Like last month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS. Individual reports In September 2014, 3 contributors have been paid for 11h each. Here are their individual reports:

• Holger Levsen
• Rapha l Hertzog
• Thorsten Alteholz

Evolution of the situation Compared to last month, we have gained 5 new sponsors, that s great. We re now at almost 25% of a full-time position. But we re not done yet. We believe that we would need at least twice as many sponsored hours to do a reasonable work with at least the most used packages, and possibly four times as much to be able to cover the full archive. We re now at 39 packages that need an update in Squeeze (+9 compared to last month), and the contributors paid by Freexian did handle 11 during last month (this gives an approximate rate of 3 hours per update, CVE triage included). Open questions Dear readers, what can we do to convince more companies to join the effort? The list of sponsors contains almost exclusively companies from Europe. It s true that Freexian s offer is in Euro but the economy is world-wide and it s common to have international invoices. When Ivan Kohler asked if having an offer in dollar would help convince other companies, we got zero feedback. What are the main obstacles that you face when you try to convince your managers to get the company to contribute? By the way, we prefer that companies take small sponsorship commitments that they can afford over multiple years over granting lots of money now and then not being able to afford it for another year. Thanks to our sponsors Let me thank our main sponsors:

• Gold sponsors:
• The Positive Internet
• Silver sponsors:
• AD&D David Ayers IntarS Austria
• Blablacar
• Domeneshop AS
• Evolix
• Trollweb Solutions
• Universit Lille 3
• Bronze sponsors:
• Freeside Internet Service
• Intevation GmbH
• Linuxhotel GmbH
• MyTux
• Nantes M tropole
• Offensive Security
• Seznam.cz, a.s.

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It turns out that my recent woes with pbuilder were all due to libpam-tmpdir being installed (at least two old bug reports exist about this issue: #576425 and #725434). I rather like my private temporary directory that cannot be accessed by other (potential) users on the same system. Previously I used a hook to fix this up by ensuring that the directory actually exists in the chroot, but somehow that recently broke.

A rather crude but working solution seems to be "session required pam_env.so user_readenv=1" in /etc/pam.d/sudo and "TMPDIR=/tmp" in /root/.pam_environment. One could probably skip pam_tmpdir.so for root, but I did not want to start fighting with pam-auth-update as this is in /etc/pam.d/common-session*.

It's past time I wrote about how Linaro's students fared in this year's Google Summer of Code. You might remember me posting earlier in the year when we welcomed our students. We started with 3 student projects at the beginning of the summer. One of the students unfortunately didn't work out, but the other two were hugely successful. Gaurav Minocha was a graduate student at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. He worked on Linux Flattened Device Tree Self-checking, mentored by Grant Likely from Linaro's Office of the CTO. Gaurav achieved all of his project's goals, and he was invited to Linaro's recent Linaro Connect USAConnect conference in California to meet people and and talk about his project. He and Grant presented a session on their work; it was filmed, and video is online. Grant said he was very happy with Gaurav's "strong, solid performance" during the project. Varad Gautam was a student at Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, India. He succeeded in porting UEFI to the BeagleBone Black. Leif Lindholm from the Linaro Enterprise Group was his mentor for the summer. At the end of the summer, Varad delivered a UEFI port ready for booting Linux and his code was included in Linaro's September UEFI release. Leif said that he was "very pleased with Varad's self sufficiency and ability to pick up an entirely new software project very quickly". We were hoping to invite Gaurad to Connect in California also, but travel document delays got in the way. With luck we'll see him at the next Connect in Hong Kong in February 2015. Well done, guys! It was great to work with these young developers for the summer, and we wish them lots more success in their future endeavours. Google have also just confirmed that they will be running the Summer of Code program again in 2015. I'm hoping that Linaro will be accepted again next year as a mentoring organisation. I'll post more about that early next year.

I ve just spent a little time squashing several bugs on the trot, all the same: insufficient build-dependencies when built in a clean environment. Typically this means that the package was uploaded after being built on a developer s normal machine, which already has everything required installed. It s long been the case that we have several ways to build packages in a clean chroot before upload, which reveals these sorts of errors and more. There s not really any excuse for uploading packages that fail to build in this way. Please, for the sanity of everyone working with the archive, don t upload packages that haven t been built in a clean environment. It s such a waste of everybody s time if you don t do this most basic of checks.

