Search Results: "ema"

10 June 2021

Petter Reinholdtsen: Nikita version 0.6 released - free software archive API server

I am very pleased to be able to share with you the announcement of a new version of the archiving system Nikita published by its lead developer Thomas S dring:
It is with great pleasure that we can announce a new release of nikita. Version 0.6 (https://gitlab.com/OsloMet-ABI/nikita-noark5-core). This release makes new record keeping functionality available. This really is a maturity release. Both in terms of functionality but also code. Considerable effort has gone into refactoring the codebase and simplifying the code. Notable changes for this release include:
  • Significantly improved OData parsing
  • Support for business specific metadata and national identifiers
  • Continued implementation of domain model and endpoints
  • Improved testing
  • Ability to export and import from arkivstruktur.xml
We are currently in the process of reaching an agreement with an archive institution to publish their picture archive using nikita with business specific metadata and we hope that we can share this with you soon. This is an interesting project as it allows the organisation to bring an older picture archive back to life while using the original metadata values stored as business specific metadata. Combined with OData means the scope and use of the archive is significantly increased and will showcase both the flexibility and power of Noark. I really think we are approaching a version 1.0 of nikita, even though there is still a lot of work to be done. The notable work at the moment is to implement access-control and full text indexing of documents. My sincere thanks to everyone who has contributed to this release! - Thomas Release 0.6 2021-06-10 (d1ba5fc7e8bad0cfdce45ac20354b19d10ebbc7b)
  • Refactor metadata entity search
  • Remove redundant security configuration
  • Make OpenAPI documentation work
  • Change database structure / inheritance model to a more sensible approach
  • Make it possible to move entities around the fonds structure
  • Implemented a number of missing endpoints
  • Make sure yml files are in sync
  • Implemented/finalised storing and use of
    • Business Specific Metadata
    • Norwegian National Identifiers
    • Cross Reference
    • Keyword
    • StorageLocation
    • Author
    • Screening for relevant objects
    • ChangeLog
    • EventLog
  • Make generation of updated docker image part of successful CI pipeline
  • Implement pagination for all list requests
    • Refactor code to support lists
    • Refactor code for readability
    • Standardise the controller/service code
  • Finalise File->CaseFile expansion and Record->registryEntry/recordNote expansion
  • Improved Continuous Integration (CI) approach via gitlab
  • Changed conversion approach to generate tagged PDF documents
  • Updated dependencies
    • For security reasons
    • Brought codebase to spring-boot version 2.5.0
    • Remove import of necessary dependencies
    • Remove non-used metrics classes
  • Added new analysis to CI including
  • Implemented storing of Keyword
  • Implemented storing of Screening and ScreeningMetadata
  • Improved OData support
    • Better support for inheritance in queries where applicable
    • Brought in more OData tests
    • Improved OData/hibernate understanding of queries
    • Implement $count, $orderby
    • Finalise $top and $skip
    • Make sure & is used between query parameters
  • Improved Testing in codebase
    • A new approach for integration tests to make test more readable
    • Introduce tests in parallel with code development for TDD approach
    • Remove test that required particular access to storage
  • Implement case-handling process from received email to case-handler
    • Develop required GUI elements (digital postroom from email)
    • Introduced leader, quality control and postroom roles
  • Make PUT requests return 200 OK not 201 CREATED
  • Make DELETE requests return 204 NO CONTENT not 200 OK
  • Replaced 'oppdatert*' with 'endret*' everywhere to match latest spec
  • Upgrade Gitlab CI to use python > 3 for CI scripts
  • Bug fixes
    • Fix missing ALLOW
    • Fix reading of objects from jar file during start-up
    • Reduce the number of warnings in the codebase
    • Fix delete problems
    • Make better use of cascade for "leaf" objects
    • Add missing annotations where relevant
    • Remove the use of ETAG for delete
    • Fix missing/wrong/broken rels discovered by runtest
    • Drop unofficial convertFil (konverterFil) end point
    • Fix regex problem for dateTime
    • Fix multiple static analysis issues discovered by coverity
    • Fix proxy problem when looking for object class names
    • Add many missing translated Norwegian to English (internal) attribute/entity names
    • Change UUID generation approach to allow code also set a value
    • Fix problem with Part/PartParson
    • Fix problem with empty OData search results
    • Fix metadata entity domain problem
  • General Improvements
    • Makes future refactoring easier as coupling is reduced
    • Allow some constant variables to be set from property file
    • Refactor code to make reflection work better across codebase
    • Reduce the number of @Service layer classes used in @Controller classes
    • Be more consistent on naming of similar variable types
    • Start printing rels/href if they are applicable
    • Cleaner / standardised approach to deleting objects
    • Avoid concatenation when using StringBuilder
    • Consolidate code to avoid duplication
    • Tidy formatting for a more consistent reading style across similar class files
    • Make throw a log.error message not an log.info message
    • Make throw print the log value rather than printing in multiple places
    • Add some missing pronom codes
    • Fix time formatting issue in Gitlab CI
    • Remove stale / unused code
    • Use only UUID datatype rather than combination String/UUID for systemID
    • Mark variables final and @NotNull where relevant to indicate intention
  • Change Date values to DateTime to maintain compliance with Noark 5 standard
  • Domain model improvements using Hypersistence Optimizer
    • Move @Transactional from class to methods to avoid borrowing the JDBC Connection unnecessarily
    • Fix OneToOne performance issues
    • Fix ManyToMany performance issues
    • Add missing bidirectional synchronization support
    • Fix ManyToMany performance issue
  • Make List
  • and Set
  • use final-keyword to avoid potential problems during update operations
  • Changed internal URLs, replaced "hateoas-api" with "api".
  • Implemented storing of Precedence.
  • Corrected handling of screening.
  • Corrected _links collection returned for list of mixed entity types to match the specific entity.
  • Improved several internal structures.
If free and open standardized archiving API sound interesting to you, please contact us on IRC (#nikita on irc.oftc.net) or email (nikita-noark mailing list). As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address 15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.

Dirk Eddelbuettel: #33: Collaborative Editing and Execution in Shared Byoby Sessions

Welcome to the 33th post in the rigorously raconteuring R recommendations series, or R4 for short. This post is also a post in the T4 series of tips, tricks, tools, and toys as it picks up and extends earlier posts on byobu. And it fits nicely in the more recent ESS-Intro series as we show some Emacs. You can find earlier R4 posts here, and the T4 posts here; the ESS-Intro series is here. The focus of this short video (and slides) is on collaboration using files, but also entire sessions, execution and all aspects of joint exploration, development or debugging. Anything you can do in a terminal you can also do shared in a terminal. The video contains a brief lightning talk, and a shared session jointly with Grant McDermott and Vicent Arel-Bundock. My big big thanks to both of them for prodding and encouragement, as well as fearless participation in the joint section of the video:

The corresponding pdf slides are here. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

7 June 2021

Russell Coker: Dell PowerEdge T320 and Linux

I recently bought a couple of PowerEdge T320 servers, so now to learn about setting them up. They are a little newer than the R710 I recently setup (which had iDRAC version 6), they have iDRAC version 7. RAM Speed One system has a E5-2440 CPU with 2*16G DDR3 DIMMs and a Memtest86+ speed of 13,043MB/s, the other is essentially identical but with a E5-2430 CPU and 4*16G DDR3 DIMMs and a Memtest86+ speed of 8,270MB/s. I had expected that more DIMMs means better RAM performance but this isn t what happened. I firstly upgraded the BIOS, as I expected it didn t make a difference but it s a good thing to try first. On the E5-2430 I tried removing a DIMM after it was pointed out on Facebook that the CPU has 3 memory channels (here s a link to a great site with information on that CPU and many others [1]). When I did that I was prompted to disable advanced ECC (which treats pairs of DIMMs as a single unit for ECC allowing correcting more than 1 bit errors) and I had to move the 3 remaining DIMMS to different slots. That improved the performance to 13,497MB/s. I then put the spare DIMM into the E5-2440 system and the performance increased to 13,793MB/s, when I installed 4 DIMMs in the E5-2440 system the performance remained at 13,793MB/s and the E5-2430 went down to 12,643MB/s. This is a good result for me, I now have the most RAM and fastest RAM configuration in the system with the fastest CPU. I ll sell the other one to someone who doesn t need so much RAM or performance (it will be really good for a small office mail server and NAS). Firmware Update BIOS The first issue is updating the BIOS, unfortunately the first link I found to the Dell web site didn t have a link to download the Linux installer. It offered a Windows binary, an EFI program, and a DOS binary. I m not about to install Windows if there is any other option and EFI is somewhat annoying, so that leaves DOS. The first Google result for installing FreeDOS advised using unetbootin , that didn t work at all for me (created a USB image that the Dell BIOS didn t recognise as bootable) and even if it did it wouldn t have been a good solution. I went to the FreeDOS download page [2] and got the Lite USB zip file. That contained FD12LITE.img which I could just dd to a USB stick. I then used fdisk to create a second 32MB partition, used mkfs.fat to format it, and then copied the BIOS image file to it. I booted the USB stick and then ran the BIOS update program from drive D:. After the BIOS update this became the first system I ve seen get a totally green result from spectre-meltdown-checker ! I found the link to the Linux installer for the new Dell BIOS afterwards, but it was still good to play with FreeDOS. PERC Driver I probably didn t really need to update the PERC (PowerEdge Raid Controller) firmware as I m just going to run it in JBOD mode. But it was easy to do, a simple bash shell script to update it. Here are the perccli commands needed to access disks, it s all hot-plug so you can insert disks and do all this without a reboot: 
# show overview
perccli show
# show controller 0 details
perccli /c0 show all
# show controller 0 info with less detail
perccli /c0 show
# clear all "foreign" RAID members
perccli /c0 /fall delete
# add a vd (RAID) of level RAID0 (r0) with the drive 32:0 (enclosure:slot from above command)
perccli /c0 add vd r0 drives=32:0
The perccli /c0 show command gives the following summary of disk ( PD in perccli terminology) information amongst other information. The EID is the enclosure, Slt is the slot (IE the bay you plug the disk into) and the DID is the disk identifier (not sure what happens if you have multiple enclosures). The allocation of device names (sda, sdb, etc) will be in order of EID:Slt or DID at boot time, and any drives added at run time will get the next letters available. 
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
EID:Slt DID State DG       Size Intf Med SED PI SeSz Model                     Sp 
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
32:0      0 Onln   0  465.25 GB SATA SSD Y   N  512B Samsung SSD 850 EVO 500GB U  
32:1      1 Onln   1  465.25 GB SATA SSD Y   N  512B Samsung SSD 850 EVO 500GB U  
32:3      3 Onln   2   3.637 TB SATA HDD N   N  512B ST4000DM000-1F2168        U  
32:4      4 Onln   3   3.637 TB SATA HDD N   N  512B WDC WD40EURX-64WRWY0      U  
32:5      5 Onln   5 278.875 GB SAS  HDD Y   N  512B ST300MM0026               U  
32:6      6 Onln   6 558.375 GB SAS  HDD N   N  512B AL13SXL600N               U  
32:7      7 Onln   4   3.637 TB SATA HDD N   N  512B ST4000DM000-1F2168        U  
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The PERC controller is a MegaRAID with possibly some minor changes, there are reports of Linux MegaRAID management utilities working on it for similar functionality to perccli. The version of MegaRAID utilities I tried didn t work on my PERC hardware. The smartctl utility works on those disks if you tell it you have a MegaRAID controller (so obviously there s enough similarity that some MegaRAID utilities will work). Here are example smartctl commands for the first and last disks on my system. Note that the disk device node doesn t matter as all device nodes associated with the PERC/MegaRAID are equal for smartctl. 
# get model number etc on DID 0 (Samsung SSD)
smartctl -d megaraid,0 -i /dev/sda
# get all the basic information on DID 0
smartctl -d megaraid,0 -a /dev/sda
# get model number etc on DID 7 (Seagate 4TB disk)
smartctl -d megaraid,7 -i /dev/sda
# exactly the same output as the previous command
smartctl -d megaraid,7 -i /dev/sdc
I have uploaded etbemon version 1.3.5-6 to Debian which has support for monitoring smartctl status of MegaRAID devices and NVMe devices. IDRAC To update IDRAC on Linux there s a bash script with the firmware in the same file (binary stuff at the end of a shell script). To make things a little more exciting the script insists that rpm be available (running apt install rpm fixes that for a Debian system). It also creates and runs other shell scripts which start with #!/bin/sh but depend on bash syntax. So I had to make /bin/sh a symlink to /bin/bash. You know you need this if you see errors like typeset: not found and [: -eq: unexpected operator and then the system reboots. Dell people, please test your scripts on dash (the Debian /bin/sh) or just specify #!/bin/bash. If the IDRAC update works it will take about 8 minutes. Lifecycle Controller The Lifecycle Controller is apparently for installing OS and firmware updates. I use Linux tools to update Linux and I generally don t plan to update the firmware after deployment (although I could do so from Linux if needed). So it doesn t seem to offer anything useful to me. Setting Up IDRAC For extra excitement I decided to try to setup IDRAC from the Linux command-line. To install the RAC setup tool you run apt install srvadmin-idracadm7 libargtable2-0 (because srvadmin-idracadm7 doesn t have the right dependencies). 
# srvadmin-idracadm7 is missing a dependency
apt install srvadmin-idracadm7 libargtable2-0
# set the IP address, netmask, and gatewat for IDRAC
idracadm7 setniccfg -s 192.168.0.2 255.255.255.0 192.168.0.1
# put my name on the front panel LCD
idracadm7 set System.LCD.UserDefinedString "Russell Coker"
Conclusion This is a very nice deskside workstation/server. It s extremely quiet with hardly any fan noise and the case is strong enough to contain the noise of hard drives. When running with 3* 3.5 SATA disks and 2*10k 2.5 SAS disks on a wooden floor it wasn t annoyingly loud. Without the SAS disks it was as quiet as you can expect any PC to be, definitely not the volume you expect from a serious server! I bought the T320 systems loaded with SAS disks which made them quite loud, I immediately put the disks on ebay and installed SATA SSDs and hard drives which gives me more performance and more space than the SAS disks with less cost and almost no noise. 8*3.5 drive bays gives room for expansion. I currently have 2*SATA SSDs and 3*SATA disks, the SSDs are for the root filesystem (including /home) and the disks are for a separate filesystem for large files.
Related posts:
  1. More About the PowerEdge R710 I ve got the R710 (mentioned in my previous post [1])...
  2. Cheap SATA Disks in a Dell PowerEdge T410 A non-profit organisation I support has just bought a Dell...
  3. Dell PowerEdge T30 I just did a Debian install on a Dell PowerEdge...

