Search Results: "beh"

16 November 2022

Antoine Beaupr : A ZFS migration

In my tubman setup, I started using ZFS on an old server I had lying around. The machine is really old though (2011!) and it "feels" pretty slow. I want to see how much of that is ZFS and how much is the machine. Synthetic benchmarks show that ZFS may be slower than mdadm in RAID-10 or RAID-6 configuration, so I want to confirm that on a live workload: my workstation. Plus, I want easy, regular, high performance backups (with send/receive snapshots) and there's no way I'm going to use BTRFS because I find it too confusing and unreliable. So off we go.

Installation Since this is a conversion (and not a new install), our procedure is slightly different than the official documentation but otherwise it's pretty much in the same spirit: we're going to use ZFS for everything, including the root filesystem. So, install the required packages, on the current system:
apt install --yes gdisk zfs-dkms zfs zfs-initramfs zfsutils-linux
We also tell DKMS that we need to rebuild the initrd when upgrading:
echo REMAKE_INITRD=yes > /etc/dkms/zfs.conf

Partitioning This is going to partition /dev/sdc with:
  • 1MB MBR / BIOS legacy boot
  • 512MB EFI boot
  • 1GB bpool, unencrypted pool for /boot
  • rest of the disk for zpool, the rest of the data
     sgdisk --zap-all /dev/sdc
     sgdisk -a1 -n1:24K:+1000K -t1:EF02 /dev/sdc
     sgdisk     -n2:1M:+512M   -t2:EF00 /dev/sdc
     sgdisk     -n3:0:+1G      -t3:BF01 /dev/sdc
     sgdisk     -n4:0:0        -t4:BF00 /dev/sdc
    
That will look something like this:
    root@curie:/home/anarcat# sgdisk -p /dev/sdc
    Disk /dev/sdc: 1953525168 sectors, 931.5 GiB
    Model: ESD-S1C         
    Sector size (logical/physical): 512/512 bytes
    Disk identifier (GUID): [REDACTED]
    Partition table holds up to 128 entries
    Main partition table begins at sector 2 and ends at sector 33
    First usable sector is 34, last usable sector is 1953525134
    Partitions will be aligned on 16-sector boundaries
    Total free space is 14 sectors (7.0 KiB)
    Number  Start (sector)    End (sector)  Size       Code  Name
       1              48            2047   1000.0 KiB  EF02  
       2            2048         1050623   512.0 MiB   EF00  
       3         1050624         3147775   1024.0 MiB  BF01  
       4         3147776      1953525134   930.0 GiB   BF00
Unfortunately, we can't be sure of the sector size here, because the USB controller is probably lying to us about it. Normally, this smartctl command should tell us the sector size as well:
root@curie:~# smartctl -i /dev/sdb -qnoserial
smartctl 7.2 2020-12-30 r5155 [x86_64-linux-5.10.0-14-amd64] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-20, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org
=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Model Family:     Western Digital Black Mobile
Device Model:     WDC WD10JPLX-00MBPT0
Firmware Version: 01.01H01
User Capacity:    1 000 204 886 016 bytes [1,00 TB]
Sector Sizes:     512 bytes logical, 4096 bytes physical
Rotation Rate:    7200 rpm
Form Factor:      2.5 inches
Device is:        In smartctl database [for details use: -P show]
ATA Version is:   ATA8-ACS T13/1699-D revision 6
SATA Version is:  SATA 3.0, 6.0 Gb/s (current: 6.0 Gb/s)
Local Time is:    Tue May 17 13:33:04 2022 EDT
SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Enabled
Above is the example of the builtin HDD drive. But the SSD device enclosed in that USB controller doesn't support SMART commands, so we can't trust that it really has 512 bytes sectors. This matters because we need to tweak the ashift value correctly. We're going to go ahead the SSD drive has the common 4KB settings, which means ashift=12. Note here that we are not creating a separate partition for swap. Swap on ZFS volumes (AKA "swap on ZVOL") can trigger lockups and that issue is still not fixed upstream. Ubuntu recommends using a separate partition for swap instead. But since this is "just" a workstation, we're betting that we will not suffer from this problem, after hearing a report from another Debian developer running this setup on their workstation successfully. We do not recommend this setup though. In fact, if I were to redo this partition scheme, I would probably use LUKS encryption and setup a dedicated swap partition, as I had problems with ZFS encryption as well.

Creating pools ZFS pools are somewhat like "volume groups" if you are familiar with LVM, except they obviously also do things like RAID-10. (Even though LVM can technically also do RAID, people typically use mdadm instead.) In any case, the guide suggests creating two different pools here: one, in cleartext, for boot, and a separate, encrypted one, for the rest. Technically, the boot partition is required because the Grub bootloader only supports readonly ZFS pools, from what I understand. But I'm a little out of my depth here and just following the guide.

Boot pool creation This creates the boot pool in readonly mode with features that grub supports:
    zpool create \
        -o cachefile=/etc/zfs/zpool.cache \
        -o ashift=12 -d \
        -o feature@async_destroy=enabled \
        -o feature@bookmarks=enabled \
        -o feature@embedded_data=enabled \
        -o feature@empty_bpobj=enabled \
        -o feature@enabled_txg=enabled \
        -o feature@extensible_dataset=enabled \
        -o feature@filesystem_limits=enabled \
        -o feature@hole_birth=enabled \
        -o feature@large_blocks=enabled \
        -o feature@lz4_compress=enabled \
        -o feature@spacemap_histogram=enabled \
        -o feature@zpool_checkpoint=enabled \
        -O acltype=posixacl -O canmount=off \
        -O compression=lz4 \
        -O devices=off -O normalization=formD -O relatime=on -O xattr=sa \
        -O mountpoint=/boot -R /mnt \
        bpool /dev/sdc3
I haven't investigated all those settings and just trust the upstream guide on the above.

Main pool creation This is a more typical pool creation.
    zpool create \
        -o ashift=12 \
        -O encryption=on -O keylocation=prompt -O keyformat=passphrase \
        -O acltype=posixacl -O xattr=sa -O dnodesize=auto \
        -O compression=zstd \
        -O relatime=on \
        -O canmount=off \
        -O mountpoint=/ -R /mnt \
        rpool /dev/sdc4
Breaking this down:
  • -o ashift=12: mentioned above, 4k sector size
  • -O encryption=on -O keylocation=prompt -O keyformat=passphrase: encryption, prompt for a password, default algorithm is aes-256-gcm, explicit in the guide, made implicit here
  • -O acltype=posixacl -O xattr=sa: enable ACLs, with better performance (not enabled by default)
  • -O dnodesize=auto: related to extended attributes, less compatibility with other implementations
  • -O compression=zstd: enable zstd compression, can be disabled/enabled by dataset to with zfs set compression=off rpool/example
  • -O relatime=on: classic atime optimisation, another that could be used on a busy server is atime=off
  • -O canmount=off: do not make the pool mount automatically with mount -a?
  • -O mountpoint=/ -R /mnt: mount pool on / in the future, but /mnt for now
Those settings are all available in zfsprops(8). Other flags are defined in zpool-create(8). The reasoning behind them is also explained in the upstream guide and some also in [the Debian wiki][]. Those flags were actually not used:
  • -O normalization=formD: normalize file names on comparisons (not storage), implies utf8only=on, which is a bad idea (and effectively meant my first sync failed to copy some files, including this folder from a supysonic checkout). and this cannot be changed after the filesystem is created. bad, bad, bad.
[the Debian wiki]: https://wiki.debian.org/ZFS#Advanced_Topics

Side note about single-disk pools Also note that we're living dangerously here: single-disk ZFS pools are rumoured to be more dangerous than not running ZFS at all. The choice quote from this article is:
[...] any error can be detected, but cannot be corrected. This sounds like an acceptable compromise, but its actually not. The reason its not is that ZFS' metadata cannot be allowed to be corrupted. If it is it is likely the zpool will be impossible to mount (and will probably crash the system once the corruption is found). So a couple of bad sectors in the right place will mean that all data on the zpool will be lost. Not some, all. Also there's no ZFS recovery tools, so you cannot recover any data on the drives.
Compared with (say) ext4, where a single disk error can recovered, this is pretty bad. But we are ready to live with this with the idea that we'll have hourly offline snapshots that we can easily recover from. It's trade-off. Also, we're running this on a NVMe/M.2 drive which typically just blinks out of existence completely, and doesn't "bit rot" the way a HDD would. Also, the FreeBSD handbook quick start doesn't have any warnings about their first example, which is with a single disk. So I am reassured at least.

Creating mount points Next we create the actual filesystems, known as "datasets" which are the things that get mounted on mountpoint and hold the actual files.
  • this creates two containers, for ROOT and BOOT
     zfs create -o canmount=off -o mountpoint=none rpool/ROOT &&
     zfs create -o canmount=off -o mountpoint=none bpool/BOOT
    
    Note that it's unclear to me why those datasets are necessary, but they seem common practice, also used in this FreeBSD example. The OpenZFS guide mentions the Solaris upgrades and Ubuntu's zsys that use that container for upgrades and rollbacks. This blog post seems to explain a bit the layout behind the installer.
  • this creates the actual boot and root filesystems:
     zfs create -o canmount=noauto -o mountpoint=/ rpool/ROOT/debian &&
     zfs mount rpool/ROOT/debian &&
     zfs create -o mountpoint=/boot bpool/BOOT/debian
    
    I guess the debian name here is because we could technically have multiple operating systems with the same underlying datasets.
  • then the main datasets:
     zfs create                                 rpool/home &&
     zfs create -o mountpoint=/root             rpool/home/root &&
     chmod 700 /mnt/root &&
     zfs create                                 rpool/var
    
  • exclude temporary files from snapshots:
     zfs create -o com.sun:auto-snapshot=false  rpool/var/cache &&
     zfs create -o com.sun:auto-snapshot=false  rpool/var/tmp &&
     chmod 1777 /mnt/var/tmp
    
  • and skip automatic snapshots in Docker:
     zfs create -o canmount=off                 rpool/var/lib &&
     zfs create -o com.sun:auto-snapshot=false  rpool/var/lib/docker
    
    Notice here a peculiarity: we must create rpool/var/lib to create rpool/var/lib/docker otherwise we get this error:
     cannot create 'rpool/var/lib/docker': parent does not exist
    
    ... and no, just creating /mnt/var/lib doesn't fix that problem. In fact, it makes things even more confusing because an existing directory shadows a mountpoint, which is the opposite of how things normally work. Also note that you will probably need to change storage driver in Docker, see the zfs-driver documentation for details but, basically, I did:
    echo '  "storage-driver": "zfs"  ' > /etc/docker/daemon.json
    
    Note that podman has the same problem (and similar solution):
    printf '[storage]\ndriver = "zfs"\n' > /etc/containers/storage.conf
    
  • make a tmpfs for /run:
     mkdir /mnt/run &&
     mount -t tmpfs tmpfs /mnt/run &&
     mkdir /mnt/run/lock
    
We don't create a /srv, as that's the HDD stuff. Also mount the EFI partition:
mkfs.fat -F 32 /dev/sdc2 &&
mount /dev/sdc2 /mnt/boot/efi/
At this point, everything should be mounted in /mnt. It should look like this:
root@curie:~# LANG=C df -h -t zfs -t vfat
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
rpool/ROOT/debian     899G  384K  899G   1% /mnt
bpool/BOOT/debian     832M  123M  709M  15% /mnt/boot
rpool/home            899G  256K  899G   1% /mnt/home
rpool/home/root       899G  256K  899G   1% /mnt/root
rpool/var             899G  384K  899G   1% /mnt/var
rpool/var/cache       899G  256K  899G   1% /mnt/var/cache
rpool/var/tmp         899G  256K  899G   1% /mnt/var/tmp
rpool/var/lib/docker  899G  256K  899G   1% /mnt/var/lib/docker
/dev/sdc2             511M  4.0K  511M   1% /mnt/boot/efi
Now that we have everything setup and mounted, let's copy all files over.

Copying files This is a list of all the mounted filesystems
for fs in /boot/ /boot/efi/ / /home/; do
    echo "syncing $fs to /mnt$fs..." && 
    rsync -aSHAXx --info=progress2 --delete $fs /mnt$fs
done
You can check that the list is correct with:
mount -l -t ext4,btrfs,vfat   awk ' print $3 '
Note that we skip /srv as it's on a different disk. On the first run, we had:
root@curie:~# for fs in /boot/ /boot/efi/ / /home/; do
        echo "syncing $fs to /mnt$fs..." && 
        rsync -aSHAXx --info=progress2 $fs /mnt$fs
    done
syncing /boot/ to /mnt/boot/...
              0   0%    0.00kB/s    0:00:00 (xfr#0, to-chk=0/299)  
syncing /boot/efi/ to /mnt/boot/efi/...
     16,831,437 100%  184.14MB/s    0:00:00 (xfr#101, to-chk=0/110)
syncing / to /mnt/...
 28,019,293,280  94%   47.63MB/s    0:09:21 (xfr#703710, ir-chk=6748/839220)rsync: [generator] delete_file: rmdir(var/lib/docker) failed: Device or resource busy (16)
could not make way for new symlink: var/lib/docker
 34,081,267,990  98%   50.71MB/s    0:10:40 (xfr#736577, to-chk=0/867732)    
rsync error: some files/attrs were not transferred (see previous errors) (code 23) at main.c(1333) [sender=3.2.3]
syncing /home/ to /mnt/home/...
rsync: [sender] readlink_stat("/home/anarcat/.fuse") failed: Permission denied (13)
 24,456,268,098  98%   68.03MB/s    0:05:42 (xfr#159867, ir-chk=6875/172377) 
file has vanished: "/home/anarcat/.cache/mozilla/firefox/s2hwvqbu.quantum/cache2/entries/B3AB0CDA9C4454B3C1197E5A22669DF8EE849D90"
199,762,528,125  93%   74.82MB/s    0:42:26 (xfr#1437846, ir-chk=1018/1983979)rsync: [generator] recv_generator: mkdir "/mnt/home/anarcat/dist/supysonic/tests/assets/\#346" failed: Invalid or incomplete multibyte or wide character (84)
*** Skipping any contents from this failed directory ***
315,384,723,978  96%   76.82MB/s    1:05:15 (xfr#2256473, to-chk=0/2993950)    
rsync error: some files/attrs were not transferred (see previous errors) (code 23) at main.c(1333) [sender=3.2.3]
Note the failure to transfer that supysonic file? It turns out they had a weird filename in their source tree, since then removed, but still it showed how the utf8only feature might not be such a bad idea. At this point, the procedure was restarted all the way back to "Creating pools", after unmounting all ZFS filesystems (umount /mnt/run /mnt/boot/efi && umount -t zfs -a) and destroying the pool, which, surprisingly, doesn't require any confirmation (zpool destroy rpool). The second run was cleaner:
root@curie:~# for fs in /boot/ /boot/efi/ / /home/; do
        echo "syncing $fs to /mnt$fs..." && 
        rsync -aSHAXx --info=progress2 --delete $fs /mnt$fs
    done
syncing /boot/ to /mnt/boot/...
              0   0%    0.00kB/s    0:00:00 (xfr#0, to-chk=0/299)  
syncing /boot/efi/ to /mnt/boot/efi/...
              0   0%    0.00kB/s    0:00:00 (xfr#0, to-chk=0/110)  
syncing / to /mnt/...
 28,019,033,070  97%   42.03MB/s    0:10:35 (xfr#703671, ir-chk=1093/833515)rsync: [generator] delete_file: rmdir(var/lib/docker) failed: Device or resource busy (16)
could not make way for new symlink: var/lib/docker
 34,081,807,102  98%   44.84MB/s    0:12:04 (xfr#736580, to-chk=0/867723)    
rsync error: some files/attrs were not transferred (see previous errors) (code 23) at main.c(1333) [sender=3.2.3]
syncing /home/ to /mnt/home/...
rsync: [sender] readlink_stat("/home/anarcat/.fuse") failed: Permission denied (13)
IO error encountered -- skipping file deletion
 24,043,086,450  96%   62.03MB/s    0:06:09 (xfr#151819, ir-chk=15117/172571)
file has vanished: "/home/anarcat/.cache/mozilla/firefox/s2hwvqbu.quantum/cache2/entries/4C1FDBFEA976FF924D062FB990B24B897A77B84B"
315,423,626,507  96%   67.09MB/s    1:14:43 (xfr#2256845, to-chk=0/2994364)    
rsync error: some files/attrs were not transferred (see previous errors) (code 23) at main.c(1333) [sender=3.2.3]
Also note the transfer speed: we seem capped at 76MB/s, or 608Mbit/s. This is not as fast as I was expecting: the USB connection seems to be at around 5Gbps:
anarcat@curie:~$ lsusb -tv   head -4
/:  Bus 02.Port 1: Dev 1, Class=root_hub, Driver=xhci_hcd/6p, 5000M
    ID 1d6b:0003 Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub
     __ Port 1: Dev 4, If 0, Class=Mass Storage, Driver=uas, 5000M
        ID 0b05:1932 ASUSTek Computer, Inc.
So it shouldn't cap at that speed. It's possible the USB adapter is failing to give me the full speed though. It's not the M.2 SSD drive either, as that has a ~500MB/s bandwidth, acccording to its spec. At this point, we're about ready to do the final configuration. We drop to single user mode and do the rest of the procedure. That used to be shutdown now, but it seems like the systemd switch broke that, so now you can reboot into grub and pick the "recovery" option. Alternatively, you might try systemctl rescue, as I found out. I also wanted to copy the drive over to another new NVMe drive, but that failed: it looks like the USB controller I have doesn't work with older, non-NVME drives.

Boot configuration Now we need to enter the new system to rebuild the boot loader and initrd and so on. First, we bind mounts and chroot into the ZFS disk:
mount --rbind /dev  /mnt/dev &&
mount --rbind /proc /mnt/proc &&
mount --rbind /sys  /mnt/sys &&
chroot /mnt /bin/bash
Next we add an extra service that imports the bpool on boot, to make sure it survives a zpool.cache destruction:
cat > /etc/systemd/system/zfs-import-bpool.service <<EOF
[Unit]
DefaultDependencies=no
Before=zfs-import-scan.service
Before=zfs-import-cache.service
[Service]
Type=oneshot
RemainAfterExit=yes
ExecStart=/sbin/zpool import -N -o cachefile=none bpool
# Work-around to preserve zpool cache:
ExecStartPre=-/bin/mv /etc/zfs/zpool.cache /etc/zfs/preboot_zpool.cache
ExecStartPost=-/bin/mv /etc/zfs/preboot_zpool.cache /etc/zfs/zpool.cache
[Install]
WantedBy=zfs-import.target
EOF
Enable the service:
systemctl enable zfs-import-bpool.service
I had to trim down /etc/fstab and /etc/crypttab to only contain references to the legacy filesystems (/srv is still BTRFS!). If we don't already have a tmpfs defined in /etc/fstab:
ln -s /usr/share/systemd/tmp.mount /etc/systemd/system/ &&
systemctl enable tmp.mount
Rebuild boot loader with support for ZFS, but also to workaround GRUB's missing zpool-features support:
grub-probe /boot   grep -q zfs &&
update-initramfs -c -k all &&
sed -i 's,GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX.*,GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="root=ZFS=rpool/ROOT/debian",' /etc/default/grub &&
update-grub
For good measure, make sure the right disk is configured here, for example you might want to tag both drives in a RAID array:
dpkg-reconfigure grub-pc
Install grub to EFI while you're there:
grub-install --target=x86_64-efi --efi-directory=/boot/efi --bootloader-id=debian --recheck --no-floppy
Filesystem mount ordering. The rationale here in the OpenZFS guide is a little strange, but I don't dare ignore that.
mkdir /etc/zfs/zfs-list.cache
touch /etc/zfs/zfs-list.cache/bpool
touch /etc/zfs/zfs-list.cache/rpool
zed -F &
Verify that zed updated the cache by making sure these are not empty:
cat /etc/zfs/zfs-list.cache/bpool
cat /etc/zfs/zfs-list.cache/rpool
Once the files have data, stop zed:
fg
Press Ctrl-C.
Fix the paths to eliminate /mnt:
sed -Ei "s /mnt/? / " /etc/zfs/zfs-list.cache/*
Snapshot initial install:
zfs snapshot bpool/BOOT/debian@install
zfs snapshot rpool/ROOT/debian@install
Exit chroot:
exit

Finalizing One last sync was done in rescue mode:
for fs in /boot/ /boot/efi/ / /home/; do
    echo "syncing $fs to /mnt$fs..." && 
    rsync -aSHAXx --info=progress2 --delete $fs /mnt$fs
done
Then we unmount all filesystems:
mount   grep -v zfs   tac   awk '/\/mnt/  print $3 '   xargs -i  umount -lf  
zpool export -a
Reboot, swap the drives, and boot in ZFS. Hurray!

