Search Results: "ewt"

11 April 2016

Thomas Goirand: Announcing validated Debian packages for Mitaka

Greetings! This is a (4 days delay) copy of the announce I made on the openstack-dev@lists.openstack.org on the 8th of April 2016. I am overjoyed, thrilled and delighted to announce the release of the Debian packages for Mitaka. All of the DefCore packages were validated successfully this morning through our package-only-based Tempest CI. Content of this release
This release includes the following 23 services:
aodh 2.0.0
barbican 2.0.0
ceilometer 6.0.0
cinder 8.0.0
congress 3.0.0+dfsg1
designate 2.0.0
glance 12.0.0
gnocchi 2.0.2
heat 6.0.0
horizon 9.0.0
ironic 5.1.0
keystone 9.0.0
magnum 2.0.0
manila 2.0.0
mistral 2.0.0
murano 2.0.0
neutron 8.0.0
nova 13.0.0
trove 5.0.0
sahara 4.0.0
senlin 1.0.0
swift 2.7.0
zaqar 2.0.0 Where to find these packages
1/ Sid
All of Mitaka was uploaded to Debian Sid this week. You can use Debian Sid directly to use them. 2/ Official jessie-backports
As soon as everything migrates to Debian Testing (currently aka: Stretch), in 5 days if no RC bug is reported, it will be possible to upload all of Mitaka to the Debian official jessie-backports. 3/ Non-official Jessie and Trusty backports
In the meantime, the packages are available through Mirantis Jenkins automatic Debian Jessie backport repository. The full sources.list is available here: http://mitaka-jessie.pkgs.mirantis.com/ You can use the Trusty backports as well: http://mitaka-trusty.pkgs.mirantis.com/ To use these repositories, simply add the described sources.list to (for example) /etc/apt/sources.list.d/openstack.list, and run apt-get update. If you want to install the GPG key of the repositories, you can either install the mitaka-jessie-archive-keyring or mitaka-trusty-archive-keyring package (depending on your distribution of choice). Alternatively apt-key add the public key available at /debian/dists/pukey.gpg in these repositories. As a reminder, the URLs above contain the word Mirantis only because the service is sponsored by my employer. These repositories are straight backports from what is available in Debian Sid, without any modification. Remember that the packages listed below are maintained separately in Debian and Ubuntu, and therefore, packages are different in these distributions:
aodh, barbican, ceilometer, cinder, designate, glance, heat, horizon, ironic, keystone, manila, neutron, nova, trove, swift. All other packages (including all OpenStack libraries like Oslo and python-*clients) are maintained in Debian, with the contribution of Canonical, and then synced to Ubuntu, so they are the exact same packages (or at least, with a minimal difference). I hope we can further improve collaboration between Debian and Canonical during the Newton cycle. Bug reporting
As always, bug reports are welcome, and considered as high value contributions. Please follow the instructions available at https://www.debian.org/Bugs/Reporting to report bugs to the Debian BTS. Moving forward with higher QA and the Packaging-deb project in Newton
Currently, DefCore packages are tested through a package-only (ie: no puppet, chef, you-name-it system management involved) Tempest CI. Results can be seen at:
https://mitaka-jessie.pkgs.mirantis.com/job/openstack-tempest-ci/ Though not all packages are included in this CI. It is my intention, during the Newton cycle, to also include services like Designate, Trove, Barbican, Congress, in this CI. Individual upstream team for these services are more than welcome to approach us to get this happen quicker. Also, as we re slowing starting to get the Packaging-Deb project (ie: packaging using upstream OpenStack gerrit and gating), it is also in the pipe to use the above mentioned tempest CI system as a gate system for the packaging. Hopefully, this will lead us to a full CI/CD working from trunk. We also hope to be able to use these packages to help the Puppet team to test packaged OpenStack from trunk. Greetings
On each release, I ask myself who I should thank. This time, I would like to thank everyone, because this release was overall very nice and working well. The whole OpenStack community is always very helpful and understand the requirements of downstream distributions. Guys, you re awesome, I love my work, and I love working with you all! Cheers,

21 February 2016

Vincent Sanders: Stack 'em, pack 'em and rack 'em.

