• Run a test-job that SSH's to the live systems, and tests syntax.
  • Via pfctl -n -f /path/to/rules/pf.conf.
• Write a tool on your Linux hosts to parse and validate the rules.

  deagol ~/pf.ctl $ ./pfctl ./pf.conf
  ./pf.conf:298: macro 'undefined_variable' not defined
  ./pf.conf:298: syntax error

vlans=" vlan1,vlan2 "
..
pass out on $vlans proto udp from $undefined_variable

pass out on vlan12 inet proto tcp from <unknown> to $http_server port  80,443 

  deagol ~/pf.ctl $ tree
  .
    inc
      net
        pfvar.h
      queue.h
      sys
          _null.h
          refcnt.h
          tree.h
    Makefile
    parse.y
    pf.conf
    pfctl.h
    pfctl_parser.h
    y.tab.c
  3 directories, 11 files

Why not GitLab? While this may come as a surprise to some who would expect Debian to use the more popular GitLab project, the discussion and decision actually took place a while back. During a lengthy debate last year, Debian contributors discussed the relative merits of different code-hosting platforms, following the initiative of Debian Developer "Pirate" Praveen Arimbrathodiyil to package GitLab for Debian. At that time, Praveen also got a public GitLab instance running for Debian (gitlab.debian.net), which was sponsored by GitLab B.V. the commercial entity behind the GitLab project. The sponsorship was originally offered in 2015 by the GitLab CEO, presumably to counter a possible move to GitHub, as there was a discussion about creating a GitHub Organization for Debian at the time. The deployment of a Debian-specific GitLab instance then raised the question of the overlap with the already existing git.debian.org service, which is backed by Alioth's FusionForge deployment. It then seemed natural that the new GitLab instance would replace Alioth. But when Praveen directly proposed to move to GitLab, Wirt stepped in and explained that a migration plan was already in progress. The plan then was to migrate to a simpler gitolite-based setup, a decision that was apparently made in corridor discussions surrounding the Alioth Git replacement BoF held during Debconf 2015. The first objection raised by Wirt against GitLab was its "huge number of dependencies". Another issue Wirt identified was the "open core / enterprise model", preferring a "real open source system", an opinion which seems shared by other participants on the mailing list. Wirt backed his concerns with an hypothetical example:

Debian needs feature X but it is already in the enterprise version. We make a patch and, for commercial reasons, it never gets merged (they already sell it in the enterprise version). Which means we will have to fork the software and keep those patches forever. Been there done that. For me, that isn't acceptable.

This concern was further deepened when GitLab's Director of Strategic Partnerships, Eliran Mesika, explained the company's stewardship policy that explains how GitLab decides which features end up in the proprietary version. Praveen pointed out that:

[...] basically it boils down to features that they consider important for organizations with less than 100 developers may get accepted. I see that as a red flag for a big community like debian.

Since there are over 600 Debian Developers, the community seems to fall within the needs of "enterprise" users. The features the Debian community may need are, by definition, appropriate only to the "Enterprise Edition" (GitLab EE), the non-free version, and are therefore unlikely to end up in the "Community Edition" (GitLab CE), the free-software version. Interestingly, Mesika asked for clarification on which features were missing, explaining that GitLab is actually open to adding features to GitLab CE. The response from Debian Developer Holger Levsen was categorical: "It's not about a specific patch. Free GitLab and we can talk again." But beyond the practical and ethical concerns, some specific features Debian needs are currently only in GitLab EE. For example, debian.org systems use LDAP for authentication, which would obviously be useful in a GitLab deployment; GitLab CE supports basic LDAP authentication, but advanced features, like group or SSH-key synchronization, are only available in GitLab EE. Wirt also expressed concern about the Contributor License Agreement that GitLab B.V. requires contributors to sign when they send patches, which forces users to allow the release of their code under a non-free license. The debate then went on going through a exhaustive inventory of different free-software alternatives:

• GitLab, a Ruby-based GitHub replacement, dual-licensed MIT/Commercial
• Gogs, Go, MIT
• Gitblit, Java, Apache-licensed
• Kallithea, in Python, also supports Mercurial, GPLv3
• and finally, pagure, also written Python, GPLv2

