As a reader of Planet Debian I see a bunch of updates at the start of each month about what people are up to in terms of their Free Software activities. I m not generally active enough in the Free Software world to justify a monthly report, but I did a report of my Free Software Activities for 2019 and thought I d do another for 2020. I ended up not doing as much as last year; I put a lot of that down to fatigue about the state of the world and generally not wanting to spend time on the computer at the end of the working day.

Conferences 2020 was unsurprisingly not a great year for conference attendance. I was fortunate enough to make it to FOSDEM and CopyleftConf 2020 - I didn t speak at either, but had plenty of interesting hallway track conversations as well as seeing some good talks. I hadn t been planning to attend DebConf20 due to time constraints, but its move to an entirely online conference meant I was able to attend a few talks at least. I have to say I don t like virtual conferences as much as the real thing; it s not as easy to have the casual chats at them, and it s also harder to carve out the exclusive time when you re at home. That said I spoke at NIDevConf this year, which was also fully virtual. It s not a Free Software focussed conference, but there s a lot of crossover in terms of technologies and I spoke on my experiences with Go, some of which are influenced by my packaging experiences within Debian.

Debian Most of my contributions to Free software happen within Debian. As part of the Data Protection Team I responded to various inbound queries to that team. Some of this involved chasing up other project teams who had been slow to respond - folks, if you re running a service that stores personal data about people then you need to be responsive to requests about it. The Debian Keyring was possibly my largest single point of contribution. We re in a roughly 3 month rotation of who handles the keyring updates, and I handled 2020.02.02, 2020.03.24, 2020.06.24, 2020.09.24 + 2020.12.24 For Debian New Members I m mostly inactive as an application manager - we generally seem to have enough available recently. If that changes I ll look at stepping in to help, but I don t see that happening. I continue to be involved in Front Desk, having various conversations throughout the year with the rest of the team, but there s no doubt Mattia and Pierre-Elliott are the real doers at present. In terms of package uploads I continued to work on gcc-xtensa-lx106, largely doing uploads to deal with updates to the GCC version or packaging (5, 6 + 7). sigrok had a few minor updates, libsigkrok 0.5.2-2, libsigrokdecode 0.5.3-2 as well as a new upstream release of Pulseview 0.4.2-1 and a fix to cope with change to QT 0.4.2-2. Due to the sigrok-firmware requirement on sdcc I also continued to help out there, updating to 4.0.0+dfsg-1 and doing some fixups in 4.0.0+dfsg-2. Despite still not writing an VHDL these days I continue to try and make sure ghdl is ok, because I found it a useful tool in the past. In 2020 that meant a new upstream release, 0.37+dfsg-1 along with a couple of more minor updates (0.37+dfsg-2 + 0.37+dfsg-3. libcli had a new upstream release, 1.10.4-1, and I did a long overdue update to sendip to the latest upstream release, 2.6-1 having been poked about an outstanding bug by the Reproducible Builds folk. OpenOCD is coming up to 4 years since its last stable release, but I did a snapshot upload to Debian experimental (0.10.0+g20200530-1) and a subsequent one to unstable (0.10.0+g20200819-1). There are also moves to produce a 0.11.0 release and I uploaded 0.11.0~rc1-1 as a result. libjaylink got a bump as a result (0.2.0-1) after some discussion with upstream.

OpenOCD On the subject of OpenOCD I ve tried to be a bit more involved upstream. I m not familiar enough with the intricacies of JTAG/SWD/the various architectures supported to contribute to the core, but I pushed the config for my HIE JTAG adapter upstream and try and review patches that don t require in depth hardware knowledge.

Linux I ve been contributing to the Linux kernel for a number of years now, mostly just minor bits here and there for issues I hit. This year I spent a lot of time getting support for the MikoTik RB3011 router upstreamed. That included the basic DTS addition, fixing up QCA8K to support SGMII CPU connections, adding proper 802.1q VLAN support to QCA8K and cleaning up an existing QCOM ADM driver that s required for the NAND. There were a number of associated bugfixes/minor changes found along the way too. It can be a little frustrating at times going round the review loop with submitting things upstream, but I do find it quite satisfying when it all comes together and I have no interest in weird vendor trees that just bitrot over time.

Software in the Public Interest I haven t sat on the board of SPI since 2015 but I was still acting as the primary maintainer of the membership website (with Martin Michlmayr as the other active contributor) and hosting it on my own machine. I managed to finally extricate myself from this role in August. I remain a contributing member.

Personal projects 2020 finally saw another release (0.6.0, followed swiftly by 0.6.1 to allow the upload of 0.6.1-1 to Debian) of onak. This release finally adds various improvements to deal with the hostility shown to the OpenPGP keyserver network in recent years, including full signature verification as an option. I fixed an oversight in my Digoo/1-wire temperature decoder and a bug that turned up on ARM but not MIPS in my mqtt-arp code. I should probably package it for Debian (even if I don t upload it), as I m running it on my RB3011 now.

FTP master This month I only accepted 8 packages and like last month rejected 0. Despite the holidays 293 packages got accepted. Debian LTS This was my seventy-eighth month that I did some work for the Debian LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian. This month my all in all workload has been 26h. During that time I did LTS uploads of:

• [DLA 2489-1] minidlna security update for two CVEs
• [DLA 2490-1] x11vnc security update for one CVE
• [DLA 2501-1] influxdb security update for one CVE
• [DLA 2511-1] highlight.js security update for one CVE

Unfortunately package slirp has the same version in Stretch and Buster. So I first had to upload slirp/1:1.0.17-11 to unstable, in order to be allowed to fix the CVE in Buster and to finally upload a new version to Stretch. Meanwhile the fix for Buster has been approved by the Release Team and I am waiting for the next point release now. I also prepared a debdiff for influxdb, which will result in DSA-4823-1 in January. As there appeared new CVEs for openjpeg2, I did not do an upload yet. This is planned for January now. Last but not least I did some days of frontdesk duties. Debian ELTS This month was the thirtieth ELTS month. During my allocated time I uploaded:

• ELA-341-1 for highlight.js

As well as for LTS, I did not finish work on all CVEs of openjpeg2, so the upload is postponed to January. Last but not least I did some days of frontdesk duties. Unfortunately I also had to give back some hours. Other stuff This month I uploaded new upstream versions of:

• golang-github-cyberdelia-heroku-go
• golang-github-rivo-uniseg
• golang-github-dchest-uniuri
• golang-github-deanthompson-ginpprof
• golang-github-cnf-structhash
• golang-github-dreamitgetit-statuscake
• golang-github-gin-contrib-static
• golang-github-grafana-grafana-plugin-model
• golang-github-hashicorp-terraform-svchost
• golang-github-jesseduffield-pty
• golang-github-vividcortex-mysqlerr
• golang-github-zorkian-go-datadog-api
• golang-github-zenazn-goji
• golang-github-suapapa-go-eddystone
• golang-github-uber-go-atomic
• golang-github-rhnvrm-simples3
• golang-github-ua-parser-uap-go
• golang-github-hashicorp-go-slug
• astronomical-almanac
• meep
• meep-mpi-default
• meep-openmpi
• mpb
• nuspell
• osmo-msc
• osmo-bts
• libosmocore

I fixed one or two bugs in:

• entropybroker
• chktex
• osmo-pcu
• libosmo-netif
• libosmo-sccp
• osmo-bsc
• osmo-sgsn
• osmo-ggsn
• osmo-pcu
• osmo-trx
• libsmpp34
• osmo-hlr
• osmo-mgw
• openbsc
• osmo-iuh
• osmo-bts
• osmo-msc
• libosmo-abis
• golang-gopkg-go-playground-colors.v1

I improved packaging of:

• pescetti
• rplay
• setserial
• siggen
• te923con
• sshesame
• feynmf
• pywws
• golang-github-wildducktheories-go-csv

Some packages just needed a source upload:

• golang-github-jesseduffield-termbox-go
• golang-github-mgutz-str
• golang-github-ua-parser-uap-go
• golang-github-rivo-uniseg

and there have been even some new packages:

• golang-github-go-chi-chi
• golang-github-hashicorp-go-azure-helpers
• golang-github-mitch000001-go-hbci
• golang-github-go-chi-cors
• golang-github-fvbommel-sortorder
• golang-github-goburrow-modbus
• golang-github-hashicorp-go-tfe
• golang-github-zclconf-go-cty-yaml
• golang-github-go-chi-chi

With these uploads I finished the libosmocom- and libctl-transitions. The Debian Med Advent Calendar was again really successful this year. There was no new record, but with 109, the second most number of bugs has been closed.

year	number of bugs closed
2011	63
2012	28
2013	73
2014	5
2015	150
2016	95
2017	105
2018	81
2019	104
2020	109

Well done everybody who participated. It is really nice to see that Andreas is no longer a lone wolf.

