1. We administer an allocation of IP addresses that we call 44Net. These IP addresses (in the 44.0.0.0/8 IP range) can only be used for amateur radio applications and experimentation.
2. We make grants to organizations whose work aligns with our mission. This includes amateur radio clubs as well as other amateur radio-related organizations and activities. Additionally, we support scholarship programs for people who either have an amateur radio license or are pursuing careers in technology, STEM education and open-source software development projects that fit our mission, such as Reproducible Builds.

• Broad reach. We look for projects that will benefit the widest community possible.
• Social over commercial benefit. We prioritize giving to organizations and funding projects that may not have a viable business model, but provide a clear benefit to society.
• Preservation of the right to innovate. We oppose any efforts that restrict innovation to protect the status quo and keep the current winners in privileged positions.

• The ARRL Foundation, which has awarded dozens of scholarships over the past couple of years to amateur radio operators both young and old.

• The Chippewa Valley Amateur Club, who used the grant to build an emergency communications trailer and improve the emergency communication infrastructure in their community.
• Woodridge Middle School, who have developed innovative, hands-on, radio-related projects that have dramatically increased the test scores of the kids in their STEM program.
• The Make Operating Radio Easier (MORE) Project, which aims to reduce both gender and age imbalances in ham radio, through education and hands-on activities. Led by the IEEE Central Jersey Section, MORE provides mentoring, proactive intervention, and inclusivity to groups that are under-represented in amateur radio.

Changes in drat version 0.2.3 (2022-04-13)

• Arm M1 repos are now supported (#126 and #131 fixing #125)
• A vignette typo has been fixed (#130)

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

Frequency So the first thing I looked at was WifiAnalyzer to see if I had any optimisation I could do there. Normally, I try to avoid having nearby APs on the same frequency to avoid collisions, but who knows, maybe I had messed that up. And turns out I did! Both APs were on "auto" for 5GHz, which typically means "do nothing or worse". 5GHz is really interesting, because, in theory, there are LOTS of channels to pick from, it goes up to 196!! And both my APs were on 36, what gives? So the first thing I did was to set it to channel 100, as there was that long gap in WifiAnalyzer where no other AP was. But that just broke 5GHz on the AP. The OpenWRT GUI (luci) would just say "wireless not associated" and the ESSID wouldn't show up in a scan anymore. At first, I thought this was a problem with OpenWRT or my hardware, but I could reproduce the problem with both my APs: a TP-Link Archer A7 v5 and a Turris Omnia (see also my review). As it turns out, that's because that range of the WiFi band interferes with trivial things like satellites and radar, which make the actually very useful radar maps look like useless christmas trees. So those channels require DFS to operate. DFS works by first listening on the frequency for a certain amount of time (1-2 minute, but could be as high as 10) to see if there's something else transmitting at all. So typically, that means they just don't operate at all in those bands, especially if you're near any major city which generally means you are near a weather radar that will transmit on that band. In the system logs, if you have such a problem, you might see this:

Apr  9 22:17:39 octavia hostapd: wlan0: DFS-CAC-START freq=5500 chan=100 sec_chan=1, width=0, seg0=102, seg1=0, cac_time=60s
Apr  9 22:17:39 octavia hostapd: DFS start_dfs_cac() failed, -1

... and/or this:

Sat Apr  9 18:05:03 2022 daemon.notice hostapd: Channel 100 (primary) not allowed for AP mode, flags: 0x10095b NO-IR RADAR
Sat Apr  9 18:05:03 2022 daemon.warn hostapd: wlan0: IEEE 802.11 Configured channel (100) not found from the channel list of current mode (2) IEEE 802.11a
Sat Apr  9 18:05:03 2022 daemon.warn hostapd: wlan0: IEEE 802.11 Hardware does not support configured channel

Here, it clearly says RADAR (in all caps too, which means it's really important). NO-IR is also important, I'm not sure what it means but it could be that you're not allowed to transmit in that band because of other local regulations. There might be a way to workaround those by changing the "region" in the Luci GUI, but I didn't mess with that, because I figured that other devices will have that already configured. So using a forbidden channel might make it more difficult for clients to connect (although it's possible this is enforced only on the AP side). In any case, 5GHz is promising, but in reality, you only get from channel 36 (5.170GHz) to 48 (5.250GHz), inclusively. Fast counters will notice that is exactly 80MHz, which means that if an AP is configured for that hungry, all-powerful 80MHz, it will effectively take up all 5GHz channels at once. This, in other words, is as bad as 2.4GHz, where you also have only two 40MHz channels. (Really, what did you expect: this is an unregulated frequency controlled by commercial interests...) So the first thing I did was to switch to 40MHz. This gives me two distinct channels in 5GHz at no noticeable bandwidth cost. (In fact, I couldn't find hard data on what the bandwidth ends up being on those frequencies, but I could still get 400Mbps which is fine for my use case.)

