Search Results: "ema"

9 June 2017

Petter Reinholdtsen: Release 0.1.1 of free software archive system Nikita announced

I am very happy to report that the Nikita Noark 5 core project tagged its second release today. The free software solution is an implementation of the Norwegian archive standard Noark 5 used by government offices in Norway. These were the changes in version 0.1.1 since version 0.1.0 (from NEWS.md): If this sound interesting to you, please contact us on IRC (#nikita on irc.freenode.net) or email (nikita-noark mailing list).

Jonathan Dowland: Western Digital Hard Drive head parking

I stumbled across some information about pathological behaviour of Western Digital Green (and some Red) hard drives relating to drive-head parking when the device is idle. In some circumstances, a particular pattern of drive activity can result in the drive head being repeatedly parked and un-parked in short intervals, possibly* resulting in excess wear on the drive. Apparently* the drive head parking is recorded in the S.M.A.R.T. "Load Cycle Count" attribute. I have two WD Red drives in my NAS, one for live data and one for backup. The latter drive is basically unused most of the day until scheduled backup jobs kick in and those jobs are all clustered together. I already unmount the backup filesystems when the jobs are not active (I wrote about this in mount-on-demand backups). Inspecting the S.M.A.R.T. attributes was surprising:
drive power on hours load cycle count
regular 12143 348
backup 12191 13043
It certainly looks like my backup drive has a much higher load cycle count than you might expect for a mostly-idle drive. I checked the attributes again 24 hours later and the regular drive had incremented by a single cycle, whilst the backup drive went up by 56. There are some official tools from Western Digital that makes an adjustment to the idle timeouts for head parking on the drives. There's also an unofficial tool idle3tcl to do the same, which is packaged in Debian. The unofficial tool let you set and fetch a particular value from the drive firmware. I don't know for sure* that the official tool does exactly the same thing, and nothing else. One advantage of the unofficial tool is it lets you read the value as well as write it. I tried the unofficial tool to get the drive's default value, which was 0x8a, and bump it to the maximum of 0xff. I then tried the official tool then fetched the value again: interestingly the official tool had reset the value back to 0x8a. I haven't managed to assess the impact of these changes on the attrition rate yet because I need to perform a cold boot for the change to take effect and that isn't convenient just now. My plan is to try and disable the feature completely via the unofficial tool. If that rectifies the issue I will then investigate changing the power management settings by hand at backup start/end time, perhaps via hdparm. ( The problem with these kind of issues is there is precious little in the way of reliable documentation as to the real issue, real drive behaviour, etc. I've marked a few sections of this blog post with * asterisks to indicate where we are having to make informed guesses. )

8 June 2017

Eriberto Mota: OpenVAS 9 from Kali Linux 2017.1 to Debian 9

The OpenVAS OpenVAS is a framework of several services and tools offering a comprehensive and powerful vulnerability scanning and vulnerability management solution. The framework is part of Greenbone Networks' commercial vulnerability management solution from which developments are contributed to the Open Source community since 2009. OpenVAS is composed of some elements, as OpenVAS-Cli, Greenbone Security Assistant, OpenVAS Scanner and OpenVAS Manager. The official OpenVAS homepage is http://www.openvas.org. From Kali Linux 2017.1 to Debian 9 Ok, this is a temporary solution. Now (June 2017), Debian 9 wasn't released yet and OpenVAS 9 is not available in Debian in good conditions (it is in Experimental but a bit problematic). I think that we will have OpenVAS in backports soon. The OpenVAS 9 from Kali is working perfect for Debian 9. So, to take advantage of this, adopt the following procedures:

1. Add a line to end of /etc/apt/sources.list file: 

deb http://http.kali.org/kali kali-rolling main

2. Run: 

# apt-get update
# apt-get install -t kali-rolling openvas

(if you want to simulate before install, add a -s option before -t)

3. Rermove or comment the previous line added to /etc/apt/sources.list file to avoid future problems in your Debian.

4. Run the following command to configure the OpenVAS and to download the initial database: 

# openvas-setup

This step may take some time. Note that the initial password for user admin will be created and shown.

5. Finally, open a web browser and access the address https://127.0.0.1:9392 (use https!!!). Alternatively, you can call http://127.0.0.1 to be automagically redirected to https://127.0.0.1:9392.

The default user is admin and the password was shown in the last step. You will can change this password inside OpenVAS (menu Administration > Users > Edit User, which is an blue icon).

If your password was lost, you will be able to create a new administrative user via shell command. See the section "Some tips" below.

6. To see the packages installed from Kali Linux, use the command: 

$ dpkg -l   grep kali
Some tips To create a new administrative user called test: 
# openvasmd --create-user test --role Admin
To update the database (NVTs): 
# openvasmd --update
# openvasmd --rebuild
# service openvas-scanner restart
To solve the message "Login failed. Waiting for OMP service to become available": 
# openvas-start
To make OpenVAS listen all network interfaces, allowing one to call the service in a remote web browser (http://remote-server, port 80 only), edit the /lib/systemd/system/greenbone-security-assistant.service and change: 
ExecStart=/usr/sbin/gsad --foreground --listen=127.0.0.1 --port=9392 --mlisten=127.0.0.1 --mport=9390

to 

ExecStart=/usr/sbin/gsad --foreground --listen=0.0.0.0 --port=9392 --mlisten=127.0.0.1 --mport=9390
After the change, reload the configuration and restart the service: 
# systemctl daemon-reload
# systemctl restart greenbone-security-assistant
Quick start for beginners If OpenVAS isn't familiar for you, I have a suggestion for a quick test. Firstly, download Ubuntu Server 8.04 from this page and install it inside a virtual machine, selecting all services as LAMP, SSH etc. I used the i386 version and VirtualBox. After this, use OpenVAS to scan the Ubuntu (menu Scans > Tasks > a pink icon with a magic wand in the upper left corner). After the scan, click over the blue bar where we will can see the word "Done". Enjoy!

7 June 2017

Petter Reinholdtsen: Idea for storing trusted timestamps in a Noark 5 archive

This is a copy of an email I posted to the nikita-noark mailing list. Please follow up there if you would like to discuss this topic. The background is that we are making a free software archive system based on the Norwegian Noark 5 standard for government archives. I've been wondering a bit lately how trusted timestamps could be stored in Noark 5. Trusted timestamps can be used to verify that some information (document/file/checksum/metadata) have not been changed since a specific time in the past. This is useful to verify the integrity of the documents in the archive. Then it occured to me, perhaps the trusted timestamps could be stored as dokument variants (ie dokumentobjekt referered to from dokumentbeskrivelse) with the filename set to the hash it is stamping? Given a "dokumentbeskrivelse" with an associated "dokumentobjekt", a new dokumentobjekt is associated with "dokumentbeskrivelse" with the same attributes as the stamped dokumentobjekt except these attributes: This assume a service following IETF RFC 3161 is used, which specifiy the given MIME type for replies and the .tsr file ending for the content of such trusted timestamp. As far as I can tell from the Noark 5 specifications, it is OK to have several variants/renderings of a dokument attached to a given dokumentbeskrivelse objekt. It might be stretching it a bit to make some of these variants represent crypto-signatures useful for verifying the document integrity instead of representing the dokument itself. Using the source of the service in formatDetaljer allow several timestamping services to be used. This is useful to spread the risk of key compromise over several organisations. It would only be a problem to trust the timestamps if all of the organisations are compromised. The following oneliner on Linux can be used to generate the tsr file. $input is the path to the file to checksum, and $sha256 is the SHA-256 checksum of the file (ie the ".tsr" value mentioned above). 
openssl ts -query -data "$inputfile" -cert -sha256 -no_nonce \
    curl -s -H "Content-Type: application/timestamp-query" \
      --data-binary "@-" http://zeitstempel.dfn.de > $sha256.tsr
To verify the timestamp, you first need to download the public key of the trusted timestamp service, for example using this command: 
wget -O ca-cert.txt \
  https://pki.pca.dfn.de/global-services-ca/pub/cacert/chain.txt
Note, the public key should be stored alongside the timestamps in the archive to make sure it is also available 100 years from now. It is probably a good idea to standardise how and were to store such public keys, to make it easier to find for those trying to verify documents 100 or 1000 years from now. :) The verification itself is a simple openssl command: 
openssl ts -verify -data $inputfile -in $sha256.tsr \
  -CAfile ca-cert.txt -text
Is there any reason this approach would not work? Is it somehow against the Noark 5 specification?

