What happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday January 8 and Saturday January 14 2017: Upcoming Events

• The Reproducible Build Zoo will be presented by Vagrant Cascadian at the Embedded Linux Conference in Portland, Oregon, February 22nd
• Dennis Gilmore and Holger Levsen will present about "Reproducible Builds and Fedora" at Devconf.cz on February, 27th.
• Introduction to Reproducible Builds will be presented by Vagrant Cascadian at Scale15x in Pasadena, California, March 5th

Reproducible work in other projects Reproducible Builds have been mentioned in the FSF high-priority project list. The F-Droid Verification Server has been launched. It rebuilds apps from source that were built by f-droid.org and checks that the results match. Bernhard M. Wiedemann did some more work on reproducibility for openSUSE. Bootstrappable.org (unfortunately no HTTPS yet) was launched after the initial work was started at our recent summit in Berlin. This is another topic related to reproducible builds and both will be needed in order to perform "Diverse Double Compilation" in practice in the future. Toolchain development and fixes Ximin Luo researched data formats for SOURCE_PREFIX_MAP and explored different options for encoding a map data structure in a single environment variable. He also continued to talk with the rustc team on the topic. Daniel Shahaf filed #851225 ('udd: patches: index by DEP-3 "Forwarded" status') to make it easier to track our patches. Chris Lamb forwarded #849972 upstream to yard, a Ruby documentation generator. Upstream has fixed the issue as of release 0.9.6. Alexander Couzens (lynxis) has made mksquashfs reproducible and is looking for testers. It compiles on BSD systems such as FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD. Bugs filed Chris Lamb:

• #850683 filed against gerbv.

Lucas Nussbaum:

• #850973 filed against shogun.

Nicola Corna:

• #851190 filed against gerbv.

Reviews of unreproducible packages 13 package reviews have been added and 13 have been removed in this week, adding to our knowledge about identified issues. 1 issue type has been added:

• help2man_puts_traceback_in_generated_man_page

Weekly QA work During our reproducibility testing, the following FTBFS bugs have been detected and reported by:

• Chris Lamb (3)
• Lucas Nussbaum (11)
• Nicola Corna (1)

diffoscope development Many bugs were opened in diffoscope during the past few weeks, which probably is a good sign as it shows that diffoscope is much more widely used than a year ago. We have been working hard to squash many of them in time for Debian stable, though we will see how that goes in the end

• Mattia Rizzolo:
  • Code quality and style improvements.
• Maria Glukhova:
  • Add image metadata comparison.
  • Zipinfo included in APK files comparison. (Closes: #850502)
  • Remove archive name from apktool.yml and rename it. (Closes: #850501)
• Chris Lamb:
  • Correctly escape value of href="" elements (re. #849411)
  • Support comparing .ico files using img2txt (Closes: #850730) and fixes and extra tests in subsequent commits.
  • comparators.utils.file: Include magic file type when we know the file format but can't find file-specific details. (Closes: #850850)
  • And other code quality and style improvements.

reproducible-website development

• Daniel Shahaf:
  • Add how-to-chair-a-meeting.md.
• Holger Levsen:
  • Add links to reports by several attendees of berlin2016

tests.reproducible-builds.org

• Ximin Luo and Holger Levsen worked on stricter tests to check that /dev/shm and /run/shm are both mounted with the correct permissions. Some of our build machines currently still fail this test, and the problem is probably the root cause of the FTBFS of some packages (which fails with issues regarding sem_open). The proper fix is still being discussed in #851427.
• Valerie Young worked on creating and linking autogenerated schema documentation for our database used to store the results.
• Holger Levsen added a graph with diffoscope crashes and timeouts.
• Holger also further improved the daily mail notifications about problems.

Misc. This week's edition was written by Ximin Luo, Chris Lamb and Holger Levsen and reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC & the mailing lists.

As the freeze of the next release is closing in, I have updated a bunch of packages around TeX: All of the TeX Live packages (binaries and arch independent ones) and tex-common. I might see whether I get some updates of ConTeXt out, too.
The changes in the binaries are mostly cosmetic: one removal of a non-free (unclear-free) file, and several upstream patches got cherrypicked (dvips, tltexjp contact email, upmendex, dvipdfmx). I played around with including LuaTeX v1.0, but that breaks horribly with the current packages in TeX Live, so I refrained from it. The infrastructure package tex-common got a bugfix for updates from previous releases, and for the other packages there is the usual bunch of updates and new packages. Enjoy! New packages arimo, arphic-ttf, babel-japanese, conv-xkv, css-colors, dtxdescribe, fgruler, footmisx, halloweenmath, keyfloat, luahyphenrules, math-into-latex-4, mendex-doc, missaali, mpostinl, padauk, platexcheat, pstring, pst-shell, ptex-fontmaps, scsnowman, stanli, tinos, undergradmath, yaletter. Updated packages acmart, animate, apxproof, arabluatex, arsclassica, babel-french, babel-russian, baskervillef, beamer, beebe, biber, biber.x86_64-linux, biblatex, biblatex-apa, biblatex-chem, biblatex-dw, biblatex-gb7714-2015, biblatex-ieee, biblatex-philosophy, biblatex-sbl, bidi, calxxxx-yyyy, chemgreek, churchslavonic, cochineal, comicneue, cquthesis, csquotes, ctanify, ctex, cweb, dataref, denisbdoc, diagbox, dozenal, dtk, dvipdfmx, dvipng, elocalloc, epstopdf, erewhon, etoolbox, exam-n, fbb, fei, fithesis, forest, glossaries, glossaries-extra, glossaries-french, gost, gzt, historische-zeitschrift, inconsolata, japanese-otf, japanese-otf-uptex, jsclasses, latex-bin, latex-make, latexmk, lt3graph, luatexja, markdown, mathspec, mcf2graph, media9, mendex-doc, metafont, mhchem, mweights, nameauth, noto, nwejm, old-arrows, omegaware, onlyamsmath, optidef, pdfpages, pdftools, perception, phonrule, platex-tools, polynom, preview, prooftrees, pst-geo, pstricks, pst-solides3d, ptex, ptex2pdf, ptex-fonts, qcircuit, quran, raleway, reledmac, resphilosophica, sanskrit, scalerel, scanpages, showexpl, siunitx, skdoc, skmath, skrapport, smartdiagram, sourcesanspro, sparklines, tabstackengine, tetex, tex, tex4ht, texlive-scripts, tikzsymbols, tocdata, uantwerpendocs, updmap-map, uplatex, uptex, uptex-fonts, withargs, wtref, xcharter, xcntperchap, xecjk, xellipsis, xepersian, xint, xlop, yathesis.

