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15 September 2020

Russell Coker: More About the PowerEdge R710

I ve got the R710 (mentioned in my previous post [1]) online. When testing the R710 at home I noticed that sometimes the VGA monitor I was using would start flickering when in some parts of the BIOS setup, it seemed that the horizonal sync wasn t working properly. It didn t seem to be a big deal at the time. When I deployed it the KVM display that I had planned to use with it mostly didn t display anything. When the display was working the KVM keyboard wouldn t work (and would prevent a regular USB keyboard from working if they were both connected at the same time). The VGA output of the R710 also wouldn t work with my VGA->HDMI device so I couldn t get it working with my portable monitor. Fortunately the Dell front panel has a display and tiny buttons that allow configuring the IDRAC IP address, so I was able to get IDRAC going. One thing Dell really should do is allow the down button to change 0 to 9 when entering numbers, that would make it easier to enter 8.8.8.8 for the DNS server. Another thing Dell should do is make the default gateway have a default value according to the IP address and netmask of the server. When I got IDRAC going it was easy to setup a serial console, boot from a rescue USB device, create a new initrd with the driver for the MegaRAID controller, and then reboot into the server image. When I transferred the SSDs from the old server to the newer Dell server the problem I had was that the Dell drive caddies had no holes in suitable places for attaching SSDs. I ended up just pushing the SSDs in so they are hanging in mid air attached only by the SATA/SAS connectors. Plugging them in took the space from the above drive, so instead of having 2*3.5 disks I have 1*2.5 SSD and need the extra space to get my hand in. The R710 is designed for 6*3.5 disks and I m going to have trouble if I ever want to have more than 3*2.5 SSDs. Fortunately I don t think I ll need more SSDs. After booting the system I started getting alerts about a fault in one SSD, with no detail on what the fault might be. My guess is that the SSD in question is M.2 and it s in a M.2 to regular SATA adaptor which might have some problems. The data seems fine though, a BTRFS scrub found no checksum errors. I guess I ll have to buy a replacement SSD soon. I configured the system to use the nosmt kernel command line option to disable hyper-threading (which won t provide much performance benefit but which makes certain types of security attacks much easier). I ve configured BOINC to run on 6/8 CPU cores and surprisingly that didn t cause the fans to be louder than when the system was idle. It seems that a system that is designed for 6 SAS disks doesn t need a lot of cooling when run with SSDs. Update: It s a R710 not a T710. I mostly deal with Dell Tower servers and typed the wrong letter out of habit.
Related posts:
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14 September 2020

Russ Allbery: Review: Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect?

Review: Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect?, edited by Maya Schenwar, et al.
Editor: Maya Schenwar
Editor: Joe Macar
Editor: Alana Yu-lan Price
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Copyright: June 2016
ISBN: 1-60846-684-1
Format: Kindle
Pages: 250
Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? is an anthology of essays about policing in the United States. It's divided into two sections: one that enumerates ways that police are failing to serve or protect communities, and one that describes how communities are building resistance and alternatives. Haymarket Books (a progressive press in Chicago) has made it available for free in the aftermath of the George Floyd killing and resulting protests in the United States. I'm going to be a bit unfair to this book, so let me start by admitting that the mismatch between it and the book I was looking for is not entirely its fault. My primary goal was to orient myself in the discussion on the left about alternatives to policing. I also wanted to sample something from Haymarket Books; a free book was a good way to do that. I was hoping for a collection of short introductions to current lines of thinking that I could selectively follow in longer writing, and an essay collection seemed ideal for that. What I had not realized (which was my fault for not doing simple research) is that this is a compilation of articles previously published by Truthout, a non-profit progressive journalism site, in 2014 and 2015. The essays are a mix of reporting and opinion but lean towards reporting. The earliest pieces in this book date from shortly after the police killing of Michael Brown, when racist police violence was (again) reaching national white attention. The first half of the book is therefore devoted to providing evidence of police abuse and violence. This is important to do, but it's sadly no longer as revelatory in 2020, when most of us have seen similar things on video, as it was to white America in 2014. If you live in the United States today, while you may not be aware of the specific events described here, you're unlikely to be surprised that Detroit police paid off jailhouse informants to provide false testimony ("Ring of Snitches" by Aaron Miguel Cant ), or that Chicago police routinely use excessive deadly force with no consequences ("Amid Shootings, Chicago Police Department Upholds Culture of Impunity" by Sarah Macaraeg and Alison Flowers), or that there is a long history of police abuse and degradation of pregnant women ("Your Pregnancy May Subject You to Even More Law Enforcement Violence" by Victoria Law). There are about eight essays along those lines. Unfortunately, the people who excuse or disbelieve these stories are rarely willing to seek out new evidence, let alone read a book like this. That raises the question of intended audience for the catalog of horrors part of this book. The answer to that question may also be the publication date; in 2014, the base of evidence and example for discussion had not been fully constructed. This sort of reporting is also obviously relevant in the original publication context of web-based journalism, where people may encounter these accounts individually through social media or other news coverage. In 2020, they offer reinforcement and rhetorical evidence, but I'm dubious that the people who would benefit from this knowledge will ever see it in this form. Those of us who will are already sickened, angry, and depressed. My primary interest was therefore in the second half of the book: the section on how communities are building resistance and alternatives. This is where I'm going to be somewhat unfair because the state of that conversation may have been different in 2015 than it is now in 2020. But these essays were lacking the depth of analysis that I was looking for. There is a human tendency, when one becomes aware of an obvious wrong, to simply publicize the horrible thing that is happening and expect someone to do something about it. It's obviously and egregiously wrong, so if more people knew about it, certainly it would be stopped! That has happened repeatedly with racial violence in the United States. It's also part of the common (and school-taught) understanding of the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s: activists succeeded in getting the violence on the cover of newspapers and on television, people were shocked and appalled, and the backlash against the violence created political change. Putting aside the fact that this is too simplistic of a picture of the Civil Rights era, it's abundantly clear at this point in 2020 that publicizing racist and violent policing isn't going to stop it. We're going to have to do something more than draw attention to the problem. Deciding what to do requires political and social analysis, not just of the better world that we want to see but of how our current world can become that world. There is very little in that direction in this book. Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? does not answer the question of its title beyond "not us" and "white supremacy." While those answers are not exactly wrong, they're also not pushing the analysis in the direction that I wanted to read. For example (and this is a long-standing pet peeve of mine in US political writing), it would be hard to tell from most of the essays in this book that any country besides the United States exists. One essay ("Killing Africa" by William C. Anderson) talks about colonialism and draws comparisons between police violence in the United States and international treatment of African and other majority-Black countries. One essay talks about US military behavior oversees ("Beyond Homan Square" by Adam Hudson). That's about it for international perspective. Notably, there is no analysis here of what other countries might be doing better. Police violence against out-groups is not unique to the United States. No one has entirely solved this problem, but versions of this problem have been handled with far more success than here. The US has a comparatively appalling record; many countries in the world, particularly among comparable liberal democracies in Europe, are doing far better on metrics of racial oppression by agents of the government and of law enforcement violence. And yet it's common to approach these problems as if we have to develop a solution de novo, rather than ask what other countries are doing differently and if we could do some of those things. The US has some unique challenges, both historical and with the nature of endemic violence in the country, so perhaps such an analysis would turn up too many US-specific factors to copy other people's solutions. But we need to do the analysis, not give up before we start. Novel solutions can lead to novel new problems; other countries have tested, working improvements that could provide a starting framework and some map of potential pitfalls. More fundamentally, only the last two essays of this book propose solutions more complex than "stop." The authors are very clear about what the police are doing, seem less interested in why, and are nearly silent on how to change it. I suspect I am largely in political agreement with most of the authors, but obviously a substantial portion of the country (let alone its power structures) is not, and therefore nothing is changing. Part of the project of ending police violence is understanding why the violence exists, picking apart the motives and potential fracture lines in the political forces supporting the status quo, and building a strategy to change the politics. That isn't even attempted here. For example, the "who do you serve?" question of the book's title is more interesting than the essays give it credit. Police are not a monolith. Why do Black people become police officers? What are their experiences? Are there police forces in the United States that are doing better than others? What makes them different? Why do police act with violence in the moment? What set of cultural expectations, training experiences, anxieties, and fears lead to that outcome? How do we change those factors? Or, to take another tack, why are police not held accountable even when there is substantial public outrage? What political coalition supports that immunity from consequences, what are its fault lines and internal frictions, and what portions of that coalition could be broken off, pealed away, or removed from power? To whom, institutionally, are police forces accountable? What public offices can aspiring candidates run for that would give them oversight capability? This varies wildly throughout the United States; political approaches that work in large cities may not work in small towns, or with county sheriffs, or with the FBI, or with prison guards. To treat these organizations as a monolith and their motives as uniform is bad political tactics. It gives up points of leverage. I thought the best essays of this collection were the last two. "Community Groups Work to Provide Emergency Medical Alternatives, Separate from Police," by Candice Bernd, is a profile of several local emergency response systems that divert emergency calls from the police to paramedics, mental health experts, or social workers. This is an idea that's now relatively mainstream, and it seems to be finding modest success where it has been tried. It's more of a harm mitigation strategy than an attempt to deal with the root problem, but we're going to need both. The last essay, "Building Community Safety" by Ejeris Dixon, is the only essay in this book that is pushing in the direction that I was hoping to read. Dixon describes building an alternative system that can intervene in violent situations without using the police. This is fascinating and I'm glad that I read it. It's also frustrating in context because Dixon's essay should be part of a discussion. Dixon describes spending years learning de-escalation techniques, doing hard work of community discussion and collective decision-making, and making deep investment in the skills required to handle violence without calling in a dangerous outside force. I greatly admire this approach (also common in parts of the anarchist community) and the people who are willing to commit to it. But it's an immense amount of work, and as Dixon points out, that work often falls on the people who are least able to afford it. Marginalized communities, for whom the police are often dangerous, are also likely to lack both time and energy to invest in this type of skill training. And many people simply will not do this work even if they do have the resources to do it. More fundamentally, this approach conflicts somewhat with division of labor. De-escalation and social work are both professional skills that require significant time and practice to hone, and as much as I too would love to live in a world where everyone knows how to do some amount of this work, I find it hard to imagine scaling this approach without trained professionals. The point of paying someone to do this work as their job is that the money frees up their time to focus on learning those skills at a level that is difficult to do in one's free time. But once you have an organized group of professionals who do this work, you have to find a way to keep them from falling prey to the problems that plague the police, which requires understanding the origins of those problems. And that's putting aside the question of how large the residual of dangerous crime that cannot be addressed through any form of de-escalation might be, and what organization we should use to address it. Dixon's essay is great; I wouldn't change anything about it. But I wanted to see the next essay engaging with Dixon's perspective and looking for weaknesses and scaling concerns, and then the next essay that attempts to shore up those weaknesses, and yet another essay that grapples with the challenging philosophical question of a government monopoly on force and how that can and should come into play in violent crime. And then essays on grass-roots organizing in the context of police reform or abolition, and on restorative justice, and on the experience of attempting police reform from the inside, and on how to support public defenders, and on the merits and weaknesses of focusing on electing reform-minded district attorneys. Unfortunately, none of those are here. Overall, Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? was a disappointment. It was free, so I suppose I got what I paid for, and I may have had a different reaction if I read it in 2015. But if you're looking for a deep discussion on the trade-offs and challenges of stopping police violence in 2020, I don't think this is the place to start. Rating: 3 out of 10