6 June 2017

Reproducible builds folks: Reproducible Builds: week 110 in Stretch cycle

Here's what happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday May 28 and Saturday June 3 2017: Past an upcoming events Documentation updates Toolchain development and fixes Patches and bugs filed 4 package reviews have been added, 6 have been updated and 25 have been removed in this week, adding to our knowledge about identified issues. Weekly QA work During our reproducibility testing, FTBFS bugs have been detected and reported by: diffoscope development tests.reproducible-builds.org Mattia Rizzolo: Daniel Kahn Gillmor: Vagrant Cascadian: Holger Levsen: Misc. This week's edition was written by Chris Lamb, Bernhard M. Wiedemann and Holger Levsen & reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC & the mailing lists.

Russ Allbery: Review: Star Healer

Review: Star Healer, by James White
Series: Sector General #6
Publisher: Orb
Copyright: 1984
Printing: 2002
ISBN: 0-312-87770-6
Format: Trade paperback
Pages: 206
Star Healer is the sixth book of the Sector General series, and I think it may be the first novel in the series that was written as a novel instead of a fix-up of short stories. That makes it not a bad place to start in the series if one would rather not deal with fix-ups or barely-disguised short story collections. There isn't a huge amount of character development over the course of this series (at least to this point), so the main thing you would lose by starting here is some built-up reason for caring about the main character. This is the third book in the Alien Emergencies omnibus (the book referenced in the publication information here). Most of the previous stories have focused on Conway, a Senior Physician in the sprawling and wonderfully well-equipped multi-species hospital called Sector General and, in recent stories, the head physician in the hospital's ambulance ship. Becoming a Senior Physician at Sector General is quite the accomplishment, and a fine point to reach in the career of any doctor specializing in varied life forms, but there is another tier above: the Diagnosticians, who are the elite of Sector General. The difference is education tapes. Deep knowledge of even one specific type of life is a lot to ask of a doctor, as shown by the increasing specialization of human medicine. Sector General, which deals with wildly varying ailments of thousands of species including entirely unknown ones (if, admittedly, primarily trauma, at least in the stories shown), would be an impossible task. White realizes this and works around it with education tapes that temporarily embed in a doctor's head the experience of a doctor of another species entirely. This provides the native expertise missing, but it comes with the full personality of the doctor who recorded the tape, including preferences for food and romantic attachment that may be highly disorienting. Senior Physicians use a tape at a time, and then have it erased again when they don't need it. Diagnosticians juggle four or more tapes at the same time, and keep them for long periods or even permanently, allowing them to do ground-breaking original research. The opening of Star Healer is an offer from the intimidating Chief Psychologist of Sector General: he has a shot at Diagnostician. But it's a major decision that he should think over first, so the next step is to take a vacation of sorts on a quiet world with a small human scientific station. Oh, and there's a native medical problem, although not one with much urgency. Conway doesn't do a lot of resting, because of course he gets pulled into trying to understand the mystery of an alien species that is solitary to the point of deep and unbreakable social taboos against even standing close to other people. This is a nice cultural puzzle in line with the rest of the series, but it also leaves Conway with a new ally: an alien healer in a society in which being a doctor is difficult to the point of near hopelessness. It's not much of a spoiler to say that of course Conway decides to try for Diagnostician after his "vacation." The rest of the book is him juggling multiple cases with his new and often conflicting modes of thinking, and tackling problems that require a bit less in the way of puzzle-solving and a bit more in the way of hard trade-off decisions and quick surgical action. Senior Physicians may be able to concentrate on just one puzzle at a time; Diagnosticians have to juggle several. And they're larger, more long-term problems, focusing on how to improve a general problem for a whole species rather than just heal a specific injured alien. One interesting aspect of this series, which is very much on display here, is that Sector General most definitely does not have a Prime Directive. They are cautious about making contact with particularly primitive civilizations for fear that spacefarers would give them an inferiority complex, but sometimes they do anyway. And if they run into some biological system that offends their sensibilities, they try to fix it, not just observe it. White frequently shows species caught in what the characters call "biological traps," unable to develop farther because of some biological adaptation that gets in their way, and Sector General tries to fix those. It's an interesting ethical problem that I wish they'd think about a bit more. It's not clear they're wrong, and I think it's correct to take an expansive view of the mission to heal, but there's also a sense in which Sector General is modifying culture and biology to make aliens more like them. (The parallels between this and all the abusive paternalism that human cultures do around disability is a little too close to home to be comfortable, and now I kind of wish it hadn't occurred to me.) The gender roles, sadly, continue to be dire, although mostly ignorable because the one major female character is generally just shown as another doctor with little attention to sex. But apparently women (of every species!) cannot become Diagnosticians because they have an insurmountable biological aversion to sharing their minds with a learning tape from any doctor who doesn't find them physically attractive, which is just... sigh. It's sad that someone who could write an otherwise remarkably open-minded and pacifist series of stories, in sharp contrast with most of SF history, would still have that large of a blind spot. Apart from the times gender comes up, I liked this book more than the rest of the series, in part because I strongly prefer novels to short stories. There's more room to develop the story, and while characterization continues to not be White's strong point and that space mostly goes to more puzzles instead, he does provide an interesting set of interlocking puzzles. The problem posed by the aliens Conway meets on his "vacation" isn't fully resolved here (presumably that's for a future book), but he does solve several other significant problems and develops his own problem-solving style in more depth than in previous stories. Mildly recommended, particularly if you like this series in general. Followed by Code Blue - Emergency. Rating: 7 out of 10

5 June 2017

Sean Whitton: skiessequel

Hey Sega, Why the Hell is There No Skies of Arcadia Sequel? USgamer
There was still plenty of world left to be explored, if it came to that
I don t understand this remark there really wasn t much left. They d have to make changes in order to squash more in, as I ve found when trying to convert the world of Arcadia to D&D.

3 June 2017

Holger Levsen: 20170603-stretch

Stretch So I have done my (hopefully) last uploads for Stretch (r0) today and want to share how pleased I've been with this release cycle. It was the smoothest freeze I've witnessed so far, I really liked the clear and documented rules from the Release Team, their regular release infos on d-d-a and publically logged IRC meetings plus the easy-to-remember URL http://release.debian.org (nicely redirecting to https), where one can easily find those relevant dates, emails and rules. Plus, useful bug views via https://udd.debian.org. There is more, but to me the last (and probably most important) factor to all this has been that most of this actually hasn't been new in this release cycle, but rather that by now a significant number of developers are aware of this and mostly have acted accordingly and communicated this further. Kudos and many thanks to the Release team, you have been amazing! Many thanks also to everyone who has contributed nicely to those 24838 source packages! You rock as well. And then I'll also like the upcoming quieter two weeks, also to prepare the Debian Edu Stretch announcement :) And then, finally, I really really look forward to the next development cycle and being able to meaningful start working on reproducible Buster!