Benchmarks This is a test that was ran in single-user mode using fio and the Ars Technica recommended tests, which are:
  • Single 4KiB random write process:
     fio --name=randwrite4k1x --ioengine=posixaio --rw=randwrite --bs=4k --size=4g --numjobs=1 --iodepth=1 --runtime=60 --time_based --end_fsync=1
    
  • 16 parallel 64KiB random write processes:
     fio --name=randwrite64k16x --ioengine=posixaio --rw=randwrite --bs=64k --size=256m --numjobs=16 --iodepth=16 --runtime=60 --time_based --end_fsync=1
    
  • Single 1MiB random write process:
     fio --name=randwrite1m1x --ioengine=posixaio --rw=randwrite --bs=1m --size=16g --numjobs=1 --iodepth=1 --runtime=60 --time_based --end_fsync=1
    
Strangely, that's not exactly what the author, Jim Salter, did in his actual test bench used in the ZFS benchmarking article. The first thing is there's no read test at all, which is already pretty strange. But also it doesn't include stuff like dropping caches or repeating results. So here's my variation, which i called fio-ars-bench.sh for now. It just batches a bunch of fio tests, one by one, 60 seconds each. It should take about 12 minutes to run, as there are 3 pair of tests, read/write, with and without async. My bias, before building, running and analysing those results is that ZFS should outperform the traditional stack on writes, but possibly not on reads. It's also possible it outperforms it on both, because it's a newer drive. A new test might be possible with a new external USB drive as well, although I doubt I will find the time to do this.

Results All tests were done on WD blue SN550 drives, which claims to be able to push 2400MB/s read and 1750MB/s write. An extra drive was bought to move the LVM setup from a WDC WDS500G1B0B-00AS40 SSD, a WD blue M.2 2280 SSD that was at least 5 years old, spec'd at 560MB/s read, 530MB/s write. Benchmarks were done on the M.2 SSD drive but discarded so that the drive difference is not a factor in the test. In practice, I'm going to assume we'll never reach those numbers because we're not actually NVMe (this is an old workstation!) so the bottleneck isn't the disk itself. For our purposes, it might still give us useful results.

Rescue test, LUKS/LVM/ext4 Those tests were performed with everything shutdown, after either entering the system in rescue mode, or by reaching that target with:
systemctl rescue
The network might have been started before or after the test as well:
systemctl start systemd-networkd
So it should be fairly reliable as basically nothing else is running. Raw numbers, from the ?job-curie-lvm.log, converted to MiB/s and manually merged:
test read I/O read IOPS write I/O write IOPS
rand4k4g1x 39.27 10052 212.15 54310
rand4k4g1x--fsync=1 39.29 10057 2.73 699
rand64k256m16x 1297.00 20751 1068.57 17097
rand64k256m16x--fsync=1 1290.90 20654 353.82 5661
rand1m16g1x 315.15 315 563.77 563
rand1m16g1x--fsync=1 345.88 345 157.01 157
Peaks are at about 20k IOPS and ~1.3GiB/s read, 1GiB/s write in the 64KB blocks with 16 jobs. Slowest is the random 4k block sync write at an abysmal 3MB/s and 700 IOPS The 1MB read/write tests have lower IOPS, but that is expected.

Rescue test, ZFS This test was also performed in rescue mode. Raw numbers, from the ?job-curie-zfs.log, converted to MiB/s and manually merged:
test read I/O read IOPS write I/O write IOPS
rand4k4g1x 77.20 19763 27.13 6944
rand4k4g1x--fsync=1 76.16 19495 6.53 1673
rand64k256m16x 1882.40 30118 70.58 1129
rand64k256m16x--fsync=1 1865.13 29842 71.98 1151
rand1m16g1x 921.62 921 102.21 102
rand1m16g1x--fsync=1 908.37 908 64.30 64
Peaks are at 1.8GiB/s read, also in the 64k job like above, but much faster. The write is, as expected, much slower at 70MiB/s (compared to 1GiB/s!), but it should be noted the sync write doesn't degrade performance compared to async writes (although it's still below the LVM 300MB/s).

Conclusions Really, ZFS has trouble performing in all write conditions. The random 4k sync write test is the only place where ZFS outperforms LVM in writes, and barely (7MiB/s vs 3MiB/s). Everywhere else, writes are much slower, sometimes by an order of magnitude. And before some ZFS zealot jumps in talking about the SLOG or some other cache that could be added to improved performance, I'll remind you that those numbers are on a bare bones NVMe drive, pretty much as fast storage as you can find on this machine. Adding another NVMe drive as a cache probably will not improve write performance here. Still, those are very different results than the tests performed by Salter which shows ZFS beating traditional configurations in all categories but uncached 4k reads (not writes!). That said, those tests are very different from the tests I performed here, where I test writes on a single disk, not a RAID array, which might explain the discrepancy. Also, note that neither LVM or ZFS manage to reach the 2400MB/s read and 1750MB/s write performance specification. ZFS does manage to reach 82% of the read performance (1973MB/s) and LVM 64% of the write performance (1120MB/s). LVM hits 57% of the read performance and ZFS hits barely 6% of the write performance. Overall, I'm a bit disappointed in the ZFS write performance here, I must say. Maybe I need to tweak the record size or some other ZFS voodoo, but I'll note that I didn't have to do any such configuration on the other side to kick ZFS in the pants...

Real world experience This section document not synthetic backups, but actual real world workloads, comparing before and after I switched my workstation to ZFS.

Docker performance I had the feeling that running some git hook (which was firing a Docker container) was "slower" somehow. It seems that, at runtime, ZFS backends are significant slower than their overlayfs/ext4 equivalent:
May 16 14:42:52 curie systemd[1]: home-docker-overlay2-17e4d24228decc2d2d493efc401dbfb7ac29739da0e46775e122078d9daf3e87\x2dinit-merged.mount: Succeeded.
May 16 14:42:52 curie systemd[5161]: home-docker-overlay2-17e4d24228decc2d2d493efc401dbfb7ac29739da0e46775e122078d9daf3e87\x2dinit-merged.mount: Succeeded.
May 16 14:42:52 curie systemd[1]: home-docker-overlay2-17e4d24228decc2d2d493efc401dbfb7ac29739da0e46775e122078d9daf3e87-merged.mount: Succeeded.
May 16 14:42:53 curie dockerd[1723]: time="2022-05-16T14:42:53.087219426-04:00" level=info msg="starting signal loop" namespace=moby path=/run/docker/containerd/daemon/io.containerd.runtime.v2.task/moby/af22586fba07014a4d10ab19da10cf280db7a43cad804d6c1e9f2682f12b5f10 pid=151170
May 16 14:42:53 curie systemd[1]: Started libcontainer container af22586fba07014a4d10ab19da10cf280db7a43cad804d6c1e9f2682f12b5f10.
May 16 14:42:54 curie systemd[1]: docker-af22586fba07014a4d10ab19da10cf280db7a43cad804d6c1e9f2682f12b5f10.scope: Succeeded.
May 16 14:42:54 curie dockerd[1723]: time="2022-05-16T14:42:54.047297800-04:00" level=info msg="shim disconnected" id=af22586fba07014a4d10ab19da10cf280db7a43cad804d6c1e9f2682f12b5f10
May 16 14:42:54 curie dockerd[998]: time="2022-05-16T14:42:54.051365015-04:00" level=info msg="ignoring event" container=af22586fba07014a4d10ab19da10cf280db7a43cad804d6c1e9f2682f12b5f10 module=libcontainerd namespace=moby topic=/tasks/delete type="*events.TaskDelete"
May 16 14:42:54 curie systemd[2444]: run-docker-netns-f5453c87c879.mount: Succeeded.
May 16 14:42:54 curie systemd[5161]: run-docker-netns-f5453c87c879.mount: Succeeded.
May 16 14:42:54 curie systemd[2444]: home-docker-overlay2-17e4d24228decc2d2d493efc401dbfb7ac29739da0e46775e122078d9daf3e87-merged.mount: Succeeded.
May 16 14:42:54 curie systemd[5161]: home-docker-overlay2-17e4d24228decc2d2d493efc401dbfb7ac29739da0e46775e122078d9daf3e87-merged.mount: Succeeded.
May 16 14:42:54 curie systemd[1]: run-docker-netns-f5453c87c879.mount: Succeeded.
May 16 14:42:54 curie systemd[1]: home-docker-overlay2-17e4d24228decc2d2d493efc401dbfb7ac29739da0e46775e122078d9daf3e87-merged.mount: Succeeded.
Translating this:
  • container setup: ~1 second
  • container runtime: ~1 second
  • container teardown: ~1 second
  • total runtime: 2-3 seconds
Obviously, those timestamps are not quite accurate enough to make precise measurements... After I switched to ZFS:
mai 30 15:31:39 curie systemd[1]: var-lib-docker-zfs-graph-41ce08fb7a1d3a9c101694b82722f5621c0b4819bd1d9f070933fd1e00543cdf\x2dinit.mount: Succeeded. 
mai 30 15:31:39 curie systemd[5287]: var-lib-docker-zfs-graph-41ce08fb7a1d3a9c101694b82722f5621c0b4819bd1d9f070933fd1e00543cdf\x2dinit.mount: Succeeded. 
mai 30 15:31:40 curie systemd[1]: var-lib-docker-zfs-graph-41ce08fb7a1d3a9c101694b82722f5621c0b4819bd1d9f070933fd1e00543cdf.mount: Succeeded. 
mai 30 15:31:40 curie systemd[5287]: var-lib-docker-zfs-graph-41ce08fb7a1d3a9c101694b82722f5621c0b4819bd1d9f070933fd1e00543cdf.mount: Succeeded. 
mai 30 15:31:41 curie dockerd[3199]: time="2022-05-30T15:31:41.551403693-04:00" level=info msg="starting signal loop" namespace=moby path=/run/docker/containerd/daemon/io.containerd.runtime.v2.task/moby/42a1a1ed5912a7227148e997f442e7ab2e5cc3558aa3471548223c5888c9b142 pid=141080 
mai 30 15:31:41 curie systemd[1]: run-docker-runtime\x2drunc-moby-42a1a1ed5912a7227148e997f442e7ab2e5cc3558aa3471548223c5888c9b142-runc.ZVcjvl.mount: Succeeded. 
mai 30 15:31:41 curie systemd[5287]: run-docker-runtime\x2drunc-moby-42a1a1ed5912a7227148e997f442e7ab2e5cc3558aa3471548223c5888c9b142-runc.ZVcjvl.mount: Succeeded. 
mai 30 15:31:41 curie systemd[1]: Started libcontainer container 42a1a1ed5912a7227148e997f442e7ab2e5cc3558aa3471548223c5888c9b142. 
mai 30 15:31:45 curie systemd[1]: docker-42a1a1ed5912a7227148e997f442e7ab2e5cc3558aa3471548223c5888c9b142.scope: Succeeded. 
mai 30 15:31:45 curie dockerd[3199]: time="2022-05-30T15:31:45.883019128-04:00" level=info msg="shim disconnected" id=42a1a1ed5912a7227148e997f442e7ab2e5cc3558aa3471548223c5888c9b142 
mai 30 15:31:45 curie dockerd[1726]: time="2022-05-30T15:31:45.883064491-04:00" level=info msg="ignoring event" container=42a1a1ed5912a7227148e997f442e7ab2e5cc3558aa3471548223c5888c9b142 module=libcontainerd namespace=moby topic=/tasks/delete type="*events.TaskDelete" 
mai 30 15:31:45 curie systemd[1]: run-docker-netns-e45f5cf5f465.mount: Succeeded. 
mai 30 15:31:45 curie systemd[5287]: run-docker-netns-e45f5cf5f465.mount: Succeeded. 
mai 30 15:31:45 curie systemd[1]: var-lib-docker-zfs-graph-41ce08fb7a1d3a9c101694b82722f5621c0b4819bd1d9f070933fd1e00543cdf.mount: Succeeded. 
mai 30 15:31:45 curie systemd[5287]: var-lib-docker-zfs-graph-41ce08fb7a1d3a9c101694b82722f5621c0b4819bd1d9f070933fd1e00543cdf.mount: Succeeded.
That's double or triple the run time, from 2 seconds to 6 seconds. Most of the time is spent in run time, inside the container. Here's the breakdown:
  • container setup: ~2 seconds
  • container run: ~4 seconds
  • container teardown: ~1 second
  • total run time: about ~6-7 seconds
That's a two- to three-fold increase! Clearly something is going on here that I should tweak. It's possible that code path is less optimized in Docker. I also worry about podman, but apparently it also supports ZFS backends. Possibly it would perform better, but at this stage I wouldn't have a good comparison: maybe it would have performed better on non-ZFS as well...

Interactivity While doing the offsite backups (below), the system became somewhat "sluggish". I felt everything was slow, and I estimate it introduced ~50ms latency in any input device. Arguably, those are all USB and the external drive was connected through USB, but I suspect the ZFS drivers are not as well tuned with the scheduler as the regular filesystem drivers...

Recovery procedures For test purposes, I unmounted all systems during the procedure:
umount /mnt/boot/efi /mnt/boot/run
umount -a -t zfs
zpool export -a
And disconnected the drive, to see how I would recover this system from another Linux system in case of a total motherboard failure. To import an existing pool, plug the device, then import the pool with an alternate root, so it doesn't mount over your existing filesystems, then you mount the root filesystem and all the others:
zpool import -l -a -R /mnt &&
zfs mount rpool/ROOT/debian &&
zfs mount -a &&
mount /dev/sdc2 /mnt/boot/efi &&
mount -t tmpfs tmpfs /mnt/run &&
mkdir /mnt/run/lock

Offsite backup Part of the goal of using ZFS is to simplify and harden backups. I wanted to experiment with shorter recovery times specifically both point in time recovery objective and recovery time objective and faster incremental backups. This is, therefore, part of my backup services. This section documents how an external NVMe enclosure was setup in a pool to mirror the datasets from my workstation. The final setup should include syncoid copying datasets to the backup server regularly, but I haven't finished that configuration yet.

Partitioning The above partitioning procedure used sgdisk, but I couldn't figure out how to do this with sgdisk, so this uses sfdisk to dump the partition from the first disk to an external, identical drive:
sfdisk -d /dev/nvme0n1   sfdisk --no-reread /dev/sda --force

Pool creation This is similar to the main pool creation, except we tweaked a few bits after changing the upstream procedure:
zpool create \
        -o cachefile=/etc/zfs/zpool.cache \
        -o ashift=12 -d \
        -o feature@async_destroy=enabled \
        -o feature@bookmarks=enabled \
        -o feature@embedded_data=enabled \
        -o feature@empty_bpobj=enabled \
        -o feature@enabled_txg=enabled \
        -o feature@extensible_dataset=enabled \
        -o feature@filesystem_limits=enabled \
        -o feature@hole_birth=enabled \
        -o feature@large_blocks=enabled \
        -o feature@lz4_compress=enabled \
        -o feature@spacemap_histogram=enabled \
        -o feature@zpool_checkpoint=enabled \
        -O acltype=posixacl -O xattr=sa \
        -O compression=lz4 \
        -O devices=off \
        -O relatime=on \
        -O canmount=off \
        -O mountpoint=/boot -R /mnt \
        bpool-tubman /dev/sdb3
The change from the main boot pool are: Main pool creation is:
zpool create \
        -o ashift=12 \
        -O encryption=on -O keylocation=prompt -O keyformat=passphrase \
        -O acltype=posixacl -O xattr=sa -O dnodesize=auto \
        -O compression=zstd \
        -O relatime=on \
        -O canmount=off \
        -O mountpoint=/ -R /mnt \
        rpool-tubman /dev/sdb4

First sync I used syncoid to copy all pools over to the external device. syncoid is a thing that's part of the sanoid project which is specifically designed to sync snapshots between pool, typically over SSH links but it can also operate locally. The sanoid command had a --readonly argument to simulate changes, but syncoid didn't so I tried to fix that with an upstream PR. It seems it would be better to do this by hand, but this was much easier. The full first sync was:
root@curie:/home/anarcat# ./bin/syncoid -r  bpool bpool-tubman
CRITICAL ERROR: Target bpool-tubman exists but has no snapshots matching with bpool!
                Replication to target would require destroying existing
                target. Cowardly refusing to destroy your existing target.
          NOTE: Target bpool-tubman dataset is < 64MB used - did you mistakenly run
                 zfs create bpool-tubman  on the target? ZFS initial
                replication must be to a NON EXISTENT DATASET, which will
                then be CREATED BY the initial replication process.
INFO: Sending oldest full snapshot bpool/BOOT@test (~ 42 KB) to new target filesystem:
44.2KiB 0:00:00 [4.19MiB/s] [========================================================================================================================] 103%            
INFO: Updating new target filesystem with incremental bpool/BOOT@test ... syncoid_curie_2022-05-30:12:50:39 (~ 4 KB):
2.13KiB 0:00:00 [ 114KiB/s] [===============================================================>                                                         ] 53%            
INFO: Sending oldest full snapshot bpool/BOOT/debian@install (~ 126.0 MB) to new target filesystem:
 126MiB 0:00:00 [ 308MiB/s] [=======================================================================================================================>] 100%            
INFO: Updating new target filesystem with incremental bpool/BOOT/debian@install ... syncoid_curie_2022-05-30:12:50:39 (~ 113.4 MB):
 113MiB 0:00:00 [ 315MiB/s] [=======================================================================================================================>] 100%
root@curie:/home/anarcat# ./bin/syncoid -r  rpool rpool-tubman
CRITICAL ERROR: Target rpool-tubman exists but has no snapshots matching with rpool!
                Replication to target would require destroying existing
                target. Cowardly refusing to destroy your existing target.
          NOTE: Target rpool-tubman dataset is < 64MB used - did you mistakenly run
                 zfs create rpool-tubman  on the target? ZFS initial
                replication must be to a NON EXISTENT DATASET, which will
                then be CREATED BY the initial replication process.
INFO: Sending oldest full snapshot rpool/ROOT@syncoid_curie_2022-05-30:12:50:51 (~ 69 KB) to new target filesystem:
44.2KiB 0:00:00 [2.44MiB/s] [===========================================================================>                                             ] 63%            
INFO: Sending oldest full snapshot rpool/ROOT/debian@install (~ 25.9 GB) to new target filesystem:
25.9GiB 0:03:33 [ 124MiB/s] [=======================================================================================================================>] 100%            
INFO: Updating new target filesystem with incremental rpool/ROOT/debian@install ... syncoid_curie_2022-05-30:12:50:52 (~ 3.9 GB):
3.92GiB 0:00:33 [ 119MiB/s] [======================================================================================================================>  ] 99%            
INFO: Sending oldest full snapshot rpool/home@syncoid_curie_2022-05-30:12:55:04 (~ 276.8 GB) to new target filesystem:
 277GiB 0:27:13 [ 174MiB/s] [=======================================================================================================================>] 100%            
INFO: Sending oldest full snapshot rpool/home/root@syncoid_curie_2022-05-30:13:22:19 (~ 2.2 GB) to new target filesystem:
2.22GiB 0:00:25 [90.2MiB/s] [=======================================================================================================================>] 100%            
INFO: Sending oldest full snapshot rpool/var@syncoid_curie_2022-05-30:13:22:47 (~ 5.6 GB) to new target filesystem:
5.56GiB 0:00:32 [ 176MiB/s] [=======================================================================================================================>] 100%            
INFO: Sending oldest full snapshot rpool/var/cache@syncoid_curie_2022-05-30:13:23:22 (~ 627.3 MB) to new target filesystem:
 627MiB 0:00:03 [ 169MiB/s] [=======================================================================================================================>] 100%            
INFO: Sending oldest full snapshot rpool/var/lib@syncoid_curie_2022-05-30:13:23:28 (~ 69 KB) to new target filesystem:
44.2KiB 0:00:00 [1.40MiB/s] [===========================================================================>                                             ] 63%            
INFO: Sending oldest full snapshot rpool/var/lib/docker@syncoid_curie_2022-05-30:13:23:28 (~ 442.6 MB) to new target filesystem:
 443MiB 0:00:04 [ 103MiB/s] [=======================================================================================================================>] 100%            
INFO: Sending oldest full snapshot rpool/var/lib/docker/05c0de7fabbea60500eaa495d0d82038249f6faa63b12914737c4d71520e62c5@266253254 (~ 6.3 MB) to new target filesystem:
6.49MiB 0:00:00 [12.9MiB/s] [========================================================================================================================] 102%            
INFO: Updating new target filesystem with incremental rpool/var/lib/docker/05c0de7fabbea60500eaa495d0d82038249f6faa63b12914737c4d71520e62c5@266253254 ... syncoid_curie_2022-05-30:13:23:34 (~ 4 KB):
1.52KiB 0:00:00 [27.6KiB/s] [============================================>                                                                            ] 38%            
INFO: Sending oldest full snapshot rpool/var/lib/flatpak@syncoid_curie_2022-05-30:13:23:36 (~ 2.0 GB) to new target filesystem:
2.00GiB 0:00:17 [ 115MiB/s] [=======================================================================================================================>] 100%            
INFO: Sending oldest full snapshot rpool/var/tmp@syncoid_curie_2022-05-30:13:23:55 (~ 57.0 MB) to new target filesystem:
61.8MiB 0:00:01 [45.0MiB/s] [========================================================================================================================] 108%            
INFO: Clone is recreated on target rpool-tubman/var/lib/docker/ed71ddd563a779ba6fb37b3b1d0cc2c11eca9b594e77b4b234867ebcb162b205 based on rpool/var/lib/docker/05c0de7fabbea60500eaa495d0d82038249f6faa63b12914737c4d71520e62c5@266253254
INFO: Sending oldest full snapshot rpool/var/lib/docker/ed71ddd563a779ba6fb37b3b1d0cc2c11eca9b594e77b4b234867ebcb162b205@syncoid_curie_2022-05-30:13:23:58 (~ 218.6 MB) to new target filesystem:
 219MiB 0:00:01 [ 151MiB/s] [=======================================================================================================================>] 100%
Funny how the CRITICAL ERROR doesn't actually stop syncoid and it just carries on merrily doing when it's telling you it's "cowardly refusing to destroy your existing target"... Maybe that's because my pull request broke something though... During the transfer, the computer was very sluggish: everything feels like it has ~30-50ms latency extra:
anarcat@curie:sanoid$ LANG=C top -b  -n 1   head -20
top - 13:07:05 up 6 days,  4:01,  1 user,  load average: 16.13, 16.55, 11.83
Tasks: 606 total,   6 running, 598 sleeping,   0 stopped,   2 zombie
%Cpu(s): 18.8 us, 72.5 sy,  1.2 ni,  5.0 id,  1.2 wa,  0.0 hi,  1.2 si,  0.0 st
MiB Mem :  15898.4 total,   1387.6 free,  13170.0 used,   1340.8 buff/cache
MiB Swap:      0.0 total,      0.0 free,      0.0 used.   1319.8 avail Mem 
    PID USER      PR  NI    VIRT    RES    SHR S  %CPU  %MEM     TIME+ COMMAND
     70 root      20   0       0      0      0 S  83.3   0.0   6:12.67 kswapd0
4024878 root      20   0  282644  96432  10288 S  44.4   0.6   0:11.43 puppet
3896136 root      20   0   35328  16528     48 S  22.2   0.1   2:08.04 mbuffer
3896135 root      20   0   10328    776    168 R  16.7   0.0   1:22.93 zfs
3896138 root      20   0   10588    788    156 R  16.7   0.0   1:49.30 zfs
    350 root       0 -20       0      0      0 R  11.1   0.0   1:03.53 z_rd_int
    351 root       0 -20       0      0      0 S  11.1   0.0   1:04.15 z_rd_int
3896137 root      20   0    4384    352    244 R  11.1   0.0   0:44.73 pv
4034094 anarcat   30  10   20028  13960   2428 S  11.1   0.1   0:00.70 mbsync
4036539 anarcat   20   0    9604   3464   2408 R  11.1   0.0   0:00.04 top
    352 root       0 -20       0      0      0 S   5.6   0.0   1:03.64 z_rd_int
    353 root       0 -20       0      0      0 S   5.6   0.0   1:03.64 z_rd_int
    354 root       0 -20       0      0      0 S   5.6   0.0   1:04.01 z_rd_int
I wonder how much of that is due to syncoid, particularly because I often saw mbuffer and pv in there which are not strictly necessary to do those kind of operations, as far as I understand. Once that's done, export the pools to disconnect the drive:
zpool export bpool-tubman
zpool export rpool-tubman

Raw disk benchmark Copied the 512GB SSD/M.2 device to another 1024GB NVMe/M.2 device:
anarcat@curie:~$ sudo dd if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/sdc bs=4M status=progress conv=fdatasync
499944259584 octets (500 GB, 466 GiB) copi s, 1713 s, 292 MB/s
119235+1 enregistrements lus
119235+1 enregistrements  crits
500107862016 octets (500 GB, 466 GiB) copi s, 1719,93 s, 291 MB/s
... while both over USB, whoohoo 300MB/s!