I have been a Puppet user for a couple of years now, first at work, and eventually for my personal servers and computers. Although it can have a steep learning curve, I find Puppet both nimble and very powerful. I also prefer it to Ansible for its speed and the agent-server model it uses. Sadly, Puppet Labs hasn't been the most supportive upstream and tends to move pretty fast. Major versions rarely last for a whole Debian Stable release and the upstream .deb packages are full of vendored libraries.¹ Since 2017, Apollon Oikonomopoulos has been the one doing most of the work on Puppet in Debian. Sadly, he's had less time for that lately and with Puppet 5 being deprecated in January 2021, Thomas Goirand, Utkarsh Gupta and I have been trying to package Puppet 6 in Debian for the last 6 months. With Puppet 6, the old ruby Puppet server using Passenger is not supported anymore and has been replaced by puppetserver, written in Clojure and running on the JVM. That's quite a large change and although puppetserver does reuse some of the Clojure libraries puppetdb (already in Debian) uses, packaging it meant quite a lot of work. Work in the Clojure team As part of my efforts to package puppetserver, I had the pleasure to join the Clojure team and learn a lot about the Clojure ecosystem. As I mentioned earlier, a lot of the Clojure dependencies needed for puppetserver were already in the archive. Unfortunately, when Apollon Oikonomopoulos packaged them, the leiningen build tool hadn't been packaged yet. This meant I had to rebuild a lot of packages, on top of packaging some new ones. Since then, thanks to the efforts of Elana Hashman, leiningen has been packaged and lets us run the upstream testsuites and create .jar artifacts closer to those upstream releases. During my work on puppetserver, I worked on the following packages:

List of packages

• backport9
• bidi-clojure
• clj-digest-clojure
• clj-helper
• clj-time-clojure
• clj-yaml-clojure
• cljx-clojure
• core-async-clojure
• core-cache-clojure
• core-match-clojure
• cpath-clojure
• crypto-equality-clojure
• crypto-random-clojure
• data-csv-clojure
• data-json-clojure
• data-priority-map-clojure
• java-classpath-clojure
• jnr-constants
• jnr-enxio
• jruby
• jruby-utils-clojure
• kitchensink-clojure
• lazymap-clojure
• liberator-clojure
• ordered-clojure
• pathetic-clojure
• potemkin-clojure
• prismatic-plumbing-clojure
• prismatic-schema-clojure
• puppetlabs-http-client-clojure
• puppetlabs-i18n-clojure
• puppetlabs-ring-middleware-clojure
• puppetserver
• raynes-fs-clojure
• riddley-clojure
• ring-basic-authentication-clojure
• ring-clojure
• ring-codec-clojure
• shell-utils-clojure
• ssl-utils-clojure
• test-check-clojure
• tools-analyzer-clojure
• tools-analyzer-jvm-clojure
• tools-cli-clojure
• tools-reader-clojure
• trapperkeeper-authorization-clojure
• trapperkeeper-clojure
• trapperkeeper-filesystem-watcher-clojure
• trapperkeeper-metrics-clojure
• trapperkeeper-scheduler-clojure
• trapperkeeper-webserver-jetty9-clojure
• url-clojure
• useful-clojure
• watchtower-clojure

If you want to learn more about packaging Clojure libraries and applications, I rewrote the Debian Clojure packaging tutorial and added a section about the quirks of using leiningen without a dedicated dh_lein tool. Work left to get puppetserver 6 in the archive Unfortunately, I was not able to finish the puppetserver 6 packaging work. It is thus unlikely it will make it in Debian Bullseye. If the issues described below are fixed, it would be possible to to package puppetserver in bullseye-backports though. So what's left? jruby Although I tried my best (kudos to Utkarsh Gupta and Thomas Goirand for the help), jruby in Debian is still broken. It does build properly, but the testsuite fails with multiple errors:

• ruby-psych is broken (#959571)
• there are some random java failures on a few tests (no clue why)
• tests ran by raklelib/rspec.rake fail to run, maybe because the --pattern command line option isn't compatible with our version of rake? Utkarsh seemed to know why this happens.

jruby testsuite failures aside, I have not been able to use the jruby.deb the package currently builds in jruby-utils-clojure (testsuite failure). I had the same exact failure with the (more broken) jruby version that is currently in the archive, which leads me to think this is a LOAD_PATH issue in jruby-utils-clojure. More on that below. To try to bypass these issues, I tried to vendor jruby into jruby-utils-clojure. At first I understood vendoring meant including upstream pre-built artifacts (jruby-complete.jar) and shipping them directly. After talking with people on the #debian-mentors and #debian-ftp IRC channels, I now understand why this isn't a good idea (and why it's not permitted in Debian). Many thanks to the people who were patient and kind enough to discuss this with me and give me alternatives. As far as I now understand it, vendoring in Debian means "to have an embedded copy of the source code in another package". Code shipped that way still needs to be built from source. This means we need to build jruby ourselves, one way or another. Vendoring jruby in another package thus isn't terribly helpful. If fixing jruby the proper way isn't possible, I would suggest trying to build the package using embedded code copies of the external libraries jruby needs to build, instead of trying to use the Debian libraries.² This should make it easier to replicate what upstream does and to have a final .jar that can be used. jruby-utils-clojure This package is a first-level dependency for puppetserver and is the glue between jruby and puppetserver. It builds fine, but the testsuite fails when using the Debian jruby package. I think the problem is caused by a jruby LOAD_PATH issue. The Debian jruby package plays with the LOAD_PATH a little to try use Debian packages instead of downloading gems from the web, as upstream jruby does. This seems to clash with the gem-home, gem-path, and jruby-load-path variables in the jruby-utils-clojure package. The testsuite plays around with these variables and some Ruby libraries can't be found. I tried to fix this, but failed. Using the upstream jruby-complete.jar instead of the Debian jruby package, the testsuite passes fine. This package could clearly be uploaded to NEW right now by ignoring the testsuite failures (we're just packaging static .clj source files in the proper location in a .jar). puppetserver jruby issues aside, packaging puppetserver itself is 80% done. Using the upstream jruby-complete.jar artifact, the testsuite fails with a weird Clojure error I'm not sure I understand, but I haven't debugged it for very long. Upstream uses git submodules to vendor puppet (agent), hiera (3), facter and puppet-resource-api for the testsuite to run properly. I haven't touched that, but I believe we can either:

• link to the Debian packages
• fix the Debian packages if they don't include the right files (maybe in a new binary package that just ships part of the source code?)

Without the testsuite actually running, it's hard to know what files are needed in those packages. What now Puppet 5 is now deprecated. If you or your organisation cares about Puppet in Debian,³ puppetserver really isn't far away from making it in the archive. Very talented Debian Developers are always eager to work on these issues and can be contracted for very reasonable rates. If you're interested in contracting someone to help iron out the last issues, don't hesitate to reach out via one of the following:

• the debian-puppet mailing list
• the debian-jobs mailing list
• the Debian Consultants index
• fossjobs.net

As for I, I'm happy to say I got a new contract and will go back to teaching Economics for the Winter 2021 session. I might help out with some general Debian packaging work from time to time, but it'll be as a hobby instead of a job. Thanks The work I did during the last 6 weeks would be not have been possible without the support of the Wikimedia Foundation, who were gracious enough to contract me. My particular thanks to Faidon Liambotis, Moritz M hlenhoff and John Bond. Many, many thanks to Rob Browning, Thomas Goirand, Elana Hashman, Utkarsh Gupta and Apollon Oikonomopoulos for their direct and indirect help, without which all of this wouldn't have been possible.