1 June 2017

Markus Koschany: My Free Software Activities in May 2017

Welcome to gambaru.de. Here is my monthly report that covers what I have been doing for Debian. If you re interested in Java, Games and LTS topics, this might be interesting for you. Debian Games Bug fixes New upstream release Debian Java Debian LTS This was my fifteenth month as a paid contributor and I have been paid to work 27,25 hours on Debian LTS, a project started by Rapha l Hertzog. In that time I did the following: Misc Thanks for reading and see you next time.

Paul Wise: FLOSS Activities May 2017

Changes

Issues

Review

Administration
  • Debian: discuss mail bounces with a hoster, check perms of LE results, add 1 user to a group, re-sent some TLS cert expiry mail, clean up mail bounce flood, approve some debian.net TLS certs, do the samhain dance thrice, end 1 samhain mail flood, diagnose/fix LDAP update issue, relay DebConf cert expiry mails, reboot 2 non-responsive VM, merged patches for debian.org-sources.debian.org meta-package,
  • Debian mentors: lintian/security updates & reboot
  • Debian wiki: delete stray tmp file, whitelist 14 email addresses, disable 1 accounts with bouncing email, ping 3 persons with bouncing email
  • Debian website: update/push index/CD/distrib
  • Debian QA: deploy my changes, disable some removed suites in qadb
  • Debian PTS: strip whitespace from existing pages, invalidate sigs so pages get a rebuild
  • Debian derivatives census: deploy changes
  • Openmoko: security updates & reboots.

Communication
  • Invite Purism (on IRC), XBian (also on IRC), DuZeru to the Debian derivatives census
  • Respond to the shutdown of Parsix
  • Report BlankOn fileserver and Huayra webserver issues
  • Organise a transition of Ubuntu/Endless Debian derivatives census maintainers
  • Advocate against Debian having a monopoly on hardware certification
  • Advocate working with existing merchandise vendors
  • Start a discussion about Debian membership in other organisations
  • Advocate for HPE to join the LVFS & support fwupd

Sponsors All work was done on a volunteer basis.

31 May 2017

Chris Lamb: Free software activities in May 2017

Here is my monthly update covering what I have been doing in the free software world (previous month):
Reproducible builds

Whilst anyone can inspect the source code of free software for malicious flaws, most software is distributed pre-compiled to end users. The motivation behind the Reproducible Builds effort is to permit verification that no flaws have been introduced either maliciously or accidentally during this compilation process by promising identical results are always generated from a given source, thus allowing multiple third-parties to come to a consensus on whether a build was compromised. (I have generously been awarded a grant from the Core Infrastructure Initiative to fund my work in this area.) This month I:
I also made the following changes to our tooling:
diffoscope

diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility that can locate and diagnose reproducibility issues.

  • Don't fail when run under perversely-recursive input files. (#780761).

strip-nondeterminism

strip-nondeterminism is our tool to remove specific non-deterministic results from a completed build.

  • Move from verbose_print to nonquiet_print so we print when normalising a file. This is so we can start to target the removal of strip-nondeterminism itself.
  • Only print log messages by default if the file was actually modified. (#863033)
  • Update package long descriptions to clarify that the tool itself is a temporary workaround. (#862029)


Debian My activities as the current Debian Project Leader are covered in my "Bits from the DPL" email to the debian-devel-announce list. However, I:
  • Represented Debian at the OSCAL 2017 in Tirana, Albania.
  • Attended the Reproducible Builds hackathon in Hamburg, Germany. (Report)
  • Finally, I attended Debian SunCamp 2017 in Lloret de Mar in Catalonia, Spain.

Patches contributed
  • xarchiver: Adding files to .tar.xz deletes existing content. (#862593)
  • screen-message: Please invert the default colours. (#862056)
  • fontconfig: fc-cache returns with exit code 0 on 256 errors. (#863427)
  • quadrapassel: Segfaults when unpausing a paused finished game. (#863106)
  • camping: Broken symlink. (#861040)
  • dns-root-data: Does not build if /bin/sh is Bash. (#862252)
  • dh-python: bit.ly link doesn't work anymore. (#863074)
Debian LTS

This month I have been paid to work 18 hours on Debian Long Term Support (LTS). In that time I did the following:
  • "Frontdesk" duties, triaging CVEs, adding links to upstream patches, etc.
  • Issued DLA 930-1 fixing a remote application crash vulnerability in libxstream-java, a Java library to serialize objects to XML and back again
  • Issued DLA 935-1 correcting a local denial of service vulnerability in lxterminal, the terminal emulator for the LXDE desktop environment.
  • Issued DLA 940-1 to remedy an issue in sane-backends which allowed remote attackers to obtain sensitive memory information via a crafted SANE_NET_CONTROL_OPTION packet.
  • Issued DLA 943-1 for the deluge bittorrent client to fix a directory traversal attack vulnerability in the web user interface.
  • Issued DLA 949-1 fixing an integer signedness error in the miniupnpc UPnP client that could allow remote attackers to cause a denial of service attack.
  • Issued DLA 959-1 for the libical calendaring library. A use-after-free vulnerability could allow remote attackers could cause a denial of service and possibly read heap memory via a specially crafted .ICS file.
Uploads
  • redis (3:3.2.9-1) New upstream release.
  • python-django:
    • 1:1.11.1-1 New upstream minor release.
    • 1:1.11.1-2 & 1:1.11.1-3 Add missing Build-Depends on libgdal-dev due to new GIS tests.
  • docbook-to-man:
    • 1:2.0.0-36 Adopt package. Apply a patch to prevent undefined behaviour caused by a memcpy(3) parameter overlap. (#842635, #858389)
    • 1:2.0.0-37 Install manpages using debian/docbook-to-man.manpages over manual calls.
  • installation-birthday Initial upload and misc. subsequent fixes.
  • bfs:
    • 1.0-3 Fix FTBFS on hurd-i386. (#861569)
    • 1.0.1-1 New upstream release & correct debian/watch file.

I also made the following non-maintainer uploads (NMUs):
  • ca-certificates (20161130+nmu1) Remove StartCom and WoSign certificates as they are now untrusted by the major browser vendors. (#858539)
  • sane-backends (1.0.25-4.1) Correct missing error handler in (generated) prerm script. (#862334)
  • seqan2 (2.3.1+dfsg-3.1) Fix broken /usr/bin/splazers symlink on 32-bit architectures. (#863669)
  • jackeq (0.5.9-2.1) Fix a segmentation fault caused by passing a truncated pointer instead of a GtkType. (#863416)
  • kluppe (0.6.20-1.1) Fix segmentation fault at startup. (#863421)
  • coyim (0.3.7-2.1) Skip tests that require internet access to avoid FTBFS. (#863414)
  • pavuk (0.9.35-6.1) Fix segmentation fault when opening "Limitations" window. (#863492)
  • porg (2:0.10-1.1) Fix broken LD_PRELOAD path. (#863495)
  • timemachine (0.3.3-2.1) Fix two segmentation faults caused by truncated pointers. (#863420)
Debian bugs filed
  • acct: Docs incorrectly installed to "accounting.html" directory. (#862180)
  • git-hub: Does not work with 2FA-enabled accounts. (#863265)
  • libwibble: Homepage and Vcs-Darcs fields are outdated. (#861673)


I additionally filed 2 bugs for packages that access the internet during build against flower and r-bioc-gviz.


