As many others, I have been following the launch of Let s Encrypt. Let s Encrypt is a new zero-cost X.509 Certificate Authority that supports the Automated Certificate Management Environment (ACME) protocol. ACME allow you to automate creation and retrieval of HTTPS server certificates. As anyone who has maintained a number of HTTPS servers can attest, this process has unfortunately been manual, error-prone and differ between CAs. On some of my personal domains, such as this blog.josefsson.org, I have been using the CACert authority to sign the HTTPS server certificate. The problem with CACert is that the CACert trust anchors aren t shipped with sufficient many operating systems and web browsers. The user experience is similar to reaching a self-signed server certificate. For organization-internal servers that you don t want to trust external parties for, I continue to believe that running your own CA and distributing it to your users is better than using a public CA (compare my XMPP server certificate setup). But for public servers, availability without prior configuration is more important. Therefor I decided that my public HTTPS servers should use a CA/Browser Forum-approved CA with support for ACME, and as long as Let s Encrypt is trustworthy and zero-cost, they are a good choice. I was in need of a free software ACME client, and set out to research what s out there. Unfortunately, I did not find any web pages that listed the available options and compared them. The Let s Encrypt CA points to the official Let s Encrypt client, written by Jakub Warmuz, James Kasten, Peter Eckersley and several others. The manual contain pointers to two other clients in a seamingly unrelated section. Those clients are letsencrypt-nosudo by Daniel Roesler et al, and simp_le by (again!) Jakub Warmuz. From the letsencrypt.org s client-dev mailing list I also found letsencrypt.sh by Gerhard Heift and LetsEncryptShell by Jan Moj . Is anyone aware of other ACME clients? By comparing these clients, I learned what I did not like in them. I wanted something small so that I can audit it. I want something that doesn t require root access. Preferably, it should be able to run on my laptop, since I wasn t ready to run something on the servers. Generally, it has to be Secure, which implies something about how it approaches private key handling. The letsencrypt official client can do everything, and has plugin for various server software to automate the ACME negotiation. All the cryptographic operations appear to be hidden inside the client, which usually means it is not flexible. I really did not like how it was designed, it looks like your typical monolithic proof-of-concept design. The simp_le client looked much cleaner, and gave me a good feeling. The letsencrypt.sh client is simple and written in /bin/sh shell script, but it appeared a bit too simplistic. The LetsEncryptShell looked decent, but I wanted something more automated. What all of these clients did not have, and that letsencrypt-nosudo client had, was the ability to let me do the private-key operations. All the operations are done interactively on the command-line using OpenSSL. This would allow me to put the ACME user private key, and the HTTPS private key, on a YubiKey, using its PIV applet and techniques similar to what I used to create my SSH host CA. While the HTTPS private key has to be available on the HTTPS server (used to setup TLS connections), I wouldn t want the ACME user private key to be available there. Similarily, I wouldn t want to have the ACME or the HTTPS private key on my laptop. The letsencrypt-nosudo tool is otherwise more rough around the edges than the more cleaner simp_le client. However the private key handling aspect was the deciding matter for me. After fixing some hard-coded limitations on RSA key sizes, getting the cert was as simple as following the letsencrypt-nosudo instructions. I ll follow up with a later post describing how to put the ACME user private key and the HTTPS server certificate private key on a YubiKey and how to use that with letsencrypt-nosudo. So you can now enjoy browsing my blog over HTTPS! Thank you Let s Encrypt!

A while back, I wrote about how you should always do image calculations in linear light, not gamma space; since then, Tom Forsythe has come out with a much better metaphor than I could cough up myself, namely that you should look at sRGB value as compressed values, not integers. So naturally, when I needed a deinterlacing filter for Movit, my GPU filter library, I wanted to do it in linear light. (In fact, all pixel processing in Movit is in linear light, except in the cases where it's 100% equivalent to do it on the gamma-encoded values and the conversion can be skipped for speed.) After some deliberations, I made an implementation of Martin Weston's three-field deinterlacing filter, known in ffmpeg as w3fdif. I won't discuss deinterlacing in detail here since it's really hard, but I'll note that w3fdif works by way of applying two filters; low-frequency components are estimated from the current field, and high-frequency from the previous and next fields. (This makes intuitive sense; you cannot get the HF information from the current field since you don't have the lines you need for that, but you can hope it hasn't changed too much.) Aha! A filter. Brilliant, that's exactly when linear light means the most, too. But when implementing it, I found that it sometimes looked weird -- and ffmpeg's implementation (which works directly on the sRGB values, which we already established is wrong) didn't. After lots of tweaking back and forth, I decided to set up a synthetic test to settle this once and for all; I took a static test picture (eliminating everything related to video capture, codecs, frame rates, etc.) and compared to ffmpeg. Of course, deinterlacing is all about movement, but this would do to try to nail things down. So after lots of fruitless debugging, I did a last-ditch: What if I turned off the gamma conversions? This gave me a huge surprise; indeed it looked better! I'll provide some upscaled versions; left is the original image, middle is deinterlaced in sRGB space and right is deinterlaced in linear light: If that's not dramatic enough for you (trust me, you'll notice it when it's animated as you flicker through the two different fields), here's an even more high-contrast example (same ordering): I guess it's obvious in retrospect what happens; the HF filter picks up residue from its outer edges, and even if the coefficient is just 0.031 (well, times two; it adds that value from both the previous and next field), 3% the photons of a fully lit pixel (which is what you get when working in linear light) is actually quite a bit, whereas a 3% gray is only pixel value 8 or so, which is barely visible. So what am I to make of this? I'm honestly not sure. Maybe it's somehow related to that these filter values were chosen in 1988, where they were relatively unlikely to do this in linear light (although if they did it with analog circuitry, perhaps they could?) and it was tweaked to look good despite doing the wrong thing. Or maybe I need to change my approach here entirely. It always sucks when your fundamental assumptions are challenged, but I think it shows once again that if you notice something funny in your output, you really ought to investigate, because you never know how deep the rabbit hole goes. :-/

Timothy Peake boarded the International Space Station a few hours ago becoming the United Kingdom's first official astronaut. It has become headline news, dominating the day's news cycle. But whilst Peake left our pale blue dot with only the humble honorific "Mister", he has subsequently been awarded the dubious appellation of "British Astronaut". Now, I'm no open-borders pan-nationalist and nor do I in any wish to detract or denigrate Peake's accomplishments indeed, it is only out of a genuine respect of "our Tim's" achievements that I pen this in the first place but are we still clinging to the idea that an extraordinary effort by a co-member of our species requires a nationalistic qualifier? How much do we really have in common with our "fellow countrymen"? This is, after all, the International Space Station, to which Peake was elevated from Kazakhstan on the back of a Russian rocket, in order that he may peacefully collaborate with an American, a Ukrainian, etc. I encountered the rebuttal that support of this nature is inspirational and incentive to others, but is it really motivating to know that if you toil to achieve greatness in this life then your accomplishments will be cheaply co-opted by mediocrities who only share the same colour passport as you? In this sense, isn't national pride really a form of national insecurity? A "Briton" in space: if space travel can teach us anything, it's that broadcasting the specific patch of ground you were born in is an outdated, tribalistic contrivance and should be assigned to the dustbin of history.

