1. Debian Installer does not support a proper BTRFS based root file system. It just allows btrfs as root but no subvolume support. Also I'm not sure about the luks support with btrfs as root.
2. I also wanted to give a try to systemd-boot as my laptop is UEFI capable and I've slowly started disliking Grub.
3. I really hate installing task-kde-desktop (Yeah you read it right, I've switched to be a KDE user for quite some time) which will pull tons of unwanted stuff and bloat. Well it's not just task-kde-desktop but any other task-desktop package does similar and I don't want to have too much of unused stuff and services running.

parted -a optimal -s /dev/sda mklabel gpt
parted -a optimal -s /dev/sda mkpart primary vfat 0% 1G
parted -a optimal -s /dev/sda set 1 esp on
mkfs.vfat -n boot_disk -F 32 /dev/sda1

cryptsetup luksFormat /dev/sda2
cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sda2 ENC
mkfs.btrfs -L root_disk /dev/mapper/ENC

mount -o compress=zstd:1 /dev/mapper/ENC /mnt
btrfs subvol create /mnt/@
cd /mnt/@
btrfs subvol create ./home
btrfs subvol create ./opt
mkdir -p var
btrfs subvol create ./var/log
btrfs suvol set-default /mnt/@

cd /mnt/
debootstrap --include=dbus,locales,tzdata unstable @/ http://deb.debian.org/debian

umount /mnt
mount -o compress=zstd:1 /dev/mapper/ENC /mnt
mkdir -p /mnt/boot/efi
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/boot/efi
grml-chroot /mnt /bin/bash

apt-get update
apt-get install linux-image-amd64 dracut openssh-client \
                        kde-plasma-desktop plasma-workspace-wayland \
                        plasma-nm cryptsetup btrfs-progs sudo

LABEL="root_disk" / btrfs defaults,compress=zstd:1 0 0

ENCRYPTED_ROOT UUID=xxxx none discard,x-initrd.attach

export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
dpkg-reconfigure locales
dpkg-reconfigure tzdata

systemd.gpt_auto=no quiet root=LABEL=root_disk

apt-get install -y systemd-boot
bootctl install --make-entry-directory=yes --entry-token=machine-id
dpkg-reconfigure linux-image-6.0.0-5-amd64

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

wget https://cloud.debian.org/images/cloud/bullseye/latest/debian-11-generic-ppc64el.qcow2
cp debian-11-generic-ppc64el.qcow2 foo.qcow2
cat>meta-data
dsmode: local
network-interfaces:  
 iface enp0s1 inet static
 address 192.168.98.14/24
 gateway 192.168.98.12
^D
cat>user-data
#cloud-config
fqdn: foo.mydomain
manage_etc_hosts: true
disable_root: false
ssh_pwauth: false
ssh_authorized_keys:
- ssh-ed25519 AAAA...
timezone: Europe/Stockholm
bootcmd:
- rm -f /run/network/interfaces.d/enp0s1
- ifup enp0s1
^D
virt-install --name foo --import --os-variant debian10 --disk foo.qcow2 --cloud-init meta-data=meta-data,user-data=user-data

cat>network_config_static.cfg
version: 2
 ethernets:
  enp0s1:
   dhcp4: false
   addresses: [ 192.168.98.14/24, fc00::14/7 ]
   gateway4: 192.168.98.12
   gateway6: fc00::12
   nameservers:
    addresses: [ 192.168.98.12, fc00::12 ]
^D
cloud-localds -v -m local --network-config=network_config_static.cfg seed.iso user-data
virt-install --name foo --import --os-variant debian10 --disk foo.qcow2 --disk seed.iso,readonly=on --noreboot
virsh start foo
virsh detach-disk foo vdb --config
virsh console foo

runcmd:
- touch /etc/cloud/cloud-init.disabled
- apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade -uy && apt-get autoremove --yes --purge && printf '#!/bin/sh\n  rm /etc/cloud/cloud-init.disabled /etc/cloud/cloud.cfg.d/01_debian_cloud.cfg && apt-get purge --yes cloud-init cloud-guest-utils cloud-initramfs-growroot genisoimage isc-dhcp-client && apt-get autoremove --yes --purge && rm -f /etc/cron.hourly/cloud-cleanup && shutdown --reboot +1;   2>&1   logger -t cloud-cleanup\n' > /etc/cron.hourly/cloud-cleanup && chmod +x /etc/cron.hourly/cloud-cleanup && reboot &

Server setup The first thing I did was to open up my server's rsyslog (Debian's default syslog server) to remote connections since it's going to be the destination host for the router's log messages. I added the following to /etc/rsyslog.d/router.conf:

module(load="imtcp")
input(type="imtcp" port="514")
if $fromhost-ip == '192.168.1.1' then  
    if $syslogseverity <= 5 then  
        action(type="omfile" file="/var/log/router.log")
     
    stop
 

This is using the latest rsyslog configuration method: a handy scripting language called RainerScript. Severity level 5 maps to "notice" which consists of unusual non-error conditions, and 192.168.1.1 is of course the IP address of the router on the LAN side. With this, I'm directing all router log messages to a separate file, filtering out anything less important than severity 5. In order for rsyslog to pick up this new configuration file, I restarted it:

systemctl restart rsyslog.service

and checked that it was running correctly (e.g. no syntax errors in the new config file) using:

systemctl status rsyslog.service

Since I added a new log file, I also setup log rotation for it by putting the following in /etc/logrotate.d/router:

/var/log/router.log
 
    rotate 4
    weekly
    missingok
    notifempty
    compress
    delaycompress
    sharedscripts
    postrotate
        /usr/lib/rsyslog/rsyslog-rotate
    endscript
 

In addition, since I use logcheck to monitor my server logs and email me errors, I had to add /var/log/router.log to /etc/logcheck/logcheck.logfiles. Finally I opened the rsyslog port to the router in my server's firewall by adding the following to /etc/network/iptables.up.rules:

# Allow logs from the router
-A INPUT -s 192.168.1.1 -p tcp --dport 514 -j ACCEPT

and ran iptables-apply. With all of this in place, it was time to get the router to send messages.

Router setup As suggested on the Turris forum, I ssh'ed into my router and added this in /etc/syslog-ng.d/remote.conf:

destination d_loghost  
        network("192.168.1.200" time-zone("America/Vancouver"));
 ;
source dns  
        file("/var/log/resolver");
 ;
log  
        source(src);
        source(net);
        source(kernel);
        source(dns);
        destination(d_loghost);
 ;

Setting the timezone to the same as my server was needed because the router messages were otherwise sent with UTC timestamps. To ensure that the destination host always gets the same IP address (192.168.1.200), I went to the advanced DHCP configuration page and added a static lease for the server's MAC address so that it always gets assigned 192.168.1.200. If that wasn't already the server's IP address, you'll have to restart it for this to take effect. Finally, I restarted the syslog-ng daemon on the router to pick up the new config file:

/etc/init.d/syslog-ng restart

Testing In order to test this configuration, I opened three terminal windows:

1. tail -f /var/log/syslog on the server
2. tail -f /var/log/router.log on the server
3. tail -f /var/log/messages on the router

I immediately started to see messages from the router in the third window and some of these, not all because of my severity-5 filter, were flowing to the second window as well. Also important is that none of the messages make it to the first window, otherwise log messages from the router would be mixed in with the server's own logs. That's the purpose of the stop command in /etc/rsyslog.d/router.conf. To force a log messages to be emitted by the router, simply ssh into it and issue the following command:

logger Test

It should show up in the second and third windows immediately if you've got everything setup correctly

Various efforts towards build verifiability have been made to C/C++-based systems, yet the techniques for Java-based systems are not systematic and are often specific to a particular build tool (eg. Maven). In this study, we present a systematic approach towards build verifiability on Java-based systems.

