OS security features and server class systems are things that surely belong together. If a program is important enough to buy expensive servers to run it then it s important enough that you want to have all the OS security features enabled. For such an important program you will also want to have all possible monitoring systems running so you can predict hardware failures etc. Therefore you would expect that you could buy a server, setup the vendor s management software, configure your Linux kernel with security features such as lockdown (a LSM that restricts access to /dev/mem, the iopl() system call, and other dangerous things [1]), and have it run nicely! You will be disappointed if you try doing that on a HP or Dell server though. HP Problems

[370742.622525] Lockdown: hpasmlited: raw io port access is restricted; see man kernel_lockdown.7

The above message is logged when trying to INSTALL (not even run) the hp-health package from the official HP repository (as documented in my previous blog post about the HP ML-110 Gen9 [2]) with lockdown=integrity (the less restrictive lockdown option). Now the HP package in question is in their repository for Debian/Stretch (released in 2017) and the Lockdown LSM was documented by LWN as being released in 2019, so not supporting a Debian/Bullseye feature in Debian/Stretch packages isn t inherently a bad thing apart from the fact that they haven t released a new version of that package since. The Stretch package that I am testing now was released in 2019. Also it s been regarded as best practice to have device drivers for this sort of thing since long before 2017.

# hplog -v
ERROR: Could not open /dev/cpqhealth/cdt.
Please make sure the Health Monitor is started.

Attempting to run the hplog -v command (to view the HP hardware log) gives the above error. Strace reveals that it could and did open /dev/cpqhealth/cdt but had problems talking to something (presumably the Health Monitor daemon) over a Unix domain socket. It would be nice if they could at least get the error message right! Dell Problems

[   13.811165] Lockdown: smbios-sys-info: /dev/mem,kmem,port is restricted; see man kernel_lockdown.7
[   13.820935] Lockdown: smbios-sys-info: raw io port access is restricted; see man kernel_lockdown.7
[   18.118118] Lockdown: dchcfg: raw io port access is restricted; see man kernel_lockdown.7
[   18.127621] Lockdown: dchcfg: /dev/mem,kmem,port is restricted; see man kernel_lockdown.7
[   19.371391] Lockdown: dsm_sa_datamgrd: raw io port access is restricted; see man kernel_lockdown.7
[   19.382147] Lockdown: dsm_sa_datamgrd: /dev/mem,kmem,port is restricted; see man kernel_lockdown.7

Above is a sample of the messages when booting a Dell PowerEdge R710 with lockdown=integrity with the srvadmin-omacore package installed from the official Dell repository I describe in my blog post about the Dell PowerEdge R710 [3]. Now that repository is for Ubuntu/Xenial which was released in 2015, but again it was best practice to have device drivers for this many years ago. Also the newest Debian based releases that Dell apparently supports are Ubuntu/Xenial and Debian/Jessie which were both released in 2015.

# omreport system esmlog
Error! No Embedded System Management (ESM) log found on this system.

Above is the result when I try to view the ESM log (the Dell hardware log). How Long Should Server Support Last? The Wikipedia List of Dell PowerEdge Servers shows that the R710 is a Generation 11 system. Generation 11 was first released in 2010 and Generation 12 was first released in 2012. Generation 13 was the latest hardware Dell sold in 2015 when they apparently ceased providing newer OS support for Generation 11. Dell currently sells Generation 15 systems and provides more recent support for Generation 14 and Generation 15. I think it s reasonable to debate whether Dell should support servers for 4 generations. But given that a major selling point of server class systems is that they have long term support I think it would make sense to give better support for this and not drop support when it s only 2 versions from the latest release! The support for Dell Generation 11 hardware only seems to have lasted for 3 years after Generation 12 was first released. Also it appears that software support for Dell Generation 13 ceased before Generation 14 was released, that sucks for the people who bought Generation 13 when they were new! HP is currently selling Gen 10 servers which were first released at the end of 2017. So it appears that HP stopped properly supporting Gen 9 servers as soon as Gen 10 servers were released! One thing to note about these support times, when the new generation of hardware was officially released the previous generation was still on sale. So while HP Gen 10 servers officially came out in 2017 that doesn t necessarily mean that someone who wanted to buy a ML-110 Gen10 could actually have done so. For comparison Red Hat Enterprise Linux has been supported for 4-6 years for every release they made since 2005 and Ubuntu has always had a 5 year LTS support for servers. How To Do It Properly The correct way of interfacing with hardware is via a device driver that is supported in the kernel.org tree. That means it goes through the usual kernel source code quality checks which are really good at finding bugs and gives users an assurance that the code won t cause security problems. Generally nothing about the code from Dell or HP gives me confidence that it should be directly accessing /dev/kmem or raw IO ports without risk of problems. Once a driver is in the kernel.org tree it will usually stay there forever and not require further effort from the people who submit it. Then it just works for everyone and tends to work with any other kernel features that people use, like LSMs. If they released the source code to the management programs then it would save them even more effort as they could be maintained by the community.

• [1] https://lwn.net/Articles/791863/
• [2] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2021/05/30/hp-ml110-gen9/
• [3] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2020/09/13/dell-t710-idrac6/

As part of my GSoC project, my first task includes that user could login into their account on debci using their Debian Salsa account (collaborative development server for Debian based on the GitLab software). The task is officially completed using OmniAuth library and while implementing it, I found that the documentation of OmniAuth is quite a mix-match and more focused on using it with Rails app and this gives me a idea to write a tutorial for people looking to integrate OmniAuth with Sinatra application. So here it is. Now, depending on the provider, Omniauth requires specific strategy which are generally released individually as RubyGems. For this tutorial, I would be using omniauth-gitlab which I used for Debian Salsa in my project, omniauth-twitter and a developer strategy which could be used for project in development mode and comes with omniauth gem itself. For simplicity purposes, I have included all routes and OmniAuth configurations in a single file app.rb. Let s start.

Register your application This can be easily done just head over to provider (Twitter, Salsa) website and find the option to create a new application and fill in the form. In the callback URL field, you need to append /auth/:provider/callback to whichever URL you used in the website field. The client-id and client-secret is obtained from the console which is used in further step to set up OmniAuth.

Gems At the top of the file, we require the necessary gems of for our project

require 'sinatra'
require 'omniauth'
require 'omniauth-gitlab'
require 'omniauth-twitter'

Enable sessions In order for OmniAuth to work and to store the logged in user across requests, sessions need to be activated and if activated, you have one session hash per user session.

configure do
    set :sessions, true
end

Set up OmniAuth configurations OmniAuth::Builder Rack middleware build up your list of OmniAuth strategies for use in your application:

use OmniAuth::Builder do
    if development?
      provider :developer,
               fields: [:name],
               uid_field: :name
    end
    provider :gitlab, #client-id , #client-secret,
             scope: "read_user",
             client_options:  
               site: 'https://salsa.debian.org/api/v4/'
              
    provider :twitter, #client-id , #client-secret,
end

Here, few things to note could be the extra options used with providers, as
In developer:
fields : to specify the form fields for login in developer mode and by default it has name and email.
uid_field: to specify that which field s value could be obtained as uid and by default it is email.
In gitlab:
scope: to limit the scope of application, by default, the api scope is requested and must be allowed in GitLab s application configuration.
client_options: to specify the server being used as client based on Gitlab software.
Note: In case you want to have a different callback url other than the default /auth/:provider/callback, it can be specified using redirect_url option in case of gitlab provider and accordingly update it in your Application Configuration at provider s console.

Extra configurations To redirect to auth/failure route in case of failure even in developer mode, following could be added:

OmniAuth.config.on_failure = proc do  env 
    OmniAuth::FailureEndpoint.new(env).redirect_to_failure
end

By default, OmniAuth will log to STDOUT but you can configure this. If you don t want OmniAuth to log to STDOUT, following could be used:

OmniAuth.config.logger.level = Logger::UNKNOWN

Setting up routes

Login route Starting with GET /login route, where you can specify the options available to login:

get '/login' do
    <<~HTML
    <form method='post' action='/auth/gitlab'>
    <input type="hidden" name="authenticity_token" value='# request.env["rack.session"]["csrf"] '>
    <button type='submit'>Login with Salsa</button>
    </form>
    <form method='post' action='/auth/twitter'>
    <input type="hidden" name="authenticity_token" value='# request.env["rack.session"]["csrf"] '>
    <button type='submit'>Login with Twitter</button>
    </form>
    <form method='post' action='/auth/developer'>
    <input type="hidden" name="authenticity_token" value='# request.env["rack.session"]["csrf"] '>
    <button type='submit'>Login with Developer</button>
    </form>
  HTML
end

The auth/:provider path is created and configured automatically by OmniAuth, so you just need to send the request to that paths and auth process will start.
As per the OmniAuth version 2.0, OmniAuth now defaults to only POST as allowed request_phase methods and authenticity_token is required to validate your requests so make sure to take care of this.