Categories:

• Debian-Blog
• General
• KDE
• Computing
• Technology

Keywords:

• calibre
• gnome
• multitouch
• touchscreen
• tablet
• goldendict
• onboard

Like:

One of the PGP Clean Room s aims is to provide users with the option to easily initialize one or more smartcards with personal info and pins, and subsequently transfer keys to the smartcard(s). The advantage of using smartcards is that users don t have to expose their keys to their laptop for daily certification, signing, encryption or authentication purposes. I started building a basic whiptail TUI that asks users if they will be using a smartcard: smartcard-init.sh on Github If yes, whiptail provides the user with the opportunity to initialize the smartcard with their name, preferred language and login, and change their admin PIN, user PIN, and reset code. I outlined the commands and interactions necessary to edit personal info on the smartcard using gpg --card-edit and sending the keys to the card with gpg --edit-key <FPR> in smartcard-workflow. There s no batch mode for smartcard operations and there s no quick command for it just yet (as in quick-addkey). One option would be to try this out with command-fd/command-file. Currently, python bindings for gpgme are under development so that is another possibility. We can use this workflow to support two smartcards one for the primary key and one for the subkeys, a setup that would also support subkey rotation.

Like each month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS. Individual reports In December, about 175 work hours have been dispatched among 14 paid contributors. Their reports are available:

• Antoine Beaupr did 20.5 hours (out of 13.5 hours allocated + 7 remaining hours).
• Balint Reczey did 10 hours (out of 13.5 hours allocated, thus keeping 2.5 hours for January).
• Ben Hutchings did 10 hours (out of 13.5 hours allocated + 2 hours remaining, thus keeping 5.5 extra hours for January).
• Brian May did 10 hours.
• Chris Lamb did 13.5 hours.
• Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 11 hours (out of 13.5 hours allocated, thus keeping 2.5 extra hours for January).
• Guido G nther did 8 hours.
• Hugo Lefeuvre did 11 hours (out of 13.5 hours allocated, thus keeping 2.5 extra hours for January).
• Jonas Meurer did 5.25 hours (out of 12 hours allocated, thus keeping 6.75 extra hours for January).
• Markus Koschany did 13.5 hours.
• Ola Lundqvist did 13.5 hours.
• Rapha l Hertzog did 10 hours.
• Roberto C. Sanchez did 13.5 hours.
• Thorsten Alteholz did 13.5 hours.

Evolution of the situation The number of sponsored hours did not increase but a new silver sponsor is in the process of joining. We are only missing another silver sponsor (or two to four bronze sponsors) to reach our objective of funding the equivalent of a full time position. The security tracker currently lists 31 packages with a known CVE and the dla-needed.txt file 27. The situation improved a little bit compared to last month. Thanks to our sponsors New sponsors are in bold.

• Platinum sponsors:
• TOSHIBA (for 14 months)
• GitHub (for 5 months)
• Gold sponsors:
• The Positive Internet (for 30 months)
• Blablacar (for 29 months)
• Linode LLC (for 19 months)
• Babiel GmbH (for 8 months)
• Plat Home (for 8 months)
• Silver sponsors:
• Domeneshop AS (for 29 months)
• Universit Lille 3 (for 29 months)
• Trollweb Solutions (for 27 months)
• Nantes M tropole (for 23 months)
• University of Luxembourg (for 21 months)
• Dalenys (for 20 months)
• Univention GmbH (for 15 months)
• Universit Jean Monnet de St Etienne (for 15 months)
• Sonus Networks (for 9 months)
• UR Communications BV (for 3 months)
• maxcluster GmbH (for 3 months)
• Bronze sponsors:
• David Ayers IntarS Austria (for 30 months)
• Evolix (for 30 months)
• Offensive Security (for 30 months)
• Seznam.cz, a.s. (for 30 months)
• Freeside Internet Service (for 29 months)
• MyTux (for 29 months)
• Linuxhotel GmbH (for 27 months)
• Intevation GmbH (for 26 months)
• Daevel SARL (for 25 months)
• Bitfolk LTD (for 24 months)
• Megaspace Internet Services GmbH (for 24 months)
• Greenbone Networks GmbH (for 23 months)
• NUMLOG (for 23 months)
• WinGo AG (for 22 months)
• Ecole Centrale de Nantes LHEEA (for 19 months)
• Sig-I/O (for 16 months)
• Entr ouvert (for 14 months)
• Adfinis SyGroup AG (for 11 months)
• Laboratoire LEGI UMR 5519 / CNRS (for 6 months)
• Quarantainenet BV (for 6 months)
• GNI MEDIA (for 5 months)
• RHX Srl (for 3 months)

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2 more weeks of my awesome Outreachy journey have passed, so it is time to make an update on my progress. I continued my work on improving diffoscope by fixing bugs and completing wishlist items. These include:

Improving APK support I worked on #850501 and #850502 to improve the way diffoscope handles APK files. Thanks to Emanuel Bronshtein for providing clear description on how to reproduce these bugs and ideas on how to fix them. And special thanks to Chris Lamb for insisting on providing tests for these changes! That part actually proved to be little more tricky, and I managed to mess up with these tests (extra thanks to Chris for cleaning up the mess I created). Hope that also means I learned something from my mistakes. Also, I was pleased to see F-droid Verification Server as a sign of F-droid progress on reproducible builds effort - I hope these changes to diffoscope will help them!

