Search Results: "ag"

14 December 2023

Dirk Eddelbuettel: RProtoBuf 0.4.21 on CRAN: Updated Upstream Support!

An exciting new release 0.4.21 of RProtoBuf arrived on CRAN earlier today. RProtoBuf provides R with bindings for the Google Protocol Buffers ( ProtoBuf ) data encoding and serialization library used and released by Google, and deployed very widely in numerous projects as a language and operating-system agnostic protocol. ProtoBuf development, following what seemed like a multi-year lull, all of a sudden picked up again with a vengeance a little while ago. And the library releases we rely on for convenience and provided by the Linux distributions are lagging. So last summer we received an excellent, and focussed, pull request #93 offering to update the package to the newer ProtoBuf 22.0 and beyond. (Aside: When a library ditches its numbering scheme you know changes are for real . My Ubuntu 23.10 box is still at 3.21 in a different counting scheme .) But it wasn t until last weekend the issue ticket #95 by Sebastian ran into the same issue, but recognized it and contained a container recipe! So now all of a sudden we were able to build under a newer ProtoBuf which made accepting the PR #93 much easier! We added this as an additional continuous unit test, and made a few other smaller updates to documentation and style. The following section from the NEWS.Rd file has full details.

Changes in RProtoBuf version 0.4.21 (2022-12-13)
  • Package now builds with ProtoBuf >= 22.x thanks to Matteo Gianella (#93 addressing #92).
  • An Alpine 3.19-based workflow was added to test this in continuous integration thanks to a suggestion by Sebastian Meyer.
  • A large number of old-style .Call were updated (#96).
  • Several packaging, dcoumentation and testing items were updated.

Thanks to my CRANberries, there is a diff to the previous release. The RProtoBuf page has copies of the (older) package vignette, the quick overview vignette, and the pre-print of our JSS paper. Questions, comments etc should go to the GitHub issue tracker off the GitHub repo. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

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

13 December 2023

Jonathan Dowland: equivalence problems with StreamGraph

I've been tackling an equivalence problem with rewritten programs in StrIoT, our proof-of-concept stream-processing system. The StrIoT Logical Optimiser applies a set of rewrite rules to a stream-processing program, generating a set of variants that can be reasoned about, ranked, and deployed. The problem I've been tackling is that a variant may appear to be semantically equivalent to another, but compare (with ==) as distinct. The issue relates to the design of our data-type representing programs, in particular, a consequence of our choice to outsource the structural aspect to a 3rd-party library (Algebra.Graph). The Graph library deems nodes that compare as equivalent (again with ==) to be the same. Since a stream-processing program may contain many operators which are equivalent, but distinct, we needed to add a field to our payload type to differentiate them: so we opted for an Integer field, vertexId (something I've described as a "wart" elsewhere) Here's a simplified example of our existing payload type, StreamVertex:
data StreamVertex = StreamVertex
      vertexId   :: Int
    , operator   :: StreamOperator
    , parameters :: [ExpQ]
    , intype     :: String
    , outtype    :: String
     
A rewrite rule might introduce or eliminate operators from a stream-processing program. For example, consider the rule which "hoists" a filter upstream from a merge operator. In pseudo-Haskell,
streamFilter p . streamMerge [a , b, ...]
=>
streamMerge [ streamFilter p a
            , streamFilter p b
            , ...]
The original streamFilter is removed, and new streamFilters are introduced, one per stream arriving at streamMerge. In general, rules may need to synthesise new operators, and thus new vertexIds. Another rewrite rule might perform the reverse operation. But the individual rules operate in isolation: and so, the program variant that results after applying a rule and then applying an inverse rule may not have the same vertexIds, or the same order of vertexIds, as the original program. I thought of the outline of two possible solutions to this. "well-numbered" StreamGraphs The first was to encode (and enforce) some rules about how vertexIds are used. If they always began from (say) 1, and were strictly-ascending from the source operator(s), and rewrite rules guaranteed that a "well numbered" input would be "well numbered" after rewriting, this would be sufficient to rule out a rewritten-but-semantically-equivalent program being considered distinct. The trouble with this approach is using properties of a numerical system built around vertexId as a stand-in for the real structural problem. I was not sure I could prove both that the stand-in system was sound and that it was a proper analogue for the underlying structural issue. It feels to me more that the choice to use an external library to encode the structure of a stream-processing program was the issue: the structure itself is a fundamental part of the semantics of the program. What if we had encoded the structure of programs within the same data-type? alternative data-type StrIoT programs are trees. The root is the sink node: there is always exactly one. There can be multiple source (leaf nodes), but they always converge. Operators can have multiple inputs (including zero). The root node has no output, but all other operators have exactly one. I explored transforming StreamVertex into a tree by adding a field representing incoming streams, and dispensing with Graph and vertexId. Something like this
data StreamProg = StreamProg StreamOperator [Exp] String String [StreamProg]
A uni-directional transformation from Graph StreamVertex to StreamProg is all that's needed to implement something like ==, so we don't need to keep track of vertexId mappings. Unfortunately, we can't fix the actual Eq (Graph StreamVertex) implementation this way: it delegates to Eq StreamVertex, and we just don't have enough information to fix the problem at that level. But, we can write a separate graphEq and use that instead where we need to. could I go further? Spoiler: I haven't. But I've been sorely tempted. We still have a separate StreamOperator type, which it would be nice to fold in; and we still have to use a list around the incoming nodes, since different operators accept different numbers of incoming streams. It would be better to encode the correct valences in the type. In 2020 I explored iteratively reducing the StreamVertex data-type to try and get it as close as possible to the ideal end-user API: simple functions. I wrote about one step along that path in Template Haskell and Stream-processing programs, but concluded that, since this was not my main PhD focus, I wouldn't go further. But it was nagging at my subconcious ever since. I allowed myself a couple of days exploring some advanced concepts including typed Template Haskell (that has had some developments since 2020), generalised abstract data types (GADTs) and more generic programming to see what could be achieved. I'll summarise all that in the next blog post.

Melissa Wen: 15 Tips for Debugging Issues in the AMD Display Kernel Driver

A self-help guide for examining and debugging the AMD display driver within the Linux kernel/DRM subsystem. It s based on my experience as an external developer working on the driver, and are shared with the goal of helping others navigate the driver code. Acknowledgments: These tips were gathered thanks to the countless help received from AMD developers during the driver development process. The list below was obtained by examining open source code, reviewing public documentation, playing with tools, asking in public forums and also with the help of my former GSoC mentor, Rodrigo Siqueira.

Pre-Debugging Steps: Before diving into an issue, it s crucial to perform two essential steps: 1) Check the latest changes: Ensure you re working with the latest AMD driver modifications located in the amd-staging-drm-next branch maintained by Alex Deucher. You may also find bug fixes for newer kernel versions on branches that have the name pattern drm-fixes-<date>. 2) Examine the issue tracker: Confirm that your issue isn t already documented and addressed in the AMD display driver issue tracker. If you find a similar issue, you can team up with others and speed up the debugging process.

Understanding the issue: Do you really need to change this? Where should you start looking for changes? 3) Is the issue in the AMD kernel driver or in the userspace?: Identifying the source of the issue is essential regardless of the GPU vendor. Sometimes this can be challenging so here are some helpful tips:
  • Record the screen: Capture the screen using a recording app while experiencing the issue. If the bug appears in the capture, it s likely a userspace issue, not the kernel display driver.
  • Analyze the dmesg log: Look for error messages related to the display driver in the dmesg log. If the error message appears before the message [drm] Display Core v... , it s not likely a display driver issue. If this message doesn t appear in your log, the display driver wasn t fully loaded and you will see a notification that something went wrong here.
4) AMD Display Manager vs. AMD Display Core: The AMD display driver consists of two components:
  • Display Manager (DM): This component interacts directly with the Linux DRM infrastructure. Occasionally, issues can arise from misinterpretations of DRM properties or features. If the issue doesn t occur on other platforms with the same AMD hardware - for example, only happens on Linux but not on Windows - it s more likely related to the AMD DM code.
  • Display Core (DC): This is the platform-agnostic part responsible for setting and programming hardware features. Modifications to the DC usually require validation on other platforms, like Windows, to avoid regressions.
5) Identify the DC HW family: Each AMD GPU has variations in its hardware architecture. Features and helpers differ between families, so determining the relevant code for your specific hardware is crucial.
  • Find GPU product information in Linux/AMD GPU documentation
  • Check the dmesg log for the Display Core version (since this commit in Linux kernel 6.3v). For example:
    • [drm] Display Core v3.2.241 initialized on DCN 2.1
    • [drm] Display Core v3.2.237 initialized on DCN 3.0.1

