(defhost lxc1.silentflame.com ()
  (os:debian-stable "bullseye" :amd64)
  (basic-props)
  (apt:installed "systemd" "netcat")
  (apache:https-vhost ...))
(defhost lxctest.laptop.silentflame.com ()
  (os:debian-stable "bullseye" :amd64)
  (apt:proxy "http://192.168.122.1:3142")
  (basic-props)
  (apt:installed "linux-image-amd64" "lxc")
  (lxc:usernet-usable-by "spwhitton" "lxcbr0")
  (lxc:user-containers-autostart "spwhitton")
  (lxc:user-container-for '(:additional-lines
                            ("lxc.net.0.type = veth"
                             "lxc.net.0.flags = up"
                             "lxc.net.0.link = lxcbr0"
                             ...))
                          "spwhitton"
                          lxc1.silentflame.com))
(defhost laptop.silentflame.com ()
  ...
  (libvirt:kvm-boots-chroot-for '(:always-deploys t)
                                lxctest.laptop.silentflame.com))

(defun route-athenet-container-veth (host)
  (let ((user (getenv "USERV_USER"))
        (peer (getenv "USERV_U_PEER"))
        (ip (car (uiop:command-line-arguments))))
    (unless (string-prefix-p (format nil "veth~D_" (getenv "USERV_UID")) peer)
      (error "~A does not belong to requester." peer))
    (unless (member (cons user ip) (get-hostattrs 'veth-ips host) :test #'equal)
      (error "~A does not have permission to route ~A." user ip))
    (flet ((r (&rest args)
             ;; Explicitly passing nil means UIOP will not invoke a shell.
             (run-program args :force-shell nil)))
      (eswitch ((getenv "USERV_U_HOOK_TYPE") :test #'string=)
        ("up"
         (apply #'r
                "sysctl" "-w"
                "net.ipv6.conf.all.forwarding=1"
                ...)
         (r "ip" "addr" "flush" "dev" peer "scope" "link")
         (r "ip" "-6" "addr" "add" "fe80::1/64" "dev" peer)
         (r "ip" "-6" "route" "add" (strcat ip "/128") "dev" peer)
         ...)
        ("down"
         ...
         (r "ip" "-6" "route" "del" (strcat ip "/128") "dev" peer))))))

(image-dumped
 "/usr/lib/userv/route-athenet-container-veth"
  (route-athenet-container-veth ,(intern (string-upcase (get-hostname)))))

What is Neo-Colonialism? The term "neo-colonialism" was coined by Kwame Nkrumah, first president of Ghana. In Neo-Colonialism, the Last Stage of Imperialism (1965), he wrote:

In place of colonialism, as the main instrument of imperialism, we have today neo-colonialism ... [which] like colonialism, is an attempt to export the social conflicts of the capitalist countries. ... The result of neo-colonialism is that foreign capital is used for the exploitation rather than for the development of the less developed parts of the world. Investment, under neo-colonialism, increases, rather than decreases, the gap between the rich and the poor countries of the world.

So basically, if colonialism is Europeans bringing genocide, war, and its religion to the Africa, Asia, and the Americas, neo-colonialism is the Americans (note the "n") bringing capitalism to the world. Before we see how this applies to the Internet, we must therefore make a detour into US history. This matters, because anyone would be hard-pressed to decouple neo-colonialism from the empire under which it evolves, and here we can only name the United States of America.

US Declaration of Independence Let's start with the United States declaration of independence (1776). Many Americans may roll their eyes at this, possibly because that declaration is not actually part of the US constitution and therefore may have questionable legal standing. Still, it was obviously a driving philosophical force in the founding of the nation. As its author, Thomas Jefferson, stated:

it was intended to be an expression of the American mind, and to give to that expression the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion

In that aging document, we find the following pearl:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

As a founding document, the Declaration still has an impact in the sense that the above quote has been called an:

"immortal declaration", and "perhaps [the] single phrase" of the American Revolutionary period with the greatest "continuing importance." (Wikipedia)

Let's read that "immortal declaration" again: "all men are created equal". "Men", in that context, is limited to a certain number of people, namely "property-owning or tax-paying white males, or about 6% of the population". Back when this was written, women didn't have the right to vote, and slavery was legal. Jefferson himself owned hundreds of slaves. The declaration was aimed at the King and was a list of grievances. A concern of the colonists was that the King:

has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

This is a clear mark of the frontier myth which paved the way for the US to exterminate and colonize the territory some now call the United States of America. The declaration of independence is obviously a colonial document, having being written by colonists. None of this is particularly surprising, historically, but I figured it serves as a good reminder of where the Internet is coming from, since it was born in the US.

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace Two hundred and twenty years later, in 1996, John Perry Barlow wrote a declaration of independence of cyberspace. At this point, (almost) everyone has a right to vote (including women), slavery was abolished (although some argue it still exists in the form of the prison system); the US has made tremendous progress. Surely this text will have aged better than the previous declaration it is obviously derived from. Let's see how it reads today and how it maps to how the Internet is actually built now.

Borders of Independence One of the key ideas that Barlow brings up is that "cyberspace does not lie within your borders". In that sense, cyberspace is the final frontier: having failed to colonize the moon, Americans turn inwards, deeper into technology, but still in the frontier ideology. And indeed, Barlow is one of the co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (the beloved EFF), founded six years prior. But there are other problems with this idea. As Wikipedia quotes:

The declaration has been criticized for internal inconsistencies.[9] The declaration's assertion that 'cyberspace' is a place removed from the physical world has also been challenged by people who point to the fact that the Internet is always linked to its underlying geography.[10]

And indeed, the Internet is definitely a physical object. First controlled and severely restricted by "telcos" like AT&T, it was somewhat "liberated" from that monopoly in 1982 when an anti-trust lawsuit broke up the monopoly, a key historical event that, one could argue, made the Internet possible. (From there on, "backbone" providers could start competing and emerge, and eventually coalesce into new monopolies: Google has a monopoly on search and advertisement, Facebook on communications for a few generations, Amazon on storage and computing, Microsoft on hardware, etc. Even AT&T is now pretty much as consolidated as it was before.) The point is: all those companies have gigantic data centers and intercontinental cables. And those are definitely prioritizing the western world, the heart of the empire. Take for example Google's latest 3,900 mile undersea cable: it does not connect Argentina to South Africa or New Zealand, it connects the US to UK and Spain. Hardly a revolutionary prospect.

Private Internet But back to the Declaration:

Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.