We first define the problem, and then provide insight into the challenges of making real-world software build in a reproducible manner-this is, when every build generates bit-for-bit identical results. Through the experience of the Reproducible Builds project making the Debian Linux distribution reproducible, we also describe the affinity between reproducibility and quality assurance (QA).

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 203, 204, 205 and 206 to Debian unstable, as well as made the following changes to the code itself:

• Bug fixes:
  • Fix a file(1)-related regression where Debian .changes files that contained non-ASCII text were not identified as such, therefore resulting in seemingly arbitrary packages not actually comparing the nested files themselves. The non-ASCII parts were typically in the Maintainer or in the changelog text. [ ][ ]
  • Fix a regression when comparing directories against non-directories. [ ][ ]
  • If we fail to scan using binwalk, return False from BinwalkFile.recognizes. [ ]
  • If we fail to import binwalk, don t report that we are missing the Python rpm module! [ ]
• Testsuite improvements:
  • Add a test for recent file(1) issue regarding .changes files. [ ]
  • Use our assert_diff utility where we can within the test_directory.py set of tests. [ ]
  • Don t run our binwalk-related tests as root or fakeroot. The latest version of binwalk has some new security protection against this. [ ]
• Codebase improvements:
  • Drop the _PATH suffix from module-level globals that are not paths. [ ]
  • Tidy some control flow in Difference._reverse_self. [ ]
  • Don t print a warning to the console regarding NT_GNU_BUILD_ID changes. [ ]

In addition, Mattia Rizzolo updated the Debian packaging to ensure that diffoscope and diffoscope-minimal packages have the same version. [ ]

Debian-related updates Vagrant Cascadian wrote to the debian-devel mailing list after noticing that the binutils source package contained unreproducible logs in one of its binary packages. Vagrant expanded the discussion to one about all kinds of build metadata in packages and outlines a number of potential solutions that support reproducible builds and arbitrary metadata. Vagrant also started a discussion on debian-devel after identifying a large number of packages that embed build paths via RPATH when building with CMake, including a list of packages (grouped by Debian maintainer) affected by this issue. Maintainers were requested to check whether their package still builds correctly when passing the -DCMAKE_BUILD_RPATH_USE_ORIGIN=ON directive. On our mailing list this month, kpcyrd announced the release of rebuilderd-debian-buildinfo-crawler a tool to parse the Packages.xz Debian package index file, attempts to discover the right .buildinfo file from buildinfos.debian.net and outputs it in a format that can be understood by rebuilderd. The tool, which is available on GitHub, solves a problem regarding correlating Debian version numbers with their builds. bauen1 provided two patches for debian-cd, the software used to make Debian installer images. This involved passing --invariant and -i deb00001 to mkfs.msdos(8) and avoided embedding timestamps into the gzipped Packages and Translations files. After some discussion, the patches in question were merged and will be included in debian-cd version 3.1.36. Roland Clobus wrote another in-depth status update about status of live Debian images, summarising the current situation that all major desktops build reproducibly with bullseye, bookworm and sid . The python3.10 package was uploaded to Debian by doko, fixing an issue where [.pyc files were not reproducible because the elements in frozenset data structures were not ordered reproducibly. This meant that to creating a bit-for-bit reproducible Debian chroot which included .pyc files was not reproducible. As of writing, the only remaining unreproducible parts of a standard chroot is man-db, but Guillem Jover has a patch for update-alternatives which will likely be part of the next release of dpkg. Elsewhere in Debian, 139 reviews of Debian packages were added, 29 were updated and 17 were removed this month adding to our knowledge about identified issues. A large number of issue types have been updated too, including the addition of captures_kernel_variant, erlang_escript_file, captures_build_path_in_r_rdb_rds_databases, captures_build_path_in_vo_files_generated_by_coq and build_path_in_vo_files_generated_by_coq.

Website updates There were quite a few changes to the Reproducible Builds website and documentation this month as well, including:

• Chris Lamb:
  • Considerably rework the Who is involved? page. [ ][ ]
  • Move the contributors.sh Bash/shell script into a Python script. [ ][ ][ ]
• Daniel Shahaf:
  • Try a different Markdown footnote content syntax to work around a rendering issue. [ ][ ][ ]
• Holger Levsen:
  • Make a huge number of changes to the Who is involved? page, including pre-populating a large number of contributors who cannot be identified from the metadata of the website itself. [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ]
  • Improve linking to sponsors in sidebar navigation. [ ]
  • drop sponsors paragraph as the navigation is clearer now. [ ]
  • Add Mullvad VPN as a bronze-level sponsor . [ ][ ]
• Vagrant Cascadian:
  • Remove a stray parenthesis from the Who is involved? page. [ ]

Upstream patches The Reproducible Builds project attempts to fix as many currently-unreproducible packages as possible. February s patches included the following:

• Bernhard M. Wiedemann:
  • btop (sort-related issue)
  • complexity (date)
  • giac (update the version with upstreamed date patch)
  • htcondor (use CMake timestamp)
  • libint (readdir system call related)
  • libnet (date-related issue)
  • librime-lua (sort filesystem ordering)
  • linux_logo (sort-related issue)
  • micro-editor (date-related issue)
  • openvas-smb (date-related issue)
  • ovmf (sort-related issue)
  • paperjam (date-related issue)
  • python-PyQRCode (date-related issue)
  • quimb (single-CPU build failure)
  • radare2 (Meson date/time-related issue)
  • radare2 (Rework SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH usage to be portable)
  • siproxd (date, with Sebastian Kemper + follow-up
  • xonsh (Address Space Layout Randomisation-related issue)
  • xsnow (date & tar(1)-related issue)
  • zip (toolchain issue related to filesystem ordering)
• Chris Lamb:
  • #1005029 filed against ltsp (forwarded upstream).
  • #1005197 filed against pcmemtest.
  • #1005825 filed against hatchling.
  • #1005826 filed against mpl-sphinx-theme (forwarded upstream)
  • #1005827 filed against gap-hapcryst.
  • #1005901 filed against tree-puzzle.
  • #1005954 filed against jcabi-aspects.
  • #1005955 filed against paper-icon-theme.
• Roland Clobus:
  • #1006358 filed against libxmlb.
• Vagrant Cascadian:
  • #1005408 filed against wcwidth.
  • #1005420 filed against xir.
  • #1005421 filed against xir.
  • #1005726 filed against ruby-github-markup.
  • #1005727 filed against ruby-tioga.
  • #1005792 filed against btop.
  • #1005793 filed against libadwaita-1.
  • #1005794 filed against snibbetracker.
  • #1006252 filed against cctbx.
  • #1006254 filed against mdnsd.
  • #1006256 filed against gmerlin.
  • #1006302 filed against beav.
  • #1006385 filed against krita.
  • #1006407 filed against qt6-base.
  • #1006455 filed against onevpl-intel-gpu.
  • #1006471 filed against ruby3.0.
  • #1006473 filed against nix.
  • #1006474 filed against foma.
  • #1006476 filed against ruby3.0.

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

• Daniel Golle:
  • Update the OpenWrt configuration to not depend on the host LLVM, adding lines to the .config seed to build LLVM for eBPF from source. [ ]
  • Preserve more OpenWrt-related build artifacts. [ ]
• Holger Levsen:
• Temporary use a different Git tree when building OpenWrt as our tests had been broken since September 2020. This was reverted after the patch in question was accepted by Paul Spooren into the canonical openwrt.git repository the next day.
  • Various improvements to debugging OpenWrt reproducibility. [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ]
  • Ignore useradd warnings when building packages. [ ]
  • Update the script to powercycle armhf architecture nodes to add a hint to where nodes named virt-*. [ ]
  • Update the node health check to also fix failed logrotate and man-db services. [ ]
• Mattia Rizzolo:
  • Update the website job after contributors.sh script was rewritten in Python. [ ]
  • Make sure to set the DIFFOSCOPE environment variable when available. [ ]
• Vagrant Cascadian:
  • Various updates to the diffoscope timeouts. [ ][ ][ ]

Node maintenance was also performed by Holger Levsen [ ] and Vagrant Cascadian [ ].