I recently ordered two Yubikey devices from Yubico, partly because of a special offer from Github. I ordered both a Yubikey NEO and a Yubikey 4, although I am not sure I remember why I ordered two - you can see their Yubikey product comparison if you want to figure that out, but basically, the main difference is that the NEO has support for NFC while the "4" has support for larger RSA key sizes (4096). This article details my experiment on the matter. It is partly based on first hand experience, but also links to various other tutorials that helped me along the way. Especially thanks to folks on various IRC channels that really helped me out in understanding this. My objective in getting a hardware security token like this was three-fold:

1. use 2FA on important websites like Github, to improve the security of critical infrastructure (like my Borg backup software)
2. login to remote SSH servers without exposing my password or my private key material on third party computers
3. store OpenPGP key material on the key securely, so that the private key material can never be compromised

To make a long story short: this article documents step 2 and implicitly step 3 (because I use OpenPGP to login to SSH servers). However it is not possible to use the key on arbitrary third party computers, given how much setup was necessary to make the thing work at all. 2FA on the Github site completely failed, but could be used on other sites, although this is not covered by this article. I have also not experimented in details the other ways the Yubikey can also be used (sorry for the acronym flood) as:

• PIV (Personnal Identity Verification): basically to run your own Certificate Authority
• OTP (One Time Password): allows sites to request a OTP from a Yubikey server validator. I haven't explored that mode since it requires a third party server and more modifications on the server side.
• OATH (Initiative for Open Authentication): a purely "offline" and more "traditionnal" approach to OTP. In this mode, you can authenticate with only the token given by the key and a shared secret. Maybe i will follow this OATH tutorial eventually.

Update: OATH works! It is easy to configure and i added a section below.

Not recommended After experimenting with the device and doing a little more research, I am not sure it was the right decision to buy a Yubikey. I would not recommend buying Yubikey devices because they don't allow changing the firmware, making the device basically proprietary, even in the face of an embarrassing security vulnerability on the Yubikey NEO that came out in 2015. A security device, obviously, should be as open as the protocols it uses, otherwise it's basically impossible to trust that the crypto hasn't been backdoored or compromised, or, in this case, is vulnerable to the simplest drive-by attacks. Furthermore, it turns out that the primary use case that Github was promoting is actually not working as advertised: to use the Yubikey on Github, you actually first need to configure 2FA with another tool, either with your phone's text messages (SMS) or with something like Google Authenticator. After contacting Github support, they explained that the Yubikey is seen as a "backup device", which seems really odd to me, especially considering the promotion and the fact that I don't have a "smart" (aka "Google", it seems these days) phone or the desire to share my personal phone number with Github. Finally, as I mentioned before, the fact that those devices are fairly new and the configuration necessary to make them work at all is completely obtuse, non-standardized or at least not available by default on arbitrary computers makes them basically impossible to use on other computers than your own specially crafted gems.

Plugging it in The Yubikey, when inserted into a USB port, seems to be detected properly. It shows up both as a USB keyboard and a generic device.

d c 14 17:23:26 angela kernel: input: Yubico Yubikey NEO OTP+U2F as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:12.0/usb3/3-2/3-2:1.0/0003:1050:0114.0016/input/input127
d c 14 17:23:26 angela kernel: hid-generic 0003:1050:0114.0016: input,hidraw3: USB HID v1.10 Keyboard [Yubico Yubikey NEO OTP+U2F] on usb-0000:00:12.0-2/input0
d c 14 17:23:26 angela kernel: hid-generic 0003:1050:0114.0017: hiddev0,hidraw4: USB HID v1.10 Device [Yubico Yubikey NEO OTP+U2F] on usb-0000:00:12.0-2/input1

We'll be changing this now - we want to to support OTP, U2F and CCID. Don't worry about those acronyms now, but U2F is for the web, CCID is for GPG/SSH, and OTP is for the One Time Passwords stuff mentionned earlier. I am using the Yubikey Personalization tool from stretch because the jessie one is too old, according to Gorzen. Indeed, I found out that the jessie version doesn't ship with the proper udev rules. Also, note that we need to run as sudo otherwise we get a permission denied:

$ sudo apt install yubikey-personalization/stretch
$ sudo ykpersonalize -m86
Firmware version 3.4.3 Touch level 1541 Program sequence 1
The USB mode will be set to: 0x86
Commit? (y/n) [n]: y

To understand better what the above does, see the NEO composite device documentation. The next step is to reconnect the key, for the udev rules to kick in. If you were like me, you enthusiastically plugged in the device before installing the yubikey-personalization package, and the udev rules were not present then.

Configuring a PIN Various operations will require you to enter a PIN when talking to the key. The default PIN is 123456 and the default admin PIN is 12345678. You will want to change that, otherwise someone that gets a hold of your key could do any operation without your consent. For this, you need to use:

$ gpg --card-edit
> passwd
> admin
> passwd

Be sure to remember those passwords! Of course, the key material on the Yubikey can be revoked when you loose the key, but only if you still have control of the master key, or if you have a OpenPGP revocation certification (which you should have).

Configuring GPG To do OpenPGP operations (like decryption, signatures and so on), or SSH operations (like authentication on a remote server), you need to talk with GPG. Yes, OpenPGP keys are RSA keys that can be used to authenticate with SSH servers, that's not new and I have already been doing this with Monkeysphere for a while. Now the challenge is how to make GPG talk with the Yubikey. So the next step is to see if gpg can see the key alright, as described in the Yubikey importing keys howto - you will need first to install scdaemon and pcscd (according to this howto) for gpg-agent to be able to talk with the key:

$ sudo apt install scdaemon gnupg-agent pcscd
$ gpg-connect-agent --hex "scd apdu 00 f1 00 00" /bye
ERR 100663404 Card error <SCD>

Well that failed. At this point, touching the key types a bunch of seemingly random characters wherever my cursor is sitting - fun but totally useless still. That was because I failed to reconnect the key: make sure the udev rules are in place and reconnect the key, the above should work:

$ gpg-connect-agent --hex "scd apdu 00 f1 00 00" /bye
D[0000]  01 00 10 90 00                                     .....
OK

This shows it is running the firmware 1.10, which is not vulnerable to the infamous security issue. (Note: I also happened to install opensc and gpgsm because of this suggestion but I am not sure they are required at all.)

Using SSH To make GPG work with SSH, you need somehow to start gpg-agent with ssh support, for example with:

gpg-agent --daemon --enable-ssh-support bash

Of course, this will work better if it's started with your Xsession. Such an agent should already be started, so you just need to add the ssh emulation to its configuration file and restart your X session.

echo 'enable-ssh-support' >> .gnupg/gpg-agent.conf

In Debian Jessie, the ssh-agent wrapper will not start if it detects that you have already one running (for example from gpg-agent) but if that fails, you can try commenting out use-ssh-agent from /etc/X11/Xsession.options to keep it from starting up in your session. (Thanks to stackexchange for that reference.) Here I assume you have already created an authentication subkey on your PGP key. If you haven't, I suggest trying out simply monkeysphere gen-subkey, which will generate an authentication subkey for you. You can also do it by hand by following one of the OpenPGP/SSH tutorials from Yubikey, especially the more complete one. If you are going to generate a completely new OpenPGP key, you may want to follow this simpler tutorial here. Then you need to move your authentication subkey to the Yubikey. For this, you need to edit the key and use the keytocard command:

$ gpg2 --edit-key anarcat@debian.org
> toggle
> key 2
> keytocard
> save

Here, we use toggle to show the OpenPGP private key material. You should see a key marked with A for Authentication. Mine was the second one so I selected it with key 2 which put a star next to it. The keytocard command moved it to the key and save ensure the key was removed from the local keyring. Obviously, backups are essential before doing this, because it's perfectly possible to loose that key in the process, for example if you destroy or lose the key or forget the password. It's probably better to create a completely different authentication subkey for just this purpose, but that may require reconfiguring all remote SSH hosts, and you may not want to do that. Then SSH should magically talk with the GPG agent and ask you for the PIN! That's pretty much all there is to it - if it doesn't, it means that gpg-agent is not your SSH agent, and obviously things will fail... Also, you should be able to see the key being loaded in the agent when it is:

$ ssh-add -l
2048 23:f3:be:bf:1e:da:e8:ad:4b:c7:f6:60:5e:03:c2:a6 cardno:000603647189 (RSA)

.. that's about it! I have yet to cover 2FA and OpenPGP support, but that got me going for a while and I'll stop geeking around with that thing for now. It was fun, for sure, but not sure it's worth it for now.