As you may be aware I have a bit of a problem with Single Board Computers in that I have a lot of them. Keeping them organised has turned into a bit of a problem.

cluttered shelf of SBC
I designed clip cases for many of these systems giving me a higher storage density on my rack shelves and built a power supply to reduce the cabling complexity. These helped but I still ended up with a cluttered shelf full of SBC.

I decided I would make a rack enclosure to hold the SBC, I was limited to material I could easily CNC machine which limited me to acrylic plastics or wood.

laser cutting the design, viewed through heavily tinted filterInitially I started with the idea of housing the individual boards in a toast rack arrangement. This would mean that the enclosure would have to be at least 2U high to fit the boards all the existing cases would have to be discarded. This approach was dropped when the drawbacks of having no flexibility and only being able to fit the units that were selected at design time became apparent (connector cutouts and mounting hole placement.

Instead I changed course to try and incorporate the existing cases which already solved the differing connector and mounting placement problem and gave me a uniform size to consider. Once I had this approach the design came pretty quickly. I used a tube girder construction 1U in height to get as much strength as possible from the 3mm acrylic plastic I would use.

laser cut pieces arranged for assembly still with protective film on
The design was simply laser cut from sheet stock and fastened together with M3 nut and bolts. Once I corrected the initial design errors (I managed to get almost every important dimension wrong on the first attempt) the result was a success.

working prototype resting on initial version
The prototype is a variety of colours because makespace ran out of suitably sized clear acrylic stock but the colouring has no effect on the result other than aesthetical. The structure gives a great deal of rigidity and there is no sagging or warping, indeed testing on the prototype got to almost 50Kg loading without a failure (one end clamped and the other end loaded at 350mm distance)

I added some simple rotating latches at the front which keep the modules held in place and allow units to be removed quickly if necessary.

rack slots installed and in use
Overall this project was successful and I can now pack five SBC per U neatly. It does limit me to using systems cased in my "slimline" designs (68x30x97mm) which currently means the Raspberry Pi B+ style and the Orange Pi PC.

Once small drawback is access to I/O and power connectors. These need to be right angled and must be unplugged before unit removal which can be a little fiddly. Perhaps a toast rack design of cases would have given easier connector access but I am happy with this trade off of space for density.

As usual the design files are freely available, perhaps they could be useful as a basis for other laser cut rack enclosure designs.

16 February 2016

Norbert Preining: Debian/TeX Live 2015.20160215-1

About one month has passed and here is the usual updated of TeX Live packages for Debian. While I am not really calling for testers at the moment, building of preliminary packages for TeX Live 2016 has begone. The binaries are already uploaded to experimental, and arch=all packages for experimental will follow soon. Debian - TeX Live 2015 As with the last time, here is the list of new and updated pacakges with (auto-generated) links to the package pages on CTAN. New packages adtrees, babel-occitan, crimson, emisa, glossaries-extra, gloss-occitan, libertinus, luatex-def, mynsfc, nihbiosketch, signchart, smartunits, tikz-feynman, uhrzeit, xduthesis. Updated packages achemso, acro, animate, apnum, archaeologie, babel, babel-french, babel-greek, babel-macedonian, bangorcsthesis, biblatex-bookinarticle, biblatex-gost, biblatex-manuscripts-philology, br-lex, caption, chemgreek, chemmacros, chemnum, cmtiup, csplain, csquotes, ctanify, ctex, cweb, datatool, datetime2, datetime2-english, delimseasy, droit-fr, dvips, erewhon, exsheets, fibeamer, fira, fontspec, forest, geschichtsfrkl, glossaries, graphics, greek-fontenc, greektonoi, hyph-utf8, inconsolata, isodoc, l2tabu, l3build, l3experimental, l3kernel, l3packages, latex, latex-bin, latex-make, leadsheets, leaflet, luaotfload, luatexja, mathastext, mcf2graph, mcmthesis, media9, metrix, mhchem, ndsu-thesis, newpx, newtx, ocgx2, pas-tableur, pdftex, pdfx, pict2e, pst-perspective, pstricks, pstricks-add, ptex, quran, ran_toks, realscripts, schemata, showhyphens, siunitx, sr-vorl, sttools, tempora, tetex, tex4ht, texfot, texlive-scripts, thinsp, thuthesis, tkz-orm, tools, uantwerpendocs, ulthese, unicode-data, uptex, xassoccnt, xcjk2uni, xebaposter, xecjk, xetex, xetexko, xltxtra, xpinyin, zhnumber, zhspacing. Enjoy.

