1. People who directly launch our image and treat it like a classic VPS. These users most likely will be logging into their instances via ssh and configuring it interactively, though they may also install and use a configuration management system at some point.
2. People who directly launch our images but configure them automatically via launch-time configuration passed to the cloud-init process on the agent. This automatic configuration may optionally serve to bootstrap the instance into a more complete configuration management system. The user may or may not ever actually log in to the system at all.
3. People who will not use our images directly at all, but will instead construct their own image based on ours. They may do this by launching an instance of our image, customizing it, and snapshotting it, or they may build a custom image from scratch by reusing and modifying the tools and configuration that we use to generate our images.

sudo fai-diskimage --hostname stretch-image --size 8G \
--class DEBIAN,STRETCH,AMD64,GRUB_PC,DEVEL,CLOUD,EC2 \
/tmp/stretch-image.raw

PACKAGES install
apache2

sudo fai-diskimage --hostname stretch-image --size 8G \
--class DEBIAN,STRETCH,AMD64,GRUB_PC,DEVEL,CLOUD,EC2,HTTPD \
/tmp/stretch-image.raw

admin@ip-10-0-0-64:~$ sudo partx --show /tmp/stretch-image.raw
NR START      END  SECTORS SIZE NAME UUID
 1  2048 16777215 16775168   8G      ed093314-01
admin@ip-10-0-0-64:~$ sudo partx -a /tmp/stretch-image.raw 
partx: /dev/loop0: error adding partition 1
admin@ip-10-0-0-64:~$ lsblk 
NAME      MAJ:MIN RM    SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
xvda      202:0    0      8G  0 disk 
 xvda1   202:1    0 1007.5K  0 part 
 xvda2   202:2    0      8G  0 part /
loop0       7:0    0      8G  0 loop 
 loop0p1 259:0    0      8G  0 loop 
admin@ip-10-0-0-64:~$ sudo mount /dev/loop0p1 /mnt/
admin@ip-10-0-0-64:~$ ls /mnt/
bin/   dev/  home/        initrd.img.old@  lib64/       media/  opt/   root/  sbin/  sys/  usr/  vmlinuz@
boot/  etc/  initrd.img@  lib/             lost+found/  mnt/    proc/  run/   srv/   tmp/  var/  vmlinuz.old@

1. Attach a secondary EBS volume to your EC2 instance. It must be large enough to hold the raw disk image you created.
2. Use dd to write your image to the secondary volume, e.g. sudo dd if=/tmp/stretch-image.raw of=/dev/xvdb
3. Use the volume-to-ami.sh script in the fail-cloud-image repo to snapshot the volume and register the resulting snapshot with AWS as a new AMI. Example: ./volume-to-ami.sh vol-04351c30c46d7dd6e

• Nobody's Wife: The first song I heard from her, and her voice totally catched me.
• Lost: A more quite song for a break.
• Modern World: A great song about the toxic beauty norms that society likes to paint. Lovely!

/music permanent link Comments: 0 Flattr this

R> library(anytime)
R> anytime("Thu Sep 01 10:11:12 CDT 2016")
[1] "2016-09-01 10:11:12 CDT"
R> anytime("Thu Sep 01 10:11:12.123456 CDT 2016") # with frac. seconds
[1] "2016-09-01 10:11:12.123456 CDT"
R> 

Changes in anytime version 0.2.1 (2017-02-09)

• The new DatetimeVector class from Rcpp is now used, and proper versioned Depends: have been added (#43)
• The anydate and utcdate functions convert again from factor and ordered (#46 closing #44)
• A format similar to RFC 28122 but with additonal timezone text can now be parsed (#48 closing #47)
• Conversion from POSIXt to Date now also respect the timezone (#50 closing #49)
• The internal .onLoad functions was updated
• The Travis setup uses https to fetch the run script

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

package main
import (
    "log"
    "net"
    "net/http"
)
func main()  
    l, err := net.Listen("tcp", ":8081")
    if err != nil  
        log.Panicf("cannot listen: %s", err)
     
    http.Serve(l, nil)
 

[Unit]
Description=404 micro-service
[Service]
Type=notify
ExecStart=/usr/bin/404
WatchdogSec=30s
Restart=on-failure
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Readiness The classic way for an Unix daemon to signal its readiness is to daemonize. Technically, this is done by calling fork(2) twice (which also serves other intents). This is a very common task and the BSD systems, as well as some other C libraries, supply a daemon(3) function for this purpose. Services are expected to daemonize only when they are ready (after reading configuration files and setting up a listening socket, for example). Then, a system can reliably initialize its services with a simple linear script:

syslogd
unbound
ntpd -s

Each daemon can rely on the previous one being ready to do its work. The sequence of actions is the following:

1. syslogd reads its configuration, activates /dev/log, daemonizes.
2. unbound reads its configuration, listens on 127.0.0.1:53, daemonizes.
3. ntpd reads its configuration, connects to NTP peers, waits for clock to be synchronized², daemonizes.