Callback routes: On success from authentication, Omniauth will return the hash of information to the auth/:provider/callback in the Rack environment under the key omniauth.auth so this is what you can use in your desired way like creating a entry to your database and storing the current user in session params.

get '/auth/:provider/callback' do
    erb "
    <h1>Hello # request.env['omniauth.auth']['info']['name'] </h1>"
end
post '/auth/developer/callback' do
    erb "
    <h1>Hello # request.env['omniauth.auth']['info']['name'] </h1>"
end

Here, POST request method is used for developer strategy and GET request method for twitter and gitlab as that is how their working is defined in their respective strategies.

Failure route: If user authentication fails on the provider side, OmniAuth will catch the response and then redirect the request to the path /auth/failure, passing a corresponding error message in a parameter named message.

get '/auth/failure' do
    halt(403, erb("<h2>Authentication Failed</h2><h4>Reason: </h4><pre># params[:message] </pre>"))
end

Final result That s it, our application is all set to be tested. And this is how it will be working. Here, I have already logged into my respective accounts so page for entring credentials does not show up but if the user has not logged into his account, he would be first asked to log in. For complete code, you can check out: OmniAuth with Sinatra Tutorial So this completes the tutorial. I hope it helps others who are looking to integrate their Ruby Applications with OmniAuth. If you have any feedback, feel free to let me know. See you next time!

Most people connect to Zoom via a proprietary client which has been on the receiving end of a number of security and privacy issues over the past year, with some experts even describing it as malware. It's not widely known however that Zoom offers a half-decent WebRTC client which means cross-platform one-click access to a Zoom room or webinar without needing to install any software. Given a Zoom link such as https://companyname.zoom.us/j/123456789?pwd=letmein, you can use https://zoom.us/wc/join/123456789?pwd=letmein to connect in your browser. Notice that the pool of Zoom room IDs is global and you can just drop the companyname from the URL. In my experience however, Jitsi has much better performance than Zoom's WebRTC client. For instance, I've never been able to use Zoom successfully on a Raspberry Pi 4 (8GB), but Jitsi works quite well. If you have a say in the choice of conference platform, go with Jitsi instead.

Created a web page for recording game play. For mixing video and audio from HDMI input and grabbing audio from mic. Basically just configuring the two audio and video tracks. here it is.

In June I was assigned 14 hours of work by Freexian's Debian LTS initiative and carried over 2 hours from earlier months. I worked 13.25 hours and will carry over the remainder. I finished bringing the linux (Linux 4.9) package up to date, uploaded it, and issued DLA-2689-1. I also updated the linux-4.19 package based on the version in stable point release 10.10, and issued DLA-2690-1. Finally, I backported my recent security fixes for klibc, uploaded it and issued DLA-2695-1.

I built my current desktop PC in 2014. A second SSD was added in 2015. The motherboard and the power supply were replaced after a fault¹ in 2016. The memory was upgraded in 2018. A discrete AMD GPU was installed in 2019 to drive two 4K screens. An NVMe disk was added earlier this year to further increase storage performance. This is a testament to the durability of a desktop PC compared to a laptop: it s evolutive and you can keep it a long time. While fine for most usage, the CPU started to become a bottleneck during video conferences.² So, it was set for an upgrade. The table below summarizes the change. This update cost me about 800 . According to some benchmark, the new CPU should be 4 faster when all cores are used and 1.5 faster for a single-threaded workload. Compiling an arbitrary³ kernel provides a 3 speedup. Before: After: Here we go for another seven years!

Focus This month I didn't have any particular focus. I just worked on issues in my info bubble.

Changes

• flower: fix load test
• kms-jsonrpc: version agnostic cmake dir
• kms-cmake-utils: version agnostic cmake dir
• kurento-module-creator: version agnostic cmake dir
• wayback-machine-downloader: fix crash, fix URI.open usage
• colord: drop abandoned domain
• ptp-gadget: gitignore, fix make dist, drop tar.bz2, document option
• duck: indicators phrases
• check-all-the-things: many TODO items, lists
• Debian usertags QA: refactor, automove ftcbfs, fix noise, support comments
• Debian website: drop freenode
• Debian package uploads: purple-discord experimental/backports
• Debian wiki pages: Bind9, Brave, DebConf/21/Volunteering, DebianKernel/GitBisect, DebianServiceForDD, Derivatives/Census/HandyLinux, Hardware/Wanted, InterWikiMap, MemberBenefits, NewInBullseye, Packaging/debspawn, PaulWise, PortsDocs/New (1 2), QemuUserEmulation, Scanner, Teams/Dpkg/Spec/InstallBootstrap, UnifiedCommunications/DebianDevelopers/UserGuide, Wayland, ZNC_IRC_bouncer
• Bootstrappable Builds wiki pages: Projects List
• FOSSjobs wiki pages: Resources
• Wikipedia: Message-ID

Issues

• Crashes in evolution
• Cross-build failure in ppp
• Migration needed for apparmor-profiles-extra
• Dependency changes for sane-backends, parl-desktop, education-common, hollywood
• Broken URLs in colord
• Features in ognibuild, Debian firefox-esr, diffoscope, fossjobs, evolution
• Warnings in kalgebra
• Usability in ognibuild
• Documentation needed in purple-lurch
• Outdated forks in Kurento jsoncpp
• Typos in abilint
• Security issue in a module of a programming language (sent privately)
• Unhandled message type in purple-discord

Review

• Spam: reported 3 Debian bug reports and 135 Debian mailing list posts
• Debian wiki: RecentChanges for the month
• Debian BTS usertags: changes for the month
• Debian screenshots:
  • approved php-horde endless-sky claws-mail memtester
  • rejected python-gdal/weboob-qt (unrelated software)

Administration

• Debian: restart bacula director
• Debian wiki: approve accounts

Communication

• This month I left freenode, an IRC network I had been on for at least 16 years, for reasons that you probably all read about. I think the biggest lesson I take from this situation and ones happening around the same time is that proper governance in peer production projects is absolutely critical.
• Respond to queries from Debian users and contributors on the mailing lists and IRC

Sponsors The purple-discord/flower work was sponsored by my employers. All other work was done on a volunteer basis.

LTS This is my fourth month of working for LTS. I was assigned 12 hrs and worked all of them.