7 February 2016

Iustin Pop: mt-st project new homepage

A short public notice: mt-st project new homepage at https://github.com/iustin/mt-st. Feel free to forward your distribution-specific patches for upstream integration! Context: a while back I bought a tape unit to help me with backups. Yay, tape! All good, except that I later found out that the Debian package was orphaned, so I took over the maintenance. All good once more, but there were a number of patches in the Debian package that were not Debian-specific, but rather valid for upstream. And there was no actual upstream project homepage, as this was quite an old project, with no (visible) recent activity; the canonical place for the project source code was an ftp site (ibiblio.org). I spoke with Kai M kisara, the original author, and he agreed to let me take over the maintenance of the project (and that's what I intend to do: maintenance mostly, merging of patches, etc. but not significant work). So now there's a github project for it. There was no VCS history for the project, so I did my best to partially recreate the history: I took the debian releases from snapshots.debian.org and used the .orig.tar.gz as bulk import; the versions 0.7, 0.8, 0.9b and 1.1 have separate commits in the tree. I also took the Debian and Fedora patches and applied them, and with a few other cleanups, I've just published the 1.2 release. I'll update the Debian packaging soon as well. So, if you somehow read this and are the maintainer of mt-st in another distribution, feel free to send patches my way for integration; I know this might be late, as some distributions have dropped it (e.g. Arch Linux).

27 January 2016

Lunar: ASLR now!

Address space layout randomization helps to protect against buffer overflow attacks as it becomes harder for an attacker to turn a programming error into an exploitable security hole. The first implementation for Linux is 15 years old. Support in mainline kernel and toolchains have been available for a good while now. But to work, ASLR also needs executables to be built as position independent. And as Hanno B ck from the fuzzing project gently reminded me at 32C3, almost no executables in Debian are built as such, while it is now the default in Windows, Mac OS X, OpenBSD, and Fedora to name just a few other systems. PIE has the reputation of having a performance hit. While true, especially for register constrained architectures like i386, it makes a difference only for the executable itself, not any shared library it uses as they are already built as position independent. Also, several optimizations have been made since the early days. GCC 5 will reuse the PIC hard register (which is also good for libraries). On amd64, GCC 5 and binutils 2.26 will do copy relocations. More improvements for i386 are being worked on. I sincerly believe that users are way more likely to notice a compromised system than a slightly slower one.

Tracking progress Since version 2.5.40, lintian will now issue a warning1 when it detects that a binary has not been compiled as a position independent executable. Kudos to Niels Thykier. Now that we can track our progress, I'm calling every Debian Developers: let's try to get as many ASLR-compatible executables in Stretch!

How to enable PIE Thanks to all contributors over the past years who have improved our toolchain, we now have a fairly easy way to enable hardening flags with dpkg-buildflags. For packages using dh, it now boils down with adding on top of debian/rules: 
export DEB_BUILD_MAINT_OPTIONS = hardening=+all
You can even test if a package supports all hardening flags without any changes running DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=hardening=+all dpkg-buildpackage. Running lintian or hardening-check can then tell you if the protections have been successfully enabled.