---

Clean builds for the win is a post from: jwiltshire.org.uk Flattr

Day trip on the Olympic Peninsula TL;DR: drove many kilometres on very nice roads, took lots of pictures, saw sunshine and fog and clouds, an angry ocean and a calm one, a quiet lake and lots and lots of trees: a very well spent day. Pictures at http://photos.k1024.org/Daytrips/Olympic-Peninsula-2014/. Sometimes I travel to the US on business, and as such I've been a few times in the Seattle area. Until this summer, when I had my last trip there, I was content to spend any extra days (weekend or such) just visiting Seattle itself, or shopping (I can spend hours in the REI store!), or working on my laptop in the hotel. This summer though, I thought - I should do something a bit different. Not too much, but still - no sense in wasting both days of the weekend. So I thought maybe driving to Mount Rainier, or something like that. On the Wednesday of my first week in Kirkland, as I was preparing my drive to the mountain, I made the mistake of scrolling the map westwards, and I saw for the first time the Olympic Peninsula; furthermore, I was zoomed in enough that I saw there was a small road right up to the north-west corner. Intrigued, I zoomed further and learned about Cape Flattery ( the northwestern-most point of the contiguous United States! ), so after spending a bit time reading about it, I was determined to go there. Easier said than done - from Kirkland, it's a 4h 40m drive (according to Google Maps), so it would be a full day on the road. I was thinking of maybe spending the night somewhere on the peninsula then, in order to actually explore the area a bit, but from Wednesday to Saturday it was a too short notice - all hotels that seemed OK-ish were fully booked. I spent some time trying to find something, even not directly on my way, but I failed to find any room. What I did manage to do though, is to learn a bit about the area, and to realise that there's a nice loop around the whole peninsula - the 104 from Kirkland up to where it meets the 101N on the eastern side, then take the 101 all the way to Port Angeles, Lake Crescent, near Lake Pleasant, then south toward Forks, crossing the Hoh river, down to Ruby Beach, down along the coast, crossing the Queets River, east toward Lake Quinault, south toward Aberdeen, then east towards Olympia and back out of the wilderness, into the highway network and back to Kirkland. This looked like an awesome road trip, but it is as long as it sounds - around 8 hours (continuous) drive, though skipping Cape Flattery. Well, I said to myself, something to keep in mind for a future trip to this area, with a night in between. I was still planning to go just to Cape Flattery and back, without realising at that point that this trip was actually longer (as you drive on smaller, lower-speed roads). Preparing my route, I read about the queues at the Edmonds-Kingston ferry, so I was planning to wake up early on the weekend, go to Cape Flattery, and go right back (maybe stop by Lake Crescent). Saturday comes, I - of course - sleep longer than my trip schedule said, and start the day in a somewhat cloudy weather, driving north from my hotel on Simonds Road, which was quite nicer than the usual East-West or North-South roads in this area. The weather was becoming nicer, however as I was nearing the ferry terminal and the traffic was getting denser, I started suspecting that I'll spend a quite a bit of time waiting to board the ferry. And unfortunately so it was (photo altered to hide some personal information): . The weather at least was nice, so I tried to enjoy it and simply observe the crowd - people were looking forward to a weekend relaxing, so nobody seemed annoyed by the wait. After almost half an hour, time to get on the ferry - my first time on a ferry in US, yay! But it was quite the same as in Europe, just that the ship was much larger. Once I secured the car, I went up deck, and was very surprised to be treated with some excellent views: The crossing was not very short, but it seemed so, because of the view, the sun, the water and the wind. Soon we were nearing the other shore; also, see how well panorama software deals with waves :P! And I was finally on the "real" part of the trip. The road was quite interesting. Taking the 104 North, crossing the "Hood Canal Floating Bridge" (my, what a boring name), then finally joining the 101 North. The environment was quite varied, from bare plains and hills, to wooded areas, to quite dense forests, then into inhabited areas - quite a long stretch of human presence, from the Sequim Bay to Port Angeles. Port Angeles surprised me: it had nice views of the ocean, and an interesting port (a few big ships), but it was much smaller than I expected. The 101 crosses it, and in less than 10 minutes or so it was already over. I expected something nicer, based on the name, but Anyway, onwards! Soon I was at a crossroads and had to decide: I could either follow the 101, crossing the Elwha River and then to Lake Crescent, then go north on the 113/112, or go right off 101 onto 112, and follow it until close to my goal. I took the 112, because on the map it looked "nicer", and closer to the shore. Well, the road itself was nice, but quite narrow and twisty here and there, and there was some annoying traffic, so I didn't enjoy this segment very much. At least it had the very interesting property (to me) that whenever I got closer to the ocean, the sun suddenly disappeared, and I was finding myself in the fog: So my plan to drive nicely along the coast failed. At one point, there was even heavy smoke (not fog!), and I wondered for a moment how safe was to drive out there in the wilderness (there were other cars though, so I was not alone). Only quite a bit later, close to Neah Bay, did I finally see the ocean: I saw a small parking spot, stopped, and crossing a small line of trees I found myself in a small cove? bay? In any case, I had the impression I stepped out of the daily life in the city and out into the far far wilderness: There was a couple, sitting on chairs, just enjoying the view. I felt very much intruding, behaving like I did as a tourist: running in, taking pictures, etc., so I tried at least to be quiet . I then quickly moved on, since I still had some road ahead of me. Soon I entered Neah Bay, and was surprised to see once more blue, and even more blue. I'm a sucker for blue, whether sky blue or sea blue , so I took a few more pictures (watch out for the evil fog in the second one): Well, the town had some event, and there were lots of people, so I just drove on, now on the last stretch towards the cape. The road here was also very interesting, yet another environment - I was driving on Cape Flattery Road, which cuts across the tip of the peninsula (quite narrow here) along the Waatch River and through its flooding plains (at least this is how it looked to me). Then it finally starts going up through the dense forest, until it reaches the parking lot, and from there, one goes on foot towards the cape. It's a very easy and nice walk (not a hike), and the sun was shining very nicely through the trees: But as I reached the peak of the walk, and started descending towards the coast, I was surprised, yet again, by fog: I realised that probably this means the cape is fully in fog, so I won't have any chance to enjoy the view. Boy, was I wrong! There are three viewpoints on the cape, and at each one I was just "wow" and "aah" at the view. Even thought it was not a sunny summer view, and there was no blue in sight, the combination between the fog (which was hiding the horizon and even the closer islands), the angry ocean which was throwing wave after wave at the shore, making a loud noise, and the fact that even this seemingly inhospitable area was just teeming with life, was both unexpected and awesome. I took here waay to many pictures, here are just a couple inlined: I spent around half an hour here, just enjoying the rawness of nature. It was so amazing to see life encroaching on each bit of land, even though it was not what I would consider a nice place. Ah, how we see everything through our own eyes! The walk back was through fog again, and at one point it switched over back to sunny. Driving back on the same road was quite different, knowing what lies at its end. On this side, the road had some parking spots, so I managed to stop and take a picture - even though this area was much less wild, it still has that outdoors flavour, at least for me: Back in Neah Bay, I stopped to eat. I had a place in mind from TripAdvisor, and indeed - I was able to get a custom order pizza at "Linda's Woodfired Kitchen". Quite good, and I ate without hurry, looking at the people walking outside, as they were coming back from the fair or event that was taking place. While eating, a somewhat disturbing thought was going through my mind. It was still early, around two to half past two, so if I went straight back to Kirkland I would be early at the hotel. But it was also early enough that I could - in theory at least - still do the "big round-trip". I was still rummaging the thought as I left On the drive back I passed once more near Sekiu, Washington, which is a very small place but the map tells me it even has an airport! Fun, and the view was quite nice (a bit of blue before the sea is swallowed by the fog): After passing Sekiu and Clallam Bay, the 112 curves inland and goes on a bit until you are at the crossroads: to the left the 112 continues, back the same way I came; to the right, it's the 113, going south until it meets the 101. I looked left - remembering the not-so-nice road back, I looked south - where a very appealing, early afternoon sun was beckoning - so I said, let's take the long way home! It's just a short stretch on the 113, and then you're on the 101. The 101 is a very nice road, wide enough, and it goes through very very nice areas. Here, west to south-west of the Olympic Mountains, it's a very different atmosphere from the 112/101 that I drove on in the morning; much warmer colours, a bit different tree types (I think), and more flat. I soon passed through Forks, which is one of the places I looked at when searching for hotels. I did so without any knowledge of the town itself (its wikipedia page is quite drab), so imagine my surprise when a month later I learned from a colleague that this is actually a very important place for vampire-book fans. Oh my, and I didn't even stop! This town also had some event, so I just drove on, enjoying the (mostly empty) road. My next planned waypoint was Ruby Beach, and I was looking forward to relaxing a bit under the warm sun - the drive was excellent, weather perfect, so I was watching the distance countdown on my Garmin. At two miles out, the "Near waypoint Ruby Beach" message appeared, and two seconds later the sun went out. What the I was hoping this is something temporary, but as I slowly drove the remaining mile I couldn't believe my eyes that I was, yet again, finding myself in the fog I park the car, thinking that asking for a refund would at least allow me to feel better - but it was I who planned the trip! So I resigned myself, thinking that possibly this beach is another special location that is always in the fog. However, getting near the beach it was clear that it was not so - some people were still in their bathing suits, just getting dressed, so it seems I was just unlucky with regards to timing. However, I the beach itself was nice, even in the fog (I later saw online sunny pictures, and it is quite beautiful), the the lush trees reach almost to the shore, and the way the rocks are sitting on the beach: Since the weather was not that nice, I took a few more pictures, then headed back and started driving again. I was soo happy that the weather didn't clear at the 2 mile mark (it was not just Ruby Beach!), but alas - it cleared as soon as the 101 turns left and leaves the shore, as it crosses the Queets river. Driving towards my next planned stop was again a nice drive in the afternoon sun, so I think it simply was not a sunny day on the Pacific shore. Maybe seas and oceans have something to do with fog and clouds ! In Switzerland, I'm very happy when I see fog, since it's a somewhat rare event (and seeing mountains disappearing in the fog is nice, since it gives the impression of a wider space). After this day, I was a bit fed up with fog for a while Along the 101 one reaches Lake Quinault, which seemed pretty nice on the map, and driving a bit along the lake - a local symbol, the "World's largest spruce tree". I don't know what a spruce tree is, but I like trees, so I was planning to go there, weather allowing. And the weather did cooperate, except that the tree was not so imposing as I thought! In any case, I was glad to stretch my legs a bit: However, the most interesting thing here in Quinault was not this tree, but rather - the quiet little town and the view on the lake, in the late afternoon sun: The entire town was very very quiet, and the sun shining down on the lake gave an even stronger sense of tranquillity. No wind, not many noises that tell of human presence, just a few, and an overall sense of peace. It was quite the opposite of the Cape Flattery and a very nice way to end the trip. Well, almost end - I still had a bit of driving ahead. Starting from Quinault, driving back and entering the 101, driving down to Aberdeen: then turning east towards Olympia, and back onto the highways. As to Aberdeen and Olympia, I just drove through, so I couldn't make any impression of them. The old harbour and the rusted things in Aberdeen were a bit interesting, but the day was late so I didn't stop. And since the day shouldn't end without any surprises, during the last profile change between walking and driving in Quinault, my GPS decided to reset its active maps list and I ended up with all maps activated. This usually is not a problem, at least if you follow a pre-calculated route, but I did trigger recalculation as I restarted my driving, so the Montana was trying to decide on which map to route me - between the Garmin North America map and the Open StreeMap one, the result was that it never understood which road I was on. It always said "Drive to I5", even though I was on I5. Anyway, thanks to road signs, and no thanks to "just this evening ramp closures", I was able to arrive safely at my hotel. Overall, a very successful, if long trip: around 725 kilometres, 10h:30m moving, 13h:30m total: There were many individual good parts, but the overall think about this road trip was that I was able to experience lots of different environments of the peninsula on the same day, and that overall it's a very very nice area. The downside was that I was in a rush, without being able to actually stop and enjoy the locations I visited. And there's still so much to see! A two nights trip sound just about right, with some long hikes in the rain forest, and afternoons spent on a lake somewhere. Another not so optimal part was that I only had my "travel" camera (a Nikon 1 series camera, with a small sensor), which was a bit overwhelmed here and there by the situation. It was fortunate that the light was more or less good, but looking back at the pictures, how I wish that I had my "serious" DSLR So, that means I have two reasons to go back! Not too soon though, since Mount Rainier is also a good location to visit . If the pictures didn't bore you yet, the entire gallery is on my smugmug site. In any case, thanks for reading!