Released DLAs

1. DLA 2672-1 imagemagick_6.9.7.4+dfsg-11+deb9u13
   • CVE-2020-27751 A flaw was found in MagickCore/quantum-export.c. An attacker who submits a crafted file that is processed by ImageMagick could trigger undefined behavior in the form of values outside the range of type unsigned long long as well as a shift exponent that is too large for 64-bit type. This would most likely lead to an impact to application availability, but could potentially cause other problems related to undefined behavior.
   • CVE-2021-20243 A flaw was found in MagickCore/resize.c. An attacker who submits a crafted file that is processed by ImageMagick could trigger undefined behavior in the form of math division by zero.
   • CVE-2021-20245 A flaw was found in coders/webp.c. An attacker who submits a crafted file that is processed by ImageMagick could trigger undefined behavior in the form of math division by zero.
   • CVE-2021-20309 A division by zero in WaveImage() of MagickCore/visual-effects.c may trigger undefined behavior via a crafted image file submitted to an application using ImageMagick.
   • CVE-2021-20312 An integer overflow in WriteTHUMBNAILImage of coders/thumbnail.c may trigger undefined behavior via a crafted image file that is submitted by an attacker and processed by an application using ImageMagick.
   • CVE-2021-20313 A potential cipher leak when the calculate signatures in TransformSignature is possible.
2. DLA 2677-1 libwebp_0.5.2-1+deb9u1
   • CVE-2018-25009 An out-of-bounds read was found in function WebPMuxCreateInternal. The highest threat from this vulnerability is to data confidentiality and to the service availability.
   • CVE-2018-25010 An out-of-bounds read was found in function ApplyFilter. The highest threat from this vulnerability is to data confidentiality and to the service availability.
   • CVE-2018-25011 A heap-based buffer overflow was found in PutLE16(). The highest threat from this vulnerability is to data confidentiality and integrity as well as system availability.
   • CVE-2018-25012 An out-of-bounds read was found in function WebPMuxCreateInternal. The highest threat from this vulnerability is to data confidentiality and to the service availability.
   • CVE-2018-25013 An out-of-bounds read was found in function ShiftBytes. The highest threat from this vulnerability is to data confidentiality and to the service availability.
   • CVE-2018-25014 An unitialized variable is used in function ReadSymbol. The highest threat from this vulnerability is to data confidentiality and integrity as well as system availability.
   • CVE-2020-36328 A heap-based buffer overflow in function WebPDecodeRGBInto is possible due to an invalid check for buffer size. The highest threat from this vulnerability is to data confidentiality and integrity as well as system availability.
   • CVE-2020-36329 A use-after-free was found due to a thread being killed too early. The highest threat from this vulnerability is to data confidentiality and integrity as well as system availability.
   • CVE-2020-36330 An out-of-bounds read was found in function ChunkVerifyAndAssign. The highest threat from this vulnerability is to data confidentiality and to the service availability.
   • CVE-2020-36331 An out-of-bounds read was found in function ChunkAssignData. The highest threat from this vulnerability is to data confidentiality and to the service availability.
   CVE-2020-36332 was marked as ignored for stretch due to too disruptive patch for older versions of libwebp.
3. DLA-2687-1 prosody_0.9.12-2+deb9u3
   • CVE-2021-32917 The proxy65 component allows open access by default, even if neither of the users has an XMPP account on the local server, allowing unrestricted use of the server s bandwidth.
   • CVE-2021-32921 Authentication module does not use a constant-time algorithm for comparing certain secret strings when running under Lua 5.2 or later. This can potentially be used in a timing attack to reveal the contents of secret strings to an attacker.
4. DLA-2687-2 prosody_0.9.12-2+deb9u4 Upload prosody_0.9.12-2+deb9u3 introduced a regression in the mod_auth_internal_hashed module. Big thanks to Andre Bianchi for the reporting an issue and for testing the update. CVE-2021-32918, CVE-2021-32920, were marked as ignored for stretch: the affected code is not existing in that version of prosody.

LTS-Meeting I attended the Debian LTS team Jitsi-meeting.

Debian Science Team

openpiv-python I started to package python-openpiv. The software implements PIV (Particle Image Velocimetry) method to compare two images and obtain velocity field.

Other FLOSS activities

Admesh Admesh is the first package which I adopted over 10 years ago! Upstream is not active for a very long time, so I created a github-repo back in 2013. The software helps to manipulate STL-files. STL is the file format for meshes, mostly developed for CAD programs. This month I decided to clean the build system. It was switched to cmake. CI was updated, now it compiles the sources under Linux/Windows environment, runs tests, AddressSanitizer and UndefinedBehaviourSanitizer were employed. Work is ongoing.

MIT Technology Review has an interesting article about Google Project Zero shutting down a western intelligence operation [1]. There s an Internet trend of people eating rotten meat they call high meat (rotten meat) [2]. This is up there with people setting themselves on fire and nut shot videos. A young female who was making popular Twitter posts about motorbikes turned out to be a 50yo man using deep fake technology [3]. He has long hair IRL and just needed to replace his face. After coming out of the closet he has continued making such videos and remains popular. FYHTECH has an informative blog post about using sgdisk to backup and restore GPT partition tables [4]. This is in the Debian package gdisk along with several other tools for managing partition tables. One interesting thing to note is that you can backup a partition table and restore to a smaller device (with a bunch of warnings that you can ignore if you know what you are doing). This is the only way I ve discovered to cleanly truncate a GPT partitioned disk, which is sometimes necessary when running VMs. Insightful blog post about PCIe bifurcation and how PCIe lanes are assigned to sockets [5]. This explains why many motherboards have sockets with unused PCIe lanes, EG *8 sockets that are wired for *4. The PCIe slots all go back to the CPU which has a limited number of *16 PCIe connections that are bifurcated to make the larger number of PCIe slots on the motherboard. New Republic has an interesting article on the infamous transphobe Jordan Peterson s battle with tranquiliser dependency [6]. Wired has an interesting article about the hack of RSA infrastructure related to the SecureID keys 10 years ago [7]. Apparently some 10 year NDAs had delayed it. There are many posts about the situation with Freenode, I think that this one best captures the problems in the shortest amount of text [8]. You could spend a few hours reading about it as I have just done, but just reading this gives you the basics that you need to know to avoid Freenode. That blog post has links to articles about Andrew Lee s involvement with Mt Gox and claims to be the heir to the throne of Korea (which is not a monarchy). Nicholas Wade wrote an insightful and informative article about the origin of Covid19, which leads to the conclusion that it was made in a Chinese laboratory [9]. I first saw this in David Brin s Facebook feed. I would be hesitant to share this sort of thing if it wasn t reviewed by a reliable source, I think David Brin has the skill to analyse this sort of article and the contacts to allow him to seek verification of any scientific issues that are outside his field. I believe that this article is reliable and it s conclusion is most likely to be correct. Interesting Wired article about an art project using display computers at Apple stores to photograph people [10]. Ends with a visit from the FBI.

• [1] https://tinyurl.com/yhoxy6lf
• [2] https://tinyurl.com/ydtssdtx
• [3] https://tinyurl.com/ygwwyrww
• [4] https://tech.feedyourhead.at/content/copy-partition-table-one-disk-another
• [5] https://tinyurl.com/yzf2kw4y
• [6] https://newrepublic.com/article/156829/happened-jordan-peterson
• [7] https://tinyurl.com/yfydxb9r
• [8] https://tinyurl.com/ydl9lajf
• [9] https://tinyurl.com/ygfhdjj9
• [10] https://www.wired.com/2012/07/people-staring-at-computers/

This is part of a series of posts on ideas for an ansible-like provisioning system, implemented in Transilience. Unit testing some parts of Transilience, like the apt and systemd actions, or remote Mitogen connections, can really use a containerized system for testing. To have that, I reused my work on nspawn-runner. to build a simple and very fast system of ephemeral containers, with minimal dependencies, based on systemd-nspawn and btrfs snapshots: Setup To be able to use systemd-nspawn --ephemeral, the chroots needs to be btrfs subvolumes. If you are not running on a btrfs filesystem, you can create one to run the tests, even on a file: I created a script to setup the test environment, here is an extract: CACHEDIR.TAG is a nice trick to tell backup software not to bother backing up the contents of this directory, since it can be easily regenerated. eatmydata is optional, and it speeds up debootstrap quite a bit. Running unittest with sudo Here's a simple helper to drop root as soon as possible, and regain it only when needed. Note that it needs $SUDO_UID and $SUDO_GID, that are set by sudo, to know which user to drop into: As soon as this module is loaded, root privileges are dropped, and can be regained for as little as possible using a handy context manager: Using the chroot from test cases The infrastructure to setup and spin down ephemeral machine is relatively simple, once one has worked out the nspawn incantations: And here's a TestCase mixin that starts a containerized systems and opens a Mitogen connection to it: Running tests Once the tests are set up, everything goes on as normal, except one needs to run nose2 with sudo: Spin up time for containers is pretty fast, and the tests drop root as soon as possible, and only regain it for as little as needed. Also, dependencies for all this are minimal and available on most systems, and the setup instructions seem pretty straightforward

Although I'm about 5 months early and we're in the middle of a terrible heat wave where I live, I've just finished building my new winter bicycle! I've been riding all year round for about 8 years now and the winters in Montreal are harsh enough that a second winter-ready bicycle is required to have a fun and safe cold season. I'm saying "new bicycle" because a few months ago I totaled the frame of my previous winter bike. As you can see in the picture below (please disregard the salt crust), I broke the seat tube at the lug. I didn't notice it at first and while riding I kept hearing a "bang bang" sound coming from the frame when going over bumps. To my horror, I eventually realised the sound was coming from the seat tube hitting the bottom bracket shell! I'm sad to see this Lejeune French frame go, but it was probably built in the 70's or the early 80's: it had a good life. Another great example of how a high quality steel frame can last a lifetime. Sparing no expense, I decided to replace it by a brand new Surly Cross-Check frameset. Surly is known for making great bike frames and the Cross-Check is a very versatile model. I'll finally be able to fit my Schwalbe Marathon Winter Plus tires at the front and the back with full length mud guards!!! Hard to ask for more. Summer has just started and I'm already looking forward to winter :)