In Barlow's mind, the "public" is bad, and private is good, natural. Or, in other words, a "public construction project" is unnatural. And indeed, the modern "nature" of development is private: most of the Internet is now privately owned and operated. I must admit that, as an anarchist, I loved that sentence when I read it. I was rooting for "us", the underdogs, the revolutionaries. And, in a way, I still do: I am on the board of Koumbit and work for a non-profit that has pivoted towards censorship and surveillance evasion. Yet I cannot help but think that, as a whole, we have failed to establish that independence and put too much trust in private companies. It is obvious in retrospect, but it was not, 30 years ago. Now, the infrastructure of the Internet has zero accountability to traditional political entities supposedly representing the people, or even its users. The situation is actually worse than when the US was founded (e.g. "6% of the population can vote"), because the owners of the tech giants are only a handful of people who can override any decision. There's only one Amazon CEO, he's called Jeff Bezos, and he has total control. (Update: Bezos actually ceded the CEO role to Andy Jassy, AWS and Amazon music founder, while remaining executive chairman. I would argue that, as the founder and the richest man on earth, he still has strong control over Amazon.)

Social Contract Here's another claim of the Declaration:

We are forming our own Social Contract.

I remember the early days, back when "netiquette" was a word, it did feel we had some sort of a contract. Not written in standards of course -- or barely (see RFC1855) -- but as a tacit agreement. How wrong we were. One just needs to look at Facebook to see how problematic that idea is on a global network. Facebook is the quintessential "hacker" ideology put in practice. Mark Zuckerberg explicitly refused to be "arbiter of truth" which implicitly means he will let lies take over its platforms. He also sees Facebook as place where everyone is equal, something that echoes the Declaration:

We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.

(We note, in passing, the omission of gender in that list, also mirroring the infamous "All men are created equal" claim of the US declaration.) As the Wall Street Journal's (WSJ) Facebook files later shown, both of those "contracts" have serious limitations inside Facebook. There are VIPs who systematically bypass moderation systems including fascists and rapists. Drug cartels and human traffickers thrive on the platform. Even when Zuckerberg himself tried to tame the platform -- to get people vaccinated or to make it healthier -- he failed: "vaxxer" conspiracies multiplied and Facebook got angrier. This is because the "social contract" behind Facebook and those large companies is a lie: their concern is profit and that means advertising, "engagement" with the platform, which causes increased anxiety and depression in teens, for example. Facebook's response to this is that they are working really hard on moderation. But the truth is that even that system is severely skewed. The WSJ showed that Facebook has translators for only 50 languages. It's a surprisingly hard to count human languages but estimates range the number of distinct languages between 2500 and 7000. So while 50 languages seems big at first, it's actually a tiny fraction of the human population using Facebook. Taking the first 50 of the Wikipedia list of languages by native speakers we omit languages like Dutch (52), Greek (74), and Hungarian (78), and that's just a few random nations picks from Europe. As an example, Facebook has trouble moderating even a major language like Arabic. It censored content from legitimate Arab news sources when they mentioned the word al-Aqsa because Facebook associates it with the al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades when they were talking about the Al-Aqsa Mosque... This bias against Arabs also shows how Facebook reproduces the American colonizer politics. The WSJ also pointed out that Facebook spends only 13% of its moderation efforts outside of the US, even if that represents 90% of its users. Facebook spends three more times moderating on "brand safety", which shows its priority is not the safety of its users, but of the advertisers.

Military Internet Sergey Brin and Larry Page are the Lewis and Clark of our generation. Just like the latter were sent by Jefferson (the same) to declare sovereignty over the entire US west coast, Google declared sovereignty over all human knowledge, with its mission statement "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful". (It should be noted that Page somewhat questioned that mission but only because it was not ambitious enough, Google having "outgrown" it.) The Lewis and Clark expedition, just like Google, had a scientific pretext, because that is what you do to colonize a world, presumably. Yet both men were military and had to receive scientific training before they left. The Corps of Discovery was made up of a few dozen enlisted men and a dozen civilians, including York an African American slave owned by Clark and sold after the expedition, with his final fate lost in history. And just like Lewis and Clark, Google has a strong military component. For example, Google Earth was not originally built at Google but is the acquisition of a company called Keyhole which had ties with the CIA. Those ties were brought inside Google during the acquisition. Google's increasing investment inside the military-industrial complex eventually led Google to workers organizing a revolt although it is currently unclear to me how much Google is involved in the military apparatus. Other companies, obviously, do not have such reserve, with Microsoft, Amazon, and plenty of others happily bidding on military contracts all the time.

Spreading the Internet I am obviously not the first to identify colonial structures in the Internet. In an article titled The Internet as an Extension of Colonialism, Heather McDonald correctly identifies fundamental problems with the "development" of new "markets" of Internet "consumers", primarily arguing that it creates a digital divide which creates a "lack of agency and individual freedom":

Many African people have gained access to these technologies but not the freedom to develop content such as web pages or social media platforms in their own way. Digital natives have much more power and therefore use this to create their own space with their own norms, shaping their online world according to their own outlook.

But the digital divide is certainly not the worst problem we have to deal with on the Internet today. Going back to the Declaration, we originally believed we were creating an entirely new world:

This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different.

How I dearly wished that was true. Unfortunately, the Internet is not that different from the offline world. Or, to be more accurate, the values we have embedded in the Internet, particularly of free speech absolutism, sexism, corporatism, and exploitation, are now exploding outside of the Internet, into the "real" world. The Internet was built with free software which, fundamentally, was based on quasi-volunteer labour of an elite force of white men with obviously too much time on their hands (and also: no children). The mythical writing of GCC and Emacs by Richard Stallman is a good example of this, but the entirety of the Internet now seems to be running on random bits and pieces built by hit-and-run programmers working on their copious free time. Whenever any of those fails, it can compromise or bring down entire systems. (Heck, I wrote this article on my day off...) This model of what is fundamentally "cheap labour" is spreading out from the Internet. Delivery workers are being exploited to the bone by apps like Uber -- although it should be noted that workers organise and fight back. Amazon workers are similarly exploited beyond belief, forbidden to take breaks until they pee in bottles, with ambulances nearby to carry out the bodies. During peak of the pandemic, workers were being dangerously exposed to the virus in warehouses. All this while Amazon is basically taking over the entire economy. The Declaration culminates with this prophecy:

We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts.

This prediction, which first felt revolutionary, is now chilling.

Colonial Internet The Internet is, if not neo-colonial, plain colonial. The US colonies had cotton fields and slaves, we have disposable cell phones and Foxconn workers. Canada has its cultural genocide, Facebook has his own genocides in Ethiopia, Myanmar, and mob violence in India. Apple is at least implicitly accepting the Uyghur genocide. And just like the slaves of the colony, those atrocities are what makes the empire run. The Declaration actually ends like this, a quote which I have in my fortune cookies file:

We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.

That is still inspiring to me. But if we want to make "cyberspace" more humane, we need to decolonize it. Work on cyberpeace instead of cyberwar. Establish clear code of conduct, discuss ethics, and question your own privileges, biases, and culture. For me the first step in decolonizing my own mind is writing this article. Breaking up tech monopolies might be an important step, but it won't be enough: we have to do a culture shift as well, and that's the hard part.

