Search Results: "tar"

13 November 2017

Fran ois Marier: Test mail server on Ubuntu and Debian

I wanted to setup a mail service on a staging server that would send all outgoing emails to a local mailbox. This avoids sending emails out to real users when running the staging server using production data. First, install the postfix mail server: 
apt install postfix
and choose the "Local only" mail server configuration type. Then change the following in /etc/postfix/main.cf: 
default_transport = error
to: 
default_transport = local:root
and restart postfix: 
systemctl restart postfix.service
Once that's done, you can find all of the emails in /var/mail/root. So you can install mutt: 
apt install mutt
and then view the mailbox like this: 
mutt -f /var/mail/root

12 November 2017

Sven Hoexter: Offering a Simtec Entropy Key

Since I started to lean a bit towards the concept of minimalism I've got rid of stuff, including all stationary computers. So for now I'm left with just my laptop and that's something where I do not want to attach an USB entropy key permanently. That's why I've a spare Simtec Entropy Key I no longer use, and I'm willing to sell. In case someone is interested, I'm willing to give it away for 20EUR + shipping. If you can convince me it'll be of use for the Debian project (end up on a DSA managed machine for example) I'm willing to give it away for less. If you're located in Cologne, Copenhagen or Barcelona we might be able, depending on the timing, to do a personal handover (with or without keysigning). Otherwise I guess shipping is mainly interesting for someone also located in Europe. You can use sven at stormbind dot net or hoexter at debian dot org to contact me and use GPG key 0xA6DC24D9DA2493D1.

10 November 2017

Wouter Verhelst: SReview 0.1

This morning I uploaded version 0.1 of SReview, my video review and transcoding system, to Debian experimental. There's still some work to be done before it'll be perfectly easy to use by anyone, but I do think I've reached the point by now where it should have basic usability by now. Quick HOWTO for how to use it: There's still some bits of the above list that I want to make easier to do, and there's still some things that shouldn't be strictly necessary, but all in all, I think SReview has now reached a certain level of maturity that means I felt confident doing its first upload to Debian. Did you try it out? Let me know what you think!

Guido G nther: git-buildpackage 0.9.2

After some time in the experimental distribution I've uploaded git-buildpackage 0.9.0 to sid a couple of weeks ago and were now at 0.9.2 as of today. This brought in two new commands: We moved to better supported tools: We added integration with pk4: 
 mkdir -p ~/.config/pk4/hooks-enabled/unpack/
 ln -s /usr/share/pk4/hooks-available/unpack/gbp ~/.config/pk4/hooks-enabled/unpack/
so pk4 invokes gbp import-dsc on package import. There were lots of improvements all over the place like gbp pq now importing the patch queue on switch (if it's not already there) and gbp import-dsc and import-orig not creating pointless master branches if debian-branch != 'master'. And after being broken in the early 0.9.x cycle gbp buildpackage --git-overlay ... should be much better supported now that we have proper tests. All in all 26 bugs fixed. Thanks to everybody who contributed bug reports and fixes.

8 November 2017

Neil McGovern: Software Freedom Law Center and Conservancy

Before I start, I would like to make it clear that the below is entirely my personal view, and not necessarily that of the GNOME Foundation, the Debian Project, or anyone else. There s been quite a bit of interest recently about the petition by Software Freedom Law Center to cancel the Software Freedom Conservancy s trademark. A number of people have asked my views on it, so I thought I d write up a quick blog on my experience with SFLC and Conservancy both during my time as Debian Project Leader, and since. It s clear to me that for some time, there s been quite a bit of animosity between SFLC and Conservancy, which for me started to become apparent around the time of the large debate over ZFS on Linux. I talked about this in my DebConf 16 talk, which fortunately was recorded (ZFS bit from 8:05 to 17:30).
This culminated in SFLC publishing a statement, and Conservancy also publishing their statement, backed up by the FSF. These obviously came to different conclusions, and it seems bizarre to me that SFLC who were acting as Debian s legal counsel published a position that was contrary to the position taken by Debian. Additionally, Conservancy and FSF who were not acting as counsel mirrored the position of the project. Then, I hear of an even more confusing move that SFLC has filed legal action against Conservancy, despite being the organisation they helped set up. This happened on the 22nd September, the day after SFLC announced corporate and support services for Free Software projects. SFLC has also published a follow up, which they say that the act is not an attack, let alone a bizarre attack , and that the response from Conservancy, who view it as such was like reading a declaration of war issued in response to a parking ticket . Then, as SFLC somehow find the threat of your trademark being taken away as something other than an attack, they also state: Any project working with the Conservancy that feels in any way at risk should contact us. We will immediately work with them to put in place measures fully ensuring that they face no costs and no risks in this situation. which I read as a direct pitch to try and pull projects away from Conservancy and over to SFLC. Now, even if there is a valid claim here, despite the objections that were filed by a trademark lawyer who I have a great deal of respect for (disclosure: Pam also provides pro-bono trademark advice to my employer, the GNOME Foundation), the optics are pretty terrible. We have a case of one FOSS organisation taking another one to court, after many years of them being aware of the issue, and when wishing to promote a competing service. At best, this is a distraction from the supposed goals of Free Software organisations, and at worst is a direct attempt to interrupt the workings of an established and successful umbrella organisation which lots of projects rely on. I truly hope that this case is simply dropped, and if I was advising SFLC, that s exactly what I would suggest, along with an apology for the distress. Put it this way if SFLC win, then they re simply displaying what would be viewed as an aggressive move to hold the term software freedom exclusively to themselves. If they lose, then it shows that they re willing to do so to another 501(c)3 without actually having a case. Before I took on the DPL role, I was under the naive impression that although there were differences in approach, at least we were coming to try and work together to promote software freedoms for the end user. Unfortunately, since then, I ve now become a lot more jaded about exactly who, and which organisations hold our best interests at heart. (Featured image by Nick Youngson CC-BY-SA-3.0 http://nyphotographic.com/)