Adding support for image metadata That came from #849395 - a request was made to compare image metadata along with image content. Diffoscope has support for three types of images: JPEG, MS Windows Icon (*.ico) and PNG. Among these, PNG already had good image metadata support thanks to sng tool, so I worked on .jpeg and .ico files support. I initially tried to use exiftool for extracting metadata, but then I discovered it does not handle .ico files, so I decided to use a bigger force - ImageMagick s identify - for this task. I was glad to see it had that handy -format option I could use to select only the necessary fields (I found their -verbose, well, too verbose for the task) and presenting them in the defined form, negating the need of filtering its output. What was particulary interesting and important for me in terms of learning: while working on this feature, I discovered that, at the moment, diffoscope could not handle .ico files at all - img2txt tool, that was used for retrieving image content, did not support that type of images. But instead of recognizing this as a bug and resolving it, I started to think of possible workaround, allowing for retrieving image metadata even after retrieving image content failed. Definetely not very good thinking. Thanks Mattia Rizzolo for actually recognizing this as a bug and filing it, and Chris Lamb for fixing it!

Other work

Order-like differences, part 2 In the previous post, I mentioned Lunar s suggestion to use hashing for finding order-like difference in wide variety of input data. I implemented that idea, but after discussion with my mentor, we decided it is probably not worth it - this change would alter quite a lot of things in core modules of diffoscope, and the gain would be not really significant. Still, implementing that was an important experience for me, as I had to hack on deepest and, arguably, most difficult modules of diffoscope and gained some insight on how they work.

Comparing with several tools (work in progress) Although my initial motivation for this idea was flawed (the workaround I mentioned earlier for .ico files), it still might be useful to have a mechanism that would allow to run several commands for finding difference, and then give the output of those that succeed, failing if and only if they all have failed. One possible case when it might happen is when we use commands coming from different tools, and one of them is not installed. It would be nice if we still used the other and not the uninformative binary diff (that is a default fallback option for when something goes wrong with more clever comparison). I am still in process of polishing this change, though, and still in doubt if it is needed at all.

Side note - Outreachy and my university progress In my Outreachy application, I promised that if I am selected into this round, I will do everything I can to unload the required time period from my university time commitements. I did that by moving most of my courses to the first half of the academic year. Now, the main thing that is left for me to do is my Master s thesis. I consulted my scientific advisors from both universities that I am formally attending (SFEDU and LUT - I am in double degree program), and as a result, they agreed to change my Master s thesis topic to match my Outreachy work. Now, that should have sounded like an excellent news - merging these activities together actually mean I can allocate much more time to my work on reproducible builds, even beyond the actual internship time period. That was intended to remove a burden from my shoulders. Still, I feel a bit uneasy. The drawback of this decision lies in fact I have no idea on how to write scientific report based on pure practical work. I know other students from my universities have done such things before, but choosing my own topic means my scientific advisors can t help me much - this is just out of their area of expertise. Well, wish me luck - I m up to the challenge!

I've been working on a fun holiday project in my spare time lately. It all started innocently enough. The office construction was nearing its end, and it was time for my workspace to be set up. Our deployment wizard and I were discussing. Normally we stick two high-end monitors on a desk. I'm blind; that seemed silly. He wanted to do something similarly nice for me, so he replaced one of the monitors with excellent speakers. They are a joy to listen to, but I felt like I should actually do something with them. So, I wanted to play around with some sort of audio project.
I decided to take a crack at an audio representation of network traffic. The solaris version of ping used to have an audio option, which would produce sound for successful pings. In the past I've used audio queues to monitor events like service health and build status.
It seemed like you could produce audio to give an overall feel for what was happening on the network. I was imagining a quick listen would be able to answer questions like:

1. How busy is the network


2. How many sources are active


3. Is the traffic a lot of streams or just a few?


4. Are there any interesting events such as packet loss or congestion collapse going on?


5. What's the mix of services involved

I divided the project into three segments, which I will write about in future entries:

• What parts of the network to model


• How to present the audio information


• Tools and implementation

I'm fairly happy with what I have. It doesn't represent all the items above. As an example, it doesn't directly track packet loss or retransmissions, nor does it directly distinguish one service from another. Still, just because of the traffic flow, rsync sounds different from http. It models enough of what I'm looking for that I find it to be a useful tool. And I learned a lot about music and Linux audio. I also got to practice designing discrete-time control functions in ways that brought back the halls of MIT.

Many of you are big fans of S.W.O.T analysis, I am sure of that! :-) Technical competence is our strongest suit, but we have reached a size and sphere of influence which requires an increase in organisation.

We all love our project and want to make sure Debian still shines in the next decades (and centuries!). One way to secure that goal is to identify elements/events/things which could put that goal at risk. To this end, we've organized a short S.W.O.T analysis session at DebConf16. Minutes of the meeting can be found here. I believe it is an interesting read and is useful for Debian old-timers as well as newcomers. It helps to convey a better understanding of the project's status. For each item, we've tried to identify an action.

Here are a few things we've worked on:

• Identify new potential contributors by attending and speaking at conferences where Free and Open Sources software are still not very well-known, or where we have too few contributors.
  
  Each Debian developer is encouraged to identify events where we can promote FOSS and Debian. As DPL, I'd be happy to cover expenses to attend such events.
• Our average age is also growing over the years. It is true that we could attract more new contributors than we already do.
  
  We can organize short internships. We should not wait for students to come to us. We can get in touch with universities and engineering schools and work together on a list of topics. It is easy and will give us the opportunity to reach out to more students.
  
  It is true that we have tried in the past to do that. We may organize a sprint with interested people and share our experience on trying to do internships on Debian-related subjects. If you have successfully done that in the past and managed to attract new contributors that way, please share your experience with us!
  
  If you see other ways to attract new contributors, please get in touch so that we can discuss!
• Not easy to get started in the project.
  
  It could be argued that all the information is available, but rather than being easily findable from on starting point, it is scattered over several places (documentation on our website, wiki, metadata on bug reports, etc ).
  
  Fedora and Mozilla both worked on this subject and did build a nice web application to make this easier and nicer. The result of this is asknot-ng.
  