Investigating the relevant driver code: Keep from letting unrelated driver code to affect your investigation. 6) Narrow the code inspection down to one DC HW family: the relevant code resides in a directory named after the DC number. For example, the DCN 3.0.1 driver code is located at drivers/gpu/drm/amd/display/dc/dcn301. We all know that the AMD s shared code is huge and you can use these boundaries to rule out codes unrelated to your issue. 7) Newer families may inherit code from older ones: you can find dcn301 using code from dcn30, dcn20, dcn10 files. It s crucial to verify which hooks and helpers your driver utilizes to investigate the right portion. You can leverage ftrace for supplemental validation. To give an example, it was useful when I was updating DCN3 color mapping to correctly use their new post-blending color capabilities, such as: Additionally, you can use two different HW families to compare behaviours. If you see the issue in one but not in the other, you can compare the code and understand what has changed and if the implementation from a previous family doesn t fit well the new HW resources or design. You can also count on the help of the community on the Linux AMD issue tracker to validate your code on other hardware and/or systems. This approach helped me debug a 2-year-old issue where the cursor gamma adjustment was incorrect in DCN3 hardware, but working correctly for DCN2 family. I solved the issue in two steps, thanks for community feedback and validation: 8) Check the hardware capability screening in the driver: You can currently find a list of display hardware capabilities in the drivers/gpu/drm/amd/display/dc/dcn*/dcn*_resource.c file. More precisely in the dcn*_resource_construct() function. Using DCN301 for illustration, here is the list of its hardware caps:
	/*************************************************
	 *  Resource + asic cap harcoding                *
	 *************************************************/
	pool->base.underlay_pipe_index = NO_UNDERLAY_PIPE;
	pool->base.pipe_count = pool->base.res_cap->num_timing_generator;
	pool->base.mpcc_count = pool->base.res_cap->num_timing_generator;
	dc->caps.max_downscale_ratio = 600;
	dc->caps.i2c_speed_in_khz = 100;
	dc->caps.i2c_speed_in_khz_hdcp = 5; /*1.4 w/a enabled by default*/
	dc->caps.max_cursor_size = 256;
	dc->caps.min_horizontal_blanking_period = 80;
	dc->caps.dmdata_alloc_size = 2048;
	dc->caps.max_slave_planes = 2;
	dc->caps.max_slave_yuv_planes = 2;
	dc->caps.max_slave_rgb_planes = 2;
	dc->caps.is_apu = true;
	dc->caps.post_blend_color_processing = true;
	dc->caps.force_dp_tps4_for_cp2520 = true;
	dc->caps.extended_aux_timeout_support = true;
	dc->caps.dmcub_support = true;
	/* Color pipeline capabilities */
	dc->caps.color.dpp.dcn_arch = 1;
	dc->caps.color.dpp.input_lut_shared = 0;
	dc->caps.color.dpp.icsc = 1;
	dc->caps.color.dpp.dgam_ram = 0; // must use gamma_corr
	dc->caps.color.dpp.dgam_rom_caps.srgb = 1;
	dc->caps.color.dpp.dgam_rom_caps.bt2020 = 1;
	dc->caps.color.dpp.dgam_rom_caps.gamma2_2 = 1;
	dc->caps.color.dpp.dgam_rom_caps.pq = 1;
	dc->caps.color.dpp.dgam_rom_caps.hlg = 1;
	dc->caps.color.dpp.post_csc = 1;
	dc->caps.color.dpp.gamma_corr = 1;
	dc->caps.color.dpp.dgam_rom_for_yuv = 0;
	dc->caps.color.dpp.hw_3d_lut = 1;
	dc->caps.color.dpp.ogam_ram = 1;
	// no OGAM ROM on DCN301
	dc->caps.color.dpp.ogam_rom_caps.srgb = 0;
	dc->caps.color.dpp.ogam_rom_caps.bt2020 = 0;
	dc->caps.color.dpp.ogam_rom_caps.gamma2_2 = 0;
	dc->caps.color.dpp.ogam_rom_caps.pq = 0;
	dc->caps.color.dpp.ogam_rom_caps.hlg = 0;
	dc->caps.color.dpp.ocsc = 0;
	dc->caps.color.mpc.gamut_remap = 1;
	dc->caps.color.mpc.num_3dluts = pool->base.res_cap->num_mpc_3dlut; //2
	dc->caps.color.mpc.ogam_ram = 1;
	dc->caps.color.mpc.ogam_rom_caps.srgb = 0;
	dc->caps.color.mpc.ogam_rom_caps.bt2020 = 0;
	dc->caps.color.mpc.ogam_rom_caps.gamma2_2 = 0;
	dc->caps.color.mpc.ogam_rom_caps.pq = 0;
	dc->caps.color.mpc.ogam_rom_caps.hlg = 0;
	dc->caps.color.mpc.ocsc = 1;
	dc->caps.dp_hdmi21_pcon_support = true;
	/* read VBIOS LTTPR caps */
	if (ctx->dc_bios->funcs->get_lttpr_caps)  
		enum bp_result bp_query_result;
		uint8_t is_vbios_lttpr_enable = 0;
		bp_query_result = ctx->dc_bios->funcs->get_lttpr_caps(ctx->dc_bios, &is_vbios_lttpr_enable);
		dc->caps.vbios_lttpr_enable = (bp_query_result == BP_RESULT_OK) && !!is_vbios_lttpr_enable;
	 
	if (ctx->dc_bios->funcs->get_lttpr_interop)  
		enum bp_result bp_query_result;
		uint8_t is_vbios_interop_enabled = 0;
		bp_query_result = ctx->dc_bios->funcs->get_lttpr_interop(ctx->dc_bios, &is_vbios_interop_enabled);
		dc->caps.vbios_lttpr_aware = (bp_query_result == BP_RESULT_OK) && !!is_vbios_interop_enabled;
	 
Keep in mind that the documentation of color capabilities are available at the Linux kernel Documentation.

Understanding the development history: What has brought us to the current state? 9) Pinpoint relevant commits: Use git log and git blame to identify commits targeting the code section you re interested in. 10) Track regressions: If you re examining the amd-staging-drm-next branch, check for regressions between DC release versions. These are defined by DC_VER in the drivers/gpu/drm/amd/display/dc/dc.h file. Alternatively, find a commit with this format drm/amd/display: 3.2.221 that determines a display release. It s useful for bisecting. This information helps you understand how outdated your branch is and identify potential regressions. You can consider each DC_VER takes around one week to be bumped. Finally, check testing log of each release in the report provided on the amd-gfx mailing list, such as this one Tested-by: Daniel Wheeler:

Reducing the inspection area: Focus on what really matters. 11) Identify involved HW blocks: This helps isolate the issue. You can find more information about DCN HW blocks in the DCN Overview documentation. In summary:
  • Plane issues are closer to HUBP and DPP.
  • Blending/Stream issues are closer to MPC, OPP and OPTC. They are related to DRM CRTC subjects.
This information was useful when debugging a hardware rotation issue where the cursor plane got clipped off in the middle of the screen. Finally, the issue was addressed by two patches: 12) Issues around bandwidth (glitches) and clocks: May be affected by calculations done in these HW blocks and HW specific values. The recalculation equations are found in the DML folder. DML stands for Display Mode Library. It s in charge of all required configuration parameters supported by the hardware for multiple scenarios. See more in the AMD DC Overview kernel docs. It s a math library that optimally configures hardware to find the best balance between power efficiency and performance in a given scenario. Finding some clk variables that affect device behavior may be a sign of it. It s hard for a external developer to debug this part, since it involves information from HW specs and firmware programming that we don t have access. The best option is to provide all relevant debugging information you have and ask AMD developers to check the values from your suspicions.
  • Do a trick: If you suspect the power setup is degrading performance, try setting the amount of power supplied to the GPU to the maximum and see if it affects the system behavior with this command: sudo bash -c "echo high > /sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_dpm_force_performance_level"
I learned it when debugging glitches with hardware cursor rotation on Steam Deck. My first attempt was changing the clock calculation. In the end, Rodrigo Siqueira proposed the right solution targeting bandwidth in two steps:

Checking implicit programming and hardware limitations: Bring implicit programming to the level of consciousness and recognize hardware limitations. 13) Implicit update types: Check if the selected type for atomic update may affect your issue. The update type depends on the mode settings, since programming some modes demands more time for hardware processing. More details in the source code:
/* Surface update type is used by dc_update_surfaces_and_stream
 * The update type is determined at the very beginning of the function based
 * on parameters passed in and decides how much programming (or updating) is
 * going to be done during the call.
 *
 * UPDATE_TYPE_FAST is used for really fast updates that do not require much
 * logical calculations or hardware register programming. This update MUST be
 * ISR safe on windows. Currently fast update will only be used to flip surface
 * address.
 *
 * UPDATE_TYPE_MED is used for slower updates which require significant hw
 * re-programming however do not affect bandwidth consumption or clock
 * requirements. At present, this is the level at which front end updates
 * that do not require us to run bw_calcs happen. These are in/out transfer func
 * updates, viewport offset changes, recout size changes and pixel
depth changes.
 * This update can be done at ISR, but we want to minimize how often
this happens.
 *
 * UPDATE_TYPE_FULL is slow. Really slow. This requires us to recalculate our
 * bandwidth and clocks, possibly rearrange some pipes and reprogram
anything front
 * end related. Any time viewport dimensions, recout dimensions,
scaling ratios or
 * gamma need to be adjusted or pipe needs to be turned on (or
disconnected) we do
 * a full update. This cannot be done at ISR level and should be a rare event.
 * Unless someone is stress testing mpo enter/exit, playing with
colour or adjusting
 * underscan we don't expect to see this call at all.
 */
enum surface_update_type  
UPDATE_TYPE_FAST, /* super fast, safe to execute in isr */
UPDATE_TYPE_MED,  /* ISR safe, most of programming needed, no bw/clk change*/
UPDATE_TYPE_FULL, /* may need to shuffle resources */
 ;

Using tools: Observe the current state, validate your findings, continue improvements. 14) Use AMD tools to check hardware state and driver programming: help on understanding your driver settings and checking the behavior when changing those settings.
  • DC Visual confirmation: Check multiple planes and pipe split policy.
  • DTN logs: Check display hardware state, including rotation, size, format, underflow, blocks in use, color block values, etc.
  • UMR: Check ASIC info, register values, KMS state - links and elements (framebuffers, planes, CRTCs, connectors). Source: UMR project documentation
15) Use generic DRM/KMS tools:
  • IGT test tools: Use generic KMS tests or develop your own to isolate the issue in the kernel space. Compare results across different GPU vendors to understand their implementations and find potential solutions. Here AMD also has specific IGT tests for its GPUs that is expect to work without failures on any AMD GPU. You can check results of HW-specific tests using different display hardware families or you can compare expected differences between the generic workflow and AMD workflow.
  • drm_info: This tool summarizes the current state of a display driver (capabilities, properties and formats) per element of the DRM/KMS workflow. Output can be helpful when reporting bugs.