Jonathan Dowland: Christmas

Every year, family members ask me to produce a list of gift suggestions for them to buy for me for Christmas. An enviable position for many, I'm sure, but combined with trying to come up with gift ideas for them, this can sometimes be a stressful situation, with a risk of either giving or receiving gifts that are really nothing more than tat, fluff or kipple. I've started to feel that this is detracting from the spirit of the season. I also don't really want much "stuff". When I am interested in something, it's not something that is convenient for others to buy, either because it's hard to describe, or has limited availability, or is only available at particular times of the year, etc. I'd rather focus on spending time with friends and family. Starting this year, I'm asking that people who wish to do so donate to a charity on my behalf instead. The charity I have chosen for this year is St. Oswald's Hospice.

7 November 2017

Reproducible builds folks: Reproducible Builds: Weekly report #132

Here's what happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday October 29 and Saturday November 4 2017: Past events Upcoming events Reproducible work in other projects Packages reviewed and fixed, and bugs filed Reviews of unreproducible packages 7 package reviews have been added, 43 have been updated and 47 have been removed in this week, adding to our knowledge about identified issues. Weekly QA work During our reproducibility testing, FTBFS bugs have been detected and reported by: Documentation updates diffoscope development Version 88 was uploaded to unstable by Mattia Rizzolo. It included contributions (already covered by posts of the previous weeks) from: strip-nondeterminism development Version 0.040-1 was uploaded to unstable by Mattia Rizzolo. It included contributions already covered by posts of the previous weeks, as well as new ones from:
Version 0.5.2-2 was uploaded to unstable by Holger Levsen. It included contributions already covered by posts of the previous weeks, as well as new ones from: reprotest development buildinfo.debian.net development tests.reproducible-builds.org Misc. This week's edition was written by Bernhard M. Wiedemann, Chris Lamb, Mattia Rizzolo & reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC & the mailing lists.

Rog rio Brito: Some activities of the day

Yesterday, I printed the first draft of the first chapter when my little boy was here and he was impressed with this strange object called a "printer". Before I printed what I needed, I fired up LibreOffice and chose the biggest font size that was available and let him type his first name by himself. He was quicker than I thought with a keyboard. After seeing me print his first name, he was jumping up and down with joy of having created something and even showed grandma and grandpa what he had done. He, then, wanted more and I taught him how to use that backspace key, what it meant and he wanted to type his full name. I let him and taught him that there is a key called space that he should type every time he wants to start a new word and, in the end, he typed his first two names. To my surprise, he memorized the icon with the printer (which I must say that I have to hunt every time, since it seems so similar to the adjacent ones!) and pressed this new key called "Enter". When he pressed, he wasn't expecting the printer on his right to start making noises and printing his name. He was so excited and it was so nice to see his reaction full of joy to get a job done! I am thinking of getting a spare computer, building it with him and for him, so that he can call it his computer every time he comes to see daddy. As a serendipitous situation, Packt Publishing offered yesterday their title "Python Projects for Kids". Unfortunately, he does not yet know how to read, but I guess that the right age is coming soon, which is a good thing to make him be educated "the right way" (that is, with the best support, teaching and patience that I can give him). Anyway, I printed the first draft of the first chapter and today I have to turn it in. As I write this, I am downloading a virtual machine from Microsoft to try to install Java on it. Let me see if it works. I have none of the virtualization options used, tough the closest seems to be virtualbox. Let me cross my fingers. In other news, I updated some of the tags of very old posts of this blog, and I am seriously thinking about switching from [ikiwiki][0] to another blog platform. It is slow, very slow on my system with the repositories that I have, especially on my armel system. Some non-interpreted system would be best, but I don't know if such a thing even exists. But the killer problem is that it doesn't support easily the typing of Mathematics (even though a 3rd party plugin for MathJax exists). On the other hand, I just received an answer on twitter from @telegram and it was nice:
Hello, Telegram supports bold and italic. You can type **bold** and __italic__. On mobile, you can also highlight text for this as well.
It is nice that this works with telegram-desktop too. Besides that, I filed some bugs on Debian's BTS, responded to some issues on my projects on GitHub (I'm slowly getting back on maintaining things) and file wishlist bugs on some other projects. Oh, and I grabbed a copy of "Wonder woman" ("Mulher Maravilha") and "Despicable Me 3" ("Meu Malvado Favorito 3") dubbed in Brazilian Portuguese for my son. I have to convert the audio from AAC-LC in 6 channels to AC3 or to stereo. Otherwise, my TVs have problem with the videos (one refuses to play the entire file and another plays the audio with sounds of hiccups). Edit: After converting the VirtualBox image taken from Microsoft, I could easily use qemu/kvm to create screenshots of the installation of Java. The command that I used (for future reference) is: qemu-system-x86_64 -enable-kvm -m 4096 -smp 2 -net nic,model=e1000 -net user -soundhw ac97 -drive index=0,media=disk,cache=unsafe,file=win7.qcow2 Edit: Fixed some typos.