Appendix: an apology to Barlow I kind of feel bad going through Barlow's declaration like this, point by point. It is somewhat unfair, especially since Barlow passed away a few years ago and cannot mount a response (even humbly assuming that he might read this). But then again, he himself recognized he was a bit too "optimistic" in 2009, saying: "we all get older and smarter":

I'm an optimist. In order to be libertarian, you have to be an optimist. You have to have a benign view of human nature, to believe that human beings left to their own devices are basically good. But I'm not so sure about human institutions, and I think the real point of argument here is whether or not large corporations are human institutions or some other entity we need to be thinking about curtailing. Most libertarians are worried about government but not worried about business. I think we need to be worrying about business in exactly the same way we are worrying about government.

And, in a sense, it was a little naive to expect Barlow to not be a colonist. Barlow is, among many things, a cattle rancher who grew up on a colonial ranch in Wyoming. The ranch was founded in 1907 by his great uncle, 17 years after the state joined the Union, and only a generation or two after the Powder River War (1866-1868) and Black Hills War (1876-1877) during which the US took over lands occupied by Lakota, Cheyenne, Arapaho, and other native American nations, in some of the last major First Nations Wars.

Appendix: further reading There is another article that almost has the same title as this one: Facebook and the New Colonialism. (Interestingly, the <title> tag on the article is actually "Facebook the Colonial Empire" which I also find appropriate.) The article is worth reading in full, but I loved this quote so much that I couldn't resist reproducing it here:

Representations of colonialism have long been present in digital landscapes. ( Even Super Mario Brothers, the video game designer Steven Fox told me last year. You run through the landscape, stomp on everything, and raise your flag at the end. ) But web-based colonialism is not an abstraction. The online forces that shape a new kind of imperialism go beyond Facebook.

It goes on:

Consider, for example, digitization projects that focus primarily on English-language literature. If the web is meant to be humanity s new Library of Alexandria, a living repository for all of humanity s knowledge, this is a problem. So is the fact that the vast majority of Wikipedia pages are about a relatively tiny square of the planet. For instance, 14 percent of the world s population lives in Africa, but less than 3 percent of the world s geotagged Wikipedia articles originate there, according to a 2014 Oxford Internet Institute report.

And they introduce another definition of Neo-colonialism, while warning about abusing the word like I am sort of doing here:

I m loath to toss around words like colonialism but it s hard to ignore the family resemblances and recognizable DNA, to wit, said Deepika Bahri, an English professor at Emory University who focuses on postcolonial studies. In an email, Bahri summed up those similarities in list form:

1. ride in like the savior
2. bandy about words like equality, democracy, basic rights
3. mask the long-term profit motive (see 2 above)
4. justify the logic of partial dissemination as better than nothing
5. partner with local elites and vested interests
6. accuse the critics of ingratitude

In the end, she told me, if it isn t a duck, it shouldn t quack like a duck.

Another good read is the classic Code and other laws of cyberspace (1999, free PDF) which is also critical of Barlow's Declaration. In "Code is law", Lawrence Lessig argues that:

computer code (or "West Coast Code", referring to Silicon Valley) regulates conduct in much the same way that legal code (or "East Coast Code", referring to Washington, D.C.) does (Wikipedia)

And now it feels like the west coast has won over the east coast, or maybe it recolonized it. In any case, Internet now christens emperors.

Dropdown for GitHub workflows input parameters Sometimes when we look at CI/CD tools embedded within git-based software repository manager like GitHub, GitLab or Bitbucket, we ran into a lack of some features. This time me and my DevOps/SRE team were facing a pain of not being able to have the option to create drop-downs within GitHub workflows using input parameters. Although this functionality is already available on other platforms such as Bitbucket, the specific client we were working on stored the code inside GitHub. At first I thought that someone has already solved this problem somehow, but doing an extensive search on the internet I found several angry GitHub users opening requests within the Support Community and even in the stack overflow. So I decided to create a solution for this, always thinking about simplicity and in a way that makes it easy to get this missing functionality. I started by creating an input array pattern using commas and using a tag (the selector) e.g brackets as the default value marker. Here is an example of what an input string would look like:

name: gh-action-dropdown-list-input
on:
  workflow_dispatch:
    inputs:
      environment:
        description: 'Environment'
        required: true
        default: 'dev,staging,[uat],prod'

Now the final question that would turn out to be the most complicated to deal with. How can I change the GitHub Actions interface to replace the input pattern we created earlier to a dropdown? The simplest answer I thought was to create a chrome and firefox extension that would do all this logic behind the scenes and replace the HTML input element with the selected tag containing the array values and leaving the tag value (selector) always as the default. All code was developed in pure JavaScript, open-source licensed under Apache 2.0 and available at https://github.com/arthurbdiniz/gh-action-dropdown-list-input.

Install extension

• Chrome
• Firefox

Once installed, the extension is ready to use and the final result we see is the Actions interface with drop-downs. :)

Configuring selectors Go to the top right corner of the browser you are using and click on the extension logo. A screen will popup with tag options. Choose the right tags for you and save it.

This action might require reloading the GitHub workflow tab.

---

Have fun using drop-downs inside GitHub. If you liked this project please share this post and if possible star within the repository. Also feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/arthurbdiniz

References

• https://github.community/t/can-workflow-dispatch-input-be-option-list/127338
• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/69296314/dropdown-for-github-workflows-input-parameters

• Adopt and introduce a new Openstack component into our cloud: Manila this was the right choice if we were interested in a general NFS as a service offering for our Cloud VPS users.
• Put the data on Cinder volumes and serve NFS from a couple of virtual machines created by hand this was the right choice if we wanted something that required low effort to engineer and adopt.

• #1946002 generic driver: service instance ends up with 2 ports in the admin network
• #1945463 generic driver: service instance name template is ignored
• #1944980 generic driver: support additional SSH options for service instance
• #1944696 [DOC] document additional generic driver configuration options

• https://review.opendev.org/c/openstack/manila/+/810702
• https://review.opendev.org/c/openstack/manila/+/810719
• https://review.opendev.org/c/openstack/manila/+/811736

• Abhijith PA has returned hours and marked themselves inactive, at least for the time being. He did 0h out of 14h, carried over 14h and returned 28h.
• Adrian Bunk did 19.5h (out of 24.75h assigned and 12.75 from August), carrying over 18h to October.
• Anton Gladky did 12h (out of 12h assigned).
• Ben Hutchings did 2h (out of 12.75h assigned and 19.25h from August), thus carrying over 30h to October.
• Chris Lamb did 18h (out of 18h assigned).
• Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did not report back about their work so we assume they did nothing (out of 5.5h assigned plus 74.5h from August), thus is carrying over 80h for October.
• Holger Levsen did 3h (out of 12h assigned) and gave back 9h and carried over 3h.
• Jeremiah Foster worked 10 hours (out of 20h assigned) on LTS work, carrying over 10h.
• Lee Garrett did not report back about their work so we assume they did nothing (out of 24.75h assigned and 23.75 from August), thus is carrying over 48.50h for October.
• Markus Koschany did 43.5h (out of 24.75h assigned and 18.75h from August)
• Neil Williams did 24.5h (out of 24.75h assigned)
• Roberto C. S nchez did 6h (out of 24.75h assigned and gave back 18.75h)
• Sylvain Beucler did 27h (out of 24.75h assigned).
• Thorsten Alteholz did 24.75h (out of 24.75h assigned).
• Utkarsh Gupta did 24.75h (out of 24.75h assigned) but did not publish his report yet.
• Ola Lundqvist did 2 hours (out of 21h carried over from previous months), and is thus carrying 19h for October.

