Search Results: "ag"

4 November 2015

Johannes Schauer: Let's Encrypt with Pound on Debian

TLDR: mister-muffin.de (and all its subdomains), bootstrap.debian.net and binarycontrol.debian.net are now finally signed by "Let's Encrypt Authority X1" \o/ I just tried out the letsencrypt client Debian packages prepared by Harlan Lieberman-Berg which can be found here: My server setup uses Pound as a reverse proxy in front of a number of LXC based containers running the actual services. Furthermore, letsencrypt only supports Nginx and Apache for now, so I had to manually setup things anyways. Here is how. After installing the Debian packages I built from above git repositories, I ran the following commands: 
$ mkdir -p letsencrypt/etc letsencrypt/lib letsencrypt/log
$ letsencrypt certonly --authenticator manual --agree-dev-preview \
    --server https://acme-v01.api.letsencrypt.org/directory --text \
    --config-dir letsencrypt/etc --logs-dir letsencrypt/log \
    --work-dir letsencrypt/lib --email josch@mister-muffin.de \
    --domains mister-muffin.de --domains blog.mister-muffin.de \
    --domains [...]
I created the letsencrypt directory structure to be able to run letsencrypt as a normal user. Otherwise, running this command would require access to /etc/letsencrypt and others. Having to set this up and pass all these parameters is a bit bothersome but there is an upstream issue about making this easier when using the "certonly" option which in princible should not require superuser privileges. The --server option is necessary for now because "Let's Encrypt" is still in beta and one needs to register for it. Without the --server option one will get an untrusted certificate from the "happy hacker fake CA". The letsencrypt program will then ask me for my agreement to the Terms of Service and then, for each domain I specified with the --domains option present me the token content and the location under each domain where it expects to find this content, respectively. This looks like this each time: 
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
NOTE: The IP of this machine will be publicly logged as having requested this
certificate. If you're running letsencrypt in manual mode on a machine that is
not your server, please ensure you're okay with that.
Are you OK with your IP being logged?
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(Y)es/(N)o: Y
Make sure your web server displays the following content at
http://mister-muffin.de/.well-known/acme-challenge/XXXX before continuing:
 "header":  "alg": "RS256", "jwk":  "e": "AQAB", "kty": "RSA", "n": "YYYY" , "payload": "ZZZZ", "signature": "QQQQ" 
Content-Type header MUST be set to application/jose+json.
If you don't have HTTP server configured, you can run the following
command on the target server (as root):
mkdir -p /tmp/letsencrypt/public_html/.well-known/acme-challenge
cd /tmp/letsencrypt/public_html
echo -n ' "header":  "alg": "RS256", "jwk":  "e": "AQAB", "kty": "RSA", "n": "YYYY" , "payload": "ZZZZ", "signature": "QQQQ" ' > .well-known/acme-challenge/XXXX
# run only once per server:
$(command -v python2   command -v python2.7   command -v python2.6) -c \
"import BaseHTTPServer, SimpleHTTPServer; \
SimpleHTTPServer.SimpleHTTPRequestHandler.extensions_map =  '': 'application/jose+json' ; \
s = BaseHTTPServer.HTTPServer(('', 80), SimpleHTTPServer.SimpleHTTPRequestHandler); \
s.serve_forever()" 
Press ENTER to continue
For brevity I replaced any large base64 encoded chunks of the messages with YYYY, ZZZZ and QQQQ. The token location is abbreviated with XXXX. After temporarily stopping Pound on my webserver I created the directory /tmp/letsencrypt/public_html/.well-known/acme-challenge and then opened two shells on my server, both at /tmp/letsencrypt/public_html. In one, I kept a tiny HTTP server running (like the suggested Python SimpleHTTPServer which will also work if one has Python installed). In the other I copy pasted the echo line that the letsencrypt program suggested me to run. I had to copypaste that echo command for each domain I wanted to verify. This could easily be automated, so I filed an issue about this with upstream. It seems that the letsencrypt servers query each of these tokens twice: once directly each time after having hit enter after seeing the message above and another time once all tokens are in place. At the end of this ordeal I get: 
2015-11-04 11:12:18,409:WARNING:letsencrypt.client:Non-standard path(s), might not work with crontab installed by your operating system package manager
IMPORTANT NOTES:
 - If you lose your account credentials, you can recover through
   e-mails sent to josch@mister-muffin.de.
 - Congratulations! Your certificate and chain have been saved at
   letsencrypt/etc/live/mister-muffin.de/fullchain.pem. Your cert will
   expire on 2016-02-02. To obtain a new version of the certificate in
   the future, simply run Let's Encrypt again.
 - Your account credentials have been saved in your Let's Encrypt
   configuration directory at letsencrypt/etc. You should make a
   secure backup of this folder now. This configuration directory will
   also contain certificates and private keys obtained by Let's
   Encrypt so making regular backups of this folder is ideal.
I can now scp the content of letsencrypt/etc/live/mister-muffin.de/* to my server. Unfortunately, Pound (and also my ejabberd XMPP server) requires the private key to be in the same file as the certificate and the chain, so on the server I also had to do: 
cat /etc/ssl/private/privkey.pem /etc/ssl/private/fullchain.pem > /etc/ssl/private/private_fullchain.pem
And edit the Pound config to use /etc/ssl/private/private_fullchain.pem. But that's all, folks! EDIT It seems that manually copying over the echo commands as I described above is not necessary. Instead of using the certonly plugin, I can use the webroot plugin. That plugin takes the --webroot-path option and will copy the tokens to there. Since my webroot is on a remote machine, I could just mount it locally via sshfs and pass the mountpoint as --webroot-path. That I didn't realize that the webroot plugin does what I want (and not the certonly plugin) can easily be explained by the only documentation of the webroot plugin in the help output and the man page generated from it being "Webroot Authenticator" which is not very helpful. Another user seems to have run into similar problems. Better documenting the plugins so that these situations can be prevented in the future is tracked in this upstream bug.