13 September 2020

Jonathan Carter: Wootbook / Tongfang laptop

Old laptop I ve been meaning to get a new laptop for a while now. My ThinkPad X250 is now 5 years old and even though it s still adequate in many ways, I tend to run out of memory especially when running a few virtual machines. It only has one memory slot, which I maxed out at 16GB shortly after I got it. Memory has been a problem in considering a new machine. Most new laptops have soldered RAM and local configurations tend to ship with 8GB RAM. Getting a new machine with only a slightly better CPU and even just the same amount of RAM as what I have in the X250 seems a bit wasteful. I was eyeing the Lenovo X13 because it s a super portable that can take up to 32GB of RAM, and it ships with an AMD Ryzen 4000 series chip which has great performance. With Lenovo s discount for Debian Developers it became even more attractive. Unfortunately that s in North America only (at least for now) so that didn t work out this time.

Enter Tongfang I ve been reading a bunch of positive reviews about the Tuxedo Pulse 14 and KDE Slimbook 14. Both look like great AMD laptops, supports up to 64GB of RAM and clearly runs Linux well. I also noticed that they look quite similar, and after some quick searches it turns out that these are made by Tongfang and that its model number is PF4NU1F. I also learned that a local retailer (Wootware) sells them as the Wootbook. I ve seen one of these before although it was an Intel-based one, but it looked like a nice machine and I was already curious about it back then. After struggling for a while to find a local laptop with a Ryzen CPU and that s nice and compact and that breaks the 16GB memory barrier, finding this one that jumped all the way to 64GB sealed the deal for me. This is the specs for the configuration I got:

This configuration cost R18 796 ( 947 / $1122). That s significantly cheaper than anything else I can get that even starts to approach these specs. So this is a cheap laptop, but you wouldn t think so by using it.
I used the Debian netinstall image to install, and installation was just another uneventful and boring Debian installation (yay!). Unfortunately it needs the firmware-iwlwifi and firmare-amd-graphics packages for the binary blobs that drives the wifi card and GPU. At least it works flawlessly and you don t need an additional non-free display driver (as is the case with NVidia GPUs). I haven t tested the graphics extensively yet, but desktop graphics performance is very snappy. This GPU also does fancy stuff like VP8/VP9 encoding/decoding, so I m curious to see how well it does next time I have to encode some videos. The wifi upgrade was nice for copying files over. My old laptop maxed out at 300Mbps, this one connects to my home network between 800-1000Mbps. At this speed I don t bother connecting via cable at home. I read on Twitter that Tuxedo Computers thinks that it s possible to bring Coreboot to this device. That would be yet another plus for this machine. I ll try to answer some of my own questions about this device that I had before, that other people in the Debian community might also have if they re interested in this device. Since many of us are familiar with the ThinkPad X200 series of laptops, I ll compare it a bit to my X250, and also a little to the X13 that I was considering before. Initially, I was a bit hesitant about the 14 form factor, since I really like the portability of the 12.5 ThinkPad. But because the screen bezel is a lot smaller, the Wootbook (that just rolls off the tongue a lot better than the PF4NU1F ) is just slightly wider than the X250. It weighs in at 1.1KG instead of the 1.38KG of the X250. It s also thinner, so even though it has a larger display, it actually feels a lot more portable. Here s a picture of my X250 on top of the Wootbook, you can see a few mm of Wootbook sticking out to the right.
Card Reader One thing that I overlooked when ordering this laptop was that it doesn t have an SD card reader. I see that some variations have them, like on this Slimbook review. It s not a deal-breaker for me, I have a USB card reader that s very light and that I ll just keep in my backpack. But if you re ordering one of these machines and have some choice, it might be something to look out for if it s something you care about. Keyboard/Touchpad On to the keyboard. This keyboard isn t quite as nice to type on as on the ThinkPad, but, it s not bad at all. I type on many different laptop keyboards and I would rank this keyboard very comfortably in the above average range. I ve been typing on it a lot over the last 3 days (including this blog post) and it started feeling natural very quickly and I m not distracted by it as much as I thought I would be transitioning from the ThinkPad or my mechanical desktop keyboard. In terms of layout, it s nice having an actual Insert button again. This is things normal users don t care about, but since I use mc (where insert selects files) this is a welcome return :). I also like that it doesn t have a Print Screen button at the bottom of my keyboard between alt and ctrl like the ThinkPad has. Unfortunately, it doesn t have dedicated pgup/pgdn buttons. I use those a lot in apps to switch between tabs. At leas the Fn button and the ctrl buttons are next to each other, so pressing those together with up and down to switch tabs isn t that horrible, but if I don t get used to it in another day or two I might do some remapping. The touchpad has en extra sensor-button on the top left corner that s used on Windows to temporarily disable the touchpad. I captured it s keyscan codes and it presses left control + keyscan code 93. The airplane mode, volume and brightness buttons work fine. I do miss the ThinkPad trackpoint. It s great especially in confined spaces, your hands don t have to move far from the keyboard for quick pointer operations and it s nice for doing something quick and accurate. I painted a bit in Krita last night, and agree with other reviewers that the touchpad could do with just a bit more resolution. I was initially disturbed when I noticed that my physical touchpad buttons were gone, but you get right-click by tapping with two fingers, and middle click with tapping 3 fingers. Not quite as efficient as having the real buttons, but it actually works ok. For the most part, this keyboard and touchpad is completely adequate. Only time will tell whether the keyboard still works fine in a few years from now, but I really have no serious complaints about it. Display The X250 had a brightness of 172 nits. That s not very bright, I think the X250 has about the dimmest display in the ThinkPad X200 range. This hasn t been a problem for me until recently, my eyes are very photo-sensitive so most of the time I use it at reduced brightness anyway, but since I ve been working from home a lot recently, it s nice to sometimes sit outside and work, especially now that it s spring time and we have some nice days. At full brightness, I can t see much on my X250 outside. The Wootbook is significantly brighter even (even at less than 50% brightness), although I couldn t find the exact specification for its brightness online. Ports The Wootbook has 3x USB type A ports and 1x USB type C port. That s already quite luxurious for a compact laptop. As I mentioned in the specs above, it also has a full-sized ethernet socket. On the new X13 (the new ThinkPad machine I was considering), you only get 2x USB type A ports and if you want ethernet, you have to buy an additional adapter that s quite expensive especially considering that it s just a cable adapter (I don t think it contains any electronics). It has one hdmi port. Initially I was a bit concerned at lack of displayport (which my X250 has), but with an adapter it s possible to convert the USB-C port to displayport and it seems like it s possible to connect up to 3 external displays without using something weird like display over usual USB3.

Overall remarks When maxing out the CPU, the fan is louder than on a ThinkPad, I definitely noticed it while compiling the zfs-dkms module. On the plus side, that happened incredibly fast. Comparing the Wootbook to my X250, the biggest downfall it has is really it s pointing device. It doesn t have a trackpad and the touchpad is ok and completely usable, but not great. I use my laptop on a desk most of the time so using an external mouse will mostly solve that. If money were no object, I would definitely choose a maxed out ThinkPad for its superior keyboard/mouse, but the X13 configured with 32GB of RAM and 128GB of SSD retails for just about double of what I paid for this machine. It doesn t seem like you can really buy the perfect laptop no matter how much money you want to spend, there s some compromise no matter what you end up choosing, but this machine packs quite a punch, especially for its price, and so far I m very happy with my purchase and the incredible performance it provides. I m also very glad that Wootware went with the gray/black colours, I prefer that by far to the white and silver variants. It s also the first laptop I ve had since 2006 that didn t come with Windows on it. The Wootbook is also comfortable/sturdy enough to carry with one hand while open. The ThinkPads are great like this and with many other brands this just feels unsafe. I don t feel as confident carrying it by it s display because it s very thin (I know, I shouldn t be doing that with the ThinkPads either, but I ve been doing that for years without a problem :) ). There s also a post on Reddit that tracks where you can buy these machines from various vendors all over the world.