It s great to see more and more packages in Debian and Ubuntu getting an autopkgtest. We now have some 660, and soon we ll get another ~ 4000 from Perl and Ruby packages. Both Debian s and Ubuntu s autopkgtest runner machines are currently static manually maintained machines which ache under their load. They just don t scale, and at least Ubuntu s runners need quite a lot of handholding. This needs to stop. To quote Tim The Tool Man Taylor: We need more power!. This is a perfect scenario to be put into a cloud with ephemeral VMs to run tests in. They scale, there is no privacy problem, and maintenance of the hosts then becomes Somebody Else s Problem. I recently brushed up autopkgtest s ssh runner and the Nova setup script. Previous versions didn t support revert yet, tests that leaked processes caused eternal hangs due to the way ssh works, and image building wasn t yet supported well. autopkgtest 3.5.5 now gets along with all that and has a dozen other fixes. So let me introduce the Binford 6100 variable horsepower DEP-8 engine python-coated cloud test runner! While you can run adt-run from your home machine, it s probably better to do it from an autopkgtest controller cloud instance as well. Testing frequently requires copying files and built package trees between testbeds and controller, which can be quite slow from home and causes timeouts. The requirements on the controller node are quite low you either need the autopkgtest 3.5.5 package installed (possibly a backport to Debian Wheezy or Ubuntu 12.04 LTS), or run it from git ($checkout_dir/run-from-checkout), and other than that you only need python-novaclient and the usual $OS_* OpenStack environment variables. This controller can also stay running all the time and easily drive dozens of tests in parallel as all the real testing action is happening in the ephemeral testbed VMs. The most important preparation step to do for testing in the cloud is quite similar to testing in local VMs with adt-virt-qemu: You need to have suitable VM images. They should be generated every day so that the tests don t have to spend 15 minutes on dist-upgrading and rebooting, and they should be minimized. They should also be as similar as possible to local VM images that you get with vmdebootstrap or adt-buildvm-ubuntu-cloud, so that test failures can easily be reproduced by developers on their local machines. To address this, I refactored the entire knowledge how to turn a pristine default vmdebootstrap or cloud image into an autopkgtest environment into a single /usr/share/autopkgtest/adt-setup-vm script. adt-buildvm-ubuntu-cloud now uses this, you shold use it with vmdebootstrap --customize (see adt-virt-qemu(1) for details), and it s also easy to run for building custom cloud images: Essentially, you pick a suitable pristine image, nova boot an instance from it, run adt-setup-vm through ssh, then turn this into a new adt specific "daily" image with nova image-create. I wrote a little script create-nova-adt-image.sh to demonstrate and automate this, the only parameter that it gets is the name of the pristine image to base on. This was tested on Canonical's Bootstack cloud, so it might need some adjustments on other clouds. Thus something like this should be run daily (pick the base images from nova image-list):

  $ ./create-nova-adt-image.sh ubuntu-utopic-14.10-beta2-amd64-server-20140923-disk1.img
  $ ./create-nova-adt-image.sh ubuntu-utopic-14.10-beta2-i386-server-20140923-disk1.img

This will generate adt-utopic-i386 and adt-utopic-amd64. Now I picked 34 packages that have the "most demanding" tests, in terms of package size (libreoffice), kernel requirements (udisks2, network manager), reboot requirement (systemd), lots of brittle tests (glib2.0, mysql-5.5), or needing Xvfb (shotwell):

  $ cat pkglist
  apport
  apt
  aptdaemon
  apache2
  autopilot-gtk
  autopkgtest
  binutils
  chromium-browser
  cups
  dbus
  gem2deb
  glib-networking
  glib2.0
  gvfs
  kcalc
  keystone
  libnih
  libreoffice
  lintian
  lxc
  mysql-5.5
  network-manager
  nut
  ofono-phonesim
  php5
  postgresql-9.4
  python3.4
  sbuild
  shotwell
  systemd-shim
  ubiquity
  ubuntu-drivers-common
  udisks2
  upstart

Now I created a shell wrapper around adt-run to work with the parallel tool and to keep the invocation in a single place:

$ cat adt-run-nova
#!/bin/sh -e
adt-run "$1" -U -o "/tmp/adt-$1" --- ssh -s nova -- \
    --flavor m1.small --image adt-utopic-i386 \
    --net-id 415a0839-eb05-4e7a-907c-413c657f4bf5

Please see /usr/share/autopkgtest/ssh-setup/nova for details of the arguments. --image is the image name we built above, --flavor should use a suitable memory/disk size from nova flavor-list and --net-id is an "always need this constant to select a non-default network" option that is specific to Canonical Bootstack. Finally, let' run the packages from above with using ten VMs in parallel:

  parallel -j 10 ./adt-run-nova -- $(< pkglist)

After a few iterations of bug fixing there are now only two failures left which are due to flaky tests, the infrastructure now seems to hold up fairly well. Meanwhile, Vincent Ladeuil is working full steam to integrate this new stuff into the next-gen Ubuntu CI engine, so that we can soon deploy and run all this fully automatically in production. Happy testing!

I've wanted to ride to Paris for a few months now but was put off by the hassle of taking a bicycle on the Eurostar, as well having a somewhat philosophical and aesthetic objection to taking a bike on a train in the first place. After all, if one already is possession of a mode of transport... My itinerary was straightforward:

Friday 12h00

London Newhaven

Friday 23h00

Newhaven Dieppe (ferry)

Saturday 04h00

Dieppe Paris

Saturday 23h00

(Sleep)

Sunday 07h00

Paris Dieppe

Sunday 18h00

Dieppe Newhaven (ferry)

Sunday 21h00

Newhaven Peacehaven

Sunday 23h00

(Sleep)

Monday 07h00

Peacehaven London

I've just recently built the large bulk of VMs that we use for first semester teaching. This year that was 112. We use the same general approach for these as our others: get a generic base image up and running, with just enough configuration complete so a puppet client starts up; get it talking to our master; let puppet take it from there. There are pragmatic balances between how much we do in the kickstart versus how much we do in puppet, but also when we build a new VM from scratch versus when we clone an existing image, and how specialisation we do in the clone image. Unfortunately this year we ended up in a situation where our clone image wouldn't talk to our puppet master out of the box, due to some changes we'd made to our master set up since the clone image was prepared. We didn't really have enough time to re-clone the entire set of VMs from a fixed base image, and instead needed to fix them whilst up. However we couldn't rely on puppet to do that, since they wouldn't talk to the puppet master. We needed to manually reset the puppet client state per VM and then re-establish a trust relationship with the correct master (which is not the default master hostname in our environment anymore). Luckily, we deploy a local account with a known passphrase via the kickstart, which also has sudo access, as an interim measure before puppet strips it back out again and sets up proper LDAP and Kerberos authentication. So we can at least get into the boxes. However logging into 112 VMs by hand is not a particularly pleasant task. In the past I might have tried to achieve this using something like clusterssh but this year I decided to give ansible a try instead. Ansible started life, I believe, as a tool that would let you run arbitrary commands on remote hosts, including navigating ssh and sudo as required, without needing any agent software on the remote end. It has since seemed to grow into an enterprise product in its own right, seemingly in competition with puppet, chef, cfengine et al. Looking at the Ansible website now I'd be rather put off by just how "enterprisey" it has become - much as I am by the puppet website, if I'm honest - but if you persevere past the webinars, testimonials, etc. etc., you can find yourself to the documentation, and running an arbitrary command is as simple as

• defining a list of hosts
• running an ansible command line referencing some or all of those hosts

The hosts file format is simple

[somehosts]
host1
host2
...
[otherhosts]
host3

The command line can be a little bit more complex, especially if you need to use one username for ssh, another for sudo, and you don't want to use ssh key auth:

ansible -i ./hostsfile somehosts -k -u someuser \
    --sudo -K -a 'puppet agent --onetime --no-daemonize --verbose 

"all" would work where I've used somehosts in the example above. So there you go: using one configuration management system to bootstrap another. I'm sure I've reserved myself a special place in hell for this.

As preannounced here the GNOME Infrastructure switched to a new Account Management System which is reachable at https://account.gnome.org. All the details will follow. Introduction It s been a while since someone actually touched the underlaying authentication infrastructure that powers the GNOME machines. The very first setup was originally configured by Jonathan Blandford (jrb) who configured an OpenLDAP istance with several customized schemas. (pServer fields in the old CVS days, pubAuthorizedKeys and GNOME modules related fields in recent times) While OpenLDAP-server was living on the GNOME machine called clipboard (aka ldap.gnome.org) the clients were configured to synchronize users, groups, passwords through the nslcd daemon. After several years Jeff Schroeder joined the Sysadmin Team and during one cold evening (date is Tue, February 1st 2011) spent some time configuring SSSD to replace the nslcd daemon which was missing one of the most important SSSD features: caching. What surely convinced Jeff to adopt SSSD (a very new but promising sofware at that time as the first release happened right before 2010 s Christmas) and as the commit log also states ( New sssd module for ldap information caching ) was SSSD s caching feature. It was enough for a certain user to log in once and the /var/lib/sss/db directory was populated with its login information preventing the LDAP daemon in charge of picking up login details (from the LDAP server) to query the LDAP server itself every single time a request was made against it. This feature has definitely helped in many occasions especially when the LDAP server was down for a particular reason and sysadmins needed to access a specific machine or service: without SSSD this wasn t ever going to work and sysadmins were probably going to be locked out from the machines they were used to manage. (except if you still had /etc/passwd , /etc/group and /etc/shadow entries as fallback) Things were working just fine except for a few downsides that appeared later on:

1. the web interface (view) on our LDAP user database was managed by Mango, an outdated tool which many wanted to rewrite in Django that slowly became a huge dinosaur nobody ever wanted to look into again
2. the Foundation membership information were managed through a MySQL database, so two databases, two sets of users unrelated to each other
3. users were not able to modify their own account information on their own but even a single e-mail change required them to mail the GNOME Accounts Team which was then going to authenticate their request and finally update the account.

