Search Results: "tar"

16 July 2014

Juliana Louback: Become an Open-source Contributor Video Conference

A couple weeks ago I was contacted by Yehuda Korotkin through one of the Debian mailing lists. Yehuda is a tech professor at one of Israel s leading colleges for women. He proposed a video conference to present the open source community to his class and explain how they can contribute to open source projects. I volunteered to participate and last Monday (July 14th 2014) we had our virtual meeting, which I hope was the first of many. Shauna G. also participated from Boston, making it a Israel - USA - Brazil meetup. Pretty impressive, eh? The conference was hosted on Google Hangouts, the video is available for viewing here. Run time is around 2.5 hours so to save you time I ve kindly posted a summary of the conference! To be frank, I look ghastly half the time so I d much prefer that you read this post. First there was a Q&A period which was more of a discussion panel, followed by a hands-on session where the girls made their first contribution to an open source project. Here s the gist of it: Q&A Hands on For the practical part of our conference, Yehuda s students contributed to Jscommunicator s Issue #5 which requests i18n support for major languages. JSCommunicator is a SIP communication tool developed in HTML and JavaScript, currently supporting audio/video calls and SIP SIMPLE instant messaging. First we set up Github in their local machines and forked the Jscommunicator repo. We learned the basic git commands needed to push changes to their remote repositories and to create a pull requests. This is explained in further detail here. At the end of the conference with nearly an hour overtime due to my tendency to be overly verbose, Yehuda s class made their first contribution with a Hebrew translation for Jscommunicator! All in all, it was great to virtually meet Yehuda and his epic students who all seemed very clever engineers. I m looking forward to our next meetup once I gain some time-management skills.

Raphaël Hertzog: Spotify migrate 5000 servers from Debian to Ubuntu

Or yet another reason why it s really important that we succeed with Debian LTS. Last year we heard of Dreamhost switching to Ubuntu because they can maintain a stable Ubuntu release for longer than a Debian stable release (and this despite the fact that Ubuntu only supports software in its main section, which misses a lot of popular software). Spotify Logo A few days ago, we just learned that Spotify took a similar decision:
A while back we decided to move onto Ubuntu for our backend server deployment. The main reasons for this was a predictable release cycle and long term support by upstream (this decision was made before the announcement that the Debian project commits to long term support as well.) With the release of the Ubuntu 14.04 LTS we are now in the process of migrating our ~5000 servers to that distribution.
This is just a supplementary proof that we have to provide long term support for Debian releases if we want to stay relevant in big deployments. But the task is daunting and it s difficult to find volunteers to do the job. That s why I believe that our best answer is to get companies to contribute financially to Debian LTS. We managed to convince a handful of companies already and July is the first month where paid contributors have joined the effort for a modest participation of 21 work hours (watch out for Thorsten Alteholz and Holger Levsen on debian-lts and debian-lts-announce). But we need to multiply this figure by 5 or 6 at least to make a correct work of maintaining Debian 6. So grab the subscription form and have a chat with your management. It s time to convince your company to join the initiative. Don t hesitate to get in touch if you have questions or if you prefer that I contact a representative of your company. Thank you!

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13 July 2014

Laura Arjona: New GPG Key!

Achievement unlocked: I have a new GPG key:

0xF22674467E4AF4A3

pub 4096R/7E4AF4A3 2014-07-13 [caduca: 2016-07-12]
Fingerprint = 445E 3AD0 3690 3F47 E19B 37B2 F226 7446 7E4A F4A3
uid Laura Arjona Reina <laura.arjona@upm.es>
uid Laura Arjona Reina <larjona@fsfe.org>
uid Laura Arjona Reina <larjona99@gmail.com>
sub 3072R/CC706B74 2014-07-13 [expires: 2016-07-12]
sub 3072R/7E51465F 2014-07-13 [expires: 2016-07-12]
sub 4096R/74C23D6E 2014-07-13 [expires: 2016-07-12]

The master key is 4096 bit, stored in a safe place, and 2 subkeys 3072 bit, stored in an FSFE Smartcard (I cannot store 4096 keys there).

I have carefully used the FSFE SmartCard Howto and Creating the perfect GPG keypair by Alex Cabal for strenghtening hash preferences and creating revocation certificate.

It seems everything works as intended. Passphrase is strong and this time I will not forget it. As first celebration, 1/2 lt icecream is waiting for me after dinner :)

People knowing me and around Madrid, please send me an encrypted mail as test or normal communication, and ping me to meet and sign keys :) One more step towards involvement in Debian and free software, controlling my digital life and communications, and becoming familiar with these technologies so I can teach them to my son as the natural way . Yay!
Filed under: My experiences and opinion, Tools Tagged: Contributing to libre software, Debian, encryption, English, Free Software, gpg, libre software, Moving into free software, mswl-cases

Dimitri John Ledkov: Hacking on launchpadlib

So here is a quick sample of my progress playing around with launchpadlib using lp-shell from lptools: 
In [1]: lp
Out[1]: <launchpadlib.launchpad.Launchpad at 0x7f49ecc649b0>

In [2]: lp.distributions
Out[2]: <launchpadlib.launchpad.DistributionSet at 0x7f49ddf0e630>

In [3]: lp.distributions['ubuntu']
Out[3]: <distribution at https://api.launchpad.net/1.0/ubuntu>

In [4]: lp.distributions['ubuntu'].display_name
Out[4]: 'Ubuntu'

In [5]: lp.distributions['ubuntu'].summary
Out[5]: 'Ubuntu is a complete Linux-based operating system, freely available with both community and professional support.'

