Search Results: "xam"

17 February 2015

Peter Eisentraut: Listing screen sessions on login

There is a lot of helpful information about screen out there, but I haven t found anything about this. I don t want to forget any screen sessions, so I d like to be notified when I log into a box and there are screens running for me. Obviously, there is screen -ls, but it needs to be wrapped in a bit logic so that it doesn t annoy when there is no screen running or even installed. After perusing the screen man page a little, I came up with this for .bash_profile or .zprofile:

if which screen >/dev/null; then
    screen -q -ls
    if [ $? -ge 10 ]; then
        screen -ls
    fi
fi

The trick is that -q in conjuction with -ls gives you exit codes about the current status of screen. Here is an example of how this looks in practice:

~$ ssh host
Last login: Fri Feb 13 11:30:10 2015 from 192.0.2.15
There is a screen on:
        31572.pts-0.foobar      (2015-02-15 13.03.21)   (Detached)
1 Socket in /var/run/screen/S-peter.
peter@host:~$

16 February 2015

Matthew Garrett: Intel Boot Guard, Coreboot and user freedom

PC World wrote an article on how the use of Intel Boot Guard by PC manufacturers is making it impossible for end-users to install replacement firmware such as Coreboot on their hardware. It's easy to interpret this as Intel acting to restrict competition in the firmware market, but the reality is actually a little more subtle than that.

UEFI Secure Boot as a specification is still unbroken, which makes attacking the underlying firmware much more attractive. We've seen several presentations at security conferences lately that have demonstrated vulnerabilities that permit modification of the firmware itself. Once you can insert arbitrary code in the firmware, Secure Boot doesn't do a great deal to protect you - the firmware could be modified to boot unsigned code, or even to modify your signed bootloader such that it backdoors the kernel on the fly.

But that's not all. Someone with physical access to your system could reflash your system. Even if you're paranoid enough that you X-ray your machine after every border crossing and verify that no additional components have been inserted, modified firmware could still be grabbing your disk encryption passphrase and stashing it somewhere for later examination.

Intel Boot Guard is intended to protect against this scenario. When your CPU starts up, it reads some code out of flash and executes it. With Intel Boot Guard, the CPU verifies a signature on that code before executing it[1]. The hash of the public half of the signing key is flashed into fuses on the CPU. It is the system vendor that owns this key and chooses to flash it into the CPU, not Intel.

This has genuine security benefits. It's no longer possible for an attacker to simply modify or replace the firmware - they have to find some other way to trick it into executing arbitrary code, and over time these will be closed off. But in the process, the system vendor has prevented the user from being able to make an informed choice to replace their system firmware.

The usual argument here is that in an increasingly hostile environment, opt-in security isn't sufficient - it's the role of the vendor to ensure that users are as protected as possible by default, and in this case all that's sacrificed is the ability for a few hobbyists to replace their system firmware. But this is a false dichotomy - UEFI Secure Boot demonstrated that it was entirely possible to produce a security solution that provided security benefits and still gave the user ultimate control over the code that their machine would execute.

To an extent the market will provide solutions to this. Vendors such as Purism will sell modern hardware without enabling Boot Guard. However, many people will buy hardware without consideration of this feature and only later become aware of what they've given up. It should never be necessary for someone to spend more money to purchase new hardware in order to obtain the freedom to run their choice of software. A future where users are obliged to run proprietary code because they can't afford another laptop is a dystopian one.

Intel should be congratulated for taking steps to make it more difficult for attackers to compromise system firmware, but criticised for doing so in such a way that vendors are forced to choose between security and freedom. The ability to control the software that your system runs is fundamental to Free Software, and we must reject solutions that provide security at the expense of that ability. As an industry we should endeavour to identify solutions that provide both freedom and security and work with vendors to make those solutions available, and as a movement we should be doing a better job of articulating why this freedom is a fundamental part of users being able to place trust in their property.

[1] It's slightly more complicated than that in reality, but the specifics really aren't that interesting.

comments

15 February 2015

Matthew Palmer: The Vicious Circle of Documentation

Ever worked at a company (or on a codebase, or whatever) where it seemed like, no matter what the question was, the answer was written down somewhere you could easily find it? Most people haven t, sadly, but they do exist, and I can assure you that it is an absolute pleasure. On the other hand, practically everyone has experienced completely undocumented systems and processes, where knowledge is shared by word-of-mouth, or lost every time someone quits. Why are there so many more undocumented systems than documented ones out there, and how can we cause more well-documented systems to exist? The answer isn t people are lazy , and the solution is simple though not easy.

Why Johnny Doesn t Read When someone needs to know something, they might go look for some documentation, or they might ask someone else or just guess wildly. The behaviour look for documentation is often reinforced negatively, by the result documentation doesn t exist . At the same time, the behaviours ask someone and guess wildly are positively reinforced, by the results I get my question answered and/or at least I can get on with my work . Over time, people optimise their behaviour by skipping the look for documentation step, and just go straight to asking other people (or guessing wildly).

Why Johnny Doesn t Write When someone writes documentation, they re hoping that people will read it and not have to ask them questions in order to be productive and do the right thing. Hence, the behaviour write documentation is negatively reinforced by the results I still get asked questions , and nobody does things the right way around here, dammit! Worse, though, is that there is very little positive reinforcement for the author: when someone does read the docs, and thus doesn t ask a question, the author almost certainly doesn t know they dodged a bullet. Similarly, when someone does things the right way, it s unlikely that anyone will notice. It s only the mistakes that catch the attention. Given that the experience of writing documentation tends to skew towards the negative, it s not surprising that eventually, the time spent writing documentation is reallocated to other, more utility-producing activities.

Death Spiral The combination of these two situations is self-reinforcing. While a suitably motivated reader might start by strictly looking for documentation, or an author initially be enthused to always fully documenting their work, over time the reflex will be for readers to just go ask someone, because there s never any documentation! , and for authors to not write documentation because nobody bothers to read what I write anyway! . It is important to recognise that this iterative feedback loop is the natural state of the reader/author ecosystem, resulting in something akin to thermodynamic entropy. To avoid the system descending into chaos, energy needs to be constantly applied to keep the system in order.

The Solution Effective methods for avoiding the vicious circle can be derived from the things that cause it. Change the forces that apply themselves to readers and authors, and they will behave differently. On the reader s side, the most effective way to encourage people to read documentation is for it to consistently exist. This means that those in control of a project or system mustn t consider something done until the documentation is in a good state. Patches shouldn t be landed, and releases shouldn t be made, unless the documentation is altered to match the functional changes being made. Yes, this requires discipline, which is just a form of energy application to prevent entropic decay. Writing documentation should be an explicit and well-understood part of somebody s job description. Whoever is responsible for documentation needs to be given the time to do it properly. Writing well takes time and mental energy, and that time needs to be factored into the plans. Never forget that skimping on documentation, like short-changing QA or customer support, is a false economy that will cost more in the long term than it saves in the short term. Even if the documentation exists, though, some people are going to tend towards asking people rather than consulting the documentation. This isn t a moral failing on their part, but only happens when they believe that asking someone is more beneficial to them than going to the documentation. To change the behaviour, you need to change the belief. You could change the belief by increasing the cost of asking. You could fire (or hellban) anyone who ever asks a question that is answered in the documentation. But you shouldn t. You could yell RTFM! at everyone who asks a question. Thankfully that s one acronym that s falling out of favour. Alternately, you can reduce the cost of getting the answer from the documentation. Possibly the largest single productivity boost for programmers, for example, has been the existence of Google. Whatever your problem, there s a pretty good chance that a search or two will find a solution. For your private documentation, you probably don t have the power of Google available, but decent full-text search systems are available. Use them. Finally, authors would benefit from more positive reinforcement. If you find good documentation, let the author know! It requires a lot of effort (comparatively) to look up an author s contact details and send them a nice e-mail. The like button is a more low-energy way of achieving a similar outcome you click the button, and the author gets a warm, fuzzy feeling. If your internal documentation system doesn t have some way to close the loop and let readers easily give authors a bit of kudos, fix it so it does. Heck, even if authors just know that a page they wrote was loaded `N` times in the past week, that s better than the current situation, in which deafening silence persists, punctuated by the occasional plaintive cry of Hey, do you know how to ? . Do you have any other ideas for how to encourage readers to read, and for authors to write?

13 February 2015

Richard Hartmann: Release Critical Bug report for Week 07

The UDD bugs interface currently knows about the following release critical bugs:

In Total: 1071 (Including 192 bugs affecting key packages)
- Affecting Jessie: 147 (key packages: 110) That's the number we need to get down to zero before the release. They can be split in two big categories:
  - Affecting Jessie and unstable: 106 (key packages: 82) Those need someone to find a fix, or to finish the work to upload a fix to unstable:
    - 25 bugs are tagged 'patch'. (key packages: 23) Please help by reviewing the patches, and (if you are a DD) by uploading them.
    - 4 bugs are marked as done, but still affect unstable. (key packages: 0) This can happen due to missing builds on some architectures, for example. Help investigate!
    - 77 bugs are neither tagged patch, nor marked done. (key packages: 59) Help make a first step towards resolution!
  - Affecting Jessie only: 41 (key packages: 28) Those are already fixed in unstable, but the fix still needs to migrate to Jessie. You can help by submitting unblock requests for fixed packages, by investigating why packages do not migrate, or by reviewing submitted unblock requests.
    - 11 bugs are in packages that are unblocked by the release team. (key packages: 6)
    - 30 bugs are in packages that are not unblocked. (key packages: 22)

How do we compare to the Squeeze and Wheezy release cycles?

