Search Results: "storm"

19 March 2017

Clint Adams: Measure once, devein twice

Ophira lived in a wee house in University Square, Tampa. It had one floor, three bedrooms, two baths, a handful of family members, a couple pets, some plants, and an occasional staring contest. Mauricio lived in Lowry Park North, but Ophira wasn t allowed to go there because Mauricio was afraid that someone would tell his girlfriend. Ophira didn t like Mauricio s girlfriend and Mauricio s girlfriend did not like Ophira. Mauricio did not bring his girlfriend along when he and Ophira went to St. Pete Beach. They frolicked in the ocean water, and attempted to have sex. Mauricio and Ophira were big fans of science, so Somewhat quickly they concluded that it is impossible to have sex underwater, and absconded to Ophira s car to have sex therein. I hate Mauricio s girlfriend, Ophira told Amit on the telephone. She s not even pretty. Hey, listen, said Amit. I m going to a wedding on Captiva. Oh, my family used to go to Captiva every year. There s bioluminescent algae and little crabs and stuff. Yeah? Do you want to come along? You could pick me up at the airport. Why would I want to go to a wedding? Well, it s on the beach and they re going to have a bouncy castle. A bouncy castle Are you serious? Yes. Well, okay. Amit prepared to go to the wedding and Ophira became terse then unresponsive. After he landed at RSW, he called Ophira, but instead of answering the phone she startled and fell out of her chair. Amit arranged for other transportation toward the Sanibel Causeway. Ophira bit her nails for a few hours, then went to her car and drove to Cape Coral. Ophira cruised around Cape Coral for a while, until she spotted a teenager cleaning a minivan. She parked her car and approached him. Whatcha doing? asked Ophira, pretending to chew on imaginary gum. The youth slid the minivan door open. I m cleaning, he said hesitantly. Didn t your parents teach you not to talk to strangers? I could do all kinds of horrible things to you. They conversed for a bit. She recounted a story of her personal hero, a twelve-year-old girl who seduced and manipulated older men into ruin. She rehashed the mysteries of Mauricio s girlfriend. She waxed poetic on her love of bouncy castles. The youth listened, hypnotized. What s your name, kid? Ophira yawned. Arjun, he replied. How old are you? Arjun thought about it. 15, he said. Hmm, Ophira stroked her chin. Can you sneak me into your room so that your parents never find out about it? Arjun s eyes went wide. MEANWHILE, on Captiva Island, Amit had learned that even though the Tenderly had multiple indoor jacuzzis, General Fitzpatrick and Mrs. Fitzpatrick had decided it prudent to have sex in the hot tub on the deck; that the execution of this plan had somehow necessitated a lengthy cleaning process before the hot tub could be used again; that that s why workmen were cleaning the hot tub; and that the Fitzpatrick children had gotten General Fitzpatrick and Mrs. Fitzpatrick to agree to not do that again, with an added suggestion that they not be seen doing anything else naked in public. A girl walked up to Amit. Hey, I heard you lost your plus-one. Are you here alone? What a loser! she giggled nervously, then stared. Leave me alone, Darlene, sighed Amit. Darlene s face reddened as she spun on her heels and stormed over to Lisette. Oh my god, did you see that? I practically threw myself at him and he was abusive toward me. He probably has all the classic signs of being an abuser. Did you hear about that girl he dated in Ohio? I bet I know why that ended. Oh really? said Lisette distractedly, looking Amit up and down. So he s single now? Darlene glared at Lisette as Amit wandered back outside to stare at the hot tub. Hey kid, said Ophira, bring me some snacks. I don t bring food into my room, said Arjun. It attracts pests. Is that what your parents told you? scoffed Ophira. Don t be such a wuss. Three minutes later, Ophira was finishing a bag of paprika puffs. These are great, Arjun! Where do you get these? My cousin sends them from Europe, he explained. Now get me a diet soda. Amit strolled along the beach, then yelped. What s biting my legs? he cried out. Those are sand fleas, said Nessarose. What are sand fleas? asked Amit incredulously. Nessarose rolled her eyes. Stop being a baby and have a drink. After the sun went down, Amit began to notice the crabs, and this made him drink more. When everyone was soused, General Fitzpatrick announced that they were going for a swim in the Gulf, in direct contravention of safety guidelines. Most of the guests were wise enough to refuse, but an eightsome swam out, occasionally stopping to slap the algae, but continuing until they reached the sandbar that General Fitzpatrick correctly claimed was there. Then screams echoed through the night as all the jellyfish attacked everyone invading their sandbar. The crestfallen swimming party eventually made it back to shore. Pee on the jellyfish sting, commanded Nessarose. It s the best cure. No! shouted General Fitzpatrick s daughter. Urine makes it worse. Things quickly escalated from Nessarose and General Fitzpatrick s daughter screaming at each other to the beach dividing into three factions: those siding with Nessarose, those siding with General Fitzpatrick s daughter, and those who had no idea what was going on. General Fitzpatrick had no interest in any of this, and went straight to bed. It s getting late, kid, said Ophira. I m taking your bed. What? squeaked Arjun. Look, said Ophira, your bed is small and there isn t room for both of us. You may sleep on the floor if you re quiet and don t bother me. What? squeaked Arjun. Are you deaf, kid? Ophira grunted and then went to bed. Arjun blinked in confusion, then tried to fall asleep on the floor, without much success. Ophira got up in the morning and said, Before I go, I want to teach you a valuable lesson. What? groaned Arjun, getting to his feet. You should be careful talking to strangers. Now, I told you that I could do horrible things to you, so this is not my fault; it s yours, she announced, then sucker-punched him in the gut. Ophira climbed out the window as Arjun doubled over. As the ceremony began, only a small minority of the wedding party was visibly suffering from jellyfish stings, which may or may not have helped with ignoring the sand fleas. The ceremony ended shortly thereafter, and now that marriage had been accomplished, everyone turned their attention to food and drink and swimming less irresponsibly than the night before. Guests that needed to return home sooner departed in waves and Amit started to appreciate the more peaceful environment. He heard the deck door slide open behind him and turned his attention away from the hot tub. Hey, mofo, Ophira shouted as strode stylishly out onto the deck. Where s this bouncy castle? Amit blinked in surprise. That was yesterday. You missed it. Oh, she frowned. So I met this South Slav guy with a really sexy forehead, and I need some advice. I don t know if I should call him or wait. Amit pointed to the hot tub and told her the story of General Fitzpatrick and Mrs. Fitzpatrick and the hot tub. What? said Ophira. How could they have sex underwater? What do you mean? asked Amit. Well, it s impossible, she replied.
Posted on 2017-03-19
Tags: mintings