Power The next thing I did was to fiddle with power. By default, both radios were configured to transmit as much power as they needed to reach clients, which means that if a client gets farther away, it would boost its transmit power which, in turns, would mean the client would still connect to instead of failing and properly roaming to the other AP. The higher power also means more interference with neighbors and other APs, although that matters less if they are on different channels. On 5GHz, power was about 20dBm (100 mW) -- and more on the Turris! -- when I first looked, so I tried to lower it drastically to 5dBm (3mW) just for kicks. That didn't work so well, so I bumped it back up to 14 dBm (25 mW) and that seems to work well: clients hit about -80dBm when they get far enough from the AP, which gets close to the noise floor (and where the neighbor APs are), which is exactly what I want. On 2.4GHz, I lowered it down even further, to 10 dBm (10mW) since it's better at going through wells, I figured it would need less power. And anyways, I rather people use the 5GHz APs, so maybe that will act as an encouragement to switch. I was still able to connect correctly to the APs at that power as well.

Other tweaks I disabled the "Allow legacy 802.11b rates" setting in the 5GHz configuration. According to this discussion:

Checking the "Allow b rates" affects what the AP will transmit. In particular it will send most overhead packets including beacons, probe responses, and authentication / authorization as the slow, noisy, 1 Mb DSSS signal. That is bad for you and your neighbors. Do not check that box. The default really should be unchecked.

This, in particular, "will make the AP unusable to distant clients, which again is a good thing for public wifi in general". So I just unchecked that box and I feel happier now. I didn't make tests to see the effect separately however, so this is mostly just a guess.

• 2D accel, using the closed firmware (regular raspi-firmware)
• Similar to the above, but running on the VPU, with no firmware blobs involved. Due to the lack of HDMI initialization code, this is filmed from an NTSC output. The garbling you can see happens when too many sprites collide in the same rows.
• This one really blew my mind: it shows Linux booting with the open firmware, while the VPU performs 2D and 3D animations in the background
• Just a 2D+3D demo, with no operating system involved

Anger workshop Based on my readings about the subject and a mediation training, I created a first workshop about dealing with one s own anger for the feminist hackers assembly in 2020. Many women who attended said they recognized themselves in what I was talking about. I created the exercises in the workshop with the goal of getting participants to share and self-reflect in small groups. I m not giving out solutions, instead proposals on how to deal with anger come from the participants themselves. (I added the last two content pages to the file after the workshop.) This is why this workshop is always different, depending on the group and what they want to share. The first time I did this workshop was a huge success and so I created an improved version for the assembly of 2021. Angry womxn* workshop

The act of saying NO We often say yes, despite wanting to say no, out of a sense of duty, or because we learned that we should always be nice and helpful, and that our own needs are best served last. Many people don t really know how to say no. Sarah Cooper, a former Google employee herself, makes fun of this in her fabulous book How to Be Successful Without Hurting Men s Feelings (highly recommended read!): That s why a discussion space about saying NO did not seem out of place at the feminist hackers assembly :) I based my workshop on the original, created by the Institute of War and Peace Reporting and distributed through their holistic security training manual. I like this workshop because sharing happens in a small groups and has an immediately felt effect. Several people reported that the exercises allowed them to identify the exact moment when they had said yes to something despite really having wanted to say no. The exercises from the workshop can easily be done with a friend or trusted person, and they can even be done alone by writing them down, although the effect in writing might be less pronounced. The act of saying NO workshop

Mapping capacities and desires Based on discussions with a friend, whose company uses SWOT analysis (strengths weaknesses opportunities threats) to regularly check in with their employees, and to allow employees to check in with themselves, I created a similar tool for myself which I thought would be nice to share with others. It s a very simple self-reflection that can help map out what works well, what doesn t work so well and where one wants to go in the future. I find it important to not use this tool narrow-mindedly only regarding work skills and expertise. Instead, I think it s useful to also include soft skills, hobbies, non-work capacities and whatever else comes to mind in order to create a truer map. Fun fact: During the assembly, a bunch of participants reported that they found it hard to distinguish between things they don t like doing and things they don t know how to do. Mapping capacities and desires

Known issues One important feedback point I got is that people felt the time for the exercises in all three workshops could have been longer. In case you want to try out these workshops, you might want to take this into account.

Shell? Rust! Not the first shell script I took and made a rust version of, but probably my largest yet. This time I took my little tm (tmux helper) tool which is (well, was) a bit more than 600 lines of shell, and converted it to Rust. I got most of the functionality done now, only one major part is missing.