Week	Squeeze	Wheezy	Jessie
43	284 (213+71)	468 (332+136)	319 (240+79)
44	261 (201+60)	408 (265+143)	274 (224+50)
45	261 (205+56)	425 (291+134)	295 (229+66)
46	271 (200+71)	401 (258+143)	427 (313+114)
47	283 (209+74)	366 (221+145)	342 (260+82)
48	256 (177+79)	378 (230+148)	274 (189+85)
49	256 (180+76)	360 (216+155)	226 (147+79)
50	204 (148+56)	339 (195+144)	???
51	178 (124+54)	323 (190+133)	189 (134+55)
52	115 (78+37)	289 (190+99)	147 (112+35)
1	93 (60+33)	287 (171+116)	140 (104+36)
2	82 (46+36)	271 (162+109)	157 (124+33)
3	25 (15+10)	249 (165+84)	172 (128+44)
4	14 (8+6)	244 (176+68)	187 (132+55)
5	2 (0+2)	224 (132+92)	175 (124+51)
6	release!	212 (129+83)	161 (109+52)
7	release+1	194 (128+66)	147 (106+41)
8	release+2	206 (144+62)
9	release+3	174 (105+69)
10	release+4	120 (72+48)
11	release+5	115 (74+41)
12	release+6	93 (47+46)
13	release+7	50 (24+26)
14	release+8	51 (32+19)
15	release+9	39 (32+7)
16	release+10	20 (12+8)
17	release+11	24 (19+5)
18	release+12	2 (2+0)

Graphical overview of bug stats thanks to azhag:

Olivier Berger: Testing the RuneStone interactive Python courses server in docker

I ve been working on setting up a Docker container environment allowing to test the RuneStone Interactive server. RuneStone Interactive allows the publication of courses containing interactive Python examples, and while most of the content is static (the Python examples are run innside a Python interpreter implemented in JavaScript, hence locally in the JS VM of the Web browser), the tool also offers an environment allowing to monitor the progress of learners in a course, which is dynamic and is queried by the browser over AJAX APIs. That s the part which I wanted to be able to operate for test purposes. As it is a web2py application, it s not exactly obvious to gather all dependencies and run locally. Well, in fact it is, but I want to understand the architecture of the tool to be able to understand the deployment constraints, so making a docker image will help in this purpose. The result is the following :

a container image which allows to test web2py over Apache (with mod_wsgi) on Debian (see it on github : olberger/docker-web2py-debian)
a container image (reusing the previous one) which allows to test runestone (see it on github : olberger/runestone-web2py)

Now, it s easier to test the writing of a new course (yet another container above the latter one), and directly test for real.

12 February 2015

Daniel Leidert: Setting up a network buildd with pbuilder ... continued

Last year I'd described my setup of a local network-buildd using pbuilder, ccache, inoticoming and NFS. One then-still-open goal was to support different Debian releases. This is especially necessary for backports of e.g. bluefish. The rules to contribute backports require to include all changelog entries since the last version on debian-backports or since stable if it's the first version in an uploaded package. Therefor one needs to know the last version in e.g. wheezy-backports. Because I'm not typing the command (the source package only gets uploaded and inoticoming starts the build process) I was looking for a way to automatically retrieve that version and add the relevant -vX.Y-Z switch to dpkg-buildpackage.The solution I found requires aptitude and a sources.list entry for the relevant release. If you are only interested in the solution, just jump to the end :)I'm going to add the version switch to the DEBBUILDOPTS variable of pbuilder. In my setup I have a common (shared) snippet called /etc/pbuilderrc.inc and one configuration file per release and architecture, say /etc/pbuilderrc.amd64.stable. Now the first already contains ...

DEBBUILDOPTS="-us -uc -j2"

... and DEBBUILDOPTS can be extended in the latter:

DEBBUILDOPTS+="..."

Because the config file is parsed pretty early in the process the package name has not yet been assigned to any variable. The last argument to pbuilder is the .dsc file. So I use the last argument and parse the file to retrieve the source package name.

cat $ @: -1    grep -e ^Source   awk -F\  '  print $2  '

The solution above works, because pbuilder is a BASH script. Otherwise it maybe needs some tweaking. I use the source package name, because it is unique and there is just one :) Now with this name I check for all versions in wheezy* and stable* and sort them. The sort order of aptitude is from low to high, so the last line shopuld contain the highest version. This covers the possibility that there has not yet been a backport or that there is one:

aptitude versions -F '%p' --show-package-names=never --group-by=none --sort=version \
   "?narrow(?source-package(^PACKAGE\$), ?or(?archive(^wheezy.*), ?archive(^stable.*)))"  \
   tail -n 1   sed -e 's#~bpo.*$##g'

The sed-part is necessary because otherwise dh_genchanges will add a superfluous changelog entry (the last one of the last upload). To make things easier, I assign the name and version to variables. So this is the complete solution:


[..]
MYPACKAGE=" cat $ @: -1    grep -e ^Source   awk -F\  '  print $2  ' "
MYBPOVERS=" aptitude versions -F '%p' --show-package-names=never --group-by=none --sort=version "?narrow(?source-package(^$MYPACKAGE\$), ?or(?archive(^wheezy.*), ?archive(^stable.*)))"   tail -n 1   sed -e 's#~bpo.*$##g' "

log "I: Package is $MYPACKAGE and last stable/bpo version is $MYBPOVERS"

DEBBUILDOPTS+=" -v$MYBPOVERS"
[..]

ExamplesI've recently built a new bluefish backport. The last backport version is 2.2.6-1~bpo70+1. There is also the stable version 2.2.3-4. So the version I need is 2.2.6-1 (2.2.6-1~bpo70+1 < 2.2.6-1!!). Checking the log it works:

I: Package is bluefish and last stable/bpo version is 2.2.6-1

A different example is rsync. I've recently locally rebuilt it for a stable system (wanted to make use of the --chown switch). There is not yet a backport. So the version I (would) need is 3.0.9-4. Checking the logs again and works too:

I: Package is rsync and last stable/bpo version is 3.0.9-4

Feedback appreciated ... Links

11 February 2015

John Goerzen: Reactions to Has modern Linux lost its way? and the value of simplicity

Apparently I touched a nerve with my recent post about the growing complexity of issues. There were quite a few good comments, which I ll mention here. It s provided me some clarity on the problem, in fact. I ll try to distill a few more thoughts here. The value of simplicity and predictability The best software, whether it s operating systems or anything else, is predictable. You read the documentation, or explore the interface, and you can make a logical prediction that when I do action X, the result will be Y. grep and cat are perfect examples of this. The more complex the rules in the software, the more hard it is for us to predict. It leads to bugs, and it leads to inadvertant security holes. Worse, it leads to people being unable to fix things themselves one of the key freedoms that Free Software is supposed to provide. The more complex software is, the fewer people will be able to fix it by themselves. Now, I want to clarify: I hear a lot of talk about ease of use. Gnome removes options in my print dialog box to make it easier to use. (This is why I do not use Gnome. It actually makes it harder to use, because now I have to go find some obscure way to just make the darn thing print.) A lot of people conflate ease of use with ease of learning, but in reality, I am talking about neither. I am talking about ease of analysis. The Linux command line may not have pointy-clicky icons, but at least at one time once you understood ls -l and how groups, users, and permission bits interacted, you could fairly easily conclude who had access to what on a system. Now we have a situation where the answer to this is quite unclear in terms of desktop environments (apparently some distros ship network-manager so that all users on the system share the wifi passwords they enter. A surprise, eh?) I don t mind reading a manpage to learn about something, so long as the manpage was written to inform. With this situation of dbus/cgmanager/polkit/etc, here s what it feels like. This, to me, is the crux of the problem: It feels like we are in a twisty maze, every passage looks alike, and our flashlight ran out of battieries in 2013. The manpages, to the extent they exist for things like cgmanager and polkit, describe the texture of the walls in our cavern, but don t give us a map to the cave. Therefore, we are each left to piece it together little bits at a time, but there are traps that keep moving around, so it s slow going. And it s a really big cave. Other user perceptions There are a lot of comments on the blog about this. It is clear that the problem is not specific to Debian. For instance:

Christopher writes that on Fedora, annoying, niggling problems that used to be straightforward to isolate, diagnose and resolve by virtue of the platform s simple, logical architecture have morphed into a morass that s worse than the Windows Registry. Alessandro Perucchi adds that he s been using Linux for decades, and now his wifi doesn t work, suspend doesn t work, etc. in Fedora and he is surprisingly unable to fix it himself.
Nate bargman writes, in a really insightful comment, I do feel like as though I m becoming less a master of and more of a slave to the computing software I use. This is not a good thing.
Singh makes the valid point that this stuff is in such a state of flux that even if a person is one of the few dozen in the world that understand what goes into a session today, the knowledge will be outdated in 6 months. (Hal, anyone?)