In [7]: import sys; print(sys.version)
3.4.1 (default, Jun  9 2014, 17:34:49) 
[GCC 4.8.3]

There is not much yet, but it's a start. python3 port of launchpadlib is coming soon. It has been attempted a few times before and I am leveraging that work. Porting this stack has proven to be the most difficult python3 port I have ever done. But there is always python-libvirt that still needs porting ;-)

Some of above is just merge proposals against launchpadlib & lazr.restfulclient, and requires not yet packaged modules in the archive. When trying it out, I'm still getting a lot of run-time asserts and things that haven't been picked up by e.g. pyflakes3 and has not been unit-tested yet.

Russ Allbery: Review: Neptune's Brood

Review: Neptune's Brood, by Charles Stross
Series: Freyaverse #2
Publisher: Ace
Copyright: July 2013
ISBN: 1-101-62453-1
Format: Kindle
Pages: 325
Neptune's Brood is set in the same universe as Saturn's Children, but I wouldn't call it a sequel. It takes place considerably later, after substantial expansion of the robot civilization to the stars, and features entirely different characters (or, if there was overlap, I didn't notice). It also represents a significant shift in tone: while Saturn's Children is clearly a Heinlein pastiche and parody, Neptune's Brood takes its space opera more seriously. There is some situational humor assault auditors, for example but this book is played mostly straight, and I detected little or no Heinlein. This is Stross fleshing out his own space opera concept. This being Stross, that concept is not exactly conventional. This is a space opera about economics. Specifically, it's a space opera about interstellar economics, a debt pyramid, and a very interesting remapping of the continual growth requirements of capitalism to the outward expansion of colonization. The first-person protagonist comes from a "family" (as in Saturn's Children, the concept exists but involves rather more aggressive control of the instantiated "children") of bankers, but she is a forensic accountant and historian who specializes in analysis of financial scams. As you might expect, this is a significant clue about the plot. Neptune's Brood opens with Krina in search of her sister. She is supposed to be an itinerant scholar, moving throughout colonized space to spend some time with various scattered sisters, spreading knowledge and expanding her own. But it's clear from the start of the book that something else is going on, even before an assassin with Krina's face appears on her trail. Unfortunately, it takes roughly a third of the book to learn just what is happening beneath the surface, and most of that time is spent in a pointless interlude on a flying cathedral run by religious fanatics. The religion is a callback to Saturn's Children: robots who are trying to spread original humanity (the Fragiles) to the stars. This mostly doesn't go well, and is going particularly poorly for the ship that Krina works for passage on. But this is a brief gag that I thought went on much too long. The plot happens to Krina for this first section of the book rather than the other way around, little of lasting significance other than some character introductions occurs, and the Church itself, while playing a minor role in the later plot, is not worth the amount of attention that it gets. The best parts of the early book are the interludes in which Krina explains major world concepts to the reader. These are absolutely blatant infodumping, and I'm not sure how Stross gets away with them, but somehow he does, at least for me. They remind me of some of his blog posts, except tighter and fit into an interesting larger structure. Thankfully, once Krina finally arrives on Shin-Tethys, the plot improves considerably. There was a specific moment for me when the book became interesting: when Krina finds her sib's quarters in Shin-Tethys and analyzes what she finds there. It's the first significant thing in the book that she does rather than have done to her or thrust upon her, and she's a much better character when she's making decisions. This is also about the point where Stross starts fully explaining slow money, which is key to both the economics and the plot, and the plot starts to unwind its various mysteries and identify the motives of the players. Even then, Krina suffers from a lack of agency. Only at rare intervals does she get a chance to affect the story. Most of what she did of relevance to this book she did in the past, and while those descriptions of the backstory are interesting, they don't entirely make up for a passive protagonist. Thankfully, the other characters are varied and interesting enough, and the political machinations and cascading revelations captivating enough, that the last part of the book was very satisfying even with Krina on for the ride. This is a Stross novel, so it's full of two-dollar technical words mixed with technobabble. However, it shares with Saturn's Children the recasting of robots as the norm and fleshy humans as the exception, which means much of the technobabble is a straight substitution for our normal babble about meaty bodies and often works as an alienation technique. That makes it a bit more tolerable for me, although I still wished Stross would turn down the manic vocabulary in places. This bothers some people more than others; if you had no trouble with Accelerando, Neptune's Brood will pose no problems. I don't think the first section of this book was successful, but I liked the rest well enough to recommend it. If you like your space opera with a heavy dose of economics, a realistic attitude towards deep space exploration without faster-than-light technology, and a realistic perspective on the hostility of alien planets to Earth life, Neptune's Brood is a good choice. And any book that quotes David Graeber's Debt, and whose author has clearly paid attention to its contents, wins bonus points from me. Rating: 8 out of 10

11 July 2014

Russell Coker: Improving Computer Reliability

In a comment on my post about Taxing Inferior Products [1] Ben pointed out that most crashes are due to software bugs. Both Ben and I work on the Debian project and have had significant experience of software causing system crashes for Debian users. But I still think that the widespread adoption of ECC RAM is a good first step towards improving the reliability of the computing infrastructure. Currently when software developers receive bug reports they always wonder whether the bug was caused by defective hardware. So when bugs can t be reproduced (or can t be reproduced in a way that matches the bug report) they often get put in a list of random crash reports and no further attention is paid to them. When a system has ECC RAM and a filesystem that uses checksums for all data and metadata we can have greater confidence that random bugs aren t due to hardware problems. For example if a user reports a file corruption bug they can t repeat that occurred when using the Ext3 filesystem on a typical desktop PC I ll wonder about the reliability of storage and RAM in their system. If however the same bug report came from someone who had ECC RAM and used the ZFS filesystem then I would be more likely to consider it a software bug. The current situation is that every part of a typical PC is unreliable. When a bug can be attributed to one of several pieces of hardware, the OS kernel and even malware (in the case of MS Windows) it s hard to know where to start in tracking down a bug. Most users have given up and accepted that crashing periodically is just what computers do. Even experienced Linux users sometimes give up on trying to track down bugs properly because it s sometimes very difficult to file a good bug report. For the typical computer user (who doesn t have the power that a skilled Linux user has) it s much worse, filing a bug report seems about as useful as praying. One of the features of ECC RAM is that the motherboard can inform the user (either at boot time, after a NMI reboot, or through system diagnostics) of the problem so it can be fixed. A feature of filesystems such as ZFS and BTRFS is that they can inform the user of drive corruption problems, sometimes before any data is lost. My recommendation of BTRFS in regard to system integrity does have a significant caveat, currently the system reliability decrease due to crashes outweighs the reliability increase due to checksums at this time. This isn t all bad because at least when BTRFS crashes you know what the problem is, and BTRFS is rapidly improving in this regard. When I discuss BTRFS in posts like this one I m considering the theoretical issues related to the design not the practical issues of software bugs. That said I ve twice had a BTRFS filesystem seriously corrupted by a faulty DIMM on a system without ECC RAM.
Related posts:
  1. Reliability of RAID ZDNet has an insightful article by Robin Harris predicting the...
  2. Improving Blog Latency to Benefit Readers I just read an interesting post about latency and how...
  3. Banking with an Infected Computer Bruce Schneier summarised a series of articles about banking security...