What s tm? tm started as a tiny shell script to make handling tmux easier. The first commit in git was in July 2013, but I started writing and using it in 2011. It started out as a kind-of wrapper around ssh, opening tmux windows with an ssh session on some other hosts. It quickly gained support to open multiple ssh sessions in one window, telling tmux to synchronize input (send input to all targets at once), which is great when you have a set of machines that ought to get the same commands.

tm vs clusterssh / mussh In spirit it is similar to clusterssh or mussh, allowing to run the same command on many hosts at the same time. clusterssh sets out to open new terminals (xterm) per host and gives you an input line, that it sends everywhere. mussh appears to take your command and then send it to all the hosts. Both have disadvantages in my opinion: clusterssh opens lots of xterm windows, and you can not easily switch between multiple sessions, mussh just seems to send things over ssh and be done. tm instead just creates a tmux session, telling it to ssh to the targets, possibly setting the tmux option to send input to all panes. And leaves all the rest of the handling to tmux. So you can

• detach a session and reattach later easily,
• use tmux great builtin support for copy/paste,
• see all output, modify things even for one machine only,
• zoom in to one machine that needs just ONE bit different (cssh can do this too),
• let colleagues also connect to your tmux session, when needed,
• easily add more machines to the mix, if needed,
• and all the other extra features tmux brings.

More tm tm also supports just attaching to existing sessions as well as killing sessions, mostly for lazyness (less to type than using tmux directly). At some point tm gained support for setting up sessions according to some session file . It knows two formats now, one is simple and mostly a list of hostnames to open synchronized sessions for. This may contain LIST commands, which let tm execute that command, expected output is list of hostnames (or more LIST commands) for the session. That, combined with the replacement part, lets us have one config file that opens a set of VMs based on tags our Ganeti runs, based on tags. It is simply a LIST command asking for VMs tagged with the replacement arg and up. Very handy. Or also all VMs on host X . The second format is basically free form tmux commands . Mostly commandline tmux call, just drop the tmux in front collection. Both of them supporting a crude variable replacement.

Conversion to Rust Some while ago I started playing with Rust and it somehow clicked , I do like it. My local git tells me, that I tried starting off with go in 2017, but that appearently did not work out. Fun, everywhere I can read says that Rust ought to be harder to learn. So by now I have most of the functionality implemented in the Rust version, even if I am sure that the code isn t a good Rust example. I m learning, after all, and already have adjusted big parts of it, multiple times, whenever I learn (and understand) something more - and am also sure that this will happen again

Compatibility with old tm It turns out that my goal of staying compatible with the behaviour of the old shell script does make some things rather complicated. For example, the LIST commands in session config files - in shell I just execute them commands, and shell deals with variable/parameter expansion, I just set IFS to newline only and read in what I get back. Simple. Because shell is doing a lot of things for me. Now, in Rust, it is a different thing at all:

• Properly splitting the line into shell words, taking care of quoting (can t simply take whitespace) (there is shlex)
• Expanding specials like ~ and $HOME (there is home_dir).
• Supporting environment variables in general, tm has some that adjust behaviour of it. Which shell can use globally. Used lazy_static for a similar effect - they aren t going to change at runtime ever, anyways.

Properly supporting the commandline arguments also turned out to be a bit more work. Rust appearently has multiple crates supporting this, I settled on clap, but as tm supports getopts -style as well as free-form arguments (subcommands in clap), it takes a bit to get that interpreted right.

Speed Most of the time entirely unimportant in the tool that tm is (open a tmux with one to some ssh connections to some places is not exactly hard or time consuming), there are situations, where one can notice that it s calling out to tmux over and over again, for every single bit to do, and that just takes time: Configurations that open sessions to 20 and more hosts at the same time especially lag in setup time. (My largest setup goes to 443 panes in one window). The compiled Rust version is so much faster there, it s just great. Nice side effect, that is. And yes, in the end it is also only driving tmux, still, it takes less than half the time to do so.

Code, Fun parts As this is still me learning to write Rust, I am sure the code has lots to improve. Some of which I will sure find on my own, but if you have time, I love PRs (or just mails with hints).

Github Also the first time I used Github Actions to see how it goes. Letting it build, test, run clippy and also run a code coverage tool (Yay, more than 50% covered ) on it. Unsure my tests are good, I am not used to writing tests for code, but hey, coverage!

Up next I do have to implement the last missing feature, which is reading the other config file format. A little scared, as that means somehow translating those lines into correct calls within the tmux_interface I am using, not sure that is easy. I could be bad and just shell out to tmux on it all the time, but somehow I don t like the thought of doing that. Maybe (ab)using the control mode, but then, why would I use tmux_interface, so trying to handle it with that first. Afterwards I want to gain a new command, to save existing sessions and be able to recreate them easily. Shouldn t be too hard, tmux has a way to get at that info, somewhere.

• To active Debian contributors.
• To promote diversity: newcomers to Debian and/or DebConf, especially from under-represented communities.