Julien Danjou: Gnocchi 1.3.0 release

Finally, Gnocchi 1.3.0 is out. This is our final release, more or less matching the OpenStack 6 months schedule, that concludes the Liberty development cycle.
This release was supposed to be released a few weeks earlier, but our integration test got completely blocked for several days just the week before the OpenStack Mitaka summit. New website We build a new dedicated website for Gnocchi at gnocchi.xyz. We want to promote Gnocchi outside of the OpenStack bubble, as it a useful timeseries database on its own that can work without the rest of the stack. We'll try to improve the documentation. If you're curious, feel free to check it out and report anything you miss! The speed bump Obviously, if it was a bug in Gnocchi that we have hit, it would have been quick to fix. However, we found a nasty bug in Swift caused by the evil monkey-patching of Eventlet (once again) blended with a mixed usage of native threads and Eventlet threads in Swift. Shake all of that, and you got yourself pretty race conditions when using the Keystone middleware authentication. In the meantime, we disabled Swift multi-threading by using mod_wsgi instead of Eventlet in devstack. New features So what's new in this new shiny release? A few interesting things: And that's all we did in the last couple of months. We have a lot of things on the roadmap that are pretty exciting, and I'll sure talk about them in the next weeks.

Craig Sanders: Part-time sysadmin work in Melbourne?

I m looking for a part-time Systems Administration role in Melbourne, either in a senior capacity or happy to assist an existing sysadmin or development team. I m mostly recovered from a long illness and want to get back to work, on a part-time basis (up to 3 days per week). Preferably in the City or Inner North near public transport. I can commute further if there is scope for telecommuting once I know your systems and people, and trust has been established. If you have a suitable position available or know of someone who does, please contact me by email. Why hire me? Pros: Cons: Full CV available on request. I m in the top few percent on ServerFault and Unix & Linux StackExchange sites if you want to get a preview of my problem-solving and technical communication skills, see my profile at: http://unix.stackexchange.com/users/7696/cas?tab=profile CV Summary: Systems Administrator and Programmer with extensive exposure to a wide variety of hardware and software systems. Excellent fault-diagnosis, problem-solving and system design skills. Strong technical/user support background. Ability to communicate technical concepts clearly to non-IT people. Significant IT Management and supervisory experience. Particular Skills Part-time sysadmin work in Melbourne? is a post from: Errata

3 November 2015

Joey Hess: STM Region contents

concurrent-output released yesterday got a lot of fun features. It now does full curses-style minimization of the output, to redraw updated lines with optimal efficiency. And supports multiline regions/wrapping too long lines. And allows the user to embed ANSI colors in a region. 3 features that are in some tension and were fun to implement all together. But I have a more interesting feature to blog about... I've added the ability for the content of a Region to be determined by a (STM transaction). Here, for example, is a region that's a clock: 
timeDisplay :: TVar UTCTime -> STM Text
timeDisplay tv = T.pack . show <$> readTVar tv
clockRegion :: IO ConsoleRegionHandle
clockRegion = do
    tv <- atomically . newTVar =<< getCurrentTime
    r <- openConsoleRegion Linear
    setConsoleRegion r (timeDisplay tv)
    async $ forever $ do
        threadDelay 1000000 -- 1 sec
        atomically . (writeTVar tv) =<< getCurrentTime
    return r
There's something magical about this. Whenever a new value is written into the TVar, concurrent-output automatically knows that this region needs to be updated. How does it know how to do that? Magic of STM. Basically, concurrent-output composes all the STM transactions of Regions, and asks STM to wait until there's something new to display. STM keeps track of whatever TVars might be looked at, and so can put the display thread to sleep until there's a change to display. Using STM I've gotten extensability for free, due to the nice ways that STM transactions compose. A few other obvious things to do with this: Compose 2 regions with padding so they display on the same line, left and right aligned. Trim a region's content to the display width. (Handily exported by concurrent-output in a TVar for this kind of thing.)
I'm tempted to write a console spreadsheet using this. Each visible cell of the spreadsheet would have its own region, that uses a STM transaction to display. Plain data Cells would just display their current value. Cells that contain a function would read the current values of other Cells, and use that to calculate what to display. Which means that a Cell containing a function would automatically update whenever any of the Cells that it depends on were updated! Do you think that a simple interactive spreadsheet built this way would be more than 100 lines of code?