Russell Coker: Setting Up a Dell T710 Server with DRAC6

I ve just got a Dell T710 server for LUV and I ve been playing with the configuration options. Here s a list of what I ve done and recommendations on how to do things. I decided not to try to write a step by step guide to doing stuff as the situation doesn t work for that. I think that a list of how things are broken and what to avoid is more useful. BIOS Firstly with a Dell server you can upgrade the BIOS from a Linux root shell. Generally when a server is deployed you won t want to upgrade the BIOS (why risk breaking something when it s working), so before deployment you probably should install the latest version. Dell provides a shell script with encoded binaries in it that you can just download and run, it s ugly but it works. The process of loading the firmware takes a long time (a few minutes) with no progress reports, so best to plug both PSUs in and leave it alone. At the end of loading the firmware a hard reboot will be performed, so upgrading your distribution while doing the install is a bad idea (Debian is designed to not lose data in this situation so it s not too bad). IDRAC IDRAC is the Integrated Dell Remote Access Controller. By default it will listen on all Ethernet ports, get an IP address via DHCP (using a different Ethernet hardware address to the interface the OS sees), and allow connections. Configuring it to be restrictive as to which ports it listens on may be a good idea (the T710 had 4 ports built in so having one reserved for management is usually OK). You need to configure a username and password for IDRAC that has administrative access in the BIOS configuration. Web Interface By default IDRAC will run a web server on the IP address it gets from DHCP, you can connect to that from any web browser that allows ignoring invalid SSL keys. Then you can use the username and password configured in the BIOS to login. IDRAC 6 on the PowerEdge T710 recommends IE 6. To get a ssl cert that matches the name you want to use (and doesn t give browser errors) you have to generate a CSR (Certificate Signing Request) on the DRAC, the only field that matters is the CN (Common Name), the rest have to be something that Letsencrypt will accept. Certbot has the option --config-dir /etc/letsencrypt-drac to specify an alternate config directory, the SSL key for DRAC should be entirely separate from the SSL key for other stuff. Then use the --csr option to specify the path of the CSR file. When you run letsencrypt the file name of the output file you want will be in the format *_chain.pem . You then have to upload that to IDRAC to have it used. This is a major pain for the lifetime of letsencrypt certificates. Hopefully a more recent version of IDRAC has Certbot built in. When you access RAC via ssh (see below) you can run the command racadm sslcsrgen to generate a CSR that can be used by certbot. So it s probably possible to write expect scripts to get that CSR, run certbot, and then put the ssl certificate back. I don t expect to use IDRAC often enough to make it worth the effort (I can tell my browser to ignore an outdated certificate), but if I had dozens of Dells I d script it. SSH The web interface allows configuring ssh access which I strongly recommend doing. You can configure ssh access via password or via ssh public key. For ssh access set TERM=vt100 on the host to enable backspace as ^H. Something like TERM=vt100 ssh root@drac . Note that changing certain other settings in IDRAC such as enabling Smartcard support will disable ssh access. There is a limit to the number of open sessions for managing IDRAC, when you ssh to the IDRAC you can run racadm getssninfo to get a list of sessions and racadm closessn -i NUM to close a session. The closessn command takes a -a option to close all sessions but that just gives an error saying that you can t close your own session because of programmer stupidity. The IDRAC web interface also has an option to close sessions. If you get to the limits of both ssh and web sessions due to network issues then you presumably have a problem. I couldn t find any documentation on how the ssh host key is generated. I Googled for the key fingerprint and didn t get a match so there s a reasonable chance that it s unique to the server (please comment if you know more about this). Don t Use Graphical Console The T710 is an older server and runs IDRAC6 (IDRAC9 is the current version). The Java based graphical console access doesn t work with recent versions of Java. The Debian package icedtea-netx has has the javaws command for running the .jnlp command for the console, by default the web browser won t run this, you download the .jnlp file and pass that as the first parameter to the javaws program which then downloads a bunch of Java classes from the IDRAC to run. One error I got with Java 11 was Exception in thread Timer-0 java.util.ServiceConfigurationError: java.nio.charset.spi.CharsetProvider: Provider sun.nio.cs.ext.ExtendedCharsets could not be instantiated , Google didn t turn up any solutions to this. Java 8 didn t have that problem but had a connection failed error that some people reported as being related to the SSL key, but replacing the SSL key for the web server didn t help. The suggestion of running a VM with an old web browser to access IDRAC didn t appeal. So I gave up on this. Presumably a Windows VM running IE6 would work OK for this. Serial Console Fortunately IDRAC supports a serial console. Here s a page summarising Serial console setup for DRAC [1]. Once you have done that put console=tty0 console=ttyS1,115200n8 on the kernel command line and Linux will send the console output to the virtual serial port. To access the serial console from remote you can ssh in and run the RAC command console com2 (there is no option for using a different com port). The serial port seems to be unavailable through the web interface. If I was supporting many Dell systems I d probably setup a ssh to JavaScript gateway to provide a web based console access. It s disappointing that Dell didn t include this. If you disconnect from an active ssh serial console then the RAC might keep the port locked, then any future attempts to connect to it will give the following error: 
/admin1-> console com2
console: Serial Device 2 is currently in use
So far the only way I ve discovered to get console access again after that is the command racadm racreset . If anyone knows of a better way please let me know. As an aside having racreset being so close to racresetcfg (which resets the configuration to default and requires a hard reboot to configure it again) seems like a really bad idea. Host Based Management 
deb http://linux.dell.com/repo/community/ubuntu xenial openmanage
The above apt sources.list line allows installing Dell management utilities (Xenial is old but they work on Debian/Buster). Probably the packages srvadmin-storageservices-cli and srvadmin-omacore will drag in enough dependencies to get it going. Here are some useful commands: 
# show hardware event log
omreport system esmlog
# show hardware alert log
omreport system alertlog
# give summary of system information
omreport system summary
# show versions of firmware that can be updated
omreport system version
# get chassis temp
omreport chassis temps
# show physical disk details on controller 0
omreport storage pdisk controller=0
RAID Control The RAID controller is known as PERC (PowerEdge Raid Controller), the Dell web site has an rpm package of the perccli tool to manage the RAID from Linux. This is statically linked and appears to have different versions of libraries used to make it. The command perccli show gives an overview of the configuration, but the command perccli /c0 show to give detailed information on controller 0 SEGVs and the kernel logs a vsyscall attempted with vsyscall=none message. Here s an overview of the vsyscall enmulation issue [2]. Basically I could add vsyscall=emulate to the kernel command line and slightly reduce security for the system to allow system calls from perccli that are called from old libc code to work, or I could run code from a dubious source as root. Some versions of IDRAC have a racadm raid command that can be run from a ssh session to perform RAID administration remotely, mine doesn t have that. As an aside the help for the RAC system doesn t list all commands and the Dell documentation is difficult to find so blog posts from other sysadmins is the best source of information. I have configured IDRAC to have all of the BIOS output go to the virtual serial console over ssh so I can see the BIOS prompt me for PERC administration but it didn t accept my key presses when I tried to do so. In any case this requires downtime and I d like to be able to change hard drives without rebooting. I found vsyscall_trace on Github [3], it uses the ptrace interface to emulate vsyscall on a per process basis. You just run vsyscall_trace perccli and it works! Thanks Geoffrey Thomas for writing this! Here are some perccli commands: 
# show overview
perccli show
# help on adding a vd (RAID)
perccli /c0 add help
# show controller 0 details
perccli /c0 show
# add a vd (RAID) of level RAID0 (r0) with the drive 32:0 (enclosure:slot from above command)
perccli /c0 add vd r0 drives=32:0
When a disk is added to a PERC controller about 525MB of space is used at the end for RAID metadata. So when you create a RAID-0 with a single device as in the above example all disk data is preserved by default except for the last 525MB. I have tested this by running a BTRFS scrub on a disk from another system after making it into a RAID-0 on the PERC.
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12 September 2020

Ryan Kavanagh: Configuring OpenIKED VPNs for Road Warriors

A few weeks ago I configured a road warrior VPN setup. The remote end is on a VPS running OpenBSD and OpenIKED, the VPN is an IKEv2 VPN using x509 authentication, and the local end is StrongSwan. I also configured an IKEv2 VPN between my VPSs. Here are the notes for how to do so. In all cases, to use x509 authentication, you will need to generate a bunch of certificates and keys: Fortunately, OpenIKED provides the ikectl utility to help you do so. Before going any further, you might find it useful to edit /etc/ssl/ikeca.cnf to set some reasonable defaults for your certificates. Begin by creating and installing a CA certificate: 
# ikectl ca vpn create
# ikectl ca vpn install
For simplicity, I am going to assume that the you are managing your CA on the same host as one of the hosts that you want to configure for the VPN. If not, see the bit about exporting certificates at the beginning of the section on persistent host-host VPNs. Create and install a key/certificate pair for your server. Suppose for example your first server is called server1.example.org: 
# ikectl ca vpn certificate server1.example.org create
# ikectl ca vpn certificate server1.example.org install

Persistent host-host VPNs For each other server that you want to use, you need to also create a key/certificate pair on the same host as the CA certificate, and then copy them over to the other server. Assuming the other server is called server2.example.org: 
# ikectl ca vpn certificate server2.example.org create
# ikectl ca vpn certificate server2.example.org export
This last command will produce a tarball server2.example.org.tgz. Copy it over to server2.example.org and install it: 
# tar -C /etc/iked -xzpvf server2.example.org.tgz
Next, it is time to configure iked. To do so, you will need to find some information about the certificates you just generated. On the host with the CA, run 
$ cat /etc/ssl/vpn/index.txt
V       210825142056Z           01      unknown /C=US/ST=Pennsylvania/L=Pittsburgh/CN=server1.example.org/emailAddress=rak@example.org
V       210825142208Z           02      unknown /C=US/ST=Pennsylvania/L=Pittsburgh/CN=server2.example.org/emailAddress=rak@example.org
Pick one of the two hosts to play the active role (in this case, server1.example.org). Using the information you gleaned from index.txt, add the following to /etc/iked.conf, filling in the srcid and dstid fields appropriately. 
ikev2 'server1_server2_active' active esp from server1.example.org to server2.example.org \
	local server1.example.org peer server2.example.org \
	srcid '/C=US/ST=Pennsylvania/L=Pittsburgh/CN=server1.example.org/emailAddress=rak@example.org' \
	dstid '/C=US/ST=Pennsylvania/L=Pittsburgh/CN=server2.example.org/emailAddress=rak@example.org'
On the other host, add the following to /etc/iked.conf 
ikev2 'server2_server1_passive' passive esp from server2.example.org to server1.example.org \
	local server2.example.org peer server1.example.org \
	srcid '/C=US/ST=Pennsylvania/L=Pittsburgh/CN=server2.example.org/emailAddress=rak@example.org' \
	dstid '/C=US/ST=Pennsylvania/L=Pittsburgh/CN=server1.example.org/emailAddress=rak@example.org'
Note that the names 'server1_server2_active' and 'server2_server1_passive' in the two stanzas do not matter and can be omitted. Reload iked on both hosts: 
# ikectl reload
If everything worked out, you should see the negotiated security associations (SAs) in the output of 
# ikectl show sa
On OpenBSD, you should also see some output on success or errors in the file /var/log/daemon.