Anyway, what is my talk about? My talk is titled Current challenges for the OpenPGP keyserver network. Is there a way forward?. The abstract I submitted follows:

Many free projects use OpenPGP encryption or signatures for various important tasks, like defining membership, authenticating participation, asserting identity over a vote, etc. The Web-of-Trust upon which its operation is based is a model many of us hold dear, allowing for a decentralized way to assign trust to the identity of a given person. But both the Web-of-Trust model and the software that serves as a basis for the above mentioned uses are at risk due to attacks on the key distribution protocol (not on the software itself!) With this talk, I will try to bring awareness to this situation, to some possible mitigations, and present some proposals to allow for the decentralized model to continue to thrive towards the future.

I am on the third semester of my PhD, trying to somehow keep a decentralized infrastructure for the OpenPGP Web of Trust viable and usable for the future. While this is still in the early stages of my PhD work (and I still don t have a solution to present), I will talk about what the main problems are and will sketch out the path I intend to develop. What is the relevance? Mainly, I think, that many free software projects use the OpenPGP Web of Trust for their identity definitions Are we anachronistic? Are we using tools unfit for this century? I don t think so. I think we are in time to fix the main sore spots for this great example of a decentralized infrastructure.

When is my talk scheduled? This Saturday, 2022.03.19, at

GMT / UTC time

19:25 20:10

Conference schedule time (EDT/GMT-4)

15:25 16:10

Mexico City time (GMT-6)

13:25 14:10

How to watch it? The streams are open online. I will be talking in the Saturn room, feel free to just appear there and watch! The FSF asks people to [register for the conference](https://my.fsf.org/civicrm/event/info?reset=1&id=99) beforehand, in order to be able to have an active participation (i.e. ask questions and that). Of course, you might be interested in other talks take a look at the schedule! LibrePlanet keeps a video archive of their past conferences, and this talk will be linked from there. Of course, I will link to the recording once it is online. Update: As of 2022.03.30, LibrePlanet has posted the videos for all of their talks, all linked from the program. And of course, for convenience, I copied the talk over here: Current challenges for the OpenPGP keyserver network. Is there a way forward?

• doveconf to dump dovecot's configuration to see if what it understands matches what I mean
• sieve-test parses sieve scripts: sieve-test file.sieve /dev/null is a quick and dirty syntax check

BACKUP="/srv/backupts/test- date +%Y-%m-d .mbox"
:0c
$BACKUP

apt install dovecot-sieve dovecot-lmtpd

service lmtp  
  unix_listener /var/spool/postfix/private/dovecot-lmtp  
    user = postfix
    group = postfix
    mode = 0666
   
 
protocol lmtp  
  mail_plugins = $mail_plugins sieve
 
plugin  
  sieve = file:~/.sieve;active=~/.dovecot.sieve
 

 plugin  
   sieve = file:~/.sieve;active=~/.dovecot.sieve
+  sieve_plugins = sieve_extprograms
+  sieve_extensions +vnd.dovecot.pipe
+  sieve_pipe_bin_dir = /usr/local/lib/dovecot/sieve-pipe
+  sieve_trace_dir = ~/.sieve-trace
+  sieve_trace_level = matching
+  sieve_trace_debug = yes
  

mkdir -p /usr/local/lib/dovecot/sieve-pipe/
(echo "#!/bin/sh'; echo "exec /usr/bin/procmail") > /usr/local/lib/dovecot/sieve-pipe/procmail
chmod 0755 /usr/local/lib/dovecot/sieve-pipe/procmail

require "vnd.dovecot.pipe";
pipe "procmail";

--- a/roles/mailserver/templates/dovecot.conf
+++ b/roles/mailserver/templates/dovecot.conf
@@ -25,6 +25,8 @@
 
+auth_username_format = %Ln
+
 
diff --git a/roles/mailserver/templates/main.cf b/roles/mailserver/templates/main.cf
index d2c515a..d35537c 100644
--- a/roles/mailserver/templates/main.cf
+++ b/roles/mailserver/templates/main.cf
@@ -64,8 +64,7 @@ virtual_alias_domains =
 
-mailbox_command = procmail -a "$EXTENSION"
-mailbox_size_limit = 0
+mailbox_transport = lmtp:unix:private/dovecot-lmtp
 

 plugin  
   sieve = file:~/.sieve;active=~/.dovecot.sieve
   sieve_plugins = sieve_extprograms
-  sieve_extensions +vnd.dovecot.pipe
+  sieve_extensions +vnd.dovecot.pipe +vnd.dovecot.filter
   sieve_pipe_bin_dir = /usr/local/lib/dovecot/sieve-pipe
+  sieve_filter_bin_dir = /usr/local/lib/dovecot/sieve-filter
   sieve_trace_dir = ~/.sieve-trace
   sieve_trace_level = matching
   sieve_trace_debug = yes
  

mkdir -p /usr/local/lib/dovecot/sieve-filter/"
(echo "#!/bin/sh'; echo "exec /usr/bin/spamc") > /usr/local/lib/dovecot/sieve-filter/spamc
chmod 0755 /usr/local/lib/dovecot/sieve-filter/spamc