Russ Allbery: Review: Stoneskin

Review: Stoneskin, by K.B. Spangler
Series: Deep Witches #0
Publisher: A Girl and Her Fed Books
Copyright: September 2017
ASIN: B075PHK498
Format: Kindle
Pages: 226
Stoneskin is a prequel to the Deep Witches Trilogy, which is why I have it marked as book 0 of the series. Unlike most prequels, it was written and published before the series and there doesn't seem to be any reason not to read it first. Tembi Moon is an eight-year-old girl from the poor Marumaru area on the planet of Adhama. Humanity has spread to the stars and first terraformed the worlds and then bioformed themselves to live there. The differences are subtle, but Tembi's skin becomes thicker and less sensitive when damaged (either physically or emotionally) and she can close her ears against dust storms. One day, she wakes up in an unknown alley and finds herself on the world of Miha'ana, sixteen thousand light-years away, where she is rescued and brought home by a Witch named Matindi. In this science fiction future, nearly all interstellar travel is done through the Deep. The Deep is not like the typical hand-waved science fiction subspace, most notably in that it's alive. No one is entirely sure where it came from or what sort of creature it is. It sometimes manages to communicate in words, but abstract patterns with feelings attached are more common, and it only communicates with specific people. Those people are Witches, who are chosen by the Deep via some criteria no one understands. Witches can use the Deep to move themselves or anything else around the galaxy. All interstellar logistics rely on them. The basics of Tembi's story are not that unusual; she's been chosen by the Deep to be a Witch. What is remarkable is that she's young and she's poor, completely disconnected from the power structures of the galaxy. But, once chosen, her path as far as the rest of the galaxy is concerned is fixed: she will go to Lancaster to be trained as a Witch. Matindi is able to postpone this for a time by keeping an eye on her, but not forever. I bought this book because of the idea of the Deep, and that is indeed the best part of the book. There is a lot of mystery about its exact nature, most of which is not resolved in this book, but it mostly behaves like a giant and extremely strange dog, and it's awesome. Replacing the various pseudo-scientific explanations for faster than light travel with interactions with a dream-weird giant St. Bernard with too many paws that talks in swirls of colored bubbles and is very eager to please its friends is brilliant. This book covers a lot of years of Tembi's life and is, as advertised, a prelude to a story that is not resolved here. It's a coming of age story in which she does eventually end up at Lancaster, learns and chafes at the elaborate and very conservative structures humans have put in place to try to make interactions with the Deep predictable and reliable, and eventually gets drawn into the politics of war and the question of when people have a responsibility to intervene. Tembi, and the reader, also have many opportunities to get extremely upset at how the Deep is treated and how much entitlement the Witches have about their access and control, although how the Deep feels about it is left for a future book. Not all of this story is as good as the premise. There are some standard coming of age tropes that I'm not fond of, such as Tembi's predictable temporary falling out with the Deep (although the Deep's reaction is entertaining). It's also not at all a complete story, although that's clearly signaled by the subtitle. But as an introduction to the story universe and an extended bit of scene-setting, it accomplishes what it sets out to do. It's also satisfyingly thoughtful about the moral trade-offs around stability and the value of preserving institutions. I know which side I'm on within the universe, but I appreciated how much nuance and thoughtfulness Spangler puts into the contrary opinion. I'm hooked on the universe and want to learn more about the Deep, enough so that I've already bought the first book of the main trilogy. Followed by The Blackwing War. Rating: 7 out of 10

6 June 2021

Evgeni Golov: Controlling Somfy roller shutters using an ESP32 and ESPHome

Our house has solar powered, remote controllable roller shutters on the roof windows, built by the German company named HEIM & HAUS. However, when you look closely at the remote control or the shutter motor, you'll see another brand name: SIMU. As the shutters don't have any wiring inside the house, the only way to control them is via the remote interface. So let's go on the Internet and see how one can do that, shall we? ;) First thing we learn is that SIMU remote stuff is just re-branded Somfy. Great, another name! Looking further we find that Somfy uses some obscure protocol to prevent (replay) attacks (spoiler: it doesn't!) and there are tools for RTL-SDR and Arduino available. That's perfect! Always sniff with RTL-SDR first! Given the two re-brandings in the supply chain, I wasn't 100% sure our shutters really use the same protocol. So the first "hack" was to listen and decrypt the communication using RTL-SDR: 
$ git clone https://github.com/dimhoff/radio_stuff
$ cd radio_stuff
$ make -C converters am_to_ook
$ make -C decoders decode_somfy
$ rtl_fm -M am -f 433.42M -s 270K   ./am_to_ook -d 10 -t 2000 -    ./decode_somfy
<press some buttons on the remote>
The output contains the buttons I pressed, but also the id of the remote and the command counter (which is supposed to prevent replay attacks). At this point I could just use the id and the counter to send own commands, but if I'd do that too often, the real remote would stop working, as its counter won't increase and the receiver will drop the commands when the counters differ too much. But that's good enough for now. I know I'm looking for the right protocol at the right frequency. As the end result should be an ESP32, let's move on! Acquiring the right hardware Contrary to an RTL-SDR, one usually does not have a spare ESP32 with 433MHz radio at home, so I went shopping: a NodeMCU-32S clone and a CC1101. The CC1101 is important as most 433MHz chips for Arduino/ESP only work at 433.92MHz, but Somfy uses 433.42MHz and using the wrong frequency would result in really bad reception. The CC1101 is essentially an SDR, as you can tune it to a huge spectrum of frequencies. Oh and we need some cables, a bread board, the usual stuff ;) The wiring is rather simple: ESP32 wiring for a CC1101 And the end result isn't too beautiful either, but it works: ESP32 and CC1101 in a simple case Acquiring the right software In my initial research I found an Arduino sketch and was totally prepared to port it to ESP32, but luckily somebody already did that for me! Even better, it's explicitly using the CC1101. Okay, okay, I cheated, I actually ordered the hardware after I found this port and the reference to CC1101. ;) As I am using ESPHome for my ESPs, the idea was to add a "Cover" that's controlling the shutters to it. Writing some C++, how hard can it be? Turns out, not that hard. You can see the code in my GitHub repo. It consists of two (relevant) files: somfy_cover.h and somfy.yaml. somfy_cover.h essentially wraps the communication with the Somfy_Remote_Lib library into an almost boilerplate Custom Cover for ESPHome. There is nothing too fancy in there. The only real difference to the "Custom Cover" example from the documentation is the split into SomfyESPRemote (which inherits from Component) and SomfyESPCover (which inherits from Cover) -- this is taken from the Custom Sensor documentation and allows me to define one "remote" that controls multiple "covers" using the add_cover function. The first two params of the function are the NVS name and key (think database table and row), and the third is the rolling code of the remote (stored in somfy_secrets.h, which is not in Git). In ESPHome a Cover shall define its properties as CoverTraits. Here we call set_is_assumed_state(true), as we don't know the state of the shutters - they could have been controlled using the other (real) remote - and setting this to true allows issuing open/close commands at all times. We also call set_supports_position(false) as we can't tell the shutters to move to a specific position. The one additional feature compared to a normal Cover interface is the program function, which allows to call the "program" command so that the shutters can learn a new remote. somfy.yaml is the ESPHome "configuration", which contains information about the used hardware, WiFi credentials etc. Again, mostly boilerplate. The interesting parts are the loading of the additional libraries and attaching the custom component with multiple covers and the additional PROG switches: 
esphome:
  name: somfy
  platform: ESP32
  board: nodemcu-32s
  libraries:
    - SmartRC-CC1101-Driver-Lib@2.5.6
    - Somfy_Remote_Lib@0.4.0
    - EEPROM
  includes:
    - somfy_secrets.h
    - somfy_cover.h
 
cover:
  - platform: custom
    lambda:  -
      auto somfy_remote = new SomfyESPRemote();
      somfy_remote->add_cover("somfy", "badezimmer", SOMFY_REMOTE_BADEZIMMER);
      somfy_remote->add_cover("somfy", "kinderzimmer", SOMFY_REMOTE_KINDERZIMMER);
      App.register_component(somfy_remote);
      return somfy_remote->covers;
    covers:
      - id: "somfy"
        name: "Somfy Cover"
      - id: "somfy2"
        name: "Somfy Cover2"
switch:
  - platform: template
    name: "PROG"
    turn_on_action:
      - lambda:  -
          ((SomfyESPCover*)id(somfy))->program();
  - platform: template
    name: "PROG2"
    turn_on_action:
      - lambda:  -
          ((SomfyESPCover*)id(somfy2))->program();
The switch to trigger the program mode took me a bit. As the Cover interface of ESPHome does not offer any additional functions besides movement control, I first wrote code to trigger "program" when "stop" was pressed three times in a row, but that felt really cumbersome and also had the side effect that the remote would send more than needed, sometimes confusing the shutters. I then decided to have a separate button (well, switch) for that, but the compiler yelled at me I can't call program on a Cover as it does not have such a function. Turns out, you need to explicitly cast to SomfyESPCover and then it works, even if the code becomes really readable, NOT. Oh and as the switch does not have any code to actually change/report state, it effectively acts as a button that can be pressed. At this point we can just take an existing remote, press PROG for 5 seconds, see the blinds move shortly up and down a bit and press PROG on our new ESP32 remote and the shutters will learn the new remote. And thanks to the awesome integration of ESPHome into HomeAssistant, this instantly shows up as a new controllable cover there too. Future Additional Work I started writing this post about a year ago And the initial implementation had some room for improvement More than one remote The initial code only created one remote and one cover element. Sure, we could attach that to all shutters (there are 4 of them), but we really want to be able to control them separately. Thankfully I managed to read enough ESPHome docs, and learned how to operate std::vector to make the code dynamically accept new shutters. Using ESP32's NVS The ESP32 has a non-volatile key-value storage which is much nicer than throwing bits at an emulated EEPROM. The first library I used for that explicitly used EEPROM storage and it would have required quite some hacking to make it work with NVS. Thankfully the library I am using now has a plugable storage interface, and I could just write the NVS backend myself and upstream now supports that. Yay open-source! Remaining issues Real state is unknown As noted above, the ESP does not know the real state of the shutters: a command could have been lost in transmission (the Somfy protocol is send-only, there is no feedback) or the shutters might have been controlled by another remote. At least the second part could be solved by listening all the time and trying to decode commands heard over the air, but I don't think this is worth the time -- worst that can happen is that a closed (opened) shutter receives another close (open) command and that is harmless as they have integrated endstops and know that they should not move further. Can't program new remotes with ESP only To program new remotes, one has to press the "PROG" button for 5 seconds. This was not exposed in the old library, but the new one does support "long press", I just would need to add another ugly switch to the config and I currently don't plan to do so, as I do have working remotes for the case I need to learn a new one.