  A whatcanidofor.debian.org would be wonderful! Any takers? We can help by providing a virtual machine to build this. Being a DD is not mandatory. Everyone is welcome!
• Cloud images for Debian.
  
  This is a very important point since cloud providers are now major distributions consumers. We have to ensure that Debian is correctly integrated in the cloud, without making compromises on our values and philosophy.
  
  I believe this item has been worked on during the last Debian Cloud sprint. I am looking forward to seeing the positive effects of this sprint in the long term. I believe it does help us to build a stronger relationship with cloud providers and gives us a nice opportunity to work with them on a shared set of goals!

During next DebConf, we can review the progress that has been made on each item and discuss new ones. In addition to this session acting as a health check, I see it as a way for the DPL to discuss, openly and publicly, about the important changes that should be implemented in the project and imagine together a better future.

In the meantime, everyone should feel free to pick one item from the list and work on it. :-)

TL;DR; If you use NetAddr::IP->new6() for resolving DNS names to IPv6 addresses, the addresses returned by NetAddr::IP are not what you might expect. See below for details. Issue #2 in UIF Over the last couple of days, I tried to figure out the cause of a weird issue observed in UIF (Universal Internet Firewall [1], a nice Perl tool for setting up ip(6)tables based Firewalls). Already a long time ago, I stumbled over a weird DNS resolving issue of DNS names to IPv6 addresses in UIF that I reported as issue #2 [2] against upstream UIF back then. I happen to be co-author of UIF. So, I felt very ashamed all the time for not fixing the issue any sooner. As many of us DDs try to get our packages into shape before the next Debian release these days, I find myself doing the same. I started investigating the underlying cause of issue #2 in UIF a couple of days ago. Issue #119858 on CPAN Today, I figured out that the Perl code in UIF is not causing the observed phenomenon. The same behaviour is reproducible with a minimal and pure NetAddr::IP based Perl script (reported as Debian bug #851388 [2]. Thanks to Gregor Herrmann for forwarding Debian bug upstream (#119858 [3]). Here is the example script that shows the flawed behaviour:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use NetAddr::IP;
my $hostname = "google-public-dns-a.google.com";
my $ip6 = NetAddr::IP->new6($hostname);
my $ip4 = NetAddr::IP->new($hostname);
print "$ip6 <- WTF???\n";
print "$ip4\n";
exit(0);

... gives...

[mike@minobo ~]$ ./netaddr-ip_resolv-ipv6.pl
0:0:0:0:0:0:808:808/128 <- WTF???
8.8.8.8/32

In words... So what happens in NetAddr::IP is that with the new6() "constructor" you initialize a new IPv6 address. If the address is a DNS name, NetAddr::IP internally resolves it into an IPv4 address and converts this IPv4 address into some IPv6'ish format. This bogus IPv6 address is not the one matching the given DNS name. Impacted Software in Debian Various Debian packages use NetAddr::IP and may be affected by this flaw, here is an incomplete list (use apt-rdepends -r libnetaddr-ip-perl for the complete list):

• spamassassin
• postgrey
• postfix-policyd-spf-perl
• mtpolicyd
• xen-tools
• fwsnort
• freeip-server
• 389-ds
• uif

Any of the above packages could be affected if NetAddr::IP->new6(<dnsname>) is being used. I haven't checked any of the code bases, but possibly the corresponding maintainers may want to do that. References

• [1] https://github.com/cajus/uif/
• [2] https://github.com/cajus/uif/issues/2
• [3] https://rt.cpan.org/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=119858
• [4] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=851388

light+love
Mike

Review: Enchanters' End Game, by David Eddings

Series:	The Belgariad #5
Publisher:	Del Rey
Copyright:	December 1984
Printing:	February 1990
ISBN:	0-345-33871-5
Format:	Mass market
Pages:	372

And, finally, the conclusion towards which everything has been heading, and the events for which Castle of Wizardry was the preparation. (This is therefore obviously not the place to start with this series.) Does it live up to all the foreshadowing and provide a satisfactory conclusion? I'd say mostly. The theology is a bit thin, but Eddings does a solid job of bringing all the plot threads together and giving each of the large cast a moment to shine. Enchanters' End Game (I have always been weirdly annoyed by that clunky apostrophe) starts with more of Garion and Belgarath, and, similar to the end of Castle of Wizardry, this feels like them rolling on the random encounter table. There is a fairly important bit with Nadraks at the start, but the remaining detour to the north is a mostly unrelated bit of world-building. Before this re-read, I didn't remember how extensive the Nadrak parts of this story were; in retrospect, I realize a lot of what I was remembering is in the Mallorean instead. I'll therefore save my commentary on Nadrak gender roles for an eventual Mallorean re-read, since there's quite a lot to dig through and much of it is based on information not available here. After this section, though, the story leaves Garion, Belgarath, and Silk for nearly the entire book, returning to them only for the climax. Most of this book is about Ce'Nedra, the queens and kings of the west, and what they're doing while Garion and his small party are carrying the Ring into Mordor er, you know what I mean. And this long section is surprisingly good. We first get to see the various queens of the west doing extremely well managing the kingdoms while the kings are away (see my previous note about how Eddings does examine his stereotypes), albeit partly by mercilessly exploiting the sexism of their societies. The story then picks up with Ce'Nedra and company, including all of the rest of Garion's band, being their snarky and varied selves. There are some fairly satisfying set pieces, some battle tactics, some magical tactics, and a good bit of snarking and interplay between characters who feel like old friends by this point (mostly because of Eddings's simple, broad-strokes characterization). And Ce'Nedra is surprisingly good here. I would say that she's grown up after the events of the last book, but sadly she reverts to being awful in the aftermath. But for the main section of the book, partly because she's busy with other things, she's a reasonable character who experiences some actual consequences and some real remorse from one bad decision she makes. She's even admirable in how she handles events leading up to the climax of the book. Eddings does a good job showing every character in their best light, putting quite a lot of suspense (and some dramatic rescues) into this final volume, and providing a final battle that's moderately interesting. I'm not sure I entirely bought the theological ramifications of the conclusion (the bits with Polgara do not support thinking about too deeply), but the voice in Garion's head continues to be one of the better characters of the series. And Errand is a delight. After the climax, the aftermath sadly returns to Eddings's weird war between the sexes presentation of all gender relationships in this series, and it left me with a bit of a bad taste in my mouth. (There is absolutely no way that some of these relationships would survive in reality.) Eddings portrays nearly every woman as a manipulative schemer, sometimes for good and sometimes for evil, and there is just so much gender stereotyping throughout this book for both women and men. You can tell he's trying with the queens, but women are still only allowed to be successful at politics and war within a very specific frame. Even Polgara gets a bit of the gender stereotyping, although she remains mostly an exception (and one aspect of the ending is much better than it could have been). Ah well. One does not (or at least probably should not) read this series without being aware that it has some flaws. But it has a strange charm as well, mostly from its irreverence. The dry wise-cracking of these characters rings more true to me than the epic seriousness of a lot of fantasy. This is how people behave under stress, and this is how quirky people who know each other extremely well interact. It also keeps one turning the pages quite effectively. I stayed up for several late nights finishing it, and was never tempted to put it down and stop reading. This is not great literature, but it's still fun. It wouldn't sustain regular re-reading for me, but a re-read after twenty years or so was pretty much exactly the experience I was hoping for: an unchallenging, optimistic story with amusing characters and a guaranteed happy ending. There's a place for that. Followed, in a series sense, by the Mallorean, the first book of which is The Guardians of the West. But this is a strictly optional continuation; the Belgariad comes to a definite end here. Rating: 7 out of 10