Using OATH This is pretty neat: it allows you to add two factor authentication to a lot of things. For example, PAM has such a module, which I will configure here to allow myself to login to my server from untrusted machines. While I will expose my main password to keyloggers, the OTP password will prevent that from being reused. This is a simplified version of this OATH tutorial. We install the PAM module with:

sudo apt install libpam-oath

Then, we can hook it into any PAM consumer, for example with sshd:

--- a/pam.d/sshd
+++ b/pam.d/sshd
@@ -1,5 +1,8 @@
 # PAM configuration for the Secure Shell service
+# for the yubikey
+auth required pam_oath.so usersfile=/etc/users.oath window=5 digits=8
+
 # Standard Un*x authentication.
 @include common-auth

We also needed to allow OTP passwords in sshd explicitely, with:

ChallengeResponseAuthentication yes

This will force the user to enter a valid oath token on the server. Unfortunately, this will affect all users, regardless of whether they are present in the users.oath file. I filed bug #807990 regarding this, with a patch. Also, it means the main password is still exposed on the client machine - you can use the sufficient keyword instead of required to workaround that, but then it means anyone with your key can login to your machine, which is something to keep in mind. The /etc/users.oath file needs to be created with something like:

#type   username        pin     start seed
HOTP    anarcat -   00

00 is obviously a fake, and insecure string. Generate a proper one with:

dd if=/dev/random bs=1k count=1   sha1sum # create a random secret

Then the shared secret needs to be added to the Yubikey:

ykpersonalize -1 -o oath-hotp -o oath-hotp8 -o append-cr -a

You simply paste the random secret you created above, when prompted, and that shared secret will be saved in a Yubikey slot for future use. Next time you login to the SSH server, you will be prompted for a OATH password, you just touch the button on the key and it will be pasted there:

$ ssh -o PubkeyAuthentication=no anarc.at
One-time password (OATH) for  anarcat':
Password:
[... logged in!]

Final note: the centralized file approach makes it hard, if not impossible, for users to update their own secret token.. It would be nice if there would be a user-accessible token file, maybe ~/.oath? Filed feature request #807992 about this as well.

Like each month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS. Individual reports In November, 114.50 work hours have been dispatched among 8 paid contributors. Their reports are available:

• Ben Hutchings did 5 hours only (out of 15 hours allocated + 5 extra hours remaining, meaning that he has 15 extra hours to do over December).
• Chris Lamb did 13 hours (12h allocated + 1h remaining).
• Guido G nther did 10 hours (out of 8 hours allocated + 4 remaining, thus keeping 2 extra hours for December).
• Mike Gabriel did 6.5 hours only (out of 8 hours allocated + 8 hours remaining, the 9.5 unused extra hours have been dispatched to others for December).
• Rapha l Hertzog did 21.25 hours.
• Santiago Ruano Rinc n did 19 hours (out of 21h allocated, thus keeping 2 extra hours for December).
• Scott Kitterman did 8 hours.
• Thorsten Alteholz did 21.25 hours.

Evolution of the situation We lost one hour of funding for December due to a sponsor not renewing, and we don t have any new sponsor lined up right now. There s another sponsor who will reduce his sponsorship starting with 2016. While the situation is relatively healthy right now, we should continue the efforts to find new sponsors, both to ensure we can cover more software in wheezy and to better share the costs: having many small sponsors is more resilient than relying on a few big ones. And we still haven t reached our second goal of funding the equivalent of a full-time position. In terms of security updates waiting to be handled, the situation is close to last month: the dla-needed.txt file lists 19 packages awaiting an update (2 less than last month), the list of open vulnerabilities in Squeeze shows about 22 affected packages in total (1 less than last month). Thanks to our sponsors The new sponsors are in bold.

• Platinum sponsors:
• TOSHIBA
• Gold sponsors:
• The Positive Internet (for 18 months already)
• Blablacar (for 17 months already)
• Linode LLC (for 7 months already)
• Silver sponsors:
• David Ayers IntarS Austria (for 18 months already)
• Domeneshop AS (for 17 months already)
• Universit Lille 3 (for 17 months already)
• Trollweb Solutions (for 15 months already)
• Gandi SAS (for 12 months already)
• University of Luxembourg (for 9 months already)
• Rentabiliweb Group (for 7 months already)
• Univention GmbH (for 3 months already)
• Universit Jean Monnet de St Etienne (for 3 months already)
• Bronze sponsors:
• Offensive Security (for 18 months already)
• Seznam.cz, a.s. (for 18 months already)
• Evolix (for 17 months already)
• Freeside Internet Service (for 17 months already)
• MyTux (for 17 months already)
• Linuxhotel GmbH (for 15 months already)
• Intevation GmbH (for 14 months already)
• Daevel SARL (for 13 months already)
• Bitfolk LTD (for 12 months already)
• Megaspace Internet Services GmbH (for 12 months already)
• Gree, Inc. (for 11 months already)
• Greenbone Networks GmbH (for 11 months already)
• NUMLOG (for 11 months already)
• WinGo AG (for 10 months already)
• Ecole Centrale de Nantes LHEEA (for 6 months already)
• Sig-I/O (for 4 months already)
• Entr ouvert

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it looks like this autumn was not my best blogging time: this is the first posting in 3 months. anyway, I wanted to give a quick overview about my work on RC bugs. again nothing exciting, mostly just trying to fix the ones popping up in the pkg-perl team.