24 February 2017

Sven Hoexter: Tcl and https - back to TclCurl

Must be the irony of life that I was about to give up the TclCurl Debian package some time ago, and now I'm using it again for some very old and horrible web scraping code. The world moved on to https but the Tcl http package only supports unencrypted http. You can combine it with the tls package as explained in the Wiki, but that seems to be overly complicated compared to just loading the TclCurl binding and moving on with something like this: 
package require TclCurl
# download to a variable
curl::transfer -url https://sven.stormbind.net -bodyvar page
# or store it in a file
curl::transfer -url https://sven.stormbind.net -file page.html
Now the remaining problem is that the code is unmaintained upstream and there is one codebase on bitbucket and one on github. While I fed patches to the bitbucket repo and thus based the Debian package on that repo, the github repo diverted in a different direction.

14 February 2017

Sven Hoexter: moto g falcon up and running with LineageOS 14.1 nightly

After a few weeks of running Exodus on my moto g falcon, I've now done again the full wipe and moved on to LineageOS nightly from 20170213. Though that build is no longer online at the moment. It's running smooth so far for myself but there was an issue with the Google Play edition of the phone according to Reddit. Since I don't use gapps anyway I don't care. The only issue I see so far is that I can not reach the flash menu in the camera app. It's hidden behind a grey bar. Not nice but not a show stopper for me either.

9 February 2017

Sven Hoexter: Limit host access based on LDAP groupOfUniqueNames with sssd

For CentOS 4 to CentOS 6 we used pam_ldap to restrict host access to machines, based on groupOfUniqueNames listed in an openldap. With RHEL/CentOS 6 RedHat already deprecated pam_ldap and highly recommended to use sssd instead, and with RHEL/CentOS 7 they finally removed pam_ldap from the distribution. Since pam_ldap supported groupOfUniqueNames to restrict logins a bigger collection of groupOfUniqueNames were created to restrict access to all kind of groups/projects and so on. But sssd is in general only able to filter based on an "ldap_access_filter" or use the host attribute via "ldap_user_authorized_host". That does not allow the use of "groupOfUniqueNames". So to allow a smoth migration I had to configure sssd in some way to still support groupOfUniqueNames. The configuration I ended up with looks like this: 
[domain/hostacl]
autofs_provider = none 
ldap_schema = rfc2307bis
# to work properly we've to keep the search_base at the highest level
ldap_search_base = ou=foo,ou=people,o=myorg
ldap_default_bind_dn = cn=ro,ou=ldapaccounts,ou=foo,ou=people,o=myorg
ldap_default_authtok = foobar
id_provider = ldap
auth_provider = ldap
chpass_provider = none
ldap_uri = ldaps://ldapserver:636
ldap_id_use_start_tls = false
cache_credentials = false
ldap_tls_cacertdir = /etc/pki/tls/certs
ldap_tls_cacert = /etc/pki/tls/certs/ca-bundle.crt
ldap_tls_reqcert = allow
ldap_group_object_class = groupOfUniqueNames
ldap_group_member = uniqueMember
access_provider = simple
simple_allow_groups = fraappmgmtt
[sssd]
domains = hostacl
services = nss, pam
config_file_version = 2
Important side note: With current sssd versions you're more or less forced to use ldaps with a validating CA chain, though hostnames are not required to match the CN/SAN so far. Relevant are: In practise what we do is match the member of the groupOfUniqueNames to the sssd internal group representation. The best explanation about the several possible object classes in LDAP for group representation I've found so far is unfortunately in a german blog post. Another explanation is in the LDAP wiki. In short: within a groupOfUniqueNames you'll find a full DN, while in a posixGroup you usually find login names. Different kind of object class requires a different handling. Next step would be to move auth and nss functionality to sssd as well.