:0 fw
  /usr/bin/spamc
:0
* ^X-Spam-Status: Yes
.spam/

require "vnd.dovecot.filter";
require "fileinto";
filter "spamc";
if header :contains "x-spam-level" "**************"  
    discard;
  elsif header :matches "X-Spam-Status" "Yes,*"  
    fileinto "spam";
 

require "date"
require "variables"
if currentdate :matches "month" "*"   set "month" "$ 1 ";  
if currentdate :matches "year" "*"   set "year" "$ 1 ";  
fileinto :create "$ month -$ year ";

Simple radios Handheld radios shouldn t be forgotten. They are cheap, small, and easy to operate. Their range isn t huge maybe a couple of miles in rural areas, much less in cities but they can be a useful place to start. They tend to have no actual encryption features (the privacy features really aren t.) In the USA, options are FRS/GMRS and CB.

Syncthing With Syncthing, you can share files among your devices or with your friends. Syncthing essentially builds a private mesh for file sharing. Devices will auto-discover each other when on the same LAN or Wifi network, and opportunistically sync. I wrote more about offline uses of Syncthing, and its use with NNCP, in my blog post A simple, delay-tolerant, offline-capable mesh network with Syncthing (+ optional NNCP). Yes, it is a form of a Mesh Network! Homepage: https://syncthing.net/

Briar Briar is an instant messaging service based around Android. It s IM with a twist: it can use a mesh of Bluetooh devices. Or, if Internet is available, Tor. It has even been extended to support the use of SD cards and USB sticks to carry your messages. Like some others here, it can relay messages for third parties as well. Homepage: https://briarproject.org/

Manyverse and Scuttlebutt Manyverse is a client for Scuttlebutt, which is a sort of asynchronous, offline-friendly social network. You can use it to keep in touch with your family and friends, and it supports syncing over Bluetooth and Wifi even in the absence of Internet. Homepages: https://www.manyver.se/ and https://scuttlebutt.nz/

Yggdrasil Yggdrasil is a self-healing, fully end-to-end Encrypted Mesh Network. It can work among local devices or on the global Internet. It has network services that can egress onto things like Tor, I2P, and the public Internet. Yggdrasil makes a perfect companion to ad-hoc wifi as it has auto peer discovery on the local network. I talked about it in more detail in my blog post Make the Internet Yours Again With an Instant Mesh Network. Homepage: https://yggdrasil-network.github.io/

Ad-Hoc Wifi Few people know about the ad-hoc wifi mode. Ad-hoc wifi lets devices in range talk to each other without an access point. You just all set your devices to the same network name and password and there you go. However, there often isn t DHCP, so IP configuration can be a bit of a challenge. Yggdrasil helps here.

NNCP Moving now to more advanced tools, NNCP lets you assemble a network of peers that can use Asynchronous Communication over sneakernet, USB drives, radios, CD-Rs, Internet, tor, NNCP over Yggdrasil, Syncthing, Dropbox, S3, you name it . NNCP supports multi-hop file transfer and remote execution. It is fully end-to-end encrypted. Think of it as the offline version of ssh. Homepage: https://nncp.mirrors.quux.org/

Meshtastic Meshtastic uses long-range, low-power LoRa radios to build a long-distance, encrypted, instant messaging system that is a Mesh Network. It requires specialized hardware, about $30, but will tend to get much better range than simple radios, and with very little power. Homepages: https://meshtastic.org/ and https://meshtastic.letstalkthis.com/

Portable Satellite Communicators You can get portable satellite communicators that can send SMS from anywhere on earth with a clear view of the sky. The Garmin InReach mini and Zoleo are two credible options. Subscriptions range from about $10 to $40 per month depending on usage. They also have global SOS features.

Telephone Lines If you have a phone line and a modem, UUCP can get through just about anything. It s an older protocol that lacks modern security, but will deal with slow and noisy serial lines well. XBee SX radios also have a serial mode that can work well with UUCP.

Additional Suggestions It is probably useful to have a Linux live USB stick with whatever software you want to use handy. Debian can be installed from the live environment, or you could use a security-focused distribution such as Tails or Qubes.

References This page originated in my Mastodon thread and incorporates some suggestions I received there. It also formed a post on my blog.

• The western capitalistic system has finally reached end-of-life in 2019 after it almost collapsed already in 2008.
• The western oligarchs as organised in the World Economic Forum were well aware of this and planned a Great Reset of the system through a medical emergency. The goal is to create a new system where the old elite will remain in power.
• There has been no pandemic in 2020 but only a PCR-test that created cases . Age-normalized mortality in most countries was unspectacular in 2020.
• The so called Covid-19 vaccines are extremely dangerous in some batches with harmless batches in between to not raise suspicion: How Bad is My Batch.