• #728955 src:libatomic-ops: "FTBFS on powerpc: FAIL: test_stack"
  upload NMU prepared by Fernando Seiti Furusato, upload to DELAYED/5, and cancelled again later on maintainer's request
• #784404 src:libssh: "libssh: CVE-2015-3146: null pointer dereference due to a logical error in the handling of a SSH_MSG_NEWKEYS and KEXDH_REPLY packets"
  upload NMU prepared by Chris Knadle
• #787453 src:libdata-alias-perl: "libdata-alias-perl: FTBFS with perl 5.22"
  upload new upstream release (pkg-perl)
• #790334 src:libb-lint-perl: "libb-lint-perl: FTBFS with perl 5.22: test failure"
  add patch from upstream bug tracker (pkg-perl)
• #791848 src:zeroc-ice: "zeroc-ice: FTBFS with ruby2.2: Config.h:84:36: error: 'RBIGNUM' was not declared in this scope"
  upload NMU prepared by Chris Knadle
• #795295 src:libsignatures-perl: "libsignatures-perl: broken by ABI change in libb-hooks-parser-perl"
  new upstream release, bump versioned dependency (pkg-perl)
• #796535 src:libmodule-starter-plugin-cgiapp-perl: "libmodule-starter-plugin-cgiapp-perl: FTBFS: Failed 3/5 test programs. 0/1 subtests failed."
  add patch to deal with newer Module::Starter, upload to DELAYED/5, later cancelled in favour of maintainer upload
• #796887 src:libmodule-info-perl: "libmodule-info-perl: FTBFS with perl 5.22: test failures"
  upload new upstream devel release (pkg-perl)
• #799578 src:libevent-rpc-perl: "libevent-rpc-perl: FTBFS: hostname verification failed at t/04.cnct-auth-ssl-verifypeer-wrongca.t line 54"
  upload new upstream release (pkg-perl)
• #799763 src:libmoosex-app-cmd-perl: "libmoosex-app-cmd-perl: FTBFS: (Wstat: 256 Tests: 1 Failed: 1)"
  upload new upstream release (pkg-perl)
• #799822 src:vnstat: "vnstat: FTBFS: undefined reference to subunit_test_error'"
  add patch from Mathieu Malaterre, upload to DELAYED/2
• #799888 src:libfont-freetype-perl: "libfont-freetype-perl: FTBFS on many architectures"
  upload new upstream release (pkg-perl)
• #799969 libmath-bigint-gmp-perl: "libmath-bigint-gmp-perl: FTBFS: broken by libmath-bigint-perl_1.999701-1"
  upload new upstream release (pkg-perl)
• #801610 libogg-vorbis-decoder-perl: "libogg-vorbis-decoder-perl: FTBFS: Failed test 'raw_total'"
  skip failing test temporarily (pkg-perl)
• #802939 src:libparse-keyword-perl: "libparse-keyword-perl: FTBFS with perl 5.22: test failures"
  prepare patch (pkg-perl)
• #803178 libmongodb-perl: "libmongodb-perl: FTBFS on various architectures"
  add patch from Niko Tyni (pkg-perl)
• #803439 libzeroc-ice3.5-cil: "libzeroc-ice3.5-cil: fails to install: E: installing Assembly /usr/lib/cli/libzeroc-ice3.5/Ice.dll failed"
  upload NMU prepared by Chris Knadle
• #803974 src:libnet-tclink-perl: "libnet-tclink-perl: FTBFS: Uses SSLv3_client_method"
  add patch to use SSLv23_* (pkg-perl)
• #803975 src:libcrypt-ssleay-perl: "libcrypt-ssleay-perl: Uses SSLv3_client_method()"
  prepare new upstream release in git and upload later (pkg-perl)
• #804220 src:libmath-bigint-gmp-perl: "libmath-bigint-gmp-perl: FTBFS: t/bigintpm.t (Wstat: 256 Tests: 3707 Failed: 1)"
  upload new upstream release (pkg-perl)
• #805102 libmessage-passing-perl: "libmessage-passing-perl: missing runtime and build dependencies on libjson-perl"
  add missing (build) dependency (pkg-perl)
• #805103 libmessage-passing-filter-regexp-perl: "libmessage-passing-filter-regexp-perl: FTBFS: missing build-dependency on libjson-perl"
  add missing build dependency (pkg-perl)
• #805104 libdatetime-format-strptime-perl: "libdatetime-format-strptime-perl: warns on usage, breaks libxml-rpc-fast-perl build"
  upload new upstream release prepared by kanashiro (pkg-perl)
• #805233 libdbix-class-perl: "libdbix-class-perl: FTBFS: t/105view_deps.t failure"
  add patch from upstream git (pkg-perl)
• #805403 libpango-perl: "libpango-perl: FTBFS: undefined symbol: pango_cairo_update_layout (broken by pkg-config 0.29)"
  upload with patch fro ntyni (pkg-perl)
• #805876 src:libclass-accessor-chained-perl: "libclass-accessor-chained-perl: FTBFS with perl 5.22: missing dependency on Module::Build"
  add missing build dependency (pkg-perl)
• #805967 src:libextutils-cppguess-perl: "libextutils-cppguess-perl: FTBFS with perl 5.22: missing dependency on Module::Build"
  add missing build dependency (pkg-perl)
• #805969 src:libmime-lite-tt-html-perl: "libmime-lite-tt-html-perl: FTBFS with perl 5.22: missing dependency on Module::Build"
  add missing build dependency (pkg-perl)
• #805970 src:libtap-parser-sourcehandler-pgtap-perl: "libtap-parser-sourcehandler-pgtap-perl: FTBFS with perl 5.22: missing dependency on Module::Build"
  add missing build dependency, upload to DELAYED/2
• #806859 src:libnet-frame-perl: "libnet-frame-perl: FTBFS: Attempts to access internet during build"
  skip a test (pkg-perl)
• #807324 src:libio-pty-perl: "libio-pty-perl: FTBFS with perl 5.22 in experimental (MakeMaker changes)"
  use DESTDIR instead of PREFIX, upload to DELAYED/2, then rescheduled to 0-day with maintainer's permission
• #807400 src:libtext-aspell-perl: "libtext-aspell-perl: FTBFS with perl 5.22 in experimental (MakeMaker changes)"
  use DESTDIR instead of PREFIX, upload to DELAYED/2
• #807401 src:libtext-unaccent-perl: "libtext-unaccent-perl: FTBFS with perl 5.22 in experimental (MakeMaker changes)"
  use DESTDIR instead of PREFIX, upload to DELAYED/2
• #807422 src:libsys-cpuload-perl: "libsys-cpuload-perl: FTBFS with perl 5.22 in experimental (MakeMaker changes)"
  use DESTDIR instead of PREFIX, upload to DELAYED/2
• #807474 src:libfile-rsyncp-perl: "libfile-rsyncp-perl: FTBFS with perl 5.22 in experimental (MakeMaker changes)"
  use DESTDIR instead of PREFIX, upload to DELAYED/2
• #807478 src:razor: "razor: FTBFS with perl 5.22 in experimental (MakeMaker changes)"
  use DESTDIR instead of PREFIX, upload to DELAYED/2
• #807492 src:libmath-bigint-gmp-perl: "libmath-bigint-gmp-perl: FTBFS on 32 bit platforms"
  prepare preliminary patch based on proposal in CPAN RT (pkg-perl)

Just to give a brief recap of why I'm writing this post, I've to describe a brief encounter I had with systemd which rendered my system unbootable. I first felt its systemd's problem but later figured out it was my mistake. So below is brief story divided into 2 sections Problem and Solution. Here Problem describes issue I faced with systemd and Solution discusses the .mount and .automount suffix files used by systemd.

I recently installed new hardware in my primary computer running Debian unstable. The disk used for the / and /home filesystem was replaced with an Intel SSD 750 series NVM Express card. The graphics card was replaced by an AMD FirePro W4100 card, and two Dell P2715Q monitors were installed. Intel SSD 750 series NVM Express card This is an 800 GB SSD on a PCI-Express x4 card (model number SSDPEDMW800G4X1) using the relatively new NVM Express interface, which appears as a /dev/nvme* device. The stretch alpha 4 Debian installer was able to detect and install onto this device, but grub-installer 1.127 on the installer media was unable to install the boot loader. This was due to a bug recently fixed in 1.128:

grub-installer (1.128) unstable; urgency=high
  * Fix buggy /dev/nvme matching in the case statement to determine
    disc_offered_devfs (Closes: #799119). Thanks, Mario Limonciello!
 -- Cyril Brulebois <kibi@debian.org>  Thu, 03 Dec 2015 00:26:42 +0100

I was able to download and install the updated .udeb by hand in the installer environment and complete the installation. This card was installed on a Supermicro X10SAE motherboard, and the UEFI BIOS was able to boot Debian directly from the NVMe card, although I updated to the latest available BIOS firmware prior to the installation. It appears in lspci like this:

02:00.0 Non-Volatile memory controller: Intel Corporation PCIe Data Center SSD (rev 01)
(prog-if 02 [NVM Express])
    Subsystem: Intel Corporation SSD 750 Series [Add-in Card]
    Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0
    Memory at f7d10000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K]
    Expansion ROM at f7d00000 [disabled] [size=64K]
    Capabilities: [40] Power Management version 3
    Capabilities: [50] MSI-X: Enable+ Count=32 Masked-
    Capabilities: [60] Express Endpoint, MSI 00
    Capabilities: [100] Advanced Error Reporting
    Capabilities: [150] Virtual Channel
    Capabilities: [180] Power Budgeting <?>
    Capabilities: [190] Alternative Routing-ID Interpretation (ARI)
    Capabilities: [270] Device Serial Number 55-cd-2e-41-4c-90-a8-97
    Capabilities: [2a0] #19
    Kernel driver in use: nvme