Monitoring ZFS should be monitoring your pools regularly. Normally, the [[!debman zed]] daemon monitors all ZFS events. It is the thing that will report when a scrub failed, for example. See this configuration guide. Scrubs should be regularly scheduled to ensure consistency of the pool. This can be done in newer zfsutils-linux versions (bullseye-backports or bookworm) with one of those, depending on the desired frequency:
systemctl enable zfs-scrub-weekly@rpool.timer --now
systemctl enable zfs-scrub-monthly@rpool.timer --now
When the scrub runs, if it finds anything it will send an event which will get picked up by the zed daemon which will then send a notification, see below for an example. TODO: deploy on curie, if possible (probably not because no RAID) TODO: this should be in Puppet

Scrub warning example So what happens when problems are found? Here's an example of how I dealt with an error I received. After setting up another server (tubman) with ZFS, I eventually ended up getting a warning from the ZFS toolchain.
Date: Sun, 09 Oct 2022 00:58:08 -0400
From: root <root@anarc.at>
To: root@anarc.at
Subject: ZFS scrub_finish event for rpool on tubman
ZFS has finished a scrub:
   eid: 39536
 class: scrub_finish
  host: tubman
  time: 2022-10-09 00:58:07-0400
  pool: rpool
 state: ONLINE
status: One or more devices has experienced an unrecoverable error.  An
        attempt was made to correct the error.  Applications are unaffected.
action: Determine if the device needs to be replaced, and clear the errors
        using 'zpool clear' or replace the device with 'zpool replace'.
   see: https://openzfs.github.io/openzfs-docs/msg/ZFS-8000-9P
  scan: scrub repaired 0B in 00:33:57 with 0 errors on Sun Oct  9 00:58:07 2022
config:
        NAME        STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
        rpool       ONLINE       0     0     0
          mirror-0  ONLINE       0     0     0
            sdb4    ONLINE       0     1     0
            sdc4    ONLINE       0     0     0
        cache
          sda3      ONLINE       0     0     0
errors: No known data errors
This, in itself, is a little worrisome. But it helpfully links to this more detailed documentation (and props up there: the link still works) which explains this is a "minor" problem (something that could be included in the report). In this case, this happened on a server setup on 2021-04-28, but the disks and server hardware are much older. The server itself (marcos v1) was built around 2011, over 10 years ago now. The hard drive in question is:
root@tubman:~# smartctl -i -qnoserial /dev/sdb
smartctl 7.2 2020-12-30 r5155 [x86_64-linux-5.10.0-15-amd64] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-20, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org
=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Model Family:     Seagate BarraCuda 3.5
Device Model:     ST4000DM004-2CV104
Firmware Version: 0001
User Capacity:    4,000,787,030,016 bytes [4.00 TB]
Sector Sizes:     512 bytes logical, 4096 bytes physical
Rotation Rate:    5425 rpm
Form Factor:      3.5 inches
Device is:        In smartctl database [for details use: -P show]
ATA Version is:   ACS-3 T13/2161-D revision 5
SATA Version is:  SATA 3.1, 6.0 Gb/s (current: 3.0 Gb/s)
Local Time is:    Tue Oct 11 11:02:32 2022 EDT
SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Enabled
Some more SMART stats:
root@tubman:~# smartctl -a -qnoserial /dev/sdb   grep -e  Head_Flying_Hours -e Power_On_Hours -e Total_LBA -e 'Sector Sizes'
Sector Sizes:     512 bytes logical, 4096 bytes physical
  9 Power_On_Hours          0x0032   086   086   000    Old_age   Always       -       12464 (206 202 0)
240 Head_Flying_Hours       0x0000   100   253   000    Old_age   Offline      -       10966h+55m+23.757s
241 Total_LBAs_Written      0x0000   100   253   000    Old_age   Offline      -       21107792664
242 Total_LBAs_Read         0x0000   100   253   000    Old_age   Offline      -       3201579750
That's over a year of power on, which shouldn't be so bad. It has written about 10TB of data (21107792664 LBAs * 512 byte/LBA), which is about two full writes. According to its specification, this device is supposed to support 55 TB/year of writes, so we're far below spec. Note that are still far from the "non-recoverable read error per bits" spec (1 per 10E15), as we've basically read 13E12 bits (3201579750 LBAs * 512 byte/LBA = 13E12 bits). It's likely this disk was made in 2018, so it is in its fourth year. Interestingly, /dev/sdc is also a Seagate drive, but of a different series:
root@tubman:~# smartctl -qnoserial  -i /dev/sdb
smartctl 7.2 2020-12-30 r5155 [x86_64-linux-5.10.0-15-amd64] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-20, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org
=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Model Family:     Seagate BarraCuda 3.5
Device Model:     ST4000DM004-2CV104
Firmware Version: 0001
User Capacity:    4,000,787,030,016 bytes [4.00 TB]
Sector Sizes:     512 bytes logical, 4096 bytes physical
Rotation Rate:    5425 rpm
Form Factor:      3.5 inches
Device is:        In smartctl database [for details use: -P show]
ATA Version is:   ACS-3 T13/2161-D revision 5
SATA Version is:  SATA 3.1, 6.0 Gb/s (current: 3.0 Gb/s)
Local Time is:    Tue Oct 11 11:21:35 2022 EDT
SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Enabled
It has seen much more reads than the other disk which is also interesting:
root@tubman:~# smartctl -a -qnoserial /dev/sdc   grep -e  Head_Flying_Hours -e Power_On_Hours -e Total_LBA -e 'Sector Sizes'
Sector Sizes:     512 bytes logical, 4096 bytes physical
  9 Power_On_Hours          0x0032   059   059   000    Old_age   Always       -       36240
240 Head_Flying_Hours       0x0000   100   253   000    Old_age   Offline      -       33994h+10m+52.118s
241 Total_LBAs_Written      0x0000   100   253   000    Old_age   Offline      -       30730174438
242 Total_LBAs_Read         0x0000   100   253   000    Old_age   Offline      -       51894566538
That's 4 years of Head_Flying_Hours, and over 4 years (4 years and 48 days) of Power_On_Hours. The copyright date on that drive's specs goes back to 2016, so it's a much older drive. SMART self-test succeeded.

Remaining issues
  • TODO: move send/receive backups to offsite host, see also zfs for alternatives to syncoid/sanoid there
  • TODO: setup backup cron job (or timer?)
  • TODO: swap still not setup on curie, see zfs
  • TODO: document this somewhere: bpool and rpool are both pools and datasets. that's pretty confusing, but also very useful because it allows for pool-wide recursive snapshots, which are used for the backup system

fio improvements I really want to improve my experience with fio. Right now, I'm just cargo-culting stuff from other folks and I don't really like it. stressant is a good example of my struggles, in the sense that it doesn't really work that well for disk tests. I would love to have just a single .fio job file that lists multiple jobs to run serially. For example, this file describes the above workload pretty well:
[global]
# cargo-culting Salter
fallocate=none
ioengine=posixaio
runtime=60
time_based=1
end_fsync=1
stonewall=1
group_reporting=1
# no need to drop caches, done by default
# invalidate=1
# Single 4KiB random read/write process
[randread-4k-4g-1x]
rw=randread
bs=4k
size=4g
numjobs=1
iodepth=1
[randwrite-4k-4g-1x]
rw=randwrite
bs=4k
size=4g
numjobs=1
iodepth=1
# 16 parallel 64KiB random read/write processes:
[randread-64k-256m-16x]
rw=randread
bs=64k
size=256m
numjobs=16
iodepth=16
[randwrite-64k-256m-16x]
rw=randwrite
bs=64k
size=256m
numjobs=16
iodepth=16
# Single 1MiB random read/write process
[randread-1m-16g-1x]
rw=randread
bs=1m
size=16g
numjobs=1
iodepth=1
[randwrite-1m-16g-1x]
rw=randwrite
bs=1m
size=16g
numjobs=1
iodepth=1
... except the jobs are actually started in parallel, even though they are stonewall'd, as far as I can tell by the reports. I sent a mail to the fio mailing list for clarification. It looks like the jobs are started in parallel, but actual (correctly) run serially. It seems like this might just be a matter of reporting the right timestamps in the end, although it does feel like starting all the processes (even if not doing any work yet) could skew the results.

Hangs during procedure During the procedure, it happened a few times where any ZFS command would completely hang. It seems that using an external USB drive to sync stuff didn't work so well: sometimes it would reconnect under a different device (from sdc to sdd, for example), and this would greatly confuse ZFS. Here, for example, is sdd reappearing out of the blue:
May 19 11:22:53 curie kernel: [  699.820301] scsi host4: uas
May 19 11:22:53 curie kernel: [  699.820544] usb 2-1: authorized to connect
May 19 11:22:53 curie kernel: [  699.922433] scsi 4:0:0:0: Direct-Access     ROG      ESD-S1C          0    PQ: 0 ANSI: 6
May 19 11:22:53 curie kernel: [  699.923235] sd 4:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg2 type 0
May 19 11:22:53 curie kernel: [  699.923676] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdd] 1953525168 512-byte logical blocks: (1.00 TB/932 GiB)
May 19 11:22:53 curie kernel: [  699.923788] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdd] Write Protect is off
May 19 11:22:53 curie kernel: [  699.923949] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdd] Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA
May 19 11:22:53 curie kernel: [  699.924149] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdd] Optimal transfer size 33553920 bytes
May 19 11:22:53 curie kernel: [  699.961602]  sdd: sdd1 sdd2 sdd3 sdd4
May 19 11:22:53 curie kernel: [  699.996083] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdd] Attached SCSI disk
Next time I run a ZFS command (say zpool list), the command completely hangs (D state) and this comes up in the logs:
May 19 11:34:21 curie kernel: [ 1387.914843] zio pool=bpool vdev=/dev/sdc3 error=5 type=2 offset=71344128 size=4096 flags=184880
May 19 11:34:21 curie kernel: [ 1387.914859] zio pool=bpool vdev=/dev/sdc3 error=5 type=2 offset=205565952 size=4096 flags=184880
May 19 11:34:21 curie kernel: [ 1387.914874] zio pool=bpool vdev=/dev/sdc3 error=5 type=2 offset=272789504 size=4096 flags=184880
May 19 11:34:21 curie kernel: [ 1387.914906] zio pool=bpool vdev=/dev/sdc3 error=5 type=1 offset=270336 size=8192 flags=b08c1
May 19 11:34:21 curie kernel: [ 1387.914932] zio pool=bpool vdev=/dev/sdc3 error=5 type=1 offset=1073225728 size=8192 flags=b08c1
May 19 11:34:21 curie kernel: [ 1387.914948] zio pool=bpool vdev=/dev/sdc3 error=5 type=1 offset=1073487872 size=8192 flags=b08c1
May 19 11:34:21 curie kernel: [ 1387.915165] zio pool=bpool vdev=/dev/sdc3 error=5 type=2 offset=272793600 size=4096 flags=184880
May 19 11:34:21 curie kernel: [ 1387.915183] zio pool=bpool vdev=/dev/sdc3 error=5 type=2 offset=339853312 size=4096 flags=184880
May 19 11:34:21 curie kernel: [ 1387.915648] WARNING: Pool 'bpool' has encountered an uncorrectable I/O failure and has been suspended.
May 19 11:34:21 curie kernel: [ 1387.915648] 
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.558614] task:txg_sync        state:D stack:    0 pid:  997 ppid:     2 flags:0x00004000
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.558623] Call Trace:
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.558640]  __schedule+0x282/0x870
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.558650]  schedule+0x46/0xb0
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.558670]  schedule_timeout+0x8b/0x140
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.558675]  ? __next_timer_interrupt+0x110/0x110
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.558678]  io_schedule_timeout+0x4c/0x80
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.558689]  __cv_timedwait_common+0x12b/0x160 [spl]
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.558694]  ? add_wait_queue_exclusive+0x70/0x70
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.558702]  __cv_timedwait_io+0x15/0x20 [spl]
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.558816]  zio_wait+0x129/0x2b0 [zfs]
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.558929]  dsl_pool_sync+0x461/0x4f0 [zfs]
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559032]  spa_sync+0x575/0xfa0 [zfs]
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559138]  ? spa_txg_history_init_io+0x101/0x110 [zfs]
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559245]  txg_sync_thread+0x2e0/0x4a0 [zfs]
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559354]  ? txg_fini+0x240/0x240 [zfs]
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559366]  thread_generic_wrapper+0x6f/0x80 [spl]
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559376]  ? __thread_exit+0x20/0x20 [spl]
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559379]  kthread+0x11b/0x140
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559382]  ? __kthread_bind_mask+0x60/0x60
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559386]  ret_from_fork+0x22/0x30
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559401] task:zed             state:D stack:    0 pid: 1564 ppid:     1 flags:0x00000000
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559404] Call Trace:
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559409]  __schedule+0x282/0x870
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559412]  ? __kmalloc_node+0x141/0x2b0
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559417]  schedule+0x46/0xb0
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559420]  schedule_preempt_disabled+0xa/0x10
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559424]  __mutex_lock.constprop.0+0x133/0x460
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559435]  ? nvlist_xalloc.part.0+0x68/0xc0 [znvpair]
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559537]  spa_all_configs+0x41/0x120 [zfs]
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559644]  zfs_ioc_pool_configs+0x17/0x70 [zfs]
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559752]  zfsdev_ioctl_common+0x697/0x870 [zfs]
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559758]  ? _copy_from_user+0x28/0x60
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559860]  zfsdev_ioctl+0x53/0xe0 [zfs]
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559866]  __x64_sys_ioctl+0x83/0xb0
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559869]  do_syscall_64+0x33/0x80
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559873]  entry_SYSCALL_64_after_hwframe+0x44/0xa9
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559876] RIP: 0033:0x7fcf0ef32cc7
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559878] RSP: 002b:00007fcf0e181618 EFLAGS: 00000246 ORIG_RAX: 0000000000000010
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559881] RAX: ffffffffffffffda RBX: 000055b212f972a0 RCX: 00007fcf0ef32cc7
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559883] RDX: 00007fcf0e181640 RSI: 0000000000005a04 RDI: 000000000000000b
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559885] RBP: 00007fcf0e184c30 R08: 00007fcf08016810 R09: 00007fcf08000080
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559886] R10: 0000000000080000 R11: 0000000000000246 R12: 000055b212f972a0
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559888] R13: 0000000000000000 R14: 00007fcf0e181640 R15: 0000000000000000
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559980] task:zpool           state:D stack:    0 pid:11815 ppid:  3816 flags:0x00004000
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559983] Call Trace:
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559988]  __schedule+0x282/0x870
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559992]  schedule+0x46/0xb0
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.559995]  io_schedule+0x42/0x70
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.560004]  cv_wait_common+0xac/0x130 [spl]
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.560008]  ? add_wait_queue_exclusive+0x70/0x70
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.560118]  txg_wait_synced_impl+0xc9/0x110 [zfs]
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.560223]  txg_wait_synced+0xc/0x40 [zfs]
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.560325]  spa_export_common+0x4cd/0x590 [zfs]
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.560430]  ? zfs_log_history+0x9c/0xf0 [zfs]
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.560537]  zfsdev_ioctl_common+0x697/0x870 [zfs]
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.560543]  ? _copy_from_user+0x28/0x60
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.560644]  zfsdev_ioctl+0x53/0xe0 [zfs]
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.560649]  __x64_sys_ioctl+0x83/0xb0
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.560653]  do_syscall_64+0x33/0x80
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.560656]  entry_SYSCALL_64_after_hwframe+0x44/0xa9
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.560659] RIP: 0033:0x7fdc23be2cc7
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.560661] RSP: 002b:00007ffc8c792478 EFLAGS: 00000246 ORIG_RAX: 0000000000000010
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.560664] RAX: ffffffffffffffda RBX: 000055942ca49e20 RCX: 00007fdc23be2cc7
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.560666] RDX: 00007ffc8c792490 RSI: 0000000000005a03 RDI: 0000000000000003
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.560667] RBP: 00007ffc8c795e80 R08: 00000000ffffffff R09: 00007ffc8c792310
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.560669] R10: 000055942ca49e30 R11: 0000000000000246 R12: 00007ffc8c792490
May 19 11:37:25 curie kernel: [ 1571.560671] R13: 000055942ca49e30 R14: 000055942aed2c20 R15: 00007ffc8c795a40
Here's another example, where you see the USB controller bleeping out and back into existence:
mai 19 11:38:39 curie kernel: usb 2-1: USB disconnect, device number 2
mai 19 11:38:39 curie kernel: sd 4:0:0:0: [sdd] Synchronizing SCSI cache
mai 19 11:38:39 curie kernel: sd 4:0:0:0: [sdd] Synchronize Cache(10) failed: Result: hostbyte=DID_ERROR driverbyte=DRIVER_OK
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel: INFO: task zed:1564 blocked for more than 241 seconds.
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:       Tainted: P          IOE     5.10.0-14-amd64 #1 Debian 5.10.113-1
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel: "echo 0 > /proc/sys/kernel/hung_task_timeout_secs" disables this message.
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel: task:zed             state:D stack:    0 pid: 1564 ppid:     1 flags:0x00000000
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel: Call Trace:
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  __schedule+0x282/0x870
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  ? __kmalloc_node+0x141/0x2b0
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  schedule+0x46/0xb0
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  schedule_preempt_disabled+0xa/0x10
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  __mutex_lock.constprop.0+0x133/0x460
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  ? nvlist_xalloc.part.0+0x68/0xc0 [znvpair]
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  spa_all_configs+0x41/0x120 [zfs]
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  zfs_ioc_pool_configs+0x17/0x70 [zfs]
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  zfsdev_ioctl_common+0x697/0x870 [zfs]
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  ? _copy_from_user+0x28/0x60
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  zfsdev_ioctl+0x53/0xe0 [zfs]
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  __x64_sys_ioctl+0x83/0xb0
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  do_syscall_64+0x33/0x80
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  entry_SYSCALL_64_after_hwframe+0x44/0xa9
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel: RIP: 0033:0x7fcf0ef32cc7
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel: RSP: 002b:00007fcf0e181618 EFLAGS: 00000246 ORIG_RAX: 0000000000000010
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel: RAX: ffffffffffffffda RBX: 000055b212f972a0 RCX: 00007fcf0ef32cc7
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel: RDX: 00007fcf0e181640 RSI: 0000000000005a04 RDI: 000000000000000b
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel: RBP: 00007fcf0e184c30 R08: 00007fcf08016810 R09: 00007fcf08000080
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel: R10: 0000000000080000 R11: 0000000000000246 R12: 000055b212f972a0
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel: R13: 0000000000000000 R14: 00007fcf0e181640 R15: 0000000000000000
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel: INFO: task zpool:11815 blocked for more than 241 seconds.
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:       Tainted: P          IOE     5.10.0-14-amd64 #1 Debian 5.10.113-1
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel: "echo 0 > /proc/sys/kernel/hung_task_timeout_secs" disables this message.
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel: task:zpool           state:D stack:    0 pid:11815 ppid:  2621 flags:0x00004004
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel: Call Trace:
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  __schedule+0x282/0x870
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  schedule+0x46/0xb0
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  io_schedule+0x42/0x70
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  cv_wait_common+0xac/0x130 [spl]
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  ? add_wait_queue_exclusive+0x70/0x70
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  txg_wait_synced_impl+0xc9/0x110 [zfs]
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  txg_wait_synced+0xc/0x40 [zfs]
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  spa_export_common+0x4cd/0x590 [zfs]
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  ? zfs_log_history+0x9c/0xf0 [zfs]
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  zfsdev_ioctl_common+0x697/0x870 [zfs]
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  ? _copy_from_user+0x28/0x60
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  zfsdev_ioctl+0x53/0xe0 [zfs]
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  __x64_sys_ioctl+0x83/0xb0
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  do_syscall_64+0x33/0x80
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel:  entry_SYSCALL_64_after_hwframe+0x44/0xa9
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel: RIP: 0033:0x7fdc23be2cc7
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel: RSP: 002b:00007ffc8c792478 EFLAGS: 00000246 ORIG_RAX: 0000000000000010
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel: RAX: ffffffffffffffda RBX: 000055942ca49e20 RCX: 00007fdc23be2cc7
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel: RDX: 00007ffc8c792490 RSI: 0000000000005a03 RDI: 0000000000000003
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel: RBP: 00007ffc8c795e80 R08: 00000000ffffffff R09: 00007ffc8c792310
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel: R10: 000055942ca49e30 R11: 0000000000000246 R12: 00007ffc8c792490
mai 19 11:39:25 curie kernel: R13: 000055942ca49e30 R14: 000055942aed2c20 R15: 00007ffc8c795a40
I understand those are rather extreme conditions: I would fully expect the pool to stop working if the underlying drives disappear. What doesn't seem acceptable is that a command would completely hang like this.