5 June 2021

Utkarsh Gupta: FOSS Activites in May 2021

Here s my (twentieth) monthly update about the activities I ve done in the F/L/OSS world.

Debian
This was my 29th month of actively contributing to Debian. I became a DM in late March 2019 and a DD on Christmas 19! \o/ Interesting month, surprisingly. Lots of things happening and lots of moving parts; becoming the new normal , I believe. Anyhow, working on Ubuntu full-time has its own advantage and one of them is being able to work on Debian stuff! So whilst I couldn t upload a lot of packages because of the freeze, here s what I worked on:

Uploads and bug fixes:

Other $things:
  • Mentoring for newcomers and assisting people in BSP.
  • Moderation of -project mailing list.

Ubuntu
This was my 4th month of actively contributing to Ubuntu. Now that I ve joined Canonical to work on Ubuntu full-time, there s a bunch of things I do! \o/ This month, by all means, was dedicated mostly to PHP 8.0, transitioning from PHP 7.4 to 8.0. Naturally, it had so many moving parts and moments of utmost frustration, shared w/ Bryce. :D So even though I can t upload anything, I worked on the following stuff & asked for sponsorship.
But before, I d like to take a moment to stress how kind and awesome Gianfranco Costamagna, a.k.a. LocutusOfBorg is! He s been sponsoring a bunch of my things & helping with re-triggers, et al. Thanks a bunch, Gianfranco; beers on me whenever we meet!

Merges:

Uploads & Syncs:

MIRs:

Seed Operations:

Debian (E)LTS
Debian Long Term Support (LTS) is a project to extend the lifetime of all Debian stable releases to (at least) 5 years. Debian LTS is not handled by the Debian security team, but by a separate group of volunteers and companies interested in making it a success. And Debian Extended LTS (ELTS) is its sister project, extending support to the Jessie release (+2 years after LTS support). This was my twentieth month as a Debian LTS and eleventh month as a Debian ELTS paid contributor.
I was assigned 29.75 hours for LTS and 40.00 hours for ELTS and worked on the following things:

LTS CVE Fixes and Announcements:

ELTS CVE Fixes and Announcements:

Other (E)LTS Work:
  • Front-desk duty from 24-05 until 30-05 for both LTS and ELTS.
  • Triaged rails, libimage-exiftool-perl, hivex, graphviz, glibc, libexosip2, impacket, node-ws, thunar, libgrss, nginx, postgresql-9.6, ffmpeg, composter, and curl.
  • Mark CVE-2019-9904/graphviz as ignored for stretch and jessie.
  • Mark CVE-2021-32029/postgresql-9.6 as not-affected for stretch.
  • Mark CVE-2020-24020/ffmpeg as not-affected for stretch.
  • Mark CVE-2020-22020/ffmpeg as postponed for stretch.
  • Mark CVE-2020-22015/ffmpeg as ignored for stretch.
  • Mark CVE-2020-21041/ffmpeg as postponed for stretch.
  • Mark CVE-2021-33574/glibc as no-dsa for stretch & jessie.
  • Mark CVE-2021-31800/impacket as no-dsa for stretch.
  • Mark CVE-2021-32611/libexosip2 as no-dsa for stretch.
  • Mark CVE-2016-20011/libgrss as ignored for stretch.
  • Mark CVE-2021-32640/node-ws as no-dsa for stretch.
  • Mark CVE-2021-32563/thunar as no-dsa for stretch.
  • [LTS] Help test and review bind9 update for Emilio.
  • [LTS] Suggest and add DEP8 tests for bind9 for stretch.
  • [LTS] Sponsored upload of htmldoc to buster for Havard as a consequence of #988289.
  • [ELTS] Fix triage order for jetty and graphviz.
  • [ELTS] Raise issue upstream about cloud-init; mock tests instead.
  • [ELTS] Write to private ELTS list about triage ordering.
  • [ELTS] Review Emilio s new script and write back feedback, mentioning extra file created, et al.
  • [ELTS/LTS] Raise upgrade problems from LTS -> LTS+1 to the list. Thread here.
    • Further help review and raise problems that could occur, et al.
  • [LTS] Help explain path forward for firmware-nonfree update to Ola. Thread here.
  • [ELTS] Revert entries of TEMP-0000000-16B7E7 and TEMP-0000000-1C4729; CVEs assigned & fix ELTS tracker build.
  • Auto EOL ed linux, libgrss, node-ws, and inspircd for jessie.
  • Attended monthly Debian LTS meeting, which didn t happen, heh.
  • Answered questions (& discussions) on IRC (#debian-lts and #debian-elts).
  • General and other discussions on LTS private and public mailing list.
Until next time.
:wq for today.

4 June 2021

Junichi Uekawa: emacs tramp mode for chroot.

emacs tramp mode for chroot. I saw tramp for docker and lxc so I figured it must be possible to write a mode for chroot. I wrote one for cros_sdk and that made my life much easier. I can build and run inside chroot from emacs transparently. Seems like it should also be possible to write something for dchroot.

3 June 2021

John Goerzen: Roundup of Unique Data/Storage Hosting Options

Recently I have been taking another look at the services at rsync.net and it got me thinking: what would I do with a lot of storage? What might I want to run with it, if it were fairly cheap? Let s start taking a look at what s out there. I m going to try to focus on things that are unique for some reason: pricing, features, etc. Incidentally, good reviews are hard to find due to the proliferation of affiliate links. I have no affiliate relationships with anyone mentioned here and there are no affiliate links in this post. I ll start with the highest-end community and commercial options (though both are quite competitive on price for what they are), and then move on to the cheaper options. Community option: SDF SDF is somewhat hard to define. What is SDF? could prompt answers like: There s a lot there. SDF lets you use things for yourself, of course, but you can also join a community. It s not a commercial service backed by SLAs it s best-effort but it s been around more than 30 years and has a great track record. Top commercial option for backup storage: rsync.net rsync.net offers storage broadly over SSH: sftp, rsync, scp, borg, rclone, restic, git-annex, git, and such. You do not get a shell, but you do get to run a few noninteractive commands via ssh. You can, for instance, run git clone on the rsync server. The rsync special sauce is in ZFS. They run raidz3 on their arrays (and also offer dual location setups for an additional fee), offer both free and paid ZFS snapshots, etc. The service is designed to be extremely reliable, particularly for backups, and it seems to me to meet those goals. Basic storage is $0.025 per GB/mo, but with certain account types such as borg, can be had for $0.015 per GB/mo. The minimum size is 400GB or $10/mo. There are no bandwidth charges. This makes it quite economical even compared to, say, S3. Additional discounts start at 10TB, so 10TB with rsync.net would cost $204.80/mo or $81.92 on the borg plan. You won t run Nextcloud on this thing, but for backups that must be reliable, or even a photo collection or something, it makes perfect sense. When you look into other options, you ll find that other providers are a lot more vague about their storage setup than rsync.net. Various offerings from Hetzner Hetzner is one of Europe s large hosting companies, and they have several options of interest. Their Storage Box competes directly with the rsync.net service. Their per-GB storage cost is lower than rsync.net, and although they do include a certain amount of free bandwidth with each account, bandwidth is not unlimited and could result in charges. Still, if you don t drive 2x or more your storage usage in bandwidth each month, it would be cheaper than rsync. The Storage Box also uses ZFS with some kind of redundancy, though they don t specifcy details. What differentiates them from rsync.net is the protocol support. They support sftp, scp, Borg, ssh, rsync, etc. just as rsync.net does. But then they also throw in Samba/CIFS, FTPS, HTTPS, and WebDAV all optionally enabled or disabled by you. Although things like sshfs exist, they aren t particularly optimal for some use cases, and CIFS support may just be what you need in some situations. 10TB with Hetzner would cost EUR 39.90/mo, or about $48.84/mo. (This figure is higher for Europeans, who also have to pay VAT.) Hetzner also offers a Storage Share, which is a private Nextcloud instance. 10TB of that is exactly the same cost as 10TB of the Storage Box. You can add your own users, groups, etc. to this as your are the Nextcloud admin of your instance. Hetzner throws in automatic updates (which is great, as updates have been a pain in my side for a long time). Nextcloud is ideal for things like photo sharing, even has email and chat built in, etc. For about the same price at 2TB of Google One, you can have 2TB of Nextcloud with all those services for yourself. Not bad. You can also mount a Nextcloud instance with WebDAV. Interestingly, Nextcloud supports external storages as backend for the data. It supports another Nextcloud instance, OpenStack or S3 object storage, and SFTP, SMB/CIFS, and WebDAV. If you re thinking you d like both SFTP and Nextcloud access to a pool of storage, I imagine you could always get a large Storage Box from Hetzner (internal transfer is free), pair it with a small Nextcloud instance, and link the two with Nextcloud external storage. Dedicated Servers If you want a more DIY approach, you can find some interesting deals on actual dedicated server hardware you get the entire machine to yourself. I ve been using OVH s SoYouStart for a number of years, with good experienaces, and they have a number of server configurations available. For instance, for $45.99, you can get a Xeon box with 4x2TB drives and 32GB RAM. With RAID5 or raidz1, that s 6TB of available space and cheaper than the 6TB from rsync.net (though less redundant) plus you get the whole box to yourself too. OVH directly has some more storage servers; for instance, you can get a box with 4x4TB + 1x500GB SSD for $86.75/mo, giving you 12TB available with RAID5/raidz1, plus a 16GB server to do what you want with. Hetzner also has some larger options available, for instance 2x4TB at EUR39 or 2x8TB at EUR54, both with 64GB of RAM. Bargain Corner Yes, you can find 10TB for $25/mo. It s hosted on ceph, by what appears to be mostly a single person (though with a lot of experience and a fair bit of transparency). You re not going to have the round-the-clock support experience as with rsync.net, nor its raidz3 level of redundancy but if you don t need that, there are quite a few options. Let s start with Lima Labs. Yes, 10TB is $25/mo, and they support sftp, rsync, borg, and even NFS mounts on storage backed by Ceph. The owner, Sam, seems to be a nice guy but the service isn t going to be on the scale of rsync.net or Hetzner. That may or may not be OK for your needs I mean, you can even get 1TB for $5/mo, so there are some fantastic deals to be had here. BorgBase does Borg hosting and borg hosting only. You can get 1TB for $6.67/mo or, for instance, 10TB for $53.46. They don t say much about their infrastructure and it s hard to get a read on the company, but for Borg backups, it could be a nice option. Bargain Corner Part 2: Seedboxes There s a market out there of companies offering BitTorrent seeding and downloading services. Typically, these services offer you Unix ssh access to a shell, give you a bunch of space on completely non-redundant drives (theory being that the data on them is transient), lots of bandwidth, for a low price. Some people use them for BitTorrent, others for media serving and such. If you are willing to take the lowest in drive redundancy, there are some deals to be had. Whatbox is a popular leader here, and has an extensive wiki with info. Or you can find some seedbox.io shared storage plans for instance, 12TB for $32.49/mo. But it s completely non-redundant drives. Seedbox has a partner company, Walker Servers, with some interesting deals; for instance, 4x8TB for EUR 52.45. Not bad for 24TB usable with RAID5 but Walker Servers is completely unknown to me and doesn t publish a phone number. So, YMMV. Conclusion I m sure I ve left out many quality options here, but hopefully this is enough to lay out a general lay of the land. Leave other suggestions in the comments.