I started to reactivate my old moto g falcon during the last days of CyanogenMod in December of 2016. First step was a recovery update to TWRP 3.0.2-2 so I was able to flash CM13/14 builds. While CM14 nightly builds did not boot at all the CM13 builds did, but up to the last build wifi connections to the internet did not work. I could actually register with my wifi (Archer C7 running OpenWRT) but all apps claim the internet connection check failed and I'm offline. So bummer, without wifi a smartphone is not much fun. I was pretty sure that wifi worked when I last used that phone about 1.5 years ago with CM11/12, so I started to dive into the forums of xda-developers to look for alternatives. Here I found out about Exodus. I've a bit of trouble trusting stuff from xda-developer forums but what the hell, the phone is empty anyway so nothing to loose and I flashed the latest falcon build. To flash it I had to clean the whole phone, format all partitions via TWRP and then sideloaded the zip image file via adb (adb from the Debian/stretch adb package works like a charm, thank you guys!). Booted and b m wifi works again! Now Exodus is a really striped down mod, to do anything useful with it I had to activate the developer options and allow USB debugging. Afterwards I could install the f-droid and Opera apk via "adb install foo.apk". Lineage OS As I could derive from another thread on xda-developers Lineage OS has the falcon still on the shortlist for 14.x nightly builds. Maybe that will be an alternative again in the future. For now Exodus is a bit behind the curve (based on Android 6.0.1 from September 2016) but at least it's functional.

A month or so ago I got involved in a discussion on IRC about notification methods for a headless NAS. One of the options considered was some sort of USB attached LED. DealExtreme had a cheap Webmail notifier , which was already supported by mainline kernels as a Riso Kagaku device but it had been sold out for some time. This seemed like a fun problem to solve with a tinyAVR and V-USB. I had my USB relay board so I figured I could use that to at least get some code to the point that the kernel detected it as the right device, and the relay output could be configured as one of the colours to ensure it was being driven in roughly the right manner. The lack of a full lsusb dump (at least when I started out) made things a bit harder, plus the fact that the Riso uses an output report unlike the relay code, which uses a control message. However I had the kernel source for the driver and with a little bit of experimentation had something which would cause the driver to be loaded and the appropriate files in /sys/class/leds/ to be created. The relay was then successfully activated when the red LED was supposed to be on. I subsequently ordered some Digispark clones and modified the code to reflect the pins there (my relay board used pins 1+2 for USB, the Digispark uses pins 3+4). I then soldered a tricolour LED to the board, plugged it in and had a clone of the Riso Kaguku device for about 1.50 in parts (no doubt much cheaper in bulk). Very chuffed. In case it s useful to someone, the code is released under GPLv3+ and is available at https://the.earth.li/gitweb/?p=riso-kagaku-clone.git;a=summary or on GitHub at https://github.com/u1f35c/riso-kagaku-clone. I m seeing occasional issues on an older Dell machine that only does USB2 with enumeration, but it generally is fine once it gets over that. (FWIW, Jon, who started the original discussion, ended up with a BlinkStick Nano which is a neater device with 2 LEDs but still based on an Tiny85.)

Modern XMPP Server

I've published a new HOWTO on my website 'http://www.trueelena.org/computers/howto/modern_xmpp_server.html':

http://www.enricozini.org/blog/2017/debian/modern-and-secure-instant-messaging/ already wrote about the Why (and the What, Who and When), so I'll just quote his conclusion and move on to the How.

I now have an XMPP setup which has all the features of the recent fancy chat systems, and on top of that it runs, client and server, on Free Software, which can be audited, it is federated and I can self-host my own server in my own VPS if I want to, with packages supported in Debian.

How

I've decided to install https://prosody.im/, mostly because it was recommended by the RTC QuickStart Guide http://rtcquickstart.org/; I've heard that similar results can be reached with https://www.ejabberd.im/ and other servers.

I'm also targeting https://www.debian.org/ stable (+ backports); as I write this is jessie; if there are significant differences I will update this article when I will upgrade my server to stretch. Right now, this means that I'm using prosody 0.9 (and that's probably also the version that will be available in stretch).

Installation and prerequisites

You will need to enable the https://backports.debian.org/ repository and then install the packages prosody and prosody-modules.

You also need to setup some TLS certificates (I used Let's Encrypt https://letsencrypt.org/); and make them readable by the prosody user; you can see Chapter 12 of the RTC QuickStart Guide http://rtcquickstart.org/guide/multi/xmpp-server-prosody.html for more details.