6 November 2017

James Bromberger: Web Security 2017

I started web development around late 1994. Some of my earliest paid web work is still online (dated June 1995). Clearly, that was a simpler time for content! I went on to be Webmaster (yes, for those joining us in the last decade, that was a job title once) for UWA, and then for Hartley Poynton/JDV.com at time when security became important as commerce boomed online. At the dawn of the web era, the consideration of backwards compatibility with older web clients (browsers) was deemed to be important; content had to degrade nicely, even without any CSS being applied. As the years stretched out, the legacy became longer and longer. Until now. In mid-2018, the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard (DSS) 3.2 comes into effect, requiring card holder environments to use (at minimum) TLS 1.2 for the encrypted transfer of data. Of course, that s also the maximum version typically available today (TLS 1.3 is in draft 21 at this point in time of writing). This effort by the PCI is forcing people to adopt new browsers that can do the TLS 1.2 protocol (and the encryption ciphers that permits), typically by running modern/recent Chrome, Firefox, Safari or Edge browsers. And for the majority of people, Chrome is their choice, and the majority of those are all auto-updating on every release. Many are pushing to be compliant with the 2018 PCI DSS 3.2 as early as possible; your logging of negotiated protocols and ciphers will show if your client base is ready as well. I ve already worked with one government agency to demonstrate they were ready, and have already helped disable TLS 1.0 and 1.1 on their public facing web sites (and previously SSL v3). We ve removed RC4 ciphers, 3DES ciphers, and enabled ephemeral key ciphers to provide forward secrecy. Web developers (writing Javascript and using various frameworks) can rejoice the age of having to support legacy MS IE 6/7/8/9/10 is pretty much over. None of those browsers support TLS 1.2 out of the box (IE 10 can turn this on, but for some reason, it is off by default). This makes Javascript code smaller as it doesn t have to have conditional code to work with the quirks of those older clients. But as we find ourselves with modern clients, we can now ask those clients to be complicit in our attempts to secure the content we serve. They understand modern security constructs such as Content Security Policies and other HTTP security-related headers. There s two tools I am currently using to help in this battle to improve web security. One is SSLLabs.com, the work of Ivan Risti (and now owned/sponsored by Qualys). This tool gives a good view of the encryption in flight (protocols, ciphers), chain of trust (certificate), and a new addition of checking DNS records for CAA records (which I and others piled on a feature request for AWS Route53 to support). The second tool is Scott Helm s SecurityHeaders.io, which looks at the HTTP headers that web content uses to ask browsers to enforce security on the client side. There s a really important reason why these tools are good; they are maintained. As new recommendations on ciphers, protocols, signature algorithms or other actions become recommended, they re updated on these tools. And these tools are produced by very small, but agile teams like one person teams, without the bureaucracy (and lag) associated with large enterprise tools. But these shouldn t be used blindly. These services make suggestions, and you should research them yourselves. For some, not all the recommendations may meet your personal risk profile. Personally, I m uncomfortable with Public-Key-Pins, so that can wait for a while indeed, Chrome has now signalled they will drop this. So while PCI is hitting merchants with their DSS-compliance stick (and making it plainly obvious what they have to do), we re getting a side-effect of having a concrete reason for drawing a line under where our backward compatibility must stretch back to, and the ability to have the web client assist in ensure security of content.