With systemd, we would use Type=fork in the service file. However, Go s runtime does not support that. Instead, we use Type=notify. In this case, systemd expects the daemon to signal its readiness with a message to an Unix socket. go-systemd package handles the details for us:

package main
import (
    "log"
    "net"
    "net/http"
    "github.com/coreos/go-systemd/daemon"
)
func main()  
    l, err := net.Listen("tcp", ":8081")
    if err != nil  
        log.Panicf("cannot listen: %s", err)
     
    daemon.SdNotify(false, "READY=1") //  
    http.Serve(l, nil)                //  
 

It s important to place the notification after net.Listen() (in ): if the notification was sent earlier, a client would get connection refused when trying to use the service. When a daemon listens to a socket, connections are queued by the kernel until the daemon is able to accept them (in ). If the service is not run through systemd, the added line is a no-op.

Liveness Another interesting feature of systemd is to watch the service and restart it if it happens to crash (thanks to the Restart=on-failure directive). It s also possible to use a watchdog: the service sends watchdog keep-alives at regular interval. If it fails to do so, systemd will restart it. We could insert the following code just before http.Serve() call:

go func()  
    interval, err := daemon.SdWatchdogEnabled(false)
    if err != nil   interval == 0  
        return
     
    for  
        daemon.SdNotify(false, "WATCHDOG=1")
        time.Sleep(interval / 3)
     
 ()

However, this doesn t add much value: the goroutine is unrelated to the core business of the service. If for some reason, the HTTP part gets stuck, the goroutine will happily continue to send keep-alives to systemd. In our example, we can just do a HTTP query before sending the keep-alive. The internal loop can be replaced with this code:

for  
    _, err := http.Get("http://127.0.0.1:8081") //  
    if err == nil  
        daemon.SdNotify(false, "WATCHDOG=1")
     
    time.Sleep(interval / 3)
 

In , we connect to the service to check if it s still working. If we get some kind of answer, we send a watchdog keep-alive. If the service is unavailable or if http.Get() gets stuck, systemd will trigger a restart. There is no universal recipe. However, checks can be split into two groups:

• Before sending a keep-alive, you execute an active check on the components of your service. The keep-alive is sent only if all checks are successful. The checks can be internal (like in the above example) or external (for example, check with a query to the database).
• Each component reports its status, telling if it s alive or not. Before sending a keep-alive, you check the reported status of all components (passive check). If some components are late or reported fatal errors, don t send the keep-alive.

If possible, recovery from errors (for example, with a backoff retry) and self-healing (for example, by reestablishing a network connection) is always better, but the watchdog is a good tool to handle the worst cases and avoid too complex recovery logic. For example, if a component doesn t know how to recover from an exceptional condition³, instead of using panic(), it could signal its situation before dying. Another dedicated component could try to resolve the situation by restarting the faulty component. If it fails to reach an healthy state in time, the watchdog timer will trigger and the whole service will be restarted.

---

1. Depending on the distribution, this should be installed in /lib/systemd/system or /usr/lib/systemd/system. Check with the output of the command pkg-config systemd --variable=systemdsystemunitdir.
2. This highly depends on the NTP daemon used. OpenNTPD doesn t wait unless you use the -s option. ISC NTP doesn t either unless you use the --wait-sync option.
3. An example of an exceptional condition is to reach the limit on the number of file descriptors. Self-healing from this situation is difficult and it s easy to get stuck in a loop.

