. They are available via my home page (http://liw.fi/). Since Debian is frozen, I am not uploading packages to Debian, but .deb files are available from my personal apt repository for intrepid explorers. (I will be uploading to Debian again after the freeze. I am afraid I'm too lazy to upload to experimental, or do backports. Help is welcome!) From the Obnam NEWS file: Bug fixes:

Lucas Nussbaum: Ideas from the -vote@ DPL election discussions

After one week of campaign on -vote@, many subjects have been mentioned already. I m trying here to list the concrete, actionable ideas I found interesting (does not necessarily mean that I agree with all of them) and that may be worth further discussion at a less busy time. There s obviously some amount of subjectivity in such a list, and I m also slightly biased ;) . Feel free to point to missing ideas or references (when an idea appeared in several emails, I ve generally tried to use the first reference). On the campaign itself, and having general discussions inside Debian: On getting new users and contributors to Debian: Infrastructure, processes, releases: Relationships with upstreams/downstreams: This list could be moved to wiki.d.o if others find sufficiently useful to help maintaining it.

Stefano Zacchiroli: bits from the DPL for February 2013 and a half

Dear project members, here's another report of DPL activities, this time for a period longer than usual (February + 1st week of March), so that the next one will be at the very end of the current DPL term. Highlights Appointments DPL helpers Two more DPL helpers IRC meetings have happened, minutes and logs of both are available. Assets Events Past At the beginning of February, I've attended FOSDEM 2013, together with many other Debian people. I didn't have any specific talk this year, but it's been a chance to talk F2F about several ongoing issues (see logs), and help mediating in some conflicts. I've also accepted the invitation to participate in the GNOME Advisory Board meeting, together with Laurent Bigonville of our GNOME team. No report of that has been prepared as of yet (sorry about that), but we have both reported "live" to the rest of the team on IRC. Future Miscellaneous A couple of months ago I've mentioned that I had filed an application, as Debian representative, to participate in a working table to define software procurement rules for the Italian public administration. Good news: my application has been accepted, together with those of other well-known FOSS communities and organizations (e.g. KDE, FSFE). I'll keep you posted of how it goes. Let's go back to elect a new DPL and release Wheezy now,
Cheers.
PS the day-to-day activity logs for February and March 2013 are available at the usual place master:/srv/leader/news/bits-from-the-DPL.txt.20130 2,3

Steve Kemp: Handling bookmarks?

I've a collection of about 500 bookmarks which I've barely touched for a few years. I started organizing them late the other night, because I'd been off work sick for two days and that was about the most I felt up for doing with a computer. The intention was to "tidy" them, and then setup some way of syncing them across browsers/computers. In the end I didn't like any of the syncing plugins I could find - xmarks, etc - so I decided to take a step backwards. I'd exported my bookmarks to HTML page, via firefox, before I started, and then later in a fit of pique I deleted the whole damn lot of them. So now a few years worth of bookmarks are stored in a single HTML file. But wait, we can use revision control can't we? We can host that file on github/similar. We can rely upon merges to deal with conflicts - simple if we just add lines to the end, or delete lines. Maybe that's the best way to store bookmarks? I updated the bookmark file to read: 
<ul>
<li tags="debian, personal"><a href="http://www.debian-administration.org/">Debian Admin</a></li>
..
</ul>
Adding "tags" to the LI-container and then some simple jQuery code gave me the ability to search/filter the bookmarks and auto-populate tags. A small example placed online here: The obvious comment is that this makes adding new bookmarks a bit harder, but we'll see.. The javascript works in the browsers I tested, and for those that have none the bookmarks will just be a simple unordered list which should be universal. I expect the javascript could be improved by a real developer.

Clint Adams: Los pollitos dicen p o-p o, eternamente

A boy died. He knew he was dying. He tried to get help. We don't know if it occurred to him to switch off the modem and make a phone call, or if he was too weak to get up and do it. We know he sent an email. He didn't type perfect English at the best of times, and as his life slipped away from him, he misspelled many things. He misspelled ambulance . He may have misspelled diabetes . That was all fine the meaning was clear enough but the bit where it gets tragic is that he misspelled .net in the To: line. So instead of arriving at its destination, the NOC of his employer, where it would have opened up a ticket and been seen by a human at some point, the email bounced. We will never know whether they could have or would have done anything in time. We will never know if, had whoever been on postmaster duty at his ISP at the time been paying attention, he could have been saved. These things were debated angrily, by people struggling to make sense of something, but it changes nothing. The email bounced, and he died.