7 February 2017

Sven Hoexter: Dell Latitude E7470 hold and mark with upper left touchpad button

Recently some of my coworkers and I experienced an issue with using the upper left touchpad button on our Dell Latitude E7470 and similar laptops (E5xxx from the current generation). Some time in January we could no longer hold down this button and select text with the touchpad. Using the left button below the touchpad still worked. This hit my coworker running Fedora and myself running Debian/stretch. So I first thought that it's likely a libinput issue (same version in Debian/stretch and Fedora and I recently pulled that in as an update), somehow blacklisting the upper left key because it's connected to the trackpoint. So I filled #99594 upstream. While this was not very helpful at first, and according to Peter very unlikely to be related to libinput, another coworker using Debian/jessie found this issue to hit him when he upgraded the backports kernel in use from 4.8 to 4.9. That finally led to the conclusion that it's a bug in the Linux alps driver, which is already fixed in 4.10 and probably 4.9.6. Until the Debian kernel team pulls in a fresh 4.9 point release I'm using 4.10-rc6 from experimental. For Debian/jessie + backports kernel user it might be more convenient to just stay at 4.8 in case this issue annoys you. Kudos to Peter, Benjamin, TW and WW for the help in locating the origin of this issue! Lessons learned:

3 February 2017

Sven Hoexter: chromium --enable-remote-extensions

From time to time I've to use chromium for creepy stuff like lifesize video conferencing with document sharing. The document sharing requires a chromium extension. Suddenly that stopped working today and I could not reinstall the extension. After trying a lot of stuff I had a look at the debian changelog and found out about: 
chromium --enable-remote-extensions
See also #851927.

28 January 2017

Sven Hoexter: Am I a target now?

While reading the Tails 2.10 changelog I stumbled upon the fact that Tails now supports exFAT. Since Tails is Debian based I just checked the image and indeed it contains the fuse-exfat package. Do I've to assume that I've now another set of crosshairs on my back just because it's one possible maintainer you could attack to place malicious code into Tails? I'm not sure, and I'm also not sure if it would change much. I've always assumed to be a target just because I'm contributing to Debian, and because I'm working in IT operations. But to be honest so far my contributions to Debian are not on crucial packages and unexpected strange looking NMUs would always raise alarm bells for everyone. BTW the exfat fuse driver package builds reproducible. Maybe a good opportunity to thank the reproducible build team for this effort!

14 January 2017

Sven Hoexter: moto g falcon reactivation and exodus mod

I started to reactivate my old moto g falcon during the last days of CyanogenMod in December of 2016. First step was a recovery update to TWRP 3.0.2-2 so I was able to flash CM13/14 builds. While CM14 nightly builds did not boot at all the CM13 builds did, but up to the last build wifi connections to the internet did not work. I could actually register with my wifi (Archer C7 running OpenWRT) but all apps claim the internet connection check failed and I'm offline. So bummer, without wifi a smartphone is not much fun. I was pretty sure that wifi worked when I last used that phone about 1.5 years ago with CM11/12, so I started to dive into the forums of xda-developers to look for alternatives. Here I found out about Exodus. I've a bit of trouble trusting stuff from xda-developer forums but what the hell, the phone is empty anyway so nothing to loose and I flashed the latest falcon build. To flash it I had to clean the whole phone, format all partitions via TWRP and then sideloaded the zip image file via adb (adb from the Debian/stretch adb package works like a charm, thank you guys!). Booted and b m wifi works again! Now Exodus is a really striped down mod, to do anything useful with it I had to activate the developer options and allow USB debugging. Afterwards I could install the f-droid and Opera apk via "adb install foo.apk". Lineage OS As I could derive from another thread on xda-developers Lineage OS has the falcon still on the shortlist for 14.x nightly builds. Maybe that will be an alternative again in the future. For now Exodus is a bit behind the curve (based on Android 6.0.1 from September 2016) but at least it's functional.

11 January 2017

Sven Hoexter: Failing with F5: using experimental mv feature on a pool causes tmm to segfault

Just a short PSA for those around working with F5 devices: TMOS 11.6 introduced an experimental "mv" command in tmsh. In the last days we tried it for the first time on TMOS 12.1.1. It worked fine for a VirtualServer but a mv for a pool caused a sefault in tmm. We're currently working with the F5 support to sort it out, they think it's a known issue. Recommendation for now is to not use mv on pools. Just do it the old way, create a new pool, assign the new pool to the relevant VS and delete the old pool. Possible bug ID at F5 is ID562808. Since I can not find it in the TMOS 12.2 release notes I expect that this issue also applies to TMOS 12.2, but I did not verify that.