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.7.700.0.0 (2017-02-07)

• Upgraded to Armadillo release 7.700.0 ("Rogue State")
  • added polyfit() and polyval()
  • added second form of log_det() to directly return the result as a complex number
  • added range() to statistics functions
  • expanded trimatu()/trimatl() and symmatu()/symmatl() to handle sparse matrice

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.7.600.2.0 (2017-01-05)

• Upgraded to Armadillo release 7.600.2 (Coup d'Etat Deluxe)
  • Bug fix to memory allocation for fields

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

• Vim and Emacs (for which I use the debian package elpa-solarized-theme).
• Midnight Commander, for which I currently use peel's theme, although I'm not happy with it; interestingly, the default theme almost works on 16-custom-colours light terminal scheme, but not quite on the dark one.
• Mutt, which is both in the main combined repository but also on the separate one. I'm not really happy with mutt's theme either, but that seems mostly because I was using a quite different theme before. I'll try to improve what I feel is missing over time.
• dircolors; I found this to be an absolute requirement for good readability of ls --color, as the defaults are too bad
• I also took the opportunity to unify my git diff and colordiff theme, but this was not really something that I found and took 'as-is' from some repository; I basically built my own theme.

• by changing the Xresources/terminal 16 basic colours to custom RGB values, or:
• by using approximations from the fixed 256 colours available in the xterm-256color terminfo

• using customised 16-colour means that all terminal programs get the new colours scheme, even if they were designed (colour-wise) based on the standard values; this makes some things pretty unreadable (hence the need to fix dircolors), but at least somewhat consistent.
• using 256-colour palette, unchanged programs stay the same, but now they look very different than the programs that were updated to solarized; note thought I haven't tested this, but that's how I understand things would be.

evilvte is quite customizable and can be lightweight. Consider it as a first alternative. Honestly, I don t remember why I didn t pick it.

• lenny had 0.4.3-1.
• etch had nothing.
• squeeze had 0.4.6-1.
• wheezy has release 0.5.1-1.
• jessie has release 0.5.1-1.
• stretch has release 0.5.1-1.
• sid has release 0.5.1-1.

 firefox '%s'

• friends that I don't see very often;
• old friends that I didn't expect to see there, some of whom decided to travel from far away in the last minute;
• met people in person for the first time, which previously I had known only though the internet -- one of whom is a protagonist in a previous blog entry, about the Debian port for OpenRISC;

• bars/pubs,
• restaurants,
• breakfast tables at lodgings,
• and public transport.

evilvte is quite customizable and can be lightweight. Consider it as a first alternative. Honestly, I don t remember why I didn t pick it.

• lenny had 0.4.3-1.
• etch had nothing.
• squeeze had 0.4.6-1.
• wheezy has release 0.5.1-1.
• jessie has release 0.5.1-1.
• stretch has release 0.5.1-1.
• sid has release 0.5.1-1.

 firefox '%s'

What makes a good password? A "good password" may mean different things to different people. I will assert that a good password has the following properties:

• high entropy: hard to guess for machines
• transferable: easy to communicate for humans or transfer across various protocols for computers
• memorable: easy to remember for humans

High entropy means that the password should be unpredictable to an attacker, for all practical purposes. It is tempting (and not uncommon) to choose a password based on something else that you know, but unfortunately those choices are likely to be guessable, no matter how "secret" you believe it is. Yes, with enough effort, an attacker can figure out your birthday, the name of your first lover, your mother's maiden name, where you were last summer, or other secrets people think they have. The only solution here is to use a password randomly generated with enough randomness or "entropy" that brute-forcing the password will be practically infeasible. Considering that a modern off-the-shelf graphics card can guess millions of passwords per second using freely available software like hashcat, the typical requirement of "8 characters" is not considered enough anymore. With proper hardware, a powerful rig can crack such passwords offline within about a day. Even though a recent US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) draft still recommends a minimum of eight characters, we now more often hear recommendations of twelve characters or fourteen characters. A password should also be easily "transferable". Some characters, like & or !, have special meaning on the web or the shell and can wreak havoc when transferred. Certain software also has policies of refusing (or requiring!) some special characters exactly for that reason. Weird characters also make it harder for humans to communicate passwords across voice channels or different cultural backgrounds. In a more extreme example, the popular Signal software even resorted to using only digits to transfer key fingerprints. They outlined that numbers are "easy to localize" (as opposed to words, which are language-specific) and "visually distinct". But the critical piece is the "memorable" part: it is trivial to generate a random string of characters, but those passwords are hard for humans to remember. As xkcd noted, "through 20 years of effort, we've successfully trained everyone to use passwords that are hard for human to remember but easy for computers to guess". It explains how a series of words is a better password than a single word with some characters replaced. Obviously, you should not need to remember all passwords. Indeed, you may store some in password managers (which we'll look at in another article) or write them down in your wallet. In those cases, what you need is not a password, but something I would rather call a "token", or, as Debian Developer Daniel Kahn Gillmor (dkg) said in a private email, a "high entropy, compact, and transferable string". Certain APIs are specifically crafted to use tokens. OAuth, for example, generates "access tokens" that are random strings that give access to services. But in our discussion, we'll use the term "token" in a broader sense. Notice how we removed the "memorable" property and added the "compact" one: we want to efficiently convert the most entropy into the shortest password possible, to work around possibly limiting password policies. For example, some bank cards only allow 5-digit security PINs and most web sites have an upper limit in the password length. The "compact" property applies less to "passwords" than tokens, because I assume that you will only use a password in select places: your password manager, SSH and OpenPGP keys, your computer login, and encryption keys. Everything else should be in a password manager. Those tools are generally under your control and should allow large enough passwords that the compact property is not particularly important.