Welcome to the 32th post in the rarely raucous R recommendations series, or R⁴ for short. This post covers continuous integration, a topic near and dear to many of us who have to recognise its added value. The popular and widely-used service at Travis is undergoing changes driven by a hard-to-argue with need for monetization. A fate that, if we re honest, lies ahead for most free services so who know, maybe one day we have to turn away from other currently ubiquitous service. Because one never knows, it can pay off to not get to tied to any one service. Which brings us to today s post and my r-ci service which allows me to run CI at Travis, at GitHub, at Azure, and on local Docker containers as the video demonstrates. It will likely also work at GitLab and other services, I simply haven t tried any others.

The slides are here. The r-ci website introduces r-ci at a high-level. This repo at GitHub contains run.sh, and can be used to raise issues, ask questions, or provide feedback. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

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

The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 164. This version includes the following changes: You find out more by visiting the project homepage.

The Smithsonian Mag has an informative article about the history of the game Monopoly [1]. The main point about Monopoly teaching about the problems of inequality is one I was already aware of, but there are some aspects of the history that I learned from the article. Here s an article about using modified version of Monopoly to teach Sociology [2]. Maria Paino and Jeffrey Chin wrote an interesting paper about using Monopoly with revised rules to teach Sociology [3]. They publish the rules which are interesting and seem good for a class. I think it would be good to have some new games which can teach about class differences. Maybe have an Escape From Poverty game where you have choices that include drug dealing to try and improve your situation or a cooperative game where people try to create a small business. While Monopoly can be instructive it s based on the economic circumstances of the past. The vast majority of rich people aren t rich from land ownership.

• [1] https://tinyurl.com/yyuukne3
• [2] https://tinyurl.com/y6cq5t9d
• [3] https://tinyurl.com/y5p88ubd

I remember reading an essay a month or so ago sadly I forget where talking about how things end for tyrants. If I were to sum it up, it would be with the word alone. Their power fading, they find that they had few true friends or believers; just others that were greedy for power or riches and, finding those no longer to be had, depart the sinking ship. The article looked back at examples like Nixon and examples from the 20th century in Europe and around the world. Today we saw images of a failed coup attempt. But we also saw hope. Already senior staff in the White House are resigning. Ones that had been ardent supporters. In the end, just 6 senators supported the objection to the legitimate electors. Six. Lindsay Graham, Mike Pence, and Mitch McConnel all deserted Trump. CNN reports that there are serious conversations about invoking the 25th amendment and removing him from office, because even Republicans are to the point of believing that America should not have two more weeks of this man. Whether those efforts are successful or not, I don t know. What I do know is that these actions have awakened many people, in a way that nothing else could for four years, to the dangers of Trump and, in the end, have bolstered the cause of democracy. Hard work will remain but today, Donald Trump is in the White House alone, abandoned by allies and blocked by Twitter. And we know that within two weeks, he won t be there at all. We will get through this.

There is no denying in the fact that 2020 was a challenging year for everybody, including animals. In India, animals such as dogs who mostly filled their bellies at street food stalls, were starving as there were no street eateries operating during a long long lockdown. I was in my home town, New Delhi, working from home like most of us. During the month of July 2020, a dog near the place I live (we fondly called her Brownie) delivered 7 pups in wilderness. I would never forget my first sight of them, inside a dirty, garbage filled land there were the cutest, cleanest, tiniest ball of fur! All of them were toppled as the land s surface was uneven.. The first instinct was to put them all together on a flat surface. After the search mission completed, this was the sight.. ..it started raining heavily one night and we were worried if the shed would sustain the heavy rainfall.
Next morning the first thing was to check on the pups, luckily, the pups were fine however, the entire area and their bed was damp. Without any second thought, the pups were moved from there to a safe house shelter as it was predicted that the rains will continue for a few more weeks due to monsoon. Soon, 2 months went by, from observing the pups crawl over, their eyes open and to their first bark, despite the struggles, it was an beautiful experience.
Brownie weaned off the pups and thus, they were ready for adoption! However, my biggest fear was, will anyone come forward to adopt them??

With such thoughts parallelly running in my mind, I started to post about adoption for these 7 pups.
To my biggest surprise, one by one, 5 amazing humans came forward and decided to give these pups a better life than what they would get on the streets of India. I wouldn t be able to express in words how grateful I will to be all the five dog parents who decided to adopt an Indian Street Puppy/Indies/Desi Puppy, opening up the space in their hearts and homes for the pups!

One of the 5 adopted pups is adopted by a person who hails from USA, but currently working in India. It s so heartwarming to see, that in India, despite so much awareness created against breeders and their methods, people still prefer to go for foreign bred puppy and disregard Indian/Desi Dogs.. On the other hand, there are foreigners who value the life of a Indian/Desi Dog : )

The 5 Adopted Pups who now have a permanent loving family!

If this isn t perfect, I don t know what is! God had planned loving families for them and they found it..
However, Its been almost six months now, that we haven t found a permanent home for 2 of the 7 pups, but they have the perfect foster family taking care of them right now. Now as winters are here, Along with one of my friend, who is also fostering the two pups, arranged gunny sack bags for our street, stray dogs. Two NGOs namely, Lotus Indie Foundation and We Exist Foundation who work Animal Welfare in India, were providing dog beds to ground volunteers like us. We are fortunate that they selected us and helped us to make winters less harsh for the stray dogs. However, the cold is such, I also purchased dog coats as well and put in on a few furries. After hours of running behind dogs and convincing them to wear coats, we managed to put it on a few. Another topic that needs more sensitivity is Sterilization/Neutering of dogs, that s a viable method cited by the Government to control dog population and end suffering of puppies who die under the wheels of cars. However, the implementation of this is worrisome, as it s not as robust. In a span of 6 months, I managed to get 5 dog sterilized in my area, number is not big but I feel it s a good start as an individual When I see them now, healthier, happier, running around, with no fear of getting attacked by dogs, I can t express the content I feel. For 2 of the dogs (Brownie and her friend) I got it done personally from a private vet. For the other 3, I got it done via Municipal Corporations who do it for free for dogs, you d have to call them and they come with dog catchers and a van and drop them back in the same area, but volunteers like us have to be very vigilant and active during the whole process to follow up with them. My 2020 ended with this, I am not sure why I am I even writing this in my blog where mostly I focused on my technical work and experiences, but this pandemic was challenging was everybody and what we planned couldn t happen, but because of 2020, because of the pandemic, I was on WFH in my city and I was able to help a few dogs in my area have a healthy life ahead!

What I learned during this entire adventure was, there are a lot of sweet, sensitive, caring people that we are just yet to meet. Along the way, we will also meet insensitive and discouraging people, who are unwilling to change or listen, ignore them and continue your good.

Have 1 person by your side, it s so much stronger than 10 against you. Silver lining! Hope you all had some positive experiences despite the adversity faced by every single one of us.

Just before Christmas I decided to try out a GNOME extension I'd read about, PaperWM. It looked promising, but I was a little nervous about breaking my existing workflow, which was heavily reliant on the Put Windows extension. It's great! I have had to carefully un-train some of my muscle memory but it seems to be worth it. It seems to strike a great balance between the rigidity of a tile-based window manager and a more traditional floating-windows one. I'm always wary of coming to rely upon large extensions or plugins. The parent software is often quite hands-off about caring about supporting users of them, or breaking them by making API changes. Certainly those Firefox users who were heavily dependent on plugins prior to the Quantum fire-break are still very, very angry. (I actually returned to Firefox at that point, so I avoided the pain, and enjoy the advantages of the re-architecture). PaperWM hopefully is large enough and popular enough to avoid that fate.