Don t give up! Debugging issues in the AMD display driver can be challenging, but by following these tips and leveraging available resources, you can significantly improve your chances of success. Worth mentioning: This blog post builds upon my talk, I m not an AMD expert, but presented at the 2022 XDC. It shares guidelines that helped me debug AMD display issues as an external developer of the driver. Open Source Display Driver: The Linux kernel/AMD display driver is open source, allowing you to actively contribute by addressing issues listed in the official tracker. Tackling existing issues or resolving your own can be a rewarding learning experience and a valuable contribution to the community. Additionally, the tracker serves as a valuable resource for finding similar bugs, troubleshooting tips, and suggestions from AMD developers. Finally, it s a platform for seeking help when needed. Remember, contributing to the open source community through issue resolution and collaboration is mutually beneficial for everyone involved.

12 December 2023

Raju Devidas: Nextcloud AIO install with docker-compose and nginx reverse proxy

Nextcloud AIO install with docker-compose and nginx reverse proxyNextcloud is a popular self-hosted solution for file sync and share as well as cloud apps such as document editing, chat and talk, calendar, photo gallery etc. This guide will walk you through setting up Nextcloud AIO using Docker Compose. This blog post would not be possible without immense help from Sahil Dhiman a.k.a. sahilisterThere are various ways in which the installation could be done, in our setup here are the pre-requisites.

Step 1 : The docker-compose file for nextcloud AIOThe original compose.yml file is present in nextcloud AIO&aposs git repo here . By taking a reference of that file, we have own compose.yml here.
services:
  nextcloud-aio-mastercontainer:
    image: nextcloud/all-in-one:latest
    init: true
    restart: always
    container_name: nextcloud-aio-mastercontainer # This line is not allowed to be changed as otherwise AIO will not work correctly
    volumes:
      - nextcloud_aio_mastercontainer:/mnt/docker-aio-config # This line is not allowed to be changed as otherwise the built-in backup solution will not work
      - /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock:ro # May be changed on macOS, Windows or docker rootless. See the applicable documentation. If adjusting, don&apost forget to also set &aposWATCHTOWER_DOCKER_SOCKET_PATH&apos!
    ports:
      - 8080:8080
    environment: # Is needed when using any of the options below
      # - AIO_DISABLE_BACKUP_SECTION=false # Setting this to true allows to hide the backup section in the AIO interface. See https://github.com/nextcloud/all-in-one#how-to-disable-the-backup-section
      - APACHE_PORT=32323 # Is needed when running behind a web server or reverse proxy (like Apache, Nginx, Cloudflare Tunnel and else). See https://github.com/nextcloud/all-in-one/blob/main/reverse-proxy.md
      - APACHE_IP_BINDING=127.0.0.1 # Should be set when running behind a web server or reverse proxy (like Apache, Nginx, Cloudflare Tunnel and else) that is running on the same host. See https://github.com/nextcloud/all-in-one/blob/main/reverse-proxy.md
      # - BORG_RETENTION_POLICY=--keep-within=7d --keep-weekly=4 --keep-monthly=6 # Allows to adjust borgs retention policy. See https://github.com/nextcloud/all-in-one#how-to-adjust-borgs-retention-policy
      # - COLLABORA_SECCOMP_DISABLED=false # Setting this to true allows to disable Collabora&aposs Seccomp feature. See https://github.com/nextcloud/all-in-one#how-to-disable-collaboras-seccomp-feature
      - NEXTCLOUD_DATADIR=/opt/docker/cloud.raju.dev/nextcloud # Allows to set the host directory for Nextcloud&aposs datadir.   Warning: do not set or adjust this value after the initial Nextcloud installation is done! See https://github.com/nextcloud/all-in-one#how-to-change-the-default-location-of-nextclouds-datadir
      # - NEXTCLOUD_MOUNT=/mnt/ # Allows the Nextcloud container to access the chosen directory on the host. See https://github.com/nextcloud/all-in-one#how-to-allow-the-nextcloud-container-to-access-directories-on-the-host
      # - NEXTCLOUD_UPLOAD_LIMIT=10G # Can be adjusted if you need more. See https://github.com/nextcloud/all-in-one#how-to-adjust-the-upload-limit-for-nextcloud
      # - NEXTCLOUD_MAX_TIME=3600 # Can be adjusted if you need more. See https://github.com/nextcloud/all-in-one#how-to-adjust-the-max-execution-time-for-nextcloud
      # - NEXTCLOUD_MEMORY_LIMIT=512M # Can be adjusted if you need more. See https://github.com/nextcloud/all-in-one#how-to-adjust-the-php-memory-limit-for-nextcloud
      # - NEXTCLOUD_TRUSTED_CACERTS_DIR=/path/to/my/cacerts # CA certificates in this directory will be trusted by the OS of the nexcloud container (Useful e.g. for LDAPS) See See https://github.com/nextcloud/all-in-one#how-to-trust-user-defined-certification-authorities-ca
      # - NEXTCLOUD_STARTUP_APPS=deck twofactor_totp tasks calendar contacts notes # Allows to modify the Nextcloud apps that are installed on starting AIO the first time. See https://github.com/nextcloud/all-in-one#how-to-change-the-nextcloud-apps-that-are-installed-on-the-first-startup
      # - NEXTCLOUD_ADDITIONAL_APKS=imagemagick # This allows to add additional packages to the Nextcloud container permanently. Default is imagemagick but can be overwritten by modifying this value. See https://github.com/nextcloud/all-in-one#how-to-add-os-packages-permanently-to-the-nextcloud-container
      # - NEXTCLOUD_ADDITIONAL_PHP_EXTENSIONS=imagick # This allows to add additional php extensions to the Nextcloud container permanently. Default is imagick but can be overwritten by modifying this value. See https://github.com/nextcloud/all-in-one#how-to-add-php-extensions-permanently-to-the-nextcloud-container
      # - NEXTCLOUD_ENABLE_DRI_DEVICE=true # This allows to enable the /dev/dri device in the Nextcloud container.   Warning: this only works if the &apos/dev/dri&apos device is present on the host! If it should not exist on your host, don&apost set this to true as otherwise the Nextcloud container will fail to start! See https://github.com/nextcloud/all-in-one#how-to-enable-hardware-transcoding-for-nextcloud
      # - NEXTCLOUD_KEEP_DISABLED_APPS=false # Setting this to true will keep Nextcloud apps that are disabled in the AIO interface and not uninstall them if they should be installed. See https://github.com/nextcloud/all-in-one#how-to-keep-disabled-apps
      # - TALK_PORT=3478 # This allows to adjust the port that the talk container is using. See https://github.com/nextcloud/all-in-one#how-to-adjust-the-talk-port
      # - WATCHTOWER_DOCKER_SOCKET_PATH=/var/run/docker.sock # Needs to be specified if the docker socket on the host is not located in the default &apos/var/run/docker.sock&apos. Otherwise mastercontainer updates will fail. For macos it needs to be &apos/var/run/docker.sock&apos
    # networks: # Is needed when you want to create the nextcloud-aio network with ipv6-support using this file, see the network config at the bottom of the file
      # - nextcloud-aio # Is needed when you want to create the nextcloud-aio network with ipv6-support using this file, see the network config at the bottom of the file
      # - SKIP_DOMAIN_VALIDATION=true
    # # Uncomment the following line when using SELinux
    # security_opt: ["label:disable"]
volumes: # If you want to store the data on a different drive, see https://github.com/nextcloud/all-in-one#how-to-store-the-filesinstallation-on-a-separate-drive
  nextcloud_aio_mastercontainer:
    name: nextcloud_aio_mastercontainer # This line is not allowed to be changed as otherwise the built-in backup solution will not work
I have not removed many of the commented options in the compose file, for a possibility of me using them in the future.If you want a smaller cleaner compose with the extra options, you can refer to
services:
  nextcloud-aio-mastercontainer:
    image: nextcloud/all-in-one:latest
    init: true
    restart: always
    container_name: nextcloud-aio-mastercontainer
    volumes:
      - nextcloud_aio_mastercontainer:/mnt/docker-aio-config
      - /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock:ro
    ports:
      - 8080:8080
    environment:
      - APACHE_PORT=32323
      - APACHE_IP_BINDING=127.0.0.1
      - NEXTCLOUD_DATADIR=/opt/docker/nextcloud
volumes:
  nextcloud_aio_mastercontainer:
    name: nextcloud_aio_mastercontainer
I am using a separate directory to store nextcloud data. As per nextcloud documentation you should be using a separate partition if you want to use this feature, however I did not have that option on my server, so I used a separate directory instead. Also we use a custom port on which nextcloud listens for operations, we have set it up as 32323 above, but you can use any in the permissible port range. The 8080 port is used the setup the AIO management interface. Both 8080 and the APACHE_PORT do not need to be open on the host machine, as we will be using reverse proxy setup with nginx to direct requests. once you have your preferred compose.yml file, you can start the containers using
$ docker-compose -f compose.yml up -d 
Creating network "clouddev_default" with the default driver
Creating volume "nextcloud_aio_mastercontainer" with default driver
Creating nextcloud-aio-mastercontainer ... done
once your container&aposs are running, we can do the nginx setup.