31 May 2021

Chris Lamb: Free software activities in May 2021

Here's my monthly update covering what I have been doing in the free software world for May 2021 (previous month): Reproducible Builds The motivation behind the Reproducible Builds effort is to ensure no flaws have been introduced during this compilation process by promising identical results are always generated from a given source, thus allowing multiple third-parties to come to a consensus on whether a build was compromised. I also made the following changes to diffoscope, including preparing and uploading versions 174, 175 and 176 to Debian: Debian Finally, I also made a sponsored upload of adminer (4.7.9-2) for Alexandre Rossi. Debian LTS This month I have worked 18 hours on Debian Long Term Support (LTS) and 12 hours on its sister Extended LTS project. You can find out more about the project via the following video:

Dirk Eddelbuettel: inline 0.3.19: Another Update

A new release of the inline package got to CRAN today, following and further updating the recent update from earlier in the month. inline facilitates writing code in-line in simple string expressions or short files. The package was used quite extensively by Rcpp in the days before Rcpp Attributes arrived on the scene providing an even better alternative for its use cases. inline is still used by rstan and a number of other packages. This release builds on and extends the work of the recent 0.3.18 release and tweaks some of the test. We cannot fully test all platforms used by CRAN so some times iterations such as this one are needed. The package was uploaded a few days ago, but it sometimes takes a few days to clarify changes over email to the CRAN maintainers whose work is still greatly appreciated. The NEWS extract follows and details the changes some more.

Changes in inline version 0.3.19 (2021-05-25)
  • Documentation for moveDLL was updated and extended (Johannes in #22).
  • A few more tests were made conditional the test platform (Dirk in #24).

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is a comparison to the previous release. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

Russell Coker: Some Ideas About Storage Reliability

Hard Drive Brands When people ask for advice about what storage to use they often get answers like use brand X, it works well for me and brand Y had a heap of returns a few years ago . I m not convinced there is any difference between the small number of manufacturers that are still in business. One problem we face with reliability of computer systems is that the rate of change is significant, so every year there will be new technological developments to improve things and every company will take advantage of them. Storage devices are unique among computer parts for their requirement for long-term reliability. For most other parts in a computer system a fault that involves total failure is usually easy to fix and even a fault that causes unreliable operation usually won t spread it s damage too far before being noticed (except in corner cases like RAM corruption causing corrupted data on disk). Every year each manufacturer will bring out newer disks that are bigger, cheaper, faster, or all three. Those disks will be expected to remain in service for 3 years in most cases, and for consumer disks often 5 years or more. The manufacturers can t test the new storage technology for even 3 years before releasing it so their ability to prove the reliability is limited. Maybe you could buy some 8TB disks now that were manufactured to the same design as used 3 years ago, but if you buy 12TB consumer grade disks, the 20TB+ data center disks, or any other device that is pushing the limits of new technology then you know that the manufacturer never tested it running for as long as you plan to run it. Generally the engineering is done well and they don t have many problems in the field. Sometimes a new range of disks has a significant number of defects, but that doesn t mean the next series of disks from the same manufacturer will have problems. The issues with SSDs are similar to the issues with hard drives but a little different. I m not sure how much of the improvements in SSDs recently have been due to new technology and how much is due to new manufacturing processes. I had a bad experience with a nameless brand SSD a couple of years ago and now stick to the better known brands. So for SSDs I don t expect a great quality difference between devices that have the names of major computer companies on them, but stuff that comes from China with the name of the discount web store stamped on it is always a risk. Hard Drive vs SSD A few years ago some people were still avoiding SSDs due to the perceived risk of new technology. The first problem with this is that hard drives have lots of new technology in them. The next issue is that hard drives often have some sort of flash storage built in, presumably a SSHD or Hybrid Drive gets all the potential failures of hard drives and SSDs. One theoretical issue with SSDs is that filesystems have been (in theory at least) designed to cope with hard drive failure modes not SSD failure modes. The problem with that theory is that most filesystems don t cope with data corruption at all. If you want to avoid losing data when a disk returns bad data and claims it to be good then you need to use ZFS, BTRFS, the NetApp WAFL filesystem, Microsoft ReFS (with the optional file data checksum feature enabled), or Hammer2 (which wasn t production ready last time I tested it). Some people are concerned that their filesystem won t support wear levelling for SSD use. When a flash storage device is exposed to the OS via a block interface like SATA there isn t much possibility of wear levelling. If flash storage exposes that level of hardware detail to the OS then you need a filesystem like JFFS2 to use it. I believe that most SSDs have something like JFFS2 inside the firmware and use it to expose what looks like a regular block device. Another common concern about SSD is that it will wear out from too many writes. Lots of people are using SSD for the ZIL (ZFS Intent Log) on the ZFS filesystem, that means that SSD devices become the write bottleneck for the system and in some cases are run that way 24*7. If there was a problem with SSDs wearing out I expect that ZFS users would be complaining about it. Back in 2014 I wrote a blog post about whether swap would break SSD [1] (conclusion it won t). Apart from the nameless brand SSD I mentioned previously all of my SSDs in question are still in service. I have recently had a single Samsung 500G SSD give me 25 read errors (which BTRFS recovered from the other Samsung SSD in the RAID-1), I have yet to determine if this is an ongoing issue with the SSD in question or a transient thing. I also had a 256G SSD in a Hetzner DC give 23 read errors a few months after it gave a SMART alert about Wear_Leveling_Count (old age). Hard drives have moving parts and are therefore inherently more susceptible to vibration than SSDs, they are also more likely to cause vibration related problems in other disks. I will probably write a future blog post about disks that work in small arrays but not in big arrays. My personal experience is that SSDs are at least as reliable as hard drives even when run in situations where vibration and heat aren t issues. Vibration or a warm environment can cause data loss from hard drives in situations where SSDs will work reliably. NVMe I think that NVMe isn t very different from other SSDs in terms of the actual storage. But the different interface gives some interesting possibilities for data loss. OS, filesystem, and motherboard bugs are all potential causes of data loss when using a newer technology. Future Technology The latest thing for high end servers is Optane Persistent memory [2] also known as DCPMM. This is NVRAM that fits in a regular DDR4 DIMM socket that gives performance somewhere between NVMe and RAM and capacity similar to NVMe. One of the ways of using this is Memory Mode where the DCPMM is seen by the OS as RAM and the actual RAM caches the DCPMM (essentially this is swap space at the hardware level), this could make multiple terabytes of RAM not ridiculously expensive. Another way of using it is App Direct Mode where the DCPMM can either be a simulated block device for regular filesystems or a byte addressable device for application use. The final option is Mixed Memory Mode which has some DCPMM in Memory Mode and some in App Direct Mode . This has much potential for use of backups and to make things extra exciting App Direct Mode has RAID-0 but no other form of RAID. Conclusion I think that the best things to do for storage reliability are to have ECC RAM to avoid corruption before the data gets written, use reasonable quality hardware (buy stuff with a brand that someone will want to protect), and avoid new technology. New hardware and new software needed to talk to new hardware interfaces will have bugs and sometimes those bugs will lose data. Filesystems like BTRFS and ZFS are needed to cope with storage devices returning bad data and claiming it to be good, this is a very common failure mode. Backups are a good thing.
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Russ Allbery: Review: The Relentless Moon

Review: The Relentless Moon, by Mary Robinette Kowal
Series: Lady Astronaut #3
Publisher: Tor
Copyright: 2020
ISBN: 1-250-23648-7
Format: Kindle
Pages: 542
Content note: Discussion of eating disorders in this review and portrayal of an eating disorder in the novel. The Relentless Moon is the third book of the Lady Astronaut series and the first one that doesn't feature Elma. It takes place simultaneously with The Fated Sky and tells the story of what happened on Earth, and the Moon, while Elma was in transit to Mars. It's meant to be read after The Fated Sky and would be a significant spoiler for that novel. The protagonist of this novel is Nicole Wargin: wife of the governor of Kansas (a more prestigious state in this universe since the seat of government for the United States was relocated to Kansas City after the Meteor), expert politician's wife, and another of the original group of female astronauts. Kenneth, her husband, is considering a run for president. Nicole is working as an astronaut, helping build out the permanent Moon base. But there are a lot of people on Earth who are not happy with the amount of money and political attention that the space program is getting. They have decided to move beyond protests and political opposition to active sabotage. Nicole was hoping to land an assignment piloting one of the larger rockets. What she gets instead is an assignment as secretary to the Lunar Colony Administrator, as cover. Her actual job is to watch for saboteurs that may or may not be operating on the Moon. Before she even leaves the planet, one of the chief engineers of the space program is poisoned. The pilot of the translunar shuttle falls ill during the flight to the Moon. And then the shuttle's controls fail during landing and disaster is only narrowly averted. The story from there is a cloak and dagger sabotage investigation mixed with Kowal's meticulously-researched speculation about a space program still running on 1950s technology but drastically accelerated by the upcoming climate collapse of Earth. Nicole has more skills for this type of mission than most around her realize due to very quiet work she did during the war, not to mention the feel for personalities and politics that she's honed as a governor's wife. But, like Elma, she's also fighting some personal battles. Elma's are against anxiety; Nicole's are against an eating disorder. I think my negative reaction to this aspect of the book is not the book's fault, but it was sufficiently strong that it substantially interfered with my enjoyment. The specific manifestation of Nicole's eating disorder is that she skips meals until she makes herself ill. My own anxious tendencies hyperfocus on prevention and on rule-following. The result is that once Kowal introduces the eating disorder subplot, my brain started anxiously monitoring everything that Nicole ate and keeping track of her last meal. This, in turn, felt horribly intrusive and uncomfortable. I did not want to monitor and police Nicole's eating, particularly when Nicole clearly was upset by anyone else doing exactly that, and yet I couldn't stop the background thread of my brain that did so. The result was a highly unsettling feeling that I was violating the privacy of the protagonist of the book that I was reading, mixed with anxiety and creeping dread about her calorie intake. Part of this may have been intentional to give the reader some sense of how this felt to Nicole. (The negative interaction with my own anxiety was likely not intentional.) Kowal did an exceptionally good job at invoking reader empathy (at least in me) for Elma's anxiety in The Calculating Stars. I didn't like the experience much this time, but that doesn't make it an invalid focus for a book. It may, however, make me a poor reviewer for this part of the reading experience. This was a major subplot, so it was hard to escape completely, but I quite enjoyed the rest of the book. It's not obvious who the saboteurs are or even how the sabotage is happening, and the acts of clear sabotage are complicated by other problems that may be more subtle sabotage, may be bad luck, or may be the inherent perils of trying to survive in space. Many of Nicole's suspicions do not pan out, which was a touch that I appreciated. She has to look for ulterior motives in everything, and in reality that means she'll be wrong most of the time, but fiction often unrealistically short-cuts that process. I also liked how Kowal handles the resolution, which avoids villain monologues and gives Nicole's opposition their own contingency plans, willingness to try to adapt to setbacks, and the intelligence to keep trying to manipulate the situation even when their plans fail. As with the rest of this series, there's a ton of sexism and racism, which the characters acknowledge and which Nicole tries to resist as much as she can, but which is so thoroughly baked into the society that it's mostly an obstacle that has to be endured. This is not the book, or series, to read if you're looking for triumph over discrimination or for women being allowed to be awesome without having to handle and soothe men's sexist feelings about their abilities. Nicole gets a clear victory arc, but it's a victory despite sexism rather than an end to it. The Relentless Moon did feel a bit long. There are a lot of scene-setting preliminaries before Nicole leaves for the Moon, and I'm not sure all of them were necessary at that length. Nicole also spends a lot of time being suspicious of everyone and second-guessing her theories, and at a few points I thought that dragged. But once things start properly happening, I thoroughly enjoyed the technological details and the thought that Kowal put into the mix of sabotage, accidents, and ill-advised human behavior that Nicole has to sort through. The last half of the book is the best, which is always a good property for a book to have. The eating disorder subplot made me extremely uncomfortable for reasons that are partly peculiar to me, but outside of that, this is a solid entry in the series and fills in some compelling details of what was happening on the other end of the intermittent radio messages Elma received. If you've enjoyed the series to date, you will probably enjoy this installment as well. But if you didn't like the handling of sexism and racism as deeply ingrained social forces that can at best be temporarily bypassed, be warned that The Relentless Moon continues the same theme. Also, if you're squeamish about medical conditions in your fiction, be aware that the specific details of polio feature significantly in the book. Rating: 7 out of 10