Daniel Pocock: How much of Linux will be illegal in the UK?

This week I've been in the UK again, giving a talk about Lumicall and JSCommunicator in Manchester last night and a talk about Free Real-Time Communications at the mini-DebConf in Cambridge on the weekend of 7-8 November. An interesting backdrop to these activities has been a national debate about Internet privacy. The UK Government and police are demanding laws to mandate back doors in all communications products and services. It leaves me wondering about a range of issues:
  • Will overzealous UK police, reknowned for singling out and bullying people who don't conform with their idea of normality, start taking a more sinister attitude to people using software like Linux? For example, if airport security asks to inspect a laptop and doesn't see the familiar Windows or Mac OS desktop, will the owner of the laptop be delayed or told to leave it behind? Some people may feel this is extreme, but workers in these roles are known for taking initiative in their own special way, such as the infamous baby pat-down. If the owner of a Linux laptop is a Muslim, like the Texas schoolboy recently arrested because his clock looks suspicious to the untrained eye of a policeman, the chances of a rough encounter with authority probably rise even further.
  • Will developers still be able to use technologies like PGP and ZRTP in the UK? Will PGP key-signing parties become illegal or have to be held 20 miles offshore on a boat like the legendary pirate radio stations of the sixties?
  • Will Linux distributions such as Debian and Fedora have to avoid distributing packages such as Enigmail?
  • Will updates to Android and iOS on smartphones seek to automatically disable or remove apps like Lumicall?
  • Even if a user chooses a secure app like Lumicall for communication, will the vendor of the operating system be required to provide alternative ways to monitor the user, for example, by intercepting audio before it is encrypted by the app?
  • Without strong encryption algorithms, digital signatures will no longer be possible either and it will be impossible for software vendors to securely distribute new versions of their software.
  • Why should the police be the only workers to have their job done for them by Internet snooping? Why shouldn't spouses have a right to all their partner's communications to periodically verify they are not cheating and putting themselves at risk of diseases? Why shouldn't employers be able to check on employee's private communications and home computers to help prevent leaks of customer data? Why shouldn't the NHS be able to go through people's garbage to monitor what they eat given the WHO warning that bacon is more likely to kill you than a terrorist?
  • While the authorities moan about the internet being a "safe" place for terrorists and paedophiles, what is their real motivation for trying to bring in these new laws, even when their best technical advisors must surely be telling them about the risks and negative consequences for compatibility of UK systems in a global Internet? If the terrorist scare story is not so credible, is it more likely they are seeking to snoop on people who may not be paying taxes or to maintain the upper hand over rival political parties like the Greens and the UKIP in a time of prolonged and increasingly punitive austerity?
  • Australia already introduced similar laws a few weeks ago, despite widespread criticism from around the world. With cricket and rugby now over, is the UK just looking to go one up on Australia in the game of snooping?
Island mentality in the Internet age Politics aside, what would this mean from a technical perspective? The overwhelming consensus among experts is that secure technology that people use and expect in many other parts of the world, including the US, simply won't be compatible with the products and services that UK residents will be permitted to use. Bigger companies like Google and Apple may be able to offer differentiated versions of their services for the UK but smaller companies or companies who have built their reputation on technical excellence simply won't be able or willing to offer crippled versions of their products with backdoors for the UK. The UK's island geography will become a metaphor for its relationship with the global marketplace. The first thing to take note of is that encryption and authentication are closely related. Public-key cryptography, for example, simply swaps the public key and private key when being used to authenticate instead of encrypt. An effective and wide-reaching legal ban on encryption would also potentially prohibit the algorithms used for authentication. Many methods of distributing software, including packages distributed through Linux distributions or apps distributed through the Google Play store are authenticated with such algorithms. This is often referred to as a digital signature. Digital signatures help ensure that software is not corrupted, tampered with by hackers or infected by viruses when it is transmitted and stored in the public Internet. To correctly implement these mechanisms for installing software safely, every device running an operating system such as Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora or Android needs to include some software modules implementing the algorithms. In Linux, for example, I'm referring to packages like GnuPG, OpenSSL and GnuTLS. Without these components, it would be hard or even impossible for developers in the UK to contribute or publish new versions of their software. Users of the software would not be able to securely receive vital updates to their systems. An opportunity for free software? Some people say that any publicity can be good publicity. Now the Government has put the ball into play, people promoting secure solutions based on free software have an opportunity to participate in the debate too. While laws may or may not change, principles don't. It is a perfect time to remind users that many of the principles of software freedom were written down many years ago, before the opportunity for mass surveillance came into existence. These principles remain relevant to this day. The experts who developed these principles back then are also far more likely to offer insights and trustworthy solutions for the road ahead. If you'd like to discuss these issues or ask questions, please join the Free-RTC mailing list.

Petter Reinholdtsen: Is Pentagon deciding the Norwegian negotiating position on Internet governance?