Russ Allbery: On (not) drinking

Captain Awkward, which is still the best advice column on the Internet, just posted an entry about someone being pestered to drink after saying that they don't drink. As another one of those people who just don't drink, but not for any specific reason that people seem to accept, I felt like blathering a bit more about that. This is mostly about me rather than about the thread over there, so I figured I'd do it on my own journal. First, I completely agree with the response that it's no one else's business why you do or don't drink, and people who persist in trying to get you to drink (or do anything else, no matter how innocuous) after you have clearly told them no are being rude and have forfeited the right to further conversation. But it also really frustrates me to see that people have to cope with that situation, particularly since I suspect it's gendered. My personal experience (as a man, and one who has a fairly firm way of expressing myself naturally) is that I say I don't drink and that's the end of it. Occasionally someone will ask me why. I've never had anyone pester me beyond that. I think the age of the letter writer (22) has something to do with this, but I suspect gender sadly also has something to do with this. People seem to be much more willing to tell women what to do and not take no for an answer. It's unbelievably rude when people do that. Don't do that. If you decide you can pester someone about their personal choices because of their gender (and, for that matter, their age, or any other reason), you deserve to get your head handed to you on a plate. Second, I wonder if some of the reason why I don't run into problems with this is that I work on a college campus. The latter means that there's a lot of surrounding culture around drinking and dealing with drinking, such as the university policy that any party have EANABs (Equally Attractive Non-Alcoholic Beverages) available as well. There's a bit of a cultural understanding that pushing people into drinking isn't okay. Third, since people do occasionally ask why I don't drink, or assume that anyone who doesn't drink is doing so for religious reasons or because they're an alcoholic, or might object to them drinking, here are a few reasons why I don't drink. It may be useful information in case you run into more people in the world like me. So, that's me. It makes no difference at all to me if other people drink. Enjoy! You won't offend me, there isn't any overtone to it, I'm not being judgemental when I say I don't drink, and it's not a dangerous topic or anything. There are probably others like me. If you run into us, all you have to say after "no thanks, I don't drink" is "oh, okay."

Russ Allbery: rra-c-util 4.8

This package is my collection of random utility functions, sort of like my version of Gnulib. (At some point, I do want to retire the bits that just duplicate Gnulib, which is less and less of it, and figure out how to properly use Gnulib for my packages as well.) The big changes in this package put the name somewhat to lie: I finally took the time to write some comprehensive infrastructure for integrating Perl tests. This is primarily in the form of three new modules and a bunch of tests that use them. The modules are Test::RRA, which provides some general facilities for handling maintainer-only tests and skipping tests when prerequisites are missing; Test::RRA::Config, which reads configuration from a separate file and allows me to use the same code verbatim in multiple packges; and Test::RRA::Automake, which provides a bunch of useful functions for intergrating tests written in Perl into packages that use Automake. Some of the test scripts were in the previous version, but they've now been overhauled to use the new modules, which makes them much simpler and more robust. But I also added a new perl/t directory, which holds all the test scripts that I use for Perl module testing, either standalone or embedded in a larger package. There are a variety of other changes, but they're minor or internal. It is worth noting, though, that all the code in rra-c-util now passes clang --analyze with clang 3.0. You can get the latest version from the rra-c-util distribution page.

15 March 2013

Russ Allbery: C TAP Harness 2.1

I probably should have updated more of my other packages before kicking out the 2.0 release, but I wanted to get something out last night. The change to try to find test executables without any extension as well as with the -t or .t extensions broke backward compatibility. In some of my test suites, I use a helper program with no extension that's run by the actual test program with a -t extension. If the helper program is compiled and hence in the build directory, and the actual test is a shell script and hence in the source directory, then the new runtests would find and try to run the wrong program. Fix this problem by instead searching all possible locations for the test program with a particular suffix before moving on to try the next suffix on the list. This should provide the same functionality while being backward-compatible. You can get the latest release from the C TAP Harness distribution page.