On your firewall, you'll need to open the following TCP ports:

• 5222 (client2server)


• 5269 (server2server)


• 5280 (default http port for prosody)


• 5281 (default https port for prosody)

The latter two are needed to enable some services provided via http(s), including rich media transfers.

With just a handful of users, I didn't bother to configure LDAP or anything else, but just created users manually via:

prosodyctl adduser alice@example.org

In-band registration is disabled by default (and I've left it that way, to prevent my server from being used to send spim https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messaging_spam).

prosody configuration

You can then start configuring prosody by editing /etc/prosody/prosody.cfg.lua and changing a few values from the distribution defaults.

First of all, enforce the use of encryption and certificate checking both for client2server and server2server communications with:


c2s_require_encryption = true
s2s_secure_auth = true


and then, sadly, add to the whitelist any server that you want to talk to and doesn't support the above:


s2s_insecure_domains = "gmail.com"


virtualhosts

For each virtualhost you want to configure, create a file /etc/prosody/conf.avail/chat.example.org.cfg.lua with contents like the following:


VirtualHost "chat.example.org"
enabled = true
ssl =
key = "/etc/ssl/private/example.org-key.pem";
certificate = "/etc/ssl/public/example.org.pem";


For the domains where you also want to enable MUCs, add the follwing lines:


Component "conference.chat.example.org" "muc"
restrict_room_creation = "local"

the "local" configures prosody so that only local users are allowed to create new rooms (but then everybody can join them, if the room administrator allows it): this may help reduce unwanted usages of your server by random people.

You can also add the following line to enable rich media transfers via http uploads (XEP-0363):


Component "upload.chat.trueelena.org" "http_upload"

The defaults are pretty sane, but see https://modules.prosody.im/mod_http_upload.html for details on what knobs you can configure for this module

Don't forget to enable the virtualhost by linking the file inside /etc/prosody/conf.d/.

additional modules

Most of the other interesting XEPs are enabled by loading additional modules inside /etc/prosody/prosody.cfg.lua (under modules_enabled); to enable mod_something just add a line like:


"something";

Most of these come from the prosody-modules package (and thus from https://modules.prosody.im/ ) and some may require changing when prosody 0.10 will be available; when this is the case it is mentioned below.

• mod_carbons (XEP-0280)
  To keep conversations syncronized while using multiple devices at the same time.
  
  This will be included by default in prosody 0.10.




• mod_privacy + mod_blocking (XEP-0191)
  To allow user-controlled blocking of users, including as an anti-spim measure.
  
  In prosody 0.10 these two modules will be replaced by mod_privacy.




• mod_smacks (XEP-0198)
  Allow clients to resume a disconnected session before a customizable timeout and prevent message loss.




• mod_mam (XEP-0313)
  Archive messages on the server for a limited period of time (default 1 week) and allow clients to retrieve them; this is required to syncronize message history between multiple clients.
  
  With prosody 0.9 only an in-memory storage backend is available, which may make this module problematic on servers with many users. prosody 0.10 will fix this by adding support for an SQL backed storage with archiving capabilities.




• mod_throttle_presence + mod_filter_chatstates (XEP-0352)
  Filter out presence updates and chat states when the client announces (via Client State Indication) that the user isn't looking. This is useful to reduce power and bandwidth usage for "useless" traffic.

@Gruppo Linux Como @LIFO

Categories:

• Debian-Blog
• Computing
• Tools

Keywords:

• Laptop Mode Tools
• power saving

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I had to figure out what kinds of signal you can run over 3G-SDI today, and it's pretty confusing, so I thought I'd share it. For the reference, 3G-SDI is the same as 3G HD-SDI, an extension of HD-SDI, which is an extension of the venerable SDI standard (well, duh). They're all used for running uncompressed audio/video data of regular BNC coaxial cable, possibly hundreds of meters, and are in wide use in professional and semiprofessional setups. So here's the rundown on 3G-SDI capabilities:

• 1080p60 supports 10-bit 4:2:2 Y'CbCr. Period.
• 720p60/1080p30/1080i60 supports a much wider range of formats: 10-bit 4:4:4:4 RGBA (alpha optional), 10-bit 4:4:4:4 Y'CbCrA (alpha optional), 12-bit 4:4:4 RGB, 12-bit 4:4:4 Y'CbCr or finally 12-bit 4:2:2 Y'CbCr (seems rather redundant).
• There's also a format exclusively for 1080p24 (actually 2048x1080) that supports 12-bit X'Y'Z. Digital cinema, hello. Apart from that, it supports pretty much what 1080p30 does. There's also a 2048x1080p30 (no interlaced version) mode for 12-bit 4:2:2:4 Y'CbCrA, but it seems rather obscure.

And then there's dual-link 3G-SDI, which uses two cables instead of one and there's also Blackmagic's proprietary 6G-SDI , which supports basically everything dual-link 3G-SDI does. But in 2015, seemingly there was also a real 6G-SDI and 12G-SDI, and it's unclear to me whether it's in any way compatible with Blackmagic's offering. It's all confusing. But at least, these are the differences from single-link to dual-link 3G-SDI:

• 1080p60 supports essentially everything that 720p60 supports on single-link: 10-bit 4:4:4:4 RGBA (alpha optional), 10-bit 4:4:4:4 Y'CbCrA (alpha optional), 12-bit 4:4:4 RGB, 12-bit 4:4:4 Y'CbCr and the redundant 12-bit 4:2:2 Y'CbCr.
• 2048x1080 4:4:4 X'Y'Z' now also supports 1080p25 and 1080p30.

4K? I don't know. 120fps? I believe that's also a proprietary extension of some sort. And of course, having a device support 3G-SDI doesn't mean at all it's required to support all of this; in particular, I believe Blackmagic's systems don't support alpha at all except on their single 12G-SDI card, and I'd also not be surprised if RGB support is rather limited in practice.