29 December 2016

Sven Hoexter: Out of the comfort zone: OpenSuSE support for an ordinary user - f*ck my morals

A friend of mine choose for $reasons to install the latest OpenSuSE 42.2 release as his new laptop operating system. It's been a while that I had contact with the SuSE Linux distribution. Must be around 12 years or so. The unsual part here is that I've to support a somewhat eccentric, but mostly ordinary user of computers. And to my surprise it's still hard to just plug in your existing stuff and expect it work. I've done so many dirty things to this installation in the last three days, my system egineering heart is bleeding. printing with a Canon Pixma iP100 printer This is a small portable Canon printer, about four years old. It provides a decent quality and its main strength is that it's small and really portable. Sadly the gutenprint driver just pushes through a blank page. No ink wasted on it at all. So the only reasonable other choice was a four year old binary rpm package provided by Canon. It has a file dependency on "libtiff.so.3" which is no longer available in recent GNU/Linux distributions. So I cheated and 
- unpacked the tarball
- installed the rpm from the "packages" folder
zypper install cnijfilter-common-3.70-1.x86_64.rpm cnijfilter-ip100series-3.70-1.x86_64.rpm
... and choose to ignore the missing file dependency on libtiff.so.5.
ln -s /usr/lib64/libtiff.so /usr/lib64/libtiff.so.5
- re-ran the ./install.sh which registered the printer with cups and does whatever else
  magic is included in 1906 lines of shell.
To my surprise this driver still works and provides the expected quality. Though it's just a question of time until this setup will break. Be it an incompatible ABI change in libtiff or another lib in use by those Canon provided tools. QGIS and gdal with ECW support While the printer stuff is a rather common use case, having a map viewer for map files in the ECW format is the eccentric part. I found some hints on stackoverflow and subsequently https://trac.osgeo.org/gdal/wiki/ECW that a non-free library is required and a specific build of gdal. Then QGIS should be able to work with ECW files. Lucky us there is at least a OpenSuSE repository for gdal and QGIS. So I did the following: 
zypper addrepo http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/Application:/Geo/openSUSE_Leap_42.2/Application:Geo.repo
zypper install qgis
Then I had to download the non-free ECW SDK from http://download.hexagongeospatial.com/downloads/erdas-ecw-jp2-sdk-v5.3-%28linux%29 - you'll and up with a '.bin' installer file. The installation process left me with "ERDAS-ECW_JPEG_2000_SDK-5.3.0" folder in my $HOME. I moved that one to /opt. Next step is adding the library to the ldconfig search path. 
echo "/opt/ERDAS-ECW_JPEG_2000_SDK-5.3.0/Desktop_Read-Only/lib/x64/release/" > /etc/ld.so.conf.d/ecw.conf; ldconfig
Now it was "just" about rebuild gdal with ECW support. So I downloaded the required source packages with "zypper source-install gdal", edited the spec somewhere in "/usr/src/" to make the following modifications 
--with-ecw=/opt/ERDAS-ECW_JPEG_2000_SDK-5.3.0/Desktop_Read-Only
added to the "./configure" invocation. And somewhere at the top we had to relax the requirement that all installed files have to be referenced inside the package. 
%define _unpackaged_files_terminate_build 0
As a last step I had to "rpmbuild -ba" the package and force the installation via zypper once more, because this time we have a file depedency on the libecw stuff and it's obviously not listed in the rpm database. Last but not least I tried to put the gdal build on hold with 
zypper addlock gdal libgdal20
to ensure it's not removed on the next update. Other non-free tools Beside of those two issues I had to install a range of other non-free tools, but currently they work without further issues or modifications. One is Teamviewer (i686 multiarch rpm) and the other one is XnViewMP. XnView is also able to show ECW files, but only the smaller ones. It crashes on bigger ones but that's also the case on Windows. Then there is also (required by some Italian map related websites) the ugly Adobe Flash Plugin for Firefox, but that one is sadly still a widespread issue. We also tried to try out the nvidia graphic drivers but at the moment we could only get the build in Intel card to work. Usually the preferred solution from my point of view but sometimes we see rendering glitches and I'm not sure if it's the driver or something else. my personal take away I hate to admit it but it's nothing extraordinary that was requested here. But still it took me the better part of two evenings to figure everything out. And even now it's not properly integrated and doomed to fail any day due to various updates and changes in the surounding ecosystem. I've full sympathy for every average user that would give up after two hours of research and try&error on this journey. For the printer drivers I'm happy to blame Canon. The printer situation as a whole improved from my point of view during the last decade, but it's still a pain in the ass with the very short shelf life you usually see with consumer models. For the ECW case one could discuss if it would be legally possible and helpful to do ugly dlopen() stuff to dynamcially load the shared libs. But then again someone has to make his hands dirty during the build and discussions about the legal use of header files will be the next chapter (hello Oracle). It's just ugly. Actually I know too little about the world of image formats to judge if someone has a good reason to keep this format commercial or not. From my personal point of view it's not useful and maybe even morally wrong. Technically one could argue if it would make sense to keep a local copy of the gdal build in "/opt" and start QGIS with a modified library path to prefer the private gdal build. Not sure if that is any better. On the other hand there are evolving mechanism like flatpack that would ease the handling of such situations. Buth then again we would be catering non-free software. It feels a lot like giving up. While my private working environment is except for firmware blobs free, I now created for someone a real "FrankenSuSE" to satisfy his everyday needs. On the one hand we now have another mostly satisfied user of a mostly free operating system. On the other hand that was only possible by adding a vast amount of non-free software. For sure we did not win the war, I'm not even sure if we've won a single battle here. It's just frustrating to see what is required to get someone up and running. With my personal attitude towards open source software it even feels wrong to invest so much time into fiddling with non-free components. What is still missing We currently lack an image viewer that allows us to print only a selection of an image, which is useful to print parts of a map. That usually works with XnView on Windows but does not work with the Linux version at the moment. I also tried gwenview and geeqie and had the same issue. Not sure if it's maybe a bug in XnView or one of the Qt parts (gwenview is also Qt based). I did not research that yet. Update: I spent quite some time looking into open bug reports for geeqie and gwenview. Seems the feature to print only a section of an image is something new. I've created #374299 (gwenview) and #457 (geeqie). For XnView I expect it's a difference between XnViewMP (the portable version) and the Windows only XnView Classic. Needs to be clarified and it might be worth to try XnView Classic with wine. Maybe printing with wine via cups works, I found at least some results for it on the internet.