Step 2: Configuring nginx reverse proxy for our domain on host. A reference nginx configuration for nextcloud AIO is given in the nextcloud git repository here . You can modify the configuration file according to your needs and setup. Here is configuration that we are using

map $http_upgrade $connection_upgrade  
    default upgrade;
    &apos&apos close;
 
server  
    listen 80;
    #listen [::]:80;            # comment to disable IPv6
    if ($scheme = "http")  
        return 301 https://$host$request_uri;
     
    listen 443 ssl http2;      # for nginx versions below v1.25.1
    #listen [::]:443 ssl http2; # for nginx versions below v1.25.1 - comment to disable IPv6
    # listen 443 ssl;      # for nginx v1.25.1+
    # listen [::]:443 ssl; # for nginx v1.25.1+ - keep comment to disable IPv6
    # http2 on;                                 # uncomment to enable HTTP/2        - supported on nginx v1.25.1+
    # http3 on;                                 # uncomment to enable HTTP/3 / QUIC - supported on nginx v1.25.0+
    # quic_retry on;                            # uncomment to enable HTTP/3 / QUIC - supported on nginx v1.25.0+
    # add_header Alt-Svc &aposh3=":443"; ma=86400&apos; # uncomment to enable HTTP/3 / QUIC - supported on nginx v1.25.0+
    # listen 443 quic reuseport;       # uncomment to enable HTTP/3 / QUIC - supported on nginx v1.25.0+ - please remove "reuseport" if there is already another quic listener on port 443 with enabled reuseport
    # listen [::]:443 quic reuseport;  # uncomment to enable HTTP/3 / QUIC - supported on nginx v1.25.0+ - please remove "reuseport" if there is already another quic listener on port 443 with enabled reuseport - keep comment to disable IPv6
    server_name cloud.example.com;
    location /  
        proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:32323$request_uri;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Port $server_port;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Scheme $scheme;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
        proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
        proxy_set_header Accept-Encoding "";
        proxy_set_header Host $host;
    
        client_body_buffer_size 512k;
        proxy_read_timeout 86400s;
        client_max_body_size 0;
        # Websocket
        proxy_http_version 1.1;
        proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
        proxy_set_header Connection $connection_upgrade;
     
    ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/cloud.example.com/fullchain.pem; # managed by Certbot
    ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/cloud.example.com/privkey.pem; # managed by Certbot
    ssl_session_timeout 1d;
    ssl_session_cache shared:MozSSL:10m; # about 40000 sessions
    ssl_session_tickets off;
    ssl_protocols TLSv1.2 TLSv1.3;
    ssl_ciphers ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:ECDHE-ECDSA-CHACHA20-POLY1305:ECDHE-RSA-CHACHA20-POLY1305:DHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:DHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:DHE-RSA-CHACHA20-POLY1305;
    ssl_prefer_server_ciphers on;
    # Optional settings:
    # OCSP stapling
    # ssl_stapling on;
    # ssl_stapling_verify on;
    # ssl_trusted_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/<your-nc-domain>/chain.pem;
    # replace with the IP address of your resolver
    # resolver 127.0.0.1; # needed for oscp stapling: e.g. use 94.140.15.15 for adguard / 1.1.1.1 for cloudflared or 8.8.8.8 for google - you can use the same nameserver as listed in your /etc/resolv.conf file
 
Please note that you need to have valid SSL certificates for your domain for this configuration to work. Steps on getting valid SSL certificates for your domain are beyond the scope of this article. You can give a web search on getting SSL certificates with letsencrypt and you will get several resources on that, or may write a blog post on it separately in the future.once your configuration for nginx is done, you can test the nginx configuration using
$ sudo nginx -t 
nginx: the configuration file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf syntax is ok
nginx: configuration file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf test is successful
and then reload nginx with
$ sudo nginx -s reload

Step 3: Setup of Nextcloud AIO from the browser.To setup nextcloud AIO, we need to access it using the web browser on URL of our domain.tld:8080, however we do not want to open the 8080 port publicly to do this, so to complete the setup, here is a neat hack from sahilister
ssh -L 8080:127.0.0.1:8080 username:<server-ip>
you can bind the 8080 port of your server to the 8080 of your localhost using Unix socket forwarding over SSH.The port forwarding only last for the duration of your SSH session, if the SSH session breaks, your port forwarding will to. So, once you have the port forwarded, you can open the nextcloud AIO instance in your web browser at 127.0.0.1:8080
Nextcloud AIO install with docker-compose and nginx reverse proxy
you will get this error because you are trying to access a page on localhost over HTTPS. You can click on advanced and then continue to proceed to the next page. Your data is encrypted over SSH for this session as we are binding the port over SSH. Depending on your choice of browser, the above page might look different.once you have proceeded, the nextcloud AIO interface will open and will look something like this.
Nextcloud AIO install with docker-compose and nginx reverse proxynextcloud AIO initial screen with capsicums as password
It will show an auto generated passphrase, you need to save this passphrase and make sure to not loose it. For the purposes of security, I have masked the passwords with capsicums. once you have noted down your password, you can proceed to the Nextcloud AIO login, enter your password and then login. After login you will be greeted with a screen like this.
Nextcloud AIO install with docker-compose and nginx reverse proxy
now you can put the domain that you want to use in the Submit domain field. Once the domain check is done, you will proceed to the next step and see another screen like this
Nextcloud AIO install with docker-compose and nginx reverse proxy
here you can select any optional containers for the features that you might want. IMPORTANT: Please make sure to also change the time zone at the bottom of the page according to the time zone you wish to operate in.
Nextcloud AIO install with docker-compose and nginx reverse proxy
The timezone setup is also important because the data base will get initialized according to the set time zone. This could result in wrong initialization of database and you ending up in a startup loop for nextcloud. I faced this issue and could only resolve it after getting help from sahilister . Once you are done changing the timezone, and selecting any additional features you want, you can click on Download and start the containersIt will take some time for this process to finish, take a break and look at the farthest object in your room and take a sip of water. Once you are done, and the process has finished you will see a page similar to the following one.
Nextcloud AIO install with docker-compose and nginx reverse proxy
wait patiently for everything to turn green.
Nextcloud AIO install with docker-compose and nginx reverse proxy
once all the containers have started properly, you can open the nextcloud login interface on your configured domain, the initial login details are auto generated as you can see from the above screenshot. Again you will see a password that you need to note down or save to enter the nextcloud interface. Capsicums will not work as passwords. I have masked the auto generated passwords using capsicums.Now you can click on Open your Nextcloud button or go to your configured domain to access the login screen.
Nextcloud AIO install with docker-compose and nginx reverse proxy
You can use the login details from the previous step to login to the administrator account of your Nextcloud instance. There you have it, your very own cloud!

Additional Notes:

How to properly reset Nextcloud setup?While following the above steps, or while following steps from some other tutorial, you may have made a mistake, and want to start everything again from scratch. The instructions for it are present in the Nextcloud documentation here . Here is the TLDR for a docker-compose setup. These steps will delete all data, do not use these steps on an existing nextcloud setup unless you know what you are doing.
  • Stop your master container.
docker-compose -f compose.yml down -v
The above command will also remove the volume associated with the master container
  • Stop all the child containers that has been started by the master container.
docker stop nextcloud-aio-apache nextcloud-aio-notify-push nextcloud-aio-nextcloud nextcloud-aio-imaginary nextcloud-aio-fulltextsearch nextcloud-aio-redis nextcloud-aio-database nextcloud-aio-talk nextcloud-aio-collabora
  • Remove all the child containers that has been started by the master container
docker rm nextcloud-aio-apache nextcloud-aio-notify-push nextcloud-aio-nextcloud nextcloud-aio-imaginary nextcloud-aio-fulltextsearch nextcloud-aio-redis nextcloud-aio-database nextcloud-aio-talk nextcloud-aio-collabora
  • If you also wish to remove all images associated with nextcloud you can do it with
docker rmi $(docker images --filter "reference=nextcloud/*" -q)
  • remove all volumes associated with child containers
docker volume rm <volume-name>
  • remove the network associated with nextcloud
docker network rm nextcloud-aio

Additional references.
  1. Nextcloud Github
  2. Nextcloud reverse proxy documentation
  3. Nextcloud Administration Guide
  4. Nextcloud User Manual
  5. Nextcloud Developer&aposs manual

Raju Devidas: How to remove multiple docker images for a specific pattern

altlist of docker images using docker images
In my case I want to remove all images which have the beta tag. to do thatuse docker rmi $(docker images --filter "reference=nextcloud/*:beta" -q)you can modify the reference part according to your use case.Ciao!