10 July 2014

Russell Coker: A Linux Conference as a Ritual

Sociological Images has an interesting post by Jay Livingston PhD about a tennis final as a ritual [1]. The main point is that you can get a much better view of the match on your TV at home with more comfort and less inconvenience, so what you get for the price of the ticket (and all the effort of getting there) is participating in the event as a spectator. It seems to me that the same idea applies to community Linux conferences (such as LCA) and some Linux users group meetings. In terms of watching a lecture there are real benefits to downloading it after the conference so that you can pause it and study related web sites or repeat sections that you didn t understand. Also wherever you might sit at home to watch a video of a conference lecture you will be a lot more comfortable than a university lecture hall. Some people don t attend conferences and users group meetings because they would rather watch a video at home. Benefits of Attending (Apart from a Ritual) One of the benefits of attending a lecture is the ability to ask questions. But that seems to mostly apply to the high status people who ask most questions. I ve previously written about speaking stacks and my observations about who asks questions vs the number that can reasonably be asked [2]. I expect that most delegates ask no questions for the entire conference. I created a SurveyMonkey survey to discover how many questions people ask [3]. I count LCA as a 3 day conference because I am only counting the days where there are presentations that have been directly approved by the papers committee, approving a mini-conf (and thus delegating the ability to approve speeches) is different. Another benefit of attending is the so-called hallway track where people talk to random other people. But that seems to be of most benefit to people who have some combination of high status in the community and good social skills. In the past I ve attended the Professional Delegates Networking Session which is an event for speakers and people who pay the Professional registration fee. Sometimes at such events there has seemed to be a great divide between speakers (who mostly knew each other before the conference) and Professional Delegates which diminishes the value of the event to anyone who couldn t achieve similar benefits without it. How to Optimise a Conference as a Ritual To get involvement of people who have the ritualistic approach one could emphasise the issue of being part of the event. For example to get people to attend the morning keynote speeches (which are sometimes poorly attended due to partying the night before) one could emphasise that anyone who doesn t attend the keynote isn t really attending the conference. Conference shirts seem to be strongly correlated with the ritual aspect of conferences, the more corporate conferences don t seem to offer branded clothing to delegates. If an item of branded schwag was given out before each keynote then that would increase the attendance by everyone who follows the ritual aspect (as well as everyone who just likes free stuff). Note that I m not suggesting that organisers of LCA or other conferences go to the effort of giving everyone schwag before the morning keynote, that would be a lot of work. Just telling people that anyone who misses the keynote isn t really attending the conference would probably do. I ve always wondered why conference organisers want people to attend the keynotes and award prizes to random delegates who attend them. Is a keynote lecture a ritual that is incomplete if the attendance isn t good enough?
Related posts:
  1. Length of Conference Questions After LCA last year I wrote about speaking stacks and...
  2. meeting people at Linux conferences One thing that has always surprised me is how few...
  3. Creating a Micro Conference The TEDxVolcano The TED conference franchise has been extended to...

Russell Coker: Taxing Inferior Products

I recently had a medical appointment cancelled due to a computer crash . Apparently the reception computer crashed and lost all bookings for a day and they just made new bookings for whoever called and anyone who had a previous booking just missed out. I ll probably never know whether they really had a computer problem or just used computer problems as an excuse when they made a mistake. But even if it wasn t a real computer problem the fact that computers are so unreliable overall that computer crash is an acceptable excuse indicates a problem with the industry. The problem of unreliable computers is a cost to everyone, it s effectively a tax on all business and social interactions that involve computers. While I spent the extra money on a server with ECC RAM for my home file storage I have no control over the computers purchased by all the companies I deal with which are mostly the cheapest available computers. I also have no option to buy a laptop with ECC RAM because companies like Lenovo have decided not to manufacture them. It seems to me that the easiest way of increasing overall reliability of computers would be to use ECC RAM everywhere. In the early 90 s all IBM compatible PCs had parity RAM, that meant that for each byte there was one extra bit which would report 100% of single-bit errors and 50% of errors that involved random memory corruption. Then manufacturers decided to save a tiny amount of money on memory by using 8/9 the number of chips for desktop/laptop systems and probably make more money on selling servers with ECC RAM. If the government was to impose a 20% tax on computers that lack ECC RAM then manufacturers would immediately start using it everywhere and the end result would be no price increase overall as it s cheaper to design desktop systems and servers with the same motherboards apparently some desktop systems have motherboard support for ECC RAM but don t ship with suitable RAM or advertise the support for such RAM. This principle applies to many other products too. One obvious example is cars, a car manufacturer can sell cheap cars with few safety features and then when occupants of those cars and other road users are injured the government ends up paying for medical expenses and disability pensions. If there was a tax for every car that has a poor crash test rating and a tax for every car company that performs badly in real world use then it would give car companies some incentive to manufacture safer vehicles. Now there are situations where design considerations preclude such features. For example implementing ECC RAM in mobile phones might involve technical difficulties (particularly for 32bit phones) and making some trucks and farm equipment safer might be difficult. But when a company produces multiple similar products that differ significantly in quality such as PCs with and without ECC RAM or cars with and without air-bags there would be no difficulty in making them all of them higher quality. I don t think that we will have a government that implements such ideas any time soon, it seems that our government is more interested in giving money to corporations than taxing them. But one thing that could be done is to adopt a policy of only giving money to companies if they produce high quality products. If a car company is to be given hundreds of millions of dollars for not closing a factory then that factory should produce cars with all possible safety features. If a computer company is going to be given significant tax breaks for doing R&D then they should be developing products that won t crash.
No related posts.