This blog post is about my observations of some of the plants in my home garden. While still a n00b on the subject, these notes are my observations and experiences over days, weeks and months. Thankfully, with the capability to take frequent pictures, it has been easy to do an assessment and generate a report of some of these amazing behaviors of plants, in an easy timeline order; all thanks to the EXIF data embedded. This has very helpfully allowed me to record my, otherwise minor observations, into great detail; and make some sense out of it by correlating the data over time. It is an emotional experience. You see, plants are amazing. When I sow a sapling, water it, feed it, watch it grow, prune it, medicate it, and what not; I build up affection towards it. Though, at the same time, to me it is a strict relationship, not too attached; as in it doesn t hurt to uproot a plant if there is a good reason. But still, I find some sort of association to it. With plants around, it feels I have a lot of lives around me. All prospering, communicating, sharing. And communicate they do. What is needed is just the right language to observe and absorb their signals and decipher what they are trying to say.

Devastation How in this world, when you are caring for your plants, can it transform:

From This

Healthy Mulberry Plant

Healthy Mulberry Plant

Healthy Bael Plant

To This

Dead Mulberry Plant

Very Sick Bael Plant

With emotions involved, this can be an unpleasant experience. Bael is a dear plant to me. The plant as a whole has religious values (Shiva). As well, its fruits have lots of health benefits, especially for the intestines. Its leaves have a lot of medicinal properties. When I planted the Bael, there were a lot of emotions that went along. On the other hand, the Mulberry is something I put in with a lot of enthusiasm. Mulberries are now rare to find, especially in urban locations. For one, they have a very short shelf life; But more than that, the way lifestyles are heading towards, I was always worried if my children would ever have a day to see and taste these fruits. The mulberry that I planted, yielded twice; once very soon when I had planted and second, before it died. Infact, it died while during its second yield phase. It was quite saddening to see that happen. It made me wonder why it happened. I had been caring for the plants fairly well. Watering them timely, feeding them the right amount of nutrients. They were getting a good amount of sun. But still their health was deteriorating. And then the demise of the Mulberry. Many thoughts hit my mind. I consulted the claimed experts in the domain, the maali, the gardener. I got a very vague answer; there must be termites in the soil. It didn t make much sense to me. I mean if there are termites they d hit day one. They won t sleep for months and just wake up one fine day and start attacking the roots of particular plants; not all. I wasn t convinced with the termite theory; But still, give the expert the blind hand, I went with his word. When my mulberry was dead, I dug its roots. Looking for proof, to see if there were any termites, I uprooted it. But I couldn t find any trace of termites. And the plant next to it was perfectly healthy and blossoming. So I was convinced that it wasn t the termite but something else. But else what ? I still didn t have an answer to that.

Thinking The Corona pandemic had embraced and there was a lot to worry, and worry not any, if you change the perspective. With plants around in my home, and our close engagement with them, and the helplessness that I felt after seeking help from the experts, it was time again; to build up some knowledge on the subject. But how ? How do you go about a subject you have not much clue about ? A subject which has always been around in the surrounding but very seldom have I dedicated focused thought to it. To be honest, the initial thought of diving on the subject made me clueless. I had no idea where to begin with. But, so, as has been my past history, I chose to take it as a curiosity. I gathered some books, skimmed through a couple of pages. Majority of the books I got hold of were about DIYs and How to do Home Gardening types. It was a decent introduction to a novice but my topic of curiosity was different. Thankfully, with the Internet, and YouTube in particular, a lot of good stuff is available as documentary videos. While going through some, I came across a video which mentioned about carnivore plants. Like, for example, this one.

Carnivore Plant

This got me thinking that there could be a possibility of something similar, that did the fate to my Mulberry plant. But who did it ? And how to dive further on this suspicion ? And most of all, if that thought of possibility was actually the reality. Or was I just hitting in the dark ?

Beginning To put some perspective, here s how it started. When we moved into our home, the gardener put in a couple of plants stock, as part of the property handover. Now, I don t exactly recollect the name of the plants that came in stock, neither English nor Hindi; But at my neighbor s place, the plant is still there. Here are some of the pictures of this beauty. But don t just go by the looks as looks can be deceiving

Dominating Plant

Dominating Plant

Dominating Plant

We hadn t put any serious thought about the plants we were offered by the gardener. After all, we never had ever thought of any mishap either.

Plants we planted Apart from what was offered by the builder/gardener as part of the property handover, in over the next 6 months of we moving in, I planted 3 tree type plants.

1. Mulberry
2. Bael
3. Rudraksha

The Mulberry, as I have described so far, died a tragic death. Bael, on the other hand, fought hard. But very little did we know that the plant was struggling the fight. Our impression was that we must have been given a bad breed of the plant. Or maybe the termite theory had some truth. For the Rudraksha plant, the growth was slow. This was the very first time I had seen a Rudraksha plant, so I had no clue of what its growth rate could be, and what to expect out of it. I wasn t sure if the local climate suited the plant. A quick search showed no objections to the plant in the local climate, but that was it. So my theory has been to put in the plant, and observe. Here s what my Rudraksha plant looked like during the initial days/weeks of its settlement

Rudraksha Plant

The Hint Days passed and so on. Not much had progressed in gathering information. The plant s health was usual; deteriorating at a slow pace. On day, thinking of the documentaries I had been watching, it hit my mind about the plant behavior.

• Plants can be Carnivores.
• Plants can be Aggressive.
• Plants can be Invaders.
• Plants can be Territorial.

There are many plants where their aggression can be witnessed with bare human eyes. Like creepers. Some of them are good at spreading tentacles, grabbing onto other plants' stems and branches and spread above it. This was my hint from the documentaries. That s one of the many ways plants set their dominance. That is what hit my mind that if plants are aggressive on the out, underneath the soil, they should be having similar behavior. I mean, what we see as humans is just a part of the actual plant. More than half of the actual plant is usually underneath the soil, in most plants. So there s a high chance to get more information out, if you dig the soil and look the roots.

The Digging As I mentioned earlier, I do establish bindings, emotions and attachments. But not much usually comes in the way to curiosity. To dig further on the theory that the problem was elsewhere, with within the plants ecosystem, we needed to pick on another subject - the plant. And the plant we chose was the plant which was planted in the initial offering to us, when we moved into our home. It was the same plant breed which was neighboring all our newly planted trees: Rudraksha, Mulberry and Bael. If you look closely into the pictures above of these plants, you ll notice the stem of another plant, the Territorial Dominator, is close-by to these 3 plants. That s because the gardener put in a good number of them to get his action item complete. So we chose to dig and uproot one of those plant to start with. Now, while they may look gentle on the outside, with nice red colored tiny flowers, these plants were giants underneath. Their roots were huge. It took some sweat shredding to single-handedly remove them.

Dominating Plant Uprooted

Dominating Plant Uprooted

Dominating Plant Uprooted

Dominating Plant Uprooted

Today is brighter

Bael I ll let the pictures do the initial talking today.

Healthy Bael

Healthy Bael

Healthy Bael

Healthy Bael

Healthy Bael

The above ones are pictures of the same Bael plant, which had struggled to live, for almost 14 months. Back then, this plant was starved of its resources. It was dying a slow death out of starvation. After we uprooted the other dominant species, the Bael has recovered and has regained its charm. In the pictures above of the Bael plant, you can clearly mark out the difference in its stem. The dark colored one is from its months of struggle, while the bright green is from now where it is well nourished and regained its health.

Mulberry As for the Mulberry, I couldn t save it. But I later managed to get another one. But it turns out I didn t take good, full length pictures of the new mulberry when I planted. The only picture I have is this:

Second Mulberry Plant

I recollect when I brought it home, it was around 1 - 1.5 feet in length. This is where I have it today: Majestically standing, 12 feet and counting

Second Mulberry Plant 7 feet tall

Rudraksha Then:

Rudraksha Plant

And now: I feel quite happy about

Rudraksha Plant

Rudraksha Plant

Rudraksha Plant

All these plants are on the very same soil with the very same care taker. What has changed is my experience and learning.