In Norway, all government offices are required by law to keep a list of every document or letter arriving and leaving their offices. Internal notes should also be documented. The document list (called a mail journal - "postjournal" in Norwegian) is public information and thanks to the Norwegian Freedom of Information Act (Offentleglova) the mail journal is available for everyone. Most offices even publish the mail journal on their web pages, as PDFs or tables in web pages. The state-level offices even have a shared web based search service (called Offentlig Elektronisk Postjournal - OEP) to make it possible to search the entries in the list. Not all journal entries show up on OEP, and the search service is hard to use, but OEP does make it easier to find at least some interesting journal entries . In 2012 I came across a document in the mail journal for the Norwegian Ministry of Transport and Communications on OEP that piqued my interest. The title of the document was "Internet Governance and how it affects national security" (Norwegian: "Internet Governance og p virkning p nasjonal sikkerhet"). The document date was 2012-05-22, and it was said to be sent from the "Permanent Mission of Norway to the United Nations". I asked for a copy, but my request was rejected with a reference to a legal clause said to authorize them to reject it (offentleglova 20, letter c) and an explanation that the document was exempt because of foreign policy interests as it contained information related to the Norwegian negotiating position, negotiating strategies or similar. I was told the information in the document related to the ongoing negotiation in the International Telecommunications Union (ITU). The explanation made sense to me in early January 2013, as a ITU conference in Dubay discussing Internet Governance (World Conference on International Telecommunications - WCIT-12) had just ended, reportedly in chaos when USA walked out of the negotiations and 25 countries including Norway refused to sign the new treaty. It seemed reasonable to believe talks were still going on a few weeks later. Norway was represented at the ITU meeting by two authorities, the Norwegian Communications Authority and the Ministry of Transport and Communications. This might be the reason the letter was sent to the ministry. As I was unable to find the document in the mail journal of any Norwegian UN mission, I asked the ministry who had sent the document to the ministry, and was told that it was the Deputy Permanent Representative with the Permanent Mission of Norway in Geneva. Three years later, I was still curious about the content of that document, and again asked for a copy, believing the negotiation was over now. This time I asked both the Ministry of Transport and Communications as the receiver and asked the Permanent Mission of Norway in Geneva as the sender for a copy, to see if they both agreed that it should be withheld from the public. The ministry upheld its rejection quoting the same law reference as before, while the permanent mission rejected it quoting a different clause (offentleglova 20 letter b), claiming that they were required to keep the content of the document from the public because it contained information given to Norway with the expressed or implied expectation that the information should not be made public. I asked the permanent mission for an explanation, and was told that the document contained an account from a meeting held in the Pentagon for a limited group of NATO nations where the organiser of the meeting did not intend the content of the meeting to be publicly known. They explained that giving me a copy might cause Norway to not get access to similar information in the future and thus hurt the future foreign interests of Norway. They also explained that the Permanent Mission of Norway in Geneva was not the author of the document, they only got a copy of it, and because of this had not listed it in their mail journal. Armed with this knowledge I asked the Ministry to reconsider and asked who was the author of the document, now realising that it was not same as the "sender" according to Ministry of Transport and Communications. The ministry upheld its rejection but told me the name of the author of the document. According to a government report the author was with the Permanent Mission of Norway in New York a bit more than a year later (2014-09-22), so I guessed that might be the office responsible for writing and sending the report initially and asked them for a copy but I was obviously wrong as I was told that the document was unknown to them and that the author did not work there when the document was written. Next, I asked the Permanent Mission of Norway in Geneva and the Foreign Ministry to reconsider and at least tell me who sent the document to Deputy Permanent Representative with the Permanent Mission of Norway in Geneva. The Foreign Ministry also upheld its rejection, but told me that the person sending the document to Permanent Mission of Norway in Geneva was the defence attach with the Norwegian Embassy in Washington. I do not know if this is the same person as the author of the document. If I understand the situation correctly, someone capable of inviting selected NATO nations to a meeting in Pentagon organised a meeting where someone representing the Norwegian defence attach in Washington attended, and the account from this meeting is interpreted by the Ministry of Transport and Communications to expose Norways negotiating position, negotiating strategies and similar regarding the ITU negotiations on Internet Governance. It is truly amazing what can be derived from mere meta-data. I wonder which NATO countries besides Norway attended this meeting? And what exactly was said and done at the meeting? Anyone know?

Nathan Handler: Ubuntu California 15.10 Release Party

Ubuntu California 15.10 Release Party On Thursday, October 22, 2015, Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf) was released. To celebrate, some San Francisco members of the Ubuntu California LoCo Team held a small release party. Yelp was gracious enough to host the event and provide us with food and drinks. Canonical also sent us a box of swag for the event. Unfortunately, it did not arrive in time. Luckily, James Ouyang had some extra goodies from a previous event for us to hand out. Despite having a rather small turnout for the event, it was still a fun night. Several people borrowed the USB flash drives I had setup with Ubuntu, Kubuntu, and Xubuntu 15.10 in order to install Ubuntu on their machines. Other people were happy to play around with the new release in a virtual machine on my computer. Overall, it was a good night. Hopefully, we can put together an even better and larger release party for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.