• Platinum sponsors:
  • TOSHIBA (for 73 months)
  • GitHub (for 64 months)
  • Civil Infrastructure Platform (CIP) (for 41 months)
• Gold sponsors:
  • Roche Diagnostics International AG (for 84 months)
  • Linode (for 78 months)
  • Babiel GmbH (for 67 months)
  • Plat Home (for 67 months)
  • University of Oxford (for 23 months)
  • Deveryware (for 10 months)
  • VyOS
• Silver sponsors:
  • The Positive Internet Company (for 89 months)
  • Domeneshop AS (for 88 months)
  • Nantes M tropole (for 82 months)
  • Univention GmbH (for 74 months)
  • Universit Jean Monnet de St Etienne (for 74 months)
  • Ribbon Communications, Inc. (for 68 months)
  • Exonet B.V. (for 58 months)
  • Leibniz Rechenzentrum (for 52 months)
  • CINECA (for 41 months)
  • Minist re de l Europe et des Affaires trang res (for 35 months)
  • Cloudways Ltd (for 24 months)
  • Dinahosting SL (for 22 months)
  • Bauer Xcel Media Deutschland KG (for 17 months)
  • Platform.sh (for 17 months)
  • Moxa Intelligence Co., Ltd. (for 11 months)
  • sipgate GmbH (for 8 months)
  • OVH US LLC (for 6 months)
  • Tilburg University (for 6 months)
• Bronze sponsors:
  • Evolix (for 89 months)
  • Seznam.cz, a.s. (for 89 months)
  • Linuxhotel GmbH (for 86 months)
  • Intevation GmbH (for 85 months)
  • Daevel SARL (for 84 months)
  • Bitfolk LTD (for 83 months)
  • Megaspace Internet Services GmbH (for 83 months)
  • Greenbone Networks GmbH (for 82 months)
  • NUMLOG (for 82 months)
  • WinGo AG (for 81 months)
  • Ecole Centrale de Nantes LHEEA (for 78 months)
  • Entr ouvert (for 73 months)
  • Adfinis AG (for 70 months)
  • Laboratoire LEGI UMR 5519 / CNRS (for 65 months)
  • Tesorion (for 65 months)
  • GNI MEDIA (for 64 months)
  • Bearstech (for 56 months)
  • LiHAS (for 56 months)
  • People Doc (for 52 months)
  • Catalyst IT Ltd (for 51 months)
  • Demarcq SAS (for 45 months)
  • Universit Grenoble Alpes (for 31 months)
  • TouchWeb SAS (for 23 months)
  • SPiN AG (for 19 months)
  • CoreFiling (for 15 months)
  • Institut des sciences cognitives Marc Jeannerod (for 10 months)
  • Observatoire des Sciences de l Univers de Grenoble (for 7 months)
  • Tem Innovations GmbH
  • WordFinder.pro

• Remove RRA_SET_LIBDIR macro, previously used by PAM modules to guess the install path.
• Fix RRA_SET_LDFLAGS to always use the multilib directory if it exists, required for OpenSSL 3.0 support.
• Perl tests and test support libraries now require Perl 5.10 or later.
• Update RRA_LIB_PYTHON to use sysconfig by preference.
• Fix SUN_LEN on macOS X Big Sur.
• Add support for testing pam_end argments to the PAM testing framework.
• Fix error handling in portable k_haspag replacement if getgroups fails.
• Avoid deprecation warnings in Autoconf macros from Autoconf 2.71.
• Work around fallout for Perl::Critic tests from the renaming of Perl::Critic::Freenode to Perl::Critic::Community, and suppress warnings that I haven't found useful.
• Tweak the perltidy configuration.
• Add a new t/docs/changes.t Perl module test for the format of Changes files.

Changes in version 0.0.14 (2021-10-17)

• Updated continuous integration to run on Linux only.
• Edited checkNonAscii.cpp for readability.
• More robust title display in intradayMarketMonitor.R.
• New C++-based function to read and convert encoding via the R-supplied iconv library, noted a potential variability.
• New function wday returning day of the week as integer.
• The signature to as.data.table was standardized.
• A new function rollMinMax was added illustrating use of the NumVec class from tidyCpp.
• The configure script can record the last commit date and sha1 to automate timestamping builds, but not activated in this release.
• checkCRANStatus() now works correctly for single-package lookups (Jordan Mark Barbone in #4).

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

> library(RcppQuantuccia)
> setCalendar("UnitedStates/FederalReserve")
> getHolidays(as.Date("2022-06-01"), as.Date("2022-06-30"))
[1] "2022-06-20"
> 

Changes in version 0.0.4 (2021-10-12)

• Allow for 'Null' calendar without weekends or holidays
• Switch CI use to r-ci
• Updated UnitedStates calendar to current QuantLib calendar
• Small updates to DESCRIPTION and README.md

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

source /path/to/collab-qa-tools/activate.sh

cqa-scanlogs   grep -v OK > todo

split --lines=30 --numeric-suffixes todo todo

cqa-fetchbugs --TODO=todo01

cqa-annotate --TODO=todo01

#!/bin/sh
set -eu
for todo in $@; do
  # force downloading bugs
  awk ' print(".bugs." $1) ' "$ todo "   xargs rm -f
  cqa-fetchbugs --TODO="$ todo "
  cqa-annotate \
    --template=template.txt.jinja2 \
    --TODO="$ todo "
done

From:   fullname   <  email  >
To: submit@bugs.debian.org
Subject:   package  : FTBFS with ruby3.0:   summary  
Source:   package  
Version:   version   split:'+rebuild'   first  
Severity: serious
Justification: FTBFS
Tags: bookworm sid ftbfs
User: debian-ruby@lists.debian.org
Usertags: ruby3.0
Hi,
We are about to enable building against ruby3.0 on unstable. During a test
rebuild,   package   was found to fail to build in that situation.
To reproduce this locally, you need to install ruby-all-dev from experimental
on an unstable system or build chroot.
Relevant part (hopefully):
 % for line in extract % >   line  
 % endfor % 
The full build log is available at
https://people.debian.org/~kanashiro/ruby3.0/round2/builds/3/  package  /  filename   replace:".log",".build.txt"  