This stuff is really important, folks. People being able to maintain their own software, work with it themselves, etc. is one of the core reasons that Free Software exists in the first place. It is a fundamental value of our community. For decades, we have been struggling for survival, for relevance. When I started using Linux, it was both a question and an accomplishment to have a useable web browser on many platforms. (Netscape Navigator was closed source back then.) Now we have succeeded. We have GPL-licensed and BSD-licensed software running on everything from our smartphones to cars. But we are snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, because just as we are managing to remove the legal roadblocks that kept people from true mastery of their software, we are erecting technological ones that make the step into the Free Software world so much more difficult than it needs to be. We no longer have to craft Modelines for X, or compile a kernel with just the right drivers. This is progress. Our hardware is mostly auto-detected and our USB serial dongles work properly more often on Linux than on Windows. This is progress. Even our printers and scanners work pretty darn well. This is progress, too. But in the place of all these things, now we have userspace mucking it up. We have people with mysterious errors that can t be easily assisted by the elders in the community, because the elders are just as mystified. We have bugs crop up that would once have been shallow, but are now non-obvious. We are going to leave a sour taste in people s mouth, and stir repulsion instead of interest among those just checking it out. The ways out It s a nasty predicament, isn t it? What are your ways out of that cave without being eaten by a grue? Obviously the best bet is to get rid of the traps and the grues. Somehow the people that are working on this need to understand that elegance is a feature a darn important feature. Sadly I think this ship may have already sailed. Software diagnosis tools like Enrico Zini s seat-inspect idea can also help. If we have something like an ls for polkit that can reduce all the complexity to something more manageable, that s great. The next best thing is a good map good manpages, detailed logs, good error messages. If software would be more verbose about the permission errors, people could get a good clue about where to look. If manpages for software didn t just explain the cavern wall texture, but explain how this room relates to all the other nearby rooms, it would be tremendously helpful. At present, I am unsure if our problem is one of very poor documentation, or is so bad that good documentation like this is impossible because the underlying design is so complex it defies being documented in something smaller than a book (in which case, our ship has not just sailed but is taking on water). Counter-argument: progress One theme that came up often in the comments is that this is necessary for progress. To a certain extent, I buy that. I get why udev is important. I get why we want the DE software to interact well. But here s my thing: this already worked well in wheezy. Gnome, XFCE, and KDE software all could mount/unmount my drives. I am truly still unsure what problem all this solved. Yes, cloud companies have demanding requirements about security. I work for one. Making security more difficult to audit doesn t do me any favors, I can assure you. The systemd angle To my surprise, systemd came up quite often in the discussion, despite the fact that I mentioned I wasn t running systemd-sysv. It seems like the new desktop environemt ecosystem is the systemd ecosystem in a lot of people s minds. I m not certain this is justified; systemd was not my first choice, but as I said in an earlier blog post, jessie will still boot . A final note I still run Debian on all my personal boxes and I m not going to change. It does awesome things. For under $100, I built a music-playing system, with Raspberry Pis, fully synced throughout my house, using a little scripting and software. The same thing from Sonos would have cost thousands. I am passionate about this community and its values. Even when jessie releases with polkit and all the rest, I m still going to use it, because it is still a good distro from good people.

Daniel Leidert: Blogger RSS feed and category URLs with combined labels/tags

Run a blog on blogger.com? Maybe made it bilingual? Maybe blog on different topics? Wondering how the URL for an RSS feed for e.g. two labels looks like? Asking how to see all articles matching two tags (labels)? Finding a keyword under one or more labels? Many things are possible. I'll show a few examples below. Maybe that is even interesting for the planet Debian folks. I happen to blog mostly in English about Debian topics. But sometimes I also want to post something in German only (e.g. about German tax software). It is discouraged to put the latter on planet-debian. Instead it can be published in the language specific planet feed. So instead of adding new tags, one could easily combine two labels: the one for language of the feed and the one for Debian related posts (e.g. debian+english or debian+german). Therefor this post goes to the Debian planet. Search for combbined labels/tagsSay I want to view all postings related to the topics FOO and BAR. Then it is:


http://domain.tld/search/label/FOO+BAR OR
http://domain.tld/search/?q=label:FOO+label:BAR

Be aware that labels are case sensitive and that more labels can be added. The examples below will show all postings related to the topics debian and n54l and xbmc:


http://www.wgdd.de/search/label/debian+n54l+xbmc
http://www.wgdd.de/search/?q=label:debian+label:n54l+label:xbmc

It is also possible to search for all posts related to the topics FOO or BAR:


http://domain.tld/search/?q=label:FOO label:BAR

Say for example, you want to see all postings related to the topics logitech or toshiba, then it is:


http://www.wgdd.de/search/?q=label:logitech label:toshiba

Feed URLsTo get back to the first example lets say, the feed shall contain all posts related to the topics FOO and BAR. Then it is:


http://domain.tld/feeds/posts/default/-/FOO/BAR/ OR
http://domain.tld/feeds/posts/default?q=label:FOO+label:BAR

Respecitvely to show all feeds related to either of those topics use:


http://domain.tld/feeds/posts/default/?q=label:FOO label:BAR

To get a feed of the example topics as shown above then would be:


http://www.wgdd.de/feeds/posts/default/-/debian/n54l/xbmc/
http://www.wgdd.de/feeds/posts/default?q=label:debian+label:n54l+label:xbmc
http://www.wgdd.de/feeds/posts/default?q=label:logitech label:toshiba

Coming back to planet Debian, below is a solution for a multi-lingual planet contribution (if both planets would exist):


http://www.wgdd.de/feeds/posts/default?q=label:planet-debian+label:english
http://www.wgdd.de/feeds/posts/default?q=label:planet-debian+label:german

Advanced ...There is much more possible. I'll just show two more examples. AND and OR can be combined ...

http://www.wgdd.de/feeds/posts/default?q=label:debian+(label:logitech label:toshiba)

... and a keyword search can be added too:

http://www.wgdd.de/feeds/posts/default?q=stick+(label:debian+(label:logitech label:toshiba))

Links

10 February 2015

Petter Reinholdtsen: Nude body scanner now present on Norwegian airport

Aftenposten, one of the largest newspapers in Norway, today report that three of the nude body scanners now is put to use at Gardermoen, the main airport in Norway. This way the travelers can have their body photographed without cloths when visiting Norway. Of course this horrible news is presented with a positive spin, stating that "now travelers can move past the security check point faster and more efficiently", but fail to mention that the machines in question take pictures of their nude bodies and store them internally in the computer, while only presenting sketch figure of the body to the public. The article is written in a way that leave the impression that the new machines do not take these nude pictures and only create the sketch figures. In reality the same nude pictures are still taken, but not presented to everyone. They are still available for the owners of the system and the people doing maintenance of the scanners, as long as they are taken and stored. Wikipedia have a more on Full body scanners, including example images and a summary of the controversy about these scanners. Personally I will decline to use these machines, as I believe strip searches of my body is a very intrusive attack on my privacy, and not something everyone should have to accept to travel.

8 February 2015

Dirk Eddelbuettel: drat Tutorial: First Steps towards Lightweight R Repositories

Now that drat is on CRAN and I got a bit of feedback (or typo corrections) in three issue tickets, I thought I could show how to quickly post such an interim version in a drat repository. Now, I obviously already have a checkout of drat. If you, dear reader, wanted to play along and create your own drat repository, one rather simple way would be to simply clone my repo as this gets you the desired gh-pages branch with the required src/contrib/ directories. Otherwise just do it by hand. Back to a new interim version. I just pushed commit fd06293 which bumps the version and date for the new interim release based mostly on the three tickets addresses right after the initial release 0.0.1. So by building it we get a new version 0.0.1.1:

edd@max:~/git$ R CMD build drat
* checking for file  drat/DESCRIPTION  ... OK
* preparing  drat :
* checking DESCRIPTION meta-information ... OK
* checking for LF line-endings in source and make files
* checking for empty or unneeded directories
* building  drat_0.0.1.1.tar.gz 
edd@max:~/git$

Because I want to use the drat repo next, I need to now switch from master to gh-pages; a step I am omitting as we can assume that your drat repo will already be on its gh-pages branch. Next we simply call the drat function to add the release:

edd@max:~/git$ r -e 'drat:::insert("drat_0.0.1.1.tar.gz")'
edd@max:~/git$

As expected, now have two updated PACKAGES files (compressed and plain) and a new tarball:

edd@max:~/git/drat(gh-pages)$ git status
On branch gh-pages
Your branch is up-to-date with 'origin/gh-pages'.
Changes not staged for commit:
  (use "git add <file>..." to update what will be committed)
  (use "git checkout -- <file>..." to discard changes in working directory)
        modified:   src/contrib/PACKAGES
        modified:   src/contrib/PACKAGES.gz
Untracked files:
  (use "git add <file>..." to include in what will be committed)
        src/contrib/drat_0.0.1.1.tar.gz
no changes added to commit (use "git add" and/or "git commit -a")
edd@max:~/git/drat(gh-pages)$

All is left to is to add, commit and push---either as I usually via the spectacularly useful editor mode, or on the command-line, or by simply adding commit=TRUE in the call to insert() or insertPackage(). I prefer to use littler's r for command-line work, so I am setting the desired repos in ~/.littler.r which is read on startup (since the recent littler release 0.2.2) with these two lines:


## add RStudio CRAN mirror
drat:::add("CRAN", "http://cran.rstudio.com")
## add Dirk's drat
drat:::add("eddelbuettel")

After that, repos are set as I like them (at home at least):

edd@max:~/git$ r -e'print(options("repos"))'
$repos
                                 CRAN                          eddelbuettel 
            "http://cran.rstudio.com" "http://eddelbuettel.github.io/drat/" 
edd@max:~/git$

And with that, we can just call update.packages() specifying the package directory to update:

edd@max:~/git$ r -e 'update.packages(ask=FALSE, lib.loc="/usr/local/lib/R/site-library")'                                                                                                                            
trying URL 'http://eddelbuettel.github.io/drat/src/contrib/drat_0.0.1.1.tar.gz'
Content type 'application/octet-stream' length 5829 bytes
opened URL
==================================================
downloaded 5829 bytes
* installing *source* package  drat  ...
** R
** inst
** preparing package for lazy loading
** help
*** installing help indices
** building package indices
** testing if installed package can be loaded
* DONE (drat)
The downloaded source packages are in
         /tmp/downloaded_packages 
edd@max:~/git$

and presto, a new version of a package we have installed (here the very drat interim release we just pushed above) is updated. Writing this up made me realize I need to update the handy update.r script (see e.g. the littler examples page for more) and it hard-wires just one repo which needs to be relaxed for drat. Maybe in install2.r which already has docopt support...