John Goerzen: The Yellow House Phone Company (Featuring Asterisk and an 11-year-old)

Well Jacob, do you think we should set up our own pretend phone company in the house? We can DO THAT? Yes! Then yes. Yes! YES YES YESYESYESYES YES! Let s do it, dad! Not long ago, my parents had dug up the old phone I used back in the day. We still have a landline, and Jacob was having fun discovering how an analog phone works. I told him about the special number he could call to get the time and temperature read out to him. He discovered what happens if you call your own number and hang up. He figured out how to play Mary Had a Little Lamb using touchtone keys (after a slightly concerned lecture from me setting out some rules to make sure his musical dialing wouldn t result in any, well, dialing.) He was hooked. So I thought that taking it to the next level would be a good thing for a rainy day. I have run Asterisk before, though I had unfortunately gotten rid of most of my equipment some time back. But I found a great deal on a Cisco 186 ATA (Analog Telephone Adapter). It has two FXS lines (FXS ports simulate the phone company, and provide dialtone and ring voltage to a connected phone), and of course hooks up to the LAN. We plugged that in, and Jacob was amazed to see its web interface come up. I had to figure out how to configure it (unfortunately, it uses SCCP rather than SIP, and figuring out Asterisk s chan_skinny took some doing, but we got there.) I set up voicemail. He loved it. He promptly figured out how to record his own greetings. We set up a second phone on the other line, so he could call between them. The cordless phones in our house support SIP, so I configured one of them as a third line. He spent a long time leaving himself messages. IMG_3465 Pretty soon we both started having ideas. I set up extension 777, where he could call for the time. Then he wanted a way to get the weather forecast. Well, weather-util generates a text-based report. With it, a little sed and grep tweaking, the espeak TTS engine, and a little help from sox, I had a shell script worked up that would read back a forecast whenever he called a certain extension. He was super excited! That s great, dad! Can it also read weather alerts too? Sure! weather-util has a nice option just for that. Both boys cackled as the system tried to read out the NWS header (their timestamps like 201711031258 started with two hundred one billion ) Then I found an online source for streaming NOAA Weather Radio feeds Jacob enjoys listening to weather radio and I set up another extension he could call to listen to that. More delight! But it really took off when I asked him, Would you like to record your own menu? You mean those things where it says press 1 or 2 for this or that? Yes. WE CAN DO THAT? Oh yes! YES, LET S DO IT RIGHT NOW! So he recorded a menu, then came and hovered by me while I hacked up extensions.conf, then eagerly went back to the phone to try it. Oh the excitement of hearing hisown voice, and finding that it worked! Pretty soon he was designing sub-menus ( OK Dad, so we ll set it up so people can press 2 for the weather, and then choose if they want weather radio or the weather report. I m recording that now. Got it? ) He has informed me that next Saturday we will build an intercom system like we have at school. I m going to have to have some ideas on how to tie Squeezebox in with Asterisk to make that happen, I think. Maybe this will do.

5 November 2017

Thorsten Alteholz: My Debian Activities in October 2017

FTP assistant Again, this month almost the same numbers as last month appeared in the statistics. I accepted 214 packages and rejected 22 uploads. The overall number of packages that got accepted this month was only 339. Debian LTS This was my fortieth month that I did some work for the Debian LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian. This month my all in all workload has been 20.75h. During that time I did LTS uploads of: I also took care of radare2 twice and marked all four CVEs as not-affected for Wheezy and Jessie. As nobody else wanted to address the issues in wireshark yet, I now started to work on this package. Last but not least I did one week of frontdesk duties. Other stuff During October I took care of some bugs and at one go uploaded new upstream versions of hoel and duktape (this had to be done twice as I introduced an new bug with the first upload :-(). I only fixed bugs in glewlwyd and smstools. This month I also sponsored an upload of printrun. After about ten years of living without any power outage, some construction worker decided to cut a cable near my place. Unfortunately one of my computers used for recording TV shows did not boot after the cable had been repaired and I had to switch some timers to other boxes. All in all this was too much stress and I purchased some USVs from APC. As apcupsd was orphaned, I took the opportunity to adopt it as DOPOM for this month. My license pasting project now contains 31 license templates for your debian/copyright. The list of available texts can be obtained with:

curl http://licapi.debian.net/template

The license text itself is available under the given links, for example with

curl http://licapi.debian.net/template/Apache-2

Russ Allbery: Review: Sweep in Peace

Review: Sweep in Peace, by Ilona Andrews
Series: Innkeeper Chronicles #2
Publisher: NYLA
Copyright: 2015
ISBN: 1-943772-32-0
Format: Kindle
Pages: 302
This is the sequel to Clean Sweep. You could pick up the background as you go along, but the character relationships benefit from reading the series in order. Dina's inn is doing a bit better, but it still desperately needs guests. That means she's not really in a position to say no when an Arbitrator shows up at her door and asks her to host a peace summit. Lucky for the Arbitrator, since every other inn on Earth did say no. Nexus has been the site of a viciously bloody conflict between the vampires, the Hope-Crushing Horde, and the Merchants of Baha-char for years. All sides have despaired of finding any form of peace. The vampires and the Horde have both deeply entrenched themselves in a cycle of revenge. The Merchants have the most strategic position and an apparently unstoppable warrior. The situation is hopeless; by far the most likely outcome will be open warfare inside the inn, which would destroy its rating and probably Dina's future as an innkeeper. Dina will need all of her power and caution just to stop that; peace seems beyond any possibility, but thankfully isn't her problem. Maybe the Arbitrator can work some miracle if she can just keep everyone alive. And well fed. Which is another problem. She has enough emergency money for the food, but somehow cook for forty people from four different species while keeping them all from killing each other? Not a chance. She's going to have to hire someone somehow, someone good, even though she can't afford to pay. Sweep in Peace takes this series farther out of urban fantasy territory and farther into science fiction, and also ups the stakes (and the quality of the plot) a notch. We get three moderately interesting alien species with only slight trappings of fantasy, a wonderful alien chef who seems destined to become a regular in the series, and a legitimately tricky political situation. The politics and motives aren't going to win any awards for deep and subtle characterization, but that isn't what the book is going for. It's trying to throw enough challenges at Dina to let her best characteristics shine, and it does that rather well. The inn continues to be wonderful, although I hope it becomes more of a character in its own right as the series continues. Dina's reshaping of it for guests, and her skill at figuring out the rooms her guests would enjoy, is my favorite part of these books. She cares about making rooms match the personality of her guests, and I love books that give the character a profession that matters to them even if it's unrelated to the plot. I do wish Andrews would find a few other ways for Dina to use her powers for combat beyond tentacles and burying people in floors, but that's mostly a quibble. You should still not expect great literature. I guessed the big plot twist several chapters before it happened, and the resolution is, well, not how these sorts of political situations resolve in the real world. But there is not a stupid love affair, there are several interesting characters, and one of the recurring characters gets pretty solid and somewhat unusual characterization. And despite taking the plot in a more serious direction, Sweep in Peace retains its generally lighthearted tone and firm conviction in Dina's ability to handle just about anything. Also, the chef is wonderful. One note: Partway into the book, I started getting that "oh, this is a crossover" feeling (well-honed by years of reading comic books). As near as I can tell from a bit of research, Andrews pulled in some of their characters from the Edge series. This was a bit awkward, in the "who are these people and why do they seem to have more backstory than any of the other supporting characters" cross-over sort of way, but the characters that were pulled in were rather intriguing. I might have to go read the Edge books now. Anyway, if you liked Clean Sweep, this is better in pretty much every way. Recommended. Followed by One Fell Sweep. Rating: 8 out of 10

4 November 2017

Steinar H. Gunderson: Tr ndisk 2017 live stream

We're streaming live from Tr ndisk 2017, first round of the Norwegian ultimate frisbee series, today from 0945 CET and throughout the day/weekend. It's an interesting first for Nageru in that it's sports, where everything happens much faster and there are more demands for overlay graphics (I've made a bunch of CasparCG templates). I had hoped to get to use Narabu in this, but as the (unfinished) post series indicates, I simply had to prioritize other things. There's plenty of new things for us anyway, not the least that I'll be playing and not operating. :-) Feel free to tune in to the live stream, although we don't have international stream reflectors. It's a fun sport with many nice properties. :-) There will be YouTube not too long after the day is over, too. Edit: All games from Saturday and Sunday are now online; see this YouTube list. Most commentary is in Norwegian, although some games are in English. I was happy everything worked well, and the production crew did a great job (I was busy playing), but of course there's tons of small things we want to improve for next time.

3 November 2017

Reproducible builds folks: Reproducible Builds: Weekly report #131

Here's what happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday October 22 and Saturday October 28 2017: Past Events Upcoming/current events Documentation updates Bernhard Wiedemann started The Unreproducible Package which "is meant as a practical way to demonstrate the various ways that software can break reproducible builds using just low level primitives without requiring external existing programs that implement these primitives themselves. It is structured so that one subdirectory demonstrates one class of issues in some variants observed in the wild." Reproducible work in other projects Hush, a fork of ZCash, opened an issue into reproducible builds. A new tag was added to lintian (lint checker for Debian packages) to ensure that changelog entry timestamps are strictly increasing. This avoids certain real-world issues with identical timestamps, documented in Debian #843773. Packages reviewed and fixed, and bugs filed Patches sent upstream: Debian bug reports: Reviews of unreproducible packages 14 package reviews have been added, 35 have been updated and 28 have been removed in this week, adding to our knowledge about identified issues. 1 issue type has been updated: Weekly QA work During our reproducibility testing, FTBFS bugs have been detected and reported by: strip-nondeterminism development Version 0.040-1 was uploaded to unstable by Mattia Rizzolo. It included contributions already covered by posts of the previous weeks, as well as new ones from: reprotest development Development continued in git: buildinfo.debian.net development Development continued in git: reproducible-website development Misc. This week's edition was written by Ximin Luo, Chris Lamb, Bernhard M. Wiedemann and Holger Levsen & reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC & the mailing lists.