Generating secure passwords We'll look now at how to generate a strong, transferable, and memorable password. These are most likely the passwords you will deal with most of the time, as security tokens used in other settings should actually never show up on screen: they should be copy-pasted or automatically typed in forms. The password generators described here are all operated from the command line. Password managers often have embedded password generators, but usually don't provide an easy way to generate a password for the vault itself. The previously mentioned xkcd cartoon is probably a common cultural reference in the security crowd and I often use it to explain how to choose a good passphrase. It turns out that someone actually implemented xkcd author Randall Munroe's suggestion into a program called xkcdpass:

    $ xkcdpass
    estop mixing edelweiss conduct rejoin flexitime

In verbose mode, it will show the actual entropy of the generated passphrase:

    $ xkcdpass -V
    The supplied word list is located at /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/xkcdpass/static/default.txt.
    Your word list contains 38271 words, or 2^15.22 words.
    A 6 word password from this list will have roughly 91 (15.22 * 6) bits of entropy,
    assuming truly random word selection.
    estop mixing edelweiss conduct rejoin flexitime

Note that the above password has 91 bits of entropy, which is about what a fifteen-character password would have, if chosen at random from uppercase, lowercase, digits, and ten symbols:

    log2((26 + 26 + 10 + 10)^15) = approx. 92.548875

It's also interesting to note that this is closer to the entropy of a fifteen-letter base64 encoded password: since each character is six bits, you end up with 90 bits of entropy. xkcdpass is scriptable and easy to use. You can also customize the word list, separators, and so on with different command-line options. By default, xkcdpass uses the 2 of 12 word list from 12 dicts, which is not specifically geared toward password generation but has been curated for "common words" and words of different sizes. Another option is the diceware system. Diceware works by having a word list in which you look up words based on dice rolls. For example, rolling the five dice "1 4 2 1 4" would give the word "bilge". By rolling those dice five times, you generate a five word password that is both memorable and random. Since paper and dice do not seem to be popular anymore, someone wrote that as an actual program, aptly called diceware. It works in a similar fashion, except that passwords are not space separated by default:

    $ diceware
    AbateStripDummy16thThanBrock

Diceware can obviously change the output to look similar to xkcdpass, but can also accept actual dice rolls for those who do not trust their computer's entropy source:

    $ diceware -d ' ' -r realdice -w en_orig
    Please roll 5 dice (or a single dice 5 times).
    What number shows dice number 1? 4
    What number shows dice number 2? 2
    What number shows dice number 3? 6
    [...]
    Aspire O's Ester Court Born Pk

The diceware software ships with a few word lists, and the default list has been deliberately created for generating passwords. It is derived from the standard diceware list with additions from the SecureDrop project. Diceware ships with the EFF word list that has words chosen for better recognition, but it is not enabled by default, even though diceware recommends using it when generating passwords with dice. That is because the EFF list was added later on. The project is currently considering making the EFF list be the default. One disadvantage of diceware is that it doesn't actually show how much entropy the generated password has those interested need to compute it for themselves. The actual number depends on the word list: the default word list has 13 bits of entropy per word (since it is exactly 8192 words long), which means the default 6 word passwords have 78 bits of entropy:

    log2(8192) * 6 = 78

Both of these programs are rather new, having, for example, entered Debian only after the last stable release, so they may not be directly available for your distribution. The manual diceware method, of course, only needs a set of dice and a word list, so that is much more portable, and both the diceware and xkcdpass programs can be installed through pip. However, if this is all too complicated, you can take a look at Openwall's passwdqc, which is older and more widely available. It generates more memorable passphrases while at the same time allowing for better control over the level of entropy:

    $ pwqgen
    vest5Lyric8wake
    $ pwqgen random=78
    Theme9accord=milan8ninety9few

For some reason, passwdqc restricts the entropy of passwords between the bounds of 24 and 85 bits. That tool is also much less customizable than the other two: what you see here is pretty much what you get. The 4096-word list is also hardcoded in the C source code; it comes from a Usenet sci.crypt posting from 1997. A key feature of xkcdpass and diceware is that you can craft your own word list, which can make dictionary-based attacks harder. Indeed, with such word-based password generators, the only viable way to crack those passwords is to use dictionary attacks, because the password is so long that character-based exhaustive searches are not workable, since they would take centuries to complete. Changing from the default dictionary therefore brings some advantage against attackers. This may be yet another "security through obscurity" procedure, however: a naive approach may be to use a dictionary localized to your native language (for example, in my case, French), but that would deter only an attacker that doesn't do basic research about you, so that advantage is quickly lost to determined attackers. One should also note that the entropy of the password doesn't depend on which word list is chosen, only its length. Furthermore, a larger dictionary only expands the search space logarithmically; in other words, doubling the word-list length only adds a single bit of entropy. It is actually much better to add a word to your password than words to the word list that generates it.

Generating security tokens As mentioned before, most password managers feature a way to generate strong security tokens, with different policies (symbols or not, length, etc). In general, you should use your password manager's password-generation functionality to generate tokens for sites you visit. But how are those functionalities implemented and what can you do if your password manager (for example, Firefox's master password feature) does not actually generate passwords for you? pass, the standard UNIX password manager, delegates this task to the widely known pwgen program. It turns out that pwgen has a pretty bad track record for security issues, especially in the default "phoneme" mode, which generates non-uniformly distributed passwords. While pass uses the more "secure" -s mode, I figured it was worth removing that option to discourage the use of pwgen in the default mode. I made a trivial patch to pass so that it generates passwords correctly on its own. The gory details are in this email. It turns out that there are lots of ways to skin this particular cat. I was suggesting the following pipeline to generate the password:

    head -c $entropy /dev/random   base64   tr -d '\n='

The above command reads a certain number of bytes from the kernel (head -c $entropy /dev/random) encodes that using the base64 algorithm and strips out the trailing equal sign and newlines (for large passwords). This is what Gillmor described as a "high-entropy compact printable/transferable string". The priority, in this case, is to have a token that is as compact as possible with the given entropy, while at the same time using a character set that should cause as little trouble as possible on sites that restrict the characters you can use. Gillmor is a co-maintainer of the Assword password manager, which chose base64 because it is widely available and understood and only takes up 33% more space than the original 8-bit binary encoding. After a lengthy discussion, the pass maintainer, Jason A. Donenfeld, chose the following pipeline:

    read -r -n $length pass < <(LC_ALL=C tr -dc "$characters" < /dev/urandom)

The above is similar, except it uses tr to directly to read characters from the kernel, and selects a certain set of characters ($characters) that is defined earlier as consisting of [:alnum:] for letters and digits and [:graph:] for symbols, depending on the user's configuration. Then the read command extracts the chosen number of characters from the output and stores the result in the pass variable. A participant on the mailing list, Brian Candler, has argued that this wastes entropy as the use of tr discards bits from /dev/urandom with little gain in entropy when compared to base64. But in the end, the maintainer argued that reading "reading from /dev/urandom has no [effect] on /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail on Linux" and dismissed the objection. Another password manager, KeePass uses its own routines to generate tokens, but the procedure is the same: read from the kernel's entropy source (and user-generated sources in case of KeePass) and transform that data into a transferable string.

Conclusion While there are many aspects to password management, we have focused on different techniques for users and developers to generate secure but also usable passwords. Generating a strong yet memorable password is not a trivial problem as the security vulnerabilities of the pwgen software showed. Furthermore, left to their own devices, users will generate passwords that can be easily guessed by a skilled attacker, especially if they can profile the user. It is therefore essential we provide easy tools for users to generate strong passwords and encourage them to store secure tokens in password managers.

Note: this article first appeared in the Linux Weekly News.