Eddy Petri&#537;or: Appdirs from pypi is retarded

The XDG standard says user-specific data files should be written [in] $XDG_DATA_HOME which defaults to $HOME/.local/share.

Appdirs explicitly breaks XDG_DATA_HOME specification and returns a path based on $XDG_CONFIG_HOME, ~/.config/<appname> instead of ~/.local/share/<appname> for user_data_dir. Although the spec is as clear as day, the authors of appdirs say this is 'subject to some interpretation'.

No, it's not, read the damn spec!

http://standards.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-spec-latest.html



The irony is that initially they got it right, but decided to break the standard some two years ago.

Thank you appdirs authors for ignoring a perfectly clear standard just because you *think* 'in practice, Linux apps tend to store their data in ~/.config/<appname>'.


Dear appdirs authors, if some people break the law it doesn't mean the law is broken. And if *you*think* some apps do not conform to a standard, it does mean *at*all* that you should not, either. More than that, if some applications decide on their own they consider some things config data and you'd classify those as 'application data', that's their business, and is not your place to decide to break the standard for everybody. Standards exist for a reason.

BTW, your software is worthless to me now and I decided NOT to use it because of this idiotic decision of yours.

Richard Hartmann: Release Critical Bug report for Week 11

Current prediction remains at six weeks. This is a tad meh. The UDD bugs interface currently knows about the following release critical bugs: How do we compare to the Squeeze release cycle?
Week Squeeze Wheezy Diff
43 284 (213+71) 468 (332+136) +184 (+119/+65)
44 261 (201+60) 408 (265+143) +147 (+64/+83)
45 261 (205+56) 425 (291+134) +164 (+86/+78)
46 271 (200+71) 401 (258+143) +130 (+58/+72)
47 283 (209+74) 366 (221+145) +83 (+12/+71)
48 256 (177+79) 378 (230+148) +122 (+53/+69)
49 256 (180+76) 360 (216+155) +104 (+36/+79)
50 204 (148+56) 339 (195+144) +135 (+47/+90)
51 178 (124+54) 323 (190+133) +145 (+66/+79)
52 115 (78+37) 289 (190+99) +174 (+112/+62)
1 93 (60+33) 287 (171+116) +194 (+111/+83)
2 82 (46+36) 271 (162+109) +189 (+116/+73)
3 25 (15+10) 249 (165+84) +224 (+150/+74)
4 14 (8+6) 244 (176+68) +230 (+168/+62)
5 2 (0+2) 224 (132+92) +222 (+132/+90)
6 release! 212 (129+83) +212 (+129/+83)
7 release+1 194 (128+66) +194 (+128/+66)
8 release+2 206 (144+62) +206 (+144/+62)
9 release+3 174 (105+69) +174 (+105/+69)
10 release+4 120 (72+48) +120 (+72/+48)
11 release+5 115 (74+41) +115 (+74/+41)
12 release+6
13 release+7
14 release+8
15 release+9
16 release+10
17 release+11
18 release+12
Graphical overview of bug stats thanks to azhag:

Hideki Yamane: pbuilder/cowbuilder and piuparts failed

Today, I've failed to create pbuilder's base.tgz and cowbuilder's base.cow, and log says as below

Get:1 http://ftp.jp.debian.org sid Release.gpg [836 B]
Hit http://ftp.jp.debian.org sid Release
Ign http://ftp.jp.debian.org sid Release
Hit http://ftp.jp.debian.org sid/main amd64 Packages/DiffIndex
Hit http://ftp.jp.debian.org sid/main Translation-en
Fetched 836 B in 0s (3011 B/s)
Reading package lists...
W: GPG error: http://ftp.jp.debian.org sid Release: The following signatures were invalid: BADSIG AED4B06F473041FA Debian Archive Automatic Signing Key (6.0/squeeze) <ftpmaster debian.org="">
I: Obtaining the cached apt archive contents</ftpmaster>
"The following signatures were invalid: BADSIG" ?

apt (0.9.7.8) unstable; urgency=criticial
 
  * SECURITY UPDATE: InRelease verification bypass
    - CVE-2013-1051
   
  [ David Kalnischk ]
  * apt-pkg/deb/debmetaindex.cc,
    test/integration/test-bug-595691-empty-and-broken-archive-files,
    test/integration/test-releasefile-verification:
    - disable InRelease downloading until the verification issue is
      fixed, thanks to Ansgar Burchardt for finding the flaw
Maybe this cause it (just wild guess).