23 December 2016

Petter Reinholdtsen: Appstream just learned how to map hardware to packages too!

I received a very nice Christmas present today. As my regular readers probably know, I have been working on the the Isenkram system for many years. The goal of the Isenkram system is to make it easier for users to figure out what to install to get a given piece of hardware to work in Debian, and a key part of this system is a way to map hardware to packages. Isenkram have its own mapping database, and also uses data provided by each package using the AppStream metadata format. And today, AppStream in Debian learned to look up hardware the same way Isenkram is doing it, ie using fnmatch(): 
% appstreamcli what-provides modalias \
  usb:v1130p0202d0100dc00dsc00dp00ic03isc00ip00in00
Identifier: pymissile [generic]
Name: pymissile
Summary: Control original Striker USB Missile Launcher
Package: pymissile
% appstreamcli what-provides modalias usb:v0694p0002d0000
Identifier: libnxt [generic]
Name: libnxt
Summary: utility library for talking to the LEGO Mindstorms NXT brick
Package: libnxt
---
Identifier: t2n [generic]
Name: t2n
Summary: Simple command-line tool for Lego NXT
Package: t2n
---
Identifier: python-nxt [generic]
Name: python-nxt
Summary: Python driver/interface/wrapper for the Lego Mindstorms NXT robot
Package: python-nxt
---
Identifier: nbc [generic]
Name: nbc
Summary: C compiler for LEGO Mindstorms NXT bricks
Package: nbc
%
A similar query can be done using the combined AppStream and Isenkram databases using the isenkram-lookup tool: 
% isenkram-lookup usb:v1130p0202d0100dc00dsc00dp00ic03isc00ip00in00
pymissile
% isenkram-lookup usb:v0694p0002d0000
libnxt
nbc
python-nxt
t2n
%
You can find modalias values relevant for your machine using cat $(find /sys/devices/ -name modalias). If you want to make this system a success and help Debian users make the most of the hardware they have, please helpadd AppStream metadata for your package following the guidelines documented in the wiki. So far only 11 packages provide such information, among the several hundred hardware specific packages in Debian. The Isenkram database on the other hand contain 101 packages, mostly related to USB dongles. Most of the packages with hardware mapping in AppStream are LEGO Mindstorms related, because I have, as part of my involvement in the Debian LEGO team given priority to making sure LEGO users get proposed the complete set of packages in Debian for that particular hardware. The team also got a nice Christmas present today. The nxt-firmware package made it into Debian. With this package in place, it is now possible to use the LEGO Mindstorms NXT unit with only free software, as the nxt-firmware package contain the source and firmware binaries for the NXT brick. As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address 15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.

21 December 2016

Bits from Debian: Free FPGA programming with Debian

FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) are increasingly popular for data acquisition, device control and application acceleration. Debian now features a completely Free set of tools to program FPGA in Verilog, prepare the binary and have it executed on an affordable device. See http://wiki.debian.org/FPGA/Lattice for details. Readers familiar with the technology may rightly guess that this refers to the yosys package together with berkeley-abc, arachne-"Place-and-Route" and the icestorm tools to communicate with the device. The packages have been contributed by the Debian Science team. We hope this effort to support the FPGA community to collect an increasing number of skills to further smoothen the Open Source experience and lower the entry barriers for this tantalising technology.