A feature comparison between each project was created in the Debian wiki as well. In the end, however, Praveen gave up on replacing Alioth with GitLab because of the controversy and moved on to support the pagure migration, which resolved the discussion in July 2016. More recently, Wirt admitted in an IRC conversation that "on the technical side I like GitLab a lot more than pagure" and that "as a user, GitLab is much nicer than pagure and it has those nice CI [continuous integration] features". However, as he explained in his blog "GitLab is Opencore, [and] that it is not entirely opensource. I don't think we should use software licensed under such a model for one of our core services" which leaves pagure as the only stable candidate. Other candidates were excluded on technical grounds, according to Wirt: Gogs "doesn't scale well" and a quick security check didn't yield satisfactory results; "Gitblit is Java" and Kallithea doesn't have support for accessing repositories over SSH (although there is a pending pull request to add the feature). In an email interview, Sid Sijbrandij, CEO of GitLab, did say that "we want to make sure that our open source edition can be used by open source projects". He gave examples of features liberated following requests by the community, such as branded login pages for the VLC project and GitLab Pages after popular demand. He stressed that "There are no artificial limits in our open source edition and some organizations use it with more than 20.000 users." So if the concern of the Debian community is that features may be missing from GitLab CE, there is definitely an opening from GitLab to add those features. If, however, the concern is purely ethical, it's hard to see how an agreement could be reached. As Sijbrandij put it:

On the mailinglist it seemed that some Debian maintainers do not agree with our open core business model and demand that there is no proprietary version. We respect that position but we don't think we can compete with the purely proprietary software like GitHub with this model.

Working toward a pagure migration The issue of Alioth maintenance came up again last month when Boyuan Yang asked what would happen to Alioth when support for Debian LTS (Wheezy) ends next year. Wirt brought up the pagure migration proposal and the community tried to make a plan for the migration. One of the issues raised was the question of the non-Git repositories hosted on Alioth, as pagure, like GitLab, only supports Git. Indeed, Ben Hutchings calculated that while 90% (\~19,000) of the repositories currently on Alioth are Git, there are 2,400 SVN repositories and a handful of Mercurial, Bazaar (bzr), Darcs, Arch, and even CVS repositories. As part of an informal survey, however, most packaging teams explained they either had already migrated away from SVN to Git or were in the process of doing so. The largest CVS user, the web site team, also explained it was progressively migrating to Git. Mattia Rizzolo then proposed that older repository services like SVN could continue running even if FusionForge goes down, as FusionForge is, after all, just a web interface to manage those back-end services. Repository creation would be disabled, but older repositories would stay operational until they migrate to Git. This would, effectively, mean the end of non-Git repository support for new projects in the Debian community, at least officially. Another issue is the creation of a Debian package for pagure. Ironically, while Praveen and other Debian maintainers have been working for 5 years to package GitLab for Debian, pagure isn't packaged yet. Antonio Terceiro, another Debian Developer, explained this isn't actually a large problem for debian.org services: "note that DSA [Debian System Administrator team] does not need/want the service software itself packaged, only its dependencies". Indeed, for Debian-specific code bases like ci.debian.net or tracker.debian.org, it may not make sense to have the overhead of maintaining Debian packages since those tools have limited use outside of the Debian project directly. While Debian derivatives and other distributions could reuse them, what usually happens is that other distributions roll their own software, like Ubuntu did with the Launchpad project. Still, Paul Wise, a member of the DSA team, reasoned that it was better, in the long term, to have Debian packages for debian.org services:

Personally I'm leaning towards the feeling that all configuration, code and dependencies for Debian services should be packaged and subjected to the usual Debian QA activities but I acknowledge that the current archive setup (testing migration plus backporting etc) doesn't necessarily make this easy.

Wise did say that "DSA doesn't have any hard rules/policy written down, just evaluation on a case-by-case basis" which probably means that pagure packaging will not be a blocker for deployment. The last pending issue is the question of the mailing lists hosted on Alioth, as pagure doesn't offer mailing list management (nor does GitLab). In fact, there are three different mailing list services for the Debian project:

• the main service, lists.debian.org, running ~~Mailman 2~~ SmartList and managed by hand
• the Alioth service, lists.alioth.debian.org, running Mailman 2 and managed by FusionForge
• the Debconf service, lists.debconf.org, also running Mailman 2