9 July 2014

Mike Gabriel: Cooperation between X2Go and TheQVD

I recently got in contact with Nicolas Arenas Alonso and Nito Martinez from the Quindel group (located in Spain) [1]. Those guys bring forth a software product called TheQVD (The Quality Virtual Desktop) [2]. The project does similar things that X2Go does. In fact, they use NX 3.5 from NoMachine internally like we do in X2Go. Already a year ago, I noticed their activity on TheQVD and thought.. "Ahaaa!?!". Now, a couple of weeks back we received a patch for libxcomp3 that fixes an FTBFS (fails to build from source) for nx-libs-lite against Android [3]. read more

Christoph Berg: New urxvt tab in current directory

Following Enrico's terminal-emulators comparison, I wanted to implement "start a new terminal tab in my current working directory" for rxvt-unicode aka urxvt. As Enrico notes, this functionality is something between "rather fragile" and non-existing, so I went to implement it myself. Martin Pohlack had the right hint, so here's the patch: 
--- /usr/lib/urxvt/perl/tabbed  2014-05-03 21:37:37.000000000 +0200
+++ ./tabbed    2014-07-09 18:50:26.000000000 +0200
@@ -97,6 +97,16 @@
       $term->resource (perl_ext_2 => $term->resource ("perl_ext_2") . ",-tabbed");
     ;
 
+   if (@  $self-> tabs   )  
+      # Get the working directory of the current tab and append a -cd to the command line
+      my $pid = $self-> cur pid ;
+      my $pwd = readlink "/proc/$pid/cwd";
+      #print "pid $pid pwd $pwd\n";
+      if ($pwd)  
+         push @argv, "-cd", $pwd;
+       
+    
+
    push @urxvt::TERM_EXT, urxvt::ext::tabbed::tab::;
 
    my $term = new urxvt::term
@@ -312,6 +322,12 @@
    1
  
 
+sub tab_child_start  
+   my ($self, $term, $pid) = @_;
+   $term-> pid  = $pid;
+   1;
+ 
+
 sub tab_start  
    my ($self, $tab) = @_;
 
@@ -402,7 +418,7 @@
 # simply proxies all interesting calls back to the tabbed class.
 
  
-   for my $hook (qw(start destroy key_press property_notify))  
+   for my $hook (qw(start destroy key_press property_notify child_start))  
       eval qq 
          sub on_$hook  
             my \$parent = \$_[0] term parent

Sune Vuorela: CMake and library properties

When writing libraries with CMake, you need to set a couple of properties, especially the VERSION and SOVERSION properties. For library libbar, it could look like:
set_property(TARGET bar PROPERTY VERSION 0.0.0 )
set_property(TARGET bar PROPERTY SOVERSION 0 )
This will give you a libbar.so => libbar.so.0 => libbar.so.0.0.0 symlink chain with a SONAME of libbar.so.0 encoded into the library. The SOVERSION target property controls the number in the middle part of the symlink chain as well as the numeric part of the SONAME encoded into the library. The VERSION target property controls the last part of the last element of the symlink chain This also means that the first part of VERSION should match what you put in SOVERSION to avoid surprises for others and for the future you. Both these properties control Technical parts and should be looked at from a technical perspective. They should not be used for the version of the software , but purely for the technical versioning of the library. In the kdeexamples git repository, it is handled like this:
set(BAR_VERSION_MAJOR 1)
set(BAR_VERSION_MINOR 2)
set(BAR_VERSION_PATCH 3)
set(BAR_VERSION $ BAR_VERSION_MAJOR .$ BAR_VERSION_MINOR .$ BAR_VERSION_PATCH )
And a bit later:
set_target_properties(bar PROPERTIES VERSION $ BAR_VERSION
SOVERSION $ BAR_VERSION_MAJOR )
which is a fine way to ensure that things actually matches. Oh. And these components is not something that should be inherited from other external projects. So people, please be careful to use these correct.