And piuparts also failed.


8m16.5s DEBUG: Starting command: ['chroot', '/tmp/tmpivurbJ', 'eatmydata', 'umount', '/proc']
8m16.5s DUMP: 
  umount: /proc: device is busy.
          (In some cases useful info about processes that use
           the device is found by lsof(8) or fuser(1))
8m16.5s DEBUG: Command failed (status=1), but ignoring error: ['chroot', '/tmp/tmpivurbJ', 'eatmydata', 'umount', '/proc']
8m16.5s DEBUG: Starting command: ['rm', '-rf', '--one-file-system', '/tmp/tmpivurbJ']
8m16.6s DUMP: 
  rm: skipping '/tmp/tmpivurbJ/proc', since it's on a different device
8m16.6s ERROR: Command failed (status=1): ['rm', '-rf', '--one-file-system', '/tmp/tmpivurbJ']
  rm: skipping '/tmp/tmpivurbJ/proc', since it's on a different device
  
8m16.7s DEBUG: Starting command: ['chroot', '/tmp/tmpivurbJ', 'umount', '/proc']
8m16.8s DUMP: 
  chroot: failed to run command 'umount': No such file or directory


It mounts binfmt_misc mount under /proc and try to umount /proc without umount it again, again and again... then failed. What causes this annoying behavior?

Please let me know.

Lior Kaplan: Team work on RTL bugs

After returning from a vacation, I went over my RTL bugs backlog. I missed helping with checking a few patches, so I got left with verifying the fixes done by the KACST guys on master. Last week was dedicated for verifications of the bug fixes, even found a regression and reverted the commit after discussion with the author. Yesterday, I took my time with pushing these fixes also to the 4-0 branch, having them available as soon as possible instead of waiting for the 4.1 release. Total of 7 bugs got pushed, see https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/RTL_Bugs#4.0.3 for the list. I notified the developers, so they ll know their changes are available to the public sooner than expected (and let the people enjoy their work earlier). All these pushes make sure that master doesn t have any RTL support superiority over the current stable branch. In one of the cases I had to do some follow up about the commit, finding another relevant commit. This was merged with a trick Eike taught me a while ago for squashing commits with git rebase. Fridrich quickly helped with verifying that the squash stills looks good, letting me push another dependent fix on top of it.
Filed under: LibreOffice

Benjamin Mako Hill: Aaron Swartz MIT Memorial

On Tuesday, there was a memorial for Aaron Swartz held at the MIT Media Lab. Unfortunately, I am traveling this week and was unable to attend. As I wrote recently, I was close to Aaron. I am also, more obviously, close to MIT and the lab. It was important to me to participate in the memorial and I found a way to give a short talk with a video. I think the lab plans to post a recording of the whole event but I have put the video of my own remarks below (and online in WebM). If you prefer, you can also read the text of the remarks. <iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/uYGoAJdE8jg" width="420"></iframe>

Jon Dowland: list filtering

The classic procmail recipe for (reasonably) safe automatic mailing list filtering is 
:0
* ^List-Id:[^<]+<\/[a-z0-9-.]+
$MAILDIR/MATCH/
This relies on mailing lists being configured such that the first part of the ID, up to the first dot, is a good identifier for the list. this is not always the case (*.lists.fedoraproject.org, I'm looking at you). Removing the dot from the expression above means you end up with unambiguous, albeit long, folder names (devel.lists.fedoraproject.org). If you access this mail over IMAP, you have another problem: the dots create a nested folder heirarchy that probably doesn't make any sense (devel lists fedoraproject org). It's possible to change the configuration of IMAP clients and servers to use a different delimiter, but this is not an oft travelled road, and I don't feel like finding the pot holes. Better to substitute the dot for something else. I'd recommend an ASCII character, Unicode seems to throw up a whole bunch of client problems. Here's a variation that solves the problem: 
:0
* ^List-Id:[^<]+<\/[a-z0-9-.]+
 