Wirt, with his "list-master hat" on, explained that the main mailing list service is "not really suited as a self-service" and expressed concern at the idea of migrating the large number mailing lists hosted on Alioth. Indeed, there are around 1,400 lists on Alioth while the main service has a set of 300 lists selected by the list masters. No solution for those mailing lists was found at the time of this writing. In the end, it seems like the Debian project has chosen pagure, the simpler, less featureful, but also less controversial, solution and will use the same hosting software as their fellow Linux distribution, Fedora. Wirt is also considering using FreeIPA for account management on top of pagure. The plan is to migrate away from FusionForge one bit at a time, and pagure is the solution for the first step: the Git repositories. Lists, other repositories, and additional features of FusionForge will be dealt with later on, but Wirt expects a plan to come out of the upcoming sprint. It will also be interesting to see how the interoperability promises of pagure will play out in the Debian world. Even though the federation features of pagure are still at the early stages, one can already clone issues and pull requests as Git repositories, which allows for a crude federation mechanism. In any case, given the long history and the wide variety of workflows in the Debian project, it is unlikely that a single tool will solve all problems. Alioth itself has significant overlap with other Debian services; not only does it handle mailing lists and forums, but it also has its own issue tracker that overlaps with the Debian bug tracking system (BTS). This is just the way things are in Debian: it is an old project with lots of moving part. As Jonathan Dowland put it: "The nature of the project is loosely-coupled, some redundancy, lots of legacy cruft, and sadly more than one way to do it." Hopefully, pagure will not become part of that "legacy redundant cruft". But at this point, the focus is on keeping the services running in a simpler, more maintainable way. The discussions between Debian and GitLab are still going on as we speak, but given how controversial the "open core" model used by GitLab is for the Debian community, pagure does seem like a more logical alternative.

Note: this article first appeared in the Linux Weekly News.

• linux: Current 3.18 based package from Debian experimental (3.18.5-1~exp1 at the time of this writing) with a stack of patches on top from the raspberrypi github repository and tweaked to build an rpi2 flavour as the patchset isn't multiplatform capable
• raspberrypi-firmware-nokernel: Firmware package and misc libraries packages taken from Raspbian, with a slight tweak to install in /boot/firmware rather then /boot.
• flash-kernel: Current flash-kernel package from debian experimental, with a small addition to detect the RPI 2 and "flash" the kernel to /boot/firmware/kernel7.img (which is what the GPU will try to boot on this board).

• /srv/armhf-vm-boot is setup to be the 9p shared folder (this should exist and owned by the libvirt-qemu user) that will be used for sharing /boot later
• the kernel args are setup to setup root= with root partition intended to be used in the VM, adjust for your usage.
• The image file to use the virtio bus, which doesn't seem the default.

virt-install --name armhf-vm --arch armv7l --memory 512 \
  --disk /srv/armhf-vm.img,bus=virtio
  --filesystem /srv/armhf-vm-boot,virtio-boot,mode=mapped \
  --boot=kernel=/tmp/vmlinuz,initrd=/tmp/initrd.gz,kernel_args="console=ttyAMA0,root=/dev/vda1"

virtio-boot /boot  9p trans=virtio,version=9p2000.L,x-systemd.automount 0 0

vm=$1
action=$2
bootdir=/srv/$ vm -boot
if [ $ action  != "prepare" ] ; then
  exit 0
fi
if [ ! -d $ bootdir  ] ; then
  exit 0
fi
ln -sf $(basename $(cat $ bootdir /vmlinuz))  $ bootdir /virtio-vmlinuz
ln -sf $(basename $(cat $ bootdir /initrd.img))  $ bootdir /virtio-initrd.img

• [1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DesktopExperienceTeam/ApplicationIndicators
• [2] https://github.com/ArcticaProject/arctica-greeter
• [3] https://launchpad.net/ayatana
• [4] https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=pkg-ayatana-devel%40lists.alio...

** libs
Error in .shlib_internal(args) : 
  C++14 standard requested but CXX14 is not defined

#!/bin/bash
## Travis can let us run R 3.4.0 (from CRAN and the PPAs) but this R version
## does not know about C++14.  Even though we can select CXX_STD = C++14, R
## will fail as the version we use there was built in too old an environment,
## namely Ubuntu "trusty" 14.04.
##
## So we install g++-6 from another repo and rely on the fact that is
## defaults to C++14.  Sadly, we need R to not fail and hence, just on
## Travis, remove the C++14 instruction
if [[ "$ CI " == "true" ]]; then
    if [[ "$ TRAVIS " == "true" ]]; then 
        echo "** Overriding src/Makevars and removing C++14 on Travis only"
        sed -i 's CXX_STD = CXX14 ' src/Makevars
    fi
fi

• Chris Lamb: #864082 filed against fontconfig, forwarded upstream

• Adrian Bunk (4)
• Chris Lamb (1)
• Christoph Biedl (1)
• Niko Tyni (1)

• build: ensure that flock is available for make download (Felix Fietkau)
• include/toplevel: set env GIT_ASKPASS=/bin/true (Alexander 'lynxis' Couzens)