Russell Coker: Work Stuff

Does anyone know of a Linux support company that provides 24*7 support to Ruby and PHP applications? I have a client that is looking for such a company. Also I m looking for more consulting work. If anyone knows of an organisation that needs some SE Linux consulting, or support for any of the FOSS software I ve written then let me know. I take payment by Paypal and Bitcoin as well as all the usual ways. I can make a private build of any of my FOSS software to suit your requirements or if you want features that could be used by other people (and don t conflict with the general use cases) I can add them on request. Small changes start at $100.
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2 November 2017

Antoine Beaupr : October 2017 report: LTS, feed2exec beta, pandoc filters, git mediawiki

Debian Long Term Support (LTS) This is my monthly Debian LTS report. This time I worked on the famous KRACK attack, git-annex, golang and the continuous stream of GraphicsMagick security issues.

WPA & KRACK update I spent most of my time this month on the Linux WPA code, to backport it to the old (~2012) wpa_supplicant release. I first published a patchset based on the patches shipped after the embargo for the oldstable/jessie release. After feedback from the list, I also built packages for i386 and ARM. I have also reviewed the WPA protocol to make sure I understood the implications of the changes required to backport the patches. For example, I removed the patches touching the WNM sleep mode code as that was introduced only in the 2.0 release. Chunks of code regarding state tracking were also not backported as they are part of the state tracking code introduced later, in 3ff3323. Finally, I still have concerns about the nonce setup in patch #5. In the last chunk, you'll notice peer->tk is reset, to_set to negotiate a new TK. The other approach I considered was to backport 1380fcbd9f ("TDLS: Do not modify RNonce for an TPK M1 frame with same INonce") but I figured I would play it safe and not introduce further variations. I should note that I share Matthew Green's observations regarding the opacity of the protocol. Normally, network protocols are freely available and security researchers like me can easily review them. In this case, I would have needed to read the opaque 802.11i-2004 pdf which is behind a TOS wall at the IEEE. I ended up reading up on the IEEE_802.11i-2004 Wikipedia article which gives a simpler view of the protocol. But it's a real problem to see such critical protocols developed behind closed doors like this. At Guido's suggestion, I sent the final patch upstream explaining the concerns I had with the patch. I have not, at the time of writing, received any response from upstream about this, unfortunately. I uploaded the fixed packages as DLA 1150-1 on October 31st.

Git-annex The next big chunk on my list was completing the work on git-annex (CVE-2017-12976) that I started in August. It turns out doing the backport was simpler than I expected, even with my rusty experience with Haskell. Type-checking really helps in doing the right thing, especially considering how Joey Hess implemented the fix: by introducing a new type. So I backported the patch from upstream and notified the security team that the jessie and stretch updates would be similarly easy. I shipped the backport to LTS as DLA-1144-1. I also shared the updated packages for jessie (which required a similar backport) and stretch (which didn't) and those Sebastien Delafond published those as DSA 4010-1.

Graphicsmagick Up next was yet another security vulnerability in the Graphicsmagick stack. This involved the usual deep dive into intricate and sometimes just unreasonable C code to try and fit a round tree in a square sinkhole. I'm always unsure about those patches, but the test suite passes, smoke tests show the vulnerability as fixed, and that's pretty much as good as it gets. The announcement (DLA 1154-1) turned out to be a little special because I had previously noticed that the penultimate announcement (DLA 1130-1) was never sent out. So I made a merged announcement to cover both instead of re-sending the original 3 weeks late, which may have been confusing for our users.

Triage & misc We always do a bit of triage even when not on frontdesk duty, so I: I also did smaller bits of work on: The latter reminded me of the concerns I have about the long-term maintainability of the golang ecosystem: because everything is statically linked, an update to a core library (say the SMTP library as in CVE-2017-15042, thankfully not affecting LTS) requires a full rebuild of all packages including the library in all distributions. So what would be a simple update in a shared library system could mean an explosion of work on statically linked infrastructures. This is a lot of work which can definitely be error-prone: as I've seen in other updates, some packages (for example the Ruby interpreter) just bit-rot on their own and eventually fail to build from source. We would also have to investigate all packages to see which one include the library, something which we are not well equipped for at this point. Wheezy was the first release shipping golang packages but at least it's shipping only one... Stretch has shipped with two golang versions (1.7 and 1.8) which will make maintenance ever harder in the long term.
We build our computers the way we build our cities--over time, without a plan, on top of ruins. - Ellen Ullman