Linux Australia have decided to cease running the Planet installation on planet.linux.org.au. I believe that blogging is still useful and a web page with a feed of Australian Linux blogs is a useful service. So I have started running a new Planet Linux Australia on https://planet.luv.asn.au/. There has been discussion about getting some sort of redirection from the old Linux Australia page, but they don t seem able to do that. If you have a blog that has a reasonable portion of Linux and FOSS content and is based in or connected to Australia then email me on russell at coker.com.au to get it added. When I started running this I took the old list of feeds from planet.linux.org.au, deleted all blogs that didn t have posts for 5 years and all blogs that were broken and had no recent posts. I emailed people who had recently broken blogs so they could fix them. It seems that many people who run personal blogs aren t bothered by a bit of downtime. As an aside I would be happy to setup the monitoring system I use to monitor any personal web site of a Linux person and notify them by Jabber or email of an outage. I could set it to not alert for a specified period (10 mins, 1 hour, whatever you like) so it doesn t alert needlessly on routine sysadmin work and I could have it check SSL certificate validity as well as the basic page header.

I just wrote a Perl script to look at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology pages to find the current temperature in an area and then adjust BOINC settings accordingly. The Perl script (in this post after the break, which shouldn t be in the RSS feed) takes the URL of a Bureau of Meteorology observation point as ARGV[0] and parses that to find the current (within the last hour) temperature. Then successive command line arguments are of the form 24:100 and 30:50 which indicate that at below 24C 100% of CPU cores should be used and below 30C 50% of CPU cores should be used. In warm weather having a couple of workstations in a room running BOINC (or any other CPU intensive task) will increase the temperature and also make excessive noise from cooling fans. To change the number of CPU cores used the script changes /etc/boinc-client/global_prefs_override.xml and then tells BOINC to reload that config file. This code is a little ugly (it doesn t properly parse XML, it just replaces a line of text) and could fail on a valid configuration file that wasn t produced by the current BOINC code. The parsing of the BoM page is a little ugly too, it relies on the HTML code in the BoM page they could make a page that looks identical which breaks the parsing or even a page that contains the same data that looks different. It would be nice if the BoM published some APIs for getting the weather. One thing that would be good is TXT records in the DNS. DNS supports caching with specified lifetime and is designed for high throughput in aggregate. If you had a million IOT devices polling the current temperature and forecasts every minute via DNS the people running the servers wouldn t even notice the load, while a million devices polling a web based API would be a significant load. As an aside I recommend playing nice and only running such a script every 30 minutes, the BoM page seems to be updated on the half hour so I have my cron jobs running at 5 and 35 minutes past the hour. If this code works for you then that s great. If it merely acts as an inspiration for developing your own code then that s great too! BOINC users outside Australia could replace the code for getting meteorological data (or even interface to a digital thermometer). Australians who use other CPU intensive batch jobs could take the BoM parsing code and replace the BOINC related code. If you write scripts inspired by this please blog about it and comment here with a link to your blog post.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use Sys::Syslog;
# St Kilda Harbour RMYS
# http://www.bom.gov.au/products/IDV60901/IDV60901.95864.shtml
my $URL = $ARGV[0];
open(IN, "wget -o /dev/null -O - $URL ") or die "Can't get $URL";
while(<IN>)
 
  if($_ =~ /tr class=.rowleftcolumn/)
   
    last;
   
 
sub get_data
 
  if(not $_[0] =~ /headers=.t1-$_[1]/)
   
    return undef;
   
  $_[0] =~ s/^.*headers=.t1-$_[1]..//;
  $_[0] =~ s/<.td.*$//;
  return $_[0];
 
my @datetime;
my $cur_temp -100;
while(<IN>)
 
  chomp;
  if($_ =~ /^<.tr>$/)
   
    last;
   
  my $res;
  if($res = get_data($_, "datetime"))
   
    @datetime = split(/\//, $res)
   
  elsif($res = get_data($_, "tmp"))
   
    $cur_temp = $res;
   
 
close(IN);
if($#datetime != 1 or $cur_temp == -100)
 
  die "Can't parse BOM data";
 
my ($sec,$min,$hour,$mday,$mon,$year,$wday,$yday,$isdst) = localtime();
if($mday - $datetime[0] > 1 or ($datetime[0] > $mday and $mday != 1))
 
  die "Date wrong\n";
 
my $mins;
my @timearr = split(/:/, $datetime[1]);
$mins = $timearr[0] * 60 + $timearr [1];
if($timearr[1] =~ /pm/)
 
  $mins += 720;
 
if($mday != $datetime[0])
 
  $mins += 1440;
 
if($mins + 60 < $hour * 60 + $min)
 
  die "page outdated\n";
 
my %temp_hash;
foreach ( @ARGV[1..$#ARGV] )
 
  my @tmparr = split(/:/, $_);
  $temp_hash $tmparr[0]  = $tmparr[1];
 
my @temp_list = sort(keys(%temp_hash));
my $percent = 0;
my $i;
for($i = $#temp_list; $i >= 0 and $temp_list[$i] > $cur_temp; $i--)
 
  $percent = $temp_hash $temp_list[$i] 
 
my $prefs = "/etc/boinc-client/global_prefs_override.xml";
open(IN, "<$prefs") or die "Can't read $prefs";
my @prefs_contents;
while(<IN>)
 
  push(@prefs_contents, $_);
 
close(IN);
openlog("boincmgr-cron", "", "daemon");
my @cpus_pct = grep(/max_ncpus_pct/, @prefs_contents);
my $cpus_line = $cpus_pct[0];
$cpus_line =~ s/..max_ncpus_pct.$//;
$cpus_line =~ s/^.*max_ncpus_pct.//;
if($cpus_line == $percent)
 
  syslog("info", "Temp $cur_temp" . "C, already set to $percent");
  exit 0;
 
open(OUT, ">$prefs.new") or die "Can't read $prefs.new";
for($i = 0; $i <= $#prefs_contents; $i++)
 
  if($prefs_contents[$i] =~ /max_ncpus_pct/)
   
    print OUT "   <max_ncpus_pct>$percent.000000</max_ncpus_pct>\n";
   
  else
   
    print OUT $prefs_contents[$i];
   
 
close(OUT);
rename "$prefs.new", "$prefs" or die "can't rename";
system("boinccmd --read_global_prefs_override");
syslog("info", "Temp $cur_temp" . "C, set percentage to $percent");

I was assigned 16 hours of work by Freexian's Debian LTS initiative and carried over 9 hours from earlier months. I worked 16.5 hours this month, so I will carry over 8.5 hours to January. (Updated: corrected number of hours worked.) I updated linux-4.19 to include the changes in the Debian 10.7 point release, uploaded the package, and issued DLA-2483-1 for this. I picked some regression fixes from the Linux 4.9 stable branch to the linux package, and uploaded the package. This unfortunately failed to build on arm64 due to some upstream changes uncovering an old bug, so I made a second upload fixing that. I issued DLA-2494-1 for this. I updated the linux packaging branch for stretch to Linux 4.9.249, but haven't made another package upload yet.

For the next library soname bump of gpsd I needed to rebuild all reverse dependencies. As this is a task I have to do very often, I came up with some code to generate (and keep uptodate) an include for the gitlab CI. Right now it is rather uncommented, undocumented, but works well. If you like it, MRs are very welcome. https://salsa.debian.org/bzed/reverse-dependency-ci/ The generated files are here: https://bzed.pages.debian.net/reverse-dependency-ci/ Usage:

include:
 - https://salsa.debian.org/salsa-ci-team/pipeline/raw/master/salsa-ci.yml
 - https://salsa.debian.org/salsa-ci-team/pipeline/raw/master/pipeline-jobs.yml
 - https://bzed.pages.debian.net/reverse-dependency-ci/gpsd.yml
variables:
 SALSA_CI_ENABLE_REVERSE_DEPENDENCY_BUILD: 1

Please do no abuse the salsa CI. Don t build all of your 100 reverse dependencies with every commit!