Plant Co-Existence Plant co-existence is a difficult topic. My knowledge on plants is very limited in general, and co-existence is something tricky, unexplored, at times invisible (when underneath the soil). So it is a difficult topic. So far, what I ve learnt is purely observations, experiences and hints from the documentaries. There surely are many many plants that co-exist very well. A good example is my Bael plant itself, which is healthily co-sharing its space with 2 other Croton plants. Same goes for the Rudraksha, which has a close-by neighbor in an Adenium and an Allamanda. The plant world is mesmerizing. How they behave, communicate and many many more signs. There s so much to observe, learn, explore and document. I hope to have more such observations and experiences to share

This is part of a series of posts on ideas for an ansible-like provisioning system, implemented in Transilience. Mitogen is a great library, but scarily complicated, and I've been wondering how hard it would be to make alternative connection methods for Transilience. Here's a wild idea: can I package a whole Transilience playbook, plus dependencies, in a zipapp, then send the zipapp to the machine to be provisioned, and run it locally? It turns out I can. Creating the zipapp This is somewhat hackish, but until I can rely on Python 3.9's improved importlib.resources module, I cannot think of a better way: Since the zipapp contains not just the playbook, the roles, and the roles' assets, but also Transilience and Jinja2, it can run on any system that has a Python 3.7+ interpreter, and nothing else! I added it to the standard set of playbook command line options, so any Transilience playbook can turn itself into a self-contained zipapp: Loading assets from the zipapp I had to create ZipFile varieties of some bits of infrastructure in Transilience, to load templates, files, and Ansible yaml files from zip files. You can see above a way to detect if a module is loaded from a zipfile: check if the module's __loader__ attribute has an archive attribute. Here's a Jinja2 template loader that looks into a zip: I also created a FileAsset abstract interface to represent a local file, and had Role.lookup_file return an appropriate instance: An interesting side effect of having smarter local file accessors is that I can cache the contents of small files and transmit them to the remote host together with the other action parameters, saving a potential network round trip for each builtin.copy action that has a small source. The result The result is kind of fun: And on the remote: Compare with a Mitogen run: From a single test run, not a good benchmark, it's 0.203 + 1.576 + 0.979 = 2.758s with the zipapp and 2.697s with Mitogen. Even if I've been lucky, it's a similar order of magnitude. What can I use this for? This was mostly a fun hack. It could however be the basis for a Fabric-based connector, or a clusterssh-based connector, or for bundling a Transilience playbook into an installation image, or to add a provisioning script to the boot partition of a Raspberry Pi. It looks like an interesting trick to have up one's sleeve. One could even build an Ansible-based connector(!) in which a simple Ansible playbook, with no facts gathering, is used to build the zipapp, push it to remote systems and run it. That would be the wackiest way of speeding up Ansible, ever! Next: using Systemd containers with unittest, for Transilience's test suite.

So I had another major email crash with my syncmaildir setup. This time I was at least able to confirm the issue, and I still haven't lost mail thanks to backups and sheer luck (again).

The crash It is not really worth going over the crash in details, it's fairly similar to the last one: something bad happened and smd started destroying everything. The hint is that it takes a long time to do what usually takes seconds. It helps that I now have a second monitor showing logs. I still lost much more mail than the last time. I used to have "301 723 messages", according to notmuch. But then when I ran smd-pull by hand, it was telling me:

95K emails scanned

Oops. You can see notmuch happily noticing the destroyed files on the server:

jun 28 16:33:40 marcos notmuch[28532]: No new mail. Removed 65498 messages. Detected 1699 file renames.
jun 28 16:36:05 marcos notmuch[29746]: No new mail. Removed 68883 messages. Detected 2488 file renames.
jun 28 16:41:40 marcos notmuch[31972]: No new mail. Removed 118295 messages. Detected 3657 file renames.

The final count ended up being 81 042 messages, according to notmuch. A whopping 220 000 mails deleted. The interesting bit, this time around, is that I caught smd in the act of running two processes in parallel:

jun 28 16:30:09 curie systemd[2845]: Finished pull emails with syncmaildir. 
jun 28 16:30:09 curie systemd[2845]: Starting push emails with syncmaildir... 
jun 28 16:30:09 curie systemd[2845]: Starting pull emails with syncmaildir... 

So clearly that is the source of the bug.

Recovery Emergency stop on curie:

notmuch dump > notmuch.dump
systemctl --user --now disable smd-pull.service smd-pull.timer smd-push.service smd-push.timer notmuch-new.service notmuch-new.timer

On marcos (the server), guessed the number of messages delivered since the last backup to be 71, just looking at timestamps in the mail log. Made a list:

grep postfix/local /var/log/mail.log   tail -71 > lost-mail

Found postfix queue IDs:

sed 's/.*\]://;s/:.*//' lost-mail > qids

Turn those into message IDs, find those that are missing from the disk (had previously ran notmuch new just to be sure it's up to date):

while read qid ; do 
    grep "$qid: message-id" /var/log/mail.log
done < qids    sed 's/.*message-id=<//;s/>//'   while read msgid; do
    sudo -u anarcat notmuch count --exclude=false id:$msgid   grep -q 0 && echo $msgid
done

Copy this back on curie as missing-msgids and:

$ wc -l missing-msgids 
48 missing-msgids
$ while read msgid ; do notmuch count --exclude=false id:$msgid   grep -q 0 && echo $msgid ; done < missing-msgids
mailman.189.1624881611.23397.nodes-reseaulibre.ca@reseaulibre.ca
AnwMy7rdSpK-N-vt4AiOag@ismtpd0148p1mdw1.sendgrid.net

only two mails missing! whoohoo! Copy those back onto marcos as really-missing-msgids, and look at the full mail logs to see what they are:

~anarcat/src/koumbit-scripts/mail/postfix-trace --from-file really-missing-msgids2

I actually remembered deleting those, so no mail lost! Rebuild the list of msgids that were lost, on marcos:

while read qid ; do grep "$qid: message-id" /var/log/mail.log; done < qids    sed 's/.*message-id=<//;s/>//'

Copy that on curie as lost-mail-msgids, then copy the files over in a test dir:

while read msgid ; do
    notmuch search --output=files --exclude=false "id:$msgid"
done < lost-mail-msgids   sed 's#/home/anarcat/Maildir/##'   rsync -v  --files-from=- /home/anarcat/Maildir/ shell.anarc.at:restore/Maildir-angela/

If that looks about right, on marcos:

find restore/Maildir-angela/ -type f   wc -l

... should match the number of missing mails, roughly. Copy if in the real spool:

while read msgid ; do
    notmuch search --output=files --exclude=false "id:$msgid"
done < lost-mail-msgids   sed 's#/home/anarcat/Maildir/##'   rsync -v  --files-from=- /home/anarcat/Maildir/ shell.anarc.at:Maildir/

Then on the server, notmuch new should find the new emails, and we shouldn't have any lost mail anymore:

while read qid ; do grep "$qid: message-id" /var/log/mail.log; done < qids    sed 's/.*message-id=<//;s/>//'   while read msgid; do sudo -u anarcat notmuch count --exclude=false id:$msgid   grep -q 0 && echo $msgid ; done

Then, crucial moment, try to pull the new mails from the backups on curie:

anarcat@curie:~(main)$ smd-pull  -n  --show-tags -v
Found lockfile of a dead instance. Ignored.
Phase 0: handshake
Phase 1: changes detection
    5K emails scanned
   10K emails scanned
   15K emails scanned
   20K emails scanned
   25K emails scanned
   30K emails scanned
   35K emails scanned
   40K emails scanned
   45K emails scanned
   50K emails scanned
Phase 2: synchronization
Phase 3: agreement
default: smd-client@localhost: TAGS: stats::new-mails(49687), del-mails(0), bytes-received(215752279), xdelta-received(3703852)
"smd-pull  -n  --show-tags -v" took 3 mins 39 secs

This brought me back to the state after the backup plus the mails delivered during the day, which means I had to catchup with all my holiday's read emails (1440 mails!) but thankfully I made a dump of the notmuch database on curie at the start of the procedure, so this actually restored a sane state:

pv notmuch.dump   notmuch restore

Phew!