Hardening by default? But do we really need to change so many packages individually? The difference between the current default features and all hardening features are pie and bindnow. Could we turn them by default and do binNMUs instead of requiring actions from maintainers? I guess the question boils down to: how many packages would require a (one-liner) change to turn off the pie or bindnow features if they were on by default? To get the beginning of an answer, I took the top 502 (according to popcon installations) source packages shipping non-position independent executables. I've try to rebuild them enabling all hardening flags through DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS. Out of 49 packages3:
  • 32 (65%) built fine and produced PIE binaries: acpi, bc, bind9, bsd-mailx, bsdmainutils, bzip2, cpio, cron, debianutils, diffutils, dpkg, file, fontconfig, gettext, glib2.0, glibc, gnupg, gzip, hostname, ifupdown, iputils, logrotate, m4, mutt, nano, net-tools, netcat, netkit-ftp, netkit-telnet, os-prober, pam, util-linux.
  • 4 (8%) built fine but did not compiled hardened binaries: discover, mawk, mlocate, patch.
  • 13 (27%) failed to build, with some of these expected failures, e.g. for *-static or GRUB: bash, busybox, coreutils, e2fsprogs, grub2, insserv, iptables, kbd, ncurses, newt, openssl, pciutils, perl.
The results are really encouraging. Especially taking in account that some of these packages are part of the tricky and weird set. To know for sure, we would need a mass-rebuild of the archive with DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=hardening=+all in the environment. Any takers?
  1. Verification of the whole archive by the latest version of lintian is still in progress by the time I'm writing these lines. According to Niels it should take 3-4 more days to look at all available packages.
  2. As always, UDD does wonders: 
    SELECT packages.source, MAX(popcon.insts) AS insts
  FROM lintian, popcon, packages
 WHERE lintian.tag = 'hardening-no-pie'
   AND lintian.package_arch = 'amd64'
   AND popcon.package = lintian.package
   AND packages.package = popcon.package
   AND packages.distribution = 'debian'
   AND packages.release = 'sid'
 GROUP BY packages.source
 ORDER BY MAX(popcon.insts) DESC
 LIMIT 50;
  3. acpid currently fail to build from source in sid.

Lunar: ALSR now!

Address space layout randomization helps to protect against buffer overflow attacks as it becomes harder for an attacker to turn a programming error into an exploitable security hole. The first implementation for Linux is 15 years old. Support in mainline kernel and toolchains have been available for a good while now. But to work, ASLR also needs executables to be built as position independent. And as Hanno B ck from the fuzzing project gently reminded me at 32C3, almost no executables in Debian are built as such, while it is now the default in Windows, Mac OS X, OpenBSD, and Fedora to name just a few other systems. PIE has the reputation of having a performance hit. While true, especially for register constrained architectures like i386, it makes a difference only for the executable itself, not any shared library it uses as they are already built as position independent. Also, several optimizations have been made since the early days. GCC 5 will reuse the PIC hard register (which is also good for libraries). On amd64, GCC 5 and binutils 2.26 will do copy relocations. More improvements for i386 are being worked on. I sincerly believe that users are way more likely to notice a compromised system than a slightly slower one.

Tracking progress Since version 2.5.40, lintian will now issue a warning1 when it detects that a binary has not been compiled as a position independent executable. Kudos to Niels Thykier. Now that we can track our progress, I'm calling every Debian Developers: let's try to get as many ALSR-compatible executables in Stretch!

How to enable PIE Thanks to all contributors over the past years who have improved our toolchain, we now have a fairly easy way to enable hardening flags with dpkg-buildflags. For packages using dh, it now boils down with adding on top of debian/rules: 
export DEB_BUILD_MAINT_OPTIONS = hardening=+all
You can even test if a package supports all hardening flags without any changes running DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=hardening=+all dpkg-buildpackage. Running lintian or hardening-check can then tell you if the protections have been successfully enabled.