Finally 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

• [1] https://www.youtube.com/c/linuxconfau/search

It can synchronise the system clock with NTP servers, reference clocks (e.g. GPS receiver), and manual input using wristwatch and keyboard. It can also operate as an NTPv4 (RFC 5905) server and peer to provide a time service to other computers in the network. It is designed to perform well in a wide range of conditions, including intermittent network connections, heavily congested networks, changing temperatures (ordinary computer clocks are sensitive to temperature), and systems that do not run continuosly, or run on a virtual machine. Typical accuracy between two machines synchronised over the Internet is within a few milliseconds; on a LAN, accuracy is typically in tens of microseconds. With hardware timestamping, or a hardware reference clock, sub-microsecond accuracy may be possible.

My problem with OpenNTPd Following concerns surrounding the security (and complexity) of the venerable ntp program, I have, a long time ago, switched to using openntpd on all my computers. I hadn't thought about it until I recently noticed a lot of noise on one of my servers:

jan 18 10:09:49 curie ntpd[1069]: adjusting local clock by -1.604366s
jan 18 10:08:18 curie ntpd[1069]: adjusting local clock by -1.577608s
jan 18 10:05:02 curie ntpd[1069]: adjusting local clock by -1.574683s
jan 18 10:04:00 curie ntpd[1069]: adjusting local clock by -1.573240s
jan 18 10:02:26 curie ntpd[1069]: adjusting local clock by -1.569592s

You read that right, openntpd was constantly rewinding the clock, sometimes in less than two minutes. The above log was taken while doing diagnostics, looking at the last 30 minutes of logs. So, on average, one 1.5 seconds rewind per 6 minutes! That might be due to a dying real time clock (RTC) or some other hardware problem. I know for a fact that the CMOS battery on that computer (curie) died and I wasn't able to replace it (!). So that's partly garbage-in, garbage-out here. But still, I was curious to see how chrony would behave... (Spoiler: much better.) But I also had trouble on another workstation, that one a much more recent machine (angela). First, it seems OpenNTPd would just fail at boot time:

anarcat@angela:~(main)$ sudo systemctl status openntpd
  openntpd.service - OpenNTPd Network Time Protocol
     Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/openntpd.service; enabled; vendor pres>
     Active: inactive (dead) since Sun 2022-01-23 09:54:03 EST; 6h ago
       Docs: man:openntpd(8)
    Process: 3291 ExecStartPre=/usr/sbin/ntpd -n $DAEMON_OPTS (code=exited, sta>
    Process: 3294 ExecStart=/usr/sbin/ntpd $DAEMON_OPTS (code=exited, status=0/>
   Main PID: 3298 (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
        CPU: 34ms
jan 23 09:54:03 angela systemd[1]: Starting OpenNTPd Network Time Protocol...
jan 23 09:54:03 angela ntpd[3291]: configuration OK
jan 23 09:54:03 angela ntpd[3297]: ntp engine ready
jan 23 09:54:03 angela ntpd[3297]: ntp: recvfrom: Permission denied
jan 23 09:54:03 angela ntpd[3294]: Terminating
jan 23 09:54:03 angela systemd[1]: Started OpenNTPd Network Time Protocol.
jan 23 09:54:03 angela systemd[1]: openntpd.service: Succeeded.

After a restart, somehow it worked, but it took a long time to sync the clock. At first, it would just not consider any peer at all:

anarcat@angela:~(main)$ sudo ntpctl -s all
0/20 peers valid, clock unsynced
peer
   wt tl st  next  poll          offset       delay      jitter
159.203.8.72 from pool 0.debian.pool.ntp.org
    1  5  2    6s    6s             ---- peer not valid ----
138.197.135.239 from pool 0.debian.pool.ntp.org
    1  5  2    6s    7s             ---- peer not valid ----
216.197.156.83 from pool 0.debian.pool.ntp.org
    1  4  1    2s    9s             ---- peer not valid ----
142.114.187.107 from pool 0.debian.pool.ntp.org
    1  5  2    5s    6s             ---- peer not valid ----
216.6.2.70 from pool 1.debian.pool.ntp.org
    1  4  2    2s    8s             ---- peer not valid ----
207.34.49.172 from pool 1.debian.pool.ntp.org
    1  4  2    0s    5s             ---- peer not valid ----
198.27.76.102 from pool 1.debian.pool.ntp.org
    1  5  2    5s    5s             ---- peer not valid ----
158.69.254.196 from pool 1.debian.pool.ntp.org
    1  4  3    1s    6s             ---- peer not valid ----
149.56.121.16 from pool 2.debian.pool.ntp.org
    1  4  2    5s    9s             ---- peer not valid ----
162.159.200.123 from pool 2.debian.pool.ntp.org
    1  4  3    1s    6s             ---- peer not valid ----
206.108.0.131 from pool 2.debian.pool.ntp.org
    1  4  1    6s    9s             ---- peer not valid ----
205.206.70.40 from pool 2.debian.pool.ntp.org
    1  5  2    8s    9s             ---- peer not valid ----
2001:678:8::123 from pool 2.debian.pool.ntp.org
    1  4  2    5s    9s             ---- peer not valid ----
2606:4700:f1::1 from pool 2.debian.pool.ntp.org
    1  4  3    2s    6s             ---- peer not valid ----
2607:5300:205:200::1991 from pool 2.debian.pool.ntp.org
    1  4  2    5s    9s             ---- peer not valid ----
2607:5300:201:3100::345c from pool 2.debian.pool.ntp.org
    1  4  4    1s    6s             ---- peer not valid ----
209.115.181.110 from pool 3.debian.pool.ntp.org
    1  5  2    5s    6s             ---- peer not valid ----
205.206.70.42 from pool 3.debian.pool.ntp.org
    1  4  2    0s    6s             ---- peer not valid ----
68.69.221.61 from pool 3.debian.pool.ntp.org
    1  4  1    2s    9s             ---- peer not valid ----
162.159.200.1 from pool 3.debian.pool.ntp.org
    1  4  3    4s    7s             ---- peer not valid ----

Then it would accept them, but still wouldn't sync the clock:

anarcat@angela:~(main)$ sudo ntpctl -s all
20/20 peers valid, clock unsynced
peer
   wt tl st  next  poll          offset       delay      jitter
159.203.8.72 from pool 0.debian.pool.ntp.org
    1  8  2    5s    6s         0.672ms    13.507ms     0.442ms
138.197.135.239 from pool 0.debian.pool.ntp.org
    1  7  2    4s    8s         1.260ms    13.388ms     0.494ms
216.197.156.83 from pool 0.debian.pool.ntp.org
    1  7  1    3s    5s        -0.390ms    47.641ms     1.537ms
142.114.187.107 from pool 0.debian.pool.ntp.org
    1  7  2    1s    6s        -0.573ms    15.012ms     1.845ms
216.6.2.70 from pool 1.debian.pool.ntp.org
    1  7  2    3s    8s        -0.178ms    21.691ms     1.807ms
207.34.49.172 from pool 1.debian.pool.ntp.org
    1  7  2    4s    8s        -5.742ms    70.040ms     1.656ms
198.27.76.102 from pool 1.debian.pool.ntp.org
    1  7  2    0s    7s         0.170ms    21.035ms     1.914ms
158.69.254.196 from pool 1.debian.pool.ntp.org
    1  7  3    5s    8s        -2.626ms    20.862ms     2.032ms
149.56.121.16 from pool 2.debian.pool.ntp.org
    1  7  2    6s    8s         0.123ms    20.758ms     2.248ms
162.159.200.123 from pool 2.debian.pool.ntp.org
    1  8  3    4s    5s         2.043ms    14.138ms     1.675ms
206.108.0.131 from pool 2.debian.pool.ntp.org
    1  6  1    0s    7s        -0.027ms    14.189ms     2.206ms
205.206.70.40 from pool 2.debian.pool.ntp.org
    1  7  2    1s    5s        -1.777ms    53.459ms     1.865ms
2001:678:8::123 from pool 2.debian.pool.ntp.org
    1  6  2    1s    8s         0.195ms    14.572ms     2.624ms
2606:4700:f1::1 from pool 2.debian.pool.ntp.org
    1  7  3    6s    9s         2.068ms    14.102ms     1.767ms
2607:5300:205:200::1991 from pool 2.debian.pool.ntp.org
    1  6  2    4s    9s         0.254ms    21.471ms     2.120ms
2607:5300:201:3100::345c from pool 2.debian.pool.ntp.org
    1  7  4    5s    9s        -1.706ms    21.030ms     1.849ms
209.115.181.110 from pool 3.debian.pool.ntp.org
    1  7  2    0s    7s         8.907ms    75.070ms     2.095ms
205.206.70.42 from pool 3.debian.pool.ntp.org
    1  7  2    6s    9s        -1.729ms    53.823ms     2.193ms
68.69.221.61 from pool 3.debian.pool.ntp.org
    1  7  1    1s    7s        -1.265ms    46.355ms     4.171ms
162.159.200.1 from pool 3.debian.pool.ntp.org
    1  7  3    4s    8s         1.732ms    35.792ms     2.228ms

It took a solid five minutes to sync the clock, even though the peers were considered valid within a few seconds:

jan 23 15:58:41 angela systemd[1]: Started OpenNTPd Network Time Protocol.
jan 23 15:58:58 angela ntpd[84086]: peer 142.114.187.107 now valid
jan 23 15:58:58 angela ntpd[84086]: peer 198.27.76.102 now valid
jan 23 15:58:58 angela ntpd[84086]: peer 207.34.49.172 now valid
jan 23 15:58:58 angela ntpd[84086]: peer 209.115.181.110 now valid
jan 23 15:58:59 angela ntpd[84086]: peer 159.203.8.72 now valid
jan 23 15:58:59 angela ntpd[84086]: peer 138.197.135.239 now valid
jan 23 15:58:59 angela ntpd[84086]: peer 162.159.200.123 now valid
jan 23 15:58:59 angela ntpd[84086]: peer 2607:5300:201:3100::345c now valid
jan 23 15:59:00 angela ntpd[84086]: peer 2606:4700:f1::1 now valid
jan 23 15:59:00 angela ntpd[84086]: peer 158.69.254.196 now valid
jan 23 15:59:01 angela ntpd[84086]: peer 216.6.2.70 now valid
jan 23 15:59:01 angela ntpd[84086]: peer 68.69.221.61 now valid
jan 23 15:59:01 angela ntpd[84086]: peer 205.206.70.40 now valid
jan 23 15:59:01 angela ntpd[84086]: peer 205.206.70.42 now valid
jan 23 15:59:02 angela ntpd[84086]: peer 162.159.200.1 now valid
jan 23 15:59:04 angela ntpd[84086]: peer 216.197.156.83 now valid
jan 23 15:59:05 angela ntpd[84086]: peer 206.108.0.131 now valid
jan 23 15:59:05 angela ntpd[84086]: peer 2001:678:8::123 now valid
jan 23 15:59:05 angela ntpd[84086]: peer 149.56.121.16 now valid
jan 23 15:59:07 angela ntpd[84086]: peer 2607:5300:205:200::1991 now valid
jan 23 16:03:47 angela ntpd[84086]: clock is now synced

That seems kind of odd. It was also frustrating to have very little information from ntpctl about the state of the daemon. I understand it's designed to be minimal, but it could inform me on his known offset, for example. It does tell me about the offset with the different peers, but not as clearly as one would expect. It's also unclear how it disciplines the RTC at all.

Compared to chrony Now compare with chrony:

jan 23 16:07:16 angela systemd[1]: Starting chrony, an NTP client/server...
jan 23 16:07:16 angela chronyd[87765]: chronyd version 4.0 starting (+CMDMON +NTP +REFCLOCK +RTC +PRIVDROP +SCFILTER +SIGND +ASYNCDNS +NTS +SECHASH +IPV6 -DEBUG)
jan 23 16:07:16 angela chronyd[87765]: Initial frequency 3.814 ppm
jan 23 16:07:16 angela chronyd[87765]: Using right/UTC timezone to obtain leap second data
jan 23 16:07:16 angela chronyd[87765]: Loaded seccomp filter
jan 23 16:07:16 angela systemd[1]: Started chrony, an NTP client/server.
jan 23 16:07:21 angela chronyd[87765]: Selected source 206.108.0.131 (2.debian.pool.ntp.org)
jan 23 16:07:21 angela chronyd[87765]: System clock TAI offset set to 37 seconds

First, you'll notice there's none of that "clock synced" nonsense, it picks a source, and then... it's just done. Because the clock on this computer is not drifting that much, and openntpd had (presumably) just sync'd it anyways. And indeed, if we look at detailed stats from the powerful chronyc client:

anarcat@angela:~(main)$ sudo chronyc tracking
Reference ID    : CE6C0083 (ntp1.torix.ca)
Stratum         : 2
Ref time (UTC)  : Sun Jan 23 21:07:21 2022
System time     : 0.000000311 seconds slow of NTP time
Last offset     : +0.000807989 seconds
RMS offset      : 0.000807989 seconds
Frequency       : 3.814 ppm fast
Residual freq   : -24.434 ppm
Skew            : 1000000.000 ppm
Root delay      : 0.013200894 seconds
Root dispersion : 65.357254028 seconds
Update interval : 1.4 seconds
Leap status     : Normal

We see that we are nanoseconds away from NTP time. That was ran very quickly after starting the server (literally in the same second as chrony picked a source), so stats are a bit weird (e.g. the Skew is huge). After a minute or two, it looks more reasonable:

Reference ID    : CE6C0083 (ntp1.torix.ca)
Stratum         : 2
Ref time (UTC)  : Sun Jan 23 21:09:32 2022
System time     : 0.000487002 seconds slow of NTP time
Last offset     : -0.000332960 seconds
RMS offset      : 0.000751204 seconds
Frequency       : 3.536 ppm fast
Residual freq   : +0.016 ppm
Skew            : 3.707 ppm
Root delay      : 0.013363549 seconds
Root dispersion : 0.000324015 seconds
Update interval : 65.0 seconds
Leap status     : Normal

Now it's learning how good or bad the RTC clock is ("Frequency"), and is smoothly adjusting the System time to follow the average offset (RMS offset, more or less). You'll also notice the Update interval has risen, and will keep expanding as chrony learns more about the internal clock, so it doesn't need to constantly poll the NTP servers to sync the clock. In the above, we're 487 micro seconds (less than a milisecond!) away from NTP time. (People interested in the explanation of every single one of those fields can read the excellent chronyc manpage. That thing made me want to nerd out on NTP again!) On the machine with the bad clock, chrony also did a 1.5 second adjustment, but just once, at startup:

jan 18 11:54:33 curie chronyd[2148399]: Selected source 206.108.0.133 (2.debian.pool.ntp.org) 
jan 18 11:54:33 curie chronyd[2148399]: System clock wrong by -1.606546 seconds 
jan 18 11:54:31 curie chronyd[2148399]: System clock was stepped by -1.606546 seconds 
jan 18 11:54:31 curie chronyd[2148399]: System clock TAI offset set to 37 seconds 

Then it would still struggle to keep the clock in sync, but not as badly as openntpd. Here's the offset a few minutes after that above startup:

System time     : 0.000375352 seconds slow of NTP time

And again a few seconds later:

System time     : 0.001793046 seconds slow of NTP time

I don't currently have access to that machine, and will update this post with the latest status, but so far I've had a very good experience with chrony on that machine, which is a testament to its resilience, and it also just works on my other machines as well.