I also filed 6 FTBFS bugs against cronutils, isoquery, libgnupg-interface-perl, maven-plugin-tools, node-dateformat, password-store & simple-tpm-pk11.
FTP Team

As a Debian FTP assistant I ACCEPTed 105 packages: boinc-app-eah-brp, debug-me, e-mem, etcd, fdroidcl, firejail, gcc-6-cross-ports, gcc-7-cross-ports, gcc-defaults, gl2ps, gnome-software, gnupg2, golang-github-dlclark-regexp2, golang-github-dop251-goja, golang-github-nebulouslabs-fastrand, golang-github-pkg-profile, haskell-call-stack, haskell-foundation, haskell-nanospec, haskell-parallel-tree-search, haskell-posix-pty, haskell-protobuf, htmlmin, iannix, libarchive-cpio-perl, libexternalsortinginjava-java, libgetdata, libpll, libtgvoip, mariadb-10.3, maven-resolver, mysql-transitional, network-manager, node-async-each, node-aws-sign2, node-bcrypt-pbkdf, node-browserify-rsa, node-builtin-status-codes, node-caseless, node-chokidar, node-concat-with-sourcemaps, node-console-control-strings, node-create-ecdh, node-create-hash, node-create-hmac, node-cryptiles, node-dot, node-ecc-jsbn, node-elliptic, node-evp-bytestokey, node-extsprintf, node-getpass, node-gulp-coffee, node-har-schema, node-har-validator, node-hawk, node-jsprim, node-memory-fs, node-pbkdf2, node-performance-now, node-set-immediate-shim, node-sinon-chai, node-source-list-map, node-stream-array, node-string-decoder, node-stringstream, node-verror, node-vinyl-sourcemaps-apply, node-vm-browserify, node-webpack-sources, node-wide-align, odil, onionshare, opensvc, otb, perl, petsc4py, pglogical, postgresql-10, psortb, purl, pymodbus, pymssql, python-decouple, python-django-rules, python-glob2, python-ncclient, python-parse-type, python-prctl, python-sparse, quoin-clojure, quorum, r-bioc-genomeinfodbdata, radlib, reprounzip, rustc, sbt-test-interface, slepc4py, slick-greeter, sparse, te923con, trabucco, traildb, typescript-types & writegood-mode. I additionally filed 6 RC bugs against packages that had incomplete debian/copyright files against: libgetdata, odil, opensvc, python-ncclient, radlib and reprounzip.

Lars Wirzenius: Using a Yubikey 4 for ensafening one's encryption

Introduction I've written before about using a U2F key with PAM. This post continues the theme and explains how to use a smartcard with GnuPG for storing OpenPGP private keys. Specifically, a Yubikey 4 card, because that's what I have, but any good GnuPG compatible card should work. The Yubikey is both a GnuPG compatible smart card, and a U2F card. The Yubikey 4 can handle keys up to 4096 bits. Older Yubikeys can only handle keys up to 2095 bits. The reason to do this is to make it harder for an attacker to steal your encryption keys. I will assume you don't already have an OpenPGP key, or are willing to generate a new one. I will also assume you run Debian stretch; some of the desktop environment setup details may differ between Debian versions or between Linux distributions. You will need: Terminology Some terminology: Outline The process outline is:
  1. Create a new, signing-only master key with GnuPG.
  2. Create three "subkeys", one each for encryption, signing, and authentication. These subkeys are what everyone else uses.
  3. Export copies of the master key pair and the subkey pairs and put them in a safe place.
  4. Put the subkeys on the Yubikey.
  5. GnuPG will automatically use the keys from the card. You have to have the card plugged into a USB port for things to work. If someone steals your laptop, they won't get the private subkeys. Even if they steal your Yubikey, they won't get them (the smartcard is physically designed to prevent that), and can't even use them (because there's PIN codes or passphrases and getting them wrong several times locks up the smartcard).
  6. Use gpg-agent as your SSH agent, and the authentication-only subkey on the Yubikey is used as your ssh key.
Configure GnuPG The process in more detail: Create new keys
$ gpg --full-generate-key
gpg (GnuPG) 2.1.18; Copyright (C) 2017 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.

Please select what kind of key you want:
(1) RSA and RSA (default)
(2) DSA and Elgamal
(3) DSA (sign only)
(4) RSA (sign only)
Your selection? 4
RSA keys may be between 1024 and 4096 bits long.
What keysize do you want? (2048) 4096
Requested keysize is 4096 bits
Please specify how long the key should be valid.
0 = key does not expire
= key expires in n days
w = key expires in n weeks
m = key expires in n months
y = key expires in n years
Key is valid for? (0) 1y
Key expires at Tue 29 May 2018 06:43:54 PM EEST
Is this correct? (y/N) y

GnuPG needs to construct a user ID to identify your key.

Real name: Lars Wirzenius
Email address: liw@liw.fi
Comment: test key
You selected this USER-ID:
"Lars Wirzenius (test key) <liw@liw.fi>>"

Change (N)ame, (C)omment, (E)mail or (O)kay/(Q)uit? o
We need to generate a lot of random bytes. It is a good idea to perform
some other action (type on the keyboard, move the mouse, utilize the
disks) during the prime generation; this gives the random number
generator a better chance to gain enough entropy.
gpg: key 25FB738D6EE435F7 marked as ultimately trusted
gpg: directory '/home/liw/.gnupg/openpgp-revocs.d' created
gpg: revocation certificate stored as '/home/liw/.gnupg/openpgp-revocs.d/A734C10BF2DF39D19DC0F6C025FB738D6EE435F7.rev'
public and secret key created and signed.

Note that this key cannot be used for encryption. You may want to use
the command "--edit-key" to generate a subkey for this purpose.
pub rsa4096 2017-05-29 [SC] [expires: 2018-05-29]
A734C10BF2DF39D19DC0F6C025FB738D6EE435F7
A734C10BF2DF39D19DC0F6C025FB738D6EE435F7
uid Lars Wirzenius (test key) <liw@liw.fi>
  • Note that I set a 1-year expiration for they key. The expiration can be extended at any time (if you have the master secret key), but unless you do, the key won't accidentally live longer than the chosen time.
  • Review the key:
$ gpg --list-secret-keys
/home/liw/.gnupg/pubring.kbx
----------------------------
sec rsa4096 2017-05-29 [SC] [expires: 2018-05-29]
A734C10BF2DF39D19DC0F6C025FB738D6EE435F7
uid [ultimate] Lars Wirzenius (test key) <liw@liw.fi>
  • You now have the signing-only master key. You should now create three subkeys (keyid is the key identifier shown in the key listing, A734C10BF2DF39D19DC0F6C025FB738D6EE435F7 above). Use the --expert option to be able to add an authentication-only subkey.
$ gpg --edit-key --expert A734C10BF2DF39D19DC0F6C025FB738D6EE435F7z
gpg (GnuPG) 2.1.18; Copyright (C) 2017 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.

Secret key is available.

sec rsa4096/25FB738D6EE435F7
created: 2017-05-29 expires: 2018-05-29 usage: SC
trust: ultimate validity: ultimate
[ultimate] (1). Lars Wirzenius (test key) <liw@liw.fi>

gpg> addkey
Please select what kind of key you want:
(3) DSA (sign only)
(4) RSA (sign only)
(5) Elgamal (encrypt only)
(6) RSA (encrypt only)
(7) DSA (set your own capabilities)
(8) RSA (set your own capabilities)
(10) ECC (sign only)
(11) ECC (set your own capabilities)
(12) ECC (encrypt only)
(13) Existing key
Your selection? 4
RSA keys may be between 1024 and 4096 bits long.
What keysize do you want? (2048) 4096
Requested keysize is 4096 bits
Please specify how long the key should be valid.
0 = key does not expire
= key expires in n days
w = key expires in n weeks
m = key expires in n months
y = key expires in n years
Key is valid for? (0) 1y
Key expires at Tue 29 May 2018 06:44:52 PM EEST
Is this correct? (y/N) y
Really create? (y/N) y
We need to generate a lot of random bytes. It is a good idea to perform
some other action (type on the keyboard, move the mouse, utilize the
disks) during the prime generation; this gives the random number
generator a better chance to gain enough entropy.