7 February 2015

Richard Hartmann: Release Critical Bug report for Week 06

Belated post due to meh real life situations. As you may have heard, if a package is removed from testing now, it will not be able to make it back into Jessie. Also, a lot of packages are about to be reoved for being buggy. If those are gone, they are gone. The UDD bugs interface currently knows about the following release critical bugs:

In Total: 1066 (Including 187 bugs affecting key packages)
- Affecting Jessie: 161 (key packages: 123) That's the number we need to get down to zero before the release. They can be split in two big categories:
  - Affecting Jessie and unstable: 109 (key packages: 90) Those need someone to find a fix, or to finish the work to upload a fix to unstable:
    - 25 bugs are tagged 'patch'. (key packages: 23) Please help by reviewing the patches, and (if you are a DD) by uploading them.
    - 6 bugs are marked as done, but still affect unstable. (key packages: 5) This can happen due to missing builds on some architectures, for example. Help investigate!
    - 78 bugs are neither tagged patch, nor marked done. (key packages: 62) Help make a first step towards resolution!
  - Affecting Jessie only: 52 (key packages: 33) Those are already fixed in unstable, but the fix still needs to migrate to Jessie. You can help by submitting unblock requests for fixed packages, by investigating why packages do not migrate, or by reviewing submitted unblock requests.
    - 19 bugs are in packages that are unblocked by the release team. (key packages: 14)
    - 33 bugs are in packages that are not unblocked. (key packages: 19)

How do we compare to the Squeeze and Wheezy release cycles?

Week	Squeeze	Wheezy	Jessie
43	284 (213+71)	468 (332+136)	319 (240+79)
44	261 (201+60)	408 (265+143)	274 (224+50)
45	261 (205+56)	425 (291+134)	295 (229+66)
46	271 (200+71)	401 (258+143)	427 (313+114)
47	283 (209+74)	366 (221+145)	342 (260+82)
48	256 (177+79)	378 (230+148)	274 (189+85)
49	256 (180+76)	360 (216+155)	226 (147+79)
50	204 (148+56)	339 (195+144)	???
51	178 (124+54)	323 (190+133)	189 (134+55)
52	115 (78+37)	289 (190+99)	147 (112+35)
1	93 (60+33)	287 (171+116)	140 (104+36)
2	82 (46+36)	271 (162+109)	157 (124+33)
3	25 (15+10)	249 (165+84)	172 (128+44)
4	14 (8+6)	244 (176+68)	187 (132+55)
5	2 (0+2)	224 (132+92)	175 (124+51)
6	release!	212 (129+83)	161 (109+52)
7	release+1	194 (128+66)
8	release+2	206 (144+62)
9	release+3	174 (105+69)
10	release+4	120 (72+48)
11	release+5	115 (74+41)
12	release+6	93 (47+46)
13	release+7	50 (24+26)
14	release+8	51 (32+19)
15	release+9	39 (32+7)
16	release+10	20 (12+8)
17	release+11	24 (19+5)
18	release+12	2 (2+0)

Graphical overview of bug stats thanks to azhag:

6 February 2015

Olivier Berger: Configuring the start of multiple docker container with Vagrant in a portable manner

I ve mentioned earlier the work that our students did on migrating part of the elements of the Database MOOC lab VM to docker. While docker seems quite cool, let s face it, participants to the MOOCs aren t all using Linux where docker can be available directly. Hence the need to use boot2docker, for instance on Windows. Then we re back quite close to the architecture of the Vagrang VM, which relies too on a VirtualBox VM to run a Linux machine (boot2docker does exactly that with a minimal Linux which runs docker). If VirtualBox is to be kept around, then why not stick to Vagrant also, as it offers a docker provider. This docker provider for Vagrant helps configure basic parameters of docker containers in a Vagrantfile, and basically uses the vagrant up command instead of using docker build + docker run. If on Linux, it only triggers docker, and if not, then it ll start boot2docker (or any other Linux box) in between. This somehow offers a unified invocation command, which renders a bit more portable the documentation. Now, there are some tricks when using this docker provider, in particular for debugging what s happening inside the VM. One nice feature is that you can debug on Linux what is to be executed on Windows, by explicitely requiring the start of the intermediary boot2docker VM even if it s not really needed. By using a custom secondary Vagrantfile for that VM, it is possible to tune some parameters of that VM (like its graphic memory to allow to start it with a GUI allowing to connect another alternative is to ssh -p 2222 docker@localhost once you know that its password is tcuser ). I ve committed an example of such a setup in the moocbdvm project s Git, which duplicates the docker provisioning files that our students had already published in the dedicated GitHub repo. Here s an interesting reference post about Vagrant + docker and multiple containers, btw.

4 February 2015

Vincent Bernat: Directory bookmarks with Zsh

There are numerous projects to implement directory bookmarks in your favorite shell. An inherent limitation of those implementations is they being only an enhanced cd command: you cannot use a bookmark in an arbitrary command. UPDATED: My initial implementation with Zsh was using dynamic named directories. I have been pointed on Twitter that there is a simpler way to implement bookmarks. The article has been updated to reflect that. As a side note, it is also possible to just use shell variables¹. Zsh comes with a not well-known feature called static named directories. They are declared with the hash builtin and can be refered by prepending ~ to them:

$ hash -d -- -lldpd=/home/bernat/code/deezer/lldpd
$ echo ~-lldpd/README.md
/home/bernat/code/deezer/lldpd/README.md
$ head -n1 ~-lldpd/README.md
lldpd: implementation of IEEE 802.1ab (LLDP)

Because ~-lldpd is substituted during file name expansion, it is possible to use it in any command like a regular directory, like shown above. The - prefix is only here to avoid collision with home directories. Bookmarks are kept into a dedicated directory, $MARKPATH. Each bookmark is a symbolic link to the target directory: for example, ~-lldpd should be expanded to $MARKPATH/lldpd which points to the appropriate directory. Assuming that you have populated $MARKPATH with some links, here is how bookmarks are registered:

for link ($MARKPATH/*(N@))  
    hash -d -- -$ link:t =$ link:A

You also automatically get completion and prompt expansion:

$ pwd
/home/bernat/code/deezer/lldpd/src/lib
$ echo $ (%):-%~ 
~-lldpd/src/lib

The last step is to manage bookmarks without adding or removing symbolic links manually. The following bookmark() function will display the existing bookmarks when called without arguments, will remove a bookmark when called with -d or add the current directory as a bookmark otherwise.

bookmark()  
    if (( $# == 0 )); then
        # When no arguments are provided, just display existing
        # bookmarks
        for link in $MARKPATH/*(N@); do
            local markname="$fg[green]$ link:t $reset_color"
            local markpath="$fg[blue]$ link:A $reset_color"
            printf "%-30s -> %s\n" $markname $markpath
        done
    else
        # Otherwise, we may want to add a bookmark or delete an
        # existing one.
        local -a delete
        zparseopts -D d=delete
        if (( $+delete[1] )); then
            # With  -d , we delete an existing bookmark
            command rm $MARKPATH/$1
        else
            # Otherwise, add a bookmark to the current
            # directory. The first argument is the bookmark
            # name.  .  is special and means the bookmark should
            # be named after the current directory.
            local name=$1
            [ $name == "." ] && name=$ PWD:t 
            ln -s $PWD $MARKPATH/$name
        fi
    fi

Find the complete version on GitHub.

Dynamic named directories Another (more complex) way to achieve the same thing is using dynamic named directories. I was initially using this solution but it is far more complex. This section is only here for historical reason. You can find the complete implementation in my GitHub repository. During file name expansion, a ~ followed by a string in square brackets is provided to the zsh_directory_name() function which will eventually reply with a directory name. This feature can be used to implement directory bookmarks:

$ cd ~[@lldpd]
$ pwd
/home/bernat/code/deezer/lldpd
$ echo ~[@lldpd]/README.md
/home/bernat/code/deezer/lldpd/README.md
$ head -n1 ~[@lldpd]/README.md
lldpd: implementation of IEEE 802.1ab (LLDP)

Like for static named directories, because ~[@lldpd] is substituted during file name expansion, it is possible to use it in any command like a regular directory.

Basic implementation Bookmarks are still kept into a dedicated directory, $MARKPATH and are still symbolic links. Here is how the core feature is implemented:

_bookmark_directory_name()  
    emulate -L zsh #  
    setopt extendedglob
    case $1 in
        n)
            [ [ $2 != ( #b)"@"(?*) ]] && return 1 #  
            typeset -ga reply
            reply=($ $ :-$MARKPATH/$match[1] :A ) #  
            return 0
            ;;
        *)
            return 1
            ;;
    esac
    return 0
 
add-zsh-hook zsh_directory_name _bookmark_directory_name

zsh_directory_name() is a function accepting hooks²: instead of defining it directly, we define another function and register it as a hook with add-zsh-hook. The hook is expected to handle different situations. The first one is to be able to transform a dynamic name into a regular directory name. In this case, the first parameter of the function is n and the second one is the dynamic name. In , the call to emulate will restore the pristine behaviour of Zsh and also ensure that any option set in the scope of the function will not have an impact outside. The function can then be reused safely in another environment. In , we check that the dynamic name starts with @ followed by at least one character. Otherwise, we declare we don t know how to handle it. Another hook will get the chance to do something. (#b) is a globbing flag. It activates backreferences for parenthesised groups. When a match is found, it is stored as an array, $match. In , we build the reply. We could have just returned $MARKPATH/$match[1] but to hide the symbolic link mechanism, we use the A modifier to ask Zsh to resolve symbolic links if possible. Zsh allows nested substitutions. It is therefore possible to use modifiers and flags on anything. $ :-$MARKPATH/$match[1] is a common trick to turn $MARKPATH/$match[1] into a parameter substitution and be able to apply the A modifier on it.