• Chris Lamb: Some code style improvements

• Build tar before downloading everything: On system without tar --sort=name we need to compile tar before downloading everything
• Set CONFIG_AUTOREMOVE to reduce required space
• Create a workaround for signing keys: LEDE signs the release with a signing key, but generates the signing key if it's not present. To have a reproducible release we need to take care of signing keys.
• openwrt_get_banner(): use staging_dir instead of build_dir because the former is persistent among the two builds.
• Don't build all packages to improve development speed for now.
• Only build one board instead of all boards. Reducing the build time improves developing speed. Once the image is reproducible we will enable more boards.
• Disable node_cleanup_tmpdirs

• Do full git reset/clean like Jenkins does
• hard code WORKSPACE dir names, as WORKSPACE cannot be generated from $0 as it's a temporary name.

• Remote scheduler:
  • English fix to error message.
  • Allow multiple architectures in one invocation.
  • Refactor: Break out a helper function. Rename variable to disambiguate with scheduling_args.message.
• Include timestamps in logs
• Set timestamps to second resolution (was millisecond by default).

• Improvements to the breakages page:
  • List broken packages and diffoscope problems first, and t.r-b.o problems last.
  • Reword, drop 'caused by'.
• Add niceness to our list of variations, running with niceness of 11 for the first build and niceness of 10 for the second one. Thanks to Vagrant for the idea.
• Automatic scheduler:
  • Reschedule after 12h packages that failed with error 404
  • Run scheduler every 3h instead of every 6h
• Add basic README about the infrastructure and merge Vagrants notes about his console host.

Git repository set up

I had already set up a repository at GitLab; right now, the contents are far from useful, they merely document what I have done so far. I have started talking with my Costa Rican friend Leo Arias, who is also interested in putting some muscle behind this translation, and we are both the admins to this project.

Talked with the authors

Sarah is quite enthusiastic about us making this! I asked her to hold a little bit before officially announcing there is work ongoing... I want to get bits of infrastructure ironed out first. Important Talking with her, she discussed the tools they used for authoring the book. It made me less of a purist :) Instead of starting from something "pristine", our master source will be the PDF export of the Google Docs document.

Markdown conversion

Given that translation tools work over the bits of plaintext, we want to work with the "plainest" rendition of the document, which is Markdown. I found that Pandoc does a very good approximation to what we need (that is, introduces very little "ugly" markup elements). Converting the ODT into Markdown is as easy as:
$ pandoc -f odt MadewithCreativeCommonsmostup-to-dateversion.odt -t markdown > MadewithCreativeCommonsmostup-to-dateversion.md
Of course, I want to fine-tune this as much as possible.

Producing a translatable .po file

I have used Gettext to translate user interfaces; it is a tool very well crafted for that task. Translating a book is quite different: How and where does it break and join? How are paragraphs "strung" together into chapters, parts, a book? That's a task for PO 4 Anything (po4a). As simple as this:
po4a-gettextize -f text -m MadewithCreativeCommonsmostup-to-dateversion.md -p MadewithCreativeCommonsmostup-to-dateversion.po -M utf-8
I tested the resulting file with my good ol' trusty poedit, and it works... Very nicely!

• I made an account and asked for hosting at Weblate. I have not discussed this with Leo, so I hope he will agree ;-) Weblate is a Web-based infrastructure for collaborative text translation, provided by Debian's Michal iha . It integrates nicely with version control systems, preserves credit for each translated string (and I understand, but might be mistaken, that it understands the role of "editors", so that Leo and I will be able to do QA on the translation done by whoever joins us, trying to have a homogeneous-sounding result. I hope the project is approved for Weblate soon!
• Work on reconstructing the book. One thing is to deconstruct, find paragraphs, turn them into translatable strings... And a very different one is to build a book again from there! I have talked with some people to help me get this in shape. It is basically just configuring Pandoc But as I have never done that, any help will be most, most welcome!
• Setting translation policies. What kind of language will we use? How will we refer to English names and terms? All that important stuff to give proper quality to our work
• Of course, the long work itself: Performing the translations

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

domain=int.foobar.example
dhcp-range=192.168.0.240,192.168.0.242,255.255.255.0,1h
dhcp-boot=bootnetx64.efi
pxe-service=X86-64_EFI, "Boot UEFI PXE-64", bootnetx64.efi
enable-tftp
tftp-root=/usr/lib/debian-installer/images/8/amd64/text
dhcp-option=3,192.168.0.1
dhcp-host=00:c0:ff:ee:00:01,192.168.0.123,foobar-01

set default="0"
set timeout=5

 linux    /debian-installer/amd64/linux vga=788 --- auto=true interface=eth1 netcfg/dhcp_timeout=60 netcfg/choose_interface=eth1 priority=critical preseed/url=tftp://192.168.0.2/preseed.cfg quiet

• tftp host IP is our dnsmasq host.
• Within d-i we see our NIC we booted from as eth1. eth0 is the shared on-board ilo interface. That differs e.g. within grml where it's eth2.