• A new step in INN development has been achieved with the migration of the INN project to GitHub. We now make use of the features GitHub provides: issue tracker, pull requests, continuous integration, a user-friendly interface to browse the code, etc. Our Subversion repository has therefore been migrated to Git, and our Trac tickets to the GitHub issue tracker.
• An up-to-date nocem.ctl file is provided with this release. You should manually update your nocem.ctl file with the new information recorded about NoCeM issuers, and make sure the right PGP keys are present on your system.
• Up-to-date control.ctl and moderators files are provided with this release. You should manually update them (notably for the fido7.* hierarchy).
• Added a stricter validation of article numbers given in NNTP commands so that numbers superior to 2^31 are correctly considered invalid. Thanks to Richard Kettlewell for the patch.
• Added a check in rc.news for the existence of the pathrun directory. INN won't start until this directory is writable. Previously, it bailed out quickly after starting, without clear logs about why it failed.
• Fixed parallel builds using make -j. Thanks to Richard Kettlewell for the path.
• nnrpd now properly gathers timer statistics when a compression layer is active.
• nnrpd now properly discards data received from a news client after a timeout when a TLS layer is active. It previously tried to read incoming data before closing the socket, leading to decoding errors from an underlying compression or SASL layer.
• innfeed and ovdb_stat now generate status reports in valid HTML syntax.
• Fixed a bug in the buffindexed overview that prevented it from working on several systems, amongst them FreeBSD. Unsupported, and useless, permission bits were given to semaphores.
• Fixed the detection of library paths at configure time: multilib directories (lib32 or lib64) are now also used if they exist, even it the system does not use multilib. It will notably fix the detection of the OpenSSL 3.0.0 library.
• The tlscertfile parameter in inn.conf now permits the use of a complete certificate chain, instead of necessarily having to use tlscafile for additional certificates.
• Added support for the new OpenSSL 3.0.0 API, which deprecated a few functions.
• The inn.conf default value for tlsprotocols no longer contains TLS versions 1.0 and 1.1, which have been deprecated by RFC 8996.
• A new inn.conf parameter has been added to tune the length of the queue of pending connections to innd, nnrpd and the ovdb overview storage method: the maxlisten parameter now permits configuring their listen backlog, whose previously hard-coded values were 128 for nnrpd and 25 for the others, which was not high enough for some uses. The default value is now 128 for all of them, and configurable in inn.conf. Thanks to Kevin Bowling for the patch.
• The name of seven man pages for routines built in libinn(3) are now prefixed with libinn_ so as not to consume namespace and conflict with other packages (notably, the list(3) and uwildmat(3) man pages are now named libinn_list(3) and libinn_uwildmat(3)).
• Other minor bug fixes and documentation improvements, notably a revised installation checklist and a section summarizing the most used configuration at the beginning of a few complex man pages.

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

• I wanted to upgrade my internet connection, but:
• My router wasn t fast enough, so:
• I bought a new one and:
• Proceeded to help work on mainline Linux support, and:
• Did some tweaking of my Debian setup to allow for a squashfs root, and:
• Upgraded it to Debian 11 (bullseye) in the process, except:
• It turned out my home automation devices weren t happy, so:
• I dug into some memory issues on my ESP8266 firmware, which:
• Led to diagnosing some TLS interaction issues with the firmware, and:
• I had an interlude into some interrupt affinity issues, but:
• I finally got there.

The desire for a faster connection When I migrated my home connection to FTTP I kept the same 80M/20M profile I d had on FTTC. I didn t have a pressing need for faster, and I saved money because I was no longer paying for the phone line portion. I wanted more, but at the time I think the only option was for a 160M/30M profile instead and I didn t need it and it wasn t enough better to convince me. Time passed and BT rolled out their GigE (really 900M) download option. And again, I didn t need it, but I wanted it. My provider, Aquiss, initially didn t offer this (I think they had up to 330M download options available by this point). So I stayed on 80M/20M. And the only time I really wanted it to be faster was when pushing off-site backups to rsync.net. Of course, we ve had the pandemic, and that s involved 2 adults working from home with plenty of video calls throughout the day. The 80M/20M connection has proved rock solid for this, so again, I didn t feel an upgrade was justified. We got a 4K capable TV last year and while the bandwidth usage for 4K streaming is noticeably higher, again the connection can handle it no problem. At some point last year I noticed Aquiss had added speed options all the way to 900M down. At the end of the year I accepted a new role, which is fully remote, so I had a bit of an acceptance about the fact that I wasn t going back into an office any time soon. The combination (and the desire for the increased upload speed) finally allowed me to justify the upgrade to myself.