Completion Zsh is also able to ask for completion of a dynamic directory name. In this case, the completion system calls the hook function with c as the first argument.

_bookmark_directory_name()  
    # [...]
    case $1 in
        c)
            # Completion
            local expl
            local -a dirs
            dirs=($MARKPATH/*(N@:t)) #  
            dirs=("@"$ ^dirs ) #  
            _wanted dynamic-dirs expl 'bookmarked directory' compadd -S\] -a dirs
            return
            ;;
        # [...]
    esac
    # [...]

First, in , we create a list of possible bookmarks. In *(N@:t), N@ is a glob qualifier. N allows us to not return nothing if there is no match (otherwise, we would get an error) while @ only returns symbolic links. t is a modifier which will remove all leading pathname components. This is equivalent to use basename or $ something##*/ in POSIX shells but it plays nice with glob expressions. In , we just add @ before each bookmark name. If we have b1, b2 and b3 as bookmarks, $ ^dirs expands to b1,b2,b3 and therefore "@"$ ^dirs expands to the (@b1 @b2 @b3) array. The result is then feeded into the completion system.

Prompt expansion Many people put the name of the current directory in their prompt. It would be nice to have the bookmark name instead of the full name when we are below a bookmarked directory. That s also possible!

$ pwd
/home/bernat/code/deezer/lldpd/src/lib
$ echo $ (%):-%~ 
~[@lldpd]/src/lib

The prompt expansion system calls the hook function with d as first argument and the file name to transform.

_bookmark_directory_name()  
    # [...]
    case $1 in
        d)
            local link slink
            local -A links
            for link ($MARKPATH/*(N@))  
                links[$  #link:A $'\0'$ link:A ]=$ link:t  #  
             
            for slink ($ (@On)$ (k)links )  
                link=$ slink#*$'\0'  #  
                if [ [ $2 = ( #b)($ link )( /*) ]]; then
                    typeset -ga reply
                    reply=("@"$ links[$slink]  $(( $  #match[1]  )) )
                    return 0
                fi
             
            return 1
            ;;
        # [...]
    esac
    # [...]

OK. This is some black Zsh wizardry. Feel free to skip the explanation. This is a bit complex because we want to substitute the most specific bookmark, hence the need to sort bookmarks by their target lengths. In , the associative array $links is created by iterating on each symbolic link ($link) in the $MARKPATH directory. The goal is to map a target directory with the matching bookmark name. However, we need to iterate on this map from the longest to the shortest key. To achieve that, we prepend each key with its length. Remember, $ link:A is the absolute path with symbolic links resolved. So, $ #link:A is the length of this path. We concatenate the length of the target directory with the target directory name and use $'\0' as a separator because this is the only safe character for this purpose. The result is mapped to the bookmark name. The second loop is an iteration on the keys of the associative array $links (thanks to the use of the k parameter flag in $ (k)links ). Those keys are turned into an array (@ parameter flag) and sorted numerically in descending order (On parameter flag). Since the keys are directory names prefixed by their lengths, the first match will be the longest one. In , we extract the directory name from the key by removing the length and the null character at the beginning. Then, we check if the extracted directory name matches the file name we have been provided. Again, (#b) just activates backreferences. With extended globbing, we can use the or operator, . So, when either the file name matches exactly the directory name or is somewhere deeper, we create the reply which is an array whose first member is the bookmark name and the second member is the untranslated part of the file name.

Easy typing Typing ~[@ is cumbersome. Hopefully, Zsh line editor can be extended with additional bindings. The following snippet will substitute @@ (if typed without a pause) by ~[@:

vbe-insert-bookmark()  
    emulate -L zsh
    LBUFFER=$ LBUFFER "~[@"
 
zle -N vbe-insert-bookmark
bindkey '@@' vbe-insert-bookmark

In combination with the autocd option and completion, it is quite easy to jump to a bookmarked directory.

For example:

$ lldpd=/home/bernat/code/deezer/lldpd
$ echo $lldpd/README.md
/home/bernat/code/deezer/lldpd/README.md
$ head -n1 $lldpd/README.md
lldpd: implementation of IEEE 802.1ab (LLDP)

The drawback is that you don t have a separate namespace for your bookmarks. You can still use a special prefix for that. Also, no prompt expansion.

Other functions accepting hooks are chpwd() or precmd().

2 February 2015

Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppStreams 0.1.0

The new package RcppStreams arrived on CRAN on Saturday. RcppStreams brings the excellent Streamulus C++ template library for event stream processing to R. Streamulus, written by Irit Katriel, uses very clever template meta-programming (via Boost Fusion) to implement an embedded domain-specific event language created specifically for event stream processing. The packages wraps the four existing examples by Irit, all her unit tests and includes a slide deck from a workshop presentation. The framework is quite powerful, and it brings a very promising avenue for (efficient !!) stream event processing to R. The NEWS file entries follows below:

Changes in version 0.1.0 (2015-01-30)

First CRAN release

Contains all upstream examples and documentation from Streamulus

Added Rcpp Attributes wrapping and minimal manual pages

Added Travis CI unit testing

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is also a copy of the DESCRIPTION file for this initial release. More detailed information is on the RcppStreams page page and of course on the Streamulus page.

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

1 February 2015

Ritesh Raj Sarraf: Debian GNU/Hurd on VirtualBox

One of the great things about Debian is the wide range of kernels it ~~supports~~ can run. This gives the user the flexibility to not spend time on the common userland stuff. For example, most apps, package management and system admin tasks are common across all Debian platforms. These platforms may not be optimal at par to Linux, but still, choice is good. For long, I had used Debian GNU/Hurd, only on a KVM hypervisor. Recently being involved in VirtualBox maintenance, I've almost beeing using VirtualBox for all my virtualization tasks. So it was time to try out Hurd on VirtualBox. All praises to the work the Debian Hurd team has put, it just works wonderfully. To try out Hurd on VirtualBox:

You could download ready to use VirtualBox images from here.

These are raw images. For VirtualBox, I'd recommend you convert the image to VDI format.

rrs@learner:~/VirtualBox VMs$ VBoxManage convertdd debian-hurd-20150105.img debian-hurd-20150105.vdi --format VDI
Converting from raw image file="debian-hurd-20150105.img" to file="debian-hurd-20150105.vdi"...
Creating dynamic image with size 3146776576 bytes (3001MB)...

The VDI format may help in with some of the goodies VirtualBox has to offer, like efficient snapshots.

The rest remains the same. You need to configure the VM just as else. Currently supported arch is x86 only, so make the selections accordingly.
The final VM config may look something like the following screenshot.
And here's the result in a video captured on VirtualBox running Debian GNU/Hurd.

Categories:
Debian-Blog
Computing
Technology
Virtualization

Keywords:
Hurd
debian
Mach
VirtualBox
VBox

RHUT

Images:

31 January 2015

John Goerzen: Home Automation, part 2: Z-Wave and ISY programming

In my part 1 post yesterday, I wrote about the start of the home automation project. I mentioned that I was using Insteon switches, and they mostly were working well (I forgot to mention an annoyance: you can dim, but not totally shut off, their LED status light.) Anyhow, the Insteon battery-operated sensors seem to not be as good as their Z-Wave competition. Setting up Z-Wave Z-Wave devices get joined to the Z-Wave network in much the same way Bluetooth devices get paired with each other. The first time you use a Z-Wave device, you join it to the controller. The controller assigns it an ID on your network, and both devices discover the best route to communicate with each other. I discovered that the Z-Wave module on the ISY-994i has particularly poor reception. Combined with the generally short range of battery-operated Z-wave devices, this meant that my sensors didn t work reliably. As with Insteon, AC-powered Z-wave devices tend to be repeaters, but I didn t have any AC-powered Z-wave devices. I went looking for Z-wave repeaters, and found some. But then I discovered that a Z-wave relay-based appliance switch was actually $5 cheaper, acted as a repeater, and could be used as a switch down the road if needed. A couple of those solved my communications issues. You join them to the network as usual, but then either re-join the battery-powered sensors (so they see the new route) or do a network heal (every device on the network re-learns about its neighbors and routes to the other devices) so they see the new route. Z-Wave Motion / Occupancy Sensors If you have been in new buildings, chances are you have seen light switches with built-in occupancy sensors. My doctor s office has these. They are typically the same size as a regular light switch, but with a passive infrared (PIR) motion sensor used to automatically turn the lights off after a timeout (or even on, when someone walks into the room.) These work fine for small rooms, but if you ve ever been in a bathroom with a PIR lightswitch that goes off while you re still in the room, you are aware of their faults for larger rooms! Most of the time, when you read about occupancy sensors , it s really a PIR sensor, and the term is used interchangeably with motion detector. Motion detectors in home automation systems are commonly used for a number of purposes: detecting occuption of rooms for automatic control of lighting or HVAC systems, triggering alerts, or even locking or unlocking doors. My friend told me he had poor luck with the Insteon PIR sensors, so I tried two different Z-Wave models: the $48 Aeon/Aeotec multi-sensor and the $30 Ecolink PIRZWAVE2-ECO. The Aeon device is clearly the more capable; it can be used indoors or out, and has a lot of options that can be configured by Z-Wave configuration parameters. It also has a ball/socket mount, so it can be easily aimed in different directions. It can draw power from 4 AAA batteries, or a mini USB cable (cable, but not power supply, included). The Aeon multi-sensor also has a temperature, humidity, and illumination (lux) sensor but, as you ll see, they have some drawbacks. The Ecolink device is more basic; it has a few settings that can be altered via jumpers, but none that can be altered via Z-Wave configuration commands. That makes it a bit of a hassle, since you have to open it up to change, and when you do, it triggers a tamper alarm that is both undocumented and never seems to go away. It is powered by a single CR123A 3V Lithium battery, which are about $2 each on Amazon. Both units have a default PIR timeout of 4 minutes. That means that after sensing motion, they will transmit the on signal (meaning motion detected) and then transmit no further signals for at least 4 minutes. This is because operating the radio consumes far more battery power than simply monitoring the PIR sensor, and it cuts down on repeated on/off transmissions. In this configuration, both units should have battery life of 6 months to a year, I figure, with an edge for the Ecolink, perhaps. Both can also be configured to transmit more frequently; the Ecolink has a jumper that can change its timeout to 10 seconds, whereas the Aeon can be configured over Z-Wave for any timeout between 10 seconds and 65535 seconds (values above 4 minutes are rounded to the nearest minute, for some reason.) Both also have adjustable sensitivity; on the Aeon this is via an adjustment knob, and on the Ecolink it s via jumpers. And both can report their battery level to enable software alerts when it s getting low. The Aeon ships with its temperature, humidity, battery, and lux sensors disabled. This appears to be the cause of much confusion online, as they send one transmission and then no more. Sadly, one has to resort to the hard-to-find but very helpful MultiSensor engineering spec document to figure out the way to enable those sensors and set their interval. (It must be said, however, that I doubt most consumers will understand how to set bitfields, and this is either not covered or covered incorrectly in their other manuals.) This can be a real power drain, so I just set it to report battery level every 6 hours (so I can alert myself if it gets low) and leave it at that. The Ecolink manual claims a detection radius of 39 feet and a total angle of 90deg (45deg left or right from center) and a 3-year battery life (I m skeptical). It also is rated for indoor use only. Aeotec claims a detection radius of 16 feet and a total angle of 120 deg. Be skeptical of all these figures. Once set up with good reception, both devices have been working fine. Programming the controller The ISY-994i-Zw Pro controller I mentioned in Part 1 has its own sort of programming language. It s a lot better than the sort of GUI clicky mess that is found in most of these things, but it still has a sort of annoying Java-based editor where you select keywords from a menu and such. Although you can backup and restore the device, and import and export the programs, the file formats are XML and not really suitable for hand-editing. Sigh. The language is limited, but gets the job done. Here is a simple program that turns off the fan in a bathroom 30 minutes after the light was turned off:

If
        Status  '1st Floor / Bathroom + Laundry / Main Bath Fan' is On
    And Status  '1st Floor / Bathroom + Laundry / Main Bath Light' is Off
 
Then
        Wait  30 minutes 
        Set '1st Floor / Bathroom + Laundry / Main Bath Fan' Off
 
Else
   - No Actions - (To add one, press 'Action')

The if/then/else clauses should probably be more properly called when/do/finally. The if clauses are evaluated whenever a relevant event occurs. If the If evaluates to true, if executes the Then section. The program in Then is uninterruptible except for wait and repeat statements. So in this case, the program begins, and if the light stays off and the fan stays on, 30 minutes later it turns off the fan. But if the light comes back on, the program aborts (since there is nothing in else ). Similarly, if the fan goes off, the program aborts. A more complicated example: motion-activated lamp There is a table lamp in our living room controlled by Insteon. By adding a motion sensor in that room, it can be automatically turned on by someone walking through the room. Now, to be useful, I don t want it to turn on during the day. I also don t want it to turn on or adjust itself if other lights are on in the room, or if I turned it on myself; that could cause it to go on and off while I m watching TV, for instance. It s just to be helpful at night. Because the ISY-994i is pretty limited, having almost no control flow operations, this as with many tasks requires several programs . First, here s my main :

If
        Status  '1st Floor / Living + Dining Room / LR Table Lamp' is Off
    And $LR_Lamp_Lockout is 0
    And Status  '1st Floor / Living + Dining Room / ZW 005 Binary Sensor' is On
    And From    Sunset 
        To      Sunrise (next day)
    And $LR_Lamp_Motion_Working is not 0
    And Status  '1st Floor / Living + Dining Room / LR Floor Lamp' is Off
    And Status  '1st Floor / Living + Dining Room / Dining Light' is Off
    And Status  '1st Floor / Living + Dining Room / LR Light' is Off
 
Then
        Set '1st Floor / Living + Dining Room / LR Table Lamp' 22%
        Set '1st Floor / Living + Dining Room / LR S Remote (Table Lamp)' 22%
 
Else
   - No Actions - (To add one, press 'Action')

So, let s look at the conditions. This program triggers if the lamp is off, the sensor is on, the time is between sunset and sunrise, and three other lights are off. (I will explain the lockout and motion_working variables later). If this is the case, it sets the lamp to 22% (and also informs the wall switch for it that the lamp is at 22%). I pick this precise value because it is unlikely I would manually set it via the wall switch, and therefore lamp is 22% bright doubles as a lamp was turned on by this program flag. So this is the turning the lamp on bit. Let s look at the program that turns it back off later:

If
        Status  '1st Floor / Living + Dining Room / LR Table Lamp' is 22%
    And (
             Status  '1st Floor / Living + Dining Room / ZW 005 Binary Sensor' is Off
          Or $LR_Lamp_Motion_Working is 0
          Or Status  '1st Floor / Living + Dining Room / LR Light' is not Off
          Or Status  '1st Floor / Living + Dining Room / LR Floor Lamp' is not Off
          Or Status  '1st Floor / Living + Dining Room / Dining Light' is not Off
        )
 
Then
        Wait  15 seconds
        Set '1st Floor / Living + Dining Room / LR S Remote (Table Lamp)' Off
        Set '1st Floor / Living + Dining Room / LR Table Lamp' Off
 
Else
   - No Actions - (To add one, press 'Action')

This is using a sensor with a 4-minute timeout, so the lamp will always be on for at least 4 minutes and 15 seconds. This program runs if the lamp is still at the program-set level (so if, for instance, I turned the lamp full on, the program does nothing to override my setting.) Then, it looks for a condition to trigger turning the lamp off, which could be any of the sensor indicating no more motion, another program detecting it s lost communication with the sensor, or somebody turning on one of the bigger lights in the room. Then it simply sets the light (and the wall switch controlling it) to off. There are a couple more bits to this puzzle. What if the system turned the lamp on, but I really want it off? If I walked up to the wall switch and pushed off , the lamp would go off. And then, a couple seconds later, come back on, since the state of the system met the conditions for the lamp-on program. So we need a lockout that prevents this from happening. Here s my trigger lockout program:

If
        Control '1st Floor / Living + Dining Room / LR Table Lamp' is switched Off
     Or Control '1st Floor / Living + Dining Room / LR Table Lamp' is switched Fast Off
     Or Control '1st Floor / Living + Dining Room / LR S Remote (Table Lamp)' is switched Fast Off
     Or Control '1st Floor / Living + Dining Room / LR S Remote (Table Lamp)' is switched Off
 
Then
        $LR_Lamp_Lockout += 1
        Run Program 'LR Lamp Clear Lockout' (If)
 
Else
   - No Actions - (To add one, press 'Action')

So if someone pushes the off button at the lamp switch box at the outlet it s plugged into (unlikely), or at the wall switch, it increments the lockout variable and runs another program. This other program is unique in that it is flagged disabled , meaning it is never run automatically by the system, only when called by another program. Here s the clear lockout program:

If
        $LR_Lamp_Lockout > 0
 
Then
        Wait  5 minutes 
        $LR_Lamp_Lockout  = 0
 
Else
   - No Actions - (To add one, press 'Action')

Thus by pushing the off button on the switch, the motion-triggered program won t turn the lamp back on for at least 5 minutes. Before I had reliable Z-Wave communication to the device, I had some times where it would simply drop off the Z-Wave network until a reboot. This was particularly annoying if it occured after having detected motion, since the state of the sensor in the ISY controller is simply whatever state it last received. Therefore, I wrote this program to check if it believes the motion sensor is working:

If
        Status  '1st Floor / Living + Dining Room / ZW 005 Binary Sensor' is On
 
Then
        $LR_Lamp_Motion_Working  = 1
        Wait  1 hour 
        $LR_Lamp_Motion_Working  = 0
 
Else
        $LR_Lamp_Motion_Working  = 1

We don t really care if the motion sensor is broken when the status is off; all that happens then is no lamp turns on. So this program activates when the status is set to on. It flips the working flag to true, then waits for an hour. If the sensor shows no motion within that hour, the program skips to the else (keeping the flag true). But if it is still on after an hour, it decides it must not be working and sets the working flag to false. You can see that flag used in the other programs logic. But because of the Else, which is run whenever the conditions that caused the Then clause to run become false, as soon as the system receives no motion , it will flag the sensor as working again. The final piece to this puzzle is a program flagged to run at boot time of the controller:

If
   - No Conditions - (To add one, press 'Schedule' or 'Condition')
 
Then
        $LR_Lamp_Motion_Working  = 1
 
Else
   - No Actions - (To add one, press 'Action')