Nothing too much has happened recently, largely as a result of the pandemic killing a lot of daily interests and habits. However as a result of Brexit I'm having to do some paperwork, apparently I now need to register for permanent residency under the terms of the withdrawal agreement, and that will supersede the permanent residency I previously obtained. Of course as a UK citizen I've now lost the previously-available freedom of movement. I can continue to reside here in Helsinki, Finland, indefinitely, but I cannot now move to any other random EU country. It has crossed my mind, more than a few times, that I should attempt to achieve Finnish citizenship. As a legal resident of Finland the process is pretty simple, I just need two things:

• Prove I've lived here for the requisite number of years.
• Pass a language test.

Of course the latter requirement is hard, I can understand a lot of spoken and written Finnish, but writing myself, and speaking a lot is currently beyond me. I need to sit down and make the required effort to increase my fluency. There is the alternative option of learning Swedish, which is a hack a lot of immigrants use:

• Learning Swedish is significantly easier for a native English-speaker.
• But the downside is that it would be learning a language solely to "cheat" the test, it wouldn't actually be useful in my daily life.

Finland has two official languages, and so the banks, the medical world, the tax-office, etc, are obliged to provide service in both. However daily life, ordering food at restaurants, talking to parents in the local neighborhood? Finnish, or English are the only real options. So if I went this route I'd end up in a weird situation where I had to learn a language to pass a test, but then would continue to need to learn more Finnish to live my life. That seems crazy, unless I were desperate for a second citizenship which I don't think I am. Learning Finnish has not yet been a priority, largely because I work in English in the IT-world, and of course when I first moved here I was working (remotely) for a UK company, and didn't have the time to attend lessons (because they were scheduled during daytime, on the basis that many immigrants are unemployed). Later we had a child, which meant that early-evening classes weren't a realistic option either. (Of course I learned a lot of the obvious things immediately upon moving, things like numbers, names for food, days of the week were essential. Without those I couldn't have bought stuff in shops and would have starved!) On the topic of languages a lot of people talk about how easy it is for children to pick up new languages, and while that is broadly true it is also worth remembering just how many years of correction and repetition they have to endure as part of the process. For example we have a child, as noted already, he is spoken to by everybody in Finnish. I speak to him in English, and he hears his mother and myself speaking English. But basically he's 100% Finnish with the exception of:

• Me, speaking English to him.
• His mother and I speaking English in his hearing.
• Watching Paw Patrol.

If he speaks Finnish to me I pretend to not understand him, even when I do, just for consistency. As a result of that I've heard him tell strangers "Daddy doesn't speak Finnish" (in Finnish) when we've been stopped and asked for directions. He also translates what some other children have said into English for my benefit which is adorable Anyway he's four, and he's pretty amazing at speaking to everybody in the correct language - he's outgrown the phase where he'd mix different languages in the same sentence ("more leip ", "saisinko milk") - when I took him to the UK he surprised and impressed me by being able to understand a lot of the heavy/thick accents he'd never heard before. (I'll still need to train him on Rab C. Nesbitt when he's a wee bit older, but so far no worries.) So children learn languages, easily and happily? Yes and no. I've spent nearly two years correcting his English and he still makes the same mistake with gender. It's not a big deal, at all, but it's a reminder that while children learn this stuff, they still don't do it as easily as people imagine. I'm trying to learn and if I'd been corrected for two years over the same basic point you'd rightly think I was "slow", but actually that's just how it works. Learning languages requires a hell of a lot of practice, a lot of effort, and a lot of feedback/corrections. Specifically Finnish doesn't have gendered pronouns, the same word is used for "he" and "she". This leads to a lot of Finnish people, adults and children, getting the pronouns wrong in English. In the case of our child he'll say "Mommy is sleeping, when he wake up?" In the case of adults I've heard people say "My girlfriend is a doctor, he works in a hospital", or "My dad is an accountant, she works for a big firm". As I say I've spent around two years making this correction to the child, and he's still nowhere near getting it right. Kinda adorable actually:

• "Mommy is a woman we say "when she wakes up"..."
• "Adriana is a girl we say "her bike".."

For once, I've already read and reviewed quite a few of these books. Elizabeth Bear Machine (sff)
Timothy Caulfield Your Day, Your Way (non-fiction)
S.A. Chakraborty The City of Brass (sff)
John Dickerson The Hardest Job in the World (non-fiction)
Tracy Deonn Legendborn (sff)
Lindsay Ellis Axiom's End (sff)
Alix E. Harrow The Once and Future Witches (sff)
TJ Klune The House in the Cerulean Sea (sff)
Maria Konnikova The Biggest Bluff (non-fiction)
Talia Levin Culture Warlords (non-fiction)
Yoon Ha Lee Phoenix Extravagent (sff)
Yoon Ha Lee, et al. The Vela (sff)
Michael Lewis Flash Boys (non-fiction)
Michael Lewis Losers (non-fiction)
Michael Lewis The Undoing Project (non-fiction)
Megan Lindholm Wizard of the Pigeons (sff)
Nathan Lowell Quarter Share (sff)
Adrienne Martini Somebody's Gotta Do It (non-fiction)
Tamsyn Muir Princess Florinda and the Forty-Flight Tower (sff)
Naomi Novik A Deadly Education (sff)
Margaret Owen The Merciful Crow (sff)
Anne Helen Peterson Can't Even (non-fiction)
Devon Price Laziness Does Not Exist (non-fiction)
The Secret Barrister The Secret Barrister (non-fiction)
Studs Terkel Working (non-fiction)
Kathi Weeks The Problem with Work (non-fiction)
Reeves Wiedeman Billion Dollar Loser (non-fiction) Rather a lot of non-fiction in this batch, much more than usual. I've been in a non-fiction mood lately. So many good things to read!

Year 2020. What a year! Sure, already around early January there were rumours/noise about Covid-19, but who would have thought where it will end up! Thankfully, none of my close or extended family was directly (medically) affected by Covid, so I/we had a privileged year compared to so many other people. I thought how to write a mini-summary, but prose is too difficult, so let s just go month-by-month. Please note that my memory is fuzzy after 9 months cooked up in the apartment, so things could 1 month compared to what I wrote.

Timeline

January Ski weekend. Skiing is awesome! Cancelling a US work trip since there will be more opportunities soon (har har!).

February Ski vacation. Yep, skiing is awesome. Can t wait for next season (har har!). Discussions about Covid start in the office, but more is this scary or just interesting? (yes, this was before casualties). Then things start escalating, work-from-home at least partially, etc. etc. Definitely not just intersting anymore. In Garmin-speak, I got ~700+ intensity minutes in February (correlates with activity time, but depends on intensity of the effort whether 1:1 or 2 intensity minutes for one wall-clock minute).

March Sometimes during the month, my workplace introduces mandatory WFH. I remember being the last person in our team in the office, on the last day we were allowed to work, and cleaning my desk/etc., thinking all this, and we ll be back in 3 weeks or so . Har har! I buy a webcam, just in case WFH gets extended. And start to increase my sports - getting double the intensity minutes (1500+).

April Switzerland enters the first, hard, lockdown. Or was it late March? Not entirely sure, but in my mind March was the opening, and April was the first main course. It is challenging, having to juggle family and work and stressed schedule, but also interesting. Looking back, I think I liked April the most, as people were actually careful at that time. I continue upgrading my home office - new sound system, so that I don t have to plug in/plug out cables. 1700+ intensity minutes this month.

May Continued WFH, somewhat routine now. My then internet provider started sucking hard, so I upgrade with good results. I m still happy, half a year later (quite happy, even). Still going strong otherwise, but waiting for summer vacation, whatever it will be. A tiny bit more effort, so 1800 intensity minutes in May.