Testing the current setup for bottlenecks The first thing to do was see whether my internal network could cope with an upgrade. I m mostly running Cat6 GigE so I wasn t worried about that side of things. However I m using an RB3011 as my core router, and while it has some coprocessors for routing acceleration they re not supported under mainline Linux (and unlikely to be any time soon). So I had to benchmark what it was capable of routing. I run a handful of VLANs within my home network, with stateful firewalling between them, so I felt that would be a good approximation of the maximum speed to the outside world I might be able to get if I had the external connection upgraded. I went for the easy approach and fired up iPerf3 on 2 hosts, both connected via ethernet but on separate networks, so routed through the RB3011. That resulted in slightly more than a 300Mb/s throughput. Ok. I confirmed that I could get 900Mb/s+ on 2 hosts both on the same network, just to be sure there wasn t some other issue I was missing. Nope, so unsurprisingly the router was the bottleneck. So. To upgrade my internet speed I need to upgrade my router. I could just buy something off the shelf, but I like being able to run Debian (or OpenWRT) on the router rather than some horrible vendor firmware. Lucky MikroTik launched the RB5009 towards the end of last year. RouterOS is probably more than capable, but what really interested me was the fact it s an ARM64 platform based on an Armada 7040, which is pretty well supported in mainline kernels already. There s a 10G connection from the internal switch to the CPU, as well as a 2.5Gb/s ethernet port and a 10G SFP+ cage. All good stuff. I ordered one just before the New Year. Thankfully the OpenWRT folk had done all of the hard work on getting a mainline kernel booting on the device; Sergey Sergeev and Robert Marko in particular fighting RouterBoot and producing a suitable device tree file to get everything up and running. I ended up soldering a serial console connection up to aid debugging, and lightly patching Rob s u-boot to fix the incorrect RAM size reported by RouterBoot. A few kernel tweaks were necessary to make the networking entirely happy and at that point it was time to think about actually doing a replacement.

Upgrading to Debian 11 (bullseye) My RB3011 is currently running Debian 10 (buster); an upgrade has been on my todo list, but with the impending replacement I decided I d hold off and create a new Debian 11 (bullseye) image for the RB5009. Additionally, I don t actually run off the internal NAND in the RB3011; I have a USB flash drive for the rootfs and just the kernel booting off internal NAND. Originally this was for ease of testing, then a combination of needing to figure out a good read-only root solution and a small enough image to fit in the 120M available. For the upgrade I decided to finally look at these pieces. I ve ended up with a script that will build me a squashfs image, and the initial rootfs takes care of mounting this and then a tmpfs as an overlay fs. That means I can easily see what pieces are being written to. The RB5009 has a total of 1G NAND so I m not as space constrained, but the squashfs ends up under 50M. I ve added some additional pieces to allow me to pre-populate the overlay fs with updates rather than always needing to rebuild the squashfs image. With that done I decided to try it out on the RB3011; I tweaked the build script to be able to build for armhf (the RB3011) or arm64 (the RB5009) and to deal with some slight differences in configuration between the two (e.g. interface naming). The idea here was to ensure I d got all the appropriate configuration sorted for the RB5009, in the known-good existing environment. Everything is still on a USB stick at this stage and the new device has an armhf busybox root meaning it can be used on either device, and the init script detects the architecture to select the appropriate squashfs to mount.

A problem with ESP8266 home automation devices Everything seemed to work fine - a few niggles with the watchdog, which is overly sensitive on the RB3011, but I got those sorted (and the build script updated) and the device came up and successfully did the PPPoE dance to bring up external connectivity. And then I noticed that my home automation devices were having problems connecting to the mosquitto MQTT server. It turned out it was only the ESP8266 based devices that were failing, and examining the serial debug output on one of my test devices revealed it was hitting an out of memory issue (displaying E:M 280) when establishing the TLS MQTT connection. I rolled back to the Debian 10 image and set about creating a test environment to look at the ESP8266 issues. My first action was to try and reduce my RAM footprint to try and ensure there was enough spare to establish the connection. I moved a few functions that were still sitting in IRAM into flash. I cleaned up a couple of buffers that are on the stack to be more correctly sized. I tried my new image, and I didn t get the memory issue. Instead I progressed a bit further and got a watchdog reset. Doh! It was obviously something related to the TLS connection, but I couldn t easily see what the difference was; the same x509 cert was in use, it looked like the initial handshake was the same (and trying with openssl s_client looked pretty similar too). I set about instrumenting the ancient Mbed TLS used in the Espressif SDK and discovered that whatever had changed between buster + bullseye meant the EPS8266 was now trying a TLS-DHE-RSA-WITH-AES-256-CBC-SHA256 handshake instead of a TLS-RSA-WITH-AES-256-CBC-SHA256 handshake and that was causing enough extra CPU usage that it couldn t complete in time and the watchdog kicked in. So I commented out MBEDTLS_KEY_EXCHANGE_DHE_RSA_ENABLED in the config_esp.h for mbedtls and rebuilt things. Hacky, but I ll go back to trying to improve this generally at some point.