This simply initializes the motion working variable to a known state. Keypads The Insteon KeypadLinc is a nice device. It can control a single load directly, but all 8 buttons are fully responsive in the Insteon system. They each also have individually-addressible LED backlights. They are commonly used to do things like ALL OFF , TV (to set lights for watching TV), AWAY (to set the system for everyone being out of the house for awhile), etc. They are the size of a regular Decora switch, and I have installed one already, but haven t programmed much of it yet. REST API The ISY has an extensive REST API, which I ve used to integrate it a bit with my Debian systems. More on that another time. Mobile app Mobile apps are a common thing people look for in these systems. You can t use the Insteon app with the ISY, but they recommend Mobilinc Pro. It does the job. Mobilinc tries to sell a $10/mo connection service, which is totally unnecessary if you can figure out SSL, and has on-screen buttons to bypass, but judging by the Google Play reviews, a lot of people thought they had to pay for that and uninstalled it afterwards. Future directions Many people put in electronic door locks. I don t plan to do that. I do plan to have the house systems be aware of the general state of things (is the house empty? is everyone asleep?) and do appropriate things with lighting and HVAC. I don t really expect the savings in power for lighting control to pay for the system anytime soon. However, if it can achieve some savings in heating and cooling, it may well be able to pay for itself in a few years. So my big next step is thermostats that can integrate with all this. I have had a water mess in my basement before, and water leak sensors are a very common item people deploy in these setups. I certainly plan to add a few of them. Door-open sensors are also useful; they trigger more instantly and reliably than motion detectors and can be used in some nice ways (is it after dark and the door is opening when the house is vacant? If so, turn on the light nearby in case their hands are full.) Issues Some issues I ran into so far are already discussed above. One other major one involves SSL on the ISY-994i Pro. The method for adding SSL keys is cumbersome, but the processor on the device which appears to run some sort of Java is just not up to working with SSL. Apparently they only recently got it fast enough to work with 2048-bit keys. This is rather undocumented, though, so I obtained a cert for a 4096-bit key, my usual. Attempting to connect to the box with SSL appeared to hang not just that but confuse a lot of other things on it as well. Turned out it wasn t hung; it just too a minute and 45 seconds to complete the SSL handshake. Moral of the story: use 2048-bit keys, or stunnel4 or some such to re-wrap the SSL communications with a stronger key. The KeypadLinc backlights can be completely shut off, and both their on and off levels can be customized. I have it set to shut off the backlight during the day and turn it on at night. The wall switches, however, can t have their brightness status LED bar entirely shut off. They can be made dim, but don t ever go away. That s rather annoying. Also annoying is that Insteon doesn t make switches in the traditional toggle switch style in colors other than white. As our house had mostly black switches, I was forced into the Decora style. Overall thoughts This has been a great learning experience for me in a number of ways. I have only begun to tap what the system can do, and the real benefits will probably come once I get the heating and cooling into the mix. It s quite a nice way for a geek to go, and the improvements in lighting have also been popular with everyone else in the house.

John Goerzen: First Steps with Home Automation and LED Lighting

I ve been thinking about home automation automating lights, switches, thermostats, etc. for years. Literally decades, in fact. When I was a child, my parents had a RadioShack X10 control module and one or two target devices. I think I had fun giving people a light show turning on or off one switch and one outlet remotely. But I was stuck there are a daunting number of standards for home automation these days. Zigbee, UPB, Z-Wave, Insteon, and all sorts of Wifi-enabled things that aren t really compatible with each other (hellooooo, Nest) or have their own ecosystem that isn t all that open (helloooo, Apple). Frankly I don t think that Wifi is a great home automation protocol; its power drain completely prohibits it being used in a lot of ways. Earlier this month, my awesome employer had our annual meeting and as part of that our technical teams had some time for anyone to talk about anything geeky. I used my time to talk about flying quadcopters, but two of my colleagues talked about home automation. I had enough to have a place to start, and was hooked. People use these systems to do all sorts of things: intelligently turn off lights when rooms aren t occupied, provide electronic door locks (unlockable via keypad, remote, or software), remote control lighting and heating/cooling via smartphone apps, detect water leakage, control switches with awkward wiring environments, buttons to instantly set multiple switches to certain levels for TV watching, turning off lights left on, etc. I even heard examples of monitoring a swamp cooler to make sure it is being used correctly. The possibilities are endless, and my geeky side was intrigued. Insteon and Z-Wave Based on what I heard from my colleagues, I decided to adopt a hybrid network consisting of Insteon and Z-Wave. Both are reliable protocols (with ACKs and retransmit), so they work far better than X10 did. Both have all sorts of controls and sensors available (browse around on smarthome.com for some ideas). Insteon is a particularly interesting system an integrated dual-mesh network. It has both powerline and RF signaling, and most hardwared Insteon devices act as repeaters for both the wired and RF network simultaneously. Insteon packets contain a maximum hop count that is decremented after each relay, and the packets repeat in such as way that they collide and strengthen one another. There is no need to maintain routing tables or anything like that; it simply scales nicely. This system addresses all sorts of potential complexities. It addresses the split-phase problem of powerline-only systems, but using an RF bridge. It addresses long distances and outbuildings by using the powerline signaling. I found it to work quite well. The downside to Insteon is that all the equipment comes from one vendor: Insteon. If you don t like their thermostat or motion sensor, you don t have any choice. Insteon devices can be used entirely without a central controller. Light switches can talk to each other directly, and you can even set them up so that one switch controls dozens of others, if you have enough patience to go around your house pressing tiny set buttons. Enter Z-Wave. Z-Wave is RF-only, and while it is also a mesh network, it is source-routed, meaning that if you move devices around, you have to heal your network as all your nodes have to re-learn the path to each other. It also doesn t have the easy distance traversal of Insteon, of course. On the other hand, hundreds of vendors make Z-Wave products, and they mostly interoperate well. Z-Wave is said to scale practically to maybe two or three dozen devices, which would have been an issue for me, buut with Insteon doing the heavy lifting and Z-Wave filling in the gaps, it s worked out well. Controlling it all While both Insteon (and, to a certain extent, Z-Wave) devices can control each other, to really spread your wings, you need more centralized control. This lets you have programs that do things like if there s motion in the room on a weekday and it s dark outside, then turn on a light, and turn it back off 5 minutes later. Insteon has several options. One, you can buy their power line modem (PLM). This can be hooked up to a PC to run either Insteon s proprietary software, or something open-source like MisterHouse, written in Perl. Or you can hook it up to a controller I ll mention in a minute. Those looking for a fairly simpe controller might get the Insteon 2242-222 Hub, which has the obligatory smartphone app and basic schedules. For more sophisticated control, my friend recommended the ISY-994i controller. Not only does it have a lot more capable programming language (though still frustrating), it supports both Insteon and Z-Wave in an integrated box, and has a comprehensive REST API for integrating with other things. I went this route. First step: LED lighting I began my project by replacing my light bulbs with LEDs. I found that I could get Cree 4-Flow 60W equivs for $10 at Home Depot. They are dimmable, a key advantage over CFL, and also maintain their brightness throughout their life far better. As I wanted to install dimmer switches, I got a combination of Cree 60W bulbs, Cree TW bulbs (which have a better color spectrum coverage for more true colors), and Cree 100W equiv bulbs for places I needed more coverage. I even put in a few LED flood lights to replace my can lights. Overall I was happy with the LEDs. They are a significant improvement over the CFLs I had been using, and use even less power to boot. I have had issues with three Cree bulbs, though: one arrived broken, and two others have had issues such as being quite dim. They have a good warranty, but it seems their QA could be better. Also, they can have a tendency to flickr when dimmed, though this plagues virtually all LED bulbs. I had done quite a bit of research. CNET has some helpful brightness guides, and Insteon has a color temperature chart. CNET also had a nifty in-depth test of LED bulbs. Second step: switches Once the LED bulbs were in place, I was then able to start installing smart switches. I picked up Insteon s basic switch, the SwitchLinc 2477D at Menard s. This is a dimmable switch and requires a neutral wire in the box, but acts as a dual-band repeater for the system as well. The way Insteon switches work, they can be standalone, or controllers, responders, or both in a scene . A scene is where multiple devices act together. You can create virtual 3-way switches in a scene, or more complicated things where different lights are turned on at different levels. Anyhow, these switches worked out quite well. I have a few boxes where there is no neutral wire, so I had to use the Insteon SwitchLinc 2474D in them. That switch is RF-only and is supposed to have a minimum load of 20W, though they seemed to work OK albeit with limited range and the occasional glitch with my LEDs. There is also the relay-based SwitchLinc 2477S for use with non-dimmable lights, fans, etc. You can also get plug-in modules for controlling lamps and such. I found the Insteon devices mostly lived up to their billing. Occasionally I could provoke a glitch by changing from dimming to brightening in rapid succession on a remote switch controlling a load on a distant one. Twice I had to power cycle an Insteon switch that got confused (rather annoying when they re hardwared). Other than that, though, it s been solid. From what I gather, this stuff isn t ever quite as reliable as a 1950s mechanical switch, but at least in this price range, this is about as good as it gets these days. Well, this post got quite long, so I will have to follow up with part 2 in a little while. I intend to write about sensors and the Z-Wave network (which didn t work quite as easily as Insteon), as well as programming the ISY and my lessons learned along the way.

30 January 2015

Richard Hartmann: Release Critical Bug report for Week 05

The UDD bugs interface currently knows about the following release critical bugs:

In Total: 1083 (Including 186 bugs affecting key packages)
- Affecting Jessie: 175 (key packages: 122) That's the number we need to get down to zero before the release. They can be split in two big categories:
  - Affecting Jessie and unstable: 124 (key packages: 89) Those need someone to find a fix, or to finish the work to upload a fix to unstable:
    - 21 bugs are tagged 'patch'. (key packages: 13) Please help by reviewing the patches, and (if you are a DD) by uploading them.
    - 8 bugs are marked as done, but still affect unstable. (key packages: 6) This can happen due to missing builds on some architectures, for example. Help investigate!
    - 95 bugs are neither tagged patch, nor marked done. (key packages: 70) Help make a first step towards resolution!
  - Affecting Jessie only: 51 (key packages: 33) Those are already fixed in unstable, but the fix still needs to migrate to Jessie. You can help by submitting unblock requests for fixed packages, by investigating why packages do not migrate, or by reviewing submitted unblock requests.
    - 30 bugs are in packages that are unblocked by the release team. (key packages: 18)
    - 21 bugs are in packages that are not unblocked. (key packages: 15)

How do we compare to the Squeeze and Wheezy release cycles?