30 May 2021

Russell Coker: Wifi Performance on Linux

Wifi usually just works. In the past I haven t had to worry much about performance as for home use things have always been bearable and at work it s never been my job so I just file a bug report with the relevant people when things go wrong. But a few years ago I had some problems. For my home network I got a free Wifi AP which wasn t performing well. My AP supported 802.11 modes b/g or g/n (b, g, and n are slow, medium, and fast speeds). I initially had the AP running in b/g mode because I had an 802.11b USB wifi device that I used. When I replaced that with one that did 802.11g I tried changing the AP to g/n mode but performance was even worse on my laptop (although quite good on phones) so I switched back. For phones it appeared to work well giving 54Mb/s while on my laptop (a second hand Thinkpad X1 Carbon) it was giving 11Mb/s at best and often much less than that. The best demonstration of problems was to start transferring a large file while pinging a system on the LAN the AP was connected to. Usually it would give ping times of 1s or more, sometimes 5s+ ping times. While this was happening the Invalid misc count increased rapidly, often by more than 100 per second. The results of Google searches suggest that Invalid misc is due to interference and recommend changing the channel. My AP had been on channel 1 which had performed poorly, channels 2-8 were ok, and channel 9 seemed reasonably good. As an aside trying all channels manually is not a good idea, it takes a lot of time and gives little useful data. After changing to channel 9 it still only gave about 500KB/s when transferring large files with ping times of about 100ms, but that s a big improvement. I tried running iwlist scanning to scan the Wifi network for other APs, that showed that channel 1 was used a lot but didn t make it clear what I should do other than that. The next thing I tried was the Wifi Analyser app on Android [1] (which doesn t work on my latest phone, I don t know if it s still being actively maintained, it will definitely work on older phones). That has a nice graph mode that shows which channels are used and how the frequencies spread and interfere with other channels. One thing I hadn t realised before I looked at the graphs is that 802.11n uses 4 channels and interferes past that. If you have two 802.11n devices you don t have much space left out of the 14 channels available. To make more space I configured the Wifi AP in my ADSL modem to 802.11b/g mode and assigned it a channel away from the others making 4 channels available with no interference. After that iwconfig reported between 60 and 120Mb/s and I got consistent transfer rates over 1.5MB/s while ping times remained below 100ms. The 5GHz frequency range is less congested. But at the time I didn t feel like buying 5GHz equipment. Since that time I had signed up with an ISP that had a good deal on a Wifi AP that had 5GHz. Now I have all my devices configured to use 5GHz or 2.4GHz depending on which they think is best. So there s less devices on 2.4GHz and the AP is configured for 20MHz channel width in the 2.4GHz range (which means 802.11b/g). Conclusion 802.11n seems to be a bad idea unless you run the only AP in an area. In a suburban area you will have 3 other houses broadcasting in your area and 802.11n is bad for everyone. The worst case scenario would be one person using 802.11n and interfering with everyone else s 802.11g and then having everyone else turn on 802.11n to try and make things faster. 5GHz is less congested as most people run old hardware. It also has a shorter range which has the upside of getting less interference from other people. I m considering installing 5GHz APs at both ends of my house and configuring all my new devices to not use 2.4GHz. Wifi spectrum analysis software is much better than manual testing of channels or trying to deduce things from the output if iwlist scanning .
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Russ Allbery: Review: The Silver Chair

Review: The Silver Chair, by C.S. Lewis
Illustrator: Pauline Baynes
Series: Chronicles of Narnia #4
Publisher: Collier
Copyright: 1953
Printing: 1978
ISBN: 0-02-044250-5
Format: Mass market
Pages: 217
The Silver Chair is a sequel to The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and the fourth book of the Chronicles of Narnia in original publication order. (For more about publication order, see the introduction to my review of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.) Apart from a few references to The Voyage of the Dawn Treader at the start, it stands sufficiently on its own that you could read it without reading the other books, although I have no idea why you'd want to. We have finally arrived at my least favorite of the Narnia books and the one that I sometimes skipped during re-reads. (One of my objections to the new publication order is that it puts The Silver Chair and The Last Battle back-to-back, and I don't think you should do that to yourself as a reader.) I was hoping that there would be previously unnoticed depth to this book that would redeem it as an adult reader. Sadly, no; with one very notable exception, it's just not very good. MAJOR SPOILERS BELOW. The Silver Chair opens on the grounds of the awful school to which Eustace's parents sent him: Experiment House. That means it opens (and closes) with a more extended version of Lewis's rant about schools. I won't get into this in detail since it's mostly a framing device, but Lewis is remarkably vicious and petty. His snide contempt for putting girls and boys in the same school did not age well, nor did his emphasis at the end of the book that the incompetent head of the school is a woman. I also raised an eyebrow at holding up ordinary British schools as a model of preventing bullying. Thankfully, as Lewis says at the start, this is not a school story. This is prelude to Jill meeting Eustace and the two of them escaping the bullies via a magical door into Narnia. Unfortunately, that's the second place The Silver Chair gets off on the wrong foot. Jill and Eustace end up in what the reader of the series will recognize as Aslan's country and almost walk off the vast cliff at the end of the world, last seen from the bottom in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Eustace freaks out, Jill (who has a much better head for heights) goes intentionally close to the cliff in a momentary impulse of arrogance before realizing how high it is, Eustace tries to pull her back, and somehow Eustace falls over the edge. I do not have a good head for heights, and I wonder how much of it is due to this memorable scene. I certainly blame Lewis for my belief that pulling someone else back from the edge of a cliff can result in you being pushed off, something that on adult reflection makes very little sense but which is seared into my lizard brain. But worse, this sets the tone for the rest of the story: everything is constantly going wrong because Eustace and Jill either have normal human failings that are disproportionately punished or don't successfully follow esoteric and unreasonably opaque instructions from Aslan. Eustace is safe, of course; Aslan blows him to Narnia and then gives Jill instructions before sending her afterwards. (I suspect the whole business with the cliff was an authorial cheat to set up Jill's interaction with Aslan without Eustace there to explain anything.) She and Eustace have been summoned to Narnia to find the lost Prince, and she has to memorize four Signs that will lead her on the right path. Gah, the Signs. If you were the sort of kid that I was, you immediately went back and re-read the Signs several times to memorize them like Jill was told to. The rest of this book was then an exercise in anxious frustration. First, Eustace is an ass to Jill and refuses to even listen to the first Sign. They kind of follow the second but only with heavy foreshadowing that Jill isn't memorizing the Signs every day like she's supposed to. They mostly botch the third and have to backtrack to follow it. Meanwhile, the narrator is constantly reminding you that the kids (and Jill in particular) are screwing up their instructions. On re-reading, it's clear they're not doing that poorly given how obscure the Signs are, but the ominous foreshadowing is enough to leave a reader a nervous wreck. Worse, Eustace and Jill are just miserable to each other through the whole book. They constantly bicker and snipe, Eustace doesn't want to listen to her and blames her for everything, and the hard traveling makes it all worse. Lewis does know how to tell a satisfying redemption arc; one of the things I have always liked about Edmund's story is that he learns his lesson and becomes my favorite character in the subsequent stories. But, sadly, Eustace's redemption arc is another matter. He's totally different here than he was at the start of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (to the degree that if he didn't have the same name in both books, I wouldn't recognize him as the same person), but rather than a better person he seems to have become a different sort of ass. There's no sign here of the humility and appreciation for friendship that he supposedly learned from his time as a dragon. On top of that, the story isn't very interesting. Rilian, the lost Prince, is a damp squib who talks in the irritating archaic accent that Lewis insists on using for all Narnian royalty. His story feels like Lewis lifted it from medieval Arthurian literature; most of it could be dropped into a collection of stories of knights of the Round Table without seeming out of place. When you have a country full of talking animals and weirdly fascinating bits of theology, it's disappointing to get a garden-variety story about an evil enchantress in which everyone is noble and tragic and extremely stupid. Thankfully, The Silver Chair has one important redeeming quality: Puddleglum. Puddleglum is a Marsh-wiggle, a bipedal amphibious sort who lives alone in the northern marshes. He's recruited by the owls to help the kids with their mission when they fail to get King Caspian's help after blowing the first Sign. Puddleglum is an absolute delight: endlessly pessimistic, certain the worst possible thing will happen at any moment, but also weirdly cheerful about it. I love Eeyore characters in general, but Puddleglum is even better because he gives the kids' endless bickering exactly the respect that it deserves.
"But we all need to be very careful about our tempers, seeing all the hard times we shall have to go through together. Won't do to quarrel, you know. At any rate, don't begin it too soon. I know these expeditions usually end that way; knifing one another, I shouldn't wonder, before all's done. But the longer we can keep off it "
It's even more obvious on re-reading that Puddleglum is the only effective member of the party. Jill has only a couple of moments where she gets the three of them past some obstacle. Eustace is completely useless; I can't remember a single helpful thing he does in the entire book. Puddleglum and his pessimistic determination, on the other hand, is right about nearly everything at each step. And he's the one who takes decisive action to break the Lady of the Green Kirtle's spell near the end. I was expecting a bit of sexism and (mostly in upcoming books) racism when re-reading these books as an adult given when they were written and who Lewis was, but what has caught me by surprise is the colonialism. Lewis is weirdly insistent on importing humans from England to fill all the important roles in stories, even stories that are entirely about Narnians. I know this is the inherent weakness of portal fantasy, but it bothers me how little Lewis believes in Narnians solving their own problems. The Silver Chair makes this blatantly obvious: if Aslan had just told Puddleglum the same information he told Jill and sent a Badger or a Beaver or a Mouse along with him, all the evidence in the book says the whole affair would have been sorted out with much less fuss and anxiety. Jill and Eustace are far more of a hindrance than a help, which makes for frustrating reading when they're supposedly the protagonists. The best part of this book is the underground bits, once they finally get through the first three Signs and stumble into the Lady's kingdom far below the surface. Rilian is a great disappointment, but the fight against the Lady's mind-altering magic leads to one of the great quotes of the series, on par with Reepicheep's speech in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
"Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that's a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We're just babies making up a game, if you're right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That's why I'm going to stand by the play world. I'm on Aslan's side even if there isn't any Aslan to lead it. I'm going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn't any Narnia. So, thanking you kindly for our supper, if these two gentlemen and the young lady are ready, we're leaving your court at once and setting out in the dark to spend our lives looking for Overland. Not that our lives will be very long, I should think; but that's small loss if the world's as dull a place as you say."
This is Puddleglum, of course. And yes, I know that this is apologetics and Lewis is talking about Christianity and making the case for faith without proof, but put that aside for the moment, because this is still powerful life philosophy. It's a cynic's litany against cynicism. It's a pessimist's defense of hope. Suppose we have only dreamed all those things like justice and fairness and equality, community and consensus and collaboration, universal basic income and effective environmentalism. The dreary magic of the realists and the pragmatists say that such things are baby's games, silly fantasies. But you can still choose to live like you believe in them. In Alasdair Gray's reworking of a line from Dennis Lee, "work as if you live in the early days of a better nation." That's one moment that I'll always remember from this book. The other is after they kill the Lady of the Green Kirtle and her magic starts to fade, they have to escape from the underground caverns while surrounded by the Earthmen who served her and who they believe are hostile. It's a tense moment that turns into a delightful celebration when they realize that the Earthmen were just as much prisoners as the Prince was. They were forced from a far deeper land below, full of living metals and salamanders who speak from rivers of fire. It's the one moment in this book that I thought captured the magical strangeness of Narnia, that sense that there are wonderful things just out of sight that don't follow the normal patterns of medieval-ish fantasy. Other than a few great lines from Puddleglum and some moments in Aslan's country, the first 60% of this book is a loss and remarkably frustrating to read. The last 40% isn't bad, although I wish Rilian had any discernible character other than generic Arthurian knight. I don't know what Eustace is doing in this book at all other than providing a way for Jill to get into Narnia, and I wish Lewis had realized Puddleglum could be the protagonist. But as frustrating as The Silver Chair can be, I am still glad I re-read it. Puddleglum is one of the truly memorable characters of children's literature, and it's a shame he's buried in a weak mid-series book. Followed, in the original publication order, by The Horse and His Boy. Rating: 6 out of 10