  :0
  subst=  echo "$MATCH"   tr . :
  :0
  $MAILDIR/$subst/
At the cost of elegance, you can add rules to give friendlier names to lists from folks who have well-defined list-ids (integration left as an exercise to the reader): 
:0
* ^List-Id:.*debian.*lists\.debian\.org
subst=  echo "$MATCH"   sed 's/\([A-Za-z0-9-]\+\)\..*/\1/'
Finally, there are some "lists" you probably don't want to file in their own individual folders. Inject these into the top-most rule: 
* ! ^List-Id.*groups\.facebook\.com
Finally thanks to Brett for showing me some exim filter snippets that would let me implement the above in a (slightly) nicer looking way. Sadly I think I'm stuck with procmail for some other features I use, but it's been a while since I looked.

Ingo Juergensmann: Friendica on Debian

I guess many of you do have an account on Facebook. Facebook, on the other hand, has many privacy issues, beside the fact that it is not a good idea to give away your own data to an maybe-evil monopolist. I'm a great fan of self-hosting. I host my own DaviCal instance for CalDAV/CardDAV to sync my mobile phone, running my own mailserver and of course my own webservers. And additionally to run my own Jabber server I now run my own Social Media service as well. It's an instance of Friendica. Unfortunately there is no Friendica package in standard Debian repositories, but when you do some web searches, you might stumble upon a package on mentors.debian.net as I did. Of course it would have been possible to run Friendica by using the git repository, but that wouldn't help the Debian package at all. Here are some caveats and issues I discovered when trying to install Friendica on a new Wheezy VM:
  • php-pear is missing as dependency
  • the directory "object" is no included/copied from source and will give you an error like this: "Failed opening required 'object/BaseObject.php'"
  • when running with a different database host than on the same machine, it's a little bit awkward to convince db-common to make use of the remote host. But that's more a db-common issue, I think.
  • symlinking to /etc/friendica/htaccess/.htaccess is wrong as the symlink in /usr/share/friendica/.htaccess points to /etc/friendica/htaccess and gives you this error: "(9)Bad file descriptor: /usr/share/friendica/.htaccess pcfg_openfile: unable to check htaccess file, ensure it is readable"
  • invocation of scriptaculous is missing. Friendica looks for it in /usr/share/friendica/library/cropper/lib/, but can't find them there, because they are located in /usr/share/javascript/scriptaculous/ directory. This will result in being unable to upload and/or change your profile picture, because you can't crop your needed frame from the uploaded picture and the result will be a black profile picture afterwards.
As I'm unsure to report bugs against an not-included package in Debian, there's no bugreport within bugs.debian.org from me. I'm just saying this because of all these "where's your bug report, dude!?"-junkies out there. I'll mail my findings directly to Tobias (#693504) and Kamath. Anyway, you can find me in Friendica at ij on nerdica.net (Web Profile) and connect to me. Have fun with your Friendica installation! :-) PS: the registration on nerdica.net is basically open, but just needs my approval to prevent spam bots. So, feel free to join! :)
Kategorie:
Debian
Tags:
Debian
SocialMedia
Internet
Software

Russ Allbery: C TAP Harness 2.0

This package is my pure C test harness that understands the TAP protocol. It's akin to prove, except written in C. It also provides a TAP library for C and shell scripts, which is useful even if you don't want to use the harness. I was going to just do a small release with no major changes, just some cleanup and merging of changes from elsewhere, but I do hate making tiny releases and I'd been meaning to get back to doing some larger development for a while. So this release has several major changes, including one backward-incompatible one. The backward-incompatible change is that, to specify a list of tests to run, one now needs to use the -l option to runtests. That's because the default interpretation of the command line is now that it is a list of tests to run and summarize. This is more consistent with other test harnesses, such as prove. Also in this release, runtests will look for the test name as given if it can't find it by appending -t or .t, which allows one to pass the actual name of the test executable on the command line (with or without the -o option). This makes command-line completion less annoying. There are a few other minor fixes to display: output is flushed after each test executable completes even if the output isn't a terminal, which produces better display when teeing to a log file, and partial status of tests that use lazy plans now show the total test count as "?" to match the behavior of prove. I also fixed a few errors when displaying a test abort to a terminal. You can get the latest version from the C TAP Harness distribution page.

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