8 July 2014

Joey Hess: laptop death

So I was at Ocracoke island, camping with family, and I brought my laptop along as I've done probably half a dozen times before. An enormous thuderstorm came up. It rained for 8 hours and thundered for 3 of those. Some lightning cracks quite close by as we crouched in the food tent, our feet up off the increasingly wet ground "just in case". The campground flooded. Luckily we were camped in the dunes and tents mostly avoided being flooded with 2-3 inches of water. (That was just the warmup; a hurricane hit a week after we left.) My laptop was in my tent when this started, and I got soaked to the skin just running over there and throwing it up on the thermarest to keep it out of any flooding and away from any drips. It seemed ok, so best not to try to move it to the car in that downpour. Next time I checked, it turned out the top vent of the tent was slightly open and dripping. The laptop bag was damp. But inside it seemed ok. Rain had slackened to just heavy, so I ran it down to the car. Laptop appeared barely damp, but it was hard to tell as I had quite forgotten what "dry" was. Turned it on for 10 seconds to check the time. It was 7:30 and we still had to cook dinner in this mess. Transferred it to a dry bag. (By the way, in some situations, discovering you have a single dry towel you didn't know you had is the best gift in the world!) Next morning, the laptop was dead. When powered on, the fan came on full, the screen stayed black, and after a few seconds it turned itself back off. I need this for work, so it was a crash priority to get it fixed or a replacement. Before I even got home, I had logged onto Lenovo's website to check warantee status and found 2 things:
  1. They needed some number from a sticker on the bottom of my laptop. Which was no longer there.
  2. The process required some stange login on an entirely different IBM website.
At this point, I had a premonition of how the beuracracy would go. Reading Sesse's Blehnovo, I see I was right. I didn't even try. I ordered a replacement with priority shipping. When I got home, I pulled the laptop apart to try to debug it. I still don't know what's wrong with it. The SSD may be damaged; it seems to cause anything I put it into to fail to work. New laptop arrived in 2 days. Since this model is now a year old, it was a few hundred dollars cheaper this time around. And now I have an extra power supply, and a replacment keyboard, and a replacement fan etc. And I've escaped the dead USB port and broken rocker switch of the old laptop too. The only weird thing is that, while my old laptop had no problem with my Toshiba passport USB drive, this new one refuses to recognize it unless I plug it into a USB 1.0 hub. Oh well..
Update: Ocracode for this trip: OBX1.1 P6 L7 SA3d+++b+c++ U2(rearended,laptop death) T4f2b1 R2T Bb+m++++n++
F+++u++ SC+s-g6 H+f0i3 V+++s++m0 E++r+

6 July 2014

Dominique Dumont: Status and next step on lcdproc automatic configuration upgrade with Perl and Config::Model

Back in March, I uploaded a Debian s version of lcdproc with a unique feature: user and maintainer configurations are merged during package upgrade: user customizations and developers enhancements are both preserved in the new configuration file. (See this blog for more details). This avoids tedious edition of the configuration LCDd.conf file after every upgrade of lcdproc package. At the beginning of June, a new version of lcdproc (0.5.7-1) was uploaded. This triggered another round of automatic upgrades on user s systems. According to the popcon rise of libconfig-model-lcdproc-perl, about 100 people have upgraded lcdproc on their system. Since automatic upgrade has an opt-out feature, one cannot say for sure that 100 people are actually using automatic upgrade, but I bet a fair portion are them are. So far, only one people has complained: a bug report was filed about the many dependencies brought by libconfig-model-lcdproc-perl. The next challenge for lcdproc configuration upgrade is brought by a bug reported on Ubuntu: the device file provided by imon kernel module is a moving target: The device file created by the kernel can be /dev/lcd0 or /dev/lcd1 or even /dev/lcd2. Static configuration files and moving target don t mix well. The obvious solution is to provide a udev rule so that a symbolic link is created from a fixed location (/dev/lcd-imon) to the moving target. Once the udev rule is installed, the user only has to update LCDd.conf file to use the symlink as imon device file and we re done. But, wait The whole point of automatic configuration upgrade is to spare the user this kind of trouble: the upgrade must be completely automatic. Moreover, the upgrade must work in all cases: whether udev is available (Linux) or not. If udev is not available, the value present in the configuration file must be preserved. To know whether udev is available, the upgrade tool (aka cme) will check whether the file provided by udev (/dev/lcd-imon) is present or not. This will be done by lcdproc postinst script (which is run automatically at the end of lcdproc upgrade). Which means that the new udev rule must also be
activated in the postinst script before the upgrade is done. In other words, the next version of lcdproc (0.5.7-2) will: In the lcdproc configuration model installed by libconfig-model-lcdproc-perl, the imon device parameter is enhanced so that running cme check lcdproc or cme migrate lcdproc issues a warning if /dev/lcd-imon exists and if imon driver is not configured to use it. This way, the next installation of lcdproc will deliver a fix for imon and cme will fix user s configuration file without requiring user input. The last point is admittedly bad marketing as users will not be aware of the magic performed by Config::Model Oh well In the previous section, I ve briefly mentioned that imon_device parameter is enhanced in lcdproc configuration model. If you re not already bored, let s lift the hood and see what kind of enhancements was added. Let s peek in lcdproc configuration file, LCDd.conf file which is used to generate lcdproc configuration model. You may remember that the formal description of all LCDd.conf parameters and their properties is generated from LCDd.conf to provide lcdproc configuration model. The comments in LCDd.conf follow a convention so that most properties of the parameters can be extracted from the comments. In the example below, the comments show that NewFirmware is a boolean value expressed as yes or no, the latter being the default : 
# Set the firmware version (New means >= 2.0) [default: no; legal: yes, no]
NewFirmware=no
Back to the moving target. In LCDd.conf, imon device file parameter is declared this way: 
# Select the output device to use
Device=/dev/lcd0
This means that device is a string where the default value is /dev/lcd0. Which is wrong once the special udev rule provided with Debian packages is activated. With this rule, the default value must be /dev/lcd-imon. To fix this problem, a special comment is added in the Debian version of LCDd.conf to tune further the properties of the device parameter: 
# select the device to use
#  %
#   default~
#   compute
#     use_eval=1
#     formula="my $l = '/dev/lcd-imon'; -e $l ? $l : '/dev/lcd0';"
#     allow_override=1 -
#   warn_if:not_lcd_imon
#     code="my $l = '/dev/lcd-imon';defined $_ and -e $l and $_ ne $l ;"
#     msg="imon device does not use /dev/lcd-imon link."
#     fix="$_ = undef;"
#   warn_unless:found_device_file
#     code="defined $_ ? -e : 1"
#     msg="missing imon device file"
#     fix="$_ = undef;"
#   - % 
Device=/dev/lcd0
This special comment between % and % follows the syntax of Config::Model::Loader. A small configuration model is declared there to enhance the model generated from LCDd.conf file. Here are the main parts: In both warn_unless and warn_if parts, the fix code snippet is run when by the command cme fix lcdproc and is used to repair the warning condition. In this case, the fix consists in resetting the device configuration value so the computed value above can be used. cme fix lcdproc is triggered during package post install script installed by dh_cme_upgrade. Come to think of it, generating a configuration model from a configuration file can probably be applied to other projects: for instance, php.ini and kdmrc are also shipped with detailed comments. May be I should make a more generic model generator from the example used to generate lcdproc model Well, I will do it if people show interest. Not in the form yeah, that would be cool , but in the form, yes, I will use your work to generate a configuration model for project [...] . I ll let you fill the blank ;-)
Tagged: Config::Model, configuration, debian, lcdproc, Perl, upgrade