sec rsa4096/25FB738D6EE435F7
created: 2017-05-29 expires: 2018-05-29 usage: SC
trust: ultimate validity: ultimate
ssb rsa4096/05F88308DFB71774
created: 2017-05-29 expires: 2018-05-29 usage: S
[ultimate] (1). Lars Wirzenius (test key) <liw@liw.fi>

gpg> addkey
Please select what kind of key you want:
(3) DSA (sign only)
(4) RSA (sign only
(5) Elgamal (encrypt only)
(6) RSA (encrypt only)
(7) DSA (set your own capabilities)
(8) RSA (set your own capabilities)
(10) ECC (sign only)
(11) ECC (set your own capabilities)
(12) ECC (encrypt only)
(13) Existing key
Your selection? 6
RSA keys may be between 1024 and 4096 bits long.
What keysize do you want? (2048) 4096
Requested keysize is 4096 bits
Please specify how long the key should be valid
0 = key does not expire
= key expires in n days
w = key expires in n weeks
m = key expires in n months
y = key expires in n years
Key is valid for? (0) 1y
Key expires at Tue 29 May 2018 06:45:22 PM EEST
Is this correct? (y/N) y
Really create? (y/N) y
We need to generate a lot of random bytes. It is a good idea to perform
some other action (type on the keyboard, move the mouse, utilize the
disks) during the prime generation; this gives the random number
generator a better chance to gain enough entropy.

sec rsa4096/25FB738D6EE435F7
created: 2017-05-29 expires: 2018-05-29 usage: SC
trust: ultimate validity: ultimate
ssb rsa4096/05F88308DFB71774
created: 2017-05-29 expires: 2018-05-29 usage: S
ssb rsa4096/2929E8A96CBA57C7
created: 2017-05-29 expires: 2018-05-29 usage: E
[ultimate] (1). Lars Wirzenius (test key) <liw@liw.fi>

gpg> addkey
Please select what kind of key you want:
(3) DSA (sign only)
(4) RSA (sign only)
(5) Elgamal (encrypt only)
(6) RSA (encrypt only)
(7) DSA (set your own capabilities)
(8) RSA (set your own capabilities)
(10) ECC (sign only)
(11) ECC (set your own capabilities)
(12) ECC (encrypt only)
(13) Existing key
Your selection? 8

Possible actions for a RSA key: Sign Encrypt Authenticate
Current allowed actions: Sign Encrypt

(S) Toggle the sign capability
(E) Toggle the encrypt capability
(A) Toggle the authenticate capability
(Q) Finished

Your selection? a

Possible actions for a RSA key: Sign Encrypt Authenticate
Current allowed actions: Sign Encrypt Authenticate

(S) Toggle the sign capability
(E) Toggle the encrypt capability
(A) Toggle the authenticate capability
(Q) Finished

Your selection? s

Possible actions for a RSA key: Sign Encrypt Authenticate
Current allowed actions: Encrypt Authenticate

(S) Toggle the sign capability
(E) Toggle the encrypt capability
(A) Toggle the authenticate capability
(Q) Finished

Your selection? e

Possible actions for a RSA key: Sign Encrypt Authenticate
Current allowed actions: Authenticate

(S) Toggle the sign capability
(E) Toggle the encrypt capability
(A) Toggle the authenticate capability
(Q) Finished

Your selection? q
RSA keys may be btween 1024 and 4096 bits long.
What keysize do you want? (2048) 4096
Requested keysize is 4096 bits
Please specify how long the key should be valid.
0 = key does not expire
= key expires in n days
w = key expires in n weeks
m = key expires in n months
y = key expires in n years
Key is valid for? (0) 1y
Key expires at Tue 29 May 2018 06:45:56 PM EEST
Is this correct? (y/N) y
Really create? (y/N) y
We need to generate a lot of random bytes. It is a good idea to perform
some other action (type on the keyboard, move the mouse, utilize the
disks) during the prime generation; this gives the random number
generator a better chance to gain enough entropy.

sec rsa4096/25FB738D6EE435F7
created: 2017-05-29 expires: 2018-05-29 usage: SC
trust: ultimate validity: ultimate
ssb rsa4096/05F88308DFB71774
created: 2017-05-29 expires: 2018-05-29 usage: S
ssb rsa4096/2929E8A96CBA57C7
created: 2017-05-29 expires: 2018-05-29 usage: E
ssb rsa4096/4477EB0AEF1C440A
created: 2017-05-29 expires: 2018-05-29 usage: A
[ultimate] (1). Lars Wirzenius (test key) <liw@liw.fi>

gpg> save
Export secret keys to files, make a backup
  • You now have a master key and three subkeys. They are hidden in the ~/.gnupg directory. It is time to "export" the secret keys out from there.
$ gpg --export-secret-key --armor keyid > master.key
$ gpg --export-secret-subkeys --armor keyid > subkeys.key
  • You should keep these files safe. You don't want to lose them, and you don't want anyone else to get access to them. I recommend you format two USB memory sticks, format them using full-disk encryption, and copy the exported files to both of them. Then keep them somewhere safe. There's ways of making this part more sophisticated, but that's for another time.
  • The next step involves some hoop-jumping. What we want is to have the master secret key NOT on you machine, so we tell GnuPG to remove it. We exported it above, so we won't lose it. However, deleting the master secret key also removes the secret subkeys. But we can import those without importing the master secret key.
$ gpg --delete-secret-key keyid
$ gpg --import subkeys.key
  • Now verify that you have the secret subkeys, but not the master key. There should be one line starting with sec# (note the hash mark, which indicates the key isn't available), and three lines starting with ssb (no hash mark).
$ gpg -K
/home/liw/.gnupg/pubring.kbx
----------------------------
sec# rsa4096 2017-05-29 [SC] [expires: 2018-05-29]
A734C10BF2DF39D19DC0F6C025FB738D6EE435F7
uid [ultimate] Lars Wirzenius (test key) <liw@liw.fi>
ssb rsa4096 2017-05-29 [S] [expires: 2018-05-29]
ssb rsa4096 2017-05-29 [E] [expires: 2018-05-29]
ssb rsa4096 2017-05-29 [A] [expires: 2018-05-29]
Install subkeys on a Yubikey
  • Now insert the Yubikey in a USB slot. We can start transferring the secret subkeys to the Yubikey. If you want, you can set your name and other information, and change PIN codes. There's several types of PIN codes: normal use, unblocking a locked card, and a third PIN code for admin operations. Changing the PIN codes is a good idea, otherwise everyone will just try the default of 123456 (admin 12345678). However, I'm skipping that in the interest of brevity.
$ gpg -card-edit
...
  • Actually move the subkeys to the card. Note that this does a move, not a copy, and the subkeys will be removed from your ~/.gnupg (check with gpg -K).
$ gpg --edit-key liw
gpg (GnuPG) 2.1.18; Copyright (C) 2017 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.