For a road warrior Add the following to /etc/iked.conf on the remote end: 
ikev2 'responder_x509' passive esp \
	from 0.0.0.0/0 to 10.0.1.0/24 \
	local server1.example.org peer any \
	srcid server1.example.org \
	config address 10.0.1.0/24 \
	config name-server 10.0.1.1 \
	tag "ROADW"
Configure or omit the address range and the name-server configurations to suit your needs. See iked.conf(5) for details. Reload iked: 
# ikectl reload
If you are on OpenBSD and want the remote end to have an IP address, add the following to /etc/hostname.vether0, again configuring the address to suit your needs: 
inet 10.0.1.1 255.255.255.0
Put the interface up: 
# ifconfig vether0 up
Now create a client certificate for authentication. In my case, my road-warrior client was client.example.org: 
# ikectl ca vpn certificate client.example.org create
# ikectl ca vpn certificate client.example.org export
Copy client.example.org.tgz to client and run 
# tar -C /etc/ipsec.d/ -xzf client.example.org.tgz -- \
	./private/client.example.org.key \
	./certs/client.example.org.crt ./ca/ca.crt
Install StrongSwan and add the following to /etc/ipsec.conf, configuring appropriately: 
ca example.org
  cacert=ca.crt
  auto=add
conn server1
  keyexchange=ikev2
  right=server1.example.org
  rightid=%server1.example.org
  rightsubnet=0.0.0.0/0
  rightauth=pubkey
  leftsourceip=%config
  leftauth=pubkey
  leftcert=client.example.org.crt
  auto=route
Add the following to /etc/ipsec.secrets: 
# space is important
server1.example.org : RSA client.example.org.key
Restart StrongSwan, put the connection up, and check its status: 
# ipsec restart
# ipsec up server1
# ipsec status
That should be it. Sources:

Ryan Kavanagh: Configuring OpenIKED VPNs for StrongSwan Clients

A few weeks ago I configured a road warrior VPN setup. The remote end is on a VPS running OpenBSD and OpenIKED, the VPN is an IKEv2 VPN using x509 authentication, and the local end is StrongSwan. I also configured an IKEv2 VPN between my VPSs. Here are the notes for how to do so. In all cases, to use x509 authentication, you will need to generate a bunch of certificates and keys: Fortunately, OpenIKED provides the ikectl utility to help you do so. Before going any further, you might find it useful to edit /etc/ssl/ikeca.cnf to set some reasonable defaults for your certificates. Begin by creating and installing a CA certificate: 
# ikectl ca vpn create
# ikectl ca vpn install
For simplicity, I am going to assume that the you are managing your CA on the same host as one of the hosts that you want to configure for the VPN. If not, see the bit about exporting certificates at the beginning of the section on persistent host-host VPNs. Create and install a key/certificate pair for your server. Suppose for example your first server is called server1.example.org: 
# ikectl ca vpn certificate server1.example.org create
# ikectl ca vpn certificate server1.example.org install

Persistent host-host VPNs For each other server that you want to use, you need to also create a key/certificate pair on the same host as the CA certificate, and then copy them over to the other server. Assuming the other server is called server2.example.org: 
# ikectl ca vpn certificate server2.example.org create
# ikectl ca vpn certificate server2.example.org export
This last command will produce a tarball server2.example.org.tgz. Copy it over to server2.example.org and install it: 
# tar -C /etc/iked -xzpvf server2.example.org.tgz
Next, it is time to configure iked. To do so, you will need to find some information about the certificates you just generated. On the host with the CA, run 
$ cat /etc/ssl/vpn/index.txt
V       210825142056Z           01      unknown /C=US/ST=Pennsylvania/L=Pittsburgh/CN=server1.example.org/emailAddress=rak@example.org
V       210825142208Z           02      unknown /C=US/ST=Pennsylvania/L=Pittsburgh/CN=server2.example.org/emailAddress=rak@example.org
Pick one of the two hosts to play the active role (in this case, server1.example.org). Using the information you gleaned from index.txt, add the following to /etc/iked.conf, filling in the srcid and dstid fields appropriately. 
ikev2 'server1_server2_active' active esp from server1.example.org to server2.example.org \
	local server1.example.org peer server2.example.org \
	srcid '/C=US/ST=Pennsylvania/L=Pittsburgh/CN=server1.example.org/emailAddress=rak@example.org' \
	dstid '/C=US/ST=Pennsylvania/L=Pittsburgh/CN=server2.example.org/emailAddress=rak@example.org'
On the other host, add the following to /etc/iked.conf 
ikev2 'server2_server1_passive' passive esp from server2.example.org to server1.example.org \
	local server2.example.org peer server1.example.org \
	srcid '/C=US/ST=Pennsylvania/L=Pittsburgh/CN=server2.example.org/emailAddress=rak@example.org' \
	dstid '/C=US/ST=Pennsylvania/L=Pittsburgh/CN=server1.example.org/emailAddress=rak@example.org'
Note that the names 'server1_server2_active' and 'server2_server1_passive' in the two stanzas do not matter and can be omitted. Reload iked on both hosts: 
# ikectl reload
If everything worked out, you should see the negotiated security associations (SAs) in the output of 
# ikectl show sa
On OpenBSD, you should also see some output on success or errors in the file /var/log/daemon.

For a road warrior Add the following to /etc/iked.conf on the remote end: 
ikev2 'responder_x509' passive esp \
	from 0.0.0.0/0 to 10.0.1.0/24 \
	local server1.example.org peer any \
	srcid server1.example.org \
	config address 10.0.1.0/24 \
	config name-server 10.0.1.1 \
	tag "ROADW"
Configure or omit the address range and the name-server configurations to suit your needs. See iked.conf(5) for details. Reload iked: 
# ikectl reload
If you are on OpenBSD and want the remote end to have an IP address, add the following to /etc/hostname.vether0, again configuring the address to suit your needs: 
inet 10.0.1.1 255.255.255.0
Put the interface up: 
# ifconfig vether0 up
Now create a client certificate for authentication. In my case, my road-warrior client was client.example.org: 
# ikectl ca vpn certificate client.example.org create
# ikectl ca vpn certificate client.example.org export
Copy client.example.org.tgz to client and run 
# tar -C /etc/ipsec.d/ -xzf client.example.org.tgz -- \
	./private/client.example.org.key \
	./certs/client.example.org.crt ./ca/ca.crt
Install StrongSwan and add the following to /etc/ipsec.conf, configuring appropriately: 
ca example.org
  cacert=ca.crt
  auto=add
conn server1
  keyexchange=ikev2
  right=server1.example.org
  rightid=%server1.example.org
  rightsubnet=0.0.0.0/0
  rightauth=pubkey
  leftsourceip=%config
  leftauth=pubkey
  leftcert=client.example.org.crt
  auto=route
Add the following to /etc/ipsec.secrets: 
# space is important
server1.example.org : RSA client.example.org.key
Restart StrongSwan, put the connection up, and check its status: 
# ipsec restart
# ipsec up server1
# ipsec status
That should be it. Sources:

11 September 2020

Louis-Philippe V ronneau: Hire me!

I'm happy to announce I handed out my Master's Thesis last Monday. I'm not publishing the final copy just yet1, as it still needs to go through the approval committee. If everything goes well, I should have my Master of Economics diploma before Christmas! It sure hasn't been easy, and although I regret nothing, I'm also happy to be done with university. Looking for a job What an odd time to be looking for a job, right? Turns out for the first time in 12 years, I don't have an employer. It's oddly freeing, but also a little scary. I'm certainly not bitter about it though and it's nice to have some time on my hands to work on various projects and read things other than academic papers. Look out for my next blog posts on using the NeTV2 as an OSHW HDMI capture card, on hacking at security tokens and much more! I'm not looking for anything long term (I'm hoping to teach Economics again next Winter), but for the next few months, my calendar is wide open. For the last 6 years, I worked as Linux system administrator, mostly using a LAMP stack in conjunction with Puppet, Shell and Python. Although I'm most comfortable with Puppet, I also have decent experience with Ansible, thanks to my work in the DebConf Videoteam. I'm not the most seasoned Debian Developer, but I have some experience packaging Python applications and libraries. Although I'm no expert at it, lately I've also been working on Clojure packages, as I'm trying to get Puppet 6 in Debian in time for the Bullseye freeze. At the rate it's going though, I doubt we're going to make it... If your company depends on Puppet and cares about having a version in Debian 11 that is maintained (Puppet 5 is EOL in November 2020), I'm your guy! Oh, and I guess I'm a soon-to-be Master of Economics specialising in Free and Open Source Software business models and incentives theory. Not sure I'll ever get paid putting that in application, but hey, who knows. If any of that resonates with you, contact me and let's have a chat! I promise I don't bite :)
  1. The title of the thesis is What are the incentive structures of Free Software? An economic analysis of Free Software's specific development model. Once the final copy is approved, I'll be sure to write a longer blog post about my findings here.