Daniel Pocock: News team jailed, phone hacking not fixed though

This week former News of the World executives were sentenced, most going to jail, for the British phone hacking scandal. Noticeably absent from the trial and much of the media attention are the phone companies. Did they know their networks could be so systematically abused? Did they care? In any case, the public has never been fully informed about how phones have been hacked. Speculation has it that phone hackers were guessing PIN numbers for remote voicemail access, typically trying birthdates and inappropriate PIN numbers like 0000 or 1234. There is more to it Those in the industry know that there are additional privacy failings in mobile networks, especially the voicemail service. It is not just in the UK either. There are various reasons for not sharing explicit details on a blog like this and comments concerning such techniques can't be accepted. Nonetheless, there are some points that do need to be made:
  • it is still possible for phones, especially voicemail, to be hacked on demand
  • an attacker does not need expensive equipment nor do they need to be within radio range (or even the same country) as their target
  • the attacker does not need to be an insider (phone company or spy agency employee)
Disable voicemail completely - the only way to be safe The bottom line is that the only way to prevent voicemail hacking is to disable the phone's voicemail service completely. Voicemail is not really necessary given that most phones support email now. For those who feel they need it, consider running the voicemail service on your own private PBX using free software like Asterisk or FreeSWITCH. Some Internet telephony service providers also offer third-party voicemail solutions that are far more secure than those default services offered by mobile networks. To disable voicemail, simply do two things:
  • send a letter to the phone company telling them you do not want any voicemail box in their network
  • in the mobile phone, select the menu option to disable all diversions, or manually disable each diversion one by one (e.g. disable forwarding when busy, disable forwarding when not answered, disable forwarding when out of range)

Russell Coker: Desktop Publishing is Wrong

When I first started using computers a word processor was a program that edited text. The most common and affordable printers were dot-matrix and people who wanted good quality printing used daisy wheel printers. Text from a word processor was sent to a printer a letter at a time. The options for fancy printing were bold and italic (for dot-matrix), underlines, and the use of spaces to justify text. It really wasn t much good if you wanted to include pictures, graphs, or tables. But if you just wanted to write some text it worked really well. When you were editing text it was typical that the entire screen (25 rows of 80 columns) would be filled with the text you were writing. Some word processors used 2 or 3 lines at the top or bottom of the screen to display status information. Some time after that desktop publishing (DTP) programs became available. Initially most people had no interest in them because of the lack of suitable printers, the early LASER printers were very expensive and the graphics mode of dot matrix printers was slow to print and gave fairly low quality. Printing graphics on a cheap dot matrix printer using the thin continuous paper usually resulted in damaging the paper a bad result that wasn t worth the effort. When LASER and Inkjet printers started to become common word processing programs started getting many more features and basically took over from desktop publishing programs. This made them slower and more cumbersome to use. For example Star Office/OpenOffice/LibreOffice has distinguished itself by remaining equally slow as it transitioned from running on an OS/2 system with 16M of RAM in the early 90 s to a Linux system with 256M of RAM in the late 90 s to a Linux system with 1G of RAM in more recent times. It s nice that with the development of PCs that have AMD64 CPUs and 4G+ of RAM we have finally managed to increase PC power faster than LibreOffice can consume it. But it would be nicer if they could optimise for the common cases. LibreOffice isn t the only culprit, it seems that every word processor that has been in continual development for that period of time has had the same feature bloat. The DTP features that made word processing programs so much slower also required more menus to control them. So instead of just having text on the screen with maybe a couple of lines for status we have a menu bar at the top followed by a couple of lines of toolbars , then a line showing how much width of the screen is used for margins. At the bottom of the screen there s a search bar and a status bar. Screen Layout By definition the operation of a DTP program will be based around the size of the paper to be used. The default for this is A4 (or Letter in the US) in a portrait layout (higher than it is wide). The cheapest (and therefore most common) monitors in use are designed for displaying wide-screen 16:9 ratio movies. So we have images of A4 paper with a width:height ratio of 0.707:1 displayed on a wide-screen monitor with a 1.777:1 ratio. This means that only about 40% of the screen space would be used if you don t zoom in (but if you zoom in then you can t see many rows of text on the screen). One of the stupid ways this is used is by companies that send around word processing documents when plain text files would do, so everyone who reads the document uses a small portion of the screen space and a large portion of the email bandwidth. Note that this problem of wasted screen space isn t specific to DTP programs. When I use the Google Keep website [1] to edit notes on my PC they take up a small fraction of the screen space (about 1/3 screen width and 80% screen height) for no good reason. Keep displays about 70 characters per line and 36 lines per page. Really every program that allows editing moderate amounts of text should allow more than 80 characters per line if the screen is large enough and as many lines as fit on the screen. One way to alleviate the screen waste on DTP programs is to use a landscape layout for the paper. This is something that all modern printers support (AFAIK the only printers you can buy nowadays are LASER and ink-jet and it s just a big image that gets sent to the printer). I tried to do this with LibreOffice but couldn t figure out how. I m sure that someone will comment and tell me I m stupid for missing it, but I think that when someone with my experience of computers can t easily figure out how to perform what should be a simple task then it s unreasonably difficult for the vast majority of computer users who just want to print a document. When trying to work out how to use landscape layout in LibreOffice I discovered the Web Layout option in the View menu which allows all the screen space to be used for text (apart from the menu bar, tool bars, etc). That also means that there are no page breaks! That means I can use LibreOffice to just write text, take advantage of the spelling and grammar correcting features, and only have screen space wasted by the tool bars and menus etc. I never worked out how to get Google Docs to use a landscape document or a single webpage view. That s especially disappointing given that the proportion of documents that are printed from Google Docs is probably much lower than most word processing or DTP programs. What I Want What I d like to have is a word processing program that s suitable for writing draft blog posts and magazine articles. For blog posts most of the formatting is done by the blog software and for magazine articles the editorial policy demands plain text in most situations, so there s no possible benefit of DTP features. The ability to edit a document on an Android phone and on a Linux PC is a good feature. While the size of a phone screen limits what can be done it does allow jotting down ideas and correcting mistakes. I previously wrote about using Google Keep on a phone for lecture notes [2]. It seems that the practical ability of Keep to edit notes on a PC is about limited to the notes for a 45 minute lecture. So while Keep works well for that task it won t do well for anything bigger unless Google make some changes. Google Docs is quite good for editing medium size documents on a phone if you use the Android app. Given the limitations of the device size and input capabilities it works really well. But it s not much good for use on a PC. I ve seen a positive review of One Note from Microsoft [3]. But apart from the fact that it s from Microsoft (with all the issues that involves) there s the issue of requiring another account. Using an Android phone requires a Gmail account (in practice for almost all possible uses if not in theory) so there s no need to get an extra account for Google Keep or Docs. What would be ideal is an Android editor that could talk to a cloud service that I run (maybe using WebDAV) and which could use the same data as a Linux-X11 application. Any suggestions?
Related posts:
  1. Desktop Equivalent Augmented Reality Augmented reality is available on all relatively modern smart phones....
  2. Linux on the Desktop I started using Linux in 1993. I initially used it...
  3. Lenny SE Linux on the Desktop I have been asked about the current status of Lenny...