Secret key is available.

pub rsa4096/25FB738D6EE435F7
created: 2017-05-29 expires: 2018-05-29 usage: SC
trust: ultimate validity: ultimate
ssb rsa4096/05F88308DFB71774
created: 2017-05-29 expires: 2018-05-29 usage: S
ssb rsa4096/2929E8A96CBA57C7
created: 2017-05-29 expires: 2018-05-29 usage: E
ssb rsa4096/4477EB0AEF1C440A
created: 2017-05-29 expires: 2018-05-29 usage: A
[ultimate] (1). Lars Wirzenius (test key) <liw@liw.fi>

gpg> key 1

pub rsa4096/25FB738D6EE435F7
created: 2017-05-29 expires: 2018-05-29 usage: SC
trust: ultimate validity: ultimate
ssb* rsa4096/05F88308DFB71774
created: 2017-05-29 expires: 2018-05-29 usage: S
ssb rsa4096/2929E8A96CBA57C7
created: 2017-05-29 expires: 2018-05-29 usage: E
ssb rsa4096/4477EB0AEF1C440A
created: 2017-05-29 expires: 2018-05-29 usage: A
[ultimate] (1). Lars Wirzenius (test key) <liw@liw.fi>

gpg> keytocard
Please select where to store the key:
(1) Signature key
(3) Authentication key
Your selection? 1

pub rsa4096/25FB738D6EE435F7
created: 2017-05-29 expires: 2018-05-29 usage: SC
trust: ultimate validity: ultimate
ssb* rsa4096/05F88308DFB71774
created: 2017-05-29 expires: 2018-05-29 usage: S
ssb rsa4096/2929E8A96CBA57C7
created: 2017-05-29 expires: 2018-05-29 usage: E
ssb rsa4096/4477EB0AEF1C440A
created: 2017-05-29 expires: 2018-05-29 usage: A
[ultimate] (1). Lars Wirzenius (test key) <liw@liw.fi>

gpg> key 1

pub rsa4096/25FB738D6EE435F7
created: 2017-05-29 expires: 2018-05-29 usage: SC
trust: ultimate validity: ultimate
ssb rsa4096/05F88308DFB71774
created: 2017-05-29 expires: 2018-05-29 usage: S
ssb rsa4096/2929E8A96CBA57C7
created: 2017-05-29 expires: 2018-05-29 usage: E
ssb rsa4096/4477EB0AEF1C440A
created: 2017-05-29 expires: 2018-05-29 usage: A
[ultimate] (1). Lars Wirzenius (test key) <liw@liw.fi>

gpg> key 2

pub rsa4096/25FB738D6EE435F7
created: 2017-05-29 expires: 2018-05-29 usage: SC
trust: ultimate validity: ultimate
ssb rsa4096/05F88308DFB71774
created: 2017-05-29 expires: 2018-05-29 usage: S
ssb* rsa4096/2929E8A96CBA57C7
created: 2017-05-29 expires: 2018-05-29 usage: E
ssb rsa4096/4477EB0AEF1C440A
created: 2017-05-29 expires: 2018-05-29 usage: A
[ultimate] (1). Lars Wirzenius (test key) <liw@liw.fi>

gpg> keytocard
Please select where to store the key:
(2) Encryption key
Your selection? 2

pub rsa4096/25FB738D6EE435F7
created: 2017-05-29 expires: 2018-05-29 usage: SC
trust: ultimate validity: ultimate
ssb rsa4096/05F88308DFB71774
created: 2017-05-29 expires: 2018-05-29 usage: S
ssb* rsa4096/2929E8A96CBA57C7
created: 2017-05-29 expires: 2018-05-29 usage: E
ssb rsa4096/4477EB0AEF1C440A
created: 2017-05-29 expires: 2018-05-29 usage: A
[ultimate] (1). Lars Wirzenius (test key) <liw@liw.fi>

gpg> key 2

pub rsa4096/25FB738D6EE435F7
created: 2017-05-29 expires: 2018-05-29 usage: SC
trust: ultimate validity: ultimate
ssb rsa4096/05F88308DFB71774
created: 2017-05-29 expires: 2018-05-29 usage: S
ssb rsa4096/2929E8A96CBA57C7
created: 2017-05-29 expires: 2018-05-29 usage: E
ssb rsa4096/4477EB0AEF1C440A
created: 2017-05-29 expires: 2018-05-29 usage: A
[ultimate] (1). Lars Wirzenius (test key) <liw@liw.fi>

gpg> key 3

pub rsa4096/25FB738D6EE435F7
created: 2017-05-29 expires: 2018-05-29 usage: SC
trust: ultimate validity: ultimate
ssb rsa4096/05F88308DFB71774
created: 2017-05-29 expires: 2018-05-29 usage: S
ssb rsa4096/2929E8A96CBA57C7
created: 2017-05-29 expires: 2018-05-29 usage: E
ssb* rsa4096/4477EB0AEF1C440A
created: 2017-05-29 expires: 2018-05-29 usage: A
[ultimate] (1). Lars Wirzenius (test key) <liw@liw.fi>

gpg> keytocard
Please select where to store the key:
(3) Authentication key
Your selection? 3

pub rsa4096/25FB738D6EE435F7
created: 2017-05-29 expires: 2018-05-29 usage: SC
trust: ultimate validity: ultimate
ssb rsa4096/05F88308DFB71774
created: 2017-05-29 expires: 2018-05-29 usage: S
ssb rsa4096/2929E8A96CBA57C7
created: 2017-05-29 expires: 2018-05-29 usage: E
ssb* rsa4096/4477EB0AEF1C440A
created: 2017-05-29 expires: 2018-05-29 usage: A
[ultimate] (1). Lars Wirzenius (test key) <liw@liw.fi>

gpg> save
  • If you want to use several Yubikeys, or have a spare one just in case, repeat the previous four steps (starting from importing subkeys back into ~/.gnupg).
  • You're now done, as far GnuPG use is concerned. Any time you need to sign, encrypt, or decrypt something, GnuPG will look for your subkeys on the Yubikey, and will tell you to insert it in a USB port if it can't find the key.
Use subkey on Yubikey as your SSH key
  • To actually use the authentication-only subkey on the Yubikey for ssh, you need to configure your system to use gpg-agent as the SSH agent. Add the following line to .gnupg/gpg-agent.conf: 
     enable-ssh-support
  • On a Debian stretch system with GNOME, edit /etc/xdg/autostart/gnome-keyring-ssh.desktop to have the following line, to prevent the GNOME ssh agent from starting up: 
     Hidden=true
  • Edit /etc/X11/Xsession.options and remove or comment out the line that says use-ssh-agent. This stops a system-started ssh-agent from being started when the desktop start.
  • Create the file ~/.config/autostart/gpg-agent.desktop with the following content: 
     [Desktop Entry]
 Type=Application
 Name=gpg-agent
 Comment=gpg-agent
 Exec=/usr/bin/gpg-agent --daemon
 OnlyShowIn=GNOME;Unity;MATE;
 X-GNOME-Autostart-Phase=PreDisplayServer
 X-GNOME-AutoRestart=false
 X-GNOME-Autostart-Notify=true
 X-GNOME-Bugzilla-Bugzilla=GNOME
 X-GNOME-Bugzilla-Product=gnome-keyring
 X-GNOME-Bugzilla-Component=general
 X-GNOME-Bugzilla-Version=3.20.0
  • To test, log out, and back in again, run the following in a terminal:
$ ssh-add -l
The output should contain a line that looks like this: 
    4096 SHA256:PDCzyQPpd9tiWsELM8LwaLBsMDMm42J8/eEfezNgnVc cardno:000604626953 (RSA)
  • You need to export the authentication-only subkey in the SSH key format. You need this for adding to .ssh/authorized_keys, if nothing else.
$ gpg --export-ssh-key keyid > ssh.pub
  • Happy hacking.
See also See also the following links. I've used them to learn enough to write the above. Edited to fix:
  • Output of gpg -K after removing secret master key.