Workaround I have filed this as a bug in upstream issue 18. Considering I filed 11 issues and only 3 of those were closed, I'm not holding my breath. I nevertheless filed PR 19 in the hope that this will fix my particular issue, but I'm not even sure this is the right fix...

Fix At this point, I'm really ready to give up on SMD. It's really, really nice to be able to sync mail over SSH because I don't need to store my IMAP password on disk. But surely there are more reliable syncing mechanisms. I do not remember ever losing that much mail before. At worst, offlineimap would duplicate emails like mad, but never destroy my entire mail spool that way. As mentioned before, there are other programs that sync mail. I'm looking at:

• offlineimap3: requires IMAP, used the py2 version in the past, might just still work, first sync painful (IIRC), ways to tunnel over SSH, see comment below
• isync/mbsync: might be faster, I remember having trouble switching from offlineimap to this, has support for TLS client certs, running over SSH, and generally has good words from multiple Debian and notmuch people
• getmail: just downloads email, might not be enough
• nncp: treat the local spool as another mail server, might not be compatible with my "multiple clients" setup
• doveadm-sync: requires dovecot on both ends, but supports using SSH to sync, will try this next, may have performance problems, see comment below
• interimap: syncs two IMAP servers, apparently faster than doveadm and offlineimap
• mail-sync: notify support, happens over any piped transport (e.g. ssh), diff/patch system, requires binary on both ends, mentions UUCP in the manpage, seems awfully complicated to setup, mentions rsmtp which is a nice name for rsendmail

In the last few months I presented several talks. Topics ranged from a round table on free software, to sharing some of my work as SRE in the Cloud Services team at the Wikimedia Foundation. For some of them the videos are now published, so I would like to write a reference here, mostly as a way to collect such events for my own record. Isn t that what a blog is all about, after all? Before you continue reading, let me mention that the two talks I ll reference were given in my native Spanish. The videos are hosted on YouTube and autogenerated subtitles should be available, with doubtful quality though. Also, there was at least one additional private talk that I m not allowed to comment on here today. I was invited to participate in a Docker community event called Kroquecon, which was aimed at pushing the spanish-speaking Kubernetes community around the world. The event name is a word play with Kubernetes , conference and croqueta , typical Spanish food. The talk happened on 2021-04-29, and I was part of a round table about free software, communities and how to join and participate in such projects. I commented on my experience in both the Debian project, Netfilter and my several years in Google Summer of Code (3 as student, 2 as mentor). Video of the event:
The other event was the CNCF-supported Kubernetes Community Days Spain (KCD Spain). During Kroquecon I was encouraged to submit a talk proposal for this event, to talk about something related to our use of Kubernetes in the Wikimedia Cloud Services team at the Wikimedia Foundation. The proposal was originally rejected. Then, a couple of weeks before the event itself, I was contacted by the organizers with a greenlight to give it because the other speaker couldn t make it. My coworker David Caro joined me in the presentation. It was titled Conoce Wikimedia Toolforge, plataforma basada en Kubernetes (or Meet Wikimedia Toolforge, Kubernetes-based platform ). We explained what Wikimedia Cloud Services is, focusing on Toolforge, and in particular how we use Kubernetes to enable the platform s most interesting use cases. We covered several interesting topics, including how we handle multi-tenancy, or the problems we had with the etcd & ceph combo. The slides we used are available. Video of the event:
EOF

I had been meaning to write on the above topic for almost a couple of months now but just kept procrastinating about it. That push came to a shove when Sucheta Dalal and Debasis Basu shared their understanding, wisdom, and all in the new book called Absolute Power Inside story of the National Stock Exchange s amazing success, leading to hubris, regulatory capture and algo scam . Now while I will go into the details of the new book as currently, I have not bought it but even if I had bought it and shared some of the revelations from it, it wouldn t have done justice to either the book or what is sharing before knowing some of the background before it.

Before I jump ahead, I would suggest people to read my sort of introductory blog post on banking history so they know where I m coming from. I m going to deviate a bit from Banking as this is about trade and capital markets, although Banking would come in later on. And I will also be sharing some cultural insights along with history so people are aware of why things happened the way they did. Calicut, Calcutta, Kolkata, one-time major depot around the world Now, one cannot start any topic about trade without talking about Kolkata. While today, it seems like a bastion of communism, at one time it was one of the major trade depots around the world. Both William Dalrymple and the Chinese have many times mentioned Kolkata as being one of the major centers of trade. This was between the 13th and the late 19th century. A cursory look throws up this article which talks about Kolkata or Calicut as it was known as a major trade depot. There are of course many, many articles and even books which do tell about how Kolkata was a major trade depot. Now between the 13th and 19th century, a lot of changes happened which made Kolkata poorer and shifted trade to Mumbai/Bombay which in those times was nothing but just a port city like many others.

The Rise of the Zamindar Around the 15th century when Babur Invaded Hindustan, he realized that Hindustan is too big a country to be governed alone. And Hindustan was much broader than independent India today. So he created the title of Zamindars. Interestingly, if you look at the Mughal period, they were much more in tune with Hindustani practices than the British who came later. They used the caste divisions and hierarchy wisely making sure that the status quo was maintained as far as castes/creed were concerned. While in-fighting with various rulers continued, it was more or less about land and power other than anything else. When the Britishers came they co-opted the same arrangement with a minor adjustment. While in the before system, the zamindars didn t have powers to be landowners. The Britishers gave them land ownerships. A huge percentage of thess zamindars especially in Bengal were from my own caste Banias or Baniyas. The problem and the solution for the Britishers had been this was a large land to control and exploit and the number of British officers and nobles were very less. So they gave virtually a lot of powers to the Banias. The only thing the British insisted on were very high rents from the newly minted Zamindars. The Zamindar in turn used the powers of personal fiefdom to give loans at very high interest rates when the poor were unable to pay the interest rate, they would take the land while at the same time slavery was forced on both men and women, many a time rapes and affairs. While there have been many records shedding light on it, don t think it could be any more powerful as enacted and shared by Shabana Azmi in Ankur:the Seedling. Another prominent grouping was formed around the same time was the Bhadralok. Now as shared Bhadralok while having all the amenities of belonging to the community, turned a blind eye to the excesses being done by the Zamindars. How much they played a hand in the decimation of Bengal has been a matter of debate, but they did have a hand, that much is not contested.

The Rise of Stock Exchanges Sadly and interestingly, many people believe and continue to believe that stock exchanges is recent phenomena. The first stock exchange though was the Calcutta Stock Exchange rather than the Bombay Stock Exchange. How valuable was Calcutta to the Britishers in its early years can be gauged from the fact that at one time it was made the capital of India in 1772 . In fact, after the Grand Trunk Road (on which there had been even Train names in both countries) x number of books have been written of the trade between Calcutta and Peshawar (Now in Pakistan). And it was not just limited to trade but also cultural give-and-take between the two centers. Even today, if you look at YT (Youtube) and look up some interviews of old people, you find many interesting anecdotes of people sharing both culture and trade.

The problem of the 60 s and rise of BSE
After India became independent and the Constitutional debates happened, the new elites understood that there cannot be two power centers that could govern India. On one hand, were the politicians who had come to power on the back of the popular vote, the other was the Zamindars, who more often than not had abused their powers which resulted in widespread poverty. The Britishers are to blame, but so do the middlemen as they became willing enablers to the same system of oppression. Hence, you had the 1951 amendment to the Constitution and the 1956 Zamindari Abolition Act. In fact, you can find much more of an in-depth article both about Zamindars and their final abolition here. Now once Zamindari was gone, there was nothing to replace it with. The Zamindars ousted of their old roles turned and tried to become Industrialists. The problem was that the poor and the downtrodden had already had experiences with the Zamindars. Also, some Industrialists from North and West also came to Bengal but they had no understanding of either the language or the cultural understanding of what had happened in Bengal. And notice that I have not talked about both the famines and the floods that wrecked Bengal since time immemorial and some of the ones which got etched on soul of Bengal and has marks even today The psyche of the Bengali and the Bhadralok has gone through enormous shifts. I have met quite a few and do see the guilt they feel. If one wonders as to how socialist parties are able to hold power in Bengal, look no further than Tarikh which tells and shares with you that even today how many Bengalis still feel somewhat lost.