18 December 2016

Johannes Schauer: Looking for self-hosted filesharing software

The owncloud package was removed from Debian unstable and testing. I am thus now looking for an alternative. Unfortunately, finding such replacement seems to be harder than I initially thought, even though I only use a very small subset of what owncloud provides. What I require is some software which allows me to:
  1. upload a directory of files of any type to my server (no "distributed" filesharing where I have to stay online with my laptop)
  2. share the content of that directory via HTTP (no requirement to install any additional software other than a web browser)
  3. let the share-links be private (no possibility to infer the location of other shares)
  4. allow users to browse that directory (image thumbnails or a photo gallery would be nice)
  5. allow me to allow anonymous users to upload their own content into that directory (also only requiring their web browser)
  6. already in Debian or easy to package and maintain due to low complexity (I don't have enough time to become the next "owncloud maintainer")
I thought this was a pretty simple task to solve but I am unable to find any software that fits above criteria. The below table shows the result of my research of what's currently available. The columns mark whether the respective software fulfills one of the six criteria from above.
Software 123456
owncloud
sparkleshare
dvcs-autosync
git annex assistant
syncthing
pydio
seafile
sandstorm.io
ipfs
bozon
droppy
Pydio, seafile and sandstorm.io look promising but they seem to be beasts similar in complexity to owncloud as they bring features like version tracking, office integration, wikis, synchronization across multiple devices or online editing of files which are features that I do not need. I would already be very happy if there was a script which would make it easy to create a hard-to-guess symlink to a directory with data tracked by git annex under my www-root and then generate some static HTML to provide a thumbnails view or a photo gallery. Unfortunately, even that solution would not be sufficient as it would still disallow public upload by anybody whom I would give the link to... If you know some software that meets my criteria or would like to submit corrections to above table, please shoot an email to josch@debian.org. Thanks!

30 November 2016

Joey Hess: drought

Drought here since August. The small cistern ran dry a month ago, which has never happened before. The large cistern was down to some 900 gallons. I don't use anywhere near the national average of 400 gallons per day. More like 10 gallons. So could have managed for a few more months. Still, this was worrying, especially as the area moved from severe to extreme drought according to the US Drought Monitor. Two days of solid rain fixed it, yay! The small cistern has already refilled, and the large will probably be full by tomorrow. The winds preceeding that same rain storm fanned the flames that destroyed Gatlinburg. Earlier, fire got within 10 miles of here, although that may have been some kind of controlled burn. Climate change is leading to longer duration weather events in this area. What tended to be a couple of dry weeks in the fall, has become multiple months of drought and weeks of fire. What might have been a few days of winter weather and a few inches of snow before the front moved through has turned into multiple weeks of arctic air, with multiple 1 ft snowfalls. What might have been a few scorching summer days has become a week of 100-110 degree temperatures. I've seen all that over the past several years. After this, I'm adding "additional, larger cistern" to my todo list. Also "larger fire break around house".

24 November 2016

Sven Hoexter: first ditch effort - LyX 2.2.2 in unstable build with Qt5

No, not about the latest NOFX record, though it's a great one. Buy it. ;) Took me a hell of a long time to get my head out of my arse and dive again into some Debian related work. Thanks to Nik for pushing me from time to time. So I've taken the time to upload LyX 2.2.2 to unstable and it's now build with Qt5. Afterall the package is still missing a lot of love, but I hope we've once again something for the upcoming stable release, that is close to the latest upstream stable release. If you use LyX please give it a try. For myself it's now the 6th year that I stopped using LyX after maintaining it for five years. And still I'm sponsoring the uploads and try to keep it at least functional. Strange how we sometimes take care of stuff even if we no longer have an active use for them.

13 November 2016

Andrew Cater: MiniDebconf Cambridge, ARM, 13/11/16 - Day 4 post 3

Just about to watch Daniel Silverstone demonstrating his new FPGA board.

Mystorm - open hardware - growing out of Icestorm. Programmable hardware - toolchains - and showing the hardware.

The Debian video team have advised that they are about to start the transcoding process - videos will be available soonish :)

http://video.debconf.org/minidebconf-low.webm


8 November 2016

Jonathan Carter: A few impressions of DebConf 16 in Cape Town

DebConf16 Group Photo

DebConf16 Group Photo by Jurie Senekal.

DebConf16 Firstly, thanks to everyone who came out and added their own uniqueness and expertise to the pool. The feedback received so far has been very positive and I feel that the few problems we did experience was dealt with very efficiently. Having a DebConf in your hometown is a great experience, consider a bid for hosting a DebConf in your city! DebConf16 Open Festival (5 August) The Open Festival (usually Debian Open Day) turned out pretty good. It was a collection of talks, a job fair, and some demos of what can be done with Debian. I particularly liked Hetzner s stand. I got to show off some 20 year old+ Super Mario skills and they had some fun brain teasers as well. It s really great to see a job stand that s so interactive and I think many companies can learn from them. The demo that probably drew the most attention was from my friend Georg who demoed some LulzBot Mini 3D Printers. They really seem to love Debian which is great! DebConf (6 August to 12 August) If I try to write up all my thoughts and feeling about DC16, I ll never get this post finished. Instead, here as some tweets from DebConf that other have written:


Day Trip We had 3 day trips: Brought to you by
orga

DebConf16 Orga Team.

See you in Montr al! DebConf17 dates: The DC17 sponsorship brochure contains a good deal of information, please share it with anyone who might be interested in sponsoring DebConf! Media

7 November 2016

Reproducible builds folks: Reproducible Builds: week 80 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday October 30 and Saturday November 5 2016: Upcoming events Reproducible work in other projects Bugs filed Reviews of unreproducible packages 81 package reviews have been added, 14 have been updated and 43 have been removed in this week, adding to our knowledge about identified issues. 3 issue types have been updated: 1 issue type has been removed: 1 issue type has been updated: Weekly QA work During of reproducibility testing, some FTBFS bugs have been detected and reported by: diffoscope development buildinfo.debian.net development tests.reproducible-builds.org Reproducible Debian: Misc. Also with thanks to Profitbricks sponsoring the "hardware" resources, Holger created a 13 core machine with 24GB RAM and 100GB SSD based storage so that Ximin can do further tests and development on GCC and other software on a fast machine. This week's edition was written by Chris Lamb, Ximin Luo, Vagrant Cascadian, Holger Levsen and reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC.