June Switzerland relaxes the lock down, but not my company, so as the rest of the family goes out and about, I start feeling alone in the apartment. And somewhat angry at it, which impacts my sports (counter-intuitively), so I only get 1500 intensity minutes. I go and buy a coffee machine a real one, that takes beans and grinds them, so I get to enjoy the smell of freshly-ground coffee and the fun of learning about coffee beans, etc. But it occupies the time. On the work/job front, I think at this time I finally got a workstation for home, instead of a laptop (which was ultra-portable too), so together with the coffee machine, it feels like a normal work environment. Well, modulo all the people. At least I m not crying anymore every time I open a new tab in Chrome

July Situation is slowly going better, but no, not my company. Still mandatory WFH, with (if I recall correctly) one day per week allowed, and no meeting other people. I get angrier, but manage to channel my energy into sports, almost doubly my efforts in July - 2937 intensity minutes, not quite reaching the 3000 magic number. I buy more stuff to clean and take care of my bicycles, which I don t really use. So shopping therapy too.

August The month starts with a one week family vacation, but I take a bike too, so I manage to put in some effort (it was quite nice riding TBH). A bit of changes in the personal life (nothing unexpected), which complicates things a bit, but at this moment I really thought Switzerland is going to continue to decrease in infections/R-factor/etc. so things will get back to normal, right? My company expands a bit the work-from-office part, so I m optimistic. Sports wise, still going strong, 2500 intensity minutes, preparing for the single race this year.

September The personal life changes from August start to stabilise, so things become again routine, and I finally get to do a race. Life was good for an extended weekend (well, modulo race angst, but that s part of the fun), and I feel justified to take it slow the week after the race. And the week after that too. I end up the month with close, but not quite, 1900 intensity minutes.

October October starts with school holidays and a one week family vacation, but I feel demotivated. Everything is closing down again (well, modulo schools), and I actually have difficulty getting re-adjusted to no longer being alone in the apartment during the work hours. I only get ~1000 intensity minutes in October, mainly thanks to good late autumn weather and outside rides. And I start playing way more computer games. I also sell my PS4, hoping to get a PS5 next month.

November November continues to suck. I think my vacation in October was actually detrimental - it broke my rhythm, I don t really do sport anymore, not consistently at least, so I only get 700+ intensity minutes. And I keep playing computer games, even if I missed the PS5 ordering window; so I switch to PC gaming. My home office feels very crowded, so as kind of anti-shopping therapy, I sell tons of smallish stuff; can t believe how much crap I kept around while not really using it. I also manage to update/refresh all my Debian packages, since next freeze approaches. Better than for previous releases, so it feels good.

December December comes, end of the year, the much awaited vacation - which we decide to cancel due to the situation in whole of Switzerland (and neighbouring countries). I basically only play computer games, and get grand total of 345 activity minutes this month. And since my weight is inversely correlated to my training, I m basically back at my February weight, having lost all the gains I made during the year. I mean, having gained back all the fat I lost. Err, you know what I mean; I m back close to my high-watermark, which is not good.

Conclusion I was somehow hoping that the end of the year will allow me to reset and restart, but somehow - a few days into January - it doesn t really feel so. My sleep schedule is totally ruined, my motivation is so-so, and I think the way I crashed in October was much harder/worse than I realised at the time, but in a way expected for this crazy year. I have some projects for 2021 - or at least, I m trying to make up a project list - in order to get a bit more structure in my continued stuck inside the house part, which is especially terrible when on-call. I don t know how the next 3-6 months will evolve, but I m thankful that so far, we are all healthy. Actually, me personally I ve been healthier physically than in other years, due to less contact with other people. On the other side, thinking of all the health-care workers, or even service workers, my IT job is comfy and all I am is a spoiled person (I could write many posts on specifically this topic). I really need to up my willpower and lower my spoil level. Hints are welcome :( Wish everybody has a better year in 2021.

Sometimes you need to do things you don't like and you don't know where you will end up.
In our household there exists one (production) system running Windows. Don't ask why and please no recommandations how to substitute it. Some things are hard to (ex)change, for example your love partner. Looking into Backup with rsync on Windows (WSL) I needed to start a privileged powershell, so I first started an unprivileged one:

powershell

Just to start a privileged:

Start-Process powershell -Verb runAs

Now you can follow the Instructions from Microsoft to install OpenSSH. Or just install the OpenSSH Server:

Add-WindowsCapability -Online -Name OpenSSH.Server~~~~0.0.1.0

Check if a firewall rule was created (maybe you want to adjust it):

Get-NetFirewallRule -Name *ssh*

Start the OpenSSH server:

Start-Service sshd

Running OpenSSH server as service:

Set-Service -Name sshd -StartupType 'Automatic'

You can create the .ssh directory with the correct permissions by connecting to localhost and creating the known_hosts file.

ssh user@127.0.0.1

When you intend to use public key authentication for users in the administrators group, have a look into How to Login Windows Using SSH Key Under Local Admin. Indeed you can get rsync running via WSL. But why load tons of dependencies on your system? With the installation of rsync I cheated a bit and used chocolately by running choco install rsync, but there is also an issue requesting rsync support for the OpenSSH server which includes an archive with a rsync.exe and libraries which may also fit. You can place those files for example into C:\Windows\System32\OpenSSH so they are in the PATH. So here we are. Now I can solve all my other issues with BackupPC, Windows firewall and the network challenges to get access to the isolated dedicated network of the windows system.

Note: this is another article in my series on asynchronous communication in Linux with UUCP and NNCP. In my previous post, I introduced a way to use ZFS backups over NNCP. In this post, I ll expand on that and also explore non-ZFS backups. Use of nncp-file instead of nncp-exec The previous example used nncp-exec (like UUCP s uux), which lets you pipe stdin in, then queues up a request to run a given command with that input on a remote. I discussed that NNCP doesn t guarantee order of execution, but that for the ZFS use case, that was fine since zfs receive would just fail (causing NNCP to try again later). At present, nncp-exec stores the data piped to it in RAM before generating the outbound packet (the author plans to fix this shortly). That made it unusable for some of my backups, so I set it up another way: with nncp-file, the tool to transfer files to a remote machine. A cron job then picks them up and processes them. On the machine being backed up, we have to find a way to encode the dataset to be received. I chose to do that as part of the filename, so the updated simplesnap-queue could look like this:

#!/bin/bash
set -e
set -o pipefail
DEST=" echo $1   sed 's,^tank/simplesnap/,,' "
FILE="bakfsfmt2- date "+%s.%N".$$ _ echo "$DEST"   sed 's,/,@,g' "
echo "Processing $DEST to $FILE" >&2
# stdin piped to this
zstd -8 - \
    gpg --compress-algo none --cipher-algo AES256 -e -r 012345...  \
    su nncp -c "/usr/local/nncp/bin/nncp-file -nice B -noprogress - 'backupsvr:$FILE'" >&2
echo "Queued $DEST to $FILE" >&2

I ve added compression and encryption here as well; more on that below. On the backup server, we would define a different incoming directory for each node in nncp.hjson. For instance:

host1:  
...
   incoming: "/var/local/nncp-bakcups-incoming/host1"
 
host2:  
...
   incoming: "/var/local/nncp-backups-incoming/host2"
 

I ll present the scanning script in a bit. Offsite Backup Rotation Most of the time, you don t want just a single drive to store the backups. You d like to have a set. At minimum, one wouldn t be plugged in so lightning wouldn t ruin all your backups. But maybe you d store a second drive at some other location you have access to (friend s house, bank box, etc.) There are several ways you could solve this:

• If the remote machine is at a location with network access and you trust its physical security (remember that although it will store data encrypted at rest and will transport it encrypted, it will in most cases handle un-encrypted data during processing), you could of course send NNCP packets to it over the network at the same time you send them to your local backup system.
• Alternatively, if the remote location doesn t have network access or you want to keep it airgapped, you could transport the NNCP packets by USB drive to the remote end.
• Or, if you don t want to have any kind of processing capability remotely probably a wise move you could rotate the hard drives themselves, keeping one plugged in locally and unplugging the other to take it offsite.