9 September 2020

Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in August 2020

Welcome to the August 2020 report from the Reproducible Builds project. In our monthly reports, we summarise the things that we have been up to over the past month. The motivation behind the Reproducible Builds effort is to ensure no flaws have been introduced from the original free software source code to the pre-compiled binaries we install on our systems. If you re interested in contributing to the project, please visit our main website.

This month, Jennifer Helsby launched a new reproduciblewheels.com website to address the lack of reproducibility of Python wheels. To quote Jennifer s accompanying explanatory blog post:
One hiccup we ve encountered in SecureDrop development is that not all Python wheels can be built reproducibly. We ship multiple (Python) projects in Debian packages, with Python dependencies included in those packages as wheels. In order for our Debian packages to be reproducible, we need that wheel build process to also be reproducible
Parallel to this, transparencylog.com was also launched, a service that verifies the contents of URLs against a publicly recorded cryptographic log. It keeps an append-only log of the cryptographic digests of all URLs it has seen. (GitHub repo) On 18th September, Bernhard M. Wiedemann will give a presentation in German, titled Wie reproducible builds Software sicherer machen ( How reproducible builds make software more secure ) at the Internet Security Digital Days 2020 conference.

Reproducible builds at DebConf20 There were a number of talks at the recent online-only DebConf20 conference on the topic of reproducible builds. Holger gave a talk titled Reproducing Bullseye in practice , focusing on independently verifying that the binaries distributed from ftp.debian.org are made from their claimed sources. It also served as a general update on the status of reproducible builds within Debian. The video (145 MB) and slides are available. There were also a number of other talks that involved Reproducible Builds too. For example, the Malayalam language mini-conference had a talk titled , ? ( I want to join Debian, what should I do? ) presented by Praveen Arimbrathodiyil, the Clojure Packaging Team BoF session led by Elana Hashman, as well as Where is Salsa CI right now? that was on the topic of Salsa, the collaborative development server that Debian uses to provide the necessary tools for package maintainers, packaging teams and so on. Jonathan Bustillos (Jathan) also gave a talk in Spanish titled Un camino verificable desde el origen hasta el binario ( A verifiable path from source to binary ). (Video, 88MB)

Development work After many years of development work, the compiler for the Rust programming language now generates reproducible binary code. This generated some general discussion on Reddit on the topic of reproducibility in general. Paul Spooren posted a request for comments to OpenWrt s openwrt-devel mailing list asking for clarification on when to raise the PKG_RELEASE identifier of a package. This is needed in order to successfully perform rebuilds in a reproducible builds context. In openSUSE, Bernhard M. Wiedemann published his monthly Reproducible Builds status update. Chris Lamb provided some comments and pointers on an upstream issue regarding the reproducibility of a Snap / SquashFS archive file. [ ]

Debian Holger Levsen identified that a large number of Debian .buildinfo build certificates have been tainted on the official Debian build servers, as these environments have files underneath the /usr/local/sbin directory [ ]. He also filed against bug for debrebuild after spotting that it can fail to download packages from snapshot.debian.org [ ]. This month, several issues were uncovered (or assisted) due to the efforts of reproducible builds. For instance, Debian bug #968710 was filed by Simon McVittie, which describes a problem with detached debug symbol files (required to generate a traceback) that is unlikely to have been discovered without reproducible builds. In addition, Jelmer Vernooij called attention that the new Debian Janitor tool is using the property of reproducibility (as well as diffoscope when applying archive-wide changes to Debian:
New merge proposals also include a link to the diffoscope diff between a vanilla build and the build with changes. Unfortunately these can be a bit noisy for packages that are not reproducible yet, due to the difference in build environment between the two builds. [ ]
56 reviews of Debian packages were added, 38 were updated and 24 were removed this month adding to our knowledge about identified issues. Specifically, Chris Lamb added and categorised the nondeterministic_version_generated_by_python_param and the lessc_nondeterministic_keys toolchain issues. [ ][ ] Holger Levsen sponsored Lukas Puehringer s upload of the python-securesystemslib pacage, which is a dependency of in-toto, a framework to secure the integrity of software supply chains. [ ] Lastly, Chris Lamb further refined his merge request against the debian-installer component to allow all arguments from sources.list files (such as [check-valid-until=no]) in order that we can test the reproducibility of the installer images on the Reproducible Builds own testing infrastructure and sent a ping to the team that maintains that code.

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

diffoscope diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility that can not only locate and diagnose reproducibility issues, it provides human-readable diffs of all kinds. In August, Chris Lamb made the following changes to diffoscope, including preparing and uploading versions 155, 156, 157 and 158 to Debian:
  • New features:
    • Support extracting data of PGP signed data. (#214)
    • Try files named .pgp against pgpdump(1) to determine whether they are Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) files. (#211)
    • Support multiple options for all file extension matching. [ ]
  • Bug fixes:
    • Don t raise an exception when we encounter XML files with <!ENTITY> declarations inside the Document Type Definition (DTD), or when a DTD or entity references an external resource. (#212)
    • pgpdump(1) can successfully parse some binary files, so check that the parsed output contains something sensible before accepting it. [ ]
    • Temporarily drop gnumeric from the Debian build-dependencies as it has been removed from the testing distribution. (#968742)
    • Correctly use fallback_recognises to prevent matching .xsb binary XML files.
    • Correct identify signed PGP files as file(1) returns data . (#211)
  • Logging improvements:
    • Emit a message when ppudump version does not match our file header. [ ]
    • Don t use Python s repr(object) output in Calling external command messages. [ ]
    • Include the filename in the not identified by any comparator message. [ ]
  • Codebase improvements:
    • Bump Python requirement from 3.6 to 3.7. Most distributions are either shipping with Python 3.5 or 3.7, so supporting 3.6 is not only somewhat unnecessary but also cumbersome to test locally. [ ]
    • Drop some unused imports [ ], drop an unnecessary dictionary comprehensions [ ] and some unnecessary control flow [ ].
    • Correct typo of output in a comment. [ ]
  • Release process:
    • Move generation of debian/tests/control to an external script. [ ]
    • Add some URLs for the site that will appear on PyPI.org. [ ]
    • Update author and author email in setup.py for PyPI.org and similar. [ ]
  • Testsuite improvements:
    • Update PPU tests for compatibility with Free Pascal versions 3.2.0 or greater. (#968124)
    • Mark that our identification test for .ppu files requires ppudump version 3.2.0 or higher. [ ]
    • Add an assert_diff helper that loads and compares a fixture output. [ ][ ][ ][ ]
  • Misc:
In addition, Mattia Rizzolo documented in setup.py that diffoscope works with Python version 3.8 [ ] and Frazer Clews applied some Pylint suggestions [ ] and removed some deprecated methods [ ].

Website This month, Chris Lamb updated the main Reproducible Builds website and documentation to:
  • Clarify & fix a few entries on the who page [ ][ ] and ensure that images do not get to large on some viewports [ ].
  • Clarify use of a pronoun re. Conservancy. [ ]
  • Use View all our monthly reports over View all monthly reports . [ ]
  • Move a is a suffix out of the link target on the SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH age. [ ]
In addition, Javier Jard n added the freedesktop-sdk project [ ] and Kushal Das added SecureDrop project [ ] to our projects page. Lastly, Michael P hn added internationalisation and translation support with help from Hans-Christoph Steiner [ ].

Testing framework The Reproducible Builds project operate a Jenkins-based testing framework to power tests.reproducible-builds.org. This month, Holger Levsen made the following changes:
  • System health checks:
    • Improve explanation how the status and scores are calculated. [ ][ ]
    • Update and condense view of detected issues. [ ][ ]
    • Query the canonical configuration file to determine whether a job is disabled instead of duplicating/hardcoding this. [ ]
    • Detect several problems when updating the status of reporting-oriented metapackage sets. [ ]
    • Detect when diffoscope is not installable [ ] and failures in DNS resolution [ ].
  • Debian:
    • Update the URL to the Debian security team bug tracker s Git repository. [ ]
    • Reschedule the unstable and bullseye distributions often for the arm64 architecture. [ ]
    • Schedule buster less often for armhf. [ ][ ][ ]
    • Force the build of certain packages in the work-in-progress package rebuilder. [ ][ ]
    • Only update the stretch and buster base build images when necessary. [ ]
  • Other distributions:
    • For F-Droid, trigger jobs by commits, not by a timer. [ ]
    • Disable the Archlinux HTML page generation job as it has never worked. [ ]
    • Disable the alternative OpenWrt rebuilder jobs. [ ]
  • Misc;
Many other changes were made too, including:
  • Chris Lamb:
    • Use <pre> HTML tags when dumping fixed-width debugging data in the self-serve package scheduler. [ ]
  • Mattia Rizzolo:
  • Vagrant Cascadian:
    • Mark that the u-boot Universal Boot Loader should not build architecture independent packages on the arm64 architecture anymore. [ ]
Finally, build node maintenance was performed by Holger Levsen [ ], Mattia Rizzolo [ ][ ] and Vagrant Cascadian [ ][ ][ ][ ]

Mailing list On our mailing list this month, Leo Wandersleb sent a message to the list after he was wondering how to expand his WalletScrutiny.com project (which aims to improve the security of Bitcoin wallets) from Android wallets to also monitor Linux wallets as well:
If you think you know how to spread the word about reproducibility in the context of Bitcoin wallets through WalletScrutiny, your contributions are highly welcome on this PR [ ]
Julien Lepiller posted to the list linking to a blog post by Tavis Ormandy titled You don t need reproducible builds. Morten Linderud (foxboron) responded with a clear rebuttal that Tavis was only considering the narrow use-case of proprietary vendors and closed-source software. He additionally noted that the criticism that reproducible builds cannot prevent against backdoors being deliberately introduced into the upstream source ( bugdoors ) are decidedly (and deliberately) outside the scope of reproducible builds to begin with. Chris Lamb included the Reproducible Builds mailing list in a wider discussion regarding a tentative proposal to include .buildinfo files in .deb packages, adding his remarks regarding requiring a custom tool in order to determine whether generated build artifacts are identical in a reproducible context. [ ] Jonathan Bustillos (Jathan) posted a quick email to the list requesting whether there was a list of To do tasks in Reproducible Builds. Lastly, Chris Lamb responded at length to a query regarding the status of reproducible builds for Debian ISO or installation images. He noted that most of the technical work has been performed but there are at least four issues until they can be generally advertised as such . He pointed that the privacy-oriented Tails operation system, which is based directly on Debian, has had reproducible builds for a number of years now. [ ]
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:

7 September 2020

Arturo Borrero Gonz lez: Debconf 2020 online, summary

Debconf2020 logo Debconf2020 took place when I was on personal vacations time. But anyway I m lucky enough that my company, the Wikimedia Foundation, paid the conference registration fee for me and allowed me to take the time (after my vacations) to watch recordings from the conference. This is my first time attending (or watching) a full-online conference, and I was curious to see first hand how it would develop. I was greatly surprised to see it worked pretty nicely, so kudos to the organization, video team, volunteers, etc! What follows is my summary of the conference, from the different sessions and talks I watched (again, none of them live but recordings). The first thing I saw was the Welcome to Debconf 2020 opening session. It is obvious the video was made with lots of love, I found it entertaining and useful. I love it :-) Then I watched the BoF Can Free Software improve social equality. It was introduced and moderated by Hong Phuc Dang. Several participants, about 10 people, shared their visions on the interaction between open source projects and communities. I m pretty much aware of the interesting social advancement that FLOSS can enable in communities, but sometimes is not so easy, it may also present challenges and barriers. The BoF was joined by many people from the Asia Pacific region, and for me, it has been very interesting to take a step back from the usual western vision of this topic. Anyway, about the session itself, I have the feeling the participants may have spent too much time on presentations, sharing their local stories (which are interesting, don t get me wrong), perhaps leaving little room for actual proposal discussions or the like. Next I watched the Bits from the DPL talk. In the session, Jonathan Carter goes over several topics affecting the project, both internally and externally. It was interesting to know more about the status of the project from a high level perspective, as an organization, including subjects such as money, common project problems, future issues we are anticipating, the social aspect of the project, etc. The Lightning Talks session grabbed my attention. It is usually very funny to watch and not as dense as other talks. I m glad I watched this as it includes some interesting talks, ranging from HAM radios (I love them!), to personal projects to help in certain tasks, and even some general reflections about life. Just when I m writing this very sentence, the video for the Come and meet your Debian Publicity team! talk has been uploaded. This team does an incredible work in keeping project information flowing, and social networks up-to-date and alive. Mind that the work of this team is mostly non-engineering, but still, is a vital part of the project. The folks in session explain what the team does, and they also discuss how new people can contribute, the different challenges related to language barriers, etc. I have to admit I also started watching a couple other sessions that turned out to don t be interesting to me (and therefore I didn t finish the video). Also, I tried to watch a couple more sessions that didn t publish their video recording just yet, for example the When We Virtualize the Whole Internet talk by Sam Hartman. Will check again in a couple of days. It is a real pleasure the video recordings from the conference are made available online. One can join the conference anytime (like I m doing!) and watch the sessions at any pace at any time. The video archive is big, I won t be able to go over all of it. I won t lie, I still have some pending videos to watch from last year Debconf2019 :-)

6 September 2020

Thorsten Alteholz: My Debian Activities in August 2020

FTP master This month I accepted 159 packages and rejected 16. The overall number of packages that got accepted was 172. Debian LTS This was my seventy-fourth month that I did some work for the Debian LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian. This month my all in all workload has been 21.75h. During that time I did LTS uploads of: I also started to work on curl but did not upload a fixed version yet. As usual, testing the package takes up some time. Last but not least I did some days of frontdesk duties. Debian ELTS This month was the twenty sixth ELTS month. During my allocated time I uploaded: Like in LTS, I also started to work on curl and encountered the same problems as in LTS above. Last but not least I did some days of frontdesk duties. Other stuff This month I found again some time for other Debian work and uploaded packages to fix bugs, mainly around gcc10: I also uploaded new upstream versions of: All package called *osmo* are developed by the Osmocom project, that is about Open Source MObile COMmunication. They are really doing a great job and I apologize that my uploads of new versions are mostly far behind their development. Some of the uploads are related to new packages:

Ben Armstrong: Dronefly relicensed under copyleft licenses

To ensure Dronefly always remains free, the Dronefly project has been relicensed under two copyleft licenses. Read the license change and learn more about copyleft at these links. I was prompted to make this change after a recent incident in the Red DiscordBot development community that made me reconsider my prior position that the liberal MIT license was best for our project. While on the face of it, making your license as liberal as possible might seem like the most generous and hassle-free way to license any project, I was shocked into the realization that its liberality was also its fatal flaw: all is well and good so long as everyone is being cooperative, but it does not afford any protection to developers or users should things suddenly go sideways in how a project is run. A copyleft license is the best way to avoid such issues. In this incident a sad story of conflict between developers I respect on both sides of the rift, and owe a debt to for what they ve taught me three cogs we had come to depend on suddenly stopped being viable for us to use due to changes to the license & the code. Effectively, those cogs became unsupported and unsupportable. To avoid any such future disaster with the Dronefly project, I started shopping for a new license that would protect developers and users alike from similarly losing support, or losing control of their contributions. I owe thanks to Dale Floer, a team member who early on advised me the AGPL might be a better fit, and later was helpful in selecting the doc license and encouraging me to follow through. We ran the new licenses by each contributor and arrived at this consensus: the AGPL is best suited for our server-based code, and CC-BY-SA is best suited for our documentation. The relicensing was made official this morning. On Discord platform alternatives You might well question what I, a Debian developer steeped in free software culture and otherwise in agreement with its principles, am doing encouraging a community to grow on the proprietary Discord platform! I have no satisfying answer to that. I explained when I introduced my project here some of the backstory, but that s more of an account of its beginnings than justification for it to continue on this platform. Honestly, all I can offer is a rather dissatisfying it seemed like the right thing to do at the time. Time will tell whether we could successfully move off of it to a freedom-respecting and privacy-respecting alternative chat platform that is both socially and technically viable to migrate to. That platform would ideally: I m intrigued by Matrix and wonder if it provides some or all of the above in its current form. Are you a developer writing bots for this platform? If so, I especially want to hear from you in the comments about your experience. Or in any case, if you ve been there before if you ve faced the same issue with your community and have a success story to share, I would love to hear from you.

Russ Allbery: September haul

So many good books, so little reading time. Jairus Banaji A Brief History of Commercial Capitalism (nonfiction)
Steven Brust The Baron of Magister Valley (sff)
Micaiah Johnson The Space Between Worlds (sff)
Ian McDonald Luna: New Moon (sff)
Elizabeth Moon Trading in Danger (sff)
Tamsyn Muir Harrow the Ninth (sff)
Suzanne Palmer Finder (sff)
Kit Rocha Beyond Shame (sff)
Kit Rocha Beyond Control (sff)
Kit Rocha Beyond Pain (sff)
Arundhati Roy Azadi (nonfiction)
Jeff VanderMeer Authority (sff)
Jeff VanderMeer Acceptance (sff)
K.B. Wagers Behind the Throne (sff)
Jarrett Walker Human Transit (nonfiction) I took advantage of a few sales to get books I know I'm going to want to read eventually for a buck or two.

5 September 2020

Mike Gabriel: My Work on Debian LTS (August 2020)

In August 2020, I have worked on the Debian LTS project for 16 hours (of 8 hours planned, plus another 8 hours that I carried over from July). For ELTS, I have worked for another 8 hours (of 8 hours planned). LTS Work ELTS Work Other security related work for Debian References

3 September 2020

Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppArmadillo 0.9.900.3.0

armadillo image Armadillo is a powerful and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra aiming towards a good balance between speed and ease of use with a syntax deliberately close to a Matlab. RcppArmadillo integrates this library with the R environment and language and is widely used by (currently) 769 other packages on CRAN. A few days ago, Conrad released a new minor version 9.900.3 of Armadillo which we packaged and tested as usual. Given the incremental release character, we only tested the release and not candidate release. No regressions were found, and, as usual, logs from reverse-depends runs are in the rcpp-logs repo. All changes in the new release are noted below.

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.9.900.3.0 (2020-09-02)
  • Upgraded to Armadillo release 9.900.3 (Nocturnal Misbehaviour)
    • More efficient code for initialising matrices with fill::zeros
    • Fixes for various error messages

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is a diffstat report relative to previous release. More detailed information is on the RcppArmadillo page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub. For the first year, GitHub will match your contributions.

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

Molly de Blanc: All Animals Are Equal, Peter Singer

I recently read Disability Visibility, which opens with a piece by Harriet McBryde Johnson about debating Peter Singer. When I got my first reading for my first class and saw it was Peter Singer, I was dismayed because of his (heinous) stances in disability. I assumed All Animals Are Equal was one of Singer s pieces about animal rights. While I agree with many of the principles Singer discusses around animal rights, I feel as though his work on this front is significantly diminished by his work around disability. To put it simply, I can t take Peter Singer seriously. Because of this I had a lot of trouble reading All Animals Are Equal and taking it in good faith. I judged everything from his arguments to his writing harshly. While I don t disagree with his basic point (all animals have rights) I disagree with how he made the point and the argument supporting it. One of the things I was told to ask when reading any philosophy paper is What is the argument? or What are they trying to convince you of? In this case, you could frame the answer as: Animals have some of) the same rights people do. I think it would be more accurate though to frame it as All animals (including humans) have (some of) the same rights or even Humans are as equally worthy of consideration as animals are. I think when we usually talk about animal rights, we do it from a perspective of wanting to elevate animals to human status. From one perspective, I don t like this approach because I feel as though it turns the framing of rights as something you deserve or earn, privileges you get for being good enough. The point about rights is that they are inherent you get them because they are. The valuable thing I got out of All Animals Are Equal is that rights are not universal. When we talk about things like abortion, for example, we talk about the right to have an abortion. Singer asks whether people who cannot get pregnant have the right to an abortion? What he doesn t dig into is that the right to an abortion is really just an extension of bodily autonomy turning one facet of bodily autonomy into the legal right to have a medical procedure. I think this is worth thinking about more turning high level human rights into the mundane rights, and acknowledging that not everyone can or needs them.