• Header: this one contains basic information such as the virtual size of the image, the version number, and pointers to where the rest of the metadata is located, among other things.
• Data clusters: the data that the virtual machine sees.
• L1 and L2 tables: a two-level structure that maps the virtual disk that the guest can see to the actual location of the data clusters in the qcow2 file.
• Refcount table and blocks: a two-level structure with a reference count for each data cluster. Internal snapshots use this: a cluster with a reference count >= 2 means that it s used by other snapshots, and therefore any modifications require a copy-on-write operation.

1. Checks that run in constant time. These are equally fast for all kinds of images and I don t think they re worth disabling.
   • main-header
   • active-l1
   • refcount-table
   • snapshot-table
2. Checks that run in variable time but don t need to read anything from disk.
   • refcount-block
   • active-l2
   • inactive-l1
3. Checks that need to read data from disk. There is just one check here and it s only needed if there are internal snapshots.
   • inactive-l2

• inactive-l1: This is a variable length check because it depends on the number of internal snapshots in the qcow2 image. However its performance impact is likely to be negligible in all cases so I don t think it s worth bothering with.
• active-l2: This check depends on the virtual size of the image, and on the percentage that has already been allocated. This check might have some impact if the image is very large (several hundred GBs or more). In that case one way to deal with it is to create an image with a larger cluster size. This also has the nice side effect of reducing the amount of memory needed for the L2 cache.
• refcount-block: This check depends on the actual size of the qcow2 file and it s independent from its virtual size. This check is relatively expensive even for small images, so if you notice performance problems chances are that they are due to this one. The good news is that we have been working on optimizing it, so if it s slowing down your VMs the problem might go away completely in QEMU 2.9.

A simple terminal Let s start small with a terminal with the default settings. We ll write that in C. Another supported option is Vala.

#include <vte/vte.h>
int
main(int argc, char *argv[])
 
    GtkWidget *window, *terminal;
    /* Initialise GTK, the window and the terminal */
    gtk_init(&argc, &argv);
    terminal = vte_terminal_new();
    window = gtk_window_new(GTK_WINDOW_TOPLEVEL);
    gtk_window_set_title(GTK_WINDOW(window), "myterm");
    /* Start a new shell */
    gchar **envp = g_get_environ();
    gchar **command = (gchar *[]) g_strdup(g_environ_getenv(envp, "SHELL")), NULL  ;
    g_strfreev(envp);
    vte_terminal_spawn_sync(VTE_TERMINAL(terminal),
        VTE_PTY_DEFAULT,
        NULL,       /* working directory  */
        command,    /* command */
        NULL,       /* environment */
        0,          /* spawn flags */
        NULL, NULL, /* child setup */
        NULL,       /* child pid */
        NULL, NULL);
    /* Connect some signals */
    g_signal_connect(window, "delete-event", gtk_main_quit, NULL);
    g_signal_connect(terminal, "child-exited", gtk_main_quit, NULL);
    /* Put widgets together and run the main loop */
    gtk_container_add(GTK_CONTAINER(window), terminal);
    gtk_widget_show_all(window);
    gtk_main();
 

You can compile it with the following command:

gcc -O2 -Wall $(pkg-config --cflags --libs vte-2.91) term.c -o term

And run it with ./term:

More features From here, you can have a look at the documentation to alter behavior or add more features. Here are three examples.

Colors You can define the 16 basic colors with the following code:

#define CLR_R(x)   (((x) & 0xff0000) >> 16)
#define CLR_G(x)   (((x) & 0x00ff00) >>  8)
#define CLR_B(x)   (((x) & 0x0000ff) >>  0)
#define CLR_16(x)  ((double)(x) / 0xff)
#define CLR_GDK(x) (const GdkRGBA)  .red = CLR_16(CLR_R(x)), \
                                    .green = CLR_16(CLR_G(x)), \
                                    .blue = CLR_16(CLR_B(x)), \
                                    .alpha = 0  
vte_terminal_set_colors(VTE_TERMINAL(terminal),
    &CLR_GDK(0xffffff),
    &(GdkRGBA)  .alpha = 0.85  ,
    (const GdkRGBA[]) 
        CLR_GDK(0x111111),
        CLR_GDK(0xd36265),
        CLR_GDK(0xaece91),
        CLR_GDK(0xe7e18c),
        CLR_GDK(0x5297cf),
        CLR_GDK(0x963c59),
        CLR_GDK(0x5E7175),
        CLR_GDK(0xbebebe),
        CLR_GDK(0x666666),
        CLR_GDK(0xef8171),
        CLR_GDK(0xcfefb3),
        CLR_GDK(0xfff796),
        CLR_GDK(0x74b8ef),
        CLR_GDK(0xb85e7b),
        CLR_GDK(0xA3BABF),
        CLR_GDK(0xffffff)
 , 16);

While you can t see it on the screenshot¹, this also enables background transparency.