######## ruby-cocaine_0.5.8-1.1+rebuild1633376733_amd64.log ########
--------- Error:
     Failure/Error: undef_method :exitstatus
     FrozenError:
       can't modify frozen object: pid 2351759 exit 0
     # ./spec/support/unsetting_exitstatus.rb:4:in  undef_method'
     # ./spec/support/unsetting_exitstatus.rb:4:in  singleton class'
     # ./spec/support/unsetting_exitstatus.rb:3:in  assuming_no_processes_have_been_run'
     # ./spec/cocaine/errors_spec.rb:55:in  block (2 levels) in <top (required)>'
Deprecation Warnings:
Using  should  from rspec-expectations' old  :should  syntax without explicitly enabling the syntax is deprecated. Use the new  :expect  syntax or explicitly enable  :should  with  config.expect_with(:rspec)    c  c.syntax = :should   instead. Called from /<<PKGBUILDDIR>>/spec/cocaine/command_line/runners/backticks_runner_spec.rb:19:in  block (2 levels) in <top (required)>'.
If you need more of the backtrace for any of these deprecations to
identify where to make the necessary changes, you can configure
 config.raise_errors_for_deprecations! , and it will turn the
deprecation warnings into errors, giving you the full backtrace.
1 deprecation warning total
Finished in 6.87 seconds (files took 2.68 seconds to load)
67 examples, 1 failure
Failed examples:
rspec ./spec/cocaine/errors_spec.rb:54 # When an error happens does not blow up if running the command errored before execution
/usr/bin/ruby3.0 -I/usr/share/rubygems-integration/all/gems/rspec-support-3.9.3/lib:/usr/share/rubygems-integration/all/gems/rspec-core-3.9.2/lib /usr/share/rubygems-integration/all/gems/rspec-core-3.9.2/exe/rspec --pattern ./spec/\*\*/\*_spec.rb --format documentation failed
ERROR: Test "ruby3.0" failed:
----------------
ERROR: Test "ruby3.0" failed:      Failure/Error: undef_method :exitstatus
----------------
package: ruby-cocaine
lines: 30
------------------------------------------------------------------------
s: skip
i: ignore this package permanently
r: report new bug
f: view full log
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Action [s i r f]:

• s - skip this package and do nothing. You can run cqa-annotate again later and come back to it.
• i - ignore this package completely. New runs of cqa-annotate won't ask about it again. This is useful if the package only fails in your rebuilds due to another package, and would just work when that other package gets fixes. In the Ruby transition this happens when A depends on B, while B builds a C extension and failed to build against the new Ruby. So once B is fixed, A should just work (in principle). But even if A would even have problems of its own, we can't really know before B is fixed so we can retry A.
• r - report a bug. cqa-annotate will expand the template with the data from the current log, and feed it to mutt. This is currently a limitation: you have to use mutt to report bugs. After you report the bug, cqa-annotate will ask if it should edit the TODO file. In my opinion it's best to not do this, and annotate the package with a bug number when you have one (see below).
• f - view the full log. This is useful when the extract displayed doesn't have enough info, or you want to inspect something that happened earlier (or later) during the build.

----------------
ERROR: Test "ruby3.0" failed:      Failure/Error: undef_method :exitstatus
----------------
package: ruby-cocaine
lines: 30
------------------------------------------------------------------------
s: skip
i: ignore this package permanently
1: 996206 serious ruby-cocaine: FTBFS with ruby3.0: ERROR: Test "ruby3.0" failed:      Failure/Error: undef_method :exitstatus  
r: report new bug
f: view full log
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Action [s i 1 r f]:

The Lotus story so far My very first experience with water flowering plants was pretty good. I learnt a good deal of things; from setting up the pond, germinating the lotus seeds, setting up the right soil, witnessing the growth of the lotus plant, fish eco-system to take care of the pond. Overall, a lot of things learnt. But I couldn t succeed in getting the Lotus flower. A lot many reasons. The granite container developed some leakage, which I had to fix by emptying it, which might have caused some shock to the lotus. But more than that, in my understanding, the reason for not being able to flower the lotus, was the amount of sunlight. From what I have learned, these plants need a minimum of 6-8 hrs of sunlight to really give you with the flowering result, whereas the setup of my pond was on the ground with hardly 3-4 hrs of sun. And that too, with all the plants growing, resulted in indirect sunlight.

Lotus to Lily For my new setup, I chose a large oval container. And this one, I placed on my terrace, carefully choosing a spot where it d get 6-8 hrs of very bright sun on usual days. Other than that, the rest of the setup is pretty similar to my previous setup in the garden. Guppies, Solar Water Fountain etc.

Initial lily pond setup

The good thing about the terrace is that the setup gets ample amount of sun. You can see that in the picture above, with the amount of algae that has been formed. Something that is vital for the plant s ecosystem. I must thank my wonderful neighbor who kindly shared a sapling from their lily plant. They already had had success with flowering the lily. So I had high hopes to see the day come when I d be happy to write down my experience in this blog post. Though, a lot of patience is needed. I got the lily some time in January this year. And it blossomed now, in October. So, here s me sharing my happiness here, in particular order of how I documented the process.

Monday morning greeted with a blossomed lily

Lily Blossom Closeup

Beautiful water reflection

Dawn to Dusk The other thing that I learned in this whole lily episode is that the flower goes back to sleeping at dusk. And back to flowering again at dawn. There s so much to learn in the surrounding, only if you spare some time to the little things with mother nature.

Lily status at dusk

Lily the next day

Not sure how long this phenomenon is to last, but overall witnessing this whole process has been mesmerizing. This past week has been great.

# For more information on what jobs are run see:
# https://salsa.debian.org/salsa-ci-team/pipeline
#
---
include:
  - https://salsa.debian.org/salsa-ci-team/pipeline/raw/master/salsa-ci.yml
  - https://salsa.debian.org/salsa-ci-team/pipeline/raw/master/pipeline-jobs.yml

variables:
   RELEASE: 'unstable'
   SALSA_CI_COMPONENTS: 'main contrib non-free'

variables:
   RELEASE: 'unstable'
   SALSA_CI_COMPONENTS: 'main contrib non-free'
   SALSA_CI_DISABLE_BUILD_PACKAGE_I386: 1

https://salsa.debian.org/<team>/<project>/-/settings/ci_cd

Key: SALSA_CI_EXTRA_REPOSITORY Value: deb https://deb.debian.org/debian/ sid contrib non-free

Changes in RQuantLib version 0.4.14 (2021-10-06)

• Changes in RQuantLib code:
  • Several new calendars were added (Dirk in #159 closing #155)
• Changes in RQuantLib package and setup:
  • Docker containers are now updated on a monthly schedule via GitHub Actions
  • The configure files were updated to the standard of version 2.69 following a CRAN request

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

Software signing is not a new problem, so there must be some solution already, right? Yes, but signing software and maintaining keys is very difficult especially for non-security folks and UX of existing tools such as PGP leave much to be desired. That s why we need something like sigstore - an easy to use software/toolset for signing software artifacts.

Some time ago I checked Signal s reproducibility and it failed. I asked others to test in case I did something wrong, but nobody made any reports. Since then I tried to test the Google Play Store version of the apk against one I compiled myself, and that doesn t match either.

Most users are not capable of building from source code themselves, but we can at least get them able enough to check signatures and shasums. When reputable people who can tell everyone they were able to reproduce the project s build, others at least have a secondary source of validation.