Matthew Palmer: Witness the security of this fully DNSSEC-enabled zone!

After dealing with the client side of the DNSSEC puzzle last week, I thought it behooved me to also go about getting DNSSEC going on the domains I run DNS for. Like the resolver configuration, the server side work is straightforward enough once you know how, but boy howdy are there some landmines to be aware of. One thing that made my job a little less ordinary is that I use and love tinydns. It s an amazingly small and simple authoritative DNS server, strong in the Unix tradition of do one thing and do it well . Unfortunately, DNSSEC is anything but small and simple and so tinydns doesn t support DNSSEC out of the box. However, Peter Conrad has produced a patch for tinydns to do DNSSEC, and that does the trick very nicely. A brief aside about tinydns and DNSSEC, if I may Poor key security is probably the single biggest compromise vector for crypto. So you want to keep your keys secure. A great way to keep keys secure is to not put them on machines that run public-facing network services (like DNS servers). So, you want to keep your keys away from your public DNS servers. A really great way of doing that would be to have all of your DNS records somewhere out of the way, and when they change regenerate the zone file, re-sign it, and push it out to all your DNS servers. That happens to be exactly how tinydns works. I happen to think that tinydns fits very nicely into a DNSSEC-enabled world. Anyway, back to the story. Once I d patched the tinydns source and built updated packages, it was time to start DNSSEC-enabling zones. This breaks down into a few simple steps:
  1. Generate a key for each zone. This will produce a private key (which, as the name suggests, you should keep to yourself), a public key in a DNSKEY DNS record, and a DS DNS record. More on those in a minute. One thing to be wary of, if you re like me and don t want or need separate Key Signing and Zone Signing keys. You must generate a Key Signing key this is a key with a flags value of 257. Doing this wrong will result in all sorts of odd-ball problems. I wanted to just sign zones, so I generated a Zone Signing key, which has a flags value of 256. Big mistake. Also, the DS record is a hash of everything in the DNSKEY record, so don t just think you can change the 256 to a 257 and everything will still work. It won t.
  2. Add the key records to the zone data. For tinydns, this is just a matter of copying the zone records from the generated key into the zone file itself, and adding an extra pseudo record (it s all covered in the tinydnssec howto).
  3. Publish the zone data. Reload your BIND config, run tinydns-sign and tinydns-data then rsync, or do whatever it is PowerDNS people do (kick the database until replication starts working again?).
  4. Test everything. I found the Verisign Labs DNSSEC Debugger to be very helpful. You want ticks everywhere except for where it s looking for DS records for your zone in the higher-level zone. If there are any other freak-outs, you ll want to fix those because broken DNSSEC will take your domain off the Internet in no time.
  5. Tell the world about your DNSSEC keys. This is simply a matter of giving your DS record to your domain registrar, for them to add it to the zone data for your domain s parent. Wherever you d normally go to edit the nameservers or contact details for your domain, you probably want to do to the same place and look for something about DS or Domain Signer records. Copy and paste the details from the DS record in your zone into there, submit, and wait a minute or two for the records to get published.
  6. Test again. Before you pat yourself on the back, make sure you ve got a full board of green ticks in the DNSSEC Debugger. if anything s wrong, you want to rollback immediately, because broken DNSSEC means that anyone using a DNSSEC-enabled resolver just lost the ability to see your domain.
That s it! There s a lot of complicated crypto going on behind the scenes, and DNSSEC seems to revel in the number of acronyms and concepts that it introduces, but the actual execution of DNSSEC-enabling your domains is quite straightforward.