The third option can be helped with NNCP, too. One way is to create separate NNCP installations for each of the drives that you store data on. Then, whenever one is plugged in, the appropriate NNCP config will be loaded and appropriate packets received and processed. The neighbor machine the spooler would just store up packets for the offsite drive until it comes back onsite (or, perhaps, your airgapped USB transport would do this). Then when it s back onsite, all the queued up ZFS sends get replayed and the backups replicated. Now, how might you handle this with NNCP? The simple way would be to have each system generating backups send them to two destinations. For instance:

zstd -8 -   gpg --compress-algo none --cipher-algo AES256 -e -r 07D5794CD900FAF1D30B03AC3D13151E5039C9D5 \
    tee >(su nncp -c "/usr/local/nncp/bin/nncp-file -nice B+5 -noprogress - 'backupdisk1:$FILE'") \
        >(su nncp -c "/usr/local/nncp/bin/nncp-file -nice B+5 -noprogress - 'backupdisk2:$FILE'") \
   > /dev/null

You could probably also more safely use pee(1) (from moreutils) to do this. This has an unfortunate result of doubling the network traffic from every machine being backed up. So an alternative option would be to queue the packets to the spooling machine, and run a distribution script from it; something like this, in part:

INCOMINGDIR="/var/local/nncp-bakfs-incoming"
LOCKFILE="$INCOMINGDIR/.lock"
printf -v EVAL_SAFE_LOCKFILE '%q' "$LOCKFILE"
if dotlockfile -r 0 -l -p "$ LOCKFILE "; then
  logit "Lock obtained at $ LOCKFILE  with dotlockfile"
  trap 'ECODE=$?; dotlockfile -u '"$ EVAL_SAFE_LOCKFILE "'; exit $ECODE' EXIT INT TERM
else
  logit "Could not obtain lock at $LOCKFILE; $0 likely already running."
  exit 0
fi
logit "Scanning queue directory..."
cd "$INCOMINGDIR"
for HOST in *; do
   cd "$INCOMINGDIR/$HOST"
   for FILE in bakfsfmt2-*; do
           if [ -f "$FILE" ]; then
                   for BAKFS in backupdisk1 backupdisk2; do
                           runcommand nncp-file -nice B+5 -noprogress "$FILE" "$BAKFS:$HOST/$FILE"
                   done
                   runcommand rm "$FILE"
           else
                   logit "$HOST: Skipping $FILE since it doesn't exist"
           fi
   done
done
logit "Scan complete."

Security Considerations You ll notice that in my example above, the encryption happens as the root user, but nncp is called under su. This means that even if there is a vulnerability in NNCP, the data would still be protected by GPG. I ll also note here that many sites run ssh as root unnecessarily; the same principles should apply there. (ssh has had vulnerabilities in the past as well). I could have used gpg s built-in compression, but zstd is faster and better, so we can get good performance by using fast compression and piping that to an algorithm that can use hardware acceleration for encryption. I strongly encourage considering transport, whether ssh or NNCP or UUCP, to be untrusted. Don t run it as root if you can avoid it. In my example, the nncp user, which all NNCP commands are run as, has no access to the backup data at all. So even if NNCP were compromised, my backup data wouldn t be. For even more security, I could also sign the backup stream with gpg and validate that on the receiving end. I should note, however, that this conversation assumes that a network- or USB-facing ssh or NNCP is more likely to have an exploitable vulnerability than is gpg (which here is just processing a stream). This is probably a safe assumption in general. If you believe gpg is more likely to have an exploitable vulnerability than ssh or NNCP, then obviously you wouldn t take this particular approach. On the zfs side, the use of -F with zfs receive is avoided; this could lead to a compromised backed-up machine generating a malicious rollback on the destination. Backup zpools should be imported with -R or -N to ensure that a malicious mountpoint property couldn t be used to cause an attack. I choose to use zfs receive -u -o readonly=on which is compatible with both unmounted backup datasets and zpools imported with -R (or both). To access the data in a backup dataset, you would normally clone it and access it there. The processing script So, put this all together and look at an example of a processing script that would run from cron as root and process the incoming ZFS data.

#!/bin/bash
set -e
set -o pipefail
# Log a message
logit ()  
   logger -p info -t " basename "$0" [$$]" "$1"
 
# Log an error message
logerror ()  
   logger -p err -t " basename "$0" [$$]" "$1"
 
# Log stdin with the given code.  Used normally to log stderr.
logstdin ()  
   logger -p info -t " basename "$0" [$$/$1]"
 
# Run command, logging stderr and exit code
runcommand ()  
   logit "Running $*"
   if "$@" 2> >(logstdin "$1") ; then
      logit "$1 exited successfully"
      return 0
   else
       RETVAL="$?"
       logerror "$1 exited with error $RETVAL"
       return "$RETVAL"
   fi
 
STORE=backups/simplesnap
INCOMINGDIR=/backups/nncp/incoming
if ! [ -d "$INCOMINGDIR" ]; then
        logerror "$INCOMINGDIR doesn't exist"
        exit 0
fi
LOCKFILE="/backups/nncp/.nncp-backups-zfs-scan.lock"
printf -v EVAL_SAFE_LOCKFILE '%q' "$LOCKFILE"
if dotlockfile -r 0 -l -p "$ LOCKFILE "; then
  logit "Lock obtained at $ LOCKFILE  with dotlockfile"
  trap 'ECODE=$?; dotlockfile -u '"$ EVAL_SAFE_LOCKFILE "'; exit $ECODE' EXIT INT TERM
else
  logit "Could not obtain lock at $LOCKFILE; $0 likely already running."
  exit 0
fi
EXITCODE=0
cd "$INCOMINGDIR"
logit "Scanning queue directory..."
for HOST in *; do
    HOSTPATH="$INCOMINGDIR/$HOST"
    # files like backupsfmt2-134.13134_dest
    for FILE in "$HOSTPATH"/backupsfmt2-[0-9]*_?*; do
        if [ ! -f "$FILE" ]; then
            logit "Skipping non-existent $FILE"
            continue
        fi
        # Now, $DEST will be HOST/DEST.  Strip off the @ also.
        DEST=" echo "$FILE"   sed -e 's/^.*backupsfmt2[^_]*_//' -e 's,@,/,g' "
        if [ -z "$DEST" ]; then
            logerror "Malformed dest in $FILE"
            continue
        fi
        HOST2=" echo "$DEST"   sed 's,/.*,,g' "
        if [ -z "$HOST2" ]; then
            logerror "Malformed DEST $DEST in $FILE"
            continue
        fi
        if [ ! "$HOST" = "$HOST2" ]; then
            logerror "$DIR: $HOST doesn't match $HOST2"
            continue
        fi
        logit "Processing $FILE to $STORE/$DEST"
            if runcommand gpg -q -d < "$FILE"   runcommand zstdcat   runcommand zfs receive -u -o readonly=on "$STORE/$DEST"; then
                logit "Successfully processed $FILE to $STORE/$DEST"
                runcommand rm "$FILE"
        else
                logerror "FAILED to process $FILE to $STORE/$DEST"
                EXITCODE=15
        fi

Applying These Ideas to Non-ZFS Backups ZFS backups made our job easier in a lot of ways:

• ZFS can calculate a diff based on an efficiently-stored previous local state (snapshot or bookmark), rather than a comparison to a remote state (rsync)
• ZFS "incremental" sends, while less efficient than rsync, are reasonably efficient, sending only changed blocks
• ZFS receive detects and enforces that the incremental source on the local machine must match the incremental source of the original stream, enforcing ordering
• Datasets using ZFS encryption can be sent in their encrypted state
• Incrementals can be done without a full scan of the filesystem