Freexian Collaborators: Monthly report about Debian Long Term Support, November 2023 (by Roberto C. S nchez)

Like each month, have a look at the work funded by Freexian s Debian LTS offering. Some notable fixes which were made in LTS during the month of November include the gnutls28 cryptographic library and the freerdp2 Remote Desktop Protocol client/server implementation. The gnutls28 update was prepared by LTS contributor Markus Koschany and dealt with a timing attack which could be used to compromise a cryptographic system, while the freerdp2 update was prepared by LTS contributor Tobias Frost and is the result of work spanning 3 months to deal with dozens of vulnerabilities. In addition to the many ordinary LTS tasks which were completed (CVE triage, patch backports, package updates, etc), there were several contributions by LTS contributors for the benefit of Debian stable and old-stable releases, as well as for the benefit of upstream projects. LTS contributor Abhijith PA uploaded an update of the puma package to unstable in order to fix a vulnerability in that package while LTS contributor Thosten Alteholz sponsored an upload to unstable of libde265 and himself made corresponding uploads of libde265 to Debian stable and old-stable. LTS contributor Bastien Roucari s developed patches for vulnerabilities in zbar and audiofile which were then provided to the respective upstream projects. Updates to packages in Debian stable were made by Markus Koschany to deal with security vulnerabilities and by Chris Lamb to deal with some non-security bugs. As always, the LTS strives to provide high quality updates to packages under the direct purview of the LTS team while also rendering assistance to maintainers, the stable security team, and upstream developers whenever practical.

Debian LTS contributors In November, 18 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:
  • Abhijith PA did 7.0h (out of 0h assigned and 14.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 7.0h to the next month.
  • Adrian Bunk did 15.0h (out of 14.0h assigned and 9.75h from previous period), thus carrying over 8.75h to the next month.
  • Anton Gladky did 10.0h (out of 9.5h assigned and 5.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 5.0h to the next month.
  • Bastien Roucari s did 16.0h (out of 18.25h assigned and 1.75h from previous period), thus carrying over 4.0h to the next month.
  • Ben Hutchings did 12.0h (out of 16.5h assigned and 12.25h from previous period), thus carrying over 16.75h to the next month.
  • Chris Lamb did 18.0h (out of 17.25h assigned and 0.75h from previous period).
  • Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 15.5h (out of 23.5h assigned and 0.25h from previous period), thus carrying over 8.25h to the next month.
  • Guilhem Moulin did 13.0h (out of 12.0h assigned and 8.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 7.0h to the next month.
  • Lee Garrett did 14.5h (out of 16.75h assigned and 7.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 9.25h to the next month.
  • Markus Koschany did 30.0h (out of 30.0h assigned).
  • Ola Lundqvist did 6.5h (out of 8.25h assigned and 15.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 17.25h to the next month.
  • Roberto C. S nchez did 5.5h (out of 12.0h assigned), thus carrying over 6.5h to the next month.
  • Santiago Ruano Rinc n did 3.25h (out of 13.62h assigned and 2.375h from previous period), thus carrying over 12.745h to the next month.
  • Sean Whitton did 3.25h (out of 10.0h assigned), thus carrying over 6.75h to the next month.
  • Sylvain Beucler did 10.0h (out of 13.5h assigned and 10.25h from previous period), thus carrying over 13.75h to the next month.
  • Thorsten Alteholz did 14.0h (out of 14.0h assigned).
  • Tobias Frost did 12.0h (out of 12.0h assigned).
  • Utkarsh Gupta did 0.0h (out of 6.0h assigned and 17.75h from previous period), thus carrying over 23.75h to the next month.

Evolution of the situation In November, we have released 35 DLAs.

Thanks to our sponsors Sponsors that joined recently are in bold.

11 December 2023

Jonathan Dowland: Talks: why?

I'd planned to write some private mail on the subject of preparing and delivering conference talks. However, each time I try to write that mail, I've managed to somehow contrive to lose it. So I thought I'd try as a blog post instead, to break the curse. The first aspect I wanted to write about is the pre-planning phase, or, the bit where you decide to give a talk in the first place. But first a bit about me. I don't talk all that regularly. I think I'm averaging one talk a year. I don't consider myself to be a natural talk-giver: I don't particularly enjoy it and I still get quite nervous. So the first question is: why do it? One motivation is that you want to attend a particular conference, and presenting at it makes it much easier to get institutional support for doing so (i.e., travel and accommodation covered). At the moment, I've written some talk proposals for FOSDEM because I want to attend, and it increases my chances if I'm delivering a talk. Another reason, pertinent to academia, is you wish to have a paper published. Last year I attended a conference in Portland that I had a paper accepted to. A condition of the paper being accepted is you attend and do a presentation about it. Obviously, the presentation itself is a useful form of dissemination for your work, but the paper has the potential to reach more people. You may wish to promote what you're talking about: academic work, but perhaps a piece of open source software that would benefit from wider awareness, more adoption, more bug reports, testing, and patches. You may wish to support the venue. There are a some of small-scale conferences that I enjoy participating in which don't receive a lot of submissions and so I tend to send one or more in order to help make sure there are enough possible talks to keep the whole thing viable. Finally, you may wish to promote yourself: certainly, some Software Engineers I've met seem to spend as much time on talks and travelling as writing software. It's a good way to see a lot of the world, and might be a good way to get your name known and increase your employment prospects. I feel lucky I haven't had to rely on this.

Jonathan Dowland: Tex Shura

So yeah, I bought the Shura.
Tex Shura keyboard, ISO-UK layout
It's been about a year since I got the Tex Shinobi keyboard. I ended up taking to the office and using it there. The MX Silent Red switches are a good fit for a shared space, and I have a bit more desk space so the extra large footprint is not a problem. Back at home, I have a reasonably large desk, but I've got a Synth jammed at the back-centre, leaving a slightly tight budget for keyboard depth. The Shura is nice and compact and fits in perfectly. So what should I say about it? Build quality is excellent. I went with MX Reds (non-silent this time) which feel a lot better to me than the silent variant. I do worry about waking the kids up if I type after they've gone to bed, but it hasn't actually been a problem (and the switches activate quite early in travel so you can "tip-toe" type silently, and slowly). I like these keyboards (and I've otherwise avoided the Mech keyboard money pit) because they have the integrated trackpoint, which I rely on. Just as with the Shinobi, the Trackpoint is of an excellent quality, pretty much indistinguishable from that on the official Lenovo trackpoint keyboards. Since the Shura is a a "60%" or "65%" or "70%" or something, thus forgoing the Function keys and such, I rely on "layers": switching the function of all the regular keys whilst "Fn" is pressed. You can reprogram the Tex keyboards using a profile output by their web-based configurator which I've used to mildly customize the layout: swapped left-hand "Win" with "Fn" (FN1), mapped FN1 to the right-hand "Win". That's it so far, the defaults are otherwise sufficient for me. I've also used the DIP switches to enable mouse wheel emulation with the trackpoint (in common with the Lenovos). In September, Justin from TeX left an intriguing comment on my last blog post:
Thanks for your promotion !! We will try to design a new keyboard ( a little ergo keyboard ) should be release end of this year !!

10 December 2023

Scarlett Gately Moore: KDE: KDE Snaps 23.08.4, PIM! KDE neon, Debian

KDE PIM Kaddressbook snapKDE PIM Kaddressbook snap
KDE Snaps: This weeks big accomplishment is KDE PIM snaps! I have successfully added akonadi as a service via an akonadi content snap and running it as a service. Kaddressbook is our first PIM snap with this setup and it works flawlessly! It is available in the snap store. I have a pile of MRs awaiting approvals, so keep your eye out for the rest of PIM in the next day. KDE Applications 23.08.4 has been released and available in the snap store. Krita 5.2.2 has been released. I have created a new kde-qt6 snap as the qt-framework snap has not been updated and the maintainer is unreachable. It is in edge and I will be rebuilding our kf6 snap with this one. I am debugging an issue with the latest Labplot release. KDE neon: This week I helped with frameworks release 5.113 and KDE applications 23.08.4. I also worked on the ongoing Unstable turning red into green builds as the porting to qt6 continues. Debian: With my on going learning packaging for all the programming languages, Rust packaging: I started on Rustic https://github.com/rustic-rs/rustic unfortunately, it was a bit of wasted time as it depends on a feature of tracing-subcriber that depends on matchers which has a grave bug, so it remains disabled. Personal: I do have an interview tomorrow! And it looks like the project may go through after the new year. So things are looking up, unfortunately I must still ask, if you have any spare change please consider a donation. The phone company decided to take an extra $200.00 I didn t have to spare and while I resolved it, they refused a refund, but gave me a credit to next months bill, which doesn t help me now. Thank you for your consideration. https://gofund.me/b74e4c6f

Freexian Collaborators: Debian Contributions: Python 3.12 preparations, debian-printing, merged-/usr tranisition updates, and more! (by Utkarsh Gupta)

Contributing to Debian is part of Freexian s mission. This article covers the latest achievements of Freexian and their collaborators. All of this is made possible by organizations subscribing to our Long Term Support contracts and consulting services.

Preparing for Python 3.12 by Stefano Rivera Stefano uploaded a few packages in preparation for Python 3.12, including pycxx and cython. Cython has a major new version (Cython 3), adding support for 3.12, but also bringing changes that many packages in Debian aren t ready to build with, yet. Stefano uploaded it to Debian experimental and did an archive rebuild of affected packages, and some analysis of the result. Matthias Klose has since filed bugs for all of these issues.

debian-printing, by Thorsten Alteholz This month Thorsten invested some of the previously obtained money to build his own printlab. At the moment it only consists of a dedicated computer with an USB printer attached. Due to its 64GB RAM and an SSD, building of debian-printing packages is much faster now. Over time other printers will be added and understanding bugs should be a lot easier now. Also Thorsten again adopted two packages, namely mink and ink, and moved them to the debian-printing team.