2 November 2015

Scott Kitterman: Debian LTS Work October 2015

This was my sixth month as a Freexian sponsored LTS contributor. I was assigned 4 hours for the month of October and I had 4 unused hours from September for a total of 8. With that time I started working on backporting security fixes for Quassel, but it s turned into a major project. The commit message for one of the commits between what s in squeeze-lts and what I was trying to backport is Reformat ALL the source! . That s never a good sign. I set that aside and focused instead on reviewing the MySQL 5.5 packages that the LTS team is working on. They are getting there, but we need to make sure we have it all right as we don t want to break existing installations. This month I hope to continue the work on both these packages.

Carl Chenet: My Free activities in October 2015

Personal projects: Debian : That s all folks! See you next month!

Pau Garcia i Quiles: FOSDEM Desktops DevRoom 2016 Call for Participation

FOSDEM is one of the largest gatherings of Free Software contributors in the world and happens each February in Brussels (Belgium, Europe). One of the tracks will be the Desktops DevRoom (formerly known as CrossDesktop DevRoom ), which will host Desktop-related talks. We are now inviting proposals for talks about Free/Libre/Open-source Software on the topics of Desktop development, Desktop applications and interoperability amongst Desktop Environments. This is a unique opportunity to show novel ideas and developments to a wide technical audience. Topics accepted include, but are not limited to: Talks can be very specific, such as the advantages/disadvantages of development with Qt on Wayland over X11/Mir; or as general as predictions for the fusion of Desktop and web in 5 years time. Topics that are of interest to the users and developers of all desktop environments are especially welcome. The FOSDEM 2015 schedule might give you some inspiration. Submissions Please include the following information when submitting a proposal: How to submit All submissions are made in the Pentabarf event planning tool: https://penta.fosdem.org/submission/FOSDEM16 When submitting your talk, make sure to select the Desktops devroom as the Track . Otherwise your talk will not be even considered for any devroom. If you already have a Pentabarf account from a previous year, even if your talk was not accepted, please reuse it. Create an account if, and only if, you don t have one from a previous year. If you have any issues with Pentabarf, please contact pgquiles at elpauer dot org. Deadline The deadline for submissions is December 6th 2015. FOSDEM will be held on the weekend of January 30th and 31st 2015 and the Desktops DevRoom will take place on Sunday, January 31st 2015. We will contact every submitter with a yes or no before December 18th 2015. Recording permission The talks in the Desktops devroom will be audio and video recorded, and possibly streamed live too. By submitting a proposal you consent to be recorded and agree to license the content of your talk under a Creative Commons (CC-BY) license. If you want us to stop the recording in the Q & A part (should you have one), please tell us. We can do that but only for the Q & A part. More information The official communication channel for the Desktops DevRoom is its mailing list desktops-devroom@lists.fosdem.org. Use this page to manage your subscription: https://lists.fosdem.org/listinfo/desktops-devroom Organization The Desktops DevRoom 2016 is managed by a team representing the most notable open desktops: If you want to join the team, please contact pgquiles at elpauer dot org

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 27 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the reproducible builds effort this week: Toolchain fixes Packages fixed The following packages became reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: maven-plugin-tools, norwegian, ocaml-melt, python-biom-format, rivet. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues but not all of them: The following package is currently failing to build from source but should now be reproducible: Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet: reproducible.debian.net A quick update on current statistics: testing is at 85% of packages tested reproducible with our modified packages, unstable on armhf caught up with amd64 with 80%. The schroot name used for running diffoscope when testing OpenWrt, NetBSD, Coreboot, and Arch Linux has been fixed. (h01ger, Mattia Rizzolo) Documentation update Paul Gevers documented timestamps in unit files created by the Free Pascal Compiler. reproducible-builds.org is now live. It contains a comprehensive documentation on all aspects that have been identified so far of what we call reproducible builds . It makes room for pointers to projects working on reproducible builds, news, dedicated tools, and community events. Package reviews 206 reviews have been removed, 171 added and 196 updated this week. Chris Lamb reported 28 failing to build from source issues. New issues identified this week: timestamps_in_pdf_content, different_encoding_in_html_by_docbook_xsl, timestamps_in_ppu_generated_by_fpc, method_may_never_be_called_in_documentation_generated_by_javadoc. Misc. Andrei Borzenkov has proposed a fix for uninitialized memory in GRUB's mkimage. Uninitialized memory is one source of hard to track down reproducibility errors. Holger Levsen presented the efforts on reproduible builds at Festival de Software Libre in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico.