29 May 2021

Joey Hess: the end of the olduse.net exhibit

Ten years ago I began the olduse.net exhibit, spooling out Usenet history in real time with a 30 year delay. My archive has reached its end, and ten years is more than long enough to keep running something you cobbled together overnight way back when. So, this is the end for olduse.net. The site will continue running for another week or so, to give you time to read the last posts. Find the very last one, if you can! The source code used to run it, and the content of the website have themselves been archived up for posterity at The Internet Archive. Sometime in 2022, a spammer will purchase the domain, but not find it to be of much value. The Utzoo archives that underlay it have currently sadly been censored off the Internet by someone. This will be unsuccessful; by now they have spread and many copies will live on.
I told a lie ten years ago.
You can post to olduse.net, but it won't show up for at least 30 years.
Actually, those posts drop right now! Here are the followups to 30-year-old Usenet posts that I've accumulated over the past decade. Mike replied in 2011 to JPM's post in 1981 on fa.arms-d "Re: CBS Reports"
A greeting from the future: I actually watched this yesterday (2011-06-10) after reading about it here.
Christian Brandt replied in 2011 to schrieb phyllis's post in 1981 on the "comments" newsgroup "Re: thank you rrg"
Funny, it will be four years until you post the first subnet post i ever read and another eight years until my own first subnet post shows up.
Bernard Peek replied in 2012 to mark's post in 1982 on net.sf-lovers "Re: luke - vader relationship"
i suggest that darth vader is luke skywalker's mother.
You may be on to something there.
Martijn Dekker replied in 2012 to henry's post in 1982 on the "test" newsgroup "Re: another boring test message" trentbuck replied in 2012 to dwl's post in 1982 on the "net.jokes" newsgroup "Re: A child hood poem" Eveline replied in 2013 to a post in 1983 on net.jokes.q "Re: A couple"
Ha!
Bill Leary replied in 2015 to Darin Johnson's post in 1985 on net.games.frp "Re: frp & artwork" Frederick Smith replied in 2021 to David Hoopes's post in 1990 on trial.rec.metalworking "Re: Is this group still active?"

Shirish Agarwal: Planes, Pandemic and Medical Devices I

The Great Electric Airplane Race It took me quite sometime to write as have been depressed about things. Then a few days back saw Nova s The Great Electric Airplane Race. While it was fabulous and a pleasure to see and know that there are more than 200 odd startups who are in the race of making an electric airplane which works and has FAA certification. I was disappointed though that there no coverage of any University projects. From what little I know, almost all advanced materials which U.S. had made has been first researched in mostly Universities and when it is close to fruition then either spin-off as a startup or give to some commercial organization/venture to make it scalable and profitable. If they had, I am sure more people could be convinced to join sciences and engineering in college. I actually do want to come to this as part of both general medicine and vaccine development in U.S. but will come later. The idea that industry works alone should be discouraged, but that perhaps may require another article to articulate why I believe so.

Medical Device Ventilators in India Before the pandemic, probably most didn t know what a ventilator is and was, at least I didn t, although I probably used it during my somewhat brief hospital stay a couple of years ago. It entered into the Indian twitter lexicon more so in the second wave as the number of people who got infected became more and more and the ventilators which were serving them became less and less just due to sheer mismatch of numbers and requirements. Rich countries donated/gifted ventilators to India on which GOI put GST of 28%. Apparently, they are a luxury item, just like my hearing aid. Last week Delhi High Court passed a judgement that imposition of GST should not be on a gift like ventilators or oxygenators. The order can be found here. Even without reading the judgement the shout from the right was judicial activism while after reading it is a good judgement which touches on several points. The first, in itself, stating the dichotomy that if a commercial organization wanted to import a ventilator or an oxygenator the IGST payable is nil while for an individual it is 12%. The State (here State refers to State Government in this case Gujarat Govt.) did reduce the IGST for state from 12% to NIL IGST for federal states but that to till only 30.06.2021. No relief to individuals on that account. The Court also made use of Mr. Arvind Datar, as Amicus Curiae or friend of court. The petitioner, an 85-year-old gentleman who has put it up has put broad assertions under Article 21 (right to live) and the court in its wisdom also added Article 14 which enshrines equality of everyone before law. The Amicus Curiae, as his duty, guided the court into how the IGST law works and shared a brief history of the law and the changes happening before and after it. During his submissions, he also shared the Mega Exemption Notification no. 50/2017 under which several items are there which are exempted from putting IGST. The Amicus Curiae did note that such exemptions were also there before Mega Exemption Notification had come into play. However, DGFT (Directorate General of Foreign Trade) on 30-04-2021 issued notification No. 4/2015-2020 through which oxygenators had been exempted from Custom Duty/BCD (Basic Customs Duty. In another notification on no. 30/2021 dated 01.05.2021 it reduced IGST from 28% to 12% for personal use. If however the oxygenator was procured by a canalizing agency (bodies such as State Trading Corporation of India (STC) or/and Metals and Minerals Corporation (MMTC) and such are defined as canalising agents) then it will be fully exempted from paying any sort of IGST, albeit subject to certain conditions. What the conditions are were not shared in the open court. The Amicus Curiae further observed that it is contrary to practice where both BCD and IGST has been exempted for canalising agents and others, some IGST has to be paid for personal use. To share within the narrow boundaries of the topic, he shared entry no. 607A of General Exemption no.190 where duty and IGST in case of life-saving drugs are zero provided the life-saving drugs imported have been provided by zero cost from an overseas supplier for personal use. He further shared that the oxygen generator would fall in the same entry of 607A as it fulfills all the criteria as shared for life-saving medicines and devices. He also used the help of Drugs and Cosmetics Act 1940 which provides such a relief. The Amicus Curiae further noted that GOI amended its foreign trade policy (2015-2020) via notification no.4/2015-2020, dated 30.04.2021, issued by DGFT where Rakhi and life-saving drugs for personal use has been exempted from BCD till 30-07-2021. No reason not to give the same exemption to oxygenators which fulfill the same thing. The Amicus Curiae, further observes that there are exceptional circumstances provisions as adverted to in sub-section (2) of Section 25 of the Customs Act, whereby Covid-19 which is known and labelled as a pandemic where the distinctions between the two classes of individuals or agencies do not make any sense. While he did make the observation that exemption from duty is not a right, in the light of the pandemic and Article 14, it does not make sense to have distinctions between the two classes of importers. He further shared from Circular no. 9/2014-Customs, dated 19.08.2014 by CBEC (Central Board of Excise and Customs) which gave broad exemptions under Section 25 (2) of the same act in respect of goods and services imported for safety and rehabilitation of people suffering and effected by natural disasters and epidemics. He further submits that the impugned notification is irrational as there is no intelligible differentia rule applied or observed in classifying the import of oxygen concentrators into two categories. One, by the State and its agencies; and the other, by an individual for personal use by way of gift. So there was an absence of adequate determining principle . To bolster his argument, he shared the judgements of