# auto method must be lvm
d-i partman-auto/method string lvm
d-i partman-lvm/device_remove_lvm boolean true
d-i partman-md/device_remove_md boolean true
d-i partman-lvm/confirm boolean true
d-i partman-lvm/confirm_nooverwrite boolean true
d-i partman-basicfilesystems/no_swap boolean false
# Keep that one set to true so we end up with a UEFI enabled
# system. If set to false, /var/lib/partman/uefi_ignore will be touched
d-i partman-efi/non_efi_system boolean true
# enforce usage of GPT - a must have to use EFI!
d-i partman-basicfilesystems/choose_label string gpt
d-i partman-basicfilesystems/default_label string gpt
d-i partman-partitioning/choose_label string gpt
d-i partman-partitioning/default_label string gpt
d-i partman/choose_label string gpt
d-i partman/default_label string gpt
d-i partman-auto/choose_recipe select boot-root-all
d-i partman-auto/expert_recipe string \
boot-root-all :: \
538 538 1075 free \
$iflabel  gpt   \
$reusemethod    \
method  efi   \
format    \
. \
128 512 256 ext2 \
$defaultignore    \
method  format   format    \
use_filesystem    filesystem  ext2   \
mountpoint  /boot   \
. \
1024 4096 15360 ext4 \
$lvmok    \
method  format   format    \
use_filesystem    filesystem  ext4   \
mountpoint  /   \
. \
1024 4096 15360 ext4 \
$lvmok    \
method  format   format    \
use_filesystem    filesystem  ext4   \
mountpoint  /var   \
. \
1024 1024 -1 ext4 \
$lvmok    \
method  format   format    \
use_filesystem    filesystem  ext4   \
mountpoint  /var/lib   \
.
# This makes partman automatically partition without confirmation, provided
# that you told it what to do using one of the methods above.
d-i partman-partitioning/confirm_write_new_label boolean true
d-i partman/choose_partition select finish
d-i partman-md/confirm boolean true
d-i partman/confirm boolean true
d-i partman/confirm_nooverwrite boolean true
# This is fairly safe to set, it makes grub install automatically to the MBR
# if no other operating system is detected on the machine.
d-i grub-installer/only_debian boolean true
d-i grub-installer/with_other_os boolean true
d-i grub-installer/bootdev  string /dev/sda

pslog 26475
Pid no 26475:
Log path: /opt/observium/logs/error_log
Log path: /var/log/apache2/other_vhosts_access.log
Log path: /opt/observium/logs/access_log

• A real init system, capable of running standard startup scripts without modification, and solving the nasty Docker zombie reaping problem.
• Working syslog, which can either export all logs to Docker s logging infrastructure, or keep them within the container, depending on your preferences.
• Working real schedulers (cron, anacron, and at), plus at least the standard logrotate utility to help prevent log files inside the container from becoming huge.

• A real SMTP agent (exim4-daemon-light) so that cron and friends can actually send you mail
• SSH client and server (optionally exposed to the Internet)
• Automatic security patching via unattended-upgrades and needsrestart

• I wanted something based on Debian rather than Ubuntu
• By using sysvinit rather than runit, the OS default init scripts can be used unmodified, reducing the administrative burden on container builders
• Phusion s system is, for some reason, not auto-built on the Docker hub. Mine is, so it will be automatically revised whenever the underlying Debian system, or the Github repository, is.

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

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

2. Run:

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

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

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

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

# openvas-setup

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

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

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

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

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

$ dpkg -l   grep kali

# openvasmd --create-user test --role Admin

# openvasmd --update
# openvasmd --rebuild
# service openvas-scanner restart

# openvas-start

ExecStart=/usr/sbin/gsad --foreground --listen=127.0.0.1 --port=9392 --mlisten=127.0.0.1 --mport=9390

to

ExecStart=/usr/sbin/gsad --foreground --listen=0.0.0.0 --port=9392 --mlisten=127.0.0.1 --mport=9390

# systemctl daemon-reload
# systemctl restart greenbone-security-assistant