Week	Squeeze	Wheezy	Jessie
43	284 (213+71)	468 (332+136)	319 (240+79)
44	261 (201+60)	408 (265+143)	274 (224+50)
45	261 (205+56)	425 (291+134)	295 (229+66)
46	271 (200+71)	401 (258+143)	427 (313+114)
47	283 (209+74)	366 (221+145)	342 (260+82)
48	256 (177+79)	378 (230+148)	274 (189+85)
49	256 (180+76)	360 (216+155)	226 (147+79)
50	204 (148+56)	339 (195+144)	???
51	178 (124+54)	323 (190+133)	189 (134+55)
52	115 (78+37)	289 (190+99)	147 (112+35)
1	93 (60+33)	287 (171+116)	140 (104+36)
2	82 (46+36)	271 (162+109)	157 (124+33)
3	25 (15+10)	249 (165+84)	172 (128+44)
4	14 (8+6)	244 (176+68)	187 (132+55)
5	2 (0+2)	224 (132+92)	175 (124+51)
6	release!	212 (129+83)
7	release+1	194 (128+66)
8	release+2	206 (144+62)
9	release+3	174 (105+69)
10	release+4	120 (72+48)
11	release+5	115 (74+41)
12	release+6	93 (47+46)
13	release+7	50 (24+26)
14	release+8	51 (32+19)
15	release+9	39 (32+7)
16	release+10	20 (12+8)
17	release+11	24 (19+5)
18	release+12	2 (2+0)

Graphical overview of bug stats thanks to azhag:

Dirk Eddelbuettel: littler 0.2.2

A new minor release of littler is available now. Several examples were added or extended:

a new script check.r to check a source tarball with R CMD check after loading required packages first (and a good use case was given in the recent UBSAN testing with Rocker post);
a new script to launch Shiny apps via runApp();
a new feature to install.r and install2.r whereby source tarballs are recognized and installed directly
new options to install.r and install2.r to set repos and lib location.

See the littler examples page for more details. Another useful change is that r now reads either one (or both) of /etc/littler.r and ~/.littler.r. These are interpreted as standard R files, allowing users to provide initialization, package loading and more. Carl Boettiger and I continue to make good use of these littler examples (to to install directly from CRAN or GitHub, or to run checks) in our Rocker builds of R for Docker. Full details for the littler release are provided as usual at the ChangeLog page. The code is available via the GitHub repo, from tarballs off my littler page and the local directory here. A fresh package has gone to the incoming queue at Debian; Michael Rutter will probably have new Ubuntu binaries at CRAN in a few days too. Comments and suggestions are welcome via the mailing list or issue tracker at the GitHub repo.

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

Laura Arjona: Going selfhosting: Installing Debian Wheezy in my home server

It was in my mind to open a new series of articles with topic selfhosting , because I really believe in free software based network services and since long time I want to plug a machine 24 7 at home to host my blog, microblog, MediaGoblin, XMPP server, mail, and, in conclusion, all the services that now I trust to very kind third parties that run them with free software, but I know I could run myself (and offer them to my family and friends). Last September I bought the domain larjona.net (curious, they say buy but it s a rent, for 1,2,3 years never yours. Pending another post about my adventures with the domain name, dynamic DNS, and SSL certs!) and I bought an HP Microserver G7 N54L, with 2 GB RAM. It had a 250GB SATA harddisk and I bought 2 more SATA harddisks, 1 TB each, to setup a RAID 1 (mirror). Total cost (with keyboard and mouse), 300 . A friend gave me a TFT monitor that was too old for him (1024 768) but it serves me well, (it s a server, no graphical interface, and I will connect remotely most of the times). Installing Debian stable (wheezy) I decided to install Debian stable. Jessie was not frozen yet, and since it was my first non-LAMP server install, I wanted to make sure that errors and problems would be my errors, not issues of the non-released-yet distro. I thought to install YunoHost or some other distro prepared for selfhosting, but I ve never tried them, and I have not much free time, so I decided to stick on Debian, my beloved distro, because it s the one that I know best and I m part of its awesome community. And maybe I could contribute back some bug reports or documentation. I wanted to try a crypto setup (just for fun, just for learn, for its benefits, and to be one more freecrypto-tester in the world) so after reading a bit: https://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstaller/SataRaid
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/disk_encryption
http://madduck.net/docs/cryptdisk/
http://linuxgazette.net/140/kapil.html
http://smcv.pseudorandom.co.uk/2008/09/cryptroot/
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-security-4/lvm-before-and-after-encryption-871379/ and some other pages, and try some different things, this is the setup that I managed to configure:

A rescue system with /boot and / partitions, both in the 250 GB disk.
A RAID 1 system of the two 1TB disks, setup in the BIOS of the machine (so the motherboard handles the RAID and the OS is focused in other things).
Inside the Debian installer, I went to manual partition, then I put my /boot in the 250GB disk (yes, a 2nd /boot there), and then selected the 1TB disk (since the RAID was already made, it appeared a single 1TB disk) as physical device to be encrypted.
After that, still in the Debian installer, I setup LVM there: configured a volume group, then, two volumes, one for / and the other one for swap.
Then I saved the changes and go on installing my system.

Everything went well. Yay! Some doubts and one problem Everything went quite well except some doubts:

I m still not sure if this BIOS RAID ( Fake RAID ) is better than a software RAID or not. I suppose it s better since I delegate in the motherboard to do it, and leave the OS to care about other things (transcode my videos yeah!). But I don t know how to measure performance and which metrics and results should I expect. The disks (cheap disks) are a bit noisy (just a bit! or maybe it s the fan that it s very quiet! poor Laura, never saw/had a luxury machine like this one :)
I had to install firmware-linux-nonfree in order to properly use the graphics card (Mobility Radeon HD 4225/4250). I have no graphical environment there, only a console, so I was not sure if installing the firmware or not (without the firmware, the letters of the console were bigger, but I just don t mind since I most of the time I log in remotely from my laptop). Then, two questions arised to my ignorant mind:
1. Do I need the driver for better performance (aka is the graphics card used for rendering/transcoding/showing images and videos in my MediaGoblin site or just when it s needed to display them in local (and subsequently, never)?
2. If I leave the system like that, and forget about the firmware warning at boot time, can the hardware be damaged by the default (free) driver? (for example, due to fan controlling malfunction or something like that).

After talking about this issues with friends (and in debian-women IRC channel), I decided to install the non-free driver, just in case, with the same reasoning as with the RAID: let the card do the job, so the CPU can care about other things. Again, I notice that learning a bit about benchmarking (and having some time to do some tests) would be nice And now, the problem:

I noticed something strange in my setup. Sometimes, after a system reboot, cryptsetup was not accepting the password to unlock the encrypted disk. And believe me, I was typing it carefully. But when I completely shutdown the computer, unplug the cable, replug the cable, and start again, the password was accepted. The keyboard is USB and this machine does not accept other connection for the keyboard. The keyboard configuration, language and so, was all correct. No Non-ASCII symbols in my password. My password would need to press the same keys in a Spanish and an English keyboard.
I thought that maybe something in my RAID was failing. I tried to disconnect one of the disks, and see if (1) the bug was solved (no) and (2) the RAID was working (yes). I made the same with the other disk. I was happy that I could reconstruct my RAID when plugging the disk again. But still I had the problem of the password.

I left this problem apart and go on installing the software. I would think later what to do. Installing MediaGoblin The most urgent selfhosting service, for me, was GNU MediaGoblin, because I wanted to show my server to my family in Christmas, and upload the pictures of the babies and kids of the family. And it s a project where I contribute translations and I am a big fan, so I would be very proud of hosting my own instance. I followed the documentation to setup 2 instances of GNU MediaGoblin 0.7 (the stable release in the moment), with their corresponding PostgreSQL databases. Why two instances? Well, I want an instance to host and show my videos, images, and replicate videos that I like, and a private one for sharing photos and videos with my family. MediaGoblin has no privacy settings yet, so I installed separate instances, and the private one I put it in a different port, with a self-signed SSL cert, and enabled http-authorization in Nginx, so only authorized Linux users of my machine can accesss the website. Installing MediaGoblin was easier than what I thought. I only had some small doubts about the documentation, and they were solved in the IRC channel. You can access, for example, my user profile in my public instance, and see some different files that I already uploaded. I m very happy!! Face to face with the bug, again I had to solve the problem of the password not accepted in reboots. I began to think that it could be a bug in cryptsetup. Should I upgrade the package to the version in wheezy-backports? Jessie was almost frozen, maybe it was time to upgrade the whole system, to see if the problem was solved (and to see how my MediaGoblin was working or not in Jessie. It should work, it s almost packaged! But who knows). And if it didn t work, maybe it was time to file a bug So I upgraded my system to Debian Jessie. And after upgrade, the system didn t boot. But that s the story of another blog post (that I still need to finish to write don t worry, it has happy end, as you could see accessing my Mediagoblin site!). Comments? You can comment in this pump.io thread.
Filed under: My experiences and opinion Tagged: Debian, encryption, English, libre software, MediaGoblin, Moving into free software, N54L, selfhosting, sysadmin

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