This is an extension to last month s article/sharing where I had shared the changes that had transpired in the last 2-3 months. Now am in a position to share the kind of issues a user can go through in case he is looking for support from IRCTC to help him/her go cashless. If you a new user to use IRCTC services you wouldn t go through this trouble. For those who might have TL;DR issues it s about how hard it can become to get digital credentials fixed in IRCTC (Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation) a. 2 months back Indian Prime Minister gave a call incentivizing people to use digital means to do any commercial activities. One of the big organizations which took/takes part is IRCTC which handles the responsibility for e-ticketing millions of Rail tickets for common people. In India, a massive percentage moves by train as it s cheaper than going by Air. A typical fare from say Pune Delhi (capital of India) by second class sleeper would be INR 645/- for a distance of roughly 1600 odd kms and these are monopoly rates, there are no private trains and I m not suggesting anything of that sort, just making sure that people know. An economy class ticket by Air for the same distance would be anywhere between INR 2500-3500/- for a 2 hour flight between different airlines. Last I checked there are around 8 mainstream airlines including flag-carrier Air India. About 30% of the population live on less than a dollar and a half a day which would come around INR 100/-. There was a comment some six months back on getting more people out of the poverty line. But as there are lots of manipulations in numbers for who and what denotes above poor and below poor in India and lot of it has to do with politics it s not something which would be easily fixable. There are lots to be said in that arena but this article is not an appropriate blog-post for that. All in all, it s only 3-5% of the population at the most who can travel via Air if situation demands and around 1-2% who might be frequent, business or leisure travellers. Now while I can thankfully afford an Air Ticket if the situation so demands, my mother gets motion sickness so while together we can only travel by train. b. With the above background, I had registered with IRCTC few years ago with another number (dual-SIM) I had purchased and was thinking that I would be using this long-term (seems to my first big mistake, hindsight 50:50) . This was somewhere in 2006/2007. c. Few months later I found that the other service provider wasn t giving good service or was not upto mark. I was using IDEA (the main mobile operator) throughout those times. d. As I didn t need the service that much, didn t think to inform them that I want to change to another service provider at that point in time (possibly the biggest mistake, hindsight 50:50) e. In July 2016 itself IRCTC cut service fees, f. This was shared as a NEW news item/policy decision at November-end 2016 . g. While I have done all that has been asked by irctc-care haven t still got the issues resolved IRCTC s e-mail id care@irctc.co.in Now in detail This is my first e-mail sent to IRCTC in June 2016

Dear Customer care, I had applied and got username and password sometime back . The
number I had used to register with IRCTC was xxxxxxxxxx (BSNL mobile number not used anymore) . My mobile was lost and along with that the number was also lost. I had filed a complaint with the police and stopped that number as well. Now I have an another mobile number but have forgotten both the password and the security answer that I had given when I had registered . I do have all the conversations I had both with the ticketadmn@irctc.co.in as well as care@irctc.co.in if needed to prove my identity. The new number I want to tie it with is xxxxxxxxxx (IDEA number in-use for last 10 years) I see two options :- a. Tie the other number with my e-mail address b. Take out the e-mail address from the database so that I can fill in
as a new applicant. Looking forward to hear from you.

There was lot of back and forth with various individuals on IRCTC and after a lot of back and forth, this is the final e-mail I got from them somewhere in August 2016, he writes

Dear Customer, We request you to send mobile bill of your mobile number if it is post paid or if it is prepaid then contact to your service provider and they will give you valid proof of your mobile number or they will give you in written on company head letter so that we may update your mobile number to update so that you may reset your password through mobile OTP.
and Kindly inform you that you can update your profile by yourself also. 1.login on IRCTC website
2.after login successfully move courser on my profile tab.
3.then click on update profile
4.re-enter your password then you can update your profile
5.click on user-profile then email id.
6. click on update. Still you face any problem related to update profile please revert to us with the screen shots of error message which you will get at the time of update profile . Thanks & Regards Parivesh Patel
Executive, Customer Care
care@irctc.co.in
http://www.irctc.co.in
[#3730034]

IRCTC s response seemed responsible, valid and thought it would be a cake-walk as private providers are supposed to be much more efficient than public ones. The experience proved how wrong was I trust them with doing the right thing 1. First I tried the twitter handle to see how IDEA uses their twitter handle. 2. The idea customer care twitter handle was mild in its response. 3. After sometime I realized that the only way out of this quagmire would perhaps be to go to a brick-mortar shop and get it resolved face-to-face. I went twice or thrice but each time something or the other would happen. On the fourth and final time, I was able to get to the big Official shop only to be told they can t do anything about this and I would have to the appellate body to get the reply. The e-mail address which they shared (and I found it later) was wrong. I sent a somewhat longish e-mail sharing all the details and got bounce-backs. The correct e-mail address for the IDEA Maharashtra appellate body is appellette.mh@idea.aditybirla.com I searched online and after a bit of hit and miss finally got the relevant address. Then finally on 30th December, 2016 wrote a short email to the service provider as follows

Dear Sir,
I have been using prepaid mobile connection number xxxxxxx taken from IDEA for last 10 odd years. I want to register myself with IRCTC for online railway booking using
my IDEA mobile number. Earlier, I was having a BSNL connection which I discontinued 4 years back, For re-registering myself with IRCTC, I have to fulfill their latest
requirements as shown in the email below . It is requested that I please be issued a letter confirming my
credentials with your esteemed firm. I contacted your local office at corner of Law College Road and
Bhandarkar Road, Pune (reference number Q1 84786060793) who
refused to provide me any letter and have advised me to contact on the
above e-mail address, hence this request is being forwarded to you. Please do the needful at your earliest.

Few days later I got this short e-mail from them

Dear Customer, Greetings for the day! This is with reference to your email regarding services. Please accept our apologies for the inconvenience caused to you and delay in response. We regret to inform you that we are unable to provide demographic details from our end as provision for same is not available with us. Should you need any further assistance, please call our Customer Service help line number 9822012345 or email us at customercare@idea.adityabirla.com by mentioning ten digit Idea mobile number in subject line. Thanks & Regards, Javed Khan Customer Service Team IDEA Cellular Limited- Maharashtra & Goa Circle.