Distribution work Fr d ric Pierret announced a new testing service at beta.tests.reproducible-builds.org, showing actual rebuilds of binaries distributed by both the Debian and Qubes distributions. In Debian specifically, however, 51 reviews of Debian packages were added, 31 were updated and 31 were removed this month to our database of classified issues. As part of this, Chris Lamb refreshed a number of notes, including the build_path_in_record_file_generated_by_pybuild_flit_plugin issue. Elsewhere in Debian, Roland Clobus posted his Fourth status update about reproducible live-build ISO images in Jenkins to our mailing list, which mentions (amongst other things) that:

• All major configurations are still built regularly using live-build and bullseye.
• All major configurations are reproducible now; Jenkins is green.
  • I ve worked around the issue for the Cinnamon image.
  • The patch was accepted and released within a few hours.
• My main focus for the last month was on the live-build tool itself.
  • It will properly use the proxy for all HTTP traffic.

Related to this, there was continuing discussion on how to embed/encode the build metadata for the Debian live images which were being worked on by Roland Clobus.
Ariadne Conill published another detailed blog post related to various security initiatives within the Alpine Linux distribution. After summarising some conventional security work being done (eg. with sudo and the release of OpenSSH version 3.0), Ariadne included another section on reproducible builds: The main blocker [was] determining what to do about storing the build metadata so that a build environment can be recreated precisely . Finally, Bernhard M. Wiedemann posted his monthly reproducible builds status report.

Community news On our website this month, Bernhard M. Wiedemann fixed some broken links [ ] and Holger Levsen made a number of changes to the Who is Involved? page [ ][ ][ ]. On our mailing list, Magnus Ihse Bursie started a thread with the subject Reproducible builds on Java, which begins as follows:

I m working for Oracle in the Build Group for OpenJDK which is primary responsible for creating a built artifact of the OpenJDK source code. [ ] For the last few years, we have worked on a low-effort, background-style project to make the build of OpenJDK itself building reproducible. We ve come far, but there are still issues I d like to address. [ ]

diffoscope diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility. Not only can it locate and diagnose reproducibility issues, it can provide human-readable diffs from many kinds of binary formats. This month, Chris Lamb prepared and uploaded versions 183, 184 and 185 as well as performed significant triaging of merge requests and other issues in addition to making the following changes:

• New features:
  • Support a newer format version of the R language s .rds files. [ ]
  • Update tests for OCaml 4.12. [ ]
  • Add a missing format_class import. [ ]
• Bug fixes:
  • Don t call close_archive when garbage collecting Archive instances, unless open_archive definitely returned successfully. This prevents, for example, an AttributeError where PGPContainer s cleanup routines were rightfully assuming that its temporary directory had actually been created. [ ]
  • Fix (and test) the comparison of R language s .rdb files after refactoring temporary directory handling. [ ]
  • Ensure that RPM archives exists in the Debian package description, regardless of whether python3-rpm is installed or not at build time. [ ]
• Codebase improvements:
  • Use our assert_diff routine in tests/comparators/test_rdata.py. [ ]
  • Move diffoscope.versions to diffoscope.tests.utils.versions. [ ]
  • Reformat a number of modules with Black. [ ][ ]

However, the following changes were also made:

• Mattia Rizzolo:
  • Fix an autopkgtest caused by the androguard module not being in the (expected) python3-androguard Debian package. [ ]
  • Appease a shellcheck warning in debian/tests/control.sh. [ ]
  • Ignore a warning from h5py in our tests that doesn t concern us. [ ]
  • Drop a trailing .1 from the Standards-Version field as it s required. [ ]
• Zbigniew J drzejewski-Szmek:
  • Stop using the deprecated distutils.spawn.find_executable utility. [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ]
  • Adjust an LLVM-related test for LLVM version 13. [ ]
  • Update invocations of llvm-objdump. [ ]
  • Adjust a test with a one-byte text file for file version 5.40. [ ]

And, finally, Benjamin Peterson added a --diff-context option to control unified diff context size [ ] and Jean-Romain Garnier fixed the Macho comparator for architectures other than x86-64 [ ].

Upstream patches The Reproducible Builds project detects, dissects and attempts to fix as many currently-unreproducible packages as possible. We endeavour to send all of our patches upstream where appropriate. This month, we wrote a large number of such patches, including:

• Bernhard M. Wiedemann:
  • gtk4 (date-related issue)
  • build-compare (random tempfile problem)
  • itinerary (time-related build failure)
• Chris Lamb:
  • #993950 filed against lcalc.
  • #993952 filed against htscodecs.
  • #994123 filed against osdlyrics.
  • #994976 filed against xtermcontrol.
  • #994978 filed against rust-insta.
  • #994979 filed against python-tomli.
  • #995258 filed against python-pairix.
  • #995259 filed against python-pybedtools (forwarded upstream).
• Simon McVittie:
  • #993673 filed against clazy.
  • #993674 filed against ga.
  • #993675 filed against opensmtpd.
  • #993681 filed against sphinxcontrib-programoutput.
• Vagrant Cascadian:
  • #995092 filed against guile-3.0.
  • #995131 filed against nut.
  • #995143 filed against xdmf.
  • #995145 filed against cyrus-sasl2.
  • #995211 filed against libbrahe.
  • #995217 filed against maildirsync.
  • #995401 filed against canna.
  • #990246 filed against vlc (forwarded upstream [ ][ ])

Testing framework The Reproducible Builds project runs a testing framework at tests.reproducible-builds.org, to check packages and other artifacts for reproducibility. This month, the following changes were made:

• Holger Levsen:
  • Drop my package rebuilder prototype as it s not useful anymore. [ ]
  • Schedule old packages in Debian bookworm. [ ]
  • Stop scheduling packages for Debian buster. [ ][ ]
  • Don t include PostgreSQL debug output in package lists. [ ]
  • Detect Python library mismatches during build in the node health check. [ ]
  • Update a note on updating the FreeBSD system. [ ]
• Mattia Rizzolo:
  • Silence a warning from Git. [ ]
  • Update a setting to reflect that Debian bookworm is the new testing. [ ]
  • Upgrade the PostgreSQL database to version 13. [ ]
• Roland Clobus (Debian live image generation):
  • Workaround non-reproducible config files in the libxml-sax-perl package. [ ]
  • Use the new DNS for the snapshot service. [ ]
• Vagrant Cascadian:
  • Also note that the armhf architecture also systematically varies by the kernel. [ ]

Contributing If you are interested in contributing to the Reproducible Builds project, please visit our Contribute page on our website. However, you can get in touch with us via:

• IRC: #reproducible-builds on irc.oftc.net.
• Twitter: @ReproBuilds
• Mailing list: rb-general@lists.reproducible-builds.org