a) Union of India vs. N.S. Rathnam & Sons, (2015) 10 SCC 681 (N.S. Ratnams and Sons Case) b) Shayara Bano vs. Union of India, (2017) 9 SCC 1 (Shayara Bano Case) The Amicus Curiae also rightly observed that the right to life also encompasses within it, the right to health. You cannot have one without the other and within that is the right to have affordable treatment. He further stated that the state does not only have a duty but a positive obligation is cast upon it to ensure that the citizen s health is secured. He again cited Navtej Singh Johars vs Union of India (Navtej Singh Johar Case) in defence of right to life. Mr. Datar also shared that unlike in normal circumstances, it is and should be enough to show distinct and noticeable burdensomeness which is directly attributable to the impugned/questionable tax. The gentleman cited Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Private Limited vs. Union of India, (1985) 1 SCC 641 (Indian Express case) 1985 which shared both about Article 19 (1) (a) and Article 21. Bloggers note At this juncture, I should point out which I am sharing the judgement and I would be sharing only the Amicus Curiae POV and then the judge s final observations. While I was reading it, I was stuck by the fact that the Amicus Curiae had cited 4 cases till now, 3 of them are pretty well known both in the legal fraternity and even among public at large. Another 3 which have been shared below which are also of great significance. Hence, felt the need to share the whole judgement. The Amicus Curiae further observed that this tax would have to be disproportionately will have to be paid by the old and the infirm, and they might find it difficult to pay the amounts needed to pay the customs duty/IGST as well as find the agent to pay in this pandemic. Blogger Note The situation with the elderly is something like this. Now there are a few things to note, only Central Govt. employees and pensioners get pensions which has been freezed since last year. The rest of the elderly population does not. The rate of interest has fallen to record lows from 5-6% in savings interest rate to 2% and on Fixed Deposits at 4.9% while the nominal inflation rate has up by 6% while CPI and real inflation rates are and would be much more. And this is when there is absolutely no demand in the economy. To add to all this, RBI shared a couple of months ago that fraud of 5 trillion rupees has been committed between 2015 and 2019 in banks. And this is different from the number of record NPA s that have been both in Public and Private Sector banks. To get out of this, the banks have squeezed their customers and are squeezing as well as asking GOI for bailouts. How much GOI is responsible for the frauds as well as NPA s would probably require its own space. And even now, RBI and banks have made heavy provisions as lockdowns are still a facet and are supposed to remain a facet till the end of the year or even next year (all depending upon when we get the vaccine). The Amicus Curiae further argued that the ventilators which are available locally are of bad quality. The result of all this has resulted in a huge amount of unsurmountable pressure on hospitals which they are unable to overcome. Therefore, the levy of IGST on oxygenators has direct impact on health of the citizen. So the examination of the law should not be by what intention it was but how it is affecting citizen rights now. For this he shared R.C.Cooper vs Union of India (another famous case R.C. Cooper vs Union of India) especially paragraph 49 and Federation of Hotel & Restaurant Association of India vs. Union of India, (1989) at paragraph 46 (Federation of Hotel Case) Mr. Datar further shared the Supreme Court order dated 18.12.2020, passed in Suo Moto Writ Petition(Civil) No.7/2020, to buttress the plea that the right to health includes the right to affordable treatment. Blogger s Note For those, who don t know Suo Moto is when the Court, whether Supreme Court or the High Courts take up a matter for public good. It could be in anything, law and order, Banking, Finance, Public Health etc. etc. This was the norm before 2014. The excesses of the executive were curtailed by both the Higher and the lower Judiciary. That is and was the reason that Judiciary is and was known as the third pillar of Indian democracy. A good characterization of Suo Moto can be found here. Before ending his submission, the learned Amicus Curiae also shared Jeeja Ghosh vs. Union of India, (2016) (Jeeja Ghosh Case, an outstanding case as it deals with people with disabilities and their rights and the observations made by the Division Bench of Hon ble Mr. Justice A. K. Sikri as well as Hon ble Mr. Justice R. K. Agrawal.) After Amicus Curiae completed his submissions, it was the turn of Mr. Sudhir Nandrajog, and he adopted the arguments and submissions made by the Amicus Curiae. The gentleman reiterated the facts of the case and how the impugned notification was violative of both Article 14 and 21 of the Indian Constitution. Blogger s Note The High Court s judgement which shows all the above arguments by the Amicus Curiae and the petitioner s lawyer also shared the State s view. It is only on page 24, where the Delhi High Court starts to share its own observations on the arguments of both sides. Judgement continued The first observation that the Court makes is that while the petitioner demonstrated that the impugned tax imposition would have a distinct and noticeable burdensomeness while the State did not state or share in any way how much of a loss it would incur if such a tax were let go and how much additional work would have to be done in order to receive this specific tax. It didn t need to do something which is down the wire or mathematically precise, but it didn t even care to show even theoretically how many people will be affected by the above. The counter-affidavit by the State is silent on the whole issue. The Court also contended that the State failed to prove how collecting IGST from the concerned individuals would help in fighting coronavirus in any substantial manner for the public at large. The High Court shared observations from the Navtej Singh Johar case where it is observed that the State has both negative and positive obligations to ensure that its citizens are able to enjoy the right to health. The High Court further made the point that no respectable person does like to be turned into a charity case. If the State contends that those who obey the law should pay the taxes then it is also obligatory on the state s part to lessen exactions such as taxes at the very least in times of war, famine, floods, epidemics and pandemics. Such an approach would lead a person to live a life of dignity which is part of Article 21 of the Constitution. Another point that was made by the State that only the GST council is able to make any changes as regards to exemptions rather than the State were found to be false as the State had made some exemptions without going to the GST council using its own powers under Section 25 of the Customs Act. The Court also points out that it does send a discriminatory pattern when somebody like petitioner has to pay the tax for personal use while those who are buying it for commercial use do not have to pay the tax. The Court agreed of the view of the Amicus Curiae, Mr. Datar that oxygenator should be taxed at NIL rate at IGST as it is part of life-saving drugs and oxygenator fits the bill as medical equipment as it is used in the treatment, mitigation and prevention of spread of Coronavirus. Mr. Datar also did show that oxygenator is placed at the same level as other life-saving drugs. The Court felt further emboldened as the observations by Supreme Court in State of Andhra Pradesh vs. Linde India Limited, 2020 ( State of Andhra Pradesh vs Linde Ltd.) The Court further shared many subsequent notifications from the State and various press releases by the State itself which does make the Court s point that oxygenators indeed are drugs as defined in the court case above. The State should have it as part of notification 190. This would preserve the start of the notification date from 03.05.2021 and the state would not have to issue a new notification. The Court further went to postulate that any persons similar to the petitioner could avail of the same, if they furnish a letter of undertaking to an officer designated by the State that the medical equipment would not be put to commercial use. Till the state does not do that, in the interim the importer could give the same undertaking to Joint Secretary, Customs or their nominee can hand over the same to custom officer. The Court also shared that it does not disagree with the State s arguments but the challenges which have arisen are in a unique time period/circumstances, so they are basing their judgement based on how the situation is. The Court also mentioned an order given by Supreme Court Diary No. 10669/2020 passed on 20.03.2020 where SC has taken pains to understand the issues faced by the citizens. The court also mentioned the Small Scale Industrial Manufactures Association Case (both of these cases I don t know) . So in conclusion, the Court holds the imposition of IGST on oxygenator which are imported by individuals as gifts from their relatives as unconstitutional. They also shared that any taxes taken by GOI in above scenario have to be returned. The relief to the state is they will not have to pay interest cost on the same. To check misuse of the same, the petitioner or people who are in similar circumstances would have to give a letter of undertaking to an officer designated by the State within 7 days of the state notifying the patient or anybody authorized by him/her to act on their behalf to share the letter of undertaking with the State. And till the State doesn t provide an officer, the above will continue. Hence, both the writ petition and the pending application are disposed off. The Registry is directed to release any money deposited by the petitioner along with any interest occurred on it (if any) . At the end they record appreciation of Mr. Arvind Datar, Mr. Zoheb Hossain, Mr. Sudhir Nandrajog as well as Mr. Siddharth Bambha. It is only due to their assistance that the court could reach the conclusion it did. For Delhi High Court RAJIV SHAKDHER, J. TALWANT SINGH, J. May 21, 2020 Blogger s Observations Now, after the verdict GOI does have few choices, either accept the verdict or appeal in the SC. A third choice is to make a committee and come to the same conclusions via the committee. GOI has done something similar in the past. If that happens and the same conclusions are reached as before, then the aggrieved may have no choice but to appear in the highest court of law. And this will put the aggrieved at a much more vulnerable place than before as SC court fees, lawyer fees etc. are quite high compared to High Courts. So, there is a possibility that the petitioner may not even approach unless and until some non-profit (NGO) does decide to fight and put it up as common cause or something similar. There is another judgement that I will share, probably tomorrow. Thankfully, that one is pretty short compared to this one. So it should be far more easier to read. FWIW, I did learn about the whole freeenode stuff and many channels who have shifted from freenode to libera. I will share my own experience of the same but that probably will take a day or two.
Zeeshan of IYC (India Youth Congress) along with Salman Khan s non-profit Being Human getting oxygenators
The above picture of Zeeshan. There have been a whole team of Indian Youth Congress workers (main opposition party to the ruling party) who have doing lot of relief effort. They have been buying Oxygenators from abroad with help of Being Human Foundation started by Salman Khan, an actor who works in A-grade movies in Bollywood.

Anton Gladky: 2021/05, FLOSS activity

LTS This is my third month of working for LTS. I was assigned 12 hrs and worked all of them.

Released DLAs
  1. DLA-2646-1 subversion_1.9.5-1+deb9u6
    • CVE-2020-17525: Remote unauthenticated denial-of-service in Subversion mod_authz_svn
  2. DLA-2649-1 cgal_4.9-1+deb9u1
    • CVE-2020-28601: An oob read vulnerability exists in Nef_2/PM_io_parser.h PM_io_parser::read_vertex() Face_of[] OOB read. An attacker can provide malicious input to trigger this vulnerability.
    • CVE-2020-28636: An oob read vulnerability exists in Nef_S2/SNC_io_parser.h SNC_io_parser::read_sloop() slh->twin() An attacker can provide malicious input to trigger this vulnerability.
    • CVE-2020-35628: An oob read vulnerability exists in Nef_S2/SNC_io_parser.h SNC_io_parser::read_sloop() slh->incident_sface. An attacker can provide malicious input to trigger this vulnerability.
    • CVE-2020-35636: An oob read vulnerability exists in Nef_S2/SNC_io_parser.h SNC_io_parser::read_sface() sfh->volume(). An attacker can provide malicious input to trigger this vulnerability.
  3. DLA-2660-1 libgetdata_0.9.4-1+deb9u1
    • CVE-2021-20204: A heap memory corruption problem (use after free) can be triggered when processing maliciously crafted dirfile databases. This degrades the confidentiality, integrity and availability of third-party software that uses libgetdata as a library.

bind9 LTS-repo on salsa for testing Created a repo for bind9 to test the package in he salsa-pipeline. Package testing was asked in the mailing list. After that I have added autopkgtests, which were copied from the main salsa-repo and updated to stretch release.

libwebp and imagemagick Two packages with a high number of CVEs were in my focus this month. The work is not yet finished and DLAs will be released soon.

Debian Science Team I have prepared and uploaded following packages, which are maintained under the umbrella of Debian Science Team:
  • gfsview_20121130+dfsg-7, fixed RC-Bug #987935 and created ci-pipeline for the package (team upload). And requested the package unblock #988112.
  • Reviewed and sponsored linbox_1.6.3-3 (RC-Bug #987921)
  • Prepared and uploaded libgetdata_0.10.0-5+deb10u1, fixing CVE-2021-20204 in buster (through proposed-updates)
  • Reviewed and sponsored freefem++_3.61.1+dfsg1-6 (RC-Bug #957233)
  • Prepared and uploaded sundials_4.1.0+dfsg-4 (RC-Bug #988551)

28 May 2021

Rapha&#235;l Hertzog: Freexian s report about Debian Long Term Support, April 2021

A Debian LTS logo
Like each month, have a look at the work funded by Freexian s Debian LTS offering. Debian project funding In April, we put aside 5775 EUR to fund Debian projects. There was no proposals for new projects received, thus we re looking forward to receive more projects from various Debian teams! Please do not hesitate to submit a proposal, if there is a project that could benefit from the funding! Debian LTS contributors In April, 11 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available: Evolution of the situation In April we released 33 DLAs and held a LTS team meeting using video conferencing. The security tracker currently lists 53 packages with a known CVE and the dla-needed.txt file has 26 packages needing an update. We are please to welcome VyOS as a new gold sponsor! Thanks to our sponsors Sponsors that joined recently are in bold.

27 May 2021

Wouter Verhelst: SReview and pandemics

The pandemic was a bit of a mess for most FLOSS conferences. The two conferences that I help organize -- FOSDEM and DebConf -- are no exception. In both conferences, I do essentially the same work: as a member of both video teams, I manage the postprocessing of the video recordings of all the talks that happened at the respective conference(s). I do this by way of SReview, the online video review and transcode system that I wrote, which essentially crowdsources the manual work that needs to be done, and automates as much as possible of the workflow. The original version of SReview consisted of a database, a (very basic) Mojolicious-based webinterface, and a bunch of perl scripts which would build and execute ffmpeg command lines using string interpolation. As a quick hack that I needed to get working while writing it in my spare time in half a year, that approach was workable and resulted in successful postprocessing after FOSDEM 2017, and a significant improvement in time from the previous years. However, I did not end development with that, and since then I've replaced the string interpolation by an object oriented API for generating ffmpeg command lines, as well as modularized the webinterface. Additionally, I've had help reworking the user interface into a system that is somewhat easier to use than my original interface, and have slowly but surely added more features to the system so as to make it more flexible, as well as support more types of environments for the system to run in. One of the major issues that still remains with SReview is that the administrator's interface is pretty terrible. I had been planning on revamping that for 2020, but then massive amounts of people got sick, travel was banned, and both the conferences that I work on were converted to an online-only conference. These have some very specific requirements; e.g., both conferences allowed people to upload a prerecorded version of their talk, rather than doing the talk live; since preprocessing a video is, technically, very similar to postprocessing it, I adapted SReview to allow people to upload a video file that it would then validate (in terms of length, codec, and apparent resolution). This seems like easy to do, but I decided to implement this functionality so that it would also allow future use for in-person conferences, where occasionally a speaker requests that modifications would be made to the video file in a way that SReview is unable to do. This made it marginally more involved, but at least will mean that a feature which I had planned to implement some years down the line is now already implemented. The new feature works quite well, and I'm happy I've implemented it in the way that I have. In order for the "upload" processing and the "post-event" processing to not be confused, however, I decided to import the conference schedules twice: once as the conference itself, and once as a shadow version of that conference for the prerecordings. That way, I could track the progress through the system of the prerecording completely separately from the progress of the postprocessing of the video (which adds opening/closing credits, and transcodes to multiple variants of the same video). Schedule parsing was something that had not been implemented in a generic way yet, however; since that made doubling the schedule in that way rather complex, I decided to bite the bullet and (finally) implement schedule parsing in a generic way. Currently, schedule parsers exist for two formats (Pentabarf XML and the Wafer variant of that same format which is almost, but not quite, entirely the same). The API for that is quite flexible, and I'm happy with the way things have been implemented there. I've also implemented a set of "virtual" parsers, which allow mangling the schedule in various ways (by either filtering out talks that we don't want, or by generating the shadow version of the schedule that I talked about earlier). While the SReview settings have reasonable defaults, occasionally the output of SReview is not entirely acceptable, due to more complicated matters that then result in encoding artifacts. As a result, the DebConf video team has been doing a final review step, completely outside of SReview, to ensure that such encoding artifacts don't exist. That seemed suboptimal, so recently I've been working on integrating that into SReview as well. First tests have been run, and seem to be acceptable, but there's still a few loose ends to be finalized. As part of this, I've also reworked the way comments could be entered into the system. Previously the presence of a comment would signal that the video has some problems that an administrator needed to look at. Unfortunately, that was causing some confusion, with some people even thinking it's a good place to enter a "thank you for your work" style of comment... which it obviously isn't. Turning it into a "comment log" system instead fixes that, and also allows for better two-way communication between administrators and reviewers. Hopefully that'll improve things in that area as well. Finally, the audio normalization in SReview -- for which I've long used bs1770gain -- is having problems. First of all, bs1770gain will sometimes alter the timing of the video or audio file that it's passed, which is very problematic if I want to process it further. There is an ffmpeg loudnorm filter which implements the same algorithm, so that should make things easier to use. Secondly, the author of bs1770gain is a strange character that I'd rather not be involved with. Before I knew about the loudnorm filter I didn't really have a choice, but now I can just rip bs1770gain out and replace it by the loudnorm filter. That will fix various other bugs in SReview, too, because SReview relies on behaviour that isn't actually there (but which I didn't know at the time when I wrote it). All in all, the past year-and-a-bit has seen a lot of development for SReview, with multiple features being added and a number of long-standing problems being fixed. Now if only the pandemic would subside, allowing the whole "let's do everything online only" wave to cool down a bit, so that I can finally make time to implement the admin interface...