Now I was at almost my wit s end. Few days before, I had re-affirmed my e-mail address to IDEA . I went to the IDEA care site, registered with my credentials. While the https connection to the page is weak, but let s not dwell on that atm. I logged into the site, I went through all the drop-down menus and came across My Account > Raise a request link which I clicked on . This came to a page where I could raise requests for various things. One of the options given there was Bill Delivery. As I wasn t a postpaid user but a prepaid user didn t know if that would work or not I still clicked on it. It said it would take 4 days for that to happen. I absently filed it away as I was somewhat sure that nothing would happen from my previous experience with IDEA. But this time the IDEA support staff came through and shared a toll-free SMS number and message format that I could use to generate call details from the last 6 months. The toll-free number from IDEA is 12345 and the message format is EBILL MON (short-form for month so if it s January would be jan, so on and so forth). After gathering all the required credentials, sent my last mail to IRCTC about a week, 10 days back

Dear Mr. Parivesh Patel, I was out-of-town and couldn t do the needful so sorry for the delay.
Now that I m back in town, I have been able to put together my prepaid
bills of last 6 months which should make it easy to establish my
identity. As had shared before, I don t remember my old password and the old
mobile number (BSNL number) is no longer accessible so can t go
through that route. Please let me know the next steps in correcting the existing IRCTC
account (which I haven t operated ever) so I can start using it to
book my tickets. Look forward to hearing from you.

Haven t heard anything them from them, apart from a generated token number, each time you send a reply happens. This time it was #4763548 The whole sequence of events throws a lot of troubling questions a. Could IRCTC done a better job of articulating their need to me instead of the run-around I was given ? b. Shouldn t there be a time limit to accounts from which no transactions have been done ? I hadn t done a single transaction since registering. When cell service providers including BSNL takes number out after a year of not using a number, why is that account active for so long ? c. As that account didn t have OTP at registration, dunno if it s being used for illegal activities or something. Update This doesn t seem to be a unique thing at all. Just sampling some of the tweets by people at @IRCTC_LTD https://twitter.com/praveen4al/status/775614978258718721 https://twitter.com/vis_nov25/status/786062572390932480 https://twitter.com/ShubhamDevadiya/status/794241443950948352 https://twitter.com/rajeshhindustan/status/798028633759584256 https://twitter.com/ameetsangita/status/810081624343908352 https://twitter.com/grkisback/status/813733835213078528 https://twitter.com/gbalaji_/status/804230235625394177 https://twitter.com/chandhu_nr/status/800675627384721409 , all of this just goes to show how un-unique the situation really is.
Filed under: Miscellenous Tagged: #customer-service, #demonetization, #IDEA-aditya birla, #IRCTC, #web-services, rant

Debian LTS November marked the 20th month I contributed to Debian LTS under the Freexian umbrella. I had 8 hours allocated which I used by:

• some rather quiet frontdesk days
• updating icedove to 45.5.1 resulting in DLA-752-1 fixing 7 CVEs
• looking whether Wheezy is affected by xsa-202, xsa-203, xsa-204 and handling the communication with credativ for these (update not yet released)
• Assessing cURL/libcURL CVE-2016-9586
• Assessing whether Wheezy's QEMU is affeced by security issues in 9pfs "proxy" and "handle" code
• Releasing DLA-776-1 for samba fixing CVE-2016-2125

Other Debian stuff

• Allow travis.debian.net to start services when running autopkgtests
• Usual bunch of libvirt and related uploads
• Uploaded git-buildpackage 0.8.8 and 0.8.9 to unstable (list of changes)

Some other Free Software activites

• Some fixes to libvirt's configure.ac for merged /usr
• Made some progress on getting the merkur board clones to life. The first stage bootloader and contiki are working now.
• Some ansible_spec fixes for roles in non default directories and robustness
• Due to excessive XMPP spam started a jabber-spam-blacklist
• Unbroke ansible-module-foreman
• Added support to configure Foreman settings via ansible-module-foreman and python-foreman
• Speed up VM removal with Foreman and VMware ESX
• Started foreman_serverspec a Foreman plugin to store serverspec reports in the Foreman. This is in a very early stage.

I use openssh every day, be it the ssh command for connecting to remote hosts, or the scp command for uploading/downloading files. Once a day, or more, I forget that scp uses the non-obvious -P flag for specifying the port, not the -p flag that ssh uses. Enough is enough. I shall not file a bug report against the Debian openssh-client page, because no doubt compatibility with both upstream, and other distributions, is important. But damnit I've had enough. apt-get source openssh-client shows the appropriate code:

    fflag = tflag = 0;
    while ((ch = getopt(argc, argv, "dfl:prtvBCc:i:P:q12346S:o:F:")) != -1)
          switch (ch)  
          ..
          ..
            case 'P':
                    addargs(&remote_remote_args, "-p");
                    addargs(&remote_remote_args, "%s", optarg);
                    addargs(&args, "-p");
                    addargs(&args, "%s", optarg);
                    break;
          ..
          ..
            case 'p':
                    pflag = 1;
                    break;
          ..
          ..
          ..

Swapping those two flags around, and updating the format string appropriately, was sufficient to do the necessary. In other news I've done some hardware development, using both Arduino boards and the WeMos D1-mini. I'm still at the stage where I'm flashing lights, and doing similarly trivial things:

• Absolute Arduino Basic Tutorial
  • Recognizing the board.
  • Getting the development environment setup.
  • Running your first project.
• Absolute WeMos D1 Mini (ESP8266) Basic Tutorial
  • Recognizing the board.
  • Getting the development environment setup.
  • Installing the libraries/headers/examples
  • Writing your first WiFi project.

I have more complex projects planned for the future, but these are on-hold until the appropriate parts are delivered:

• MP3 playback.
• Bluetooth-speakers.
• Washing machine alarm.
• LCD clock, with time set by NTP, and relay control.

Even with a few LEDs though I've had fun, for example writing a trivial binary display.