References See the zfs documentation for more information about ZFS, and tubman for another installation and migration procedure.

12 November 2022

Wouter Verhelst: Day 3 of the Debian Videoteam Sprint in Cape Town

The Debian Videoteam has been sprinting in Cape Town, South Africa -- mostly because with Stefano here for a few months, four of us (Jonathan, Kyle, Stefano, and myself) actually are in the country on a regular basis. In addition to that, two more members of the team (Nicolas and Louis-Philippe) are joining the sprint remotely (from Paris and Montreal). Videoteam sprint (Kyle and Stefano working on things, with me behind the camera and Jonathan busy elsewhere.) We've made loads of progress! Some highlights: The sprint isn't over yet (we're continuing until Sunday), but loads of things have already happened. Stay tuned!

11 November 2022

Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in October 2022

Welcome to the Reproducible Builds report for October 2022! In these reports we attempt to outline the most important things that we have been up to over the past month. As ever, if you are interested in contributing to the project, please visit our Contribute page on our website.

Our in-person summit this year was held in the past few days in Venice, Italy. Activity and news from the summit will therefore be covered in next month s report!
A new article related to reproducible builds was recently published in the 2023 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. Titled Taxonomy of Attacks on Open-Source Software Supply Chains and authored by Piergiorgio Ladisa, Henrik Plate, Matias Martinez and Olivier Barais, their paper:
[ ] proposes a general taxonomy for attacks on opensource supply chains, independent of specific programming languages or ecosystems, and covering all supply chain stages from code contributions to package distribution.
Taking the form of an attack tree, the paper covers 107 unique vectors linked to 94 real world supply-chain incidents which is then mapped to 33 mitigating safeguards including, of course, reproducible builds:
Reproducible Builds received a very high utility rating (5) from 10 participants (58.8%), but also a high-cost rating (4 or 5) from 12 (70.6%). One expert commented that a reproducible build like used by Solarwinds now, is a good measure against tampering with a single build system and another claimed this is going to be the single, biggest barrier .

It was noticed this month that Solarwinds published a whitepaper back in December 2021 in order to:
[ ] illustrate a concerning new reality for the software industry and illuminates the increasingly sophisticated threats made by outside nation-states to the supply chains and infrastructure on which we all rely.
The 12-month anniversary of the 2020 Solarwinds attack (which SolarWinds Worldwide LLC itself calls the SUNBURST attack) was, of course, the likely impetus for publication.
Whilst collaborating on making the Cyrus IMAP server reproducible, Ellie Timoney asked why the Reproducible Builds testing framework uses two remarkably distinctive build paths when attempting to flush out builds that vary on the absolute system path in which they were built. In the case of the Cyrus IMAP server, these happened to be: Asked why they vary in three different ways, Chris Lamb listed in detail the motivation behind to each difference.
On our mailing list this month:
The Reproducible Builds project is delighted to welcome openEuler to the Involved projects page [ ]. openEuler is Linux distribution developed by Huawei, a counterpart to it s more commercially-oriented EulerOS.

Debian Colin Watson wrote about his experience towards making the databases generated by the man-db UNIX manual page indexing tool:
One of the people working on [reproducible builds] noticed that man-db s database files were an obstacle to [reproducibility]: in particular, the exact contents of the database seemed to depend on the order in which files were scanned when building it. The reporter proposed solving this by processing files in sorted order, but I wasn t keen on that approach: firstly because it would mean we could no longer process files in an order that makes it more efficient to read them all from disk (still valuable on rotational disks), but mostly because the differences seemed to point to other bugs.
Colin goes on to describe his approach to solving the problem, including fixing various fits of internal caching, and he ends his post with None of this is particularly glamorous work, but it paid off .
Vagrant Cascadian announced on our mailing list another online sprint to help clear the huge backlog of reproducible builds patches submitted by performing NMUs (Non-Maintainer Uploads). The first such sprint took place on September 22nd, but another was held on October 6th, and another small one on October 20th. This resulted in the following progress:
41 reviews of Debian packages were added, 62 were updated and 12 were removed this month adding to our knowledge about identified issues. A number of issue types were updated too. [1][ ]
Lastly, Luca Boccassi submitted a patch to debhelper, a set of tools used in the packaging of the majority of Debian packages. The patch addressed an issue in the dh_installsysusers utility so that the postinst post-installation script that debhelper generates the same data regardless of the underlying filesystem ordering.

Other distributions F-Droid is a community-run app store that provides free software applications for Android phones. This month, F-Droid changed their documentation and guidance to now explicitly encourage RB for new apps [ ][ ], and FC Stegerman created an extremely in-depth issue on GitLab concerning the APK signing block. You can read more about F-Droid s approach to reproducibility in our July 2022 interview with Hans-Christoph Steiner of the F-Droid Project. In openSUSE, Bernhard M. Wiedemann published his usual openSUSE monthly report.

Upstream patches The Reproducible Builds project detects, dissects and attempts to fix as many currently-unreproducible packages as possible. We endeavour to send all of our patches upstream where appropriate. This month, we wrote a large number of such patches, including:

diffoscope diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility. Not only can it locate and diagnose reproducibility issues, it can provide human-readable diffs from many kinds of binary formats. This month, Chris Lamb prepared and uploaded versions 224 and 225 to Debian:
  • Add support for comparing the text content of HTML files using html2text. [ ]
  • Add support for detecting ordering-only differences in XML files. [ ]
  • Fix an issue with detecting ordering differences. [ ]
  • Use the capitalised version of Ordering consistently everywhere in output. [ ]
  • Add support for displaying font metadata using ttx(1) from the fonttools suite. [ ]
  • Testsuite improvements:
    • Temporarily allow the stable-po pipeline to fail in the CI. [ ]
    • Rename the order1.diff test fixture to json_expected_ordering_diff. [ ]
    • Tidy the JSON tests. [ ]
    • Use assert_diff over get_data and an manual assert within the XML tests. [ ]
    • Drop the ALLOWED_TEST_FILES test; it was mostly just annoying. [ ]
    • Tidy the tests/test_source.py file. [ ]
Chris Lamb also added a link to diffoscope s OpenBSD packaging on the diffoscope.org homepage [ ] and Mattia Rizzolo fix an test failure that was occurring under with LLVM 15 [ ].

Testing framework The Reproducible Builds project operates a comprehensive testing framework at tests.reproducible-builds.org in order to check packages and other artifacts for reproducibility. In October, the following changes were made by Holger Levsen:
  • Run the logparse tool to analyse results on the Debian Edu build logs. [ ]
  • Install btop(1) on all nodes running Debian. [ ]
  • Switch Arch Linux from using SHA1 to SHA256. [ ]
  • When checking Debian debstrap jobs, correctly log the tool usage. [ ]
  • Cleanup more task-related temporary directory names when testing Debian packages. [ ][ ]
  • Use the cdebootstrap-static binary for the 2nd runs of the cdebootstrap tests. [ ]
  • Drop a workaround when testing OpenWrt and coreboot as the issue in diffoscope has now been fixed. [ ]
  • Turn on an rm(1) warning into an info -level message. [ ]
  • Special case the osuosl168 node for running Debian bookworm already. [ ][ ]
  • Use the new non-free-firmware suite on the o168 node. [ ]
In addition, Mattia Rizzolo made the following changes:
  • Ensure that 2nd build has a merged /usr. [ ]
  • Only reconfigure the usrmerge package on Debian bookworm and above. [ ]
  • Fix bc(1) syntax in the computation of the percentage of unreproducible packages in the dashboard. [ ][ ][ ]
  • In the index_suite_ pages, order the package status to be the same order of the menu. [ ]
  • Pass the --distribution parameter to the pbuilder utility. [ ]
Finally, Roland Clobus continued his work on testing Live Debian images. In particular, he extended the maintenance script to warn when workspace directories cannot be deleted. [ ]
If you are interested in contributing to the Reproducible Builds project, please visit our Contribute page on our website. However, you can get in touch with us via:

Enrico Zini: Sharing argparse arguments with subcommands

argparse subcommands are great, but they have a quirk in which options are only available right after the subcommand that define them. So, if you for example add the --verbose / -v argument to your main parser, and you have subcommands, you need to give the -v option before the subcommand name. For example, given this script:
#!/usr/bin/python3
import argparse
parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(description="test")
parser.add_argument("-v", "--verbose", action="store_true")
subparsers = parser.add_subparsers(dest="handler", required=True)
subparsers.add_parser("test")
args = parser.parse_args()
print(args.verbose)
You get this behaviour:
$ ./mycmd test
False
$ ./mycmd -v test
True
$ ./mycmd test -v
usage: mycmd [-h] [-v]  test  ...
mycmd: error: unrecognized arguments: -v
This sometimes makes sense, and many other times it's really annoying, since the user has to remember at which level an option was defined. Last night some pieces clicked in my head, and I created a not-too-dirty ArgumentParser subclass that adds a shared option to arguments, that propagates them to subparsers:
#!/usr/bin/python3
from hacks import argparse
parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(description="test")
parser.add_argument("-v", "--verbose", action="store_true", shared=True)
subparsers = parser.add_subparsers(dest="handler", required=True)
subparsers.add_parser("test")
args = parser.parse_args()
print(args.verbose)
And finally, -v can be given at all levels:
$ ./mycmd test
False
$ ./mycmd -v test
True
$ ./mycmd test -v
True
It even works recursively, forwarding arguments to sub-subparsers, but at the moment it can only do it for store_true and store kind of arguments.

10 November 2022

Shirish Agarwal: The Road to Gandolfo, Webforms, Hearing Loss info & Mum s Birthday.

The Road to Gandolfo I think I had read this book almost 10-12 years back and somehow ended up reading it up again. Apparently, he had put this fiction, story, book under some other pen name earlier. It is possible that I might have read it under that name and hence forgotten all about it. This book/story is full of innuendo, irony, sarcasm and basically the thrill of life. There are two main characters in the book, the first is General Mackenzie who has spent almost 3 to 4 decades being a spy/a counterintelligence expert in the Queen s service. And while he outclasses them all even at the ripe age of 50, he is thrown out under the pretext of conduct unbecoming of an officer. The other main character is Sam Devereaux. This gentleman is an army lawyer and is basically counting the days when he completes his tour of duty as a military lawyer and start his corporate civil law with somebody he knows. It is much to his dismay that while under a week is left for his tour of duty to be left over he is summoned to try and extradite General MacKenzie who has been put on house arrest. Apparently, in China there was a sculpture of a great Chinese gentleman in the nude. For reasons unknown or rather not being shared herein, he basically breaks part of the sculpture. This of course, enrages the Chinese and they call it a diplomatic accident and try to put the General into house arrest. Unfortunately for both the General and his captors, he decides to escape/go for it. While he does succeed entering the American embassy, he finds himself to be person non-grata and is thrown back outside where the Chinese recapture him. This is where the Embassy & the Govt. decide it would be better if somehow the General could be removed from China permanently so he doesn t cause any further diplomatic accidents. In order to do that Sam s services are bought. Now in order to understand the General, Sam learns that he has 4 ex-wives. He promptly goes and meet them to understand why the general behaved as he did. He apparently also peed on the American flag. To his surprise, all the four ex-wives are still very much in with the general. During the course of interviewing the ladies he is seduced by them and also gives names to their chests in order to differentiate between each one of them. Later he is seduced by the eldest of the four wives and they spend the evening together. Next day Sam meets and is promptly manhandled by the general and the diplomatic papers are seen by the general. After meeting the general and the Chinese counterpart, they quickly agree to extradite him as they do not know how to keep the general control. During his stay of house arrest, the General reads one of the communist rags as he puts it and gets the idea to kidnap the pope and that forms the basis of the story. Castel Gandolfo seems to be a real place which is in Italy and is apparently is the papal residence where s/he goes to reside every winter. The book is written in 1976 hence in the book, the General decides to form a corporation for which he would raise funds in order to make the kidnapping. The amount in 1976 was 40 million dollars and it was a big sum, to be with times, let s think of say 40 billion dollars so gets the scale of things. Now while a part of me wants to tell the rest of the story, the story isn t really mine to tell. Read The Road to Gandolfo for the rest. While I can t guarantee you much, I can say you might find yourself constantly amused by the antics of both the General, Sam and the General s ex-wives. There are also a few minute characters that you will meet on the way, hope you discover them and enjoy it immensely as I have. One thing I have to say, while I was reading it, I very much got vibes of Not a penny more, not a penny less by Jeffrey Archer. As shared before, lots of twists and turns, enjoy the ride

Webforms Webforms are nothing but a form you fill on the web or www. Webforms are and were a thing from early 90s to today. I was supposed to register for https://www.swavlambancard.gov.in/ almost a month back but procrastinated till few couple of days back and with good reason. I was hoping one of my good friends would help me but they had their own thing. So finally, I tried to fill the form few days back. It took me almost 30 odd attempts to finally fill the form and was given an enrollment number. Why it took me 30 odd attempts and with what should tell you the reason
  1. I felt like I was filling the form from 1990 s rather than today because
  2. The form doesn t know either its state or saves data during a session This lesson has been learned a long time back by almost all service providers except Govt. of India. Both the browsers on a mobile as well as desktop can save data during session. If you don t know what I mean by that go to about:preferences#privacy in Firefox and look at Manage Data. There you will find most sites do put some data along with cookies arguably to help make your web experience better. Chrome or Chromium has the same thing perhaps shared under a different name but its the same thing. But that is not all.
  3. None of the fields have any verification. The form is of 3 pages. The verification at the end of the document doesn t tell you what is wrong and what needs to be corrected. Really think on this, I am on a 24 LED monitor and I m filling the form and I had to do it at least 20-30 times before it was accepted. And guess what, I have no clue even about why it was selected. The same data, the same everything and after the nth time it accepted. Now if I am facing such a problem when I have some idea how technology works somewhat how are people who are trying to fill this form on 6 mobiles supposed to do? And many of them not at all clued in technology as I am.
I could go on outlining many of the issues that I faced but they are all similar in many ways the problems faced while filling the NEW Income Tax forms. Of course the New Income Tax portal is a whole ball-game in itself as it gives new errors every time instead of solving them. Most C.A. s have turned to third-party xml tools that enable you to upload xml compliant data to the New Income tax portal but this is for businesses and those who can afford it. Again, even that is in a sort of messy state but that is a whole another tale altogether. One of the reasons to my mind why the forms are designed the way they are so that people go to specific cybercafes or get individual people to fill and upload it and make more money. I was told to go to a specific cybercafe and meet a certain individual and he asked for INR 500/- to do the work. While I don t have financial problems, I was more worried about my data going into the wrong hands. But I can see a very steady way to make money without doing much hard work.

Hearing Loss info. Now because I had been both to Kamla Nehru Hospital as well as Sasoon and especially the deaf department, I saw many kids with half-formed ears. I had asked the doctors and they had shared this is due to malnutrition. We do know that women during pregnancies need more calories, more everything as they are eating for two bodies, not one. And this is large-scale, apparently more than 5 percent of population have children like this. And this number was of 2014, what is it today nobody knows. I also came to know that at least for some people like me, due to Covid they became deaf. I had asked the doctors if they knew of people who had become deaf due to Covid. They basically replied in the negative as they don t have the resources to monitor the same. The Govt. has an idea of health ID but just like Aadhar has to many serious sinister implications. Somebody had shared with me a long time back that in India systems work inspite of Govt. machinery rather than because of it. Meaning that the Government itself ties itself into several knots and then people have to be creative to try and figure a way out to help people. I found another issue while dealing with them. Apparently, even though I have 60% hearing loss I would be given a certificate of 40% hearing loss and they call it Temporary Progressive Loss. I saw almost all the people who had come, many of them having far severe defencies than me getting the same/similar certificate. All of them got Temporary Progressive. Some of the cases were real puzzling. For e.g. I met another Agarwal who had a severe accident few months ago and there is some kind of paralysis & bone issue. The doctors have given up but even that gentleman was given Temporary Progressive. From what little I could understand, the idea is that over period if there is possibility of things becoming better then it should be given. Another gentleman suffered a case of dwarfism. Even he was given the same certificate. Think there have been orders from above so that people even having difficulties are not helped. Another point if you look in a macro sense, it presents a somewhat rosy picture. If someone were to debunk the Govt. data either from India or abroad then from GOI perspective they have an agenda even though the people who are suffering are our brothers and sisters  And all of this is because I can read, write, articulate. Perhaps many of them may not even have a voice or a platform. Even to get this temporary progressive disability certificate there is more than 4 months of running from one place to the other, 4 months of culmination of work. This I can share and tell from my experience, who knows how much else others might have suffered for the same. In my case a review will happen after 5 years, in most other cases they have given only 1 year. Of course, this does justify people s jobs and perhaps partly it may be due to that. Such are times where I really miss that I am unable to hear otherwise could have fleshed out lot more other people s sufferings. And just so people know/understand this is happening in the heart of the city whose population easily exceeds 6 million plus and is supposed to be a progressive city. I do appreciate and understand the difficulties that the doctors are placed under.

Mum s Birthday & Social Engineering. While I don t want to get into details, in the last couple of weeks mum s birthday was there and that had totally escaped me. I have been trying to disassociate myself from her and at times it s hard and then you don t remember and somebody makes you remember. So, on one hand guilty, and the other do not know what to do. If she were alive I would have bought a piece of cake or something. Didn t feel like it, hence donated some money to the local aged home. This way at least I hope they have some semblance of peace. All of them are of her similar age group. The other thing that I began to observe in the earnest, fake identities have become the norm. Many people took elon musk s potrait using their own names in the handles, but even then Elon Free Speech Musk banned them. So much for free speech. Then I saw quite a few handles that have cute women as their profile picture but they are good at social engineering. This has started only a couple of weeks back and have seen quite a few handles leaving Twitter and joining Mastodon. Also, have been hearing that many admins of Mastodon pods are unable to get on top of this. Also, lot of people complaining as it isn t user-friendly UI as twitter is. Do they not realize that Twitter has its own IP and any competing network can t copy or infringe on their product. Otherwise, they will be sued like how Ford was & potentially win. I am not really gonna talk much about it as the blog post has become quite long and that needs its own post to do any sort of justice to it. Till later people

8 November 2022

Antoine Beaupr : Using the bell as modern notification

Computer terminals have traditionally had an actual bell that would ring when a certain control character (the bell character, typically control-g or \a in an C escape sequence) would come in the input stream. That feature actually predates computers altogether, and was present in Baudot code, "an early character encoding for telegraphy invented by mile Baudot in the 1870s", itself superseding Morse code. Modern terminal emulators have, of course, kept that feature: if you run this command in a terminal right now:
printf '\a'
... you may hear some annoying beep. Or not. It actually depends on a lot of factors, including which terminal emulator you're using, how it's configured, whether you have headphones on, or speakers connected, or, if you're really old school, a PC speaker, even. Typically, I have this theory that it does the exact opposite of what you want, regardless of whether you have configured it or not. That is, if you want it to make noises, it won't, and if you want it to stay silent, it will make brutal, annoying noises in moments you would the least expect. I suspect this is a law in computer science, but I'm too lazy to come up with a formal definition. Yet something can be done with this.