Michael Prokop: What to expect from Debian/bullseye #newinbullseye

Bullseye Banner, Copyright 2020 Juliette Taka Debian v11 with codename bullseye is supposed to be released as new stable release soon-ish (let s hope for June, 2021! :)). Similar to what we had with #newinbuster and previous releases, now it s time for #newinbullseye! I was the driving force at several of my customers to be well prepared for bullseye before its freeze, and since then we re on good track there overall. In my opinion, Debian s release team did (and still does) a great job I m very happy about how unblock requests (not only mine but also ones I kept an eye on) were handled so far. As usual with major upgrades, there are some things to be aware of, and hereby I m starting my public notes on bullseye that might be worth also for other folks. My focus is primarily on server systems and looking at things from a sysadmin perspective. Further readings Of course start with taking a look at the official Debian release notes, make sure to especially go through What s new in Debian 11 + Issues to be aware of for bullseye. Chris published notes on upgrading to Debian bullseye, and also anarcat published upgrade notes for bullseye. Package versions As a starting point, let s look at some selected packages and their versions in buster vs. bullseye as of 2021-05-27 (mainly having amd64 in mind):
Package buster/v10 bullseye/v11
ansible 2.7.7 2.10.8
apache 2.4.38 2.4.46
apt 1.8.2.2 2.2.3
bash 5.0 5.1
ceph 12.2.11 14.2.20
docker 18.09.1 20.10.5
dovecot 2.3.4 2.3.13
dpkg 1.19.7 1.20.9
emacs 26.1 27.1
gcc 8.3.0 10.2.1
git 2.20.1 2.30.2
golang 1.11 1.15
libc 2.28 2.31
linux kernel 4.19 5.10
llvm 7.0 11.0
lxc 3.0.3 4.0.6
mariadb 10.3.27 10.5.10
nginx 1.14.2 1.18.0
nodejs 10.24.0 12.21.0
openjdk 11.0.9.1 11.0.11+9 + 17~19
openssh 7.9p1 8.4p1
openssl 1.1.1d 1.1.1k
perl 5.28.1 5.32.1
php 7.3 7.4+76
postfix 3.4.14 3.5.6
postgres 11 13
puppet 5.5.10 5.5.22
python2 2.7.16 2.7.18
python3 3.7.3 3.9.2
qemu/kvm 3.1 5.2
ruby 2.5.1 2.7+2
rust 1.41.1 1.48.0
samba 4.9.5 4.13.5
systemd 241 247.3
unattended-upgrades 1.11.2 2.8
util-linux 2.33.1 2.36.1
vagrant 2.2.3 2.2.14
vim 8.1.0875 8.2.2434
zsh 5.7.1 5.8
Linux Kernel The bullseye release will ship a Linux kernel based on v5.10 (v5.10.28 as of 2021-05-27, with v5.10.38 pending in unstable/sid), whereas buster shipped kernel 4.19. As usual there are plenty of changes in the kernel area and this might warrant a separate blog entry, but to highlight some issues: One surprising change might be that the scrollback buffer (Shift + PageUp) is gone from the Linux console. Make sure to always use screen/tmux or handle output through a pager of your choice if you need all of it and you re in the console. The kernel provides BTF support (via CONFIG_DEBUG_INFO_BTF, see #973870), which means it s no longer necessary to install LLVM, Clang, etc (requiring >100MB of disk space), see Gregg s excellent blog post regarding the underlying rational. Sadly the libbpf-tools packaging didn t make it into bullseye (#978727), but if you want to use your own self-made Debian packages, my notes might be useful. With kernel version 5.4, SUBDIRS support was removed from kbuild, so if an out-of-tree kernel module (like a *-dkms package) fails to compile on bullseye, make sure to use a recent version of it which uses M= or KBUILD_EXTMOD= instead. Unprivileged user namespaces are enabled by default (see #898446 + #987777), so programs can create more restricted sandboxes without the need to run as root or via a setuid-root helper. If you prefer to keep this feature restricted (or tools like web browsers, WebKitGTK, Flatpak, don t work), use sysctl -w kernel.unprivileged_userns_clone=0 . The /boot/System.map file(s) no longer provide the actual data, you need to switch to the dbg package if you rely on that information: 
% cat /boot/System.map-5.10.0-6-amd64 
ffffffffffffffff B The real System.map is in the linux-image-<version>-dbg package
Be aware though, that the *-dbg package requires ~5GB of additional disk space. Systemd systemd v247 made it into bullseye (updated from v241). Same as for the kernel this might warrant a separate blog entry, but to mention some highlights: Systemd in bullseye activates its persistent journal functionality by default (storing its files in /var/log/journal/, see #717388). systemd-timesyncd is no longer part of the systemd binary package itself, but available as standalone package. This allows usage of ntp, chrony, openntpd, without having systemd-timesyncd installed (which prevents race conditions like #889290, which was biting me more than once). journalctl gained new options: 
--cursor-file=FILE      Show entries after cursor in FILE and update FILE
--facility=FACILITY...  Show entries with the specified facilities
--image=IMAGE           Operate on files in filesystem image
--namespace=NAMESPACE   Show journal data from specified namespace
--relinquish-var        Stop logging to disk, log to temporary file system
--smart-relinquish-var  Similar, but NOP if log directory is on root mount
systemctl gained new options: 
clean UNIT...                       Clean runtime, cache, state, logs or configuration of unit
freeze PATTERN...                   Freeze execution of unit processes
thaw PATTERN...                     Resume execution of a frozen unit
log-level [LEVEL]                   Get/set logging threshold for manager
log-target [TARGET]                 Get/set logging target for manager
service-watchdogs [BOOL]            Get/set service watchdog state
--with-dependencies                 Show unit dependencies with 'status', 'cat', 'list-units', and 'list-unit-files'
 -T --show-transaction              When enqueuing a unit job, show full transaction
 --what=RESOURCES                   Which types of resources to remove
--boot-loader-menu=TIME             Boot into boot loader menu on next boot
--boot-loader-entry=NAME            Boot into a specific boot loader entry on next boot
--timestamp=FORMAT                  Change format of printed timestamps
If you use systemctl edit to adjust overrides, then you ll now also get the existing configuration file listed as comment, which I consider very helpful. The MACAddressPolicy behavior with systemd naming schema v241 changed for virtual devices (I plan to write about this in a separate blog post). There are plenty of new manual pages: systemd also gained new unit configurations related to security hardening: Another new unit configuration is SystemCallLog= , which supports listing the system calls to be logged. This is very useful for for auditing or temporarily when constructing system call filters. The cgroupv2 change is also documented in the release notes, but to explicitly mention it also here, quoting from /usr/share/doc/systemd/NEWS.Debian.gz:
systemd now defaults to the unified cgroup hierarchy (i.e. cgroupv2).
This change reflects the fact that cgroups2 support has matured
substantially in both systemd and in the kernel.
All major container tools nowadays should support cgroupv2.
If you run into problems with cgroupv2, you can switch back to the previous,
hybrid setup by adding systemd.unified_cgroup_hierarchy=false to the
kernel command line.
You can read more about the benefits of cgroupv2 at
https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/admin-guide/cgroup-v2.html
Note that cgroup-tools (lssubsys + lscgroup etc) don t work in cgroup2/unified hierarchy yet (see #959022 for the details). Configuration management puppet s upstream doesn t provide packages for bullseye yet (see PA-3624 + MODULES-11060), and sadly neither v6 nor v7 made it into bullseye, so when using the packages from Debian you re still stuck with v5.5 (also see #950182). ansible is also available, and while it looked like that only version 2.9.16 would make it into bullseye (see #984557 + #986213), actually version 2.10.8 made it into bullseye. chef was removed from Debian and is not available with bullseye (due to trademark issues). Prometheus stack Prometheus server was updated from v2.7.1 to v2.24.1, and the prometheus service by default applies some systemd hardening now. Also all the usual exporters are still there, but bullseye also gained some new ones: Virtualization docker (v20.10.5), ganeti (v3.0.1), libvirt (v7.0.0), lxc (v4.0.6), openstack, qemu/kvm (v5.2), xen (v4.14.1), are all still around, though what s new and noteworthy is that podman version 3.0.1 (tool for managing OCI containers and pods) made it into bullseye. If you re using the docker packages from upstream, be aware that they still don t seem to understand Debian package version handling. The docker* packages will not be automatically considered for upgrade, as 5:20.10.6~3-0~debian-buster is considered newer than 5:20.10.6~3-0~debian-bullseye: 
% apt-cache policy docker-ce
  docker-ce:
    Installed: 5:20.10.6~3-0~debian-buster
    Candidate: 5:20.10.6~3-0~debian-buster
    Version table:
   *** 5:20.10.6~3-0~debian-buster 100
          100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
       5:20.10.6~3-0~debian-bullseye 500
          500 https://download.docker.com/linux/debian bullseye/stable amd64 Packages
Vagrant is available in version 2.2.14, the package from upstream works perfectly fine on bullseye as well. If you re relying on VirtualBox, be aware that upstream doesn t provide packages for bullseye yet, but the package from Debian/unstable (v6.1.22 as of 2021-05-27) works fine on bullseye (VirtualBox isn t shipped with stable releases since quite some time due to lack of cooperation from upstream on security support for older releases, see #794466). If you rely on the virtualbox-guest-additions-iso and its shared folders support, you might be glad to hear that v6.1.22 made it into bullseye (see #988783), properly supporting more recent kernel versions like present in bullseye. debuginfod There s a new service debuginfod.debian.net (see debian-devel-announce and Debian Wiki), which makes the debugging experience way smoother. You no longer need to download the debugging Debian packages (*-dbgsym/*-dbg), but instead can fetch them on demand, by exporting the following variables (before invoking gdb or alike): 
% export DEBUGINFOD_PROGRESS=1    # for optional download progress reporting
% export DEBUGINFOD_URLS="https://debuginfod.debian.net"
BTW: if you can t rely on debuginfod (for whatever reason), I d like to point your attention towards find-dbgsym-packages from the debian-goodies package. Vim Sadly Vim 8.2 once again makes another change for bad defaults (hello mouse behavior!). When incsearch is set, it also applies to :substitute. This makes it veeeeeeeeeery annoying when running something like :%s/\s\+$// to get rid of trailing whitespace characters, because if there are no matches it jumps to the beginning of the file and then back, sigh. To get the old behavior back, you can use this: 
au CmdLineEnter : let s:incs = &incsearch   set noincsearch
au CmdLineLeave : let &incsearch = s:incs
rsync rsync was updated from v3.1.3 to v3.2.3. It provides various checksum enhancements (see option --checksum-choice). We got new capabilities (hardlink-specials, atimes, optional protect-args, stop-at, no crtimes) and the addition of zstd and lz4 compression algorithms. And we got new options: OpenSSH OpenSSH was updated from v7.9p1 to 8.4p1, so if you re interested in all the changes, check out the release notes between those version (8.0, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3 + 8.4). Let s highlight some notable new features: Misc unsorted

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