Extras On top of "just working" (as demonstrated above), I feel that chrony's feature set is so much superior... Here's an excerpt of the extras in chrony, taken from the comparison table:

• source frequency tracking
• source state restore from file
• temperature compensation
• ready for next NTP era (year 2036)
• replace unreachable / falseticker servers
• aware of jitter
• RTC drift tracking
• RTC trimming
• Restore time from file w/o RTC
• leap seconds correction, in slew mode
• drops root privileges

I even understand some of that stuff. I think. So kudos to the chrony folks, I'm switching.

Caveats One thing to keep in mind in the above, however is that it's quite possible chrony does as bad of a job as openntpd on that old machine, and just doesn't tell me about it. For example, here's another log sample from another server (marcos):

jan 23 11:13:25 marcos ntpd[1976694]: adjusting clock frequency by 0.451035 to -16.420273ppm

I get those basically every day, which seems to show that it's at least trying to keep track of the hardware clock. In other words, it's quite possible I have no idea what I'm talking about and you definitely need to take this article with a grain of salt. I'm not an NTP expert. Update: I should also mentioned that I haven't evaluated systemd-timesyncd, for a few reasons:

1. I have enough things running under systemd
2. I wasn't aware of it when I started writing this
3. I couldn't find good documentation on it... later I found the above manpage and of course the Arch Wiki but that is very minimal
4. therefore I can't tell how it compares with chrony or (open)ntpd, so I don't see an enticing reason to switch

It has a few things going for it though:

• it's likely shipped with your distribution already
• it drops privileges (possibly like chrony, unclear if it also has seccomp filters)
• it's minimalist: it only does SNTP so not the server side
• the status command is good enough that you can tell the clock frequency, precision, and so on (especially when compared to openntpd's ntpctl)

So I'm reserving judgement over it, but I'd certainly note that I'm always a little weary in trusting systemd daemons with the network, and would prefer to keep that attack surface to a minimum. Diversity is a good thing, in general, so I'll keep chrony for now. It would certainly nice to see it added to chrony's comparison table.

Switching to chrony Because the default configuration in chrony (at least as shipped in Debian) is sane (good default peers, no open network by default), installing it is as simple as:

apt install chrony

And because it somehow conflicts with openntpd, that also takes care of removing that cruft as well.

Update: Debian defaults So it seems like I managed to write this entire blog post without putting it in relation with the original reason I had to think about this in the first place, which is odd and should be corrected. This conversation came about on an IRC channel that mentioned that the ntp package (and upstream) is in bad shape in Debian. In that discussion, chrony and ntpsec were discussed as possible replacements, but when we had the discussion on chat, I mentioned I was using openntpd, and promptly realized I was actually unhappy with it. A friend suggested chrony, I tried it, and it worked amazingly, I switched, wrote this blog post, end of story. Except today (2022-02-07, two weeks later), I actually read that thread and realized that something happened in Debian I wasn't actually aware of. In bookworm, systemd-timesyncd was not only shipped, but it was installed by default, as it was marked as a hard dependency of systemd. That was "fixed" in systemd-247.9-2 (see bug 986651), but only by making the dependency a Recommends and marking it as Priority: important. So in effect, systemd-timesyncd became the default NTP daemon in Debian in bookworm, which I find somewhat surprising. timesyncd has many things going for it (as mentioned above), but I do find it a bit annoying that systemd is replacing all those utilities in such a way. I also wonder what is going to happen on upgrades. This is all a little frustrating too because there is no good comparison between the other NTP daemons and timesyncd anywhere. The chrony comparison table doesn't mention it, and an audit by the Core Infrastructure Initiative from 2017 doesn't mention it either, even though timesyncd was announced in 2014. (Same with this blog post from Facebook.)

(defhost foo.silentflame.com (:deploy ((:ssh :user "root") :sbcl))
  (os:debian-stable "buster" :amd64)
  ;; Hetzner's Debian 10 image comes with a three-partition layout and boots
  ;; with traditional BIOS.
  (disk:has-volumes
   (physical-disk
    :device-file "/dev/sda" :boots-with '(grub:grub :target "i386-pc")))
  (on-change (installer:cleanly-installed-once
              nil
              ;; This is a specification of the OS Hetzner's image has, so
              ;; Consfigurator knows how to install SBCL and debootstrap(8).
              ;; In this case it's the same Debian release as the replacement.
              '(os:debian-stable "buster" :amd64))
    ;; Clear out the old OS's EFI system partition contents, in case we can
    ;; switch to booting with EFI at some point (if we wanted we could specify
    ;; an additional x86_64-efi target above, and grub-install would get run
    ;; to repopulate /boot/efi, but I don't think Hetzner can boot from it yet).
    (file:directory-does-not-exist "/boot/efi/EFI")
    (apt:installed "linux-image-amd64")
    (installer:bootloaders-installed)
    (fstab:entries-for-volumes
     (disk:volumes
       (mounted-ext4-filesystem :mount-point "/")
       (partition
        (mounted-fat32-filesystem
         :mount-options '("umask=0077") :mount-point "/boot/efi"))))
    (file:lacks-lines "/etc/fstab" "# UNCONFIGURED FSTAB FOR BASE SYSTEM")
    (file:is-copy-of "/etc/resolv.conf" "/old-os/etc/resolv.conf")
    (mount:unmounted-below-and-removed "/old-os"))
  (apt:mirror "http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian")
  (apt:no-pdiffs)
  (apt:standard-sources.list)
  (sshd:installed)
  (as "root" (ssh:authorized-keys +spwsshkey+))
  (sshd:no-passwords)
  (timezone:configured "Etc/UTC")
  (swap:has-swap-file "2G")
  (network:clean-/etc/network/interfaces)
  (network:static "enp1s0" "xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx" "xxx.xxx.1.1" "255.255.255.255"))

CONSFIG> (deploy ((:ssh :user "root" :hop "xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx") :sbcl) foo.silentflame.com)

UUID=...            /           ext4    relatime    0   1
PARTUUID=...        /boot/efi   vfat    umask=0077  0   2
/var/lib/swapfile   swap        swap    defaults    0   0

• Date: Thursday, June 24 through Friday, June 25
• Start: 00:00 UTC June 24
• End: 23:59 UTC June 25
• Sign up: Participants do not have to sign up, just show up!
• Slack room: #sig-node-bug-scrub on Kubernetes Slack
• Docs: See the HackMD docs.
• Email: See the kubernetes-dev mailing list.

• We need to know attendees' locations to better plan the schedule around timezones. Please make sure you fill in the "Country I call home" field in the registration form accordingly. It's especially important to have this data for people who submitted talks, but also for other attendees.
• We are offering limited amounts of financial support for those who require it in order to attend. Please refer to the corresponding page on the website for more information.