30 May 2017

Reproducible builds folks: Reproducible Builds: week 109 in Stretch cycle

Here's what happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday May 21 and Saturday May 27 2017: Past and upcoming events Bernhard M. Wiedemann gave a short talk on reproducible builds in openSUSE at the openSUSE Conference 2017. Slides and video recordings are available on that page. Chris Lamb will present at the Hong Kong Open Source Conference 2017 on reproducible builds on June 9th. Our next IRC meeting has been scheduled for Thursday June 1 at 16:00 UTC with this agenda. Academia Justin Cappos continued his work on the reproducible builds paper, with text and suggestions from Ximin Luo integrated. Toolchain developments #863470: "ftp.debian.org: security sync must not exclude .buildinfo" - while this bug isn't fixed, you need to make sure not to build jessie updates with stretch's dpkg, or else the upload will be rejected. Ximin Luo built GCC twice and ran diffoscope on them. Unfortunately the results were 1.7 GB in size and it can't be displayed in a web browser. 99/171 of the .debs are reproducible, though. He's now working on diffoscope (see below) to make it generate output more intelligently for such large size diffs. Here is a summary diff where the recursion depth cut-off was set low, so the size is reasonable and one can still see the outlines of where to look next. debuerreotype was newly added to Debian unstable. It is a reproducible, snapshot-based Debian rootfs builder. Patches and bugs filed Reviews of unreproducible packages 29 package reviews have been added, 49 have been updated and 23 have been removed in this week, adding to our knowledge about identified issues. Weekly QA work During our reproducibility testing, FTBFS bugs have been detected and reported by:
  • Adrian Bunk (10)
  • Chris Lamb (2)
  • James Clarke (1)
diffoscope development Development continued in git, with commits from:
  • Ximin Luo:
    • Refactor container-related logic to make the code clearer.
    • Various improvements to the progress bar, making it behave more accurately and make it compatible with --debug logging output.
    • Fix --exclude control.tar.gz.
    • When enforcing max-container-depth, show which internal files differ, without showing their details.
    • Add --max-container-depth CLI option.
strip-nondeterminism development Version 0.034-1 was uploaded to unstable by Chris Lamb. It included previous weeks' contributions from:
  • Chris Lamb
    • Only print log messages by default if the file was actually modified. (Closes: #863033)
  • Bernhard M. Wiedemann
    • zip: make sure we have permissions on extracted file
    • Add function prototypes.
tests.reproducible-builds.org:
  • Alexander Couzens
    • Use Alexander's LEDE git repo to test his mksquashfs patches.
  • Daniel Shahaf
    • Refactored reproducible_remote_scheduler.py to add support for multiple suites in one invocation.
  • Holger Levsen
    • Prevent the two fdroid jobs from running together by using the Build Blocker Plugin.
    • A niceness variation was also added (see #863440) to the Debian tests, but this change was reverted for now, as it was breaking stuff and needs to be readded properly.
    • Some adjustments to the Debian scheduler, still due to the improve performance through the new build services.
  • Mattia Rizzolo
    • Update dsa-check-running-kernel from dsa-nagios (to support kernel 4.x as present in stretch) on all jenkins nodes.
Misc. This week's edition was written by Ximin Luo, Bernhard M. Wiedemann, Chris Lamb and Holger Levsen & reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC & the mailing lists.

29 May 2017

Steve Kemp: Security is hard ..

3D-Printing
I continued to be impressed with local vendors, found on 3dhubs. I've had several more things printed out, including an "internet button", and some card-holders for Settlers of Catan. The most recent print I had made was a collection of display cases, for holding an OLED display, as well as an ESP8266 device. Unfortunately at the same time as I was falling in love with the service I discovered a glaring XSS attack against the site itself. Anybody who viewed my profile page could have arbitrary javascript executed, which in some cases would actually disclose their private details - such as:
  • Their forename & surname.
  • Their email-address.
  • Their telephone number.
  • Their GeoIP details.
Discovering this took minutes, writing it up took an hour, and a month later it is still unfixed. I've deleted my account.

27 May 2017

Russ Allbery: On time management

Last December, the Guardian published a long essay by Oliver Burkeman entitled "Why time management is ruining our lives". Those who follow my book reviews know I read a lot of time management books, so of course I couldn't resist this. And, possibly surprisingly, not to disagree with it. It's an excellent essay, and well worth your time. Burkeman starts by talking about Inbox Zero:
If all this fervour seems extreme Inbox Zero was just a set of technical instructions for handling email, after all this was because email had become far more than a technical problem. It functioned as a kind of infinite to-do list, to which anyone on the planet could add anything at will.
This is, as Burkeman develops in the essay, an important critique of time management techniques in general, not just Inbox Zero: perhaps you can become moderately more efficient, but what are you becoming more efficient at doing, and why does it matter? If there were a finite amount of things that you had to accomplish, with leisure the reward at the end of the fixed task list, doing those things more efficiently makes perfect sense. But this is not the case in most modern life. Instead, we live in a world governed by Parkinson's Law: "Work expands to fill the time available for its completion." Worse, we live in a world where the typical employer takes Parkinson's Law, not as a statement on the nature of ever-expanding to-do lists, but a challenge to compress the time made available for a task to try to force the work to happen faster. Burkeman goes farther into the politics, pointing out that a cui bono analysis of time management suggests that we're all being played by capitalist employers. I wholeheartedly agree, but that's worth a separate discussion; for those who want to explore that angle, David Graeber's Debt and John Kenneth Galbraith's The Affluent Society are worth your time. What I want to write about here is why I still read (and recommend) time management literature, and how my thinking on it has changed. I started in the same place that most people probably do: I had a bunch of work to juggle, I felt I was making insufficient forward progress on it, and I felt my day contained a lot of slack that could be put to better use. The alluring promise of time management is that these problems can be resolved with more organization and some focus techniques. And there is a huge surge of energy that comes with adopting a new system and watching it work, since the good ones build psychological payoff into the tracking mechanism. Starting a new time management system is fun! Finishing things is fun! I then ran into the same problem that I think most people do: after that initial surge of enthusiasm, I had lists, systems, techniques, data on where my time was going, and a far more organized intake process. But I didn't feel more comfortable with how I was spending my time, I didn't have more leisure time, and I didn't feel happier. Often the opposite: time management systems will often force you to notice all the things you want to do and how slow your progress is towards accomplishing any of them. This is my fundamental disagreement with Getting Things Done (GTD): David Allen firmly believes that the act of recording everything that is nagging at you to be done relieves the brain of draining background processing loops and frees you to be more productive. He argues for this quite persuasively; as you can see from my review, I liked his book a great deal, and used his system for some time. But, at least for me, this does not work. Instead, having a complete list of goals towards which I am making slow or no progress is profoundly discouraging and depressing. The process of maintaining and dwelling on that list while watching it constantly grow was awful, quite a bit worse psychologically than having no time management system at all. Mark Forster is the time management author who speaks the best to me, and one of the points he makes is that time management is the wrong framing. You're not going to somehow generate more time, and you're usually not managing minutes and seconds. A better framing is task management, or commitment management: the goal of the system is to manage what you mentally commit to accomplishing, usually by restricting that list to something far shorter than you would come up with otherwise. How, in other words, to limit your focus to a small enough set of goals that you can make meaningful progress instead of thrashing. That, for me, is now the merit and appeal of time (or task) management systems: how do I sort through all the incoming noise, distractions, requests, desires, and compelling ideas that life throws at me and figure out which of them are worth investing time in? I also benefit from structuring that process for my peculiar psychology, in which backlogs I have to look at regularly are actively dangerous for my mental well-being. Left unchecked, I can turn even the most enjoyable hobby into an obligation and then into a source of guilt for not meeting the (entirely artificial) terms of the obligation I created, without even intending to. And here I think it has a purpose, but it's not the purpose that the time management industry is selling. If you think of time management as a way to get more things done and get more out of each moment, you're going to be disappointed (and you're probably also being taken advantage of by the people who benefit from unsustainable effort without real, unstructured leisure time). I practice Inbox Zero, but the point wasn't to be more efficient at processing my email. The point was to avoid the (for me) psychologically damaging backlog of messages while acting on the knowledge that 99% of email should go immediately into the trash with no further action. Email is an endless incoming stream of potential obligations or requests for my time (even just to read a longer message) that I should normallly reject. I also take the time to notice patterns of email that I never care about and then shut off the source or write filters to delete that email for me. I can then reserve my email time for moments of human connection, directly relevant information, or very interesting projects, and spend the time on those messages without guilt (or at least much less guilt) about ignoring everything else. Prioritization is extremely difficult, particularly once you realize that true prioritization is not about first and later, but about soon or never. The point of prioritization is not to choose what to do first, it's to choose the 5% of things that you going to do at all, convince yourself to be mentally okay with never doing the other 95% (and not lying to yourself about how there will be some future point when you'll magically have more time), and vigorously defend your focus and effort for that 5%. And, hopefully, wholeheartedly enjoy working on those things, without guilt or nagging that there's something else you should be doing instead. I still fail at this all the time. But I'm better than I used to be. For me, that mental shift was by far the hardest part. But once you've made that shift, I do think the time management world has a lot of tools and techniques to help you make more informed choices about the 5%, and to help you overcome procrastination and loss of focus on your real goals. Those real goals should include true unstructured leisure and "because I want to" projects. And hopefully, if you're in a financial position to do it, include working less on what other people want you to do and more on the things that delight you. Or at least making a well-informed strategic choice (for the sake of money or some other concrete and constantly re-evaluated reason) to sacrifice your personal goals for some temporary external ones.