The card itself appears very large in marketing photos, but this is a visual trick: the photographs are taken with the low-profile PCI bracket installed, rather than the standard height PCI bracket which it ships installed with. smartmontools fails to read SMART data from the drive, although it is still able to retrieve basic device information, including the temperature:

root@chase 0 :~# smartctl -d scsi -a /dev/nvme0n1
smartctl 6.4 2015-06-04 r4109 [x86_64-linux-4.3.0-trunk-amd64] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-15, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org
=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Vendor:               NVMe
Product:              INTEL SSDPEDMW80
Revision:             0135
Compliance:           SPC-4
User Capacity:        800,166,076,416 bytes [800 GB]
Logical block size:   512 bytes
Rotation Rate:        Solid State Device
Logical Unit id:      8086INTEL SSDPEDMW800G4                     1000CVCQ531500K2800EGN  
Serial number:        CVCQ531500K2800EGN
Device type:          disk
Local Time is:        Sun Dec 13 01:48:37 2015 EST
SMART support is:     Unavailable - device lacks SMART capability.
=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
Current Drive Temperature:     31 C
Drive Trip Temperature:        85 C
Error Counter logging not supported
[GLTSD (Global Logging Target Save Disable) set. Enable Save with '-S on']
Device does not support Self Test logging
root@chase 4 :~# 

Simple tests with cat /dev/nvme0n1 >/dev/null and iotop show that the card can read data at about 1 GB/sec, about twice as fast as the SATA-based SSD that it replaced. apt/dpkg now run about as fast on the NVMe SSD as they do on a tmpfs. Hopefully this device doesn't at some point require updated firmware, like some infamous SSDs have. AMD FirePro W4100 graphics card This is a graphics card capable of driving multiple DisplayPort displays at "4K" resolution and at a 60 Hz refresh rate. It has four Mini DisplayPort connectors, although I only use two of them. It was difficult to find a sensible graphics card. Most discrete graphics cards appear to be marketed towards video gamers who apparently must seek out bulky cards that occupy multiple PCI slots and have excessive cooling devices. (To take a random example, the ASUS STRIX R9 390X has three fans and brags about its "Mega Heatpipes".) AMD markets a separate line of "FirePro" graphics cards intended for professionals rather than gamers, although they appear to be based on the same GPUs as their "Radeon" video cards. The AMD FirePro W4100 is a normal half-height PCI-E card that fits into a single PCI slot and has a relatively small cooler with a single fan. It doesn't even require an auxilliary power connection and is about the same dimensions as older video cards that I've successfully used with Debian. It was difficult to determine whether the W4100 card was actually supported by an open source driver before buying it. The word "FirePro" appears nowhere on the webpage for the X.org Radeon driver, but I was able to find a "CAPE VERDE" listed as an engineering name which appears to match the "Cape Verde" code name for the FirePro W4100 given on Wikipedia's List of AMD graphics processing units. This explains the "verde" string that appears in the firmware filenames requested by the kernel (available only in the non-free/firmware-amd-graphics package):

[drm] initializing kernel modesetting (VERDE 0x1002:0x682C 0x1002:0x2B1E).
[drm] Loading verde Microcode
radeon 0000:01:00.0: firmware: direct-loading firmware radeon/verde_pfp.bin
radeon 0000:01:00.0: firmware: direct-loading firmware radeon/verde_me.bin
radeon 0000:01:00.0: firmware: direct-loading firmware radeon/verde_ce.bin
radeon 0000:01:00.0: firmware: direct-loading firmware radeon/verde_rlc.bin
radeon 0000:01:00.0: firmware: direct-loading firmware radeon/verde_mc.bin
radeon 0000:01:00.0: firmware: direct-loading firmware radeon/verde_smc.bin

The card appears in lspci like this:

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Cape Verde GL [FirePro W4100]
(prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
    Subsystem: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Device 2b1e
    Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 55
    Memory at e0000000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=256M]
    Memory at f7e00000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=256K]
    I/O ports at e000 [size=256]
    Expansion ROM at f7e40000 [disabled] [size=128K]
    Capabilities: [48] Vendor Specific Information: Len=08 <?>
    Capabilities: [50] Power Management version 3
    Capabilities: [58] Express Legacy Endpoint, MSI 00
    Capabilities: [a0] MSI: Enable+ Count=1/1 Maskable- 64bit+
    Capabilities: [100] Vendor Specific Information: ID=0001 Rev=1 Len=010 <?>
    Capabilities: [150] Advanced Error Reporting
    Capabilities: [200] #15
    Capabilities: [270] #19
    Kernel driver in use: radeon

The W4100 appears to work just fine, except for a few bizarre error messages that are printed to the kernel log when the displays are woken from power saving mode:

[Sun Dec 13 00:24:41 2015] [drm:si_dpm_set_power_state [radeon]] *ERROR* si_enable_smc_cac failed
[Sun Dec 13 00:24:41 2015] [drm:si_dpm_set_power_state [radeon]] *ERROR* si_enable_smc_cac failed
[Sun Dec 13 00:24:41 2015] [drm:radeon_dp_link_train [radeon]] *ERROR* displayport link status failed
[Sun Dec 13 00:24:41 2015] [drm:radeon_dp_link_train [radeon]] *ERROR* clock recovery failed
[Sun Dec 13 00:24:41 2015] [drm:radeon_dp_link_train [radeon]] *ERROR* displayport link status failed
[Sun Dec 13 00:24:41 2015] [drm:radeon_dp_link_train [radeon]] *ERROR* clock recovery failed
[Sun Dec 13 00:24:41 2015] [drm:si_dpm_set_power_state [radeon]] *ERROR* si_enable_smc_cac failed
[Sun Dec 13 00:24:41 2015] [drm:radeon_dp_link_train [radeon]] *ERROR* displayport link status failed
[Sun Dec 13 00:24:41 2015] [drm:radeon_dp_link_train [radeon]] *ERROR* clock recovery failed
[Sun Dec 13 00:24:41 2015] [drm:radeon_dp_link_train [radeon]] *ERROR* displayport link status failed
[Sun Dec 13 00:24:41 2015] [drm:radeon_dp_link_train [radeon]] *ERROR* clock recovery failed

There don't appear to be any ill effects from these error messages, though. I have the following package versions installed:

 / Name                          Version             Description
+++-=============================-===================-================================================
ii  firmware-amd-graphics         20151207-1          Binary firmware for AMD/ATI graphics chips
ii  linux-image-4.3.0-trunk-amd64 4.3-1~exp2          Linux 4.3 for 64-bit PCs
ii  xserver-xorg-video-radeon     1:7.6.1-1           X.Org X server -- AMD/ATI Radeon display driver

The Supermicro X10SAE motherboard has two PCI-E 3.0 slots, but they're listed as functioning in either "16/NA" or "8/8" mode, which apparently means that putting anything in the second slot (like the Intel 750 SSD, which uses an x4 link) causes the video card to run at a smaller x8 link width. This can be verified by looking at the widths reported in the "LnkCap" and "LnkSta" lines in the lspci -vv output:

root@chase 0 :~# lspci -vv -s 01:00.0   egrep '(LnkCap LnkSta):'
        LnkCap: Port #0, Speed 8GT/s, Width x16, ASPM L0s L1, Exit Latency L0s <64ns, L1 <1us
        LnkSta: Speed 8GT/s, Width x8, TrErr- Train- SlotClk+ DLActive- BWMgmt- ABWMgmt-
root@chase 0 :~# 

I did not notice any visible artifacts or performance degradation because of the smaller link width. The sensors utility from the lm-sensors package is capable of reporting the temperature of the GPU:

root@chase 0 :~# sensors radeon-pci-0100
radeon-pci-0100
Adapter: PCI adapter
temp1:        +55.0 C  (crit = +120.0 C, hyst = +90.0 C)
root@chase 0 :~# 

Dell P2715Q monitors Two new 27" Dell monitors with a native resolution of 3840x2160 were attached to the new graphics card. They replaced two ten year old Dell 2001FP monitors with a native resolution of 1600x1200 that had experienced burn-in, providing 4.32 times as many pixels. (TV and monitor manufacturers now shamelessly refer to the 3840x2160 resolution as "4K" resolution even though neither dimension reaches 4000 pixels.) There was very little to setup beyond plugging the DisplayPort inputs on these monitors into the DisplayPort outputs on the graphics card. Most of the setup involved reconfiguring software to work with the very high resolution. X.org, for tl;dr CLOSED NOTABUG reasons doesn't set the DPI correctly. These monitors have ~163 DPI resolution, so I added -dpi 168 to /etc/X11/xdm/Xservers. (168 is an even 1.75x multiple of 96.) Software like Google Chrome and xfce4-terminal rendered fonts and graphical elements at the right size, but other software like notion, pidgin, and virt-manager did not fully understand the high DPI. E.g., pidgin renders fonts at the correct size, but icons are too small. The default X cursor was also too small. To fix this, I installed the dmz-cursor-theme package, ran update-alternatives --config x-cursor-theme and selected /usr/share/icons/DMZ-Black/cursor.theme as the cursor theme. Overall, these displays are much brighter and more readable than the ones they replaced.