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.10.5.0 (2021-05-21)

• Upgraded to Armadillo release 10.5 (Antipodean Fortress)
  • added .clamp() member function
  • expanded the standalone clamp() function to handle complex values
  • more efficient use of OpenMP
  • vector, matrix and cube constructors now initialise elements to zero by default; use the fill::none specifier, eg. mat X(4,5,fill::none), to disable element initialisation
• Added codecov.yml to exclude Armadillo from coverage analysis

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.10.4.1.0 (2021-04-23)

• Upgraded to Armadillo release 10.4.1 (Pressure Cooker)
• GitHub-only release

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

remotes/private/attic/novena                    822ca2bb add letter i sent to novena, never published
remotes/private/attic/secureboot                de09d82b quick review, add note and graph
remotes/private/attic/wireguard                 5c5340d1 wireguard review, tutorial and comparison with alternatives
remotes/private/backlog/dat                     914c5edf Merge branch 'master' into backlog/dat
remotes/private/backlog/packet                  9b2c6d1a ham radio packet innovations and primer
remotes/private/backlog/performance-tweaks      dcf02676 config notes for http2
remotes/private/backlog/serverless              9fce6484 postponed until kubecon europe
remotes/private/fin/cost-of-hosting             00d8e499 cost-of-hosting article online
remotes/private/fin/kubecon                     f4fd7df2 remove published or spun off articles
remotes/private/fin/kubecon-overview            21fae984 publish kubecon overview article
remotes/private/fin/kubecon2018                 1edc5ec8 add series
remotes/private/fin/netconf                     3f4b7ece publish the netconf articles
remotes/private/fin/netdev                      6ee66559 publish articles from netdev 2.2
remotes/private/fin/pgp-offline                 f841deed pgp offline branch ready for publication
remotes/private/fin/primes                      c7e5b912 publish the ROCA paper
remotes/private/fin/runtimes                    4bee1d70 prepare publication of runtimes articles
remotes/private/fin/token-benchmarks            5a363992 regenerate timestamp automatically
remotes/private/ideas/astropy                   95d53152 astropy or python in astronomy
remotes/private/ideas/avaneya                   20a6d149 crowdfunded blade-runner-themed GPLv3 simcity-like simulator
remotes/private/ideas/backups-benchmarks        fe2f1f13 review of backup software through performance and features
remotes/private/ideas/cumin                     7bed3945 review of the cumin automation tool from WM foundation
remotes/private/ideas/future-of-distros         d086ca0d modern packaging problems and complex apps
remotes/private/ideas/on-dying                  a92ad23f another dying thing
remotes/private/ideas/openpgp-discovery         8f2782f0 openpgp discovery mechanisms (WKD, etc), thanks to jonas meurer
remotes/private/ideas/password-bench            451602c0 bruteforce estimates for various password patterns compared with RSA key sizes
remotes/private/ideas/prometheus-openmetrics    2568dbd6 openmetrics standardizing prom metrics enpoints
remotes/private/ideas/telling-time              f3c24a53 another way of telling time
remotes/private/ideas/wallabako                 4f44c5da talk about wallabako, read-it-later + kobo hacking
remotes/private/stalled/bench-bench-bench       8cef0504 benchmarking http benchmarking tools
remotes/private/stalled/debian-survey-democracy 909bdc98 free software surveys and debian democracy, volunteer vs paid work

Attic Those are articles that I thought about, then finally rejected, either because it didn't seem worth it, or my editors rejected it, or I just moved on:

• novena: the project is ooold now, didn't seem to fit a LWN article. it was basically "how can i build my novena now" and "you guys rock!" it seems like the MNT Reform is the brain child of the Novena now, and I dare say it's even cooler!
• secureboot: my LWN editors were critical of my approach, and probably rightly so - it's a really complex subject and I was probably out of my depth... it's also out of date now, we did manage secureboot in Debian
• wireguard: LWN ended up writing extensive coverage, and I was biased against Donenfeld because of conflicts in a previous project

Backlog Those were articles I was planning to write about next.

• dat: I already had written Sharing and archiving data sets with Dat, but it seems I had more to say... mostly performance issues, beaker, no streaming, limited adoption... to be investigated, I guess?
• packet: a primer on data communications over ham radio, and the cool new tech that has emerged in the free software world. those are mainly notes about Pat, Direwolf, APRS and so on... just never got around to making sense of it or really using the tech...
• performance-tweaks: "optimizing websites at the age of http2", the unwritten story of the optimization of this website with HTTP/2 and friends
• serverless: god. one of the leftover topics at Kubecon, my notes on this were thin, and the actual subject, possibly even thinner... the only lie worse than the cloud is that there's no server at all! concretely, that's a pile of notes about Kubecon which I wanted to sort through. Probably belongs in the attic now.

Fin Those are finished articles, they were published on my website and LWN, but the branches were kept because previous drafts had private notes that should not be published.

Ideas

• astropy: "Python in astronomy" - had a chat with saimn while writing about sigal, and it turns out he actually works on free software in astronomy, in Python... I actually expect LWN to cover this sooner than later, after Lee Phillips's introduction to SciPy
• avaneya: crowdfunded blade-runner-themed GPLv3 simcity-like simulator, i just have that link so far
• backups-benchmarks: review of backup software through performance and features, possibly based on those benchmarks, maybe based on this list from restic although they refused casync. benchmark articles are hard though, especially when you want to "cover them all"... I did write a silly Attic vs Bup back when those programs existed (2014), in a related note...
• ideas/cumin: review of the Cumin automation tool from WikiMedia Foundation... I ended up using the tool at work and writing service documentation for it
• ideas/future-of-distros: modern packaging problems and complex apps, starting from this discussion about the removal of Dolibarr from Debian, a summary of the thread from liw, and ideas from joeyh (now from the outside of Debian), then debates over the power of FTP masters - ugh, glad I didn't step in that rat's nest
• ideas/on-dying: "what happens when a hacker dies?" rather grim subject, but a more and more important one... joeyh has ideas again, phk as well, then there's a protocol for dying (really grim)... then there are site policies like GitHub, Facebook, etc... more in the branch, but that one I can't help but think about now that family has taken a bigger place in my life...
• ideas/openpgp-discovery: OpenPGP discovery mechanisms (WKD, etc), suggested by Jonas Meurer (somewhere?), only links to Mailveloppe, LEAP, WKD (or is it WKS?), another standard, probably would need to talk about OpenPGP CA now and how Debian and Tor manage their keyrings... pain in the back.
• ideas/password-bench: bruteforce estimates for various password patterns compared with RSA key sizes, spinoff of my smartcard article, in the crypto-bench, look at this shiny graph, surely that must mean an article, right?
• ideas/prometheus-openmetrics: "Evolving the Prometheus exposition format into a standard", seems like this happened
• ideas/telling-time: telling time to users is hard. xclock vs ttyclock, etc. maybe gameclock and undertime as well? syncing time is hard, but it turns out showing it is non trivial as well... basically turning this bug report into an article. for some reason I linked to this meme, derived from this meme, presumably a premonition of my stupid idea of writing undertime TIMEZONES!
• ideas/wallabako: "talk about wallabako, read-it-later + kobo hacking", that's it, not even a link to the project!

A lot of those branches were actually just an empty commit, with the commitlog being the "pitch", more or less. I'd send that list to my editors, sometimes with a few more links (basically the above), and they would nudge me one way or the other. Sometimes they would actively discourage me to write about something, and I would do it anyways, send them a draft, and they would patiently make me rewrite it until it was a decent article. This was especially hard with the terminal emulator series, which took forever to write and even got my editors upset when they realized I had never installed Fedora (I ended up installing it, and I was proven wrong!)

Stalled Oh, and then there's those: those are either "ideas" or "backlog" that got so far behind that I just moved them out of the way because I was tired of seeing them in my list.

• stalled/bench-bench-bench benchmarking http benchmarking tools, a horrible mess of links, copy-paste from terminals, and ideas about benchmarking... some of this trickled out into this benchmarking guide at Tor, but not much more than the list of tools
• stalled/debian-survey-democracy: "free software surveys and Debian democracy, volunteer vs paid work"... A long standing concern of mine is that all Debian work is supposed to be volunteer, and paying explicitly for work inside Debian has traditionally been frowned upon, even leading to serious drama and dissent (remember Dunc-Tank)? back when I was writing for LWN, I was also doing paid work for Debian LTS. I also learned that a lot (most?) Debian Developers were actually being paid by their job to work on Debian. So I was confused by this apparent contradiction, especially given how the LTS project has been mostly accepted, while Dunc-Tank was not... See also this talk at Debconf 16. I had hopes that this study would show the "hunch" people have offered (that most DDs are paid to work on Debian) but it seems to show the reverse (only 36% of DDs, and 18% of all respondents paid). So I am still confused and worried about the sustainability of Debian.