Julien Danjou: OpenStack Summit Mitaka from a Telemetry point of view

Last week I was in Tokyo, Japan for the OpenStack Summit, discussing the new Mitaka version that will be released in 6 months. I've attended the summit mainly to discuss and follow-up new developments on Ceilometer, Gnocchi, Aodh and Oslo. It has been a pretty good week and we were able to discuss and plan a few interesting things. Below are what I found remarkable during this summit concerning those projects. Distributed lock manager
I did not attend this session, but I need to write something about it. See, when working in a distributed environment like OpenStack, it's almost obvious that sooner or later you end up needing a distributed lock mechanism. It started to be pretty obvious and a serious problem for us 2 years ago in Ceilometer. Back then, we proposed the service-sync blueprint and talked about it during the OpenStack Icehouse Design Summit in Hong-Kong. The session at that time was a success, and in 20 minutes I convinced everyone it was the good thing to do. The night following the session, we picked a named, Tooz, to name this new library. It was the first time I met Joshua Harlow, which became one of the biggest Tooz contributor since then. For the following months, we tried to move the lines in OpenStack. It was very hard to convince people that it was the solution to their problem. Most of the time, they did not seem to grasp the entirety of what was at stake. This time, it seems that we managed to convince everyone that a DLM is indeed needed. Joshua wrote an extensive specification called Chronicle of a DLM, which ended up being discussed and somehow adopted during that session in Tokyo. So yes, Tooz will be the weapon of choice for OpenStack. It will avoid a hard requirement on any DLM solution directly. The best driver right now is the ZooKeeper one, but it'll still be possible for operators to use e.g. Redis. This is a great achievement for us, after spending years trying to fix features such as the Nova service group subsystem and seeing our proposals postponed forever. (If you want to know more, LWN.net has a great article about that session.) Telemetry team name
With the new projects launched this last year, Aodh & Gnocchi, in parallel of the old Ceilometer, plus the change from programs to Big Tent in OpenSack, the team is having an identity issue. Being referred to as the "Ceilometer team" is not really accurate, as some of us only work on Aodh or on Gnocchi. So after discussing that, I proposed to rename the team to Telemetry instead. We'll see how it goes. Alarms
The first session was about alarms and the Aodh project. It turns out that the project is in pretty good shape, but probably need some more love, which I hope I'll be able to provide in the next months. The need for a new aodhclient based on the technologies we recently used building gnocchiclient has been reasserted, so we might end up working on that pretty soon. The Tempest support also needs some improvement, and we have a plan to enhance that. Data visualisation
We got David Lyle in this session, the Project Technical Leader for Horizon. It was an interesting discussion. It used to be technically challenging to draw charts from the data Ceilometer collects, but it's now very easy with Gnocchi and its API. While the technical side is resolved, the more political and user experience side of was to draw and how was discussed at length. We don't want to make people think that Ceilometer and Gnocchi are a full monitoring solution, so there's some precaution to take. Other than that, it would be pretty cool to have view of the data in Horizon. Rolling upgrade
It turns out that Ceilometer has an architecture that makes it easy to have rolling upgrade. We just need to write a proper documentation explaining how to do it and in which order the services should be upgraded. Ceilometer splitting
The split of the alarm feature of Ceilometer in its own project Aodh in the last cycle was a great success for the whole team. We want to split other pieces of Ceilometer, as they make sense on their own, makes it easier to manage. They are also some projects that want to use them without the whole stack, so that's a good idea to make it happen. CloudKitty & Gnocchi
I attended the 2 sessions that were allocated to CloudKitty. It was pretty interesting as they want to simplify their architecture and leverage what Gnocchi provides. I proposed my view of the project architecture and how they could leverage the more of Gnocchi to retrieve and store data. They want to go in that direction though it's a large amount of work and refactoring on their side, so it'll take time. We also need to enhance the support of extension for new resources in Gnocchi, and that's something I hope I'll work on in the next months. Overall, this summit was pretty good and I got a tremendous amount of good feedback on Gnocchi. I again managed to get enough ideas and tasks to tackle for the next 6 months. It really looks interesting to see where the whole team will go from that. Stay tuned!

Rapha&#235;l Hertzog: The Debian Administrator s Handbook Updated for Debian 8 Jessie

Debian Handbook: cover of the jessie editionLater than what I hoped, I m still pleased to be able to announce the availability of the Jessie version of the Debian Administrator s Handbook. Check out the official announce with its special launch offer (a 15% discount on the paperback until Sunday!). The book s preface is co-signed by the last three Debian Project Leaders and it has been available through debian.org for a few months now. We are glad to have so much recognition for the hard work we have put in the book over the years. Thank you all and I hope you will enjoy this new edition! The work is not yet entirely over us for Roland and I, since we re now busy updating the French translation of the book. It should be available in the upcoming weeks. Keep posted!

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Daniel Pocock: FOSDEM 2016 Real-Time Communications dev-room and lounge