Making the bell useful and silent Many terminal emulators have this feature where they can silence the bell somehow. It can be turned into a "visual bell" which basically flashes the screen when a bell arrives. Or that can also be disabled and the bell is just completely ignored. What I did instead is turn the bell into a "urgency hint" (part of the ICCCM standard. In xterm, this is done with this X resource entry (typically in ~/.Xresources):
XTerm*bellIsUrgent:  true
XTerm*visualBell: false
Interestingly, this doesn't clearly say "bell is muted", but it's effectively what it does. Or maybe it works because I have muted "System Sounds" in Pulseaudio. Who knows. I do have this in my startup scripts though:
xset b off
... which, according to the xset(1) manpage, means
If the dash or 'off' are given, the bell will be turned off.
Interestingly, you have the option of setting the bell "volume", "pitch, in hertz, and [...] duration in milliseconds. Note that not all hardware can vary the bell characteristics." In any case, I think that's the magic trick to turn the darn thing off. Now this should send urgency hints to your window manager:
sleep 3 ; printf '\a'
Try it: run the command, switch to another desktop, then wait 3 seconds. You should see the previous desktop show up in red or something. In the i3 window manager I am currently using, this is the default, although I did set the colors (client.urgent and urgent_workspace in bar.colors). Other window managers or desktop environments may require different configurations.

Sending a bell... Now that, on itself, will only be useful when something sets a bell. One place I had found a trick like this, long ago, is this post (dead link, archived) which has various instructions for different tools. I'll recopy some of them here since the original site is dead, but credit goes to the Netbuz blog. (Note that the blog post also features an Awesome WM configuration for urgency hints.)

Mutt
set beep=yes
set beep_new=yes

Irssi
/set beep_when_window_active ON
/set beep_when_away ON
/set beep_msg_level MSGS DCC DCCMSGS HILIGHT
It was also recommending this setting, but it appears to be deprecated and gives a warning in modern irssi versions:
/set bell_beeps ON

GNU Screen This is an important piece of the puzzle, because by default, terminal multiplexers have their own opinion of what to do with the bell as well:
# disabled: we want to propagate bell to clients, which should handle
# it in their own terminal settings. this  vbell off  is also the
# upstream and tmux's default
#
# see also: http://netbuz.org/blog/2011/11/x-bells-and-urgency-hints/
vbell off
# propagate bell from other windows up to the terminal emulator as well
bell_msg 'Bell in window %n^G'
The bell_msg bit is an extra from me: it uses the bell message that pops up when screen detects a bell in another window to resend the bell control character up to the running terminal. This makes it so a bell in any multiplexed window will also propagate to the parent terminal, which is not the default.

Tmux Untested, but that is apparently how you do it:
# listen to alerts from all windows
set -g bell-action any
# notice bell in windows
set -g monitor-bell on
# only propagate bell, don't warn user, as it hangs tmux for a second
set -g visual-bell off
# send bell *and* notify when activity (if monitor-activity)
set -g visual-activity both
Note that this config goes beyond what we have in GNU screen in that inactivity or activity will trigger a bell as well. This might be useful for cases where you don't have the prompt hack (below) but it could also very well be very noisy. It will only generate noise when monitor-activity is enabled though.

bash and shell prompts Now the icing on cake is to actually send the bell when a command completes. This is what I use this for the most, actually. I was previously using undistract-me for this, actually. That was nice: it would send me a nice desktop notification when a command was running more than a certain amount of time, and if the window was unfocused. But configuring this was a nightmare: because it uses a complex PROMPT_COMMAND in bash, it would conflict with my (already existing and way too) complex bash prompt, and lead to odd behaviors. It would also not work for remote commands, of course, as it wouldn't have access to my local D-BUS to send notifications (thankfully!). So instead, what I do now is systematically print a bell whenever a command terminates, in all my shells. I have this in my /root/.bashrc on all my servers, deployed in Puppet:
PROMPT_COMMAND='printf "\a"'
Or you can just put it directly in the shell prompt, with something like:
PS1='\[\a\]'"$PS1"
(I have the equivalent in my own .bashrc, although that thing is much more complex, featuring multi-command pipeline exit status, colors, terminal title setting, and more, which should probably warrant its own blog post.) This sounds a little bonkers and really noisy, but remember that I turned off the audible bell. And urgency hints are going to show up only if the window is unfocused. So it's actually really nice and not really distracting. Or, to reuse the undistract-me concept: it allows me to not lose focus too much when I'm waiting for a long process to complete. That idea actually came from ahf, so kudos to him on that nice hack.

Caveats That is not setup on all the machines I administer for work, that said. I'm afraid that would be too disruptive for people who do not have that configuration. This implies that I don't get notifications for commands that run for a long time on remote servers, most of the time. That said, I could simply run a command with a trailing printf '\a' to get a notification. This might not work in Wayland, your window manager, your desktop environment, your Linux console, or your telegraphy session.

2 November 2022

Antoine Beaupr : A typical yak shaving session

Someone recently asked what yak shaving means and, because I am a professional at this pastime, I figured I would share my most recent excursion in the field. As a reminder, "yak shaving" describes a (anti?) pattern by which you engage in more and more (possibly useless) tasks that lead you further and further away from your original objective. The path I took through the yak heard is this:
  1. i wondered if i can use my home network to experiment with another VPN software (e.g. Wireguard instead of IPsec)
  2. then i tried Tailscale because I heard good things about it, and they have an interesting approach to opensource
  3. I wasn't happy with that, so i tried an IPv6 tunnel
  4. that broke after a few minutes, so i went on to try deploying Wireguard with Puppet), which involved reviewing about 4 different Puppet modules
  5. while I was there, I might as well share those findings with the community, so I publish that as a blog post
  6. someone else mentions that Nebula (from Slack) is a thing, but after investigation, it's not well packaged in Debian, so didn't test it, but add it to the blog post
  7. now that I found the right Puppet module, I tried to deploy it with Puppet's g10k, which requires me to input a checksum
  8. I got lazy and figured if i would put the checksum wrong, it would tell me what the right checksum was, but it didn't: instead it silently succeeded instead of failing, which seemed really bad
  9. then I looked upstream for such a bug report and saw that the Debian package was many versions behind and, because I'm on the Golang packaging team, I figured I would just do the upgrade myself
  10. then there were problems with the Debian-specific patch trying to disable network tests, so i rewrote the patch
  11. ... but ended up realizing basically all tests require the network, so I just disabled the build-time tests
  12. ... but then tried to readd it to Debian CI instead, which didn't work
At that point, I had given up, after shaving a 12th yak. Thankfully, a kind soul provided a working test suite and I was able to roll back all those parenthesis and:
  1. test the g10k package and confirm it works (and checks the checksums)
  2. upload the package to the Debian archive
  3. deploy the package in my Puppet manifests
  4. deploy a first tunnel
You'll also notice the work is not complete at all. I still need to: Also notice the 8th yak, above, which might be a security issue. I wasn't able to confirm it, because g10k does some pretty aggressive caching, and I could "reproduce" it in the sense that the checksum wasn't checked if it exists in the cache. So it might have just been that I had actually already deployed the module before adding the checksum... but I still had that distressing sentiment:
<anarcat> there's a huge yak breathing down my neck with "CVE" written in large red letters on the side
<anarcat> i'm trying to ignore it, it stinks like hell
Hopefully it's nothing to worry about. Right? Riiight. Oh. And obviously, writing this blog post is the sugar on top, the one last yak that is self-documented here.

Robert McQueen: Many thanks & good luck to Neil McGovern

As President of the GNOME Foundation, I wanted to post a quick note to pass on the thanks from the Board, the Foundation staff team and membership to our outgoing Executive Director, Neil McGovern. I had the pleasure of passing on GNOME s thanks in person at the Casa Bariachi this summer at GUADEC in Guadelajara, at the most exellent mariachi celebration of GNOME s 25th Anniversary.  Kindly they stopped the music and handed me the microphone for the whole place, although I think many of the other guests celebrating their own birthdays were less excited about Neil s tenure as Executive Director and the Free and Open Source desktop in general.

Neil s 6-month handover period came to an end last month and he handed over the reins to myself and Thibault Martin on the Executive Committee, and Director of Operations Rosanna Yuen has stepped up to act as Chief of Staff and interface between the Board and the staff team for the time being. Our recruitment is ongoing for a new Executive Director although the search is a little behind schedule (mostly down to me!), and we re hugely grateful to a few volunteers who have joined our search committee to help us source, screen and interview applicants.

I have really enjoyed working closely with Neil in my time on the GNOME board, and we are hugely grateful for his contributions and achievements over the past 5 years which I posted about earlier in the year. Neil is this month starting a new role as the Executive Director of Ruby Central. Our very best wishes from the GNOME community and good luck with your new role. See you soon! (also posted to Discourse if you wish to add any thanks or comments of your own)

28 October 2022

Antoine Beaupr : Debating VPN options

In my home lab(s), I have a handful of machines spread around a few points of presence, with mostly residential/commercial cable/DSL uplinks, which means, generally, NAT. This makes monitoring those devices kind of impossible. While I do punch holes for SSH, using jump hosts gets old quick, so I'm considering adding a virtual private network (a "VPN", not a VPN service) so that all machines can be reachable from everywhere. I see three ways this can work:
  1. a home-made Wireguard VPN, deployed with Puppet
  2. a Wireguard VPN overlay, with Tailscale or equivalent
  3. IPv6, native or with tunnels
So which one will it be?

Wireguard Puppet modules As is (unfortunately) typical with Puppet, I found multiple different modules to talk with Wireguard.
module score downloads release stars watch forks license docs contrib issue PR notes
halyard 3.1 1,807 2022-10-14 0 0 0 MIT no requires firewall and Configvault_Write modules?
voxpupuli 5.0 4,201 2022-10-01 2 23 7 AGPLv3 good 1/9 1/4 1/61 optionnally configures ferm, uses systemd-networkd, recommends systemd module with manage_systemd to true, purges unknown keys
abaranov 4.7 17,017 2021-08-20 9 3 38 MIT okay 1/17 4/7 4/28 requires pre-generated private keys
arrnorets 3.1 16,646 2020-12-28 1 2 1 Apache-2 okay 1 0 0 requires pre-generated private keys?
The voxpupuli module seems to be the most promising. The abaranov module is more popular and has more contributors, but it has more open issues and PRs. More critically, the voxpupuli module was written after the abaranov author didn't respond to a PR from the voxpupuli author trying to add more automation (namely private key management). It looks like setting up a wireguard network would be as simple as this on node A:
wireguard::interface   'wg0':
  source_addresses => ['2003:4f8:c17:4cf::1', '149.9.255.4'],
  public_key       => $facts['wireguard_pubkeys']['nodeB'],
  endpoint         => 'nodeB.example.com:53668',
  addresses        => [ 'Address' => '192.168.123.6/30', , 'Address' => 'fe80::beef:1/64' ,],
 
This configuration come from this pull request I sent to the module to document how to use that fact. Note that the addresses used here are examples that shouldn't be reused and do not confirm to RFC5737 ("IPv4 Address Blocks Reserved for Documentation", 192.0.2.0/24 (TEST-NET-1), 198.51.100.0/24 (TEST-NET-2), and 203.0.113.0/24 (TEST-NET-3)) or RFC3849 ("IPv6 Address Prefix Reserved for Documentation", 2001:DB8::/32), but that's another story. (To avoid boostrapping problems, the resubmit-facts configuration could be used so that other nodes facts are more immediately available.) One problem with the above approach is that you explicitly need to take care of routing, network topology, and addressing. This can get complicated quickly, especially if you have lots of devices, behind NAT, in multiple locations (which is basically my life at home, unfortunately). Concretely, basic Wireguard only support one peer behind NAT. There are some workarounds for this, but they generally imply a relay server of some sort, or some custom registry, it's kind of a mess. And this is where overlay networks like Tailscale come in.

Tailscale Tailscale is basically designed to deal with this problem. It's not fully opensource, but pretty close, and they have an interesting philosophy behind that. The client is opensource, and there is an opensource version of the server side, called headscale. They have recently (late 2022) hired the main headscale developer while promising to keep supporting it, which is pretty amazing. Tailscale provides an overlay network based on Wireguard, where each peer basically has a peer-to-peer encrypted connexion, with automatic key rotation. They also ship a multitude of applications and features on top of that like file sharing, keyless SSH access, and so on. The authentication layer is based on an existing SSO provider, you don't just register with Tailscale with new account, you login with Google, Microsoft, or GitHub (which, really, is still Microsoft). The Headscale server ships with many features out of that:
  • Full "base" support of Tailscale's features
  • Configurable DNS
    • Split DNS
    • MagicDNS (each user gets a name)
  • Node registration
    • Single-Sign-On (via Open ID Connect)
    • Pre authenticated key
  • Taildrop (File Sharing)
  • Access control lists
  • Support for multiple IP ranges in the tailnet
  • Dual stack (IPv4 and IPv6)
  • Routing advertising (including exit nodes)
  • Ephemeral nodes
  • Embedded DERP server (AKA NAT-to-NAT traversal)
Neither project (client or server) is in Debian (RFP 972439 for the client, none filed yet for the server), which makes deploying this for my use case rather problematic. Their install instructions are basically a curl bash but they also provide packages for various platforms. Their Debian install instructions are surprisingly good, and check most of the third party checklist we're trying to establish. (It's missing a pin.) There's also a Puppet module for tailscale, naturally. What I find a little disturbing with Tailscale is that you not only need to trust Tailscale with authorizing your devices, you also basically delegate that trust also to the SSO provider. So, in my case, GitHub (or anyone who compromises my account there) can penetrate the VPN. A little scary. Tailscale is also kind of an "all or nothing" thing. They have MagicDNS, file transfers, all sorts of things, but those things require you to hook up your resolver with Tailscale. In fact, Tailscale kind of assumes you will use their nameservers, and have suffered great lengths to figure out how to do that. And naturally, here, it doesn't seem to work reliably; my resolv.conf somehow gets replaced and the magic resolution of the ts.net domain fails. (I wonder why we can't opt in to just publicly resolve the ts.net domain. I don't care if someone can enumerate the private IP addreses or machines in use in my VPN, at least I don't care as much as fighting with resolv.conf everywhere.) Because I mostly have access to the routers on the networks I'm on, I don't think I'll be using tailscale in the long term. But it's pretty impressive stuff: in the time it took me to even review the Puppet modules to configure Wireguard (which is what I'll probably end up doing), I was up and running with Tailscale (but with a broken DNS, naturally). (And yes, basic Wireguard won't bring me DNS either, but at least I won't have to trust Tailscale's Debian packages, and Tailscale, and Microsoft, and GitHub with this thing.)

IPv6 IPv6 is actually what is supposed to solve this. Not NAT port forwarding crap, just real IPs everywhere. The problem is: even though IPv6 adoption is still growing, it's kind of reaching a plateau at around 40% world-wide, with Canada lagging behind at 34%. It doesn't help that major ISPs in Canada (e.g. Bell Canada, Videotron) don't care at all about IPv6 (e.g. Videotron in beta since 2011). So we can't rely on those companies to do the right thing here. The typical solution here is often to use a tunnel like HE's tunnelbroker.net. It's kind of tricky to configure, but once it's done, it works. You get end-to-end connectivity as long as everyone on the network is on IPv6. And that's really where the problem lies here; the second one of your nodes can't setup such a tunnel, you're kind of stuck and that tool completely breaks down. IPv6 tunnels also don't give you the kind of security a VPN provides as well, naturally. The other downside of a tunnel is you don't really get peer-to-peer connectivity: you go through the tunnel. So you can expect higher latencies and possibly lower bandwidth as well. Also, HE.net doesn't currently charge for this service (and they've been doing this for a long time), but this could change in the future (just like Tailscale, that said). Concretely, the latency difference is rather minimal, Google:
--- ipv6.l.google.com ping statistics ---
10 packets transmitted, 10 received, 0,00% packet loss, time 136,8ms
RTT[ms]: min = 13, median = 14, p(90) = 14, max = 15
--- google.com ping statistics ---
10 packets transmitted, 10 received, 0,00% packet loss, time 136,0ms
RTT[ms]: min = 13, median = 13, p(90) = 14, max = 14
In the case of GitHub, latency is actually lower, interestingly:
--- ipv6.github.com ping statistics ---
10 packets transmitted, 10 received, 0,00% packet loss, time 134,6ms
RTT[ms]: min = 13, median = 13, p(90) = 14, max = 14
--- github.com ping statistics ---
10 packets transmitted, 10 received, 0,00% packet loss, time 293,1ms
RTT[ms]: min = 29, median = 29, p(90) = 29, max = 30
That is because HE.net peers directly with my ISP and Fastly (which is behind GitHub.com's IPv6, apparently?), so it's only 6 hops away. While over IPv4, the ping goes over New York, before landing AWS's Ashburn, Virginia datacenters, for a whopping 13 hops... I managed setup a HE.net tunnel at home, because I also need IPv6 for other reasons (namely debugging at work). My first attempt at setting this up in the office failed, but now that I found the openwrt.org guide, it worked... for a while, and I was able to produce the above, encouraging, mini benchmarks. Unfortunately, a few minutes later, IPv6 just went down again. And the problem with that is that many programs (and especially OpenSSH) do not respect the Happy Eyeballs protocol (RFC 8305), which means various mysterious "hangs" at random times on random applications. It's kind of a terrible user experience, on top of breaking the one thing it's supposed to do, of course, which is to give me transparent access to all the nodes I maintain. Even worse, it would still be a problem for other remote nodes I might setup where I might not have acess to the router to setup the tunnel. It's also not absolutely clear what happens if you setup the same tunnel in two places... Presumably, something is smart enough to distribute only a part of the /48 block selectively, but I don't really feel like going that far, considering how flaky the setup is already.

Other options If this post sounds a little biased towards IPv6 and Wireguard, it's because it is. I would like everyone to migrate to IPv6 already, and Wireguard seems like a simple and sound system. I'm aware of many other options to make VPNs. So before anyone jumps in and says "but what about...", do know that I have personnally experimented with:
  • tinc: nice, automatic meshing, used for the Montreal mesh, serious design flaws in the crypto that make it generally unsafe to use; supposedly, v1.1 (or 2.0?) will fix this, but that's been promised for over a decade by now
  • ipsec, specifically strongswan: hard to configure (especially configure correctly!), harder even to debug, otherwise really nice because transparent (e.g. no need for special subnets), used at work, but also considering a replacement there because it's a major barrier to entry to train new staff
  • OpenVPN: mostly used as a client for [VPN service][]s like Riseup VPN or Mullvad, mostly relevant for client-server configurations, not really peer-to-peer, shared secrets or TLS, kind of an hassle to maintain, see also SoftEther for an alternative implementation
All of those solutions have significant problems and I do not wish to use any of those for this project. Also note that Tailscale is only one of many projects laid over Wireguard to do that kind of thing, see this LWN review for others (basically NetbBird, Firezone, and Netmaker).

Future work Those are options that came up after writing this post, and might warrant further examination in the future.
  • Meshbird, a "distributed private networking" with little information about how it actually works other than "encrypted with strong AES-256"
  • Nebula, "A scalable overlay networking tool with a focus on performance, simplicity and security", written by Slack people to replace IPsec, docs, runs as an overlay for Slack's 50k node network, only packaged in Debian experimental, lagging behind upstream (1.4.0, from May 2021 vs upstream's 1.6.1 from September 2022), requires a central CA, Golang, I'm in "wait and see" mode for now
  • n2n: "layer two VPN", seems packaged in Debian but inactive
  • ouroboros: "peer-to-peer packet network prototype", sounds and seems complicated
  • QuickTUN is interesting because it's just a small wrapper around NaCL, and it's in Debian... but maybe too obscure for my own good
  • unetd: Wireguard-based full mesh networking from OpenWRT, not in Debian
  • vpncloud: "high performance peer-to-peer mesh VPN over UDP supporting strong encryption, NAT traversal and a simple configuration", sounds interesting, not in Debian
  • Yggdrasil: actually a pretty good match for my use case, but I didn't think of it when starting the experiments here; packaged in Debian, with the Golang version planned, Puppet module; major caveat: nodes exposed publicly inside the global mesh unless configured otherwise (firewall suggested), requires port forwards, alpha status

Conclusion Right now, I'm going to deploy Wireguard tunnels with Puppet. It seems like kind of a pain in the back, but it's something I will be able to reuse for work, possibly completely replacing strongswan. I have another Puppet module for IPsec which I was planning to publish, but now I'm thinking I should just abort that and replace everything with Wireguard, assuming we still need VPNs at work in the future. (I have a number of reasons to believe we might not need any in the near future anyways...)