The Rise of BSE Now, while Kolkata Stock Exchange had been going down, for multiple reasons other than listed above. From the 1950s onwards Jawaharlal Nehru had this idea of 5-year plans, borrowed from socialist countries such as Russia, China etc. His vision and ambition for the newly minted Indian state were huge, while at the same time he understood we were poor. The loot by East India Company and the Britishers and on top of that the division of wealth with Pakistan even though the majority of Muslims chose and remained with India. Travel on Indian Railways was a risky affair. My grandfather had shared numerous tales where he used to fill money in socks and put the socks on in boots when going between either Delhi Kolkata or Pune Kolkata. Also, as the Capital became Delhi, it unofficially was for many years, the transparency from Kolkata-based firms became less. So many Kolkata firms either mismanaged and shut down while Maharashtra, my own state, saw a huge boon in Industrialization as well as farming. From the 1960s to the 1990s there were many booms and busts in the stock exchanges but most were manageable.

While the 60s began on a good note as Goa was finally freed from the Portuguese army and influence, the 1962 war with the Chinese made many a soul question where we went wrong. Jawaharlal Nehru went all over the world to ask for help but had to return home empty-handed. Bollywood showed a world of bell-bottoms and cars and whatnot, while the majority were still trying to figure out how to put two square meals on the table. India suffered one of the worst famines in those times. People had to ration food. Families made do with either one meal or just roti (flatbread) rather than rice. In Bengal, things were much more severe. There were huge milk shortages, so Bengalis were told to cut down on sweets. This enraged the Bangalis as nothing else could. Note If one wants to read how bad Indians felt at that time, all one has to read is V.S. Naipaul s An Area of darkness . This was also the time when quite a few Indians took their first step out of India. While Air India had just started, the fares were prohibitive. Those who were not well off, either worked on ships or went via passenger or cargo ships to Dubai/Qatar middle-east. Some went to Russia and some even to States. While today s migr s want to settle in the west forever and have their children and grandchildren grow up in the West, in the 1960s and 70s the idea was far different. The main purpose for a vast majority was to get jobs and whatnot, save maximum money and send it back to India as a remittance. The idea was to make enough money in 3-5-10 years, come back to India, and then lead a comfortable life. Sadly, there has hardly been any academic work done in India, at least to my knowledge to document the sacrifices done by Indians in search of jobs, life, purpose, etc. in the 1960s and 1970s. The 1970s was also when alternative cinema started its journey with people like Smita Patil, Naseeruddin Shah who portrayed people s struggles on-screen. Most of them didn t have commercial success because the movies and the stories were bleak. While the acting was superb, most Indians loved to be captured by fights, car-chases, and whatnot rather than the deary existence which they had. And the alt cinema forced them to look into the mirror, which was frowned upon both by the masses and the classes. So cinema which could have been a wake-up call for a lot of Indians failed. One of the most notable works of that decade, at least to me, was Manthan. 1961 was also marked by the launch of Economic Times and Financial Express which tells that there was some appetite for financial news and understanding. The 1970s was also a very turbulent time in the corporate sector and stock exchanges. Again, the companies which were listed were run by the very well-off and many of them had been abroad. At the same time, you had fly-by-night operators. One of the happenings which started in this decade is you had corporate wars and hostile takeovers, quite a few of them of which could well have a Web series or two of their own. This was also a decade marked by huge labor unrest, which again changed the face of Bombay/Mumbai. From the 1950s till the 1970s, Bombay was known for its mills. So large migrant communities from all over India came to Bombay to become the next Bollywood star and if that didn t happen, they would get jobs in the mills. Bombay/Mumbai has/had this unique feature that somehow you will make money to make ends meet. Of course, with the pandemic, even that has gone for a toss. Labor unrest was a defining character of that decade. Three movies, Kaala Patthar, Kalyug, and Ankush give a broad outlook of what happened in that decade. One thing which is present and omnipresent then and now is how time and time again we lost our demographic dividend. Again there was an exodus of young people who ventured out to seek fortunes elsewhere. The 1970s and 80s were also famous for the license Raj which they bought in. Just like the Soviets, there were waiting periods for everything. A telephone line meant waiting for things anywhere from 4 to 8 years. In 1987, when we applied and got a phone within 2-3 months, most of my relatives both from my mother and father s side could not believe we paid 0 to get a telephone line. We did pay the telephone guy INR 10/- which was a somewhat princely sum when he was installing it, even then they could not believe it as in Northern India, you couldn t get a phone line even if your number had come. You had to pay anywhere from INR 500/1000 or more to get a line. This was BSNL and to reiterate there were no alternatives at that time.

The 1990s and the Harshad Mehta Scam The 90s was when I was a teenager. You do all the stupid things for love, lust, whatever. That is also the time you are introduced really to the world of money. During my time, there were only three choices, Sciences, Commerce, and Arts. If History were your favorite subject then you would take Arts and if it was not, and you were not studious, then you would up commerce. This is how careers were chosen. So I enrolled in Commerce. Due to my grandfather and family on my mother s side interested in stocks both as a saving and compounding tool, I was able to see Pune Stock Exchange in action one day. The only thing I remember that day is people shouting loudly with various chits. I had no idea that deals of maybe thousands or even lakhs. The Pune Stock Exchange had been newly minted. I also participated in a couple of mock stock exchanges and came to understand that one has to be aggressive in order to win. You had to be really loud to be heard over others, you could not afford to be shy. Also, spread your risks. Sadly, nothing about the stock markets was there in the syllabus. 1991 was also when we saw the Iraq war, the balance of payments crisis in India, and didn t know that the Harshad Mehta scam was around the corner. Most of the scams in India have been caught because the person who was doing it was flashy. And this was the reason that even he was caught as Ms. Sucheta Dalal, a young beat reporter from Indian Express who had been covering Indian stock market. Many of her articles were thought-provoking. Now, a brief understanding is required to know before we actually get to the scam. Because of the 1991 balance of payments crisis, IMF rescued India on the condition that India throws its market open. In the 1980s itself, Rajeev Gandhi had wanted to partially make India open but both politicians and Industrialists advised him not to do the same, we are/were not ready. On 21st May 1991, Rajeev Gandhi was assassinated by the LTTE. A month later, due to the sympathy vote, the Narsimha Rao Govt. took power. While for most new Governments there is usually a honeymoon period lasting 6 months or so till they get settled in their roles before people start asking tough questions. It was not to be for this Govt. Immediately, The problem had been building for a few years. Although, in many ways, our economy was better than it is today. The only thing India didn t do well at that time was managing foreign exchange. As only a few Indians had both the money and the opportunity to go abroad and need for electronics was limited. One of the biggest imports of the time then and still today is Energy, Oil. While today it is Oil/Gas and electronics, at that time it was only OIl. The Oil import bill was ballooning while exports were more or less stagnant and mostly comprised of raw materials rather than finished products. Even today, it is largely this, one of the biggest Industrialists in India Ambani exports gas/oil while Adani exports coal. Anyways, the deficit was large enough to trigger a payment crisis. And Narsimha Rao had to throw open the Indian market almost overnight. Some changes became quickly apparent, while others took a long time to come.