• Abhijith PA did 4.0h (out of 14h assigned and 5h from August), thus carrying over 15h to September.
• Adrian Bunk did 11h (out of 23.75h assigned), thus carrying over 12.75h to September.
• Anton Gladky did 12h (out of 12h assigned).
• Ben Hutchings did 1.25h (out of 13.25h assigned and 6h from August), thus carrying over 18h to September.
• Chris Lamb did 18h (out of 18h assigned).
• Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did not report back about their work so we assume they did nothing (out of 23.75h assigned plus 50.75h from August), thus is carrying over 74.5h for September.
• Holger Levsen did 3h (out of 12h assigned) to help coordinate the team, and gave back the remaining hours.
• Lee Garrett did nothing (out of 23.75h assigned), thus is carrying over 23.75h for September.
• Markus Koschany did 35h (out of 23.75h assigned and 30h from August), thus carrying over 18.75h to September.
• Neil Williams did 24h (out of 23.75h assigned), thus anticipating 0.25h of October.
• Roberto C. S nchez did 22.25h (out of 23.75h assigned), thus carrying over 1.5h to September.
• Sylvain Beucler did 21.5h (out of 23.75h assigned), thus carrying over 2.25h to September.
• Thorsten Alteholz did 23.75h (out of 23.75h assigned).
• Utkarsh Gupta did 23.75h (out of 23.75h assigned).

• Platinum sponsors:
  • TOSHIBA (for 72 months)
  • GitHub (for 63 months)
  • Civil Infrastructure Platform (CIP) (for 40 months)
• Gold sponsors:
  • Roche Diagnostics International AG (for 83 months)
  • Linode (for 77 months)
  • Babiel GmbH (for 67 months)
  • Plat Home (for 66 months)
  • University of Oxford (for 22 months)
  • Deveryware (for 9 months)
  • VyOS
• Silver sponsors:
  • The Positive Internet Company (for 89 months)
  • Domeneshop AS (for 88 months)
  • Nantes M tropole (for 82 months)
  • Universit Jean Monnet de St Etienne (for 74 months)
  • Univention GmbH (for 73 months)
  • Ribbon Communications, Inc. (for 67 months)
  • Exonet B.V. (for 57 months)
  • Leibniz Rechenzentrum (for 51 months)
  • CINECA (for 41 months)
  • Minist re de l Europe et des Affaires trang res (for 35 months)
  • Cloudways Ltd (for 24 months)
  • Dinahosting SL (for 22 months)
  • Bauer Xcel Media Deutschland KG (for 16 months)
  • Platform.sh (for 16 months)
  • Moxa Intelligence Co., Ltd. (for 10 months)
  • sipgate GmbH (for 7 months)
  • Tilburg University (for 6 months)
  • OVH US LLC (for 5 months)
• Bronze sponsors:
  • Evolix (for 88 months)
  • Seznam.cz, a.s. (for 88 months)
  • Intevation GmbH (for 85 months)
  • Linuxhotel GmbH (for 85 months)
  • Daevel SARL (for 84 months)
  • Bitfolk LTD (for 83 months)
  • Greenbone Networks GmbH (for 82 months)
  • Megaspace Internet Services GmbH (for 82 months)
  • NUMLOG (for 82 months)
  • WinGo AG (for 81 months)
  • Ecole Centrale de Nantes LHEEA (for 77 months)
  • Entr ouvert (for 72 months)
  • Adfinis AG (for 70 months)
  • GNI MEDIA (for 64 months)
  • Laboratoire LEGI UMR 5519 / CNRS (for 64 months)
  • Tesorion (for 64 months)
  • Bearstech (for 56 months)
  • LiHAS (for 56 months)
  • People Doc (for 52 months)
  • Catalyst IT Ltd (for 50 months)
  • Demarcq SAS (for 44 months)
  • Universit Grenoble Alpes (for 30 months)
  • TouchWeb SAS (for 22 months)
  • SPiN AG (for 19 months)
  • CoreFiling (for 15 months)
  • Institut des sciences cognitives Marc Jeannerod (for 9 months)
  • Observatoire des Sciences de l Univers de Grenoble (for 6 months)
  • Tem Innovations GmbH
  • WordFinder.pro

Focus This month I didn't have any particular focus. I just worked on issues in my info bubble.

Changes

• gadget-tool: build cleanup
• bootstrappable.org: https (1 2)
• iotop-py: fix crash, handle Linux kernel API changes (1 2)
• jq: document security issue
• esprima-python: cleanup typos, links, license mistakes
• feed2exec: save page resources in wayback machine plugin
• purple-discord: add missing linking, fix compile warnings
• check-all-the-things: remove duplicate TODO, add pigz-test check
• devscripts: sync BTS tags
• Debian puppet: block BTS spammer
• Debian package uploads: pytest-rerunfailures, purple-discord (1 2), harmony, quesoglc
• Debian wiki pages: AutomatedUpgrade, Debhelper, DebianInstaller/Build, DebianInstaller/Loader/SuspectedVirus, Derivatives/Census (Pengwin, Quirinux), DeveloperNews, Hardware/Database, InstallingDebianOn/Turris/Omnia, Printing, StaticLinking, Statistics, SuitesAndReposExtension, Teams/ReleaseTeam/ReleaseCheckList
• FOSSjobs wiki pages: Resources

Issues

• Crashes in lintian-brush, gnome-shell-extension-shortcuts
• Broken symlinks in speech-dispatcher, ucx
• Dependency bloat in librecaptcha
• Test hangs in pyemd
• Features in apt-listchanges, evolution (1 2 3), baobab, pipewire, reportbug (1 2), systemd-coredump (1 2), find-dbgsym-packages (1 2), gdb
• Syntax highlighting issues in gtksourceview (1 2)
• Outdated links in duktape
• License change needed in cloudflared
• Rebuild needed for ricochet-im
• New versions of pidgin
• Usability issues in GNOME Keyring certificate viewer (also mistakenly filed against Firefox)
• Underlinking in ucx
• False positives in lintian
• Security issues in systemd-coredump (sent privately, rejected)

Review

• Spam: reported 1 Sourceware Bugzilla comment, 1 KDE Bugzilla comment, 580 Debian bug reports and 178 Debian mailing list posts
• Debian packages: sponsored iotop-c backports
• Debian wiki: RecentChanges for the month
• Debian BTS usertags: changes for the month
• Debian screenshots:
  • approved ark audacious bpfmon chameleon-cursor-theme chromium color-picker convertall convert-pgn cpufrequtils cpuid cpuidtool cpulimit cpustat dclock desktop-base docker.io elementary-xfce-icon-theme engrampa ephoto eterm exadrums exifprobe exiftags file-roller firefox fspanel imgp ipython3 linphone-desktop linux-cpupower live-image-xfce-desktop lxqt-archiver mate-desktop mwm network-manager nm-tray pamix pulsemixer python3-pip supertuxkart transmission-remote-gtk xarchiver xfce4 xfce4-datetime-plugin xscreensaver
  • rejected fonts-recommended (just debian/control), obfsproxy (private data), gpart/p7zip/p7zip-full/unzip/unrar (usage), cruft (doesn't show use of tool), weboob-qt/acetoneiso/klettres (screenshot of screenshots website), default-jre-headless/minetest-mod-basic-materials (illustration), gamine/weboob-qt/libstdc++6/med-imaging (photograph), drumstick-tools (wrong package), totem (newspaper article)

Administration

• Debian BTS: reopened bugs closed by a spammer
• Debian wiki: unblock IP addresses, approve accounts

Communication

• Respond to queries from Debian users and contributors on the mailing lists and IRC

Sponsors The purple-discord/harmony/pyemd/librecaptcha/esprima-python work was sponsored by my employer. All other work was done on a volunteer basis.