It is time again for another Tanglu blogpost (to be honest, this article is pretty much overdue ). I want to shine a spotlight on the work that s done in Tanglu, be it ongoing or past work done for the new release. Why is the new release taking longer than usual? As you might have noticed, usually a new Tanglu release (Tanglu 4 Dasyatis ) should be released this month. We decided a while ago, however, to defer the release and are now aiming for an release in February / March 2016. Reason for this change in schedule is the GCC 5 transition (and more importantly the huge amount of follow-up transitions) as well as some other major infrastructure tasks, which we would like to complete and give them a good amount of testing before releasing. Also, some issues with our build system, and generally less build power than in previous releases is a problem (At least the Debile build-system issues could be worked around or solved). The hard disk crash in the forum and bugtracking server also delayed the start of the Tanglu 4 development process a lot. In all of these tasks, manpower is of course the main problem Software Tasks General infrastructure tasks Improvements on Synchrotron Synchrotron, the software which is synchronizing the Tanglu archive with the Debian archive, received a few tweaks to make it more robust and detect installability of packages more reliably. We also run it more often now. Rapidumo improvements Rapidumo is a software written to complement dak (the Debian Archive Kit) in managing the Tanglu archive. It performs automatic QA tasks on the archive and provides a collection of tools to perform various tasks (like triggering package rebuilds). For Tanglu 4, we sometimes drop broken packages from the archive now, to speed up transitions and to remove packages which got uninstallable more quickly. Packages removed from the release suite still have a chance to enter it again, but they need to go through Tanglu s staging area again first. The removal process is currently semiautomatic, to avoid unneccessary removals and breakage. Rapidumo could benefit from some improvements and an interactive web interface (as opposed to static HTML pages) would be nice. Some early work on this is done, but not completed (and has a very low priority at the moment). DEP-11 integration There will be a bigger announcement on AppStream and DEP-11 in the next days, so I keep this terse: Tanglu will go for full AppStream integration with the next release, which means no more packaged metadata, but data placed directly in the archive. Work on this has started in Tanglu, but I needed to get back to the drawing board with it, to incorporate some new ideas for using synergies with Debian on generating the DEP-11 metadata. Phabricator Phabricator has been integrated well into our infrastructure, but there are still some pending tasks. E.g. we need subprojects in Phabricator, and a more powerful Conduit interface. Those are upstream bugs on Phabricator, and are actively being worked on. As soon as the missing features are available in Phabricator, we will also pursue the integration of Tanglu bug information with the Debian DistroTracker, which was discussed at DebConf this summer. UEFI support UEFI support is a tricky beast. Full UEFI support is a release-goal for Tanglu 4 (so we won t release without it). At time, our Live-CDs start on pure EFI systems, but there are several reported issues with the Calamares live-installer as well as Debian-Installer, which fails to install GRUB correctly. Work on resolving these problems is ongoing. Major LiveCD rework Tanglu 4 will ship with improved live-cds, which e.g. allow selecting the preferred locale early in the bootloader. We switched from live-boot to manage our live sessions to casper, the same tool which is also used in Ubuntu. Casper fixed a few issues we had, and brought some new, but overall using it was a good choice and work on making top-notch live-cds is progressing well. KDE Plasma Integration of the latest Plasma release is progressing, but its speed has slowed down since fewer people are working on it. If you want to help Tanglu s KDE Workspace integration, please help! For the upcoming release, the Plasma 5 packages which we created based on a collaboration with Kubuntu for the previous Tanglu 3 release have been merged with their Debian counterparts. This action fortunately was possible without major problems. Now Tanglu is (mostly) using the same Plasma 5 packages as Debian again (lots of Kudos go the the Kubuntu and Debian Qt/KDE packagers!). GNOME The same re-merge with Debian has been done on Tanglu s GNOME flavor (Tanglu also shipped with a more recent GNOME release than Debian in Tanglu 3). So Tanglu 4 GNOME and Debian Testing GNOME are at (almost) the same level. Unfortunately, the GNOME team is heavily understaffed a GNOME team member left at the beginning of the year for personal reasons, and the team now only has one semi-active member and me. Other An fvwm-nightshade spin is being worked on . Apart from that, there are no teams maintaining other flavors in Tanglu. Security & Stable maintenance Thanks to several awesome people, the current Tanglu Stable release (Tanglu 3 Chromodoris ) receives regular updates, even for many packages which are not in the fully supported set. Tangluverse Tasks Tasks (not) done in the global Tanglu universe. HTTPS for community sites Thanks to our participation in the Let s Encrypt closed beta program, Tanglu websites like the user forums and bugtracker have been fully encrypted for a while, which should make submitting data to these sites much more secure. So far, we didn t encounter issues, which means that we will likely aim for getting HTTPS encryption enabled on every Tanglu website. Tanglu.org website The Tanglu main website didn t receive much love at all. It could use a facelift and more importantly updated content about Tanglu. So far, nobody volunteered to update the website, so this task is still open. It is, however, a high-priority task to increase our public visibility as a project, so updating the website is definitely something which will be done soon. Promotion It doesn t hurt to think about how to sell Tanglu as brand : What is Tanglu? Our motivation, our goals? What is our slogan? How can we communicate all of this to new users, without having them to read long explanations? (e.g. the Fedora Project has this nicely covered on their main website, and their slogan Freedom, Friends, Features, First immediately communicates the project s key values) Those are issues engineers don t think about often, still it is important to present Tanglu in a way that is easy to grasp for people hearing about it for the first time. So far, no people are working on this task specifically, although it regularly comes up on IRC. Sponsoring & Government Tanglu is by design not backed by any corporation. However, we still need to get our servers paid. Currently, Tanglu is supported by three sponsors, which basically provide the majority of our infrastructure. Also, developers provide additional machines to get Tanglu running and/or packages built. Still, this dependency on very few sponsors paying the majority of the costs is very bad, since it makes Tanglu vulnerable in case one sponsor decides to end sponsorship. We have no financial backing to be able to e.g. continue to pay an important server in case it s sponsor decides to drop sponsorship. Also, since Tanglu is no legal entity, accepting donations is hard for us at time, since a private person would need to accept the money on behalf of Tanglu. So we can t easily make donating to Tanglu possible (at least not in the way we want donations to be). These issues are currently being worked on, there are a couple of possible solutions on the table. I will write about details as soon as it makes sense to go public with them. In general, I am very happy with the Tanglu community: The developer community is a pleasure to work with, and interactions with our users on the forums or via the bugtracker are highly productive and friendly. Although the development speed has slowed down a bit, Tanglu is still an active and awesome project, and I am looking forward to the cool stuff we will do in future!