What do you think? So that's all I got. As people might have noticed here, I have much less time to write these days, but if there's any subject in there I should pick, what is the one that you would find most interesting? Oh! and I should mention that you can write to LWN! If you think people should know more about some Linux thing, you can get paid to write for it! Pitch it to the editors, they won't bite. The worst that can happen is that they say "yes" and there goes two years of your life learning to write. Because no, you don't know how to write, no one does. You need an editor to write. That's why this article looks like crap and has a smiley.

Hardware The hardware is fairly straightforward, but here's what I ended up getting:

• Raspberry Pi 4 board: I went for the maximum amount of RAM (8 GB).
• SD-card: Since I'm not going to store any media on here, 32 GB is plenty.
• HDMI to micro-HDMI cable
• Case and power supply

You'll probably want to add a remote control to that setup. I used an old Streamzap I had lying around.

Installing the OS on the SD-card Plug the SD card into a computer using a USB adapter. Download the imager and use it to install Raspbian on the SDcard. Then you can simply plug the SD card into the Pi and boot.

System configuration Using sudo raspi-config, I changed the following:

• Set hostname (System Options)
• Wait for network at boot (System Options): needed for NFS
• Disable screen blanking (Display Options)
• Enable ssh (Interface Options)
• Configure locale, timezone and keyboard (Localisation Options)
• Set WiFi country (Localisation Options)

Then I enabled automatic updates:

apt install unattended-upgrades anacron
echo 'Unattended-Upgrade::Origins-Pattern  
        "origin=Debian,codename=$ distro_codename ,label=Debian";
        "origin=Debian,codename=$ distro_codename ,label=Debian-Security";
        "origin=Raspbian,codename=$ distro_codename ,label=Raspbian";
        "origin=Raspberry Pi Foundation,codename=$ distro_codename ,label=Raspberry Pi Foundation";
 ;'   sudo tee /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/51unattended-upgrades-raspbian

Headless setup Should you need to do the setup without a monitor, you can enable ssh by inserting the SD card into a computer and then creating an empty file called ssh in the boot partition. Plug it into your router and boot it up. Check the IP that it received by looking at the active DHCP leases in your router's admin panel. Then login:

ssh -o PreferredAuthentications=password -o PubkeyAuthentication=no pi@192.168.1.xxx

using the default password of raspberry.

Hardening In order to secure the Pi, I followed most of the steps I usually take when setting up a new Linux server. I created a new user account for admin and ssh access:

adduser francois
addgroup sshuser
adduser francois sshuser
adduser francois sudo

and changed the pi user password to a random one:

pwgen -sy 32
sudo passwd pi

before removing its admin permissions:

deluser pi adm
deluser pi sudo
deluser pi dialout
deluser pi cdrom
deluser pi lpadmin

Finally, I enabled the Uncomplicated Firewall by installing its package:

apt install ufw

and only allowing ssh connections. After starting ufw using systemctl start ufw.service, you can check that it's configured as expected using ufw status. It should display the following:

Status: active
To                         Action      From
--                         ------      ----
22/tcp                     ALLOW       Anywhere
22/tcp (v6)                ALLOW       Anywhere (v6)

Installing Kodi Kodi is very straightforward to install since it's now part of the Raspbian repositories:

apt install kodi

To make it start at boot/login, while still being able to exit and use other apps if needed:

cp /etc/xdg/lxsession/LXDE-pi/autostart ~/.config/lxsession/LXDE-pi/
echo "@kodi" >> ~/.config/lxsession/LXDE-pi/autostart

Network File System In order to avoid having to have all media storage connected directly to the Pi via USB, I setup an NFS share over my local network. First, give static IP allocations to the server and the Pi in your DHCP server, then add it to the /etc/hosts file on your NFS server:

192.168.1.3    pi

Install the NFS server package:

apt instal nfs-kernel-server

Setup the directories to share in /etc/exports:

/pub/movies    pi(ro,insecure,all_squash,subtree_check)
/pub/tv_shows  pi(ro,insecure,all_squash,subtree_check)

Open the right ports on your firewall by putting this in /etc/network/iptables.up.rules:

-A INPUT -s 192.168.1.3 -p udp -j ACCEPT
-A INPUT -s 192.168.1.0/24 -p tcp --dport 111 -j ACCEPT
-A INPUT -s 192.168.1.0/24 -p udp --dport 111 -j ACCEPT
-A INPUT -s 192.168.1.0/24 -p udp --dport 123 -j ACCEPT
-A INPUT -s 192.168.1.0/24 -p tcp --dport 600:1124 -j ACCEPT
-A INPUT -s 192.168.1.0/24 -p udp --dport 600:1124 -j ACCEPT
-A INPUT -s 192.168.1.0/24 -p tcp --dport 2049 -j ACCEPT
-A INPUT -s 192.168.1.0/24 -p udp --dport 2049 -j ACCEPT

Finally, apply all of these changes:

iptables-apply
systemctl restart nfs-kernel-server.service

On the Pi, put the server's static IP in /etc/hosts:

192.168.1.2    fileserver

and this in /etc/fstab:

fileserver:/data/movies  /kodi/movies  nfs  ro,bg,hard,noatime,async,nolock  0  0
fileserver:/data/tv      /kodi/tv      nfs  ro,bg,hard,noatime,async,nolock  0  0

Then create the mount points and mount everything:

mkdir -p /kodi/movies
mkdir /kodi/tv
mount /kodi/movies
mount /kodi/tv

Debian

This was my 25th month of contributing to Debian. I became a DM in late March 2019 and a DD on Christmas 19! \o/ This month was bat-shit crazy. Why? We ll come to it later, probably 15th of this month?
Anyway, besides being crazy, hectic, adventerous, and the first of 2021, this month I was super-insanely busy. With what? Hm, more about this later this month! ^_^ However, I still did some Debian stuff here and there. Here are the following things I worked on:

Uploads and bug fixes:

• ruby-rack (2.1.1-6) - Fixing CVE-2020-8184/bug #963477.
• ruby-faye-websocket (0.11.0-1) - Fixing CVE-2020-15133/bug #967061.
• ruby-faye (1.4.0-1) - Fixing CVE-2020-11020/bug #959392 and CVE-2020-15134/bug #967063.
• ruby-rack (2.1.4-2) - Fix failing tests and new upstream version, v2.1.4.
• ruby-rake-ant (1.0.4-1) - Initial release, bug #979498.
• libgit2 (1.1.0+dfsg.1-4) - Source-only upload for migration.
• ruby-scanf (1.0.0-1) - Initial release, bug #979497.
• polybar (3.5.4-1) - New upstream version, v3.5.4.
• fpc (3.2.0+dfsg-10) - Severe crash fix for bugs #979850, #979853, #979862, and #979851.
• ruby-em-redis (0.3.0+gh-3) - Fixing FTBFS, bug #978975, as requested by Holger! :)
• gdebi (0.9.5.7+nmu4) - Fixing FTBFS, bug #951923, as requested by Holger! :)
• ruby-redcarpet (3.4.0-4+deb10u1) - Fixing CVE-2020-26298/bug #980057.
• ruby-in-parallel (0.1.17-1.2) - Fixing autopkgtest, bug #979700.
• ruby-in-parallel (0.1.17-1.3) - Fixing random test failures, bug #980585.
• python-bottle (0.12.15-2+deb10u1) - Fixing CVE-2020-28473.