Get your SIP credentials After signing up for JMP and setting it up in your favourite XMPP client, send the following message to the cheogram.com gateway contact:

reset sip account

In response, you will receive a message containing:

• a numerical username
• a password (e.g. three lowercase words separated by spaces)

Add SIP account to your Asterisk config First of all, I added the following near the top of my /etc/asterisk/sip.conf:

[general]
register => username:three secret words@jmp.cbcbc7.auth.bandwidth.com:5008

The other non-default options I have set in [general] are:

context=public
allowoverlap=no
udpbindaddr=0.0.0.0
tcpenable=yes
tcpbindaddr=0.0.0.0
tlsenable=yes
transport=udp
srvlookup=no
vmexten=voicemail
relaxdtmf=yes
useragent=Asterisk PBX
tlscertfile=/etc/asterisk/asterisk.cert
tlsprivatekey=/etc/asterisk/asterisk.key
tlscapath=/etc/ssl/certs/
externhost=machinename.dyndns.org
localnet=192.168.0.0/255.255.0.0

Note that you can have more than one register line in your config if you use more than one SIP provider, but you must register with the server whether you want to receive incoming calls or not. Then I added a new blurb to the bottom of the same file:

[jmp]
type=peer
host=mp.cbcbc7.auth.bandwidth.com
port=5008
secret=three secret words
defaultuser=username
context=from-jmp
disallow=all
allow=ulaw
allow=g729
insecure=port,invite
canreinvite=no
dtmfmode=rfc2833

and for reference, here's the blurb for my Snom 300 SIP phone:

[1001]
; Snom 300
type=friend
qualify=yes
secret=password
encryption=no
context=full
host=dynamic
nat=no
directmedia=no
mailbox=1000@internal
vmexten=707
dtmfmode=rfc2833
call-limit=2
disallow=all
allow=g722
allow=ulaw

I checked that the registration was successful by running asterisk -r and then typing:

sip set debug on

before reloading the configuration using:

reload

Create Asterisk extensions to send and receive calls Once I got registration to work, I hooked this up with my other extensions so that I could send and receive calls using my JMP number. In /etc/asterisk/extensions.conf, I added the following:

[from-jmp]
include => home
exten => s,1,Goto(1000,1)

where home is the context which includes my local SIP devices and 1000 is the extension I want to ring. Then I added the following to enable calls to any destination within the North American Numbering Plan:

[pstn-jmp]
exten => _1NXXNXXXXXX,1,Set(CALLERID(all)=Francois Marier <5551231434>)
exten => _1NXXNXXXXXX,n,Dial(SIP/jmp/$ EXTEN )
exten => _1NXXNXXXXXX,n,Hangup()
exten => _NXXNXXXXXX,1,Set(CALLERID(all)=Francois Marier <5551231234>)
exten => _NXXNXXXXXX,n,Dial(SIP/jmp/1$ EXTEN )
exten => _NXXNXXXXXX,n,Hangup()

Here 5551231234 is my JMP phone number, not my bwsip numerical username. For reference, here's the rest of my dialplan in /etc/asterisk/extensions.conf:

[general]
static=yes
writeprotect=no
clearglobalvars=no
[public]
exten => _X.,1,Hangup(3)
[sipdefault]
exten => _X.,1,Hangup(3)
[default]
exten => _X.,1,Hangup(3)
[internal]
include => home
[full]
include => internal
include => pstn-jmp
exten => 707,1,VoiceMailMain(1000@internal)
[home]
; Internal extensions
exten => 1000,1,Dial(SIP/1001,20)
exten => 1000,n,Goto(in1000-$ DIALSTATUS ,1)
exten => 1000,n,Hangup
exten => in1000-BUSY,1,Hangup(17)
exten => in1000-CONGESTION,1,Hangup(3)
exten => in1000-CHANUNAVAIL,1,VoiceMail(1000@internal,su)
exten => in1000-CHANUNAVAIL,n,Hangup(3)
exten => in1000-NOANSWER,1,VoiceMail(1000@internal,su)
exten => in1000-NOANSWER,n,Hangup(16)
exten => _in1000-.,1,Hangup(16)

Firewall Finally, I opened a few ports in my firewall by putting the following in /etc/network/iptables.up.rules:

# SIP and RTP on UDP (jmp.cbcbc7.auth.bandwidth.com)
-A INPUT -s 67.231.2.13/32 -p udp --dport 5008 -j ACCEPT
-A INPUT -s 216.82.238.135/32 -p udp --dport 5008 -j ACCEPT
-A INPUT -s 67.231.2.13/32 -p udp --sport 5004:5005 --dport 10001:20000 -j ACCEPT
-A INPUT -s 216.82.238.135/32 -p udp --sport 5004:5005 --dport 10001:20000 -j ACCEPT

Outbound calls not working While the above setup works for me for inbound calls, it doesn't currently work for outbound calls. The hostname currently resolves to one of two IP addresses:

$ dig +short jmp.cbcbc7.auth.bandwidth.com
67.231.2.13
216.82.238.135

If I pin it to the first one by putting the following in my /etc/hosts file:

67.231.2.13 jmp.cbcbc7.auth.bandwidth.com

then I get a 486 error back from the server when I dial 1-555-456-4567:

<--- SIP read from UDP:67.231.2.13:5008 --->
SIP/2.0 486 Busy Here
Via: SIP/2.0/UDP 127.0.0.1:5060;branch=z9hG4bK03210a30
From: "Francois Marier" <sip:5551231234@127.0.0.1>
To: <sip:15554564567@jmp.cbcbc7.auth.bandwidth.com:5008>
Call-ID: 575f21f36f57951638c1a8062f3a5201@127.0.0.1:5060
CSeq: 103 INVITE
Content-Length: 0

On the other hand, if I pin it to 216.82.238.135, then I get a 600 error:

<--- SIP read from UDP:216.82.238.135:5008 --->
SIP/2.0 600 Busy Everywhere
Via: SIP/2.0/UDP 127.0.0.1:5060;branch=z9hG4bK7b7f7ed9
From: "Francois Marier" <sip:5551231234@127.0.0.1>
To: <sip:15554564567@jmp.cbcbc7.auth.bandwidth.com:5008>
Call-ID: 5bebb8d05902c1732c6b9f4776844c66@127.0.0.1:5060
CSeq: 103 INVITE
Content-Length: 0

If you have any idea what might be wrong here, or if you got outbound calls to work on Bandwidth.com, please leave a comment!