Hardening by default? But do we really need to change so many packages individually? The difference between the current default features and all hardening features are pie and bindnow. Could we turn them by default and do binNMUs instead of requiring actions from maintainers? I guess the question boils down to: how many packages would require a (one-liner) change to turn off the pie or bindnow features if they were on by default? To get the beginning of an answer, I took the top 502 (according to popcon installations) source packages shipping non-position independent executables. I've try to rebuild them enabling all hardening flags through DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS. Out of 49 packages3:
  • 32 (65%) built fine and produced PIE binaries: acpi, bc, bind9, bsd-mailx, bsdmainutils, bzip2, cpio, cron, debianutils, diffutils, dpkg, file, fontconfig, gettext, glib2.0, glibc, gnupg, gzip, hostname, ifupdown, iputils, logrotate, m4, mutt, nano, net-tools, netcat, netkit-ftp, netkit-telnet, os-prober, pam, util-linux.
  • 4 (8%) built fine but did not compiled hardened binaries: discover, mawk, mlocate, patch.
  • 13 (27%) failed to build, with some of these expected failures, e.g. for *-static or GRUB: bash, busybox, coreutils, e2fsprogs, grub2, insserv, iptables, kbd, ncurses, newt, openssl, pciutils, perl.
The results are really encouraging. Especially taking in account that some of these packages are part of the tricky and weird set. To know for sure, we would need a mass-rebuild of the archive with DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=hardening=+all in the environment. Any takers?
  1. Verification of the whole archive by the latest version of lintian is still in progress by the time I'm writing these lines. According to Niels it should take 3-4 more days to look at all available packages.
  2. As always, UDD does wonders: 
    SELECT packages.source, MAX(popcon.insts) AS insts
  FROM lintian, popcon, packages
 WHERE lintian.tag = 'hardening-no-pie'
   AND lintian.package_arch = 'amd64'
   AND popcon.package = lintian.package
   AND packages.package = popcon.package
   AND packages.distribution = 'debian'
   AND packages.release = 'sid'
 GROUP BY packages.source
 ORDER BY MAX(popcon.insts) DESC
 LIMIT 50;
  3. acpid currently fail to build from source in sid.

18 January 2016

Norbert Preining: Debian/TeX Live 2015.20160117-1 and biber 2.3-1

About one month has passed and here is the usual updated of TeX Live packages for Debian, this time also with an update to biber to accompany the updated version of biblatex. Nothing spectacular here besides fixes for some broken links of fonts. Debian - TeX Live 2015 As a bonus this time, I provide (auto-generated) links to the packages on CTAN, so that one can check the package descriptions and manuals. Updated packages academicons, acro, apnum, babel, babel-french, babel-icelandic, babel-spanish, babel-vietnamese, bclogo, biblatex, bibtexperllibs, calxxxx-yyyy, chemformula, chemgreek, chess-problem-diagrams, chickenize, cjk-gs-integrate, cmcyr, csplain, datatool, dvips, embrac, enotez, etex-pkg, fibeamer, fithesis, invoice, isodoc, l3kernel, latexdiff, luamplib, mathastext, mcf2graph, media9, nameauth, newpx, newtx, newtxsf, nucleardata, paralist, pdftex, pgfplots, pict2e, pmxchords, prftree, ptex, reledmac, schwalbe-chess, siunitx, tempora, tetex, tex4ht, texinfo, texlive-cz, texlive-docindex, texlive-scripts, thalie, thuthesis, tkz-orm, uantwerpendocs, unicode-data, xassoccnt, xespotcolor. New packages continue, ecobiblatex, econometrics, getitems, librebodoni, lshort-estonian, moodle, nimbus15, seuthesix, uantwerpendocs. Enjoy.

14 January 2016

Vincent Sanders: Ampere was the Newton of Electricity.

I think Maxwell was probably right, certainly the unit of current Ampere gives his name to has been a concern of mine recently.

Regular readers may have possibly noticed my unhealthy obsession with single board computers. I have recently rehomed all the systems into my rack which threw up a small issue of powering them all. I had been using an ad-hoc selection of USB wall warts and adapters but this ended up needing nine mains sockets and short of purchasing a very expensive PDU for the rack would have needed a lot of space.