A detour into interrupt load Now, my testing of the RB3011 image is generally done at weekends, when I have enough time to tear down and rebuild the connection rather than doing it in the evening and having limited time to get things working again in time for work in the morning. So at the point I had an image ready to go I pulled the trigger on the line upgrade. I went with the 500M/75M option rather than the full 900M - I suspect I d have difficulty actually getting that most of the time and 75M of upload bandwidth seems fairly substantial for now. It only took a couple of days from the order to the point the line was regraded (which involved no real downtime - just a reconnection in the night). Of course this happened just after the weekend I d discovered the ESP8266 issue. This provided an opportunity to see just what the RB3011 could actually manage. In the configuration I had it turned out to be not much more than the 80Mb/s speeds I had previously seen. The upload jumped from a solid 20Mb/s to 75Mb/s, so I knew the regrade had actually happened. Looking at CPU utilisation clearly showed the problem; softirqs were using almost 100% of a CPU core. Now, the way the hardware is setup on the RB3011 is that there are two separate 5 port switches, each connected back to the CPU via a separate GigE interface. For various reasons I had everything on a single switch, which meant that all traffic was boomeranging in and out of the same CPU interface. The IPQ8064 has dual cores, so I thought I d try moving the external connection to the other switch. That puts it on its own GigE CPU interface, which then allows binding the interrupts to a different CPU core. That helps; throughput to the outside world hits 140Mb/s+. Still a long way from the expected max, but proof we just need more grunt.

Success Which brings us to this past weekend, when, having worked out all the other bits, I tried the squashfs root image again on the RB3011. Success! The home automation bits connected to it, the link to the outside world came up, everything seemed happy. So I double checked my bootloader bits on the RB5009, brought it down to the comms room and plugged it in instead. And, modulo my failing to update the nftables config to allow it to do forwarding, it all came up ok. Some testing with iperf3 internally got a nice 912Mb/s sustained between subnets, and some less scientific testing with wget + speedtest-cli saw speeds of over 460Mb/s to the outside world. Time from ordering the router until it was in service? Just under 8 weeks

Road block Some tasks took longer than expected for example writing the test cases as i was new to this way of building and also i had to refactor some code, I was very careful doing this as i wanted to make sure i do it the right way.

The journey continues I had to modify my initial expectations and my mentors have been so supportive. I hope to add more features to Debci and also write more tests. So far, it has been a great experience. Till next time!

• The Windows-like settings are spread out in three different programs and some of them require editing the registry[dconf] . Finding all the options for keybindings and power settings was a real chore, but done.
• Some file dialog boxes (such as with the screenshot-taking tool) just do not let me type in a path to save a file, insisting that I first navigate to a directory and then type in a name.
• General lack of available settings or hiding settings from people.
• True focus-follows-mouse was incompatible with keyboard window switching (PaperWM or no); with any focus-follows-mouse enabled, using Alt-Tab or any other method to switch to other windows would instantly have focus returned to whatever the mouse was over.

• Applications can declare classes of notifications. These can be managed Android-style in settings. Moreover, you can associate a shell command to run with a notification in any class. People use this to do things like run commands when a display locks and so forth.
• KDE Connect is a seriously impressive piece of software. It integrates desktops with Android devices in a way that s reminiscent of non-free operating systems and with 100% Free Software (the phone app is even in F-Droid!). Notifications from the phone can appear on the desktop, and their state is synchronized; dismiss it on the desktop and it dismisses on the phone, too. Get a SMS or Signal message on the phone? You can reply directly from the desktop. Share files in both directions, mount a directory tree from the phone on the desktop, find my phone , use the phone as a presentation remote for the desktop, shared clipboard, sending links between devices, control the phone media player from the desktop Really, really impressive.
• The shortcut settings in KDE really work and are impressive. Unlike Gnome, if you try to assign the same shortcut to multiple things, you are warned and prevented from doing this. As with Gnome, you can also bind shorcuts to arbitrary actions.
• This shouldn t be exciting, but I was just using Gnome, so The panel! I can put things wherever I want them! I can put it at the top of the screen, the bottom, or even the sides! It lets all my regular programs (eg, Nextcloud) put their icons up there without having to install two different extensions, each of which handles a different set of apps! I shouldn t be excited about all this, because Gnome actually used to have these features years ago [gripe gripe]
• Initially I was annoyed that Firefox notifications weren t showing up in the notification history as they did in Gnome but that was, of course, a setting, easily fixed!
• There is a Plasma Integration plugin for Firefox (and other browsers including Chrome). It integrates audio and video playback, download status, etc. with the rest of KDE and KDE Connect. Result: if you like, when a call comes in to your phone, Youtube is paused. Or, you can right-click to share a link to your phone via KDE Connect, and so forth. You can right click on a link, and share via Bluetooth, Nextcloud (it must have somehow registered with KDE), KDE Connect, email, etc.

• There appears to be no way to tell it to power down the display immediately after it is locked, every time instead of waiting for some timeout to elapse. This is useful when I want to switch monitor inputs to something else.
• Firefox ESR seems to have some rendering issues under KDE for some reason, but switching to the latest stable release direct from Mozilla seems to fix that.