Lars Wirzenius: Distix movement

Distix is my distributed ticketing system. I initially wrote the core of it as a bit of programming performance art, to celebrate my 30 years as a programmer. Distix is built on top of git and emails in Maildirs. It is a silent listener to your issue and bug discussions: as long as you ensure it gets a copy of each mail, it takes care of automatically arranging things into separate tickets based on email threading. Users and customers do not need to even know Distix is being used. Only the "support staff" need ever interact with Distix, and they mostly only need to close tickets that have been dealt with. I've been using Distix for my own stuff for some time now, and recently we've started using it at work. I slowly improve it as we find problems. It's not a sleek, smooth, finished tool. It's clunky, weird, and probably not what you want. But it's what I want. Changes in recent months:
  • There is a new website: http://distix.eu/. No particular good reason for a new website, but I won the domain for free a couple of years ago, so I might as well use it.
  • In addition, a ticketing system for Distix itself: http://tickets.distix.eu/. Possibly I should've called the subdomain dogfood, but I'm a serious person, not prone to trying to be funny.
  • Mails can now be imported using IMAP.
  • Importing has been optimized for speed and memory use, making my own production use more practical.
I've discussed with a friend the possibility of writing a web UI, and some day maybe that will happen. For now, distix is a command line applicaton that can generate a static HTML site.

26 May 2017

Steinar H. Gunderson: Last minute stretch bugs

The last week, I found no less than three pet bugs I have hope that will be allowed to go in before stretch release:
  • #863286: lua-http: completely broken in non-US locales
  • #843448: linux-image-4.8.0-1-armmp-lpae: fails to boot on Odroid-Xu4 with rootfs on USB (actually my problem is that the NIC doesn't work, but same root cause this makes stretch basically unusable on XU4)
  • #863280: cubemap: streams with paths exactly 7 characters long get broken buffering behavior
I promise, none of these were found late because I upgraded to stretch too late just a perfect storm. :-)

25 May 2017

Jaldhar Vyas: For Downtown Hoboken

Q: What should you do if you see a spaceman? A: Park there before someone takes it, man.

24 May 2017

Steve Kemp: Getting ready for Stretch

I run about 17 servers. Of those about six are very personal and the rest are a small cluster which are used for a single website. (Partly because the code is old and in some ways a bit badly designed, partly because "clustering!", "high availability!", "learning!", "fun!" - seriously I had a lot of fun putting together a fault-tolerant deployment with haproxy, ucarp, etc, etc. If I were paying for it the site would be both retired and static!) I've started the process of upgrading to stretch by picking a bunch of hosts that do things I could live without for a few days - in case there were big problems, or I needed to restore from backups. So far I've upgraded:
  • master.steve
    • This is a puppet-master, so while it is important killing it wouldn't be too bad - after all my nodes are currently setup properly, right?
    • Upgrading this host changed the puppet-server from 3.x to 4.x.
    • That meant I had to upgrade all my client-systems, because puppet 3.x won't talk to a 4.x master.
    • Happily jessie-backports contains a recent puppet-client.
    • It also meant I had to rework a lot of my recipes, in small ways.
  • builder.steve
    • This is a host I use to build packages upon, via pbuilder.
    • I have chroots setup for wheezy, jessie, and stretch, each in i386 and amd64 flavours.
  • git.steve
    • This is a host which stores my git-repositories, via gitbucket.
    • While it is an important host in terms of functionality, the software it needs is very basic: nginx proxies to a java application which runs on localhost:XXXX, with some caching magic happening to deal with abusive clients.
    • I do keep considering using gitlab, because I like its runners, etc. But that is pretty resource intensive.
    • On the other hand If I did switch I could drop my builder.steve host, which might mean I'd come out ahead in terms of used resources.
  • leave.steve
    • Torrent-box.
    • Upgrading was painless, I only run rtorrent, and a simple object storage system of my own devising.
All upgrades were painless, with only one real surprise - the attic-backup software was removed from Debian. Although I do intend to retry using Larss' excellent obnum in the near future pragmatically I wanted to stick with what I'm familiar with. Borg backup is a fork of attic I've been aware of for a long time, but I never quite had a reason to try it out. Setting it up pretty much just meant editing my backup-script: 
s/attic/borg/g
Once I did that, and created some new destinations all was good: 
borg@rsync.io ~ $ borg init /backups/git.steve.org.uk.borg/
borg@rsync.io ~ $ borg init /backups/master.steve.org.uk.borg/
borg@rsync.io ~ $ ..
Upgrading other hosts, for example my website(s), and my email-box, will be more complex and fiddly. On that basis they will definitely wait for the formal stretch release. But having a couple of hosts running the frozen distribution is good for testing, and to let me see what is new.

23 May 2017

Reproducible builds folks: Reproducible Builds: week 108 in Stretch cycle

Here's what happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday May 14 and Saturday May 20 2017: News and Media coverage
  • We've reached 94.0% reproducible packages on testing/amd64! (NB. without build path variation)
  • Maria Glukhova was interviewed on It's FOSS about her involvement with Reproducible Builds with respect to Outreachy.
IRC meeting Our next IRC meeting has been scheduled for Thursday June 1 at 16:00 UTC. Packages reviewed and fixed, bugs filed, etc. Bernhard M. Wiedemann: Chris Lamb: Reviews of unreproducible packages 35 package reviews have been added, 28 have been updated and 12 have been removed in this week, adding to our knowledge about identified issues. 2 issue types have been added: diffoscope development strip-nondeterminism development tests.reproducible-builds.org Holger wrote a new systemd-based scheduling system replacing 162 constantly running Jenkins jobs which were slowing down job execution in general:
  • Nothing fancy really, just 370 lines of shell code in two scripts, out of these 370 lines 80 are comments and 162 are node defitions for those 162 "jobs".
  • Worker logs not yet as good as with Jenkins but usually we dont need realitime log viewing of specific builds. Or rather, its a waste of time to do it. (Actual package build logs remain unchanged.)
  • Builds are a lot faster for the fast archs, but not so much difference on armhf.
  • Since April 12 for i386 (and a week later for the rest), the images below are ordered with i386 on top, then amd64, armhf and arm64. Except for armhf it's pretty visible when the switch was made.
Misc. This week's edition was written by Chris Lamb, Holver Levsen, Bernhard M. Wiedemann, Vagrant Cascadian and Maria Glukhova & reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC & the mailing lists.

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