Additionally having nine separate convertors from mains AC to low voltage DC was consuming over 60Watts for 20W of load! The majority of these supplies were simply delivering 5V either via micro USB or DC barrel jack.

Initially I considered using a ten port powered USB hub but this seemed expensive as I was not going to use the data connections, it also had a limit of 5W per port and some of my systems could potentially use more power than that so I decided to build my own supply.

PSU module from ebay
A quick look on ebay revealed that a 150W (30A at 5V) switching supply could be had from a UK vendor for 9.99 which seemed about right. An enclosure, fused and switched IEC inlet, ammeter/voltmeter with shunt and suitable cables were acquired for another 15

Top view of the supply all wired up
A little careful drilling and cutting of the enclosure made openings for the inlets, cables and display. These were then wired together with crimped and insulated spade and ring connectors. I wanted this build to be safe and reliable so care was taken to get the neatest layout I could manage with good separation between the low and high voltage cabling.

Completed supply with all twelve outputs wired up
The result is a neat supply with twelve outputs which i can easily extend to eighteen if needed. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that even with twelve SBC connected generating 20W load the power drawn by the supply was 25W or about 80% efficiency instead of the 33% previously achieved.

The inbuilt meter allows me to easily see the load on the supply which so far has not risen above 5A even at peak draw, despite the cubitruck and BananaPi having spinning rust hard drives attached, so there is plenty of room for my SBC addiction to grow (I already pledged for a Pine64).

Supply installed in the rack with some of the SBC connected
Overall I am pleased with how this turned out and while there are no detailed design files for this project it should be easy to follow if you want to repeat it. One note of caution though, this project has mains wiring and while I am confident in my own capabilities dealing with potentially lethal voltages I cannot be responsible for anyone else so caveat emptor!

11 January 2016

Alessio Treglia: Filling old bottles with new wine

They are filling old bottles with new wine! This is what the physicist Werner Heisenberg heard exclaiming by his friend and colleague Wolfgang Pauli who, criticizing the approach of the scientists of the time, believed that they had been forcibly glued the notion of quantum on the old theory of the planetary-model of Bohr s atom. Faced with the huge questions introduced by quantum physics, Pauli instead began to observe the new findings from a different point of view, from a new level of reality without the constraints imposed by previous theories.

Newton himself, once he theorized the law of the gravitational field, failing to place it in any of the physical realities of the time, he merely

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26 December 2015

Norbert Preining: Debian/TeX Live 2015.20151226-1

Before I disappear into the Japanese winter holidays, here the Christmas update of all TeX Live packages. Nothing spectacular here, just the usual bunch of updates of loads of packages. There is a bug with respect to a file move from one package to another, will be fixed in an upload soon. Debian - TeX Live 2015 Updated packages apnum, appendix, archaeologie, babel, babel-french, babel-greek, babel-hungarian, bangorcsthesis, beamer-verona, bhcexam, bibarts, bidi, bxjscls, chemfig, commado, comprehensive, context, cslatex, csplain, ctanify, doclicense, dvips, ejpecp, exsheets, fbb, fibeamer, fithesis, fontools, francais-bst, gitinfo2, glossaries, gnuplottex, greek-fontenc, hyph-utf8, indextools, ksp-thesis, l3build, l3experimental, l3kernel, l3packages, latexcourse-rug, lollipop, lstbayes, lualibs, luaotfload, luatexja, luatexko, luatodonotes, make4ht, mcf2graph, media9, mex, mfirstuc, mhchem, mptopdf, nameauth, nevelok, newtx, nicetext, nucleardata, ocgx2, pageslts, petri-nets, phonrule, pkuthss, powerdot, proofread, proposal, pst-labo, pst-solides3d, reledmac, sapthesis, serbian-lig, showlabels, t2, tcolorbox, tempora, testhyphens, tetex, tex4ebook, tex4ht, texlive-scripts, texsis, thuthesis, toptesi, tudscr, ucharcat, versonotes, xcharter, xepersian, xifthen, xindy, xint. New packages beamertheme-detlevcm, beamertheme-metropolis, beamertheme-phnompenh, beamer-verona, bitpattern, carbohydrates, delimseasy, drawmatrix, einfuehrung2, ellipse, ffslides, gitlog, greektonoi, ksp-thesis, longfbox, options, simpler-wick, unicode-data. Enjoy.