4 November 2016

Petter Reinholdtsen: My own self balancing Lego Segway

A while back I received a Gyro sensor for the NXT Mindstorms controller as a birthday present. It had been on my wishlist for a while, because I wanted to build a Segway like balancing lego robot. I had already built a simple balancing robot with the kids, using the light/color sensor included in the NXT kit as the balance sensor, but it was not working very well. It could balance for a while, but was very sensitive to the light condition in the room and the reflective properties of the surface and would fall over after a short while. I wanted something more robust, and had the gyro sensor from HiTechnic I believed would solve it on my wishlist for some years before it suddenly showed up as a gift from my loved ones. :) Unfortunately I have not had time to sit down and play with it since then. But that changed some days ago, when I was searching for lego segway information and came across a recipe from HiTechnic for building the HTWay, a segway like balancing robot. Build instructions and source code was included, so it was just a question of putting it all together. And thanks to the great work of many Debian developers, the compiler needed to build the source for the NXT is already included in Debian, so I was read to go in less than an hour. The resulting robot do not look very impressive in its simplicity:

Because I lack the infrared sensor used to control the robot in the design from HiTechnic, I had to comment out the last task (taskControl). I simply placed /* and */ around it get the program working without that sensor present. Now it balances just fine until the battery status run low:

Now we would like to teach it how to follow a line and take remote control instructions using the included Bluetooth receiver in the NXT. If you, like me, love LEGO and want to make sure we find the tools they need to work with LEGO in Debian and all our derivative distributions like Ubuntu, check out the LEGO designers project page and join the Debian LEGO team. Personally I own a RCX and NXT controller (no EV3), and would like to make sure the Debian tools needed to program the systems I own work as they should.

31 October 2016

Chris Lamb: Free software activities in October 2016

Here is my monthly update covering what I have been doing in the free software world (previously):

Debian & Reproducible builds

Whilst anyone can inspect the source code of free software for malicious flaws, most GNU/Linux distributions provide binary (or "compiled") packages to end users. The motivation behind the Reproducible Builds effort is to allow verification that no flaws have been introduced either maliciously and accidentally during this compilation process by promising identical binary packages are always generated from a given source.

  • Presented a talk entitled "Reproducible Builds" talk at Software Freedom Kosova, in Prishtina, Republic of Kosovo.

  • I filed my 2,500th bug in the Debian BTS: #840972: golang-google-appengine: accesses the internet during build.

  • In order to build packages reproducibly, one not only needs identical sources but also some external and sharable definition of the environment used for a particular build, stipulating such things such as the version numbers of the required build-dependencies. It is not currently clear how to handle these .buildinfo files after the archive software has processed them and how to make them available to the world so I started development on a proof-of-concept server to see what issues arise in practice. It is available at buildinfo.debian.net.

  • Chaired an IRC meeting and ran a poll to determine a regular time .

  • Submitted two design proposals to our wiki page.

  • Improvements to our tests.reproducible-builds.org testing framework:

    • Move regular "Scheduled in..." messages to the #debian-reproducible-changes IRC channel.
    • Use our log_info method instead of manual echo calls.
    • Correct an "all sources packages" "all source packages" typo.
    • Submit .buildinfo files to buildinfo.debian.net.
    • Create GPG key on nodes for buildinfo.debian.net at deploy time, not "lazily".

My work in the Reproducible Builds project was also covered in our weekly reports. (#75, #76, #77 & #78).

I also submitted 14 patches to fix specific reproducibility issues in bio-eagle, cf-python, fastx-toolkit, fpga-icestorm, http-icons, lambda-align, mypy, playitslowly, seabios, stumpwm, sympa, tj3, wims-help & xotcl.
Debian LTS

This month I have been paid to work 13 hours on Debian Long Term Support (LTS). In that time I did the following:
  • Seven days of "frontdesk" duties, triaging CVEs, etc.
  • Issued DLA 647-1 for freeimage correcting an out-of-bounds write vulnerability in the XMP image handling functionality.
  • Issued DLA 649-1 for python-django fixing a possible CSRF protection bypass on sites that use Google Analytics.
  • Issued DLA 654-1 for libxfixes preventing an integer overflow when a malicious client sent INT_MAX as a "length".
  • Issued DLA 662-1 for quagga correcting a programming error where two constants were confused that could cause stack overrun in IPv6 routing code.
  • Issued DLA 688-1 for cairo to prevent a DoS attack where a malicious SVG could generate invalid pointers.
Uploads
  • gunicorn:
    • 19.6.0-7 Set supplementary groups when changing uid, add an example systemd .service file to gunicorn-examples, and expand README.Debian to make it clearer what to do now that /etc/gunicorn.d has been removed.
    • 19.6.0-8 Correct previous supplementary groups patch to be compatible with Python 3.
  • redis:
    • 3:3.2.4-2 Ensure that sentinel's configuration actually writes to a pidfile location so that systemd can detect that the daemon has started.
    • 3:3.2.5-1 New upstream release.
  • libfiu:
    • 0.94-8 Fix FTBFS under Bash due to lack of && in debian/rules.
    • 0.94-9 Ensure the build is reproducible by sorting injected modules.
  • aptfs (2:0.8-2) Minor cosmetic changes.