Other $things:

• Attended the Debian Ruby team meeting.
• Mentoring for newcomers.
• Moderation of -project mailing list.
• Sponsored golang-github-gorilla-css for Fedrico.

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Debian (E)LTS

Debian Long Term Support (LTS) is a project to extend the lifetime of all Debian stable releases to (at least) 5 years. Debian LTS is not handled by the Debian security team, but by a separate group of volunteers and companies interested in making it a success. And Debian Extended LTS (ELTS) is its sister project, extending support to the Jessie release (+2 years after LTS support). This was my sixteenth month as a Debian LTS and seventh month as a Debian ELTS paid contributor.
I was assigned 26.00 hours for LTS and 36.75 hours for ELTS and worked on the following things:
(however, I worked extra for 9 hours for LTS and 9 hours for ELTS this month, which I intend to balance from the next month!)

LTS CVE Fixes and Announcements:

• Issued DLA 2518-1, fixing CVE-2020-35492, for cairo.
  For Debian 9 Stretch, these problems have been fixed in version 1.14.8-1+deb9u1.
• Issued DLA 2525-1, fixing CVE-2018-19840, CVE-2018-19841, CVE-2019-11498, CVE-2019-1010315, CVE-2019-1010317, CVE-2019-1010319, and CVE-2020-35738, for wavpack.
  For Debian 9 Stretch, these problems have been fixed in version 5.0.0-2+deb9u3.
• Issued DLA 2526-1, fixing CVE-2020-26298, for ruby-redcarpet.
  For Debian 9 Stretch, these problems have been fixed in version 3.3.4-2+deb9u1.
• Prepared DSA 4831-1, fixing CVE-2020-26298, for ruby-redcarpet. For Debian 10 Buster, these problems have been fixed in version 3.4.0-4+deb10u1. The announcement was released by the Security Team.
• Issued DLA 2528-1, fixing CVE-2021-3185, for gst-plugins-bad1.0.
  For Debian 9 Stretch, these problems have been fixed in version 1.10.4-1+deb9u1.
• Issued DLA 2529-1, fixing CVE-2021-3181, for mutt.
  For Debian 9 Stretch, these problems have been fixed in version 1.7.2-1+deb9u5.
• Issued DLA 2531-1), fixing CVE-2020-28473, for python-bottle.
  For Debian 9 Stretch, these problems have been fixed in version 0.12.13-1+deb9u1.
• Released buster-pu update, fixing CVE-2020-28473, for python-bottle. For Debian 10 Buster, these problems have been fixed in version 0.12.15-2+deb10u1.

ELTS CVE Fixes and Announcements:

• Issued ELA 344-1, fixing CVE-2020-27350, for apt.
  For Debian 8 Jessie, these problems have been fixed in version 1.0.9.8.7.
• Issued ELA 346-1, fixing CVE-2016-10169, CVE-2018-19840, CVE-2019-1010319, and CVE-2020-35738, for wavpack.
  For Debian 8 Jessie, these problems have been fixed in version 4.70.0-1+deb8u1.
• Issued ELA 347-1, fixing CVE-2020-26298, for ruby-redcarpet.
  For Debian 8 Jessie, these problems have been fixed in version 3.1.2-1+deb8u1.
• Issued ELA 348-1, fixing CVE-2021-3185, for gst-plugins-bad1.0.
  For Debian 8 Jessie, these problems have been fixed in version 1.4.4-2.1+deb8u3.
• Issued ELA 349-1, fixing CVE-2021-3181, for mutt.
  For Debian 8 Jessie, these problems have been fixed in version 1.5.23-3+deb8u5.
• Issued ELA 350-1, fixing CVE-2020-28473, for python-bottle.

Other (E)LTS Work:

• Front-desk duty from 28-12 until 03-01 and from 25-01 until 31-01 for both LTS and ELTS.
• Triaged dropbear, gst-plugins-bad1.0, phpmyadmin, qemu, firefox-esr, thunderbird, openldap, libdatetime-timezone-perl, tzdata, jasper, ckeditor, liblivemedia, wavpack, and ruby-redcarpet.
• Marked CVE-2019-12953/dropbear as postponed for jessie.
• Marked CVE-2019-12953/dropbear as postponed for stretch.
• Marked CVE-2018-19841/wavpack as not-affected for jessie.
• Marked CVE-2019-1010315/wavpack as not-affected for jessie.
• Marked CVE-2019-1010317/wavpack as not-affected for jessie.
• Marked CVE-2021-21252/phpmyadmin as no-dsa for stretch.
• Marked CVE-2021-20196/qemu as postponed for stretch.
• Marked CVE-2021-21252/phpmyadmin as no-dsa for jessie.
• Marked CVE-2021-20196/qemu as postponed for jessie.
• Marked CVE-2020-11947/qemu as postponed for jessie.
• Marked CVE-2021-3326/glibc as no-dsa for jessie.
• Marked CVE-2021-3326/glibc as no-dsa for stretch.
• Marked CVE-2020-35517/qemu as not-affected instead of postponed for jessie.
• Marked CVE-2021-2627 1,2 /ckeditor as postponed for jessie.
• Marked CVE-2020-24027/liblivemedia as no-dsa for stretch.
• Marked CVE-2021-2627 1,2 /ckeditor as postponed for stretch.
• Auto EOL ed csync2, firefox-esr, linux, thunderbird, collabtive, activemq, and xen for jessie.
• Got my first ever CVE assigned - CVE-2021-3181 for mutt. Weeeehooooo! \o/
• Attended the monthly LTS meeting. Logs here.
• General discussion on LTS private and public mailing list.

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Interesting Bits!

• This January, on 23rd and 24th, we had Mini DebConf India 2021 online.
  I had a talk as well, titled, Why Point Releases are important and how you can help prepare them?". It was a fun and a very short talk, where I just list out the reasons and ways to help in the preparation of point releases . I did some experimentation with this talk, figuring out what works for the audience and what doesn t and where can I improve for the next time I talk about this topic! \o/
  You can listen to the talk here and let me know if you have any feedback! Anyway, the conference lasted for 2 days and I also did some volunteering (talk director, talk miester) in Hindi and English, both! It was all so fun and new. Anyway, here s the picture we took:
• In another exciting news, I got my first CVE assigned!!! \o/
  No, it is not something that I found, it was discovered by Tavis Ormandy. I just assigned this a CVE ID, CVE-2021-3181.
  This is my first, so I am very excited about this! ^_^
• Besides, there s something more that is in the pipelines. Can t talk about it now, shh. But hopefully very sooooooon!

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Other $things! \o/ This month was tiresome, with most of the time being spent on the Debian stuff, I did very little work outside it, really. The issues and patches that I sent are:

• Issue #700 for redcarpet, asking for a reproducer for CVE-2020-26298 and some additional patch related queries.
• Issue #7 for in-parallel, asking them to not use relative paths for tests.
• Issue #8 for in-parallel, reporting a test failure for the library.
• Issue #2 for rake-ant, asking them to bump their dependencies to a newer version.
• PR #3 for rake-ant, bumping the dependencies to a newer version, fixing the above issue, heh.
• Issue #4 for rake-ant, requesting to drop git from their gemspec.
• PR #5 for rake-ant, dropping git from gemspec, fixing the above issue, heh.
• Issue #95 for WavPack, asking for a review of past security vulnerabilites wrt v4.70.0.
• Reviewed PR #128 for ruby-openid, addressing the past regression with CVE fix merge.
• Reviewed PR #63 for cocoapods-acknowledgements, updating redcarpet to v3.5.1, as a safety measure due to recently discovered vulnerability.
• Issue #1331 for bottle, asking for relevant commits for CVE-2020-28473 and clarifying other things.
• Issue #5 for em-redis, reporting test failures on IPv6-only build machines.
• Issue #939 for eventmachine, reporting test failures for em-redis on IPv6-only build machines.

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Until next time.
:wq for today.