Norbert Preining: KDE/Plasma Status Update 2020-09-03

Yesterday I have updated my builds of Plasma for Debian to Plasma 5.19.5, which are now available from the usual sources, nothing has changed. [Update 2020-09-03: KDE Apps 20.08.1 are also now available] On a different front, there are good news concerning updates in Debian proper: Together with Scarlett Moore and Patrick Franz we are in the process of updating the official Debian packages. The first bunch of packages has been uploaded to experimental, and after NEW processing the next group will go there, too. This is still 5.19.4, but a great step forward. I expect that all of Plasma 5.19.4 will be available in experimental in the next weeks, and soon after also in Debian/unstable. Again, thanks to Scarlett and Patrick for the good collaboration, this is very much appreciated!

2 September 2020

Vincent Bernat: Syncing MySQL tables with a custom Ansible module

The community.mysql collection from Ansible Galaxy provides a mysql_query module to run arbitrary MySQL queries. Unfortunately, it does not support check mode nor the --diff flag. It is also unable to tell if there was a change. Let s write a specific Ansible module to workaround these issues.

Notice I recommend that you read Writing a custom Ansible module as an introduction.

Code The module has the following signature and it executes the provided SQL statements in a single transaction. It needs a list of the affected tables to be able to detect and show the changes. 
mysql_sync:
  sql:  
    DELETE FROM rules WHERE name LIKE 'CMDB:%';
    INSERT INTO rules (name, rule) VALUES
      ('CMDB: check for cats', ':is(object, "CAT")'),
      ('CMDB: check for dogs', ':is(object, "DOG")');
    REPLACE INTO webhooks (name, url) VALUES
      ('OpsGenie', 'https://opsgenie/something/token'),
      ('Slack', 'https://slack/something/token');
  user: monitoring
  password: Yooghah5
  database: monitoring
  tables:
    - rules
    - webhooks

Prerequisites The module does not enforce idempotency, but it is expected you provide appropriate SQL queries. In the above example, idempotency is achieved because the content of the rules table is deleted and recreated from scratch while the rows in the webhooks table are replaced if they already exist. You need the PyMySQL package.

Module definition Starting from the skeleton described in the previous article, here is the module definition: 
module_args = dict(
    sql=dict(type='str', required=True),
    user=dict(type='str', required=True),
    password=dict(type='str', required=True, no_log=True),
    database=dict(type='str', required=True),
    tables=dict(type='list', required=True, elements='str'),
)
result = dict(
    changed=False
)
module = AnsibleModule(
    argument_spec=module_args,
    supports_check_mode=True
)
The password is marked with no_log to ensure it won t be displayed or stored, notably when ansible-playbook runs in verbose mode. There is no host option as the module is executed on the MySQL host. Strong authentication using certificates is not implemented either. This matches our goal with custom modules: only implement what you strictly need.

Getting the current rows The next step is to retrieve the records currently in the database. The got dictionary is a mapping from table names to the list of rows they contain: 
got =  
tables = module.params['tables']
connection = pymysql.connect(
    user=module.params['user'],
    password=module.params['password'],
    db=module.params['database'],
    charset='utf8mb4',
    cursorclass=pymysql.cursors.DictCursor
)
with connection.cursor() as cursor:
    for table in tables:
        cursor.execute("SELECT * FROM  ".format(table))
        got[table] = cursor.fetchall()

Computing the changes Let s now build the wanted dictionary. The trick is to execute the SQL statements in a transaction without issuing a final commit. The changes will be invisible1 to other readers and we can compare the final rows with the rows collected in got: 
wanted =  
sql = module.params['sql']
statements = [statement.strip()
              for statement in sql.split(";\n")
              if statement.strip()]
with connection.cursor() as cursor:
    for statement in statements:
        try:
            cursor.execute(statement)
        except pymysql.OperationalError as err:
            code, message = err.args
            result['msg'] = "MySQL error for  :  ".format(
                statement,
                message)
            module.fail_json(**result)
    for table in tables:
        cursor.execute("SELECT * FROM  ".format(table))
        wanted[table] = cursor.fetchall()
The first for loop executes each statement. On error, we return a helpful message containing the faulty one. The second for loop records the final rows of each table in wanted.

Applying changes Back to the skeleton described in the previous article, the last step is to apply the changes if there is a difference between got and wanted when not running with check mode. The diff object is a bit more elaborate as it is built table by table. This enables Ansible to display the name of each table before the diff representation: 
if got != wanted:
    result['changed'] = True
    result['diff'] = [dict(
        before_header=table,
        after_header=table,
        before=yaml.safe_dump(got[table]),
        after=yaml.safe_dump(wanted[table]))
                      for table in tables
                      if got[table] != wanted[table]]
if module.check_mode or not result['changed']:
    module.exit_json(**result)
Applying the changes is quite trivial: just commit them! Otherwise, they are lost when the module exits. 
connection.commit()
The complete code is available on GitHub. Compared to the mysql_query module, this one supports the check mode, signals correctly if there is a change and displays the differences. However, it should not be used with huge tables, as it would try to load them in memory.
  1. The tables need to use the InnoDB storage engine. Moreover, MySQL does not know how to use transactions with DDL statements: do not modify table definitions!

Vincent Bernat: Syncing SSH keys on Cisco IOS-XR with a custom Ansible module

The cisco.iosxr collection from Ansible Galaxy provides an iosxr_user module to manage local users, along with their SSH keys. However, the module is quite slow, do not display a diff for changed SSH keys, never signal change when a key is modified, and does not delete obsolete keys. Let s write a custom Ansible module managing only the SSH keys while fixing these issues.

Notice I recommend that you read Writing a custom Ansible module as an introduction.

How to add an SSH key to a user Adding SSH keys to users in Cisco IOS-XR is quite undocumented. First, you need to encode the key with the ssh-rsa key ASN.1 format, like an OpenSSH public key, but without the base64-encoding: 
$ awk ' print $2 ' id_rsa.pub \
      base64 -d \
    > publickey_vincent.raw
Then, you upload the key with SCP to harddisk:/publickey_vincent.raw and import it for the current user with the following IOS command: 
crypto key import authentication rsa harddisk:/publickey_vincent.b64
However, if you want to import a key for another user, you need to be part of the root-system group: 
username vincent
 group root-lr
 group root-system
With the following admin command, you can attach a key to another user: 
admin crypto key import authentication rsa username cedric harddisk:/publickey_cedric.b64

Code The module has the following signature and it installs the specified key for each user and remove keys from retired users the ones we do not specify. 
iosxr_users:
  keys:
    vincent: ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAA[ ]ymh+YrVWLZMJR
    cedric:  ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAA[ ]RShPA8w/8eC0n

Prerequisites Unlike the iosxr_user module, our custom module only handles SSH keys, one per user. Therefore, the user definitions have to already exist in the running configuration.1 Moreover, the user defined in ansible_user needs to be in the root-system group. The cisco.iosxr collection must also be installed as the module relies on its code. When running the module, ansible_connection needs to be set to network_cli and ansible_network_os to iosxr. These variables are usually defined in the inventory.

Module definition Starting from the skeleton described in the previous article, we define the module: 
module_args = dict(
    keys=dict(type='dict', elements='str', required=True),
)
module = AnsibleModule(
    argument_spec=module_args,
    supports_check_mode=True
)
result = dict(
    changed=False
)

Getting the installed keys The next step is to retrieve the keys currently installed. This can be done with the following command: 
# show crypto key authentication rsa all
Key label: vincent
Type     : RSA public key authentication
Size     : 2048
Imported : 16:17:08 UTC Tue Aug 11 2020
Data     :
 30820122 300D0609 2A864886 F70D0101 01050003 82010F00 3082010A 02820101
 00D81E5B A73D82F3 77B1E4B5 949FB245 60FB9167 7CD03AB7 ADDE7AFE A0B83174
 A33EC0E6 1C887E02 2338367A 8A1DB0CE 0C3FBC51 15723AEB 07F301A4 B1A9961A
 2D00DBBD 2ABFC831 B0B25932 05B3BC30 B9514EA1 3DC22CBD DDCA6F02 026DBBB6
 EE3CFADA AFA86F52 CAE7620D 17C3582B 4422D24F D68698A5 52ED1E9E 8E41F062
 7DE81015 F33AD486 C14D0BB1 68C65259 F9FD8A37 8DE52ED0 7B36E005 8C58516B
 7EA6C29A EEE0833B 42714618 50B3FFAC 15DBE3EF 8DA5D337 68DAECB9 904DE520
 2D627CEA 67E6434F E974CF6D 952AB2AB F074FBA3 3FB9B9CC A0CD0ADC 6E0CDB2A
 6A1CFEBA E97AF5A9 1FE41F6C 92E1F522 673E1A5F 69C68E11 4A13C0F3 0FFC782D
 27020301 0001
[ ]
ansible_collections.cisco.iosxr.plugins.module_utils.network.iosxr.iosxr contains a run_commands() function we can use: 
command = "show crypto key authentication rsa all"
out = run_commands(module, command)
out = out[0].replace(' \n', '\n')
A common library to parse a command output is textfsm: a Python module using a template-based state machine for parsing semi-formatted text. 
template = r"""
Value Required Label (\w+)
Value Required,List Data ([A-F0-9 ]+)
Start
 ^Key label: $ Label 
 ^Data\s+: -> GetData
GetData
 ^ $ Data 
 ^$$ -> Record Start
""".lstrip()
re_table = textfsm.TextFSM(io.StringIO(template))
got =  data[0]: "".join(data[1]).replace(' ', '')
       for data in re_table.ParseText(out)
got is a dictionary associating key labels, considered as usernames, with a hexadecimal representation of the public key currently installed. It looks like this: 
>>> pprint(got)
 'alfred': '30820122300D0609[ ]6F0203010001',
 'cedric': '30820122300D0609[ ]710203010001',
 'vincent': '30820122300D0609[ ]270203010001'