The first reproducible world summit was held in Athens, Greece, from December 1st-3rd with the support of the Linux Foundation, the Open Tech Fund, and Google. Faidon Liambotis has been an amazing help to sort out all local details. People at ImpactHub Athens have been perfect hosts. Nearly 40 participants from 14 different free software project had very busy days sharing knowledge, building understanding, and producing actual patches. Anyone interested in cross project discussions should join the rb-general mailing-list. What follows focuses mostly on what happened for Debian this previous week. A more detailed report about the summit will follow soon. You can also read the ones from Joachim Breitner from Debian, Clemens Lang from MacPorts, Georg Koppen from Tor, Dhiru Kholia from Fedora, and Ludovic Court s wrote one for Guix and for the GNU project. Infrastructure Several discussions at the meeting helped refine a shared understanding of what kind of information should be recorded on a build, and how they could be used. Daniel Kahn Gillmor sent a detailed update on how .buildinfo files should become part of the Debian archive. Some key changes compared to what we had in mind at DebConf15:

• Two .buildinfo with different environment information can attest to the same exact binary artifact.
• Multiple .buildinfo files can coexist for the same .deb as long as the listed checksums match the source and binary package in the archive.
• .buildinfo can be signed in-line to certify where a build comes from.

Hopefully, ftpmasters will be able to comment on the updated proposal soon. Packages fixed The following packages have become reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: fades, triplane, caml-crush, globus-authz. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed:

• binutils/2.25.90.20151125-2 uploaded by Matthias Klose, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• chocolate-doom/2.2.1-2 by Fabian Greffrath.
• csound/1:6.05~dfsg1-7 by Felipe Sateler.
• dispcalgui/3.0.5.0-1 uploaded by Christian Marillat, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• drmips/2.0.1-1 by Bruno Nova.
• ghc/7.10.1-5 by Joachim Breitner.
• gitolite3/3.6.3-3 by David Bremner.
• libdigidoc/3.10.1.1208+ds1-1 uploaded by Andrew Shadura, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• liberasurecode/1.1.0-3 uploaded by Thomas Goirand, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• libjs-jcrop/0.9.13+dfsg-1 uploaded by David Pr vot, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• libnet-interface-perl/1.012-3 uploaded by gregor herrmann, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• libosmocore/0.9.0-1 uploaded by Ruben Undheim, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• libperl-apireference-perl/0.21-2 fixed by Niko Tyni (#807111).
• netrik/1.16.1-2 by Axel Beckert.
• openssl/1.0.2e-1 by Kurt Roeckx.
• snp-sites/2.0.2-2 uploaded by Sascha Steinbiss, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• xfonts-shinonome/1:0.9.11-1 by Hideki Yamane, original patch by Chris Lamb.

Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them:

• raster3d/3.0-3-2 uploaded by Andreas Tille, original patch by Lunar.

Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet:

• #806580 on metview by Reiner Herrmann: remove timestamps from metview script.
• #806974 on xpra by Reiner Herrmann: interpret the changelog date as UTC.
• #807051 on why by Valentin Lorentz: removes extra timestamps from the build system.

akira sent proposals on how to make bash reproducible. Alexander Couzens submitted a patch upstream to add support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH in grub image generator (#787795). reproducible.debian.net An issue with some armhf build nodes was tracked down to a bad interaction between uname26 personality and new glibc (Vagrant Cascadian). A Debian package was created for koji, the RPM building and tracking system used by Fedora amongst others. It is currently waiting for review in the NEW queue. (Ximin Luo, Marek Marczykowski-G recki) diffoscope development diffoscope now has a dedicated mailing list to better accommodate its growing user and developer base. Going through diffoscope's guts together enabled several new contributors. Baptiste Daroussin, Ed Maste, Clemens Lang, Mike McQuaid, Joachim Breitner all contributed their first patches to improve portability or add new features. Regular contributors Chris Lamb, Reiner Herrmann, and Levente Polyak also submitted improvements. The next release should support more operating systems, filesystem image comparison via libguestfs, HTML reports with on-demand loading, and parallel processing for the most noticeable improvements. Package reviews 27 reviews have been removed, 17 added and 14 updated in the previous week. Chris Lamb and Val Lorentz filed 4 new FTBFS reports. Misc. Baptiste Daroussin has started to implement support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH in FreeBSD in libpkg and the ports tree. Thanks Joachim Breitner and h01ger for the pictures.

I've now been working on Debian LTS for a full year, so I'm going to stop counting months. In November, I carried over 5 hours from October and was assigned another 15 hours of work by Freexian's Debian LTS initiative. However, I spent much of the month on sick leave, so I only worked 5 billable hours on Debian LTS plus some unbilled time while on leave. I had another week in the front desk role, and triaged about 20 new issues. Less than half actually affected packages supported in squeeze-lts, and only about 5 were important. CVE-2015-5309 in putty had a patch that was fairly easy to backport, so I did that, uploaded and sent DLA 347-1. I backported several security fixes to linux-2.6 and sent some of those we had already released to Willy Tarreau for inclusion in Linux 2.6.32-longterm. At the end of the month, I reviewed Linux 2.6.32.69-rc1 and found a couple of bugs, leading to an -rc2. I applied that to the linux-2.6 packaging branch for squeeze-lts and spent a little time testing it, thankfully not hitting any regressions.

I wrote this so I won't forget it and for others to find, if confronted with the same issue.

I hate Microsoft Office in all its incarnations, but I have to use it at work for various stuff. One of them is maintaining some technical documentation. we now use Office 365 and Office 2013.

Since MS Office Word 2013 is not a technical documentation program, some of the support for it is clunky. For things such as version numbers or others strings that might repeat throughout the document, (advanced) document properties is a way to go.

To set them select File > Info > Properties > Advanced Properties > Custom then fill in the 'Name:', 'Type:' and 'Value:', then press Add, then OK.

Once the properties are set, it can be inserted in the document by selecting its name in the 'Property:' list from the menu: INSERT > Quick Parts > Field... > Categories:Document Information > DocProperty.

After updating the value of any property (from the Advanced Properties dialog), to update all the places where the properties were used in the document, press Ctrl+A then right click > Update Filed > Update entire table > OK.

And, yes, 'Update entire table' will update the values, although it's name is stupid.

Want to give a talk at a 6,000+ guest conference with more than 6,000 guests? Do you feel you can deliver better than any other the other 250 speakers? Here is your opportunity! The FOSDEM Organization has graciously given devroom organizers a little extension. We are therefore extending our own deadline for the Desktops DevRoom: the new deadline is December 14th. There will be no further extensions. Check the details on how to submit in the Call for Participation: FOSDEM Desktops DevRoom 2016 Call for Participation Topics include anything related to the Desktop: desktop environments, software development for desktop/cross-platform, applications, UI, etc See you in Brussels!

Linux v4.4 will include a cool new feature contributed by Sascha Hauer of Pengutronix which propagates voltages set on a regulator to the regulators that supply it (taking into account the minimum headroom that the child regulator needs). The original reason for implementing it was to allow us to set voltages through simple unregulated power switches but the cool bit is that we can also use this to save power in some systems. There are two standard types of voltage regulator, DCDCs which are very efficient but produce noisy output and LDOs which are much less efficient but a lot cheaper and simpler and produce much cleaner output. What a lot of systems do to avoid a lot of the inefficiency of LDOs is to use a DCDC to reduce the voltage from the main system power supply (eg, the battery) to something close to the minimum power supply for the LDOs in the system This means that most of the voltage reduction (which is what generates inefficiency) comes from the DCDC rather than the LDO but you still get the clean power supply from the LDO and can have several different output voltages from a single expensive DCDC. By managing the voltage we set on the DCDC at runtime depending on the LDO configurations we can maximise the power savings from this setup, putting as much of the work onto the DCDC as we can at any given moment. This has been at the back of my mind for a long time, I m really pleased to see it implemented. It s a pretty small change code wise and probably not worth implementing for any one system but when we do it in the core like this hopefully many systems will be able to use it and the effects will add up.

Now I just have to finish putting all the systems in there and I will be able to call the project a success.

Cookies are an important part of the Web since they are the primary mechanism that websites use to maintain user sessions. Unfortunately, they are also abused by surveillance marketing companies to follow you around the Web. Here are a few things you can do in Firefox to protect your privacy.