Shirish Agarwal: Shantaram, The Pyramid, Japan s Hikikomori & Backpack

Shantaram I know I have been quite behind in review of books but then that s life. First up is actually not as much as a shocker but somewhat of a pleasant surprise. So, a bit of background before I share the news. If you have been living under a rock, then about 10-12 years ago a book called Shantaram was released. While the book is said to have been released in 2003/4 I got it in my hand around 2008/09 or somewhere around that. The book is like a good meal, a buffet. To share the synopsis, Lin a 20 something Australian guy gets involved with a girl, she encourages him to get into heroin, he becomes a heroin user. And drugs, especially hard drugs need constant replenishment, it is a chemical thing. So, to fund those cravings, he starts to steal, rising to rob a bank and while getting away shoots a cop who becomes dead. Now either he surrenders or is caught is unclear, but he is tortured in the jail. So one day, he escapes from prison, lands up at home of somebody who owes him a favor, gets some money, gets a fake passport and lands up in Mumbai/Bombay as it was then known. This is from where the actual story starts. And how a 6 foot something Australian guy relying on his street smartness and know how the transformation happens from Lin to Shantaram. Now what I have shared is perhaps just 5% of the synopsis, as shared the real story starts here. Now the good news, last week 4 episodes of Shantaram were screened by Apple TV. Interestingly, I have seen quite a number people turning up to buy or get this book and also sharing it on Goodreads. Now there seems to have been some differences from the book to TV. Now I m relying on 10-12 year back memory but IIRC Khaderbhai, one of the main characters who sort of takes Lin/Shantaram under his wing is an Indian. In the series, he is a western or at least looks western/Middle Eastern to me. Also, they have tried to reproduce 1980s in Mumbai/Bombay but dunno how accurate they were  My impression of that city from couple of visits at that point in time where they were still more tongas (horse-ridden carriages), an occasional two wheelers and not many three wheelers. Although, it was one of the more turbulent times as lot of agitation for worker rights were happening around that time and a lot of industrial action. Later that led to lot of closure of manufacturing in Bombay and it became more commercial. It would be interesting to know whether they shot it in actual India or just made a set somewhere in Australia, where it possibly might have been shot. The chawl of the book needs a bit of arid land and Australia has lots of it. It is also interesting as this was a project that had who s who interested in it for a long time but somehow none of them was able to bring the project to fruition, the project seems to largely have an Australian cast as well as second generations of Indians growing in Australia. To take names, Amitabh Bacchan, Johnny Depp, Russel Crowe each of them wanted to make it into a feature film. In retrospect, it is good it was not into a movie, otherwise they would have to cut a lot of material and that perhaps wouldn t have been sufficient. Making it into a web series made sure they could have it in multiple seasons if people like it. There is a lot between now and 12 episodes to even guess till where it would leave you then. So, if you have not read the book and have some holidays coming up, can recommend it. The writing IIRC is easy and just flows. There is a bit of action but much more nuance in the book while in the web series they are naturally more about action. There is also quite a bit of philosophy between him and Kaderbhai and while the series touches upon it, it doesn t do justice but then again it is being commercially made. Read the book, see the series and share your thoughts on what you think. It is possible that the series might go up or down but am sharing from where I see it, may do another at the end of the season, depending on where they leave it and my impressions. Update A slight update from the last blog post. Seems Rishi Sunak seems would be made PM of UK. With Hunt as chancellor and Rishi Sunak, Austerity 2.0 seems complete. There have been numerous articles which share how austerity gives rises to fascism and vice-versa. History gives lot of lessons about the same. In Germany, when the economy was not good, it was all blamed on the Jews for number of years. This was the reason for rise of Hitler, and while it did go up by a bit, propaganda by him and his loyalists did the rest. And we know and have read about the Holocaust. Today quite a few Germans deny it or deny parts of it but that s how misinformation spreads. Also Hitler is looked now more as an aberration rather than something to do with the German soul. I am not gonna talk more as there is still lots to share and that actually perhaps requires its own blog post to do justice for the same.

The Pyramid by Henning Mankell I had actually wanted to review this book but then the bomb called Shantaram appeared and I had to post it above. I had read two-three books before it, but most of them were about multiple beheadings and serial killers. Enough to put anybody into depression. I do not know if modern crime needs to show crime and desperation of and to such a level. Why I and most loved and continue to love Sherlock Holmes as most stories were not about gross violence but rather a homage to the art of deduction, which pretty much seems to be missing in modern crime thrillers rather than grotesque stuff. In that, like a sort of fresh air I read/am reading the Pyramid by Henning Mankell. The book is about a character made by Monsieur Henning Mankell named Kurt Wallender. I am aware of the series called Wallender but haven t yet seen it. The book starts with Wallender as a beat cop around age 20 and on his first case. He is ambitious, wants to become a detective and has a narrow escape with death. I wouldn t go much into it as it basically gives you an idea of the character and how he thinks and what he does. He is more intuitive by nature and somewhat of a loner. Probably most detectives IRL are, dunno, have no clue. At least in the literary world it makes sense, in real world think there would be much irony for sure. This is speculation on my part, who knows. Back to the book though. The book has 5 stories a sort of prequel one could say but also not entirely true. The first case starts when he is a beat cop in 1969 and he is just a beat cop. It is a kind of a prequel and a kind of an anthology as he covers from the first case to the 1990s where he is ending his career sort of. Before I start sharing about the stories in the book, I found the foreword also quite interesting. It asks questions about the interplay of the role of welfare state and the Swedish democracy. Incidentally did watch couple of videos about a sort of mixed sort of political representation that happens in Sweden. It uses what is known as proportional representation. Ironically, Sweden made a turn to the far right this election season. The book was originally in Swedish and were translated to English by Ebba Segerberg and Laurie Thompson. While all the stories are interesting, would share the last three or at least ask the questions of intrigue. Of course, to answer them you would need to read the book  So the last three stories I found the most intriguing. The first one is titled Man on the Beach. Apparently, a gentleman goes to one of the beaches, a sort of lonely beach, hails a taxi and while returning suddenly dies. The Taxi driver showing good presence of mind takes it to hospital where the gentleman is declared dead on arrival. Unlike in India, he doesn t run away but goes to the cafeteria and waits there for the cops to arrive and take his statement. Now the man is in his early 40s and looks to be fit. Upon searching his pockets he is found to relatively well-off and later it turns out he owns a couple of shops. So then here are the questions ? What was the man doing on a beach, in summer that beach is somewhat popular but other times not so much, so what was he doing there? How did he die, was it a simple heart attack or something more? If he had been drugged or something then when and how? These and more questions can be answered by reading the story Man on the Beach . 2. The death of a photographer Apparently, Kurt lives in a small town where almost all the residents have been served one way or the other by the town photographer. The man was polite and had worked for something like 40 odd years before he is killed/murdered. Apparently, he is murdered late at night. So here come the questions a. The shop doesn t even stock any cameras and his cash box has cash. Further investigation reveals it is approximate to his average takeout for the day. So if it s not for cash, then what is the motive ? b. The body was discovered by his cleaning staff who has worked for almost 20 years, 3 days a week. She has her own set of keys to come and clean the office? Did she give the keys to someone, if yes why? c. Even after investigation, there is no scandal about the man, no other woman or any vices like gambling etc. that could rack up loans. Also, nobody seems to know him and yet take him for granted till he dies. The whole thing appears to be quite strange. Again, the answers lie in the book. 3. The Pyramid Kurt is sleeping one night when the telephone rings. The scene starts with a Piper Cherokee, a single piston aircraft flying low and dropping something somewhere or getting somebody from/on the coast of Sweden. It turns and after a while crashes. Kurt is called to investigate it. Turns out, the plane was supposed to be destroyed. On crash, both the pilot and the passenger are into pieces so only dental records can prove who they are. Same day or a day or two later, two seemingly ordinary somewhat elderly women, spinsters, by all accounts, live above the shop where they sell buttons and all kinds of sewing needs of the town. They seem middle-class. Later the charred bodies of the two sisters are found :(. So here come the questions a.Did the plane drop something or pick something somebody up ? The Cherokee is a small plane so any plane field or something it could have landed up or if a place was somehow marked then could be dropped or picked up without actually landing. b. The firefighter suspects arson started at multiple places with the use of petrol? The question is why would somebody wanna do that? The sisters don t seem to be wealthy and practically everybody has bought stuff from them. They weren t popular but weren t also unpopular. c. Are the two crimes connected or unconnected? If connected, then how? d. Most important question, why the title Pyramid is given to the story. Why does the author share the name Pyramid. Does he mean the same or the original thing? He could have named it triangle. Again, answers to all the above can be found in the book. One thing I also became very aware of during reading the book that it is difficult to understand people s behavior and what they do. And this is without even any criminality involved in. Let s say for e.g. I die in some mysterious circumstances, the possibility of the police finding my actions in last days would be limited and this is when I have hearing loss. And this probably is more to do with how our minds are wired. And most people I know are much more privacy conscious/aware than I am.

Japan s Hikikomori Japan has been a curious country. It was more or less a colonizer and somewhat of a feared power till it dragged the U.S. unnecessarily in World War 2. The result of the two atom bombs and the restitution meant that Japan had to build again from the ground up. It is also in a seismically unstable place as they have frequent earthquakes although the buildings are hardened/balanced to make sure that vibrations don t tear buildings apart. Had seen years ago on Natgeo a documentary that explains all that. Apart from that, Japan was helped by the Americans and there was good kinship between them till the 1980s till it signed the Plaza Accord which enhanced asset price bubbles that eventually burst. Something from which they are smarting even today. Japan has a constitutional monarchy. A somewhat history lesson or why it exists even today can be found here. Asset price bubbles of the 1980s, more than 50 percent of the population on zero hour contracts and the rest tend to suffer from overwork. There is a term called Karoshi that explains all. An Indian pig-pen would be two, two and a half times larger than a typical Japanese home. Most Japanese live in micro-apartments called konbachiku . All of the above stresses meant that lately many young Japanese people have become Hikikomori. Bloomberg featured about the same a couple of years back. I came to know about it as many Indians are given the idea of Japan being a successful country without knowing the ills and issues it faces. Even in that most women get the wrong end of the short stick i.e. even it they manage to find jobs, it would be most back-breaking menial work. The employment statistics of Japan s internal ministry tells its own story.

If you look at the data above, it seems that the between 2002 and 2019, the share of zero hour contracts has increased while regular work has decreased. This also means that those on the bottom of the ladder can no longer afford a home. There is and was a viral video called Lost in Manboo that went viral few years ago. It is a perfect set of storms. Add to that the Fukushima nuclear incident about which I had shared a few years ago. While the workers are blamed but all design decisions are taken by the management. And as was shown in numerous movies, documentaries etc. Interestingly, and somewhat ironically, the line workers knew the correct things to do and correct decisions to take unlike the management. The shut-ins story is almost a decade or two decades old. It is similar story in South Korea but not as depressive as the in Japan. It is somewhat depressive story but needed to be shared. The stories shared in the bloomberg article makes your heart ache

Backpacks In and around 2015, I had bought a Targus backpack, very much similar to the Targus TSB194US-70 Motor 16-inch Backpack. That bag has given me a lot of comfort over the years but now has become frayed the zip sometimes work and sometimes doesn t. Unlike those days there are a bunch of companies now operating in India. There are eight different companies that I came to know about, Aircase, Harrisons Sirius, HP Oddyssey, Mokobara, Artic Hunter, Dell Pro Hybrid, Dell Roller Backpack and lastly the Decathlon Quechua Hiking backpack 32L NH Escape 500 . Now of all the above, two backpacks seem the best, the first one is Harrisons Sirius, with 45L capacity, I don t think I would need another bag at all. The runner-up is the Decathlon Quecha Hiking Backpack 32L. One of the better things in all the bags is that all have hidden pockets for easy taking in and out of passport while having being ant-theft. I do not have to stress how stressful it is to take out the passport and put it back in. Almost all the vendors have made sure that it is not a stress point anymore. The good thing about the Quecha is that they are giving 10 years warranty, the point to be asked is if that is does the warranty cover the zip. Zips are the first thing that goes out in bags.That actually has what happened to my current bag. Decathlon has a store in Wakad, Pune while I have reached out to the gentleman in charge of Harrisons India to see if they have a reseller in Pune. So hopefully, in next one week I should have a backpack that isn t spilling with things all over the place, whichever I m able to figure out.

25 October 2022

Russ Allbery: Review: A Spaceship Repair Girl Supposedly Named Rachel

Review: A Spaceship Repair Girl Supposedly Named Rachel, by Richard Roberts
Publisher: Mystique Press
Copyright: 2022
ISBN: 1-63789-763-4
Format: Kindle
Pages: 353
Rachel had snuck out of the house to sit on the hill, to write and draw in rare peace and quiet, when a bus fell out of the sky like a meteor and plowed into the ground in front of her. This is quickly followed by a baffling encounter with a seven-foot-tall man with a blunderbuss, two misunderstandings and a storytelling lie, and a hurried invitation to get into the bus and escape before they're both infected by math. That's how Rachel discovers that she's able to make on-the-fly repairs to bicycle-powered spaceships, and how she ends up at the Lighthouse of Ceres. The title comes from Rachel's initial hesitation to give her name, which propagates through the book to everyone she meets as certainty that Rachel isn't really her name. I enjoyed this running gag way more than I expected to. I don't read enough young adult and middle-grade books to be entirely clear on the boundaries, but this felt very middle-grade. It has a headlong plot, larger-than-life characters, excitingly imaginative scenery (such as a giant space lighthouse dwarfing the asteroid that it's attached to), a focus on friendship, and no romance. This is, to be clear, not a complaint. But it's a different feel than my normal fare, and there were a few places where I was going one direction and the book went another. The conceit of this book is that Earth is unique in the solar system in being stifled by the horrific weight of math, which infects anyone who visits and makes the routine wonders of other planets impossible. Other planets have their own styles and mythos (Saturn is full of pirates, the inhabitants of Venus are space bunnies with names like Passionfruit Nectar Ecstasy), but throughout the rest of the solar system, belief, style, and story logic reign supreme. That means Rachel's wild imagination and reflexive reliance on tall tales makes her surprisingly powerful. The first wild story she tells, to the man who crashed on earth, shapes most of the story. She had written in her sketchbook that it was the property of the Witch Queen of Eloquent Verbosity and Grandiose Ornamentation, and when challenged on it, says that she stole it to cure her partner. Much to her surprise, everyone outside of Earth takes this completely seriously. Also much to her surprise, her habit of sketching spaceships and imaginative devices makes her a natural spaceship mechanic, a skill in high demand. Some of the story is set on Ceres, a refuge for misfits with hearts of gold. That's where Rachel meets Wrench, a kobold who is by far my favorite character of the book and the one relationship that I thought had profound emotional depth. Rachel's other adventures are set off by the pirate girl Violet (she's literally purple), who is the sort of plot-provoking character that I think only works in middle-grade fiction. By normal standards, Violet's total lack of respect for other people's boundaries or consent would make her more of a villain. Here, while it often annoys Rachel, it's clear that both Rachel and the book take Violet's steamroller personality in good fun, more like the gentle coercion between neighborhood friends trying to pull each other into games. I still got rather tired of Violet, though, which caused me a few problems around the middle of the book. There's a bit of found family here (some of it quite touching), a lot of adventures, a lot of delightful spaceship repair, and even some more serious plot involving the actual Witch Queen of Charon. There is a bit of a plot arc to give some structure to the adventures, but this is not the book to read if you're looking for complex plotting or depth. I thought the story fell apart a bit at the tail end, with a conflict that felt like it was supposed to be metaphorical and then never resolved for me into something concrete. I was expecting Rachel to eventually have to do more introspection and more direct wrestling with her identity, but the resolution felt a bit superficial and unsatisfying. Reading this as an adult, I found it odd but fun. I wanted more from the ending, and I was surprised that Roberts does not do more to explain to the reader why Rachel does not regret leaving Earth and her family behind. It feels like something Rachel will have to confront eventually, but this is not the book for it. Instead we get some great friendships (some of which I agreed with wholeheartedly, and some of which I found annoying) and an imaginative, chaotic universe that Rachel takes to like a fish to water. The parts of the story focused on her surprising competence (and her delight in her own competence) were my favorites. The book this most reminds me of is Norton Juster's The Phantom Tollbooth. It is, to be clear, nowhere near as good as The Phantom Tollbooth, which is a very high bar, and it's not as focused on puns. But it has the same sense of internal logic and the same tendency to put far more weight on belief and stories than our world does, and to embrace the resulting chaos. I'm not sure this will be anyone's favorite book (although I'm also not the target age), but I enjoyed reading it. It was a great change of pace after Nona the Ninth. Recommended if you're in the mood for some space fantasy that doesn't take itself seriously. Rating: 7 out of 10

19 October 2022

Shirish Agarwal: Pune Rains, Uncosted Budgets, Hearing Loss Covid, Fracking

Pune Rains Lemme start with a slightly funny picture that tells as much about Pune, my city as anything else does.
Pune- Leave your attitude behind, we have our own
This and similar tags, puns and whatnot you will find if you are entering Pune from the road highway. You can also find similar similar symbols and Puns all over the city and they are partly sarcasm and ironic and partly the truth. Puneities work from the attitude that they know everything rather than nothing, including yours truly  . What is the basis of that or why is there such kind of confidence I have no clue or idea, it is what it is. Approximately 24 hrs. ago, apparently we had a cloudburst. What I came to know later is that we got 100 mm of rain. Sharing from local news site. Much more interesting was a thread made on Reddit where many people half-seriously asked where they can buy a boat. One of the reasons being even if it s October, in fact, we passed middle of October and it s still raining. Even today in the evening, it rained for quite a while. As I had shared in a few blog posts before, June where rains should have started, it didn t, it actually started late July or even August, so something has shifted. The current leadership does not believe in Anthropogenic Climate Change or human activity induced climate change even though that is a reality. I could share many links and even using the term above should give links to various studies. Most of the people who are opposed to it are either misinformed or influenced from the fossil fuel industry. Again, could share many links, but will share just one atm. I have talked to quite a few people about it but nobody has ever been able to give a convincing answer as to why GM had to crush the cars. Let s even take the argument that it was the worst manufactured car in history and there have been quite a few, have the others been crushed? If not, then the reason shared or given by most people sounds hollow. And if you look into it, they had an opportunity that they let go, and now most of them are scrambling and yet most of the legacy auto manufacturers will be out of existence if they don t get back into the game in the next 2-3 years. There have been a bunch of announcements but we are yet to see. The Chinese though have moved far ahead, although one has to remark that they have been doing that for the last decade, so they have a 10-year head start, hardly surprising then. But I need to get back to the subject, another gentleman on Reddit remarked that if you start to use boat, and others start to use boat, then the Govt. will tax it. In fact, somebody had shared the below the other day
Different types of taxes collected by GOI
Many of the taxes that I have shared above are by the Modi Govt. who came on the platform, manifesto that once they come to power they will reduce taxes for the common man, they have reduced taxes but only for the Corporates. For the common man, the taxes have only gone up, both direct tax and indirect tax. Any reference to the Tory party who have also done similar things and have also shared that it is labor who had done large expenditures even though they have been 8 years in power, I am sure for most is purely coincidental. Incidentally, that is the same tack that was taken even by the Republican party. They all like to give tax benefits to the 1% while for the rest is austerity claiming some reason, even if it has been proven to be false.
Corporate Tax Rate, Revenue Loss to Govt.
The figures mentioned above are findings of parliamentary panel so nobody can accuse of anybody having a bias. Also, I probably had shared this but still feel the need to re-share it as people still believe that 2G scam happened even though there are plenty of arguments I can share to prove how it was all a fabricated lie.
Vinod Rai Mafinama in Uttarakhand High Court.
Part 2 of the same Mafinama.
How pathetic Mr. Rai s understanding of economics is can be gauged from the fact that he was made Chairman of IDFC and subsequently had to be thrown out. That whole lie was engineered to throw UPA out and it worked. There are and have been many such coincidences happening over the last 8 years, parallel stories happening in India and UK. This was just yesterday, about a year back Air India was given back to the Tatas, There was controversy about the supposed auctions as only Indigo was the only other party allowed to be at auction but not allowed to buy but more as a spectator as they already have 60% of the Indian civil aviation market. And there was lot of cheering from the Govt. side that finally Air India has been bought home to its true owners, the Tatas. The Tatas too started cheering and sharing how they will take down all the workers, worker unions and everything will be happy glory within a year. In fact, just couple of days back they shared new plans. Btw for the takeover of Air India, they had bought loans from the Banks and they are in the category of too big to fail. As I have shared couple of times before, RBI has not shared any inspection reports of nationalized or private banks after 2013/14. While by law, RBI is supposed to do inspection reports every 3 months and share them in the Public domain. And if you ask any of their supporter, for everything they will say UPA did x or y, which only goes to show morally bankrupt the present Govt. is. Coming back to the topic, before I forget, the idea of sharing their plans is so that they can again borrow money from the banks. But that is not the only story. Just one day back, Smita Prakash, one of the biggest cheerleaders of the present Govt. (she is the boss at Asia News International (ANI)) posted how Air India had treated her sister and other 21 passengers. Basically, they had bought business tickets but the whole cabin was dirty, they complained and they were forced to sit in economy class, not just her cousin sister but the other 21 odd passengers too. Of course Ms Smita became calm as her sister was given free air tickets on Vistara and other goodies. Of course, after that she didn t post anything about the other 21 odd passengers after that. And yes, I understand she is supposed to be a reporter but as can be seen from the twitter thread, there is or was no follow up. Incidentally, she is one of many who has calling others about Revdi culture (freebies to the masses.) but guess that only applies to other people not her or her sister. Again, if there are any coincidences of similar nature in the UK or when Trump was P.M. of the U.S. they are just coincidental .