Other free software work This month again, I was busy doing some serious yak shaving operations all over the internet, on top of publishing two of my largest LWN articles to date (2017-10-16-strategies-offline-pgp-key-storage and 2017-10-26-comparison-cryptographic-keycards).

feed2exec beta Since I announced this new project last month I have released it as a beta and it entered Debian. I have also wrote useful plugins like the wayback plugin that saves pages on the Wayback machine for eternal archival. The archive plugin can also similarly save pages to the local filesystem. I also added bash completion, expanded unit tests and documentation, fixed default file paths and a bunch of bugs, and refactored the code. Finally, I also started using two external Python libraries instead of rolling my own code: the pyxdg and requests-file libraries, the latter which I packaged in Debian (and fixed a bug in their test suite). The program is working pretty well for me. The only thing I feel is really missing now is a retry/fail mechanism. Right now, it's a little brittle: any network hiccup will yield an error email, which are readable to me but could be confusing to a new user. Strangely enough, I am particularly having trouble with (local!) DNS resolution that I need to look into, but that is probably unrelated with the software itself. Thankfully, the user can disable those with --loglevel=ERROR to silence WARNINGs. Furthermore, some plugins still have some rough edges. For example, The Transmission integration would probably work better as a distinct plugin instead of a simple exec call, because when it adds new torrents, the output is totally cryptic. That plugin could also leverage more feed parameters to save different files in different locations depending on the feed titles, something would be hard to do safely with the exec plugin now. I am keeping a steady flow of releases. I wish there was a way to see how effective I am at reaching out with this project, but unfortunately GitLab doesn't provide usage statistics... And I have received only a few comments on IRC about the project, so maybe I need to reach out more like it says in the fine manual. Always feels strange to have to promote your project like it's some new bubbly soap... Next steps for the project is a final review of the API and release production-ready 1.0.0. I am also thinking of making a small screencast to show the basic capabilities of the software, maybe with asciinema's upcoming audio support?

Pandoc filters As I mentioned earlier, I dove again in Haskell programming when working on the git-annex security update. But I also have a small Haskell program of my own - a Pandoc filter that I use to convert the HTML articles I publish on LWN.net into a Ikiwiki-compatible markdown version. It turns out the script was still missing a bunch of stuff: image sizes, proper table formatting, etc. I also worked hard on automating more bits of the publishing workflow by extracting the time from the article which allowed me to simply extract the full article into an almost final copy just by specifying the article ID. The only thing left is to add tags, and the article is complete. In the process, I learned about new weird Haskell constructs. Take this code, for example: 
-- remove needless blockquote wrapper around some tables
--
-- haskell newbie tips:
--
-- @ is the "at-pattern", allows us to define both a name for the
-- construct and inspect the contents as once
--
--   is the "empty record pattern": it basically means "match the
-- arguments but ignore the args"
cleanBlock (BlockQuote t@[Table  ]) = t
Here the idea is to remove <blockquote> elements needlessly wrapping a <table>. I can't specify the Table type on its own, because then I couldn't address the table as a whole, only its parts. I could reconstruct the whole table bits by bits, but it wasn't as clean. The other pattern was how to, at last, address multiple string elements, which was difficult because Pandoc treats spaces specially: 
cleanBlock (Plain (Strong (Str "Notifications":Space:Str "for":Space:Str "all":Space:Str "responses":_):_)) = []
The last bit that drove me crazy was the date parsing: 
-- the "GAByline" div has a date, use it to generate the ikiwiki dates
--
-- this is distinct from cleanBlock because we do not want to have to
-- deal with time there: it is only here we need it, and we need to
-- pass it in here because we do not want to mess with IO (time is I/O
-- in haskell) all across the function hierarchy
cleanDates :: ZonedTime -> Block -> [Block]
-- this mouthful is just the way the data comes in from
-- LWN/Pandoc. there could be a cleaner way to represent this,
-- possibly with a record, but this is complicated and obscure enough.
cleanDates time (Div (_, [cls], _)
                 [Para [Str month, Space, Str day, Space, Str year], Para _])
    cls == "GAByline" = ikiwikiRawInline (ikiwikiMetaField "date"
                                           (iso8601Format (parseTimeOrError True defaultTimeLocale "%Y-%B-%e,"
                                                           (year ++ "-" ++ month ++ "-" ++ day) :: ZonedTime)))
                        ++ ikiwikiRawInline (ikiwikiMetaField "updated"
                                             (iso8601Format time))
                        ++ [Para []]
-- other elements just pass through
cleanDates time x = [x]
Now that seems just dirty, but it was even worse before. One thing I find difficult in adapting to coding in Haskell is that you need to take the habit of writing smaller functions. The language is really not well adapted to long discourse: it's more about getting small things connected together. Other languages (e.g. Python) discourage this because there's some overhead in calling functions (10 nanoseconds in my tests, but still), whereas functions are a fundamental and important construction in Haskell that are much more heavily optimized. So I constantly need to remind myself to split things up early, otherwise I can't do anything in Haskell. Other languages are more lenient, which does mean my code can be more dirty, but I feel get things done faster then. The oddity of Haskell makes frustrating to work with. It's like doing construction work but you're not allowed to get the floor dirty. When I build stuff, I don't mind things being dirty: I can cleanup afterwards. This is especially critical when you don't actually know how to make things clean in the first place, as Haskell will simply not let you do that at all. And obviously, I fought with Monads, or, more specifically, "I/O" or IO in this case. Turns out that getting the current time is IO in Haskell: indeed, it's not a "pure" function that will always return the same thing. But this means that I would have had to change the signature of all the functions that touched time to include IO. I eventually moved the time initialization up into main so that I had only one IO function and moved that timestamp downwards as simple argument. That way I could keep the rest of the code clean, which seems to be an acceptable pattern. I would of course be happy to get feedback from my Haskell readers (if any) to see how to improve that code. I am always eager to learn.