FOSDEM is one of the world's premier meetings of free software developers, with over five thousand people attending each year. FOSDEM 2016 takes place 30-31 January 2016 in Brussels, Belgium. This call-for-participation contains information about:
  • Real-Time communications dev-room and lounge,
  • speaking opportunities,
  • volunteering in the dev-room and lounge,
  • related events around FOSDEM, including the XMPP summit,
  • social events (including the Saturday night dinner),
  • the Planet aggregation sites for RTC blogs
Call for participation - Real Time Communications (RTC) The Real-Time dev-room and Real-Time lounge is about all things involving real-time communication, including: XMPP, SIP, WebRTC, telephony, mobile VoIP, codecs, privacy and encryption. The dev-room is a successor to the previous XMPP and telephony dev-rooms. We are looking for speakers for the dev-room and volunteers and participants for the tables in the Real-Time lounge. The dev-room is only on Saturday, 30 January 2016 in room K.3.401. The lounge will be present for both days in building K. To discuss the dev-room and lounge, please join the FSFE-sponsored Free RTC mailing list. Speaking opportunities Note: if you used Pentabarf before, please use the same account/username Main track: the deadline for main track presentations was midnight on 30 October. Leading developers in the Real-Time Communications field are encouraged to consider submitting a presentation to the main track. Real-Time Communications dev-room: deadline 27 November. Please also use the Pentabarf system to submit a talk proposal for the dev-room. On the "General" tab, please look for the "Track" option and choose "Real-Time devroom". Other dev-rooms: some speakers may find their topic is in the scope of more than one dev-room. It is permitted to apply to more than one dev-room but please be kind enough to tell us if you do this. See the full list of dev-rooms. Lightning talks: deadline 27 November. The lightning talks are an excellent opportunity to introduce a wider audience to your project. Given that dev-rooms are becoming increasingly busy, all speakers are encouraged to consider applying for a lightning talk as well as a slot in the dev-room. Pentabarf system to submit a lightning talk proposal. On the "General" tab, please look for the "Track" option and choose "Lightning Talks". First-time speaking? FOSDEM dev-rooms are a welcoming environment for people who have never given a talk before. Please feel free to contact the dev-room administrators personally if you would like to ask any questions about it. Submission guidelines The Pentabarf system will ask for many of the essential details. Please remember to re-use your account from previous years if you have one. In the "Submission notes", please tell us about:
  • the purpose of your talk
  • any other talk applications (dev-rooms, lightning talks, main track)
  • availability constraints and special needs
You can use HTML in your bio, abstract and description. If you maintain a blog, please consider providing us with the URL of a feed with posts tagged for your RTC-related work. We will be looking for relevance to the conference and dev-room themes, presentations aimed at developers of free and open source software about RTC-related topics. Please feel free to suggest a duration between 20 minutes and 55 minutes but note that the final decision on talk durations will be made by the dev-room administrators. As the two previous dev-rooms have been combined into one, we may decide to give shorter slots than in previous years so that more speakers can participate. Please note FOSDEM aims to record and live-stream all talks. The CC-BY license is used. For any questions, please join the FSFE-sponsored Free RTC mailing list. Volunteers needed To make the dev-room and lounge run successfully, we are looking for volunteers:
  • FOSDEM provides video recording equipment and live streaming, volunteers are needed to assist in this
  • organizing one or more restaurant bookings (dependending upon number of participants) for the evening of Saturday, 30 January
  • participation in the Real-Time lounge
  • helping attract sponsorship funds for the dev-room to pay for the Saturday night dinner and any other expenses
  • circulating this Call for Participation to other mailing lists
FOSDEM is made possible by volunteers and if you have time to contribute, please feel free to get involved. Related events - XMPP and RTC summits The XMPP Standards Foundation (XSF) has traditionally held a summit in the days before FOSDEM. There is discussion about a similar summit taking place on 28 and 29 January 2016. Please see the XSF Summit 19 wiki and join the mailing list to discuss. We are also considering a more general RTC or telephony summit, potentially on 29 January. Please join the Free-RTC mailing list and send an email if you would be interested in participating, sponsoring or hosting such an event. Social events and dinners The traditional FOSDEM beer night occurs on Friday, 29 January On Saturday night, there are usually dinners associated with each of the dev-rooms. Most restaurants in Brussels are not so large so these dinners have space constraints. Please subscribe to the Free-RTC mailing list for further details about the Saturday night dinner options and how you can register for a seat. Spread the word and discuss If you know of any mailing lists where this CfP would be relevant, please forward this email. If this dev-room excites you, please blog or microblog about it, especially if you are submitting a talk. If you regularly blog about RTC topics, please send details about your blog to the planet site administrators:
http://planet.jabber.org ralphm@ik.nu
http://planet.sip5060.net daniel@pocock.pro
http://planet.opentelecoms.org daniel@pocock.pro
Please also link to the Planet sites from your own blog or web site. Contact For discussion and queries, please subscribe to the Free-RTC mailing list. The dev-room administration team:

1 November 2015

Steinar H. Gunderson: YUV color primaries

Attention: If these two videos don't both look identical (save for rounding errors) to each other and to this slide, it has broken understanding of YUV color primaries, and will render lots of perfectly normal video subtly off in color, one way or the other. Remux in MP4 instead of MPEG-TS here, for easier testing in browsers etc.: First, second. Chrome passes with perfect marks, Iceweasel segfaults on both (GStreamer's quality or lack thereof continues to amaze me). MPlayer and VLC both get one of them wrong (although VLC gets it more right if you use its screenshot function to save a PNG to disk, so check what's actually on the screen); ffmpeg with PNG output gets it right but ffplay doesn't. Edit to add: The point is the stable picture, not the flickering in the first few frames, of course. The video was encoded quite hastily.