Merged-/usr transition by Helmut Grohne, et al The dumat analysis tool has been improved in quite some aspects. Beyond fixing false negative diagnostics, it now recognizes protective diversions used for mitigating Multi-Arch: same file loss. It was found that the proposed mitigation for ineffective diversions does not work as expected. Trying to fix it up resulted in more problems, some of which remain unsolved as of this writing. Initial work on moving shared libraries in the essential set has been done. Meanwhile, the wider Debian community worked on fixing all known Multi-Arch: same file loss scenarios. This work is now being driven by Christian Hofstaedler and during the Mini DebConf in Cambridge, Chris Boot, tienne Mollier, Miguel Landaeta, Samuel Henrique, and Utkarsh Gupta sent the other half of the necessary patches.

Miscellaneous contributions
  • Stefano merged patches to support loong64 and hurd-amd64 in re2.
  • For the Cambridge mini-conf, Stefano added a web player to the DebConf video streaming frontend, as the Cambridge miniconf didn t have its own website to host the player.
  • Rapha l helped the upstream developers of hamster-time-tracker to prepare a new upstream release (the first in multiple years) and packaged that new release in Debian unstable.
  • Enrico joined Hemut in brainstorming some /usr-merge solutions.
  • Thorsten took care of RM-bugs to remove no longer needed packages from the Debian archive and closed about 50 of them.
  • Helmut ported the feature of mounting a fuse connection via /dev/fd/N from fuse3 to fuse2.
  • Helmut sent a number of patches simplifying unprivileged use of piuparts.
  • Roberto worked with Helmut to prepare the Shorewall package for the ongoing /usr-move transition.
  • Utkarsh also helped with the ongoing /usr-merge work by preparing patches for gitlab, libnfc, and net-tools.
  • Utkarsh, along with Helmut, brainstormed on fixing #961138, as this affects the whole archive and all the suites and not just R packages. Utkarsh intends to follow up on the bug in December.
  • Santiago organized a MiniDebConf in Uruguay. In total, nine people attended, including most of DDs in the surrounding area. Here s a nicely written blog by Gunnar Wolf.
  • Santiago also worked on some issues on Salsa CI, fixed with some merge requests: #462, #463, and #466.

9 December 2023

Simon Josefsson: Classic McEliece goes to IETF and OpenSSH

My earlier work on Streamlined NTRU Prime has been progressing along. The IETF document on sntrup761 in SSH has passed several process points. GnuPG s libgcrypt has added support for sntrup761. The libssh support for sntrup761 is working, but the merge request is stuck mostly due to lack of time to debug why the regression test suite sporadically errors out in non-sntrup761 related parts with the patch. The foundation for lattice-based post-quantum algorithms has some uncertainty around it, and I have felt that there is more to the post-quantum story than adding sntrup761 to implementations. Classic McEliece has been mentioned to me a couple of times, and I took some time to learn it and did a cut n paste job of the proposed ISO standard and published draft-josefsson-mceliece in the IETF to make the algorithm easily available to the IETF community. A high-quality implementation of Classic McEliece has been published as libmceliece and I ve been supporting the work of Jan Moj to package libmceliece for Debian, alas it has been stuck in the ftp-master NEW queue for manual review for over two months. The pre-dependencies librandombytes and libcpucycles are available in Debian already. All that text writing and packaging work set the scene to write some code. When I added support for sntrup761 in libssh, I became familiar with the OpenSSH code base, so it was natural to return to OpenSSH to experiment with a new SSH KEX for Classic McEliece. DJB suggested to pick mceliece6688128 and combine it with the existing X25519+sntrup761 or with plain X25519. While a three-algorithm hybrid between X25519, sntrup761 and mceliece6688128 would be a simple drop-in for those that don t want to lose the benefits offered by sntrup761, I decided to start the journey on a pure combination of X25519 with mceliece6688128. The key combiner in sntrup761x25519 is a simple SHA512 call and the only good I can say about that is that it is simple to describe and implement, and doesn t raise too many questions since it is already deployed. After procrastinating coding for months, once I sat down to work it only took a couple of hours until I had a successful Classic McEliece SSH connection. I suppose my brain had sorted everything in background before I started. To reproduce it, please try the following in a Debian testing environment (I use podman to get a clean environment).
# podman run -it --rm debian:testing-slim
apt update
apt dist-upgrade -y
apt install -y wget python3 librandombytes-dev libcpucycles-dev gcc make git autoconf libz-dev libssl-dev
cd ~
wget -q -O- https://lib.mceliece.org/libmceliece-20230612.tar.gz   tar xfz -
cd libmceliece-20230612/
./configure
make install
ldconfig
cd ..
git clone https://gitlab.com/jas/openssh-portable
cd openssh-portable
git checkout jas/mceliece
autoreconf
./configure # verify 'libmceliece support: yes'
make # CC="cc -DDEBUG_KEX=1 -DDEBUG_KEXDH=1 -DDEBUG_KEXECDH=1"
You should now have a working SSH client and server that supports Classic McEliece! Verify support by running ./ssh -Q kex and it should mention mceliece6688128x25519-sha512@openssh.com. To have it print plenty of debug outputs, you may remove the # character on the final line, but don t use such a build in production. You can test it as follows:
./ssh-keygen -A # writes to /usr/local/etc/ssh_host_...
# setup public-key based login by running the following:
./ssh-keygen -t rsa -f ~/.ssh/id_rsa -P ""
cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub > ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
adduser --system sshd
mkdir /var/empty
while true; do $PWD/sshd -p 2222 -f /dev/null; done &
./ssh -v -p 2222 localhost -oKexAlgorithms=mceliece6688128x25519-sha512@openssh.com date
On the client you should see output like this:
OpenSSH_9.5p1, OpenSSL 3.0.11 19 Sep 2023
...
debug1: SSH2_MSG_KEXINIT sent
debug1: SSH2_MSG_KEXINIT received
debug1: kex: algorithm: mceliece6688128x25519-sha512@openssh.com
debug1: kex: host key algorithm: ssh-ed25519
debug1: kex: server->client cipher: chacha20-poly1305@openssh.com MAC: <implicit> compression: none
debug1: kex: client->server cipher: chacha20-poly1305@openssh.com MAC: <implicit> compression: none
debug1: expecting SSH2_MSG_KEX_ECDH_REPLY
debug1: SSH2_MSG_KEX_ECDH_REPLY received
debug1: Server host key: ssh-ed25519 SHA256:YognhWY7+399J+/V8eAQWmM3UFDLT0dkmoj3pIJ0zXs
...
debug1: Host '[localhost]:2222' is known and matches the ED25519 host key.
debug1: Found key in /root/.ssh/known_hosts:1
debug1: rekey out after 134217728 blocks
debug1: SSH2_MSG_NEWKEYS sent
debug1: expecting SSH2_MSG_NEWKEYS
debug1: SSH2_MSG_NEWKEYS received
debug1: rekey in after 134217728 blocks
...
debug1: Sending command: date
debug1: pledge: fork
debug1: permanently_set_uid: 0/0
Environment:
  USER=root
  LOGNAME=root
  HOME=/root
  PATH=/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/local/bin
  MAIL=/var/mail/root
  SHELL=/bin/bash
  SSH_CLIENT=::1 46894 2222
  SSH_CONNECTION=::1 46894 ::1 2222
debug1: client_input_channel_req: channel 0 rtype exit-status reply 0
debug1: client_input_channel_req: channel 0 rtype eow@openssh.com reply 0
Sat Dec  9 22:22:40 UTC 2023
debug1: channel 0: free: client-session, nchannels 1
Transferred: sent 1048044, received 3500 bytes, in 0.0 seconds
Bytes per second: sent 23388935.4, received 78108.6
debug1: Exit status 0
Notice the kex: algorithm: mceliece6688128x25519-sha512@openssh.com output. How about network bandwidth usage? Below is a comparison of a complete SSH client connection such as the one above that log in and print date and logs out. Plain X25519 is around 7kb, X25519 with sntrup761 is around 9kb, and mceliece6688128 with X25519 is around 1MB. Yes, Classic McEliece has large keys, but for many environments, 1MB of data for the session establishment will barely be noticeable.
./ssh -v -p 2222 localhost -oKexAlgorithms=curve25519-sha256 date 2>&1   grep ^Transferred
Transferred: sent 3028, received 3612 bytes, in 0.0 seconds
./ssh -v -p 2222 localhost -oKexAlgorithms=sntrup761x25519-sha512@openssh.com date 2>&1   grep ^Transferred
Transferred: sent 4212, received 4596 bytes, in 0.0 seconds
./ssh -v -p 2222 localhost -oKexAlgorithms=mceliece6688128x25519-sha512@openssh.com date 2>&1   grep ^Transferred
Transferred: sent 1048044, received 3764 bytes, in 0.0 seconds
So how about session establishment time?
date; i=0; while test $i -le 100; do ./ssh -v -p 2222 localhost -oKexAlgorithms=curve25519-sha256 date > /dev/null 2>&1; i= expr $i + 1 ; done; date
Sat Dec  9 22:39:19 UTC 2023
Sat Dec  9 22:39:25 UTC 2023
# 6 seconds
date; i=0; while test $i -le 100; do ./ssh -v -p 2222 localhost -oKexAlgorithms=sntrup761x25519-sha512@openssh.com date > /dev/null 2>&1; i= expr $i + 1 ; done; date
Sat Dec  9 22:39:29 UTC 2023
Sat Dec  9 22:39:38 UTC 2023
# 9 seconds
date; i=0; while test $i -le 100; do ./ssh -v -p 2222 localhost -oKexAlgorithms=mceliece6688128x25519-sha512@openssh.com date > /dev/null 2>&1; i= expr $i + 1 ; done; date
Sat Dec  9 22:39:55 UTC 2023
Sat Dec  9 22:40:07 UTC 2023
# 12 seconds
I never noticed adding sntrup761, so I m pretty sure I wouldn t notice this increase either. This is all running on my laptop that runs Trisquel so take it with a grain of salt but at least the magnitude is clear. Future work items include: Happy post-quantum SSH ing! Update: Changing the mceliece6688128_keypair call to mceliece6688128f_keypair (i.e., using the fully compatible f-variant) results in McEliece being just as fast as sntrup761 on my machine. Update 2023-12-26: An initial IETF document draft-josefsson-ssh-mceliece-00 published.