Today s infrastructure changes are here to finally say the issues outlined at (1, 2, 3) are now fixed. What has changed? The GNOME Infrastructure is now powered by Red Hat s FreeIPA which bundles several FOSS softwares into one big bundle all surrounded by an easy and intuitive web UI that will help users update their account information on their own without the need of the Accounts Team or any other administrative entity. Users will also find two custom fields on their Overview page, these being Foundation Member since and Last Renewed on date . As you may have understood already we finally managed to migrate the Foundation membership database into LDAP itself to store the information we want once and for all. As a side note it might be possible that some users that were Foundation members in the past won t find any detail stored on the Foundation fields outlined above. That is actually expected as we were able to migrate all the current and old Foundation members that had an LDAP account registered at the time of the migration. If that s your case and you still would like the information to be stored on the new setup please get in contact with the Membership Committee at stating so. Where can I get my first login credentials? Let s make a little distinction between users that previously had access to Mango (usually maintainers) and users that didn t. If you were used to access Mango before you should be able to login on the new Account Management System by entering your GNOME username and the password you were used to use for loggin in into Mango. (after loggin in the very first time you will be prompted to update your password, please choose a strong password as this account will be unique across all the GNOME Infrastructure) If you never had access to Mango, you lost your password or the first time you read the word Mango on this post you thought why is he talking about a fruit now? you should be able to reset it by using the following command:

ssh -l yourgnomeuserid account.gnome.org

The command will start an SSH connection between you and account.gnome.org, once authenticated (with the SSH key you previously had registered on our Infrastructure) you will trigger a command that will directly send your brand new password on the e-mail registered for your account. From my tests seems GMail sees the e-mail as a phishing attempt probably because the body contains the word password twice. That said if the e-mail won t appear on your INBOX, please double-check your Spam folder. Now that Mango is gone how can I request a new account? With Mango we used to have a form that automatically e-mailed the maintainer of the selected GNOME module which was then going to approve / reject the request. From there and in the case of a positive vote from the maintainer the Accounts Team was going to create the account itself. With the recent introduction of a commit robot directly on l10n.gnome.org the number of account requests reduced its numbers. In addition to that users will now be able to perform pretty much all the needed maintenance on their accounts themselves. That said and while we will probably work on building a form in the future we feel that requesting accounts can definitely be achieved directly by mailing the Accounts Team itself which will mail the maintainer of the respective module and create the account. As just said the number of account creations has become very low and the queue is currently clear. The documentation has been updated to reflect these changes at: https://wiki.gnome.org/AccountsTeam
https://wiki.gnome.org/AccountsTeam/NewAccounts The migration of all the user data and ACLs has been massive and I ve been spending a lot of time reviewing the existing HBAC rules trying to spot possible errors or misconfigurations. If you happen to not being able to access a certain service as you were used to in the past, please get in contact with the Sysadmin Team. All the possible ways to contact us are available at https://wiki.gnome.org/Sysadmin/Contact. What is missing still? Now that the Foundation membership information has been moved to LDAP I ll be looking at porting some of the existing membership scripts to it. What I managed to port already are welcome e-mails for new or existing members. (renewals) Next step will be generating a membership page from LDAP (to populate http://www.gnome.org/foundation/membership) and all the your-membership-is-going-to-lapse e-mails that were being sent till today. Other news /home/users mount on master.gnome.org You will notice that loggin in into master.gnome.org will result in your home directory being empty, don t worry, you did not lose any of your files but master.gnome.org is now currently hosting your home directories itself. As you may have been aware of adding files to the public_html directory on master resulted in them appearing on your people.gnome.org/~userid space. That was unfortunately expected as both master and webapps2 (the machine serving people.gnome.org s webspaces) were mounting the same GlusterFS share. We wanted to prevent that behaviour to happen as we wanted to know who has access to what resource and where. From today master s home directories will be there just as a temporary spot for your tarballs, just scp and use ftpadmin against them, that should be all you need from master. If you are interested in receiving or keeping using your people.gnome.org s webspace please mail stating so. Other news a shiny and new error 500 page has been deployed Thanks to Magdalen Berns (magpie) a new error 500 web page has been deployed on all the Apache istances we host. The page contains an iframe of status.gnome.org and will appear every single time the web server behind the service you are trying to reach will be unreachable for maintenance or other purposes. While I hope you won t see the page that often you can still enjoy it at https://static.gnome.org/error-500/500.html. Make sure to whitelist status.gnome.org on your browser as it currently loads it without https. (as the service is currently hosted on OpenShift which provides us with a *.rhcloud.com wildcard certificate, which differs from the CN the browser would expect it to be)

As preannounced here the GNOME Infrastructure switched to a new Account Management System which is reachable at https://account.gnome.org. All the details will follow. Introduction It s been a while since someone actually touched the underlying authentication infrastructure that powers the GNOME machines. The very first setup was originally configured by Jonathan Blandford (jrb) who configured an OpenLDAP istance with several customized schemas. (pServer fields in the old CVS days, pubAuthorizedKeys and GNOME modules related fields in recent times) While OpenLDAP-server was living on the GNOME machine called clipboard (aka ldap.gnome.org) the clients were configured to synchronize users, groups, passwords through the nslcd daemon. After several years Jeff Schroeder joined the Sysadmin Team and during one cold evening (date is Tue, February 1st 2011) spent some time configuring SSSD to replace the nslcd daemon which was missing one of the most important SSSD features: caching. What surely convinced Jeff to adopt SSSD (a very new but promising sofware at that time as the first release happened right before 2010 s Christmas) and as the commit log also states ( New sssd module for ldap information caching ) was SSSD s caching feature. It was enough for a certain user to log in once and the /var/lib/sss/db directory was populated with its login information preventing the LDAP daemon in charge of picking up login details (from the LDAP server) to query the LDAP server itself every single time a request was made against it. This feature has definitely helped in many occasions especially when the LDAP server was down for a particular reason and sysadmins needed to access a specific machine or service: without SSSD this wasn t ever going to work and sysadmins were probably going to be locked out from the machines they were used to manage. (except if you still had /etc/passwd , /etc/group and /etc/shadow entries as fallback) Things were working just fine except for a few downsides that appeared later on:

1. the web interface (view) on our LDAP user database was managed by Mango, an outdated tool which many wanted to rewrite in Django that slowly became a huge dinosaur nobody ever wanted to look into again
2. the Foundation membership information were managed through a MySQL database, so two databases, two sets of users unrelated to each other
3. users were not able to modify their own account information on their own but even a single e-mail change required them to mail the GNOME Accounts Team which was then going to authenticate their request and finally update the account.

Today s infrastructure changes are here to finally say the issues outlined at (1, 2, 3) are now fixed. What has changed? The GNOME Infrastructure is now powered by Red Hat s FreeIPA which bundles several FOSS softwares into one big bundle all surrounded by an easy and intuitive web UI that will help users update their account information on their own without the need of the Accounts Team or any other administrative entity. Users will also find two custom fields on their Overview page, these being Foundation Member since and Last Renewed on date . As you may have understood already we finally managed to migrate the Foundation membership database into LDAP itself to store the information we want once and for all. As a side note it might be possible that some users that were Foundation members in the past won t find any detail stored on the Foundation fields outlined above. That is actually expected as we were able to migrate all the current and old Foundation members that had an LDAP account registered at the time of the migration. If that s your case and you still would like the information to be stored on the new setup please get in contact with the Membership Committee at stating so. Where can I get my first login credentials? Let s make a little distinction between users that previously had access to Mango (usually maintainers) and users that didn t. If you were used to access Mango before you should be able to login on the new Account Management System by entering your GNOME username and the password you were used to use for loggin in into Mango. (after loggin in the very first time you will be prompted to update your password, please choose a strong password as this account will be unique across all the GNOME Infrastructure) If you never had access to Mango, you lost your password or the first time you read the word Mango on this post you thought why is he talking about a fruit now? you should be able to reset it by using the following command:

ssh -l yourgnomeuserid account.gnome.org

The command will start an SSH connection between you and account.gnome.org, once authenticated (with the SSH key you previously had registered on our Infrastructure) you will trigger a command that will directly send your brand new password on the e-mail registered for your account. From my tests seems GMail sees the e-mail as a phishing attempt probably because the body contains the word password twice. That said if the e-mail won t appear on your INBOX, please double-check your Spam folder. Now that Mango is gone how can I request a new account? With Mango we used to have a form that automatically e-mailed the maintainer of the selected GNOME module which was then going to approve / reject the request. From there and in the case of a positive vote from the maintainer the Accounts Team was going to create the account itself. With the recent introduction of a commit robot directly on l10n.gnome.org the number of account requests reduced its numbers. In addition to that users will now be able to perform pretty much all the needed maintenance on their accounts themselves. That said and while we will probably work on building a form in the future we feel that requesting accounts can definitely be achieved directly by mailing the Accounts Team itself which will mail the maintainer of the respective module and create the account. As just said the number of account creations has become very low and the queue is currently clear. The documentation has been updated to reflect these changes at: https://wiki.gnome.org/AccountsTeam
https://wiki.gnome.org/AccountsTeam/NewAccounts I was used to have access to a specific service but I don t anymore, what should I do? The migration of all the user data and ACLs has been massive and I ve been spending a lot of time reviewing the existing HBAC rules trying to spot possible errors or misconfigurations. If you happen to not being able to access a certain service as you were used to in the past, please get in contact with the Sysadmin Team. All the possible ways to contact us are available at https://wiki.gnome.org/Sysadmin/Contact. What is missing still? Now that the Foundation membership information has been moved to LDAP I ll be looking at porting some of the existing membership scripts to it. What I managed to port already are welcome e-mails for new or existing members. (renewals) Next step will be generating a membership page from LDAP (to populate http://www.gnome.org/foundation/membership) and all the your-membership-is-going-to-lapse e-mails that were being sent till today. Other news /home/users mount on master.gnome.org You will notice that loggin in into master.gnome.org will result in your home directory being empty, don t worry, you did not lose any of your files but master.gnome.org is now currently hosting your home directories itself. As you may have been aware of adding files to the public_html directory on master resulted in them appearing on your people.gnome.org/~userid space. That was unfortunately expected as both master and webapps2 (the machine serving people.gnome.org s webspaces) were mounting the same GlusterFS share. We wanted to prevent that behaviour to happen as we wanted to know who has access to what resource and where. From today master s home directories will be there just as a temporary spot for your tarballs, just scp and use ftpadmin against them, that should be all you need from master. If you are interested in receiving or keeping using your people.gnome.org s webspace please mail <accounts AT gnome DOT org> stating so. Other news a shiny and new error 500 page has been deployed Thanks to Magdalen Berns (magpie) a new error 500 web page has been deployed on all the Apache istances we host. The page contains an iframe of status.gnome.org and will appear every single time the web server behind the service you are trying to reach will be unreachable for maintenance or other purposes. While I hope you won t see the page that often you can still enjoy it at https://static.gnome.org/error-500/500.html. Make sure to whitelist status.gnome.org on your browser as it currently loads it without https. (as the service is currently hosted on OpenShift which provides us with a *.rhcloud.com wildcard certificate, which differs from the CN the browser would expect it to be) Updates UPDATE on status.gnome.org s SSL certificate: the certificate has been provisioned and it should result in the 500 s page to be displayed correctly with no warnings from your browser. UPDATE from Adam Young on Kerberos ports being closed on many DC s firewalls:

The next version of upstream MIT Kerberos will have support for fetching a ticket via ports 443 and marshalling the request over HTTPS. We ll need to run a proxy on the server side, but we should be able to make it work: Read up here
http://adam.younglogic.com/2014/06/kerberos-firewalls