5 July 2014

Mario Lang: I love my MacBookAir with Debian

In short: I love my MacBook Air. It is the best (laptop) hardware I ever owned. I have seen hardware which was much more flaky in the past. I can set the display backlight to zero via software, which saves me a lot of battery life and also offers a bit of anti-spy-acroos-my-shoulder support. WLAN and bluetooth work nicely. And I just love the form-factor and the touch-feeling of the hardware. I even had the bag I use to carry my braille display modified so that the Air just fits in. I can't say how it behaves with X11. Given how flaky accessibility with graphical desktops on Linux is, I have still not made the switch. My MacBookAir is my perfect mobile terminal, I LOVE it. I am sort of surprised about the recent rant of Paul about MacBook Hardware. It is rather funny that we perceive the same technology so radically different. And after reading the second part of his rant I am wondering if I am no longer allowed to consider myself part of the "hardcore F/OSS world", because I don't consider Apple as evil as apparently most others. Why? Well, first of all, I actually like the hardware. Secondly, you have to show me a vendor first that builds usable accessibility into their products, and I mean all their products, without any extra price-tag attached. Once the others start to consider people with disabilities, we can talk about apple-bashing again. But until then, sorry, you don't see the picture as I do. Apple was the first big company on the market to take accessibility seriously. And they are still unbeaten, at least when it comes to bells and whistles included. I can unbox and configure any Apple product sold currently completely without assisstance. With some products, you just need to know a signle keypress (tripple-press the home button for touch devices and Cmd+F5 for Mac OS/X), and with others, during initial bootup, a speech synthesizer even tells you how to enable accessibility in case you need it. And after that is enabled, I can perform the setup of the device completely on my own. I don't need help from anyone else. And after the setup is complete, I can use 95% of the functionality provided by the operating system. And I am blind, part of a very small margin group so to speak. In Debian circles, I have even heard the sentiment that we supposedly have to accept that small margin groups are ignored sometimes. Well, as long as we think that way, as long as we strictly think economically, we will never be able to go there, fully. And we will never be the universal operating system, actually. Sorry to say that, but I think there is some truth to it. So, who is evil? Scratch your own itch doesn't always work to cover everything. How do we motivate contributors to work on things they don't personally need (yet)? How can we ensure that complicated but seldomly used features stay stable and do not fall to dust just because some upstream decides to rewrite an essential subcomponent of the dependency tree? I don't know. All I know is that these issues need to be solved in an universal operating system.

John Goerzen: The Heights of Coronado

Near the beautiful Swedish town of Lindsborg, Kansas, there stands a hill known as Coronado Heights. It lies in the midst of the Smoky Hills, named for the smoke-like mist that sometimes hangs in them. We Kansans smile our usual smile when we tell the story of how Francisco V squez de Coronado famously gave up his search for gold after reaching this point in Kansas. Anyhow, it was just over a year ago that Laura, Jacob, Oliver, and I went to Coronado Heights at the start of summer, 2013 our first full day together as a family. Atop Coronado Heights sits a castle , an old WPA project from the 1930s: IMG_9803 IMG_9824 The view from up there is pretty nice: IMG_9806 And, of course, Jacob and Oliver wanted to explore the grounds. IMG_9813 As exciting as the castle was, simple rocks and sand seemed to be just as entertaining. IMG_9835 After Coronado Heights, we went to a nearby lake for a picnic. After that, Jacob and Oliver wanted to play at the edge of the water. They loved to throw rocks in and observe the splash. Of course, it pretty soon descended (or, if you are a boy, ascended ) into a game of splash your brother. And then to splash Dad and Laura . 2013-05-27 15 Fun was had by all. What a wonderful day! Writing the story reminds me of a little while before that the first time all four of us enjoyed dinner and smores at a fire by our creek. IMG_9756 Jacob and Oliver insisted on sitting or, well, flopping on Laura s lap to eat. It made me smile. (And yes, she is wearing a Debian hat.)

4 July 2014

Paul Tagliamonte: Apple Hardware: Part II

A few interesting things happened after I got a macbook air.

Firstly, I got a lot of shit from my peers and friends about it. This was funny to me, nothing really bothered me about it, but I can see this becoming really tiresome at events like hackathons or conferences.

As a byproduct, there s a strong feeling in the hardcore F/OSS world that Apple hardware is the incarnation of evil.

As a result of both of the above, hardcore F/OSS (and Distro hackers) don t buy apple hardware.

Therefore, GNU/Linux is complete garbage on Apple hardware. Apple s firmware bugs don t help, but we re BAD.

Some might ask why this is a big deal. The fact is, this is one of the most used platforms for Open Source development (note I used that term exactly).

Are we to damn these users to a nonfree OS because we want to maintain our purity?

I had to give back my Air, but I still have a Mac Mini that i ve been using for testing bugs on OSX in code I have. Very soon, my Mac Mini will be used to help fix the common bugs in the install process.

Some things you can do:

Rapha&#235;l Hertzog: Tracker.debian.org is live

Maybe do you remember, last year I mentored a Google Summer of code whose aim was to replace our well known Package Tracking System with something more modern, usable by derivatives and more easily hackable. The result of this project is a new Django-based software called Distro Tracker. Warning, some internals aheadWith the help of the Debian System Administrators, it s now setup on tracker.debian.org! This service is also managed by the Debian QA team, it s deployed in /srv/tracker.debian.org/ (on ticharich.debian.org, a VM) if you want to verify something on the live installation. It runs under the qa user (so members of the qa-core group can administer it). That said you can reproduce the setup on your workstation quite easily, just by checking out the git repository and applying this change: 
--- a/distro_tracker/project/settings/local.py
+++ b/distro_tracker/project/settings/local.py
@@ -10,6 +10,7 @@ overrides on top of those type-of-installation-specific settings.
 
 from .defaults import INSTALLED_APPS
 from .selected import *
+from .debian import *
 
 ## Add your custom settings here
Speaking of contributing, the documentation includes a Contributing section to get you up and running, ready to do your first contribution! Now go use this new service and report any issue against the new tracker.debian.org pseudo-package (BTW tracker.debian.org knows about pseudo-packages, example here). There are many small things that need to be fixed/improved, if you know Python/Django and would like to start contributing to Debian, here s your chance! :-)

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