Miscellaneous settings VTE comes with many settings to change the behavior of the terminal. Consider the following code:

vte_terminal_set_scrollback_lines(VTE_TERMINAL(terminal), 0);
vte_terminal_set_scroll_on_output(VTE_TERMINAL(terminal), FALSE);
vte_terminal_set_scroll_on_keystroke(VTE_TERMINAL(terminal), TRUE);
vte_terminal_set_rewrap_on_resize(VTE_TERMINAL(terminal), TRUE);
vte_terminal_set_mouse_autohide(VTE_TERMINAL(terminal), TRUE);

This will:

• disable the scrollback buffer,
• not scroll to the bottom on new output,
• scroll to the bottom on keystroke,
• rewrap content when terminal size change, and
• hide the mouse cursor when typing.

Update the window title An application can change the window title using XTerm control sequences (for example, with printf "\e]2;$ title \a"). If you want the actual window title to reflect this, you need to define this function:

static gboolean
on_title_changed(GtkWidget *terminal, gpointer user_data)
 
    GtkWindow *window = user_data;
    gtk_window_set_title(window,
        vte_terminal_get_window_title(VTE_TERMINAL(terminal))?:"Terminal");
    return TRUE;
 

Then, connect it to the appropriate signal, in main():

g_signal_connect(terminal, "window-title-changed", 
    G_CALLBACK(on_title_changed), GTK_WINDOW(window));

Final words I don t need much more as I am using tmux inside each terminal. In my own copy, I have also added the ability to complete a word using ones from the current window or other windows (also known as dynamic abbrev expansion). This requires to implement a terminal daemon to handle all terminal windows with one process, similar to urxvtcd. While writing a terminal from scratch ² suits my need, it may not be worth it. evilvte is quite customizable and can be lightweight. Consider it as a first alternative. Honestly, I don t remember why I didn t pick it. UPDATED: evilvte has not seen an update since 2014. Its GTK+3 support is buggy. It doesn t support the latest versions of the VTE library. Therefore, it s not a good idea to use it. You should also note that the primary goal of VTE is to be a library to support GNOME Terminal. Notably, if a feature is not needed for GNOME Terminal, it won t be added to VTE. If it already exists, it will likely to be deprecated and removed.

---

1. Transparency is handled by the composite manager (Compton, in my case).
2. For some definition of scratch since the hard work is handled by VTE.

Regular backups seem to also only be taken once per 24 hours, though team-member-1 has not yet been able to figure out where they are stored. According to team-member-2 these don t appear to be working, producing files only a few bytes in size.

$ backupchecker -G database-dump.tar.gz
$ cat database-dump.list
[archive]
mtime  1486480274.2923253
[files]
database.sql  =7854803 uid 1000 gid 1000 owner chaica group chaica mode 644 type f mtime 1486480253.0

[files]
database.sql  >6m uid 1000 gid 1000 mode 644 type f

$ touch /tmp/database.sql && \
tar zcvf /tmp/database-dump.tar.gz /tmp/database.sql && \
cp /tmp/database-dump.tar.gz .

$ backupchecker -C database-dump.conf
$ cat a.out 
WARNING:root:1 file smaller than expected while checking /tmp/article-backup-checker/database-dump.tar.gz: 
WARNING:root:database.sql size is 0. Should have been bigger than 6291456.

• The Backup Checker project on Github
• The official documentation of the Backup Checker project on Readthedocs.

• Blends
• Debian in Science
• Cloud and containers
• Social context
• Packaging, policy and infrastructure
• Embedded
• Systems administration, automation and orchestration
• Security

• I should've started with the painful downgrade of xorg and libinput via snapshot.d.o before opening the bugreport.
• A lot more of the touchpad related hardware support is nowadays in the kernel and not in the xorg layer. Either that was just my personal historic misunderstanding, or it was different 10 years ago.
• There is an interesting set of slides from Benjamin related to debuging input device issues.