I decided I d post this monthly. It may be a bit boring, sorry, but I think it s a nice thing to have this public. The log starts on the 6th, because on the 4th I was back from Debconf (after a day in San Francisco, plus 20 hours of traveling and 15 hours of time gap). It is to be noted that every time something is uploaded in Debian for Icehouse (in Sid), or for Juno (in Experimental), there s also a corresponding backport produced for Wheezy. Saturday 6th & Sunday 7th:
packaged libjs-twitter-bootstrap-wizard (in new queue)
Uploaded python-pint after reviewing the debian/copyright
Worked on updating python-eventlet in Experimental, and adding Python3 support. It seems Python3 support isn t ready yet, so I will probably remove that feature from the package update.
Tried to apply the Django 1.7 patches for python-django-bootstrap-form. They didn t work, but Raphael came back on Monday morning with new versions
of the patches, which should be good this time.
Helped the DSA (Debian System Administrators) with the Debian OpenStack cloud. It s looking good and working now (note: I helped them during Debconf 14).
Started a page about adding more tasksel tasks: https://wiki.debian.org/tasksel/MoreTasks. It s looking like Joey Hess is adding new tasks by default in Tasksel, with OpenStack compute node and OpenStack proxy node . It will be nice to have them in the default Debian installer! :)
Packaged and uploaded python-dib-utils, now in NEW queue. Monday 8th:
Uploaded fixed python-django-bootstrap-form with patch for Django 1.7.
Packaged and uploaded python-pysaml2.
Finilized and uploaded python-jingo which is needed for python-django-compressor unit tests
Finalized and uploaded python-coffin which is needed for python-django-compressor unit tests
Worked on running the unit tests for python-django-compressor, as I needed to know if it could work with Django 1.7. It was hard to find the correct way to run the unit tests, but finally, they all passed. I will add the unit tests once coffin and jingo will be accepted in Sid.
Applied patches in the Debian BTS for python-django-openstack-auth and Django 1.7. Uploaded the fixed package.
Fixed python-django-pyscss compat with Django 1.7, uploaded the result.
Updated keystone to Juno b3.
Built Wheezy backports of some JS libs needed for Horizon in Juno, which I already uploaded to Sid last summer:
o libjs-twitter-bootstrap-datepicker
o libjs-jquery.quicksearch
o libjs-spin.js
Upstreamed the Django 1.7 patch for python-django-openstack-auth: https://review.openstack.org/119972 Tuesday 9:
Updated and uploaded Swift 2.1.0. Added swift-object-expirer package to it, together with init script. Wednesday 10:
Basically, cleaned the Debian BTS of almost all issues today :P
Added it.po update to nova (Closes: #758305).
Backported libvirt 1.2.7 to Wheezy, to be able to close this bug: https://bugs.debian.org/757548 (eg: changed dependency from libvirt-bin to libvirt-daemon-system)
Uploaded the fixed nova package using libvirt-daemon-system
Upgraded python-trollius to 1.0.1
Fixed tuskar-ui to work with Django 1.7. Disabled pep8 tests during build. Added build-conflicts: python-unittest2.
Fixed python-django-compressor for Django 1.7, and now running unit tests with it, after python-coffin and python-jingo got approved in Sid by FTP masters.
Fixed python-xstatic wrong upstream URLs.
Added it.po debconf translation to Designate.
Added de.po debconf translation to Tuskar.
Fixed copyright holders in python-xstatic-rickshaw
Added python-passlib as dependency for python-cinder. Remaining 3 issues in the BTS: ceilometer FTBFS, Horizon unit test with Django 1.7, Designate fail to install. All of the 3 are harder to fix, and I may try to do so later this week. Thursday 11:
Fixed python-xstatic-angular and python-xstatic-angular-mock to deal with the new libjs-angularjs version (closes 2 Debian RC bugs: uninstallable).
Fixed ceilometer FTBFS (Closes rc bug) Friday 12:
Fixed wrong copyright file for libjs-twitter-bootstrap-wizard after the FTP masters told me, and reuploaded to Sid.
Reuploaded wrong upload of ceilometer (wrong hash for orig.tar.xz)
Packaged and uploaded python-xstatic-bootstrap-scss
Packaged and uploaded python-xstatic-font-awesome
Packaged and uploaded ntpstat Monday 15:
packaged and uploaded python-xstatic-jquery.bootstrap.wizard
Fixed python-xstatic-angular-cookies to use new libjs-angularjs version (fixed version dependencies)
Fixed Ceilometer FTBFS (Closes: #759967)
Backported all python-xtatic packages to Wheezy, including all dependencies. This includes backporting of a bunch of packages from nodejs which were needed as build-dependencies (around 70 packages ). Filed about 5 or 6 release critical bugs as some nodejs packages were not buildable as-is.
Fixed some too restrictive python-xstatic-angular* dependencies on the libjs-angularjs (the libjs-angularjs increased version). Tuesday 16:
Uploaded updates to Experimental:
o python-eventlet 0.15.2 (this one took a long time as it needed maintenance)
o oslo-config
o python-oslo.i18n
Uploaded to Sid:
o python-diskimage-builder 0.1.30-1
o python-django-pyscss 1.0.2-1
Fixed horizon libapache-mode-wsgi to be a dependency of openstack-dashboard-apache and not just openstack-dashboard (in both Icehouse & Juno).
Removed the last failing Django 1.7 unit test from Horizon. It doesn t seem relevant anyway.
Backported python-netaddr 0.7.12 to Wheezy (needed by oslo-config).
Started working on oslo.rootwrap, though it failed to build in Wheezy with a unit test failure. Wednesday 17:
To experimental:
o Uploaded oslo.rootwrap 1.3.0.0~a1. It needed a build-depends on iproute2 because of a new test.
o Uploaded python-oslo.utils 0.3.0
o Uploaded python-oslo.vmware 0.6.0, fixed sphinx-build conf.py and filed a bug about it: https://bugs.launchpad.net/oslo.vmware/+bug/1370370 plus emailed the commiter of the issue (which appeared 2 weeks ago).
o Uploaded python-pycadf 0.6.0
o Uploaded python-pyghmi 0.6.17
o Uploaded python-oslotest 1.1.0.0~a2, including patch for Wheezy, which I also submited upstream: https://review.openstack.org/122171/
o Uploaded glanceclient 0.14.0, added a patch to not use the embedded version of urllib3 in requests: https://review.openstack.org/122184
To Sid:
o Uploaded python-zake_0.1.6-1 Thesday 18:
Backported zeromq3-4.0.4+dfs, pyzmq-14.3.1, pyasn1-0.1.7, python-pyasn1-modules-0.0.5
Uploaded keystoneclient 0.10.1, fixed the saml2 unit tests which were broken using testtools >= 0.9.39. Filed bug, and warned code author: https://bugs.launchpad.net/python-keystoneclient/+bug/1371085
Uploade swiftclient 2.3.0 to experimental.
Uploaded ironicclient 0.2.1 to experimental.
Uploaded saharaclient, filed bug with saharaclient expecting an up and running keystone server: https://bugs.launchpad.net/python-saharaclient/+bug/1371177 Friday 19:
Uploaded keystone Juno b3, filed but about unit tests downloading with git, while no network access should be performed during package build (forbidden by
Debian policy)
Uploaded python-oslo.db 1.0.0 which I forgot in the dependency list, and which was needed for Neutron.
Uploaded nova 2014.2~b3-1 (added a new nova-serialproxy service daemon to the nova-consoleproxy) Saturday 20:
Uploaded Neutron Juno b3.
Uploaded python-retrying 1.2.3 (was missing from depends upload)
Uploaded Glance Juno b3.
Uploaded Cinder Juno b3.
Fixed python-xstatic-angular-mock which had a .pth packaged, as well as the data folder (uploaded debian release -3).
Fixed missing depends and build-conflicts in python-xstatic-jquery. Sunday 21:
Dropped python-pil & python-django-discover-runner from runtime Depends: of python-django-pyscss, as it s only needed for tests. It also created a conflicts, because python-django-discover-runner depends on python-unittest2 and horizon build-conflicts with it.
Forward-ported the Django 1.7 patches for Horizon. Opened new patch: https://review.openstack.org/122992 (since the old fix has gone away after a refactor of the unit test).
Uploaded Horizon Juno b3.
Applied https://review.openstack.org/#/c/122768/ to the keystone package, so that it doesn t do git clone of the keystoneclient during build.
Uploaded oslo.messaging 1.4.0.0 (which really is 1.4.0) to experimental
Uploaded oslo.messaging 1.4.0.0+really+1.3.1-1 to fix the issue in Sid/Jessie after the wrong upload (due to Zul wrong tagging of Keystone in the 2014.1.2 point release). Monday 22:
Uploaded ironic 2014.2~b3-1 to experimental
Uploaded heat 2014.2~b3-1 (with some fixes for sphinx doc build)
Uploaded ceilometer 2014.2~b3-1 to experimental
Uploaded openstack-doc-tools 0.19-1 to experimental
Uploaded openstack-trove 2014.2~b3-1 to experimental Tuesday 23:
Uploaded python-neutronclient with fixed version number for cliff and six. This missing requirement for cliff version produced an error in Trove, which I don t want to happen again.
Added fix for unit tests in Trove: https://review.openstack.org/#/c/123450/1,publish
Uploaded oslo.messaging 1.4.1 in Experimental, fixing the version conflicts with the one in Sid/Jessie. Thanks to Doug Hellman for doing the tagging. I will need to upload new versions of the following packages with the >= 1.4.1 depends:
> ceilometer
> ironic
> keystone
> neutron
> nova
> oslo-config
> oslo.rootwrap
> oslo.i18n
> python-pycadf
See http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2014-September/046795.html for more explanation about the mess I m repairing
Uploaded designate Juno b3. Wednesday 24:
Uploaded oslosphinx 2.2.0.0
Uploaded update to django-openstack-auth (new last minute requirement for Horizon).
Uploaded final oslo-config package version 1.4.0.0 (really is 1.4.0)
Packaged and uploaded Sahara. This needs some tests by someone else as I don t even know how it works. Thuesday 25:
Uploaded python-keystonemiddleware 1.0.0-3, fixing CVE-2014-7144] TLS cert verification option not honoured in paste configs. https://bugs.debian.org/762748
Packaged and uploaded python-yaql, sent pull request for fixing print statements into Python3 compatible print function calls: https://github.com/ativelkov/yaql/pull/15
Packaged and uploaded python-muranoclient.
Started the packaging of Murano (not finished yet).
Uploaded python-keystoneclient 0.10.1-2 with the CVE-2014-7144 fix to Sid, with urgency=high. Uploaded 0.11.1-1 to Experimental.
Uploaded python-keystonemiddleware fix for CVE-2014-7144.
Uploaded openstack-trove 2014.2~b3-3 with last unit test fix from https://review.openstack.org/#/c/123450/ Friday 26:
Uploaded a fix for murano-agent, which makes it run as root.
Finished the packaging of Murano
Started packaging murano-dashboard, sent this patch to fix the wrong usage of the /usr/bin/coverage command: https://review.openstack.org/124444
Fixed wrong BASE_DIR in python-xstatic-angular and python-xstatic-angular-mock Saturday 27:
uploaded python-xstatic-boostrap-scss which I forgot to upload :(
uploaded python-pyscss 1.2.1 Sunday 28:
After a long investigation, I found out that the issue when installing the openstack-dasboard package was due to a wrong patch I did for Python 3.2 in Wheezy in python-pyscss. Corrected the patch from version 1.2.1-1, and uploaded version 1.2.1-2, the dashboard now installs correctly. \o/
Did a new version of an Horizon patch at https://review.openstack.org/122992/ to address Django 1.7 compat. Monday 29:
Uploaded new version of python-pyscss fixing the last issue with Python 3 (there was a release critical bug on it).
Uploaded fixup for python-django-openstack-auth fail to build in the Sid version, which was broken since the last upload of keystoneclient (which makes some of its API now as private).
Uploaded python-glance-store 0.1.8, including Ubuntu patch to fix unit tests.
Reviewed the packaging of python-strict-rfc3339 (see https://bugs.debian.org761152).
Uploaded Sheepdog with fix in the init script to start after corosync (Closes: #759216).
Uploaded pt_BR.po Brazilian Portuguese debconf templates translation for nova Icehouse in Sid (only commited it in Git for Juno).
Same for Glance. Tuesday 30:
Added Python3 support in python-django-appconf, uploaded to Sid
Upgraded to python-django-pyscss 1.0.3, and fixed broken unit tests with this new release under Django 1.7. Created pull request: https://github.com/fusionbox/django-pyscss/pull/22
Fixed designate requirements.txt in Sid (Icehouse) to allow SQLA 0.9.x. Uploaded resulting package to Sid.
Uploaded new Debian fix for python-tooz: kills memcached only if the package scripts started it (plus cleans .testrepository on clean).
Uploaded initial release of murano
Uploaded python-retrying with patch from Ubuntu to remove embedded copy of six.py code.
Uploaded python-oslo.i18n 1.0.0 to experimental (same as before, just bump of version #)
Uploaded python-oslo.utils 1.0.0 to experimental (same as before, just bump of version #)
Uploaded Keystone Juno RC1
Uploaded Glance Juno RC1