Thorsten Alteholz: My Debian Activities in November 2023

FTP master This month I accepted 276 and rejected 25 packages. The overall number of packages that got accepted was 276. I also handled several RM bugs, so the archive did not grow that much :-). Debian LTS This was my hundred-thirteenth month that I did some work for the Debian LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian. During my allocated time I uploaded: The update of libde265 was a bit unusual this time. The security tracker had three CVEs listed for it and the maintainer was looking for a sponsor to fix them in Unstable. So far, so good! I sponsored the upload and suddenly a fourth CVE appeared in the security tracker. As the debian/changelog mentioned a different CVE, it was automatically added. Indeed upstreams changelog contained a patch for a CVE that was reserved but not yet published (hence the security tracker could not connect it to libde265). I informed upstream and as things turned out marking the CVE as public was just forgotten. Luckily there was some time left for the upcoming point release and all four patches finally arrived in Bookworm. Debian ELTS This month was the sixty-fourth ELTS month. During my allocated time I uploaded: In order to check whether the patch for the standalone version of minizip was ok, I used a test from the embedded minizip version in chromium and it worked. Debian Printing This month I uploaded a new upstream version of: Within the context of preserving old printing packages, I adopted: If you know of any other package that is also needed and still maintained by the QA team, please tell me. This work is generously funded by Freexian! Debian Astro This month I uploaded a new upstream version of: Debian IoT This month I uploaded a new upstream version of: Debian Mobcom This month I uploaded a package to fix one or the other issue: Other stuff This month I uploaded new upstream version of packages, did a source upload for the transition or uploaded it to fix one or the other issue:

Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppInt64 0.0.4 on CRAN: Minor Bugfix

The new-ish package RcppInt64 (announced earlier this fall in this post, with two small updates following) arrived on CRAN minutes ago as relase 0.0.4. RcppInt64 collects some of the previous conversions between 64-bit integer values in R and C++, and regroups them in a single package. It offers two interfaces: both a more standard as<>() converter from R values along with its companions wrap() to return to R, as well as more dedicated functions from and to . This release addresses an issues Sebastian reported a few hours and which is reported by newer, pickier compilers: We need to include <cstdint> so that int64_t is declared. CRAN was at its usual best processing this efficiently including tests of the by now two reverse dependencies. Twenty two minutes total, all automated: The brief NEWS entry follows:

Changes in version 0.0.4 (2023-12-09)
  • The cstdint header is now included (closes #1).

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is a diffstat report relative to previous release. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

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

8 December 2023

Jonathan Dowland: The scourge of Electron, the nostalgia of Pidgin

For reasons I won't go into right now, I've spent some of this year working on a refurbished Lenovo Thinkpad Yoga 260. Despite it being relatively underpowered, I love almost everything about it. Unfortunately the model I bought has 8G RAM which turned out to be more limiting than I thought it would be. You can do incredible things with 8G of RAM: incredible, wondrous things. And most of my work, whether that's wrangling containers, hacking on OpenJDK, or complex Haskell projects, are manageable. Where it falls down is driving the modern scourge: Electron, and by proxy, lots of modern IM tools: Slack (urgh), Discord (where one of my main IRC social communities moved to), WhatsApp Web1 and even Signal Desktop. For that reason, I've (temporarily) looked at alternatives, and I was pleasantly surprised to find serviceable plugins for Pidgin, the stalwart Instant Messenger multiplexer. I originally used Pidgin (then called Gaim) back in the last century, at the time to talk to ICQ, MSN Messenger and AIM (all but ICQ2 long dead). It truly is an elegant weapon from a more civilized age.
Discord from within Pidgin Discord from within Pidgin
The plugins are3: Pidgin with all of these plugins loaded runs perfectly well and consumes fractions of the RAM that each of those Electron apps did prior. A side-effect of moving these into Pidgin (in particular Discord) is a refocussing of the content. Fewer distractions around the text. The lack of auto-link embedding, and other such things, make it a cleaner, purer experience. This made me think of the Discord community I am in (I'm really only active in one). It used to be an IRC channel of people that I met through a mutual friend. Said friend recently departed Discord, due to the signal to noise ratio being too poor, and the incessant nudge to click on links, engage, engage, engage. I wonder if the experience mediated by Pidgin would be more tolerable to them?
What my hexchat looks like What my hexchat looks like
I'm still active in one IRC channel (and inactive in many more). I could consider moving IRC into Pidgin as well. At the moment, my IRC client of choice is hexchat, which (like Pidgin) is still using GTK2 for the UI. There's something perversely pleasant about that.

  1. if you go to the trouble of trying to run it as an application distinct from your web browser.
  2. I'm still somewhat surprised ICQ is still going. I might try and recover my old ID.
  3. There may or may not be similar plugins for Slack, but as I (am forced to) use that for corporate stuff, I'm steering clear of them.

Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 253 released

The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 253. This version includes the following changes:
* Improve DOS/MBR extraction by adding support for 7z.
  (Closes: reproducible-builds/diffoscope#333)
* Process objdump symbol comment filter inputs as the Python "bytes" type
  (and not str). (Closes: reproducible-builds/diffoscope#358)
* Add a missing RequiredToolNotFound import.
* Update copyright years.
You find out more by visiting the project homepage.

7 December 2023

Dima Kogan: roslanch and =LD_PRELOAD=

This is part 2 of our series entitled "ROS people don't know how to use computers". This is about ROS1. ROS2 is presumably broken in some completely different way, but I don't know. Unlike normal people, the ROS people don't "run" applications. They "launch" "nodes" from "packages" (these are "ROS" packages; obviously). You run
roslaunch PACKAGE THING.launch
Then it tries to find this PACKAGE (using some rules that nobody understands), and tries to find the file THING.launch within this package. The .launch file contains inscrutable xml, which includes other inscrutable xml. And if you dig, you eventually find stuff like
<node pkg="PACKAGE"
      name="NAME"
      type="TYPE"
      args="...."
      ...>
This defines the thing that runs. Unexpectedly, the executable that ends up running is called TYPE. I know that my particular program is broken, and needs an LD_PRELOAD (exciting details described in another rant in the near future). But the above definition doesn't have a clear way to add that. Adding it to the type fails (with a very mysterious error message). Reading the docs tells you about launch-prefix, which sounds exactly like what I want. But when I add LD_PRELOAD=/tmp/whatever.so I get
RLException: Roslaunch got a 'No such file or directory' error while attempting to run:
LD_PRELOAD=/tmp/whatever.so ..../TYPE .....
But this is how you're supposed to be attaching gdb and such! Presumably it looks at the first token, and makes sure it's a file, instead of simply prepending it to the string it passes to the shell. So your options are: I'm expert-enough. You do this:
launch-prefix="/lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 --preload /tmp/whatever.so"

Daniel Kahn Gillmor: New OpenPGP certificate for dkg, December 2023

dkg's New OpenPGP certificate in December 2023 In December of 2023, I'm moving to a new OpenPGP certificate. You might know my old OpenPGP certificate, which had an fingerprint of C29F8A0C01F35E34D816AA5CE092EB3A5CA10DBA. My new OpenPGP certificate has a fingerprint of: D477040C70C2156A5C298549BB7E9101495E6BF7. Both certificates have the same set of User IDs:
  • Daniel Kahn Gillmor
  • <dkg@debian.org>
  • <dkg@fifthhorseman.net>
You can find a version of this transition statement signed by both the old and new certificates at: https://dkg.fifthhorseman.net/2023-dkg-openpgp-transition.txt The new OpenPGP certificate is:
-----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----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=9Yc8
-----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
When I have some reasonable number of certifications, i'll update the certificate associated with my e-mail addresses on https://keys.openpgp.org, in DANE, and in WKD. Until then, those lookups should continue to provide the old certificate.

6 December 2023

Tim Retout: Nostalgia for my attention span

This post was possibly inspired by my daughter s homework assignment to interview an old person about technology change. Guess who s old now? Sometimes I look back at how life used to be, and remember what it was like. There are two key nostalgia points for me: before internet, and before smartphones.

Before the internet Before the internet, there were computers. There were always computers in my life, they were just less fancy, with mainly text and fewer graphics at first. These days we adapt our user interfaces to look more like DOS and call it retro , although claiming it s more efficient that way. Sometimes it is. The written word is a fundamental mode of human communication it resonates. Some of my earliest programming memories were typing lines of BASIC code into some sort of BBC Micro, usually not successfully. Most of my computer learning was largely theoretical, through Usborne books (now available online! Thanks internet for reducing the marginal cost of publishing to approximately zero) but without the benefit of a computer of my own. I went for a walk this morning, with a slight bite to the air, and bought a newspaper, like the old person I am (I m leaning in). Imagine that - a physical paper full of news. When I was an inquisitive sixth-former, TheGuardian cost 50 pence today it was 2.80. This increase far outstrips the rate of inflation, which would bring it to around 90 pence. No, this must surely reflect the drop in circulation of the physical edition, and the rise in advertisement-filled web content.