The Uncosted budget India and the UK have many parallels, it s mind boggling. Before we get into the nitty-gritties, saw something that would be of some interest to the people here.
For those who might not be able to see above, apparently there is place in UK called Tufton Street where there are quite a few organizations that are shadowy and whose finances are not known as to how they are financed. Ms. Truss and quite a few of the people in the cabinet are from the same shadowy organizations. Mr. Kwasi Kwarteng, the just-departed chancellor is and was part of the same group. Now even for me it was a new term to learn and understand what is an uncosted budget is. To make it much more easier I share the example using a common person who goes to the bank for a loan

Now M/S X wants a loan of say Rs. 1000/- for whatever reason. He/she/they go to the bank and asks give me a loan of say INR 1000/- The banks asks them to produce a statement of accounts to show what their financial position is. They produce a somewhat half-filled statement of accounts In which all liabilities are shown, but incomes are not. The bank says you already have so much liabilities, how are you gonna pay those, accounts have to be matched otherwise you are not solvent. M/s X adamantly refuses to do any changes citing that they don t need to. At this point, M/s X credit rating goes down and nobody in the market will give them a loan. At the same time, the assets they had held, their value also depreciates because it became known that they can t act responsibly. So whose to say whether or not M/s X has those number of assets and priced them accurately. But the drama doesn t end there, M/s X says this is the responsibility of actually Mr. Z ( cue The Bank of England) as they are my accountant/lawyer etc. M/s Z says as any lawyer/accountant should. This is not under my remit. If the clients either gives incomplete information or false information or whatever then it is their responsibility not mine. And in fact, the Chancellor is supposed to be the one who is given the responsibility of making the budget. The Chancellor is very similar to our Finance Minister. Because the UK has constitutional monarchy, I am guessing the terms are slightly different, otherwise the functionality seems to be the same. For two weeks, there was lot of chaos, lot of pension funds lost quite a bit in the market and in the end Mr. Kwasi Kwarteng was ousted out of the job. Incredibly, the same media and newspapers who had praised Mr. Kwarteng just few weeks back as the best Tory budget, they couldn t wait to bury him. And while I have attempted to simplify what happened, the best explanation of what has happened can be found in an article from the guardian. Speculation is rife in the UK as to who s ruling atm as the new Chancellor has reversed almost all the policies that Ms. Truss had bought and she is now more or less a figurehead. Mr. Hunt, the new chancellor doesn t have anybody behind him. Apparently, the gentleman wanted to throw his hat the ring in the Tory leadership contest that was held about a month back and he couldn t get 20 MP s to support him. Another thing that is different between UK and India is that in UK by law the PM has to answer questions put up to him or her by the opposition leaders. That is the way accountability is measured there. This is known as PMQ s or Prime Minister Questions and Answers. One can just go to YouTube or any streaming service and give Liz Truss and PMQ s and if they are interested of a certain date, give a date and they can see how she answered the questions thrown at her. Unfortunately, all she could do in both times were non-answers. In fact, the Tories seem to be using some of Labor s policies after they had bad-mouthed the same policies. Politics of right-wing both in the UK and the US seems so out of touch with the people whom they are supposed to protect and administer. An article about cyclists which is sort of half-truth, half irony shows how screwed up the policies are of the RW (right-wing). Now they are questions about the pensions triple-lock. Sadly, it is the working class who would suffer the most, most of the rich have already moved their money abroad several years ago. The Financial Times, did share a video about how things have been unfolding

Seems Ms. Truss forgot to add Financial Times in the list of anti-growth coalition she is so fond of. Also, the Tory party seems to want to create more tax havens in the UK and calling them investment zones. Of course, most of the top tax havens are situated around the UK itself. I wouldn t go more into as that would probably require its own article, although most of that information is all in public domain. Fracking I don t really want to take much time as the blog post has become long. There have been many articles written why Fracking is bad and that is why even the Tories had put in their Manifesto that they won t allow Fracking but apparently, today they are trying to reopen Fracking. And again how bad it is and can be found out by the article in Guardian.

17 October 2022

Jeremy Bicha: Ubuntu bug fix anniversary

I first installed Ubuntu when Ubuntu 6.06 LTS Dapper Drake was released. I was brand new to Linux. This was Ubuntu s first LTS release; the very first release of Ubuntu was only a year and a half before. I was impressed by how usable and useful the system was. It soon became my primary home operating system and I wanted to help make it better. On October 15, 2009, I was helping test the release candidates ISOs for the Ubuntu 9.10 release. Specifically, I tested Edubuntu. Edubuntu has since been discontinued but at the time it was an official Ubuntu flavor preloaded with lots of education apps. One of those education apps was Moodle, an e-learning platform. When testing Moodle, I found that a default installation would make Moodle impossible to use locally. I figured out how to fix this issue. This was really exciting: I finally found an Ubuntu bug I knew how to fix. I filed the bug report. This was very late in the Ubuntu 9.10 release process and Ubuntu was in the Final Freeze state. In Final Freeze, every upload to packages included in the default install need to be individually approved by a member of the Ubuntu Release Team. Also, I didn t have upload rights to Ubuntu. Jordan Mantha (LaserJock), an Edubuntu maintainer, sponsored my bug fix upload. I also forwarded my patch to Debian. While trying to figure out what wasn t working with Moodle, I stumbled across a packaging bug. Edubuntu provided a choice of MySQL or PostgreSQL for the system default database. MySQL was the default, but if PostgreSQL were chosen instead, Moodle wouldn t work. I figured out how to fix this bug too a week later. Jordan sponsored this upload and Steve Langasek from the Release Team approved it so it also was able to be fixed before 9.10 was released. Although the first bug was new to 9.10 because of a behavior change in a low-level dependency, this PostgreSQL bug existed in stable Ubuntu releases. Therefore, I prepared Stable Release Updates for Ubuntu 9.04 and Ubuntu 8.04 LTS. Afterwards Six months later, I was able to attend my first Ubuntu Developer Summit. I was living in Bahrain (in the Middle East) at the time and a trip to Belgium seemed easier to me than if I were living in the United States where I usually live. This was the Ubuntu Developer Summit where planning for Ubuntu 10.10 took place. I like to believe that I helped with the naming since I added Maverick to the wiki page where people contribute suggestions. I did not apply for financial sponsorship to attend and I stayed in a budget hotel on the other side of Brussels. The event venue was on the outskirts of Brussels so there wasn t a direct bus or metro line to get there. I rented a car. I didn t yet have a smartphone and I had a LOT of trouble navigating to and from the site every day. I learned then that it s best to stay close to the conference site since a lot of the event is actually in the unstructured time in the evenings. Fortunately, I managed to arrive in time for Mark Shuttleworth s keynote where the Unity desktop was first announced. This was released in Ubuntu 10.10 in the Ubuntu Netbook Remix and became the default for Ubuntu Desktop in Ubuntu 11.04. Ubuntu s switch to Unity provided me with a huge opportunity. In April 2011, GNOME 3.0 was released. I wanted to try it but it wasn t yet packaged in Ubuntu or Debian. It was suggested that I could help work on packaging the major new version in a PPA. The PPA was convenient because I was able to get permission to upload there easier than being able to upload directly to Ubuntu. My contributions there then enabled me to get upload rights to the Ubuntu Desktop packages later that year. At a later Ubuntu Developer Summit, it was suggested that I start an official Ubuntu flavor for GNOME. So along with Tim Lunn (darkxst), I co-founded Ubuntu GNOME. Years later, Canonical stopped actively developing Unity; instead, Ubuntu GNOME was merged into Ubuntu Desktop. Along the way, I became an Ubuntu Core Developer and a Debian Developer. And in January 2022, I joined Canonical on the Desktop Team. This all still feels amazing to me. It took me a long time to be comfortable calling myself a developer! Conclusion My first Ubuntu bugfix was 13 years ago this week. Because Ubuntu historically uses alphabetical adjective animal release names, 13 years means that we have rolled around to the letter K again! Later today, we begin release candidate ISO testing for Ubuntu 22.10 Kinetic Kudu . I encourage you to help us test the release candidates and report bugs that you find. If you figure out how to fix a bug, we still sponsor bug fixes. If you are an Ubuntu contributor, I highly encourage you to attend an Ubuntu Summit if you can. The first Ubuntu Summit in years will be in 3 weeks in Prague, but the intent is for the Ubuntu Summits to be recurring events again.

14 October 2022

Shirish Agarwal: Dowry, Racism, Railways

Dowry Few days back, had posted about the movie Raksha Bandhan and whatever I felt about it. Sadly, just couple of days back, somebody shared this link. Part of me was shocked and part of me was not. Couple of acquaintances of mine in the past had said the same thing for their daughters. And in such situations you are generally left speechless because you don t know what the right thing to do is. If he has shared it with you being an outsider, how many times he must have told the same to their wife and daughters? And from what little I have gathered in life, many people have justified it on similar lines. And while the protests were there, sadly the book was not removed. Now if nurses are reading such literature, how their thought process might be forming, you can tell :(. And these are the ones whom we call for when we are sick and tired :(. And I have not taken into account how the girls/women themselves might be feeling. There are similar things in another country but probably not the same, nor the same motivations though although feeling helplessness in both would be a common thing. But such statements are not alone. Another gentleman in slightly different context shared this as well
The above is a statement shared in a book recommended for CTET (Central Teacher s Eligibility Test that became mandatory to be taken as the RTE (Right To Education) Act came in.). The statement says People from cold places are white, beautiful, well-built, healthy and wise. And people from hot places are black, irritable and of violent nature. Now while I can agree with one part of the statement that people residing in colder regions are more fair than others but there are loads of other factors that determine fairness or skin color/skin pigmentation. After a bit of search came to know that this and similar articulation have been made in an idea/work called Environmental Determinism . Now if you look at that page, you would realize this was what colonialism is and was all about. The idea that the white man had god-given right to rule over others. Similarly, if you are fair, you can lord over others. Seems simplistic, but yet it has a powerful hold on many people in India. Forget the common man, this thinking is and was applicable to some of our better-known Freedom fighters. Pune s own Bal Gangadhar Tilak The Artic Home to the Vedas. It sort of talks about Aryans and how they invaded India and became settled here. I haven t read or have access to the book so have to rely on third-party sources. The reason I m sharing all this is that the right-wing has been doing this myth-making for sometime now and unless and until you put a light on it, it will continue to perpetuate  . For those who have read this blog, do know that India is and has been in casteism from ever. They even took the fair comment and applied it to all Brahmins. According to them, all Brahmins are fair and hence have god-given right to lord over others. What is called the Eton boy s network serves the same in this casteism. The only solution is those idea under limelight and investigate. To take the above, how does one prove that all fair people are wise and peaceful while all people black and brown are violent. If that is so, how does one count for Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Junior, Nelson Mandela, Michael Jackson the list is probably endless. And not to forget that when Mahatma Gandhiji did his nonviolent movements either in India or in South Africa, both black and brown people in millions took part. Similar examples of Martin Luther King Jr. I know and read of so many non-violent civl movements that took place in the U.S. For e.g. Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott. So just based on these examples, one can conclude that at least the part about the fair having exclusive rights to being fair and noble is not correct. Now as far as violence goes, while every race, every community has had done violence in the past or been a victim of the same. So no one is and can be blameless, although in light of the above statement, the question can argumentated as to who were the Vikings? Both popular imagination and serious history shares stories about Vikings. The Vikings were somewhat nomadic in nature even though they had permanent settlements but even then they went on raids, raped women, captured both men and women and sold them at slaves. So they are what pirates came to be, but not the kind Hollywood romanticizes about. Europe in itself has been a tale in conflict since time immemorial. It is only after the formation of EU that most of these countries stopped fighting each other From a historical point perspective, it is too new. So even the part of fair being non-violent dies in face of this evidence. I could go on but this is enough on that topic.

Railways and Industrial Action around the World. While I have shared about Railways so many times on this blog, it continues to fascinate me that how people don t understand the first things about Railways. For e.g. Railways is a natural monopoly. What that means is and you can look at all and any type of privatization around the world, you will see it is a monopoly. Unlike the road or Skies, Railways is and would always be limited by infrastructure and the ability to have new infrastructure. Unlike in road or Skies (even they have their limits) you cannot run train services on a whim. At any particular point in time, only a single train could and should occupy a stretch of Railway network. You could have more trains on one line, but then the likelihood of front or rear-end collisions becomes a real possibility. You also need all sorts of good and reliable communications, redundant infrastructure so if one thing fails then you have something in place. The reason being a single train can carry anywhere from 2000 to 5000 passengers or more. While this is true of Indian Railways, Railways around the world would probably have some sort of similar numbers.It is in this light that I share the below videos.
To be more precise, see the fuller video
Now to give context to the recording above, Mike Lynch is the general secretary at RMT. For those who came in late, both UK and the U.S. have been threatened by railway strikes. And the reason for the strikes or threat of strikes is similar. Now from the company perspective, all they care is to invest less and make the most profits that can be given to equity shareholders. At the same time, they have freezed the salaries of railway workers for the last 3 years. While the politicians who were asking the questions, apparently gave themselves raise twice this year. They are asking them to negotiate at 8% while inflation in the UK has been 12.3% and projected to go higher. And it is not only the money. Since the 1980s when UK privatized the Railways, they stopped investing in the infrastructure. And that meant that the UK Railway infrastructure over period of time started getting behind and is even behind say Indian Railways which used to provide most bang for the buck. And Indian Railways is far from ideal. Ironically, most of the operators on UK are nationalized Railways of France, Germany etc. but after the hard Brexit, they too are mulling to cut their operations short, they have too  There is also the EU Entry/Exit system that would come next year. Why am I sharing about what is happening in UK Rail, because the Indian Government wants to follow the same thing, and fooling the public into saying we would do it better. What inevitably will happen is that ticket prices go up, people no longer use the service, the number of services go down and eventually they are cancelled. This has happened both in Indian Railways as well as Airlines. In fact, GOI just recently announced a credit scheme just a few days back to help Airlines stay afloat. I was chatting with a friend who had come down to Pune from Chennai and the round-trip cost him INR 15k/- on that single trip alone. We reminisced how a few years ago, 8 years to be precise, we could buy an Air ticket for 2.5k/- just a few days before the trip and did it. I remember doing/experiencing at least a dozen odd trips via air in the years before 2014. My friend used to come to Pune, almost every weekend because he could afford it, now he can t do that. And these are people who are in the above 5-10% of the population. And this is not just in UK, but also in the United States. There is one big difference though, the U.S. is mainly a freight carrier while the UK Railway Operations are mostly passenger based. What was and is interesting that Scotland had to nationalize their services as they realized the Operators cannot or will not function when they were most needed. Most of the public even in the UK seem to want a nationalized rail service, at least their polls say so. So, it would definitely be interesting to see what happens in the UK next year. In the end, I know I promised to share about books, but the above incidents have just been too fascinating to not just share the news but also share what I think about them. Free markets function good where there is competition, for example what is and has been happening in China for EV s but not where you have natural monopolies. In all Railway privatization, you have to handover the area to one person, then they have no motivation. If you have multiple operators, then there would always be haggling as to who will run the train and at what time. In either scenario, it doesn t work and raises prices while not delivering anything better  I do take examples from UK because lot of things are India are still the legacy of the British. The whole civil department that was created in 1953 is/was a copy of the British civil department at that time and it is to this day. P.S. Just came to know that the UK Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng was just sacked as UK Chancellor. I do commend Truss for facing the press even though she might be dumped a week later unlike our PM who hasn t faced a single press conference in the last 8 odd years.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTP6ogBqU7of The difference in Indian and UK politics seems to be that the English are now asking questions while here in India, most people are still sleeping without a care in the world. Another thing to note Minidebconf Palakkad is gonna happen 12-13th November 2022. I am probably not gonna go but would request everyone who wants to do something in free software to attend it. I am not sure whether I would be of any use like this and also when I get back, it would be an empty house. But for people young and old, who want to do anything with free/open source software it is a chance not to be missed. Registration of the same closes on 1st of November 2022. All the best, break a leg  Just read this, beautifully done.

10 October 2022

Joachim Breitner: rec-def: Minesweeper case study

I m on the train back from MuniHac, where I gave a talk about the rec-def library that I have excessively blogged about recently (here, here, here and here). I got quite flattering comments about that talk, so if you want to see if they were sincere, I suggest you watch the recording of Getting recursive definitions off their bottoms (but it s not necessary for the following). After the talk, Franz Thoma approached me and told me a story of how we was once implementing the game Minesweeper in Haskell, and in particular the part of the logic where, after the user has uncovered a field, the game would automatically uncover all fields that are next to a neutral field, i.e. one with zero adjacent bombs. He was using a comonadic data structure, which makes a context-dependent parallel computation such as uncovering one field quite natural, and was hoping that using a suitable fix-point operator, he can elegantly obtain not just the next step, but directly the result of recursively uncovering all these fields. But, much to his disappointment, that did not work out: Due to the recursion inherent in that definition, a knot-tying fixed-point operator will lead to a cyclic definition.
Microsoft Minesweeper Microsoft Minesweeper
He was wondering if the rec-def library could have helped him, and we sat down to find out, and this is the tale of this blog post. I will avoid the comonadic abstractions and program it more naively, though, to not lose too many readers along the way. Maybe read Chris Penner s blog post and Finch s functional pearl Getting a Quick Fix on Comonads if you are curious about that angle.

Minesweeper setup Let s start with defining a suitable data type for the grid of the minesweeper board. I ll use the Array data type, it s Ix-based indexing is quite useful for grids: The library lacks a function to generate an array from a generating function, but it is easy to add: Let s also fix the size of the board, as a pair of lower and upper bounds (this is the format that the Ix type class needs): Now board is simply a grid of boolean values, with True indicating that a bomb is there: It would be nice to be able to see these board in a nicer way. So let us write A function that prints a grid, including a frame, given a function that prints something for each coordinate. Together with a function that prints a bomb (as *), we can print the board: The expression b ! c looks up a the coordinate in the array, and is True when there is a bomb at that coordinate. So here is our board, with two bombs:
ghci> putStrLn $ pBombs board1
######
#    #
#*   #
#*   #
#    #
######
But that s not what we want to show to the user: Every field should have have a number that indicates the number of bombs in the surrounding fields. To that end, we first define a function that takes a coordinate, and returns all adjacent coordinates. This also takes care of the border, using inRange: With that, we can calculate what to display in each cell a bomb, or a number: With a suitable printing function, we can now see the full board: And here it is:
ghci> putStrLn $ pBoard board1
######
#11  #
#*2  #
#*2  #
#11  #
######
Next we have to add masks: We need to keep track of which fields the user already sees. We again use a grid of booleans, and define a function to print a board with the masked fields hidden behind ?:
So this is what the user would see
ghci> putStrLn $ pMasked board1 mask1
######
#11 ?#
#????#
#????#
#????#
######

Uncovering some fields With that setup in place, we now implement the piece of logic we care about: Uncovering all fields that are next to a neutral field. Here is the first attempt: The idea is that we calculate the new mask m1 from the old one m0 by the following logic: A field is visible if it was visible before (m0 ! c), or if any of its neighboring, neutral fields are visible. This works so far: I uncovered the three fields next to the one neutral visible field:
ghci> putStrLn $ pMasked board1 $ solve0 board1 mask1
######
#11  #
#?2  #
#????#
#????#
######
But that s not quite what we want: We want to keep doing that to uncover all fields.

Uncovering all fields So what happens if we change the logic to: A field is visible if it was visible before (m0 ! c), or if any of its neighboring, neutral fields will be visible. In the code, this is just a single character change: Instead of looking at m0 to see if a neighbor is visible, we look at m1: (This is roughly what happened when Franz started to use the kfix comonadic fixed-point operator in his code, I believe.) Does it work? It seems so:
ghci> putStrLn $ pMasked board1 $ solve1 board1 mask1
######
#11  #
#?2  #
#?2  #
#?1  #
######
Amazing, isn t it! Unfortunately, it seems to work by accident. If I start with a different mask: which looks as follows:
ghci> putStrLn $ pMasked board1 mask2
######
#11??#
#????#
#????#
#??? #
######
Then our solve1 function does not work, and just sits there:
ghci> putStrLn $ pMasked board1 $ solve1 board1 mask2
######
#11^CInterrupted.
Why did it work before, but now now? It fails to work because as the code tries to figure out if a field, it needs to know if the next field will be uncovered. But to figure that out, it needs to know if the present field will be uncovered. With the normal boolean connectives ( and or), this does not make progress. It worked with mask1 more or less by accident: None of the fields on in the first column don t have neutral neighbors, so nothing happens there. And for all the fields in the third and forth column, the code will know for sure that they will be uncovered based on their upper neighbors, which come first in the neighbors list, and due to the short-circuting properties of , it doesn t have to look at the later cells, and the vicious cycle is avoided.

rec-def to the rescue This is where rec-def comes in: By using the RBool type in m1 instead of plain Bool, the recursive self-reference is not a problem, and it simply works: Note that I did not change the algorithm, or the self-reference through m1; I just replaced Bool with RBool, with RB. and or with RB.or. And used RB.get at the end to get a normal boolean out. And , here we go:
ghci> putStrLn $ pMasked board1 $ solve2 board1 mask2
######
#11  #
#?2  #
#?2  #
#?1  #
######
That s the end of this repetition of let s look at a tying-the-knot-problem and see how rec-def helps , which always end up a bit anti-climatic because it just works , at least in these cases. Hope you enjoyed it nevertheless.