It s been more than 2 years since my last post about my smartphone. In the time after that post I upgraded my much loved Windows Phone 7 device to Windows Phone 8 (which I got rid of within months, for sucking), briefly used Firefox OS, then eventually used a Nexus 4 for at least a year. After years of terrible service provision and pricing, I decided I would not stay with my network Orange a moment longer and in getting a new contract, I would get a new phone too. So on Friday, I signed up to a new 15 per month contract with Three, including 200 minutes, unlimited data, and 25GB of data roaming in the USA and other countries (a saving of 200,000 per month versus Orange). Giffgaff is similarly competitive for data, but not roaming. No other network in the UK is competitive. For the phone, I had a shortlist of three: Apple iPhone 6, Sony Xperia Z3 Compact, and Samsung Galaxy Alpha. These are all small phones by 2014 standards, with a screen about the same size as the Nexus 4. I didn t consider any Windows Phone devices because they still haven t shipped a functional music player app on Windows Phone 8. Other more fringe OSes weren t considered, as I insist on trying out a real device in person before purchase, and no other comparable devices are testable on the high street. iPhone 6 This was the weakest offering, for me. 120 more than the Samsung, and almost 200 more than the Sony, a much lower hardware specification, physically larger, less attractive, and worst of all mandatory use of iTunes for Windows for music syncing. The only real selling point for me would be for access to iPhone apps. And, I guess, decreased chance of mockery by co-workers. Galaxy Alpha Now on to the real choices. I ve long felt that Samsung s phones are ugly plasticy tat the Galaxy S5 is popular, well-marketed, but looks and feels cheap compared to HTC s unibody aluminium One. They ve also committed the cardinal sin of gimping the specifications of their mini (normal-sized) phones, compared to the normal (gargantuan) versions. The newly released S5 Mini is about the same spec as early 2012 s S3, the S4 Mini was mostly an S2 internally, and so on. However, whilst HTC have continued along these lines, Samsung have finally released a proper phone under 5 , in the Alpha. The Alpha combines a 4.7 AMOLED screen, a plastic back, metal edges, 8-core big.LITTLE processor, and 2GB RAM. It is a PRETTY device the screen really dazzles (as is the nature of OLED). It feels like a mix of design cues from an iPhone and Samsung s own, keeping the angular feel of iPhone 4->5S rather than the curved edges on the iPhone 6. The Galaxy Alpha was one of the two devices I seriously considered. Xperia Z3 Compact The other Android device I considered was the Compact version of Sony s new Xperia Z3. Unlike other Android vendors, Sony decided that mini shouldn t mean low end when they released the Z1 compact earlier this year. The Z3 follows suit, where the same CPU and storage are found on both the big and little versions. The Z3C has a similar construction to the Nexus 4, with glass front and back, and plastic rim. The specification is similar to the Galaxy Alpha (with a quadcore 2.5GHz Qualcomm processor about 15% faster than the big.LITTLE Exynos in the Galaxy Alpha). It differs in a few places LCD rather than AMOLED (bad); a non-removable (bad) 2600 mAh battery (good) compared to the removable 1860 mAh in the Samsung; waterproofing (good); A less hateful Android shell (Xperia on Android vs Samsung Touchwiz). For those considering a Nexus-4-replacement class device (yes, rjek, that means you), both the Samsung and the Sony are worth a look. They both have good points and bad points. In the end, both need to be tested to form a proper opinion. But for me, the chunky battery and tasteful green were enough to swing it for the Sony. So let s see where I stand in a few months time. Every phone I ve owned, I ve ended up hating it for one reason or another. My usual measure for whether a phone is good or not is how long it takes me to hit the I can t use this limit. The Nokia N900 took me about 30 minutes, the Lumia 800 lasted months. How will the Z3 Compact do? Time will tell.

We returned safely from Krak w, despite a somewhat turbulent flight home. There were many pictures taken, but thus far I've only posted a random night-time shot. Perhaps more will appear in the future. In other news I've just made a new release of the chronicle blog compiler, So 5.0.7 should shortly appear on CPAN. The release contains a bunch of minor fixes, and some new facilities relating to templates. It seems likely that in the future there will be the ability to create "static pages" along with the blog-entries, tag-clouds & etc. The suggestion was raised on the github issue tracker and as a proof of concept I hacked up a solution which works entirely via the chronicle plugin-system, proving that the new development work wasn't a waste of time - especially when combined with the significant speedups in the new codebase. (ObRandom: Mailed the Debian package-mmaintainer to see if there was interest in changing. Also mailed a couple of people I know who are using the old code to see if they had comments on the new code, or had any compatibility issues. No replies from either, yet. *shrugs*)

The MirBSD Korn Shell has got a new security and maintenance release. This release fixes one mksh(1)-specific issue when importing values from the environment. The issue has been detected by the main developer during careful code review, looking at whether the shell is affected by the recent shellshock bugs in GNU bash, many of which also affect AT&T ksh93. (The answer is: no, none of these bugs affects mksh.) Stephane Chanzelas kindly provided me with an in-depth look at how this can be exploited. The issue has not got a CVE identifier because it was identified as low-risk. The problem here is that the environment import filter mistakenly accepted variables named FOO+ (for any FOO), which are, by general environ(7) syntax, distinct from FOO , and treated them as appending to the value of FOO . An attacker who already had access to the environment could so append values to parameters passed through programs (including sudo(8) or setuid) to shell scripts, including indirectly, after those programs intended to sanitise the environment, e.g. invalidating the last $PATH component. It could also be used to circumvent sudo s environment filter which protected against the vulnerability of an unpatched GNU bash being exploited. tl;dr: mksh not affected by any shellshock bugs, but we found a bug of our own, with low impact, which does not affect any other shell, during careful code review. Please do update to mksh R50c quickly.

You are a software vendor. You distribute software on multiple operating systems. Let s say your software is a mildly popular internet browser. Let s say its logo represents an animal and a globe. Now, because you care about the security of your users, let s say you would like the entire address space of your application to be randomized, including the main executable portion of it. That would be neat, wouldn t it? And there s even a feature for that: Position independent executables. You get that working on (almost) all the operating systems you distribute software on. Great. Then a Gnome user (or an Ubuntu user, for that matter) comes, and tells you they downloaded your software tarball, unpacked it, and tried opening your software, but all they get is a dialog telling them:

Could not display application-name
There is no application installed for shared library files

Because, you see, a Position independent executable, in ELF terms, is actually a (position independent) shared library that happens to be executable, instead of being an executable that happens to be position independent. And nautilus (the file manager in Gnome and Ubuntu s Unity) usefully knows to distinguish between executables and shared libraries. And will happily refuse to execute shared libraries, even when they have the file-system-level executable bit set. You d think you can get around this by using a .desktop file, but the Exec field in those files requires a full path. (No, ./ doesn t work unless the executable is in the nautilus process current working directory, as in, the path nautilus was run from) Dear lazyweb, please prove me wrong and tell me there s a way around this.

It's taken me a while to get sufficiently riled up about Australia's current Islamaphobia outbreak, but it's been brewing in me for a couple of weeks. For the record, I'm an Atheist, but I'll defend your right to practise your religion, just don't go pushing it on me, thank you very much. I'm also not a huge fan of Islam, because it does seem to lend itself to more violent extremism than other religions, and ISIS/ISIL/IS (whatever you want to call them) aren't doing Islam any favours at the moment. I'm against extremism of any stripes though. The Westboro Baptists are Christian extremists. They just don't go around killing people. I'm also not a big fan of the burqa, but again, I'll defend a Muslim woman's right to choose to wear one. They key point here is choice. I got my carpets cleaned yesterday by an ethnic couple. I like accents, and I was trying to pick theirs. I thought they may have been Turkish. It turned out they were Kurdish. Whenever I hear "Kurd" I habitually stick "Bosnian" in front of it after the Bosnian War that happened in my childhood. Turns out I wasn't listening properly, and that was actually "Serb". Now I feel dumb, but I digress. I got chatting with the lady while her husband did the work. I got a refresher on where most Kurds are/were (Northern Iraq) and we talked about Sunni versus Shia Islam, and how they differed. I learned a bit yesterday, and I'll have to have a proper read of the Wikipedia article I just linked to, because I suspect I'll learn a lot more. We briefly talked about burqas, and she said that because they were Sunni, they were given the choice, and they chose not to wear it. That's the sort of Islam that I support. I suspect a lot of the women running around in burqas don't get a lot of say in it, but I don't think banning it outright is the right solution to that. Those women need to feel empowered enough to be able to cast off their burqas if that's what they want to do. I completely agree that a woman in a burqa entering a secure place (for example Parliament House) needs to be identifiable (assuming that identification is verified for all entrants to Parliament House). If it's not, and they're worried about security, that's what the metal detectors are for. I've been to Dubai. I've seen how they handle women in burqas at passport control. This is an easily solvable problem. You don't have to treat burqa-clad women as second class citizens and stick them in a glass box. Or exclude them entirely.