Before smartphones As the internet became mainstream, I remember dial-up, and Freeserve, and even the tail end of USENET, and IRC. This was still a time when email was a thing you had to be at your desk to check. Feature phones were very useful, but it was still possible to get lost. My university halls had a shared land-line phone on each floor. And I wrote on the internet. I remember commenting on blogs, and I think my writing was better back then; more free, less inhibited. I do find myself giving less attention to news squeezed into the small form-factor of a mobile phone. Chat messages and notification pings. I m not convinced this is great progress for humanity.

Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in November 2023

Welcome to the November 2023 report from the Reproducible Builds project! In these reports we outline the most important things that we have been up to over the past month. As a rather rapid recap, whilst anyone may inspect the source code of free software for malicious flaws, almost all software is distributed to end users as pre-compiled binaries (more).

Reproducible Builds Summit 2023 Between October 31st and November 2nd, we held our seventh Reproducible Builds Summit in Hamburg, Germany! Amazingly, the agenda and all notes from all sessions are all online many thanks to everyone who wrote notes from the sessions. As a followup on one idea, started at the summit, Alexander Couzens and Holger Levsen started work on a cache (or tailored front-end) for the snapshot.debian.org service. The general idea is that, when rebuilding Debian, you do not actually need the whole ~140TB of data from snapshot.debian.org; rather, only a very small subset of the packages are ever used for for building. It turns out, for amd64, arm64, armhf, i386, ppc64el, riscv64 and s390 for Debian trixie, unstable and experimental, this is only around 500GB ie. less than 1%. Although the new service not yet ready for usage, it has already provided a promising outlook in this regard. More information is available on https://rebuilder-snapshot.debian.net and we hope that this service becomes usable in the coming weeks. The adjacent picture shows a sticky note authored by Jan-Benedict Glaw at the summit in Hamburg, confirming Holger Levsen s theory that rebuilding all Debian packages needs a very small subset of packages, the text states that 69,200 packages (in Debian sid) list 24,850 packages in their .buildinfo files, in 8,0200 variations. This little piece of paper was the beginning of rebuilder-snapshot and is a direct outcome of the summit! The Reproducible Builds team would like to thank our event sponsors who include Mullvad VPN, openSUSE, Debian, Software Freedom Conservancy, Allotropia and Aspiration Tech.

Beyond Trusting FOSS presentation at SeaGL On November 4th, Vagrant Cascadian presented Beyond Trusting FOSS at SeaGL in Seattle, WA in the United States. Founded in 2013, SeaGL is a free, grassroots technical summit dedicated to spreading awareness and knowledge about free source software, hardware and culture. The summary of Vagrant s talk mentions that it will:
[ ] introduce the concepts of Reproducible Builds, including best practices for developing and releasing software, the tools available to help diagnose issues, and touch on progress towards solving decades-old deeply pervasive fundamental security issues Learn how to verify and demonstrate trust, rather than simply hoping everything is OK!
Germane to the contents of the talk, the slides for Vagrant s talk can be built reproducibly, resulting in a PDF with a SHA1 of cfde2f8a0b7e6ec9b85377eeac0661d728b70f34 when built on Debian bookworm and c21fab273232c550ce822c4b0d9988e6c49aa2c3 on Debian sid at the time of writing.

Human Factors in Software Supply Chain Security Marcel Fourn , Dominik Wermke, Sascha Fahl and Yasemin Acar have published an article in a Special Issue of the IEEE s Security & Privacy magazine. Entitled A Viewpoint on Human Factors in Software Supply Chain Security: A Research Agenda, the paper justifies the need for reproducible builds to reach developers and end-users specifically, and furthermore points out some under-researched topics that we have seen mentioned in interviews. An author pre-print of the article is available in PDF form.

Community updates On our mailing list this month:

openSUSE updates Bernhard M. Wiedemann has created a wiki page outlining an proposal to create a general-purpose Linux distribution which consists of 100% bit-reproducible packages albeit minus the embedded signature within RPM files. It would be based on openSUSE Tumbleweed or, if available, its Slowroll-variant. In addition, Bernhard posted another monthly update for his work elsewhere in openSUSE.

Ubuntu Launchpad now supports .buildinfo files Back in 2017, Steve Langasek filed a bug against Ubuntu s Launchpad code hosting platform to report that .changes files (artifacts of building Ubuntu and Debian packages) reference .buildinfo files that aren t actually exposed by Launchpad itself. This was causing issues when attempting to process .changes files with tools such as Lintian. However, it was noticed last month that, in early August of this year, Simon Quigley had resolved this issue, and .buildinfo files are now available from the Launchpad system.

PHP reproducibility updates There have been two updates from the PHP programming language this month. Firstly, the widely-deployed PHPUnit framework for the PHP programming language have recently released version 10.5.0, which introduces the inclusion of a composer.lock file, ensuring total reproducibility of the shipped binary file. Further details and the discussion that went into their particular implementation can be found on the associated GitHub pull request. In addition, the presentation Leveraging Nix in the PHP ecosystem has been given in late October at the PHP International Conference in Munich by Pol Dellaiera. While the video replay is not yet available, the (reproducible) presentation slides and speaker notes are available.

diffoscope changes diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility that can locate and diagnose reproducibility issues. This month, Chris Lamb made a number of changes, including:
  • Improving DOS/MBR extraction by adding support for 7z. [ ]
  • Adding a missing RequiredToolNotFound import. [ ]
  • As a UI/UX improvement, try and avoid printing an extended traceback if diffoscope runs out of memory. [ ]
  • Mark diffoscope as stable on PyPI.org. [ ]
  • Uploading version 252 to Debian unstable. [ ]

Website updates A huge number of notes were added to our website that were taken at our recent Reproducible Builds Summit held between October 31st and November 2nd in Hamburg, Germany. In particular, a big thanks to Arnout Engelen, Bernhard M. Wiedemann, Daan De Meyer, Evangelos Ribeiro Tzaras, Holger Levsen and Orhun Parmaks z. In addition to this, a number of other changes were made, including:

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

Reproducibility testing framework The Reproducible Builds project operates a comprehensive testing framework (available at tests.reproducible-builds.org) in order to check packages and other artifacts for reproducibility. In October, a number of changes were made by Holger Levsen:
  • Debian-related changes:
    • Track packages marked as Priority: important in a new package set. [ ][ ]
    • Stop scheduling packages that fail to build from source in bookworm [ ] and bullseye. [ ].
    • Add old releases dashboard link in web navigation. [ ]
    • Permit re-run of the pool_buildinfos script to be re-run for a specific year. [ ]
    • Grant jbglaw access to the osuosl4 node [ ][ ] along with lynxis [ ].
    • Increase RAM on the amd64 Ionos builders from 48 GiB to 64 GiB; thanks IONOS! [ ]
    • Move buster to archived suites. [ ][ ]
    • Reduce the number of arm64 architecture workers from 24 to 16 in order to improve stability [ ], reduce the workers for amd64 from 32 to 28 and, for i386, reduce from 12 down to 8 [ ].
    • Show the entire build history of each Debian package. [ ]
    • Stop scheduling already tested package/version combinations in Debian bookworm. [ ]
  • Snapshot service for rebuilders
    • Add an HTTP-based API endpoint. [ ][ ]
    • Add a Gunicorn instance to serve the HTTP API. [ ]
    • Add an NGINX config [ ][ ][ ][ ]
  • System-health:
    • Detect failures due to HTTP 503 Service Unavailable errors. [ ]
    • Detect failures to update package sets. [ ]
    • Detect unmet dependencies. (This usually occurs with builds of Debian live-build.) [ ]
  • Misc-related changes:
    • do install systemd-ommd on jenkins. [ ]
    • fix harmless typo in squid.conf for codethink04. [ ]
    • fixup: reproducible Debian: add gunicorn service to serve /api for rebuilder-snapshot.d.o. [ ]
    • Increase codethink04 s Squid cache_dir size setting to 16 GiB. [ ]
    • Don t install systemd-oomd as it unfortunately kills sshd [ ]
    • Use debootstrap from backports when commisioning nodes. [ ]
    • Add the live_build_debian_stretch_gnome, debsums-tests_buster and debsums-tests_buster jobs to the zombie list. [ ][ ]
    • Run jekyll build with the --watch argument when building the Reproducible Builds website. [ ]
    • Misc node maintenance. [ ][ ][ ]
Other changes were made as well, however, including Mattia Rizzolo fixing rc.local s Bash syntax so it can actually run [ ], commenting away some file cleanup code that is (potentially) deleting too much [ ] and fixing the html_brekages page for Debian package builds [ ]. Finally, diagnosed and submitted a patch to add a AddEncoding gzip .gz line to the tests.reproducible-builds.org Apache configuration so that Gzip files aren t re-compressed as Gzip which some clients can t deal with (as well as being a waste of time). [ ]

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:

5 December 2023

Thomas Lange: FAI.me service now supports installing recommended packages

The FAI.me service for creating customized installation and cloud images has a new feature by a user requested it. You can now enable installing recommended packages for your custom package list. By default FAIme does only install the dependencies needed, but not the recommended packages. This was a very easy enhancement, only a few lines in the web interface and nearly no changes in the backend were needed. The web interface of the FAI.me service is available at https://fai-project.org/FAIme

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