15 November 2015

Simon McVittie: Discworld Noir in a Windows 98 virtual machine on Linux

Discworld Noir was a superb adventure game, but is also notoriously unreliable, even in Windows on real hardware; using Wine is just not going to work. After many attempts at bringing it back into working order, I've settled on an approach that seems to work: now that qemu and libvirt have made virtualization and emulation easy, I can run it in a version of Windows that was current at the time of its release. Unfortunately, Windows 98 doesn't virtualize particularly well either, so this still became a relatively extensive yak-shaving exercise. discworldnoir-boxes.jpg These instructions assume that /srv/virt is a suitable place to put disk images, but you can use anywhere you want. The emulated PC After some trial and error, it seems to work if I configure qemu to emulate the following: A modern laptop CPU is an order of magnitude faster than what Discworld Noir needs, so full emulation isn't a problem, despite being inefficient. There is deliberately no networking, because Discworld Noir doesn't need it, and a 17 year old operating system with no privilege separation is very much not safe to use on the modern Internet! Software needed Windows 98 installation It seems to be easiest to do this bit by running qemu-system-i386 manually: 
qemu-img create -f qcow2 /srv/virt/discworldnoir.qcow2 30G
qemu-system-i386 -hda /srv/virt/discworldnoir.qcow2 \
    -drive media=cdrom,format=raw,file=/srv/virt/windows98.iso \
    -no-kvm -vga cirrus -m 256 -cpu pentium3 -localtime
Don't start the installation immediately. Instead, boot the installation CD to a DOS prompt with CD-ROM support. From here, run 
fdisk
and create a single partition filling the emulated hard disk. When finished, hard-reboot the virtual machine (press Ctrl+C on the qemu-system-i386 process and run it again). The DOS FORMAT.COM utility is on the Windows CD-ROM but not in the root directory or the default %PATH%, so you'll have to run: 
d:\win98\format c:
to create the FAT filesystem. You might have to reboot again at this point. The reason for doing this the hard way is that the Windows 98 installer doesn't detect qemu as supporting ACPI. You want ACPI support, so that Windows will issue IDLE instructions from its idle loop, instead of occupying a CPU core with a busy-loop. To get that, boot to a DOS prompt again, and use: 
setup /p j /iv
/p j forces ACPI support (Thanks to "Richard S" on the Virtualbox forums for this tip.) /iv is unimportant, but it disables the annoying "billboards" during installation, which advertised once-exciting features like support for dial-up modems and JPEG wallpaper. I used a "Typical" installation; there didn't seem to be much point in tweaking the installed package set when everything is so small by modern standards. Windows 98 has built-in support for the Cirrus VGA card that we're emulating, so after a few reboots, it should be able to run in a semi-modern resolution and colour depth. Discworld Noir apparently prefers a 640 480 16-bit video mode, so right-click on the desktop background, choose Properties and set that up. Audio drivers This is the part that took me the longest to get working. Of the sound cards that qemu can emulate, Windows 98 only supports the SoundBlaster 16 out of the box. Unfortunately, the Soundblaster 16 emulation in qemu is incomplete, and in particular version 2.1 (as shipped in Debian 8) has a tendency to make Windows lock up during boot. I've seen advice in various places to emulate an Eqsonic ES1370 (SoundBlaster AWE 64), but that didn't work for me: one of the drivers I tried caused Windows to lock up at a black screen during boot, and the other didn't detect the emulated hardware. The next-oldest sound card that qemu can emulate is a Realtek AC97, which was often found integrated into motherboards in the late 1990s. This one seems to work, with the "A400" driver bundle linked above. For Windows 98 first edition, you