Chromium (the browser) and DRI3 I got a note on IRC a week ago that Chromium was crashing with DRI3. The Google team working on Chromium eventually sent me a link to the bug report. That's secret Google stuff, so you won't be able to follow the link, even though it's a bug in a free software application when running on free software drivers. There's a bug report in the freedesktop bugzilla which looks the same to me. In both cases, the recommended fix was to switch from DRI3 back to DRI2. That's not exactly a great plan, given that DRI3 offers better security between GPU-using applications, which seems like a pretty nice thing to have when you're running random GL applications from the web. Chromium Sandboxing I'm not entirely sure how it works, but Chromium creates a process separate from the main browser engine to talk to the GPU. That process has very limited access to the operating system via some fancy library adventures. Presumably, the hope is that security bugs in the GL driver would be harder to leverage into a remote system exploit. Debugging in this environment is a bit tricky as you can't simply run chromium under gdb and expect to be able to set breakpoints in the GL driver. Instead, you have to run chromium with a magic flag which causes the GPU process to pause before loading the driver so you can connect to it with gdb and debug from there, along with a flag that lets you see crashes within the gpu process and the usual flag that causes chromium to ignore the GPU black list which seems to always include the Intel driver for one reason or another:

$ chromium --gpu-startup-dialog --disable-gpu-watchdog --ignore-gpu-blacklist

Once Chromium starts up, it will print out a message telling you to attach gdb to the GPU process and send that process a SIGUSR1 to continue it. Now you can happily debug and get a stack trace when the crash occurs. Locating the Bug The bug manifested with a segfault at the first access to a DRI3-allocated buffer within the application. We've seen this problem in the past; whenever buffer allocation fails for some reason, the driver ignores the problem and attempts to de-reference through the (NULL) buffer pointer, causing a segfault. In this case, Chromium called glClear, which tried (and failed) to allocate a back buffer causing the i965 driver to subsequently segfault. We should probably go fix the i965 driver to not segfault when buffer allocation fails, but that wouldn't provide a lot of additional information. What I have done is add some error messages in the DRI3 buffer allocation path which at least tell you why the buffer allocation failed. That patch has been merged to Mesa master, and should also get merged to the Mesa stable branch for the next stable release. Once I had added the error messages, it was pretty easy to see what happened:

$ chromium --ignore-gpu-blacklist
[10618:10643:0930/200525:ERROR:nss_util.cc(856)] After loading Root Certs, loaded==false: NSS error code: -8018
libGL: pci id for fd 12: 8086:0a16, driver i965
libGL: OpenDriver: trying /local-miki/src/mesa/mesa/lib/i965_dri.so
libGL: Can't open configuration file /home/keithp/.drirc: Operation not permitted.
libGL: Can't open configuration file /home/keithp/.drirc: Operation not permitted.
libGL error: DRI3 Fence object allocation failure Operation not permitted

The first two errors were just the sandbox preventing Mesa from using my GL configuration file. I'm not sure how that's a security problem, but it shouldn't harm the driver much. The last error is where the problem lies. In Mesa, the DRI3 implementation uses a chunk of shared memory to hold a fence object that lets Mesa know when buffers are idle without using the X connection. That shared memory segment is allocated by creating a temporary file using the O_TMPFILE flag:

fd = open("/dev/shm", O_TMPFILE O_RDWR O_CLOEXEC O_EXCL, 0666);

This call cannot fail as /dev/shm is used by glibc for shared memory objects, and must therefore be world writable on any glibc system. However, with the Chromium sandbox enabled, it returns EPERM. Running Without a Sandbox Now that the bug appears to be in the sandboxing code, we can re-test with the GPU sandbox disabled:

$ chromium --ignore-gpu-blacklist --disable-gpu-sandbox

And, indeed, without the sandbox getting in the way of allocating a shared memory segment, Chromium appears happy to use the Intel driver with DRI3. Final Thoughts I looked briefly at the Chromium sandbox code. It looks like it needs to know intimate details of the OpenGL implementation for every possible driver it runs on; it seems to contain a fixed list of all possible files and modes that the driver will pass to open(2). That seems incredibly fragile to me, especially when used in a general Linux desktop environment. Minor changes in how the GL driver operates can easily cause the browser to stop working.

I got word via the Electronic Frontier Foundation about an act of injustice happening to a person for doing... Not only what I do day to day, but what I promote and believe to be right: Sharing academic articles. Diego is a Colombian, working towards his Masters degree on conservation and biodiversity in Costa Rica. He is now facing up to eight years imprisonment for... Sharing a scholarly article he did not author on Scribd. Many people lack the knowledge and skills to properly set up a venue to share their articles with people they know. Many people will hope for the best and expect academic publishers to be fundamentally good, not to send legal threats just for the simple, noncommercial act of sharing knowledge. Sharing knowledge is fundamental for science to grow, for knowledge to rise. Besides, most scholarly studies are funded by public money, and as the saying goes, they should benefit the public. And the public is everybody, is all of us. And yes, if this sounds in any way like what drove Aaron Swartz to his sad suicide early this year... It is exactly the same thing. Thankfully (although, sadly, after the sad fact), thousands of people strongly stood on Aaron's side on that demand. Please sign the EFF petition to help Diego, share this, and try to spread the word on the real world needs for Open Access mandates for academics! Some links with further information:

Diego's own account on the matter in Compartir no es delito
• Why are we prosecuting students for sharing knowledge? (Timothy Vollmer, on Creative Commons' weblog)
• Science is not a crime (David R. Koepsell, Center for Inquiry)
• Fuller story on the EFF

For a little toy project of mine (a wikipedia XML dump word counter) I wrote a little C++11 helper class to distribute work to all available CPU cores. It took me many years to overcome my fear of threading: In the past, whenever I toyed with threaded code, I ended up having a lot of deadlocks, and generally being confused. It appears that I finally have understood enough of this crazyness to be able to come up with the small helper class below.

A new release 0.11.3 of Rcpp is now on the CRAN network for GNU R, and an updated Debian package has been uploaded too. Rcpp has become the most popular way of enhancing GNU R with C++ code. As of today, 273 packages on CRAN depend on Rcpp for making analyses go faster and further. This release brings a fairly large number of continued enhancements, fixes and polishing to Rcpp. These were provided by a total of seven different contributors---which is a new record as well. See below for a detailed list of changes extracted from the NEWS file, but some highlights included in this release are

• Several API cleanups, polishes and a pre-announced code removal
• New InternalFunction interface, and new Timer functionality.
• More robust functionality of Rcpp Attributes as well as a new dryRun option.
• The Rcpp FAQ was updated, as was the main Description: in the DESCRIPTION file.
• Rcpp.package.skeleton() can now deploy functionality from pkgKitten to create Rcpp packages that purr.

One sore point, however, is that we missed that packages using Rcpp Modules appear to require a rebuild. We are sorry for the inconvenience; this has highlighted a shortcoming in our fairly robust and extensive tests. While we test our packages against all known CRAN dependents, such tests check for the ability to compile and run freshly and not whether previously built packages still run. We intend to augment our testing in this direction to avoid a repeat occurrence of such a misfeature.

Changes in Rcpp version 0.11.3 (2014-09-27)

• Changes in Rcpp API:
  • The deprecation of RCPP_FUNCTION_* which was announced with release 0.10.5 last year is proceeding as planned, and the file macros/preprocessor_generated.h has been removed.
  • Timer no longer records time between steps, but times from the origin. It also gains a get_timers(int) methods that creates a vector of Timer that have the same origin. This is modelled on the Rcpp11 implementation and is more useful for situations where we use timers in several threads. Timer also gains a constructor taking a nanotime_t to use as its origin, and a origin method. This can be useful for situations where the number of threads is not known in advance but we still want to track what goes on in each thread.
  • A cast to bool was removed in the vector proxy code as inconsistent behaviour between clang and g++ compilations was noticed.
  • A missing update(SEXP) method was added thanks to pull request by Omar Andres Zapata Mesa.
  • A proxy for DimNames was added.
  • A no_init option was added for Matrices and Vectors.
  • The InternalFunction class was updated to work with std::function (provided a suitable C++11 compiler is available) via a pull request by Christian Authmann.
  • A new_env() function was added to Environment.h
  • The return value of range eraser for Vectors was fixed in a pull request by Yixuan Qiu.
• Changes in Rcpp Sugar:
  • In ifelse(), the returned NA type was corrected for operator[].
• Changes in Rcpp Attributes:
  • Include LinkingTo in DESCRIPTION fields scanned to confirm that C++ dependencies are referenced by package.
  • Add dryRun parameter to sourceCpp.
  • Corrected issue with relative path and R chunk use for sourceCpp.
• Changes in Rcpp Documentation:
  • The Rcpp-FAQ vignette was updated with respect to OS X issues.
  • A new entry in the Rcpp-FAQ clarifies the use of licenses.
  • Vignettes build results no longer copied to /tmp to please CRAN.
  • The Description in DESCRIPTION has been shortened.
• Changes in Rcpp support functions:
  • The Rcpp.package.skeleton() function will now use pkgKitten package, if available, to create a package which passes R CMD check without warnings. A new Suggests: has been added for pkgKitten.
  • The modules=TRUE case for Rcpp.package.skeleton() has been improved and now runs without complaints from R CMD check as well.
• Changes in Rcpp unit test functions:
  • Functions from the RUnit package are now prefixed with RUnit::
  • The testRcppModule and testRcppClass sample packages now pass R CMD check --as-cran cleanly with NOTES or WARNINGS

Thanks to CRANberries, you can also look at a diff to the previous release As always, even fuller details are on the Rcpp Changelog page and the Rcpp page which also leads to the downloads page, the browseable doxygen docs and zip files of doxygen output for the standard formats. A local directory has source and documentation too. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page.

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