Some of these benefits you just won't get without ZFS (or something similar like btrfs), but let's see how we could apply these ideas to non-ZFS backups. I will explore the implementation of them in a future post. When I say "non ZFS", I am being a bit vague as to whether the source, the destination, or both systems are running a non-ZFS filesystem. In general I'll assume that neither are ZFS. The first and most obvious answer is to just tar up the whole system and send that every day. This is, of course, only suitable for small datasets on a fast network. These tarballs could be unpacked on the destination and stored more efficiently via any number of methods (hardlink trees, a block-level deduplicator like borg or rdedup, or even just simply compressed tarballs). To make the network trip more efficient, something like rdiff or xdelta could be used. A signature file could be stored on the machine being backed up (generated via tee/pee at stream time), and the next run could simply send an rdiff delta over NNCP. This would be quite network-efficient, but still would require reading every byte of every file on every backup, and would also require quite a bit of temporary space on the receiving end (to apply the delta to the previous tarball and generate a new one). Alternatively, a program that generates incremental backup files such as rdup could be used. These could be transmitted over NNCP to the backup server, and unpacked there. While perhaps less efficient on the network -- every file with at least one modified byte would be retransmitted in its entirety -- it avoids the need to read every byte of unmodified files or to have enormous temporary space. I should note here that GNU tar claims to have an incremental mode, but it has a potential data loss bug. There are also some tools with algorithms that may apply well in this use care: syrep and fssync being the two most prominent examples, though rdedup (mentioned above) and the nascent asuran project may also be combinable with other tools to achieve this effect. I should, of course, conclude this section by mentioning btrfs. Every time I've tried it, I've run into serious bugs, and its status page indicates that only some of them have been resolved. I would not consider using it for something as important as backups. However, if you are comfortable with it, it is likely to be able to run in more constrained environments than ZFS and could probably be processed in much the same way as zfs streams.

Review: The Once and Future Witches, by Alix E. Harrow

Publisher:	Redhook Books
Copyright:	October 2020
ISBN:	0-316-42202-9
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	515

Once upon a time there were three sisters. They were born in a forgotten kingdom that smelled of honeysuckle and mud, where the Big Sandy ran wide and the sycamores shone white as knuckle-bones on the banks. The sisters had no mother and a no-good father, but they had each other; it might have been enough. But the sisters were banished from their kingdom, broken and scattered.

The Once and Future Witches opens with Juniper, the youngest, arriving in the city of New Salem. The year is 1893, but not in our world, not quite; Juniper has witch-ways in her pocket and a few words of power. That's lucky for her because the wanted posters arrived before she did. Unbeknownst to her or to each other, her sisters, Agnes and Bella, are already in New Salem. Agnes works in a cotton mill after having her heart broken one too many times; the mill is safer because you can't love a cotton mill. Bella is a junior librarian, meek and nervous and uncertain but still fascinated by witch-tales and magic. It's Bella who casts the spell, partly by accident, partly out of wild hope, but it was Juniper arriving in the city who provided the final component that made it almost work. Not quite, not completely, but briefly the lost tower of Avalon appears in St. George's Square. And, more importantly, the three sisters are reunited. The world of the Eastwood sisters has magic, but the people in charge of that world aren't happy about it. Magic is a female thing, contrary to science and, more importantly, God. History has followed a similar course to our world in part because magic has been ruthlessly suppressed. Inquisitors are a recent memory and the cemetery has a witch-yard, where witches are buried unnamed and their ashes sown with salt. The city of New Salem is called New Salem because Old Salem, that stronghold of witchcraft, was burned to the ground and left abandoned, fit only for tourists to gawk at the supposedly haunted ruins. The women's suffrage movement is very careful to separate itself from any hint of witchcraft or scandal, making its appeals solely within the acceptable bounds of the church. Juniper is the one who starts to up-end all of that in New Salem. Juniper was never good at doing what she was told. This is an angry book that feels like something out of another era, closer in tone to a Sheri S. Tepper or Joanna Russ novel than the way feminism is handled in recent work. Some of that is the era of the setting, before women even had the right to vote. But primarily it's because Harrow, like those earlier works, is entirely uninterested in making excuses or apologies for male behavior. She takes an already-heated societal conflict and gives the underdogs magic, which turns it into a war. There is likely a better direct analogy from the suffrage movement, but the comparison that came to my mind was if Martin Luther King, Jr. proved ineffective or had not existed, and instead Malcolm X or the Black Panthers became the face of the Civil Rights movement. It's also an emotionally exhausting book. The protagonists are hurt and lost and shattered. Their moments of victory are viciously destroyed. There is torture and a lot of despair. It works thematically; all the external solutions and mythical saviors fail, but in the process the sisters build their own strength and their own community and rescue themselves. But it's hard reading at times if you're emotionally invested in the characters (and I was very invested). Harrow does try to balance the losses with triumphs and that becomes more effective and easier to read in the back half of the book, but I struggled with the grimness at the start. One particular problem for me was that the sisters start the book suspicious and distrustful of each other because of lies and misunderstandings. This is obvious to the reader, but they don't work through it until halfway through the book. I can't argue with this as a piece of characterization it made sense to me that they would have reacted to their past the way that they did. But it was still immensely frustrating to read, since in the meantime awful things were happening and I wanted them to band together to fight. They also worry over the moral implications of the fate of their father, whereas I thought the only problem was that the man couldn't die more than once. There too, it makes sense given the moral framework the sisters were coerced into, but it is not my moral framework and it was infuriating to see them stay trapped in it for so long. The other thing that I found troubling thematically is that Harrow personalizes evil. I thought the more interesting moral challenge posed in this book is a society that systematically abuses women and suppresses their power, but Harrow gradually supplants that systemic conflict with a villain who has an identity and a backstory. It provides a more straightforward and satisfying climax, and she does avoid the trap of letting triumph over one character solve all the broader social problems, but it still felt too easy. Worse, the motives of the villain turn out to be at right angles to the structure of the social oppression. It's just a tool he's using, and while that's also believable, it means the transfer of the narrative conflict from the societal to the personal feels like a shying away from a sharper political point. Harrow lets the inhabitants of New Salem off too easily by giving them the excuse of being manipulated by an evil mastermind. What I thought Harrow did handle well was race, and it feels rare to be able to say this about a book written by and about white women. There are black women in New Salem as well, and they have their own ways and their own fight. They are suspicious of the Eastwood sisters because they're worried white women will stir up trouble and then run away and leave the consequences to fall on black women... and they're right. An alliance only forms once the white women show willingness to stay for the hard parts. Black women are essential to the eventual success of the protagonists, but the opposite is not necessarily true; they have their own networks, power, and protections, and would have survived no matter what the Eastwoods did. The book is the Eastwoods' story, so it's mostly concerned with white society, but I thought Harrow avoided both making black women too magical or making white women too central. They instead operate in parallel worlds that can form the occasional alliance of mutual understanding. It helps that Cleopatra Quinn is one of the best characters of the book. This was hard, emotional reading. It's the sort of book where everything has a price, even the ending. But I'm very glad I read it. Each of the three sisters gets their own, very different character arc, and all three of those arcs are wonderful. Even Agnes, who was the hardest character for me to like at the start of the book and who I think has the trickiest story to tell, becomes so much stronger and more vivid by the end of the book. Sometimes the descriptions are trying a bit too hard and sometimes the writing is not quite up to the intended goal, but some of the descriptions are beautiful and memorable, and Harrow's way of weaving the mythic and the personal together worked for me. This is a more ambitious book than The Ten Thousand Doors of January, and while I think the ambition exceeded Harrow's grasp in a few places and she took a few thematic short-cuts, most of it works. The characters felt like living and changing people, which is not easy given how heavily the story structure leans on maiden, mother, and crone archetypes. It's an uncompromising and furious book that turns the anger of 1970s feminist SF onto themes that are very relevant in 2021. You will have to brace yourself for heartbreak and loss, but I think it's fantasy worth reading. Recommended. Rating: 8 out of 10

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