Cookie Expiry Cookies are sent from the website to your browser via a Set-Cookie HTTP header on the response. It looks like this:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Mon, 07 Dec 2015 16:55:43 GMT
Server: Apache
Set-Cookie: SESSIONID=65576c6c64206e6f2c657920756f632061726b636465742065686320646f2165
Content-Length: 2036
Content-Type: text/html;charset=UTF-8

When your browser sees this, it saves that cookie for the given hostname and keeps it until you close the browser. Should a site want to persist their cookie for longer, they can add an Expires attribute:

Set-Cookie: SESSIONID=65576c...; expires=Tue, 06-Dec-2016 22:38:26 GMT

in which case the browser will retain the cookie until the server-provided expiry date (which could be in a few years). Of course, that's if you don't instruct your browser to do things differently.

Controlling Cookie Expiry In order to change your cookie settings, you must open the Firefox preferences, click on "Privacy" and then choose "Use custom settings for history" under the "History" heading. There, you will have the ability to turn off cookies entirely (network.cookie.cookieBehavior = 2), which I don't recommend you do in your browser since you won't be able to login anywhere. On the other hand, turning off cookies is what I do (and recommend) in Thunderbird since I can't think of a legitimate reason for an email to leave a cookie in my mail client. Another control you'll find there is "Keep until" which defaults to honoring the server-provided expiry ("they expire" aka network.cookie.lifetimePolicy = 0) or making them expire at the end of the browsing session ("I close Firefox" aka network.cookie.lifetimePolicy = 2). A third option is available if you type about:config into your URL bar and looking for the network.cookie.lifetimePolicy preference. Setting this to 3 will honor the server-provided expiry up to a maximum lifetime of 90 days. You can also make that 90 days be anything you want by changing the network.cookie.lifetime.days preference. Regardless of the settings you choose, you can always tell Firefox to clear cookies when you close it by selecting the "Clear history when Firefox closes" checkbox, clicking the "Settings" button and making sure that "Cookies" is selected (privacy.clearOnShutdown.cookies = true). This could be useful for example if you'd like to ensure that cookies never last longer than 5 days but are also cleared whenever you shut down Firefox.

Third-Party Cookies So far, we've only looked at first-party cookies: the ones set by the website you visit and which are typically used to synchronize your login state with the server. There is however another kind: third-party cookies. These ones are set by the third-party resources that a page loads. For example, if a page loads JavaScript from a third-party ad network, you can be pretty confident that they will set their own cookie in order to build a profile on you and serve you "better and more relevant ads".

Controlling Third-Party Cookies If you'd like to opt out of these, you have a couple of options. The first one is to turn off third-party cookies entirely by going back into the Privacy preferences and selecting "Never" next to the "Accept third-party cookies" setting (network.cookie.cookieBehavior = 1). Unfortunately, turning off third-party cookies entirely tends to break a number of sites which rely on this functionality (for example as part of their for login process). A more forgiving option is to accept third-party cookies only for sites which you have actually visited directly. For example, if you visit Facebook and login, you will get a cookie from them. Then when you visit other sites which include Facebook widgets they will not recognize you unless you allow cookies to be sent in a third-party context. To do that, choose the "From visited" option (network.cookie.cookieBehavior = 3). In addition to this setting, you can also choose to make all third-party cookies automatically expire when you close Firefox by setting the network.cookie.thirdparty.sessionOnly option to true in about:config.

Other Ways to Limit Third-Party Cookies Another way to limit undesirable third-party cookies is to tell the browser to avoid connecting to trackers in the first place. This functionality is now built into Private Browsing mode and enabled by default. To enable it outside of Private Browsing too, simply go into about:config and set privacy.trackingprotection.enabled to true. You could also install the EFF's Privacy Badger add-on which uses heuristics to detect and block trackers, unlike Firefox tracking protection which uses a blocklist of known trackers.

My Recommended Settings On my work computer I currently use the following:

network.cookie.cookieBehavior = 3
network.cookie.lifetimePolicy = 3
network.cookie.lifetime.days = 5
network.cookie.thirdparty.sessionOnly = true
privacy.trackingprotection.enabled = true

which allows me to stay logged into most sites for the whole week (no matter now often I restart Firefox Nightly) while limiting tracking and other undesirable cookies as much as possible.

Categories:

• Debian-Blog

Keywords:

• libinput
• multitouch
• gesture
• Xorg
• X
• Wayland

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This update isn't anything particularly exciting, just some more documentation improvements (gbp buildpackage is now the standard invocation instead of git-buildpackage), so instead you get some explanation of this flurry of little software releases. Since the huge transition a year and a half ago, I've been doing lots of adjustment to a different employer, a different commute, a different schedule, different types of work (which has changed several times), different management chains (which have changed even more), and the political and social environment at a new place. Oh, and then moving for the first time in about fifteen years. All of that has meant a lot of distraction and disruption, and that, in turn, really torpedoed my free software work for a while. The silver lining is that it also gave me some distance from all the things I was working on, and an opportunity to think harder about what I want to do and how I want to allocate time. So, I did a bit of a prioritization exercise (although I should do a few more), thought about what I really wanted to focus on, and have been putting some more effort into making time for free software work, community things, and similar work that I'd been letting slip. I'm also doing less of a few things, particularly trying to stay up on random email (so expect me to not be as good of a correspondant), just because there aren't enough hours in the day. Anyway, hence the flurry. Not making any committments, as committment stress is something else I'm getting away from, but it was a fun and productive weekend. You can get the latest version of git-pbuilder from my script distribution page. (Still want to rewrite this in Python at some point.)

Hello dear readers and attendees, This is the post that I will be/ will have been referencing during my presentation to the Seattle Central Community College s Byte club on Thursday, December 10th at 1500-1630. I will begin with a bit of an autobio and find out what kind of students we have in attendance. Please feel free to comment if you d like to keep in touch before or after the presentation. I will discuss some of the bits and pieces of some industry standard platforms which I ve developed, deployed, maintained, managed, co-operated, administered and replaced. We can discuss some of the patterns that work well in the industry, and some that are a bit harder to tame. Once we have touched most of the areas of specialization represented at the meeting, I will dive in to an AngularJS demo I am developing in github here: https://github.com/LLC-Technologies-Collier/Demo-SCCC-Byte-AngularJS/tree/master To follow along with the presentation, please run these commands or something similar. My development environment is Debian stable. So yes, this means that we re not doing a demo of the state of the art. But it also means that the infrastructure has been exercised under load and in production. Install Debian package dependencies First, install the debian packages of nodejs and npm, the node package manager:

cjac@debian0:~$ sudo apt-get install nodejs nodejs-dev nodejs-legacy npm

Check out the git repository After this, check out the repository from github and create a branch for your work:

cjac@debian0:~$ mkdir -p /usr/src/git/github/LLC-Technologies-Collier
cjac@debian0:~$ cd /usr/src/git/github/LLC-Technologies-Collier
cjac@debian0:/usr/src/git/github/LLC-Technologies-Collier$ git clone git@github.com:LLC-Technologies-Collier/Demo-SCCC-Byte-AngularJS.git
...
cjac@debian0:/usr/src/git/github/LLC-Technologies-Collier$ cd Demo-SCCC-Byte-AngularJS
cjac@debian0:.../Demo-SCCC-Byte-AngularJS$ git checkout -b $USER

Upgrade to latest npm, install deps Once we have the git repository checked out, we ll grab the latest version of npm and the rest of the node modules

cjac@debian0:.../Demo-SCCC-Byte-AngularJS$ export PATH="$PWD/node_modules/.bin:$PATH"
cjac@debian0:.../Demo-SCCC-Byte-AngularJS$ npm install --save-exact npm@"2.1.0"
cjac@debian0:.../Demo-SCCC-Byte-AngularJS$ npm install --save-exact  cat pkgackage-list.txt 

This post and the associated git repository will be updated between now and the presentation on Thursday. Please chime in and feel free to get involved! C.J.