Thorsten Alteholz: My Debian Activities in October 2015

FTP assistant This month I marked 492 packages for accept and rejected 50 of them. I had to send only 11 emails to maintainers. Up to now I accepted about 6000 packages, my first one was pexpect_3.0-1 on 20131211.
date package
1 20131211 pexpect_3.0-1
1111 20140506 dochelp_0.1
2121 20140825 cl-parse-number_1.3-1
2222 20140903 node-websocket-driver_0.3.5-1
3333 20150303 libparse-keyword-perl_0.08-1
4242 20150625 python-monotonic_0.2-1
4444 20150708 libmusicbrainz5_5.1.0+git20150707-1
5555 20150928 golang-github-yosssi-ace_0.0.4+git20150515.41.78e48a2-3
So, when do you expect accepted package number 6666, 7777, 8888 and 9999? Squeeze LTS This was my sixteenth month that I did some work for the Squeeze LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian. This month I only got a workload of 13.25h. Altogether I uploaded those DLAs: While preparing the libxml2 upload, I mixed up things for the i386 build and so [DLA 334-2] had to follow shortly after [DLA 334-1].
I also prepared a new upload of PHP5 with nine CVEs fixed. I put the i386 and amd64 versions at people.d.o and invite everybody to test them and give positive or negative feedback. The real upload to the archive will happen next week. This month I also had another term of doing frontdesk work and looked for CVEs that are important for Squeeze LTS or could be ignored. Other stuff This month I only polished some packages and uploaded: I also manually closed #711329 and #352421. After adopting package chktex I inherited #352421, which was one of my oldest bugs. It was about emacs longlines-mode support and I could close it without actually fixing something. The longlines-mode vanished from emacs. So, sorry for that

Daniel Silverstone: A haiku about Haiku

I know I don't mention a season, and I'm a few hours late for hallowe'en, but here's a haiku about Haiku:
A death, once again,
The master sighs, and fixes,
It rises up, undead.

31 October 2015

Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppArmadillo 0.6.200.2.0

armadillo image Yet another monthly upstream Armadillo update gets us the first changes to the new the 6.* series. This was preceded by two uploads of test released to GitHub-only. These two were tested both against all reverse-dependencies as usual. A matching upload to Debian will follow shortly. Armadillo is a powerful and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra aiming towards a good balance between speed and ease of use with a syntax deliberately close to a Matlab. This release is fairly straightforward with few changes:
Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.6.200.2.0 (2015-10-31)
  • Upgraded to Armadillo 6.200.0 ("Midnight Blue Deluxe")
    • expanded diagmat() to handle non-square matrices and arbitrary diagonals
    • expanded trace() to handle non-square matrices
Courtesy of CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for the most recent CRAN release. As always, more detailed information is on the RcppArmadillo page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page.

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

Chris Lamb: Free software activities in October 2015

Here is my monthly update covering a large part of what I have been doing in the free software world (previously):
Debian My work in the Reproducible Builds project was also covered in more depth in Lunar's weekly reports (#23, #24, #25, #26).
LTS

This month I have been paid to work 11 hours on Debian Long Term Support (LTS). In that time I did the following:
  • DLA 326-1 for zendframework fixing an SQL injection vulnerability.
  • DLA 332-1 for optipng correcting a use-after-free issue.
  • DLA 333-1 for cakephp preventing a remote Denial of Service attack.
  • DLA 337-1 for busybox fixing a vulnerability when unzipping a specially crafted zip file/
  • DLA 338-1 for xscreensaver preventing a crash when hot-swapping monitors.
Uploads
  • redis New upstream release as well as changing the default UNIX socket location and correctly supporting "cluster" mode config file hardening and redis-sentinel's runtime directory handling under systemd. An update for jessie was also uploaded.
  • python-redis Attempting to get the autopkgtest tests to finally pass.
  • debian-timeline Making the build reproducible.
  • gunicorn New upstream release.

Russ Allbery: Vacation book haul

Reading on vacation always puts me in the mood to buy more books, including a couple that I picked up while on vacation. (I only read one, but that one, Ancillary Mercy, was certainly worth it.) Ta-Nehisi Coates Between the World and Me (non-fiction)
Kameron Hurley Empire Ascendant (sff)
Kameron Hurley Rapture (sff)
Jenny Lawson Furiously Happy (non-fiction)
Ann Leckie Ancillary Mercy (sff)
Kaori Mori Bride's Story: Volume 2 (graphic novel)
Kaori Mori Bride's Story: Volume 3 (graphic novel)
Randall Munroe xkcd: Volume 0 (strip collection)
Jo Walton The Philosopher Kings (sff)
Fumi Yoshinaga oku: Volume 3 (graphic novel) Infidel, the middle book of the Bel Dame Apocrypha trilogy by Kameron Hurley, was out of stock, so I'll have to re-order. I might put in another book order shortly to get that plus a few other things, although really I could just take that time to go read more books. Back from vacation now, so fell out of the reading habit a bit. I've been doing other stuff on the train, but shortly I'll get back into it.

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