Satellite Television and Entry of Foreign Banks Almost overnight, from 1 channel we became multi-channel. Star TV (Rupert Murdoch) bought us Bold and Beautiful, while CNN broadcasted the Iraq War. It was unbelievable for us that we were getting reports of what had happened 24-48 hours earlier. Fortunately or unfortunately, I was still very much a teenager to understand the import of what was happening. Even in my college, except for one or two-person, it wasn t a topic for debate or talk or even the economy. We were basically somehow cocooned in our own little world. But this was not the case for the rest of India and especially banks. The entry of foreign banks was a rude shock to Indian banks. The foreign banks were bringing both technology and sophistication in their offerings, and Indian Banks needed and wanted fast money to show hefty profits. Demand for credit wasn t much, at least nowhere the level it today is. At the same time, default on credit was nowhere high as today is. But that will require its own space and article. To quench the thirst for hefty profits by banks, Enter Harshad Mehta. At that point in time, banks were not permitted at all to invest in the securities/share market. They could only buy Government securities or bonds which had a coupon rate of say 8-10% which was nowhere enough to satisfy the need for hefty profits as desired by Indian banks. On top of it, that cash was blocked for a long time. Most of these Government bonds had anywhere between 10-20 year maturity date and some even longer. Now, one loophole in that was that the banks themselves could not buy these securities. They had to approach a registered broker of the share market who will do these transactions on their behalf. Here is where Mr. Mehta played his game. He shared both legal and illegal ways in which both the bank and he would prosper. While banking at one time was thought to be conservative and somewhat cautious, either because they were too afraid that Western private banks will take that pie or whatever their reasons might be, they agreed to his antics. To play the game, Harshad Mehta needed lots of cash, which the banks provided him in the guise of buying securities that were never bought, but the amounts were transferred to his account. He actively traded stocks, at the same time made a group, and also made the rumor mill work to his benefit. The share market is largely a reactionary market. It operates on patience, news, and rumor-mill. The effect of his shenanigans was that the price of a stock that was trending at say INR 200 reached the stratospheric height of INR 9000/- without any change in the fundamentals or outlook of the stock. His thirst didn t remain restricted to stocks but also ventured into the unglamorous world of Govt. securities where he started trading even in them in large quantities. In order to attract new clients, he coveted a fancy lifestyle. The fancy lifestyle was what caught the eye of Sucheta Dalal, and she started investigating the deals he was doing. Being a reporter, she had the advantage of getting many doors to open and get information that otherwise would be under lock and key. On 23rd April 1992, Sucheta Dalal broke the scam.

The Impact The impact was almost like a shock to the markets. Even today, it can be counted as one of the biggest scams in the Indian market if you adjust it for inflation. I haven t revealed much of the scam and what happened, simply because Sucheta Dalal and Debasis Basu wrote The Scam for that purpose. How do I shorten a story and experience which has been roughly written in 300 odd pages in one or two paragraphs, it is simply impossible. The impact though was severe. The Indian stock market became a bear market for two years. Sucheta Dalal was kicked out/made to resign out of Indian Express. The thing is simple, all newspapers survive on readership and advertisements with advertisements. Companies who were having a golden run, whether justified or not, on the bourses/Stock Exchange. For many companies, having a good number on the stock exchange was better than the company fundamentals. There was supposed to be a speedy fast-track court setup for Financial crimes, but it worked only for the Harshad Mehta case and still took over 5 years. It led to the creation of NSE (National Stock Exchange). It also led to the creation of SEBI, perhaps one of the most powerful regulators, giving it a wide range of powers and remit but on the ground more often that proved to be no more than a glorified postman. And the few times it used, it used on the wrong people and people had to go to courts to get justice. But then this is not about SEBI nor is this blog post about NSE. I have anyways shared about Absolute power above, so will not repeat the link here. The Anecdotal impact was widespread. Our own family broker took the extreme step. For my grandfather on the mother s side, he was like the second son. The news of his suicide devastated my grandfather quite a bit, which we realized much later when he was diagnosed with Alzheimer s. Our family stockbroker had been punting, taking lots of cash from the market at very high rates, betting on stocks wildly as the stock market was reaching for the stars when the market crashed, he was insolvent. How the family survived is a tale in itself. They had just got married just a few years ago and had a cute boy and girl soon after. While today, both are grown-up, at that time what the wife faced only she knows. There were also quite a few shareholders who also took the extreme step. The stock markets in those days were largely based on trust and even today is unless you are into day-trading. So there was always some money left on the table for the share/stockbroker which would be squared off in the next deal/transaction where again you will leave something. My grandfather once thought of going over and meeting them, and we went to the lane where their house is, seeing the line of people who had come for recovery of loans, we turned back with a heavy heart. There was another taboo that kinda got broken that day. The taboo was that the stock market is open to scams. From 1992 to 2021 has been a cycle of scams. Even now, today, the stock market is at unnatural highs. We know for sure that a lot of hot money is rolling around, a lot of American pension funds etc. Till it will work, it will work, some news something and that money will be moved out. Who will be left handing the can, the Indian investors? A Few days back, Ambani writes about Adani. Now while the facts shared are correct, is Adani the only one, the only company to have a small free float in the market. There probably are more than 1/4th or 1/3rd of well-respected companies who may have a similar configuration, the only problem is it is difficult to know who the proxies are. Now if I were to reflect and compare this either with the 1960s or even the 1990s I don t find much difference apart from the fact that the proxy is sitting in Mauritius. At the same time, today you can speculate on almost anything. Whether it is stocks, commodities, derivatives, foreign exchange, cricket matches etc. the list is endless. Since 2014, the rise in speculation rather than investment has been dramatic, almost stratospheric. Sadly, there are no studies or even attempts made to document this. How much official and unofficial speculation is there in the market nobody knows. Money markets have become both fluid and non-transparent. In theory, you have all sorts of regulators, but it is still very much like the Wild West. One thing to note that even Income tax had to change and bring it provisions to account for speculative income.So, starting from being totally illegitimate, it has become kind of legal and is part of Income Tax. And if speculation is not wrong, why not make Indian cricket officially a speculative event, that will be honest and GOI will get part of the proceeds.

Conclusion I wish there was some positive conclusion I could drive, but sadly there is not. Just today read two articles about the ongoing environmental issues in Himachal Pradesh. As I had shared even earlier, the last time I visited those places in 2011, and even at that time I was devastated to see the kind of construction going on. Jogiwara Road which they showed used to be flat single ground/first floor dwellings, most of which were restaurants and whatnot. I had seen the water issues both in Himachal and UT (Uttarakhand) back then and this is when they made huge dams. In U.S. they are removing dams and here we want more dams

This is the set of scripts and configuration files that maintain the Usenet control message archive and newsgroup lists hosted on ftp.isc.org. This is a data-only update primarily to update the Big Eight control signing key. It also removes some remnant control information about net.* and documents that the hierarchy is abandoned. You can get the latest release from the control-archive distribution page.

For various reasons, I haven't had any time to work on Usenet (or most other personal hobbies other than a few book reviews) for the past few months, so it took me longer than expected to finish this work. But I have finally switched the official, preferred Big Eight signing key to a newly-generated OpenPGP key that isn't incredibly weak. I put up a basic web page with the new control information and links to the signing keys for the Big Eight hierarchy. Duplicate control messages will continue to be issued with the old signing key for the indefinite future, but be aware that the old key is quite weak and could probably be brute-forced if someone cared enough. You should switch to only honoring the new key if you are running a news server that honors Big Eight control messages. The PGP Moose key is almost as ancient as the old control message key and is probably nearly as weak, but we've not yet replaced it. When that happens, that will be noted here and on that web page.

I have just updated the Debian Continuous Integration platform with debci 3.1. This update brings a few database performance improvements, courtesy of adding indexes to very important columns that were missing them. And boy, querying a table with 13 million rows without the proper indexes is bad! :-) Now, the most user visible change in this update is the change from Debian SSO to Salsa Logins, which is part of Pavit Kaur's GSoC work. She has been working with me and Paul Gevers for a few weeks, and this was the first official task in the internship. For users, this means that you now can only log in via Salsa. If you have an existing session where you logged in with an SSO certificate, it will still be valid. When you log in with Salsa, your username will be changed to match the one in Salsa. This means that if your account on salsa gets renamed, it will automatically be renamed on Debian CI when you log in the next time. Unfortunately we don't have a logout feature yet, but in the meantime you can use the developer toolbar to delete any existing cookies you might have for ci.debian.net. Migrating to Salsa logins was in my TODO list for a while. I had the impression that it could do it pretty quick to do by using pre-existing libraries that provide gitlab authentication integration for Rack (Ruby's de facto standard web application interface, like uwsgi for Python). But in reality, the devil was in the details. We went through several rounds of reviews to get it right. During the entire process, Pavit demonstrated an excelent capacity for responding to feedback, and overall I'm very happy with her performance in the internship so far. While we were discussing the Salsa logins, we noted a limitation in the existing database structure, where we stored usernames directly as the test requestor field, and decided it was better to normalize that relationship with a proper foreign key to the users table, which she also worked on. This update also include the very first (and non-user visible) step of her next task, which is adding support for having private tests. Those will be useful for implementing testing for embargoed security updates, and other use cases. This was broken up into 7 or 8 seperate steps, so there is still some work to do there. I'm looking forward to the continuation of this work.