Comparing with the wanted keys Let s now build the wanted dictionary using the same structure. In module.params['keys'], we have a dictionary associating usernames to public SSH keys in the OpenSSH format: 
>>> pprint(module.params['keys'])
 'cedric': 'ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1yc2[ ]',
 'vincent': 'ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1yc2[ ]'
We need to convert these keys in the same hexadecimal representation used by Cisco above. The ssh-keygen command and some glue can do the conversion:2 
$ ssh-keygen -f id_rsa.pub -e -mPKCS8 \
     grep -v '^---' \
     base64 -d \
     hexdump -e '4/1 "%0.2X"'
30820122300D06092[ ]782D270203010001
Assuming we have a ssh2cisco() function doing that, we can build the wanted dictionary: 
wanted =  k: ssh2cisco(v)
          for k, v in module.params['keys'].items()

Applying changes Back to the skeleton described in the previous article, the last step is to apply the changes if there is a difference between got and wanted when not running with check mode. The part comparing got and wanted is taken verbatim from the skeleton module: 
if got != wanted:
    result['changed'] = True
    result['diff'] = dict(
        before=yaml.safe_dump(got),
        after=yaml.safe_dump(wanted)
    )
if module.check_mode or not result['changed']:
    module.exit_json(**result)
Let s copy the new or changed keys and attach them to their respective users. For this purpose, we reuse the get_connection() and copy_file() functions from ansible_collections.cisco.iosxr.plugins.module_utils.network.iosxr.iosxr. 
conn = get_connection(module)
for user in wanted:
    if user not in got or wanted[user] != got[user]:
        dst = f"/harddisk:/publickey_ user .raw"
        with tempfile.NamedTemporaryFile() as src:
            decoded = base64.b64decode(
                module.params['keys'][user].split()[1])
            src.write(decoded)
            src.flush()
            copy_file(module, src.name, dst)
    command = ("admin crypto key import authentication rsa "
               f"username  user   dst ")
    conn.send_command(command, prompt="yes/no", answer="yes")
Then, we remove obsolete keys: 
for user in got:
    if user not in wanted:
        command = ("admin crypto key zeroize authentication rsa "
                   f"username  user ")
        conn.send_command(command, prompt="yes/no", answer="yes")
The complete code is available on GitHub. Compared to the iosxr_user module, this one displays a diff when running with --diff, correctly signals a change, is faster, 3 and deletes unwanted SSH keys. However, it is unable to create users and cannot configure passwords or multiple SSH keys.
  1. In our environment, the Ansible playbook pushes a full configuration, including the user definitions. Then, it synchronizes the SSH keys.
  2. Despite the argument provided to ssh-keygen, the format used by Cisco is not PKCS#8. This is the ASN.1 representation of a Subject Public Key Info structure, as defined in RFC 2459. Moreover, PKCS#8 is a format for a private key, not a public one.
  3. The main factors for being faster are:
    • not creating users, and
    • not reuploading existing SSH keys.

Elana Hashman: My term at the Open Source Initiative thus far

When I ran for the OSI board in early 2019, I set three goals for myself: Now that the OSI has announced hiring an interim General Manager, I thought it would be a good time to publicly reflect on what I've accomplished and what I'd like to see next. As I promised in my campaign pitch, I aim to be publicly accountable :) Growing the OSI's membership I have served as our Membership Committee Chair since the May 2019 board meeting, tasked with devising and supervising strategy to increase membership and deliver value to members. As part of my election campaign last year, I signed up over 50 new individual members. Since May 2019, we've seen strong 33% growth of individual members, to reach a new all-time high over 600 (638 when I last checked). I see the OSI as a relatively neutral organization that occupies a unique position to build bridges among organizations within the FOSS ecosystem. In order to facilitate this, we need a representative membership, and we need to engage those members and provide forums for cross-pollination. As Membership Committee Chair, I have been running quarterly video calls on Jitsi for our affiliate members, where we can share updates between many global organizations and discuss challenges we all face. But it's not enough just to hold the discussion; we also need to bring fresh new voices into the conversation. Since I've joined the board, I'm thrilled to say that 16 new affiliate members joined (in chronological order) for a total of 81: I was also excited to run a survey of the OSI's individual and affiliate membership to help inform the future of the organization that received 58 long-form responses. The survey has been accepted by the board at our August meeting and should be released publicly soon! Defending the Open Source Definition When I joined the board, the first committee I joined was the License Committee, which is responsible for running the licence review process, making recommendations on new licenses, and maintaining our existing licenses. Over the past year, under Pamela Chestek's leadership as Chair, the full board has approved the following licenses (with SPDX identifiers in brackets) on the recommendation of the License Committee: We withheld approval of the following licenses: I've also worked to define the scope of work for hiring someone to improve our license review process, which we have an open RFP for! Chopping wood and carrying water I joined the OSI with the goal of improving an organization I didn't think was performing up to its potential. Its membership and board were not representative of the wider open source community, its messaging felt outdated, and it seemed to be failing to rise to today's challenges for FOSS. But before one can rise to meet these challenges, you need a strong foundation. The OSI needed the organizational structure, health, and governance in order to address such questions. Completing that work is essential, but not exactly glamourous and it's a place that I thrive. Honestly, I don't (yet?) want to be the public face of the organization, and I apologize to those who've missed me at events like FOSDEM. I want to talk a little about some of my behind-the-scenes activities that I've completed as part of my board service: All of this work is intended to improve the organization's health and provide it with an excellent foundation for its mission. Defining the future of open source Soon after I was elected to the board, I gave a talk at Brooklyn.js entitled "The Future of Open Source." In this presentation, I pondered about the history and future of the free and open source software movement, and the ethical questions we must face. In my election campaign, I wrote "Software licenses are a means, not an end, to open source software. Focusing on licensing is necessary but not sufficient to ensure a vibrant, thriving open source community. Focus on licensing to the exclusion of other serious community concerns is to our collective detriment." My primary goal for my first term on the board was to ensure the OSI would be positioned to answer wider questions about the open source community and its future beyond licenses. Over the past two months, I supported Megan Byrd-Sanicki's suggestion to hold (and then participated in, with the rest of the board) organizational strategy sessions to facilitate our long-term planning. My contribution to help inform these sessions was providing the member survey on behalf of the Membership Committee. Now, I think we are much better equiped to face the hard questions we'll have to tackle. In my opinion, the Open Source Initiative is better positioned than ever to answer them, and I can't wait to see what the future brings. Hope to see you at our first State of the Source conference next week!

1 September 2020

Russ Allbery: Review: Riot Baby

Review: Riot Baby, by Tochi Onyebuchi
Publisher: Tor.com
Copyright: January 2020
ISBN: 1-250-21476-9
Format: Kindle
Pages: 176
From Ella's childhood, she sees visions of the future. They come at first with nose bleeds and other physical symptoms, but their worst aspect is that they're sad and dark. Ella is black, as are those around her, and their futures are full of shootings and gangs, death and trouble. As she grows older, she develops her Thing: powers that let her bend, move, and destroy things with her mind, and later to become invisible, teleport, and reshape the world. Ella has superpowers. Ella is not the viewpoint character of most of Riot Baby, however. That is Kev, her younger brother, the riot baby of the title, born in South Central on the day of the Rodney King riots. Kev grows up in Harlem where they move after the destruction from the riots: keeping Ella's secret, making friends, navigating gang politics, watching people be harassed by the cops. Growing up black in the United States. Then Ella sees something awful in the future and disappears, and some time afterwards Kev ends up in Rikers Island. One of the problems with writing reviews of every book I read is that sometimes I read books that I am utterly unqualified to review. This is one of those books. This novella is about black exhaustion and rage, about the experience of oppression, about how it feels to be inside the prison system. It's also a story in dialogue with an argument that isn't mine, between the patience and suffering of endurance and not making things worse versus the rage of using all the power that one has to force a change. Some parts of it sat uncomfortably and the ending didn't work for me on the first reading, but it's not possible for me to separate my reactions to the novella from being a white man and having a far different experience of the world. I'm writing a review anyway because that's what I do when I read books, but even more than normal, take this as my personal reaction expressed in my quiet corner of the Internet. I'm not the person whose opinion of this story should matter. In many versions of this novella, Ella would be the main character, since she's the one with superpowers. She does get some viewpoint scenes, but most of the focus is on Kev even when the narrative is following Ella. Kev trying to navigate the world, trying to survive prison, seeing his friends murdered by the police, and living as the target of oppression that Ella can escape. This was an excellent choice. Ella wouldn't have been as interesting of a character if the story were more focused on her developing powers instead of on the problems that she cannot solve. The writing is visceral, immediate, and very evocative. Onyebuchi builds the narrative with a series of short and vividly-described moments showing the narrowing of Kev's life and Ella's exploration of her growing anger and search for a way to support and protect him. This is not a story about nonviolent resistance or about the arc of the universe bending towards justice. Ella confronts this directly in a memorable scene in a church towards the end of the novella that for me was the emotional heart of the story. The previous generations, starting with Kev and Ella's mother, preach the gospel of endurance and survival and looking on the good side. The prison system eventually provides Kev a path to quiet and a form of peace. Riot Baby is a story about rejecting that approach to the continuing cycle of violence. Ella is fed up, tired, angry, and increasingly unconvinced that waiting for change is working. I wasn't that positive on this story when I finished it, but it's stuck with me since I read it and my appreciation for it has grown while writing this review. It uses the power fantasy both to make a hard point about the problems power cannot solve and to recast the argument about pacifism and nonviolence in a challenging way. I'm still not certain what I think of it, but I'm still thinking about it, which says a lot. It deserves the positive attention that it's gotten. Rating: 7 out of 10

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