Git remote MediaWiki Few people know that there is a MediaWiki remote for Git which allow you to mirror a MediaWiki site as a Git repository. As a disaster recovery mechanism, I have been keeping such a historical backup of the Amateur radio wiki for a while now. This originally started as a homegrown Python script to also convert the contents in Markdown. My theory then was to see if we could switch from Mediawiki to Ikiwiki, but it took so long to implement that I never completed the work. When someone had the weird idea of renaming a page to some impossible long name on the wiki, my script broke. I tried to look at fixing it and then remember I also had a mirror running using the Git remote. It turns out it also broke on the same issue and that got me looking in the remote again. I got lost in a zillion issues, including fixing that specific issue, but I especially looked at the possibility of fetching all namespaces because I realized that the remote fetches only a part of the wiki by default. And that drove me to submit namespace support as a patch to the git mailing list. Finally, the discussion came back to how to actually maintain that contrib: in git core or outside? Finally, it looks like I'll be doing some maintenance that project outside of git, as I was granted access to the GitHub organisation...

Galore Yak Shaving Then there's the usual hodgepodge of fixes and random things I did over the month.
There is no [web extension] only XUL! - Inside joke

1 November 2017

Steve Kemp: Possibly retiring blogspam.net

For the past few years I've hosted a service for spam-testing blog/forum comments, and I think it is on the verge of being retired. The blogspam.net service presented a simple API for deciding whether an incoming blog/forum comment was SPAM, in real-time. I used it myself for two real reasons: As a result of the Debian-Administration server cleanup I'm still in the process of tidying up virtual machines, and servers. It crossed my mind that retiring this spam-service would allow me to free up another host. Initially the service was coded in Perl using XML/RPC. The current version of the software, version 2, is written as a node.js service, and despite the async-nature of the service it is still too heavy-weight to live on the host which runs most of my other websites. It was suggested to me that rewriting it in golang might allow it to process more requests, with fewer resources, so I started reimplementing the service in golang at 4AM this morning: The service does the minimum: I've ported several plugins, I've got 100% test-coverage of those plugins, and the service seems to be faster than the node.js version - so there is hope. Of course the real test will be when it is deployed for real. If it holds up for a few days I'll leave it running. Otherwise the retirement notice I placed on the website, which chances are nobody will see, will be true. The missing feature at the moment is keeping track of the count of spam-comments rejected/accepted on a per-site basis. Losing that information might be a shame, but I think I'm willing to live with it, if the alternative is closing down..

Bernd Zeimetz: Connecting your 3D printer to OctoPrint automatically

Recently I joined the group of 3d printer owners and OctoPrint users. After some days I got annoyed by the fact that so far nobody seems to have thought about automatically connecting a printer to OctoPrint after turning the printer on. If you start OctoPrint after your printer, everything works fine. But here OctoPrint runs 24 7 but I turn off the printer when it is done with printing. My solution of the problem is based on udev and systemd and should work on most recent Linux installations.

James McCoy: Monthly FLOSS activity - 2017/10 edition

Debian subversion vim
libvterm
pangoterm
vim-gnupg
neovim
vim

31 October 2017

Paul Wise: FLOSS Activities October 2017

Changes

Issues

Review

Administration
  • Debian: respond to mail debug request, redirect hardware access seeker to guest account, redirect hardware donors to porters, redirect interview seeker to DPL, reboot system with dead service
  • Debian mentors: security updates, reboot
  • Debian wiki: upgrade search db format, remove incorrect bans, whitelist email addresses, disable accounts with bouncing email, update email for accounts with bouncing email
  • Debian website: remove need for a website rebuild
  • Openmoko: restart web server, set web server process limits, install monitoring tool

Sponsors The talloc/cmocka uploads and the remmina issue were sponsored by my employer. All other work was done on a volunteer basis.

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