NMUs
  • libxml-dumper-perl (0.81-1.2) Move away from a unsupported debhelper compat level 4.
  • netatalk (2.2.5-1.1) Drop build-dependency on hardening-includes.

QA uploads
  • anon-proxy (00.05.38+20081230-4) Move to a supported debhelper compatibility level 9.
  • ara (1.0.32) Make the build reproducible.
  • binutils-m68hc1x (1:2.18-8) Make the build reproducible & move to a supported debhelper compatibility level.
  • fracplanet (0.4.0-5) Make the build reproducible.
  • libnss-ldap (265-5) Make the build reproducible.
  • python-uniconvertor (1.1.5-3) Fix an "option release requires an argument" FTBFS. (#839375)
  • ripole (0.2.0+20081101.0215-3) Actually include the ripole binary in package. (#839919) & enable hardening flags.
  • twitter-bootstrap (2.0.2+dfsg-10) Fix incorrect copyright formatting when building under Bash. (#824592)
  • zpaq (1.10-3) Make the build reproducible.
Debian FTP Team

As a Debian FTP assistant I ACCEPTed 147 packages: ace-link, amazon-s2n, avy, basez, bootstrap-vz, bucklespring, camitk, carettah, cf-python, debian-reference, dfcgen-gtk, efivar, entropybroker, fakesleep, gall, game-data-packager, gitano, glare, gnome-panel, gnome-shell-extension-dashtodock, gnome-shell-extension-refreshwifi, gnome-shell-extension-remove-dropdown-arrows, golang-github-gogits-go-gogs-client, golang-github-gucumber-gucumber, golang-github-hlandau-buildinfo, golang-github-hlandau-dexlogconfig, golang-github-hlandau-goutils, golang-github-influxdata-toml, golang-github-jacobsa-crypto, golang-github-kjk-lzma, golang-github-miekg-dns, golang-github-minio-sha256-simd, golang-github-nfnt-resize, golang-github-nicksnyder-go-i18n, golang-github-pointlander-compress, golang-github-pointlander-jetset, golang-github-pointlander-peg, golang-github-rfjakob-eme, golang-github-thecreeper-go-notify, golang-github-twstrike-gotk3adapter, golang-github-unknwon-goconfig, golang-gopkg-dancannon-gorethink.v1, golang-petname, haskell-argon2, haskell-binary-parsers, haskell-bindings-dsl, haskell-deriving-compat, haskell-hackage-security, haskell-hcwiid, haskell-hsopenssl-x509-system, haskell-megaparsec, haskell-mono-traversable-instances, haskell-prim-uniq, haskell-raaz, haskell-readable, haskell-readline, haskell-relational-record, haskell-safe-exceptions, haskell-servant-client, haskell-token-bucket, haskell-zxcvbn-c, irclog2html, ironic-ui, lace, ledger, libdancer2-plugin-passphrase-perl, libdatetime-calendar-julian-perl, libdbix-class-optimisticlocking-perl, libdbix-class-schema-config-perl, libgeo-constants-perl, libgeo-ellipsoids-perl, libgeo-functions-perl, libgeo-inverse-perl, libio-async-loop-mojo-perl, libmojolicious-plugin-assetpack-perl, libmojolicious-plugin-renderfile-perl, libparams-validationcompiler-perl, libspecio-perl, libtest-time-perl, libtest2-plugin-nowarnings-perl, linux, lua-scrypt, mono, mutt-vc-query, neutron, node-ansi-font, node-buffer-equal, node-defaults, node-formatio, node-fs-exists-sync, node-fs.realpath, node-is-buffer, node-jison-lex, node-jju, node-jsonstream, node-kind-of, node-lex-parser, node-lolex, node-loud-rejection, node-random-bytes, node-randombytes, node-regex-not, node-repeat-string, node-samsam, node-set-value, node-source-map-support, node-spdx-correct, node-static-extend, node-test, node-to-object-path, node-type-check, node-typescript, node-unset-value, nutsqlite, opencv, openssl1.0, panoramisk, perl6, pg-rage-terminator, pg8000, plv8, puppet-module-oslo, pymoc, pyramid-jinja2, python-bitbucket-api, python-ceilometermiddleware, python-configshell-fb, python-ewmh, python-gimmik, python-jsbeautifier, python-opcua, python-pyldap, python-s3transfer, python-testing.common.database, python-testing.mysqld, python-testing.postgresql, python-wheezy.template, qspeakers, r-cran-nleqslv, recommonmark, rolo, shim, swift-im, tendermint-go-clist, tongue, uftrace & zaqar-ui.

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