6 October 2022

Jonathan Dowland: git worktrees

I work on OpenJDK backports: taking a patch that was committed to a current version of JDK, and adapting it to an older one. There are four main OpenJDK versions that I am concerned with: the current version ("jdk"), 8, 11 and 17. These are all maintained in separate Git(Hub) repositories. It's very useful to have access to the other JDKs when working on any particular version. For example, to backport a patch from the latest version to 17, where the delta is not too big, a lot of the time you can cherry-pick the patch unmodified. To do git cherry-pick <some-commit> in a git repository tracking JDK17, where <some-commit> is in "jdk", I need the "jdk" repository configured as a remote for my local jdk17 repository. Maintaining completely separate local git repositories for all four JDK versions, with each of them having a subset of the others added as remotes, adds up to a lot of duplicated data on local storage. For a little while I was exploring using shared clones: a local clone of another local git repository which share some local metadata. This saves on some disc space, but it does not share the configuration for remotes: so I still have to add any other JDK versions I want as remotes in each shared clone (even if the underlying objects already exist in the shared metadata) Then I discovered git worktree. The git repositories that I've used up until now have had exactly zero (for a bare clone) or one worktree: in other words, the check-out, the actual source code files. Git does actually support having more than one worktree, which can be achieved like so:
git worktree add --checkout \
    -b jdk8u-master \
    ../jdk.worktree.jdk8u \
    jdk8u-dev/master
The result (in this example) is a new checkout, in this case of a new local branch named jdk8u-master at the sibling directory path jdk.worktree.jdk8u, tracking the remote branch jdk8u-dev/master. Within that checkout, there is a file .git which contains a pointer to (indirectly) the main local repository path:
gitdir: /home/jon/rh/git/jdk/.git/worktrees/jdk.worktree.jdk8u-dev
The directory itself behaves exactly like the real one, in that I can see all the configured remotes, and other checked out branches in other worktree paths:
$ git branch
  JDK-8214520-11u                               + 8284977-jdk11u-dev
  JDK-8268362-11u                               + master
  8231111-jdk11u-merged                         * 8237479-jdk8u-dev
Above, you can see that the current worktree is the branch 8237479-jdk8u-dev, marked (as usual) by the prefix *, and two other branches are checked out in other worktrees, marked by the prefix +. I only need to configure one local git repository with all of the remotes I am concerned about; I can inspect, compare, cherry-pick, check out, etc. any objects from any of those branches from any of my work trees; there's only one .git directory with all the configuration and storage for the git blobs across all the versions.

4 October 2022

Russ Allbery: Review: The Dragon Never Sleeps

Review: The Dragon Never Sleeps, by Glen Cook
Publisher: Night Shade Books
Copyright: 1988
Printing: 2008
ISBN: 1-59780-099-6
Format: MOBI
Pages: 449
Canon Space is run, in a way, by the noble mercantile houses, who spread their cities, colonies, and mines through the mysterious Web that allows faster-than-light interstellar travel. The true rulers of Canon Space, though, are the Guardships: enormous, undefeatable starships run by crews who have become effectively immortal by repeated uploading and reincarnation. Or, in the case of the Deified, without reincarnation, observing, ordering, advising, and meddling from an entirely virtual existence. The Guardships have enforced the status quo for four thousand years. House Tregesser thinks they have the means to break the stranglehold of the Guardships. They have contact with Outsiders from beyond Canon Space who can provide advanced technology. They have their own cloning technology, which they use to create backup copies of their elites. And they have Lupo Provik, a quietly brilliant schemer who has devoted his life to destroying Guardships. This book was so bad. A more sensible person than I would have given up after the first hundred pages, but I was too stubborn. The stubbornness did not pay off. Sometimes I pick up an older SFF novel and I'm reminded of how much the quality bar in the field has been raised over the past twenty years. It's not entirely fair to treat The Dragon Never Sleeps as typical of 1980s science fiction: Cook is far better known for his Black Company military fantasy series, this is one of his minor novels, and it's only been intermittently in print. But I'm dubious this would have been published at all today. First, the writing is awful. It's choppy, cliched, awkward, and has no rhythm or sense of beauty. Here's a nearly random paragraph near the beginning of the book as a sample:
He hurled thunders and lightnings with renewed fury. The whole damned universe was out to frustrate him. XII Fulminata! What the hell? Was some malign force ranged against him? That was his most secret fear. That somehow someone or something was using him the way he used so many others.
(Yes, this is one of the main characters throwing a temper tantrum with a special effects machine.) In a book of 450 pages, there are 151 chapters, and most chapters switch viewpoint characters. Most of them also end with a question or some vaguely foreboding sentence to try to build tension, and while I'm willing to admit that sometimes works when used sparingly, every three pages is not sparingly. This book is also weirdly empty of description for its size. We get a few set pieces, a few battles, and a sentence or two of physical description of most characters when they're first introduced, but it's astonishing how little of a mental image I had of this universe after reading the whole book. Cook probably describes a Guardship at some point in this book, but if he does, it completely failed to stick in my memory. There are aliens that everyone recognizes as aliens, so presumably they look different than humans, but for most of them I have no idea how. Very belatedly we're told one important species (which never gets a name) has a distinctive smell. That's about it. Instead, nearly the whole book is dialogue and scheming. It's clear that Cook is intending to write a story of schemes and counter-schemes and jousting between brilliant characters. This can work if the dialogue is sufficiently sharp and snappy to carry the story. It is not.
"What mischief have you been up to, Kez Maefele?" "Staying alive in a hostile universe." "You've had more than your share of luck." "Perhaps luck had nothing to do with it, WarAvocat. Till now." "Luck has run out. The Ku Question has run its course. The symbol is about to receive its final blow."
There are hundreds of pages of this sort of thing. The setting is at least intriguing, if not stunningly original. There are immortal warships oppressing human space, mysterious Outsiders, great house politics, and an essentially immortal alien warrior who ends up carrying most of the story. That's material for a good space opera if the reader slowly learns the shape of the universe, its history, and its landmarks and political factions. Or the author can decline to explain any of that. I suppose that's also a choice. Here are some things that you may have been curious about after reading my summary, and which I'm still curious about after having finished the book: What laws do the Guardships impose and what's the philosophy behind those laws? How does the economic system work? Who built the Guardships originally, and how? How do the humans outside of Canon Space live? Who are the Ku? Why did they start fighting the humans? How many other aliens are there? What do they think of this? How does the Canon government work? How have the Guardships remained technologically superior for four thousand years? Even where the reader gets a partial explanation, such as what Web is and how it was built, it's an unimportant aside that's largely devoid of a sense of wonder. The one piece of world-building that this book is interested in is the individual Guardships and the different ways in which they've handled millennia of self-contained patrol, and even there we only get to see a few of them. There is a plot with appropriately epic scope, but even that is undermined by the odd pacing. Five, ten, or fifty years sometimes goes by in a sentence. A war starts, with apparently enormous implications for Canon Space, and then we learn that it continues for years without warranting narrative comment. This is done without transitions and without signposts for the reader; it's just another sentence in the narration, mixed in with the rhetorical questions and clumsy foreshadowing. I would like to tell you that at least the book has a satisfying ending that resolves the plot conflict that it finally reveals to the reader, but I had a hard time understanding why the ending even mattered. The plot was so difficult to follow that I'm sure I missed something, but it's not difficult to follow in the fun way that would make me want to re-read it. It's difficult to follow because Cook doesn't seem able to explain the plot in his head to the reader in any coherent form. I think the status quo was slightly disrupted? Maybe? Also, I no longer care. Oh, and there's a gene-engineered sex slave in this book, who various male characters are very protective and possessive of, who never develops much of a personality, and who has no noticeable impact on the plot despite being a major character. Yay. This was one of the worst books I've read in a long time. In retrospect, it was an awful place to start with Glen Cook. Hopefully his better-known works are also better-written, but I can't say I feel that inspired to find out. Rating: 2 out of 10

3 October 2022

Russ Allbery: Review: Jingo

Review: Jingo, by Terry Pratchett
Series: Discworld #21
Publisher: Harper
Copyright: 1997
Printing: May 2014
ISBN: 0-06-228020-1
Format: Mass market
Pages: 455
This is the 21st Discworld novel and relies on the previous Watch novels for characterization and cast development. I would not start here. In the middle of the Circle Sea, the body of water between Ankh-Morpork and the desert empire of Klatch, a territorial squabble between one fishing family from Ankh-Morpork and one from Klatch is interrupted by a weathercock rising dramatically from the sea. When the weathercock is shortly followed by the city to which it is attached and the island on which that city is resting, it's justification for more than a fishing squabble. It's a good reason for a war over new territory. The start of hostilities is an assassination attempt on a prince of Klatch. Vimes and the Watch start investigating, but politics outraces police work. Wars are a matter for the nobility and their armies, not for normal civilian leadership. Lord Vetinari resigns, leaving the city under the command of Lord Rust, who is eager for a glorious military victory against their long-term rivals. The Klatchians seem equally eager to oblige. One of the useful properties of a long series is that you build up a cast of characters you can throw at a plot, and if you can assume the reader has read enough of the previous books, you don't have to spend a lot of time on establishing characterization and can get straight to the story. Pratchett uses that here. You could read this cold, I suppose, because most of the Watch are obvious enough types that the bits of characterization they get are enough, but it works best with the nuance and layers of the previous books. Of course Colon is the most susceptible to the jingoism that prompts the book's title, and of course Angua's abilities make her the best detective. The familiar characters let Pratchett dive right in to the political machinations. Everyone plays to type here: Vetinari is deftly maneuvering everyone into place to make the situation work out the way he wants, Vimes is stubborn and ethical and needs Vetinari to push him in the right direction, and Carrot is sensible and effortlessly charismatic. Colon and Nobby are, as usual, comic relief of a sort, spending much of the book with Vetinari while not understanding what he's up to. But Nobby gets an interesting bit of characterization in the form of an extended turn as a spy that starts as cross-dressing and becomes an understated sort of gender exploration hidden behind humor that's less mocking than one might expect. Pratchett has been slowly playing more with gender in this series, and while it's simple and a bit deemphasized, I like it. I think the best part of this book, thematically, is the contrast between Carrot's and Vimes's reactions to the war. Carrot is a paragon of a certain type of ethics in Watch novels, but a war is one of the things that plays to his weaknesses. Carrot follows rules, and wars have rules of a type. You can potentially draw Carrot into them. But Vimes, despite being someone who enforces rules professionally, is deeply suspicious of them, which makes him harder to fool. Pratchett uses one of the Klatchian characters to hold a mirror up to Vimes in ways that are minor spoilers, but that I quite liked. The argument of jingoism, made by both Lord Rust and by the Klatchian prince, is that wars are something special, outside the normal rules of justice. Vimes absolutely refuses this position. As someone from the US, his reaction to Lord Rust's attempted militarization of the Watch was one of the best moments of the book.
Not a muscle moved on Rust's face. There was a clink as Vimes's badge was set neatly on the table. "I don't have to take this," Vimes said calmly. "Oh, so you'd rather be a civilian, would you?" "A watchman is a civilian, you inbred streak of pus!"
Vimes is also willing to think of a war as a possible crime, which may not be as effective as Vetinari's tricky scheming but which is very emotionally satisfying. As with most Pratchett books, the moral underpinnings of the story aren't that elaborate: people are people despite cultural differences, wars are bad, and people are too ready to believe the worst of their neighbors. The story arc is not going to provide great insights into human character that the reader did not already have. But watching Vimes stubbornly attempt to do the right thing regardless of the rule book is wholly satisfying, and watching Vetinari at work is equally, if differently, enjoyable. Not the best Discworld novel, but one of the better ones. Followed by The Last Continent in publication order, and by The Fifth Elephant thematically. Rating: 8 out of 10

2 October 2022

Steve McIntyre: Firmware vote result - the people have spoken!

It's time for another update on Debian's firmware GR. I wrote about the problem back in April and about the vote itself a few days back. Voting closed last night and we have a result! This is unofficial so far - the official result will follow shortly when the Project Secretary sends a signed mail to confirm it. But that's normally just a formality at this point. A Result! The headline result is: Choice 5 / Proposal E won: Change SC for non-free firmware in installer, one installer. I'm happy with this - it's the option that I voted highest, after all. More importantly, however, it's a clear choice of direction, as I was hoping for. Of the 366 Debian Developers who voted, 289 of them voted this option above NOTA and 63 below, so it also meets the 3:1 super-majority requirement for amending a Debian Foundation Document (Constitution section 4.1.3). So, what happens next? We have quite a few things to do now, ideally before the freeze for Debian 12 (bookworm), due January 2023. This list of work items is almost definitely not complete, and Cyril and I are aiming to get together this week and do more detailed planning for the d-i pieces. Off the top of my head I can think of the following: If you think I've missed anything here, please let me and Cyril know - the best place would be the mailing list (debian-boot@lists.debian.org). If you'd like to help implement any of these changes, that would be lovely too!

27 September 2022

Fran ois Marier: Upgrading from chan_sip to res_pjsip in Asterisk 18

After upgrading to Ubuntu Jammy and Asterisk 18.10, I saw the following messages in my logs:
WARNING[360166]: loader.c:2487 in load_modules: Module 'chan_sip' has been loaded but was deprecated in Asterisk version 17 and will be removed in Asterisk version 21.
WARNING[360174]: chan_sip.c:35468 in deprecation_notice: chan_sip has no official maintainer and is deprecated.  Migration to
WARNING[360174]: chan_sip.c:35469 in deprecation_notice: chan_pjsip is recommended.  See guides at the Asterisk Wiki:
WARNING[360174]: chan_sip.c:35470 in deprecation_notice: https://wiki.asterisk.org/wiki/display/AST/Migrating+from+chan_sip+to+res_pjsip
WARNING[360174]: chan_sip.c:35471 in deprecation_notice: https://wiki.asterisk.org/wiki/display/AST/Configuring+res_pjsip
and so I decided it was time to stop postponing the overdue migration of my working setup from chan_sip to res_pjsip. It turns out that it was not as painful as I expected, though the conversion script bundled with Asterisk didn't work for me out of the box.

Debugging Before you start, one very important thing to note is that the SIP debug information you used to see when running this in the asterisk console (asterisk -r):
sip set debug on
now lives behind this command:
pjsip set logger on

SIP phones The first thing I migrated was the config for my two SIP phones (Snom 300 and Snom D715). The original config for them in sip.conf was:
[2000]
; Snom 300
type=friend
qualify=yes
secret=password123
encryption=no
context=full
host=dynamic
nat=no
directmedia=no
mailbox=10@internal
vmexten=707
dtmfmode=rfc2833
call-limit=2
disallow=all
allow=g722
allow=ulaw
[2001]
; Snom D715
type=friend
qualify=yes
secret=password456
encryption=no
context=full
host=dynamic
nat=no
directmedia=yes
mailbox=10@internal
vmexten=707
dtmfmode=rfc2833
call-limit=2
disallow=all
allow=g722
allow=ulaw
and that became the following in pjsip.conf:
[transport-udp]
type = transport
protocol = udp
bind = 0.0.0.0
external_media_address = myasterisk.dyn.example.com
external_signaling_address = myasterisk.dyn.example.com
local_net = 192.168.0.0/255.255.0.0
[2000]
type = aor
max_contacts = 1
[2000]
type = auth
username = 2000
password = password123
[2000]
type = endpoint
context = full
dtmf_mode = rfc4733
disallow = all
allow = g722
allow = ulaw
direct_media = no
mailboxes = 10@internal
auth = 2000
outbound_auth = 2000
aors = 2000
[2001]
type = aor
max_contacts = 1
[2001]
type = auth
username = 2001
password = password456
[2001]
type = endpoint
context = full
dtmf_mode = rfc4733
disallow = all
allow = g722
allow = ulaw
direct_media = yes
mailboxes = 10@internal
auth = 2001
outbound_auth = 2001
aors = 2001
The different direct_media line between the two phones has to do with how they each connect to my Asterisk server and whether or not they have access to the Internet.

Internal calls For some reason, my internal calls (from one SIP phone to the other) didn't work when using "aliases". I fixed it by changing this blurb in extensions.conf from:
[speeddial]
exten => 1000,1,Dial(SIP/2000,20)
exten => 1001,1,Dial(SIP/2001,20)
to:
[speeddial]
exten => 1000,1,Dial($ PJSIP_DIAL_CONTACTS(2000) ,20)
exten => 1001,1,Dial($ PJSIP_DIAL_CONTACTS(2001) ,20)
I have not yet dug into what this changes or why it's necessary and so feel free to leave a comment if you know more here.

PSTN trunk Once I had the internal phones working, I moved to making and receiving phone calls over the PSTN, for which I use VoIP.ms with encryption. I had to change the following in my sip.conf:
[general]
register => tls://555123_myasterisk:password789@vancouver2.voip.ms
externhost=myasterisk.dyn.example.com
localnet=192.168.0.0/255.255.0.0
tcpenable=yes
tlsenable=yes
tlscertfile=/etc/asterisk/asterisk.cert
tlsprivatekey=/etc/asterisk/asterisk.key
tlscapath=/etc/ssl/certs/
[voipms]
type=peer
host=vancouver2.voip.ms
secret=password789
defaultuser=555123_myasterisk
context=from-voipms
disallow=all
allow=ulaw
allow=g729
insecure=port,invite
canreinvite=no
trustrpid=yes
sendrpid=yes
transport=tls
encryption=yes
to the following in pjsip.conf:
[transport-tls]
type = transport
protocol = tls
bind = 0.0.0.0
external_media_address = myasterisk.dyn.example.com
external_signaling_address = myasterisk.dyn.example.com
local_net = 192.168.0.0/255.255.0.0
cert_file = /etc/asterisk/asterisk.cert
priv_key_file = /etc/asterisk/asterisk.key
ca_list_path = /etc/ssl/certs/
method = tlsv1_2
[voipms]
type = registration
transport = transport-tls
outbound_auth = voipms
client_uri = sip:555123_myasterisk@vancouver2.voip.ms
server_uri = sip:vancouver2.voip.ms
[voipms]
type = auth
password = password789
username = 555123_myasterisk
[voipms]
type = aor
contact = sip:555123_myasterisk@vancouver2.voip.ms
[voipms]
type = identify
endpoint = voipms
match = vancouver2.voip.ms
[voipms]
type = endpoint
context = from-voipms
disallow = all
allow = ulaw
allow = g729
from_user = 555123_myasterisk
trust_id_inbound = yes
media_encryption = sdes
auth = voipms
outbound_auth = voipms
aors = voipms
rtp_symmetric = yes
rewrite_contact = yes
send_rpid = yes
timers = no
The TLS method line is needed since the default in Debian OpenSSL is too strict. The timers line is to prevent outbound calls from getting dropped after 15 minutes. Finally, I changed the Dial() lines in these extensions.conf blurbs from:
[from-voipms]
exten => 5551231000,1,Goto(2000,1)
exten => 2000,1,Dial(SIP/2000&SIP/2001,20)
exten => 2000,n,Goto(in2000-$ DIALSTATUS ,1)
exten => 2000,n,Hangup
exten => in2000-BUSY,1,VoiceMail(10@internal,su)
exten => in2000-BUSY,n,Hangup
exten => in2000-CONGESTION,1,VoiceMail(10@internal,su)
exten => in2000-CONGESTION,n,Hangup
exten => in2000-CHANUNAVAIL,1,VoiceMail(10@internal,su)
exten => in2000-CHANUNAVAIL,n,Hangup
exten => in2000-NOANSWER,1,VoiceMail(10@internal,su)
exten => in2000-NOANSWER,n,Hangup
exten => _in2000-.,1,Hangup(16)
[pstn-voipms]
exten => _1NXXNXXXXXX,1,Set(CALLERID(all)=Francois Marier <5551231000>)
exten => _1NXXNXXXXXX,n,Dial(SIP/voipms/$ EXTEN )
exten => _1NXXNXXXXXX,n,Hangup()
exten => _NXXNXXXXXX,1,Set(CALLERID(all)=Francois Marier <5551231000>)
exten => _NXXNXXXXXX,n,Dial(SIP/voipms/1$ EXTEN )
exten => _NXXNXXXXXX,n,Hangup()
exten => _011X.,1,Set(CALLERID(all)=Francois Marier <5551231000>)
exten => _011X.,n,Authenticate(1234)
exten => _011X.,n,Dial(SIP/voipms/$ EXTEN )
exten => _011X.,n,Hangup()
exten => _00X.,1,Set(CALLERID(all)=Francois Marier <5551231000>)
exten => _00X.,n,Authenticate(1234)
exten => _00X.,n,Dial(SIP/voipms/$ EXTEN )
exten => _00X.,n,Hangup()
to:
[from-voipms]
exten => 5551231000,1,Goto(2000,1)
exten => 2000,1,Dial(PJSIP/2000&PJSIP/2001,20)
exten => 2000,n,Goto(in2000-$ DIALSTATUS ,1)
exten => 2000,n,Hangup
exten => in2000-BUSY,1,VoiceMail(10@internal,su)
exten => in2000-BUSY,n,Hangup
exten => in2000-CONGESTION,1,VoiceMail(10@internal,su)
exten => in2000-CONGESTION,n,Hangup
exten => in2000-CHANUNAVAIL,1,VoiceMail(10@internal,su)
exten => in2000-CHANUNAVAIL,n,Hangup
exten => in2000-NOANSWER,1,VoiceMail(10@internal,su)
exten => in2000-NOANSWER,n,Hangup
exten => _in2000-.,1,Hangup(16)
[pstn-voipms]
exten => _1NXXNXXXXXX,1,Set(CALLERID(all)=Francois Marier <5551231000>)
exten => _1NXXNXXXXXX,n,Dial(PJSIP/$ EXTEN @voipms)
exten => _1NXXNXXXXXX,n,Hangup()
exten => _NXXNXXXXXX,1,Set(CALLERID(all)=Francois Marier <5551231000>)
exten => _NXXNXXXXXX,n,Dial(PJSIP/1$ EXTEN @voipms)
exten => _NXXNXXXXXX,n,Hangup()
exten => _011X.,1,Set(CALLERID(all)=Francois Marier <5551231000>)
exten => _011X.,n,Authenticate(1234)
exten => _011X.,n,Dial(PJSIP/$ EXTEN @voipms)
exten => _011X.,n,Hangup()
exten => _00X.,1,Set(CALLERID(all)=Francois Marier <5551231000>)
exten => _00X.,n,Authenticate(1234)
exten => _00X.,n,Dial(PJSIP/$ EXTEN @voipms)
exten => _00X.,n,Hangup()
Note that it's not just replacing SIP/ with PJSIP/, but it was also necessary to use a format supported by pjsip for the channel since SIP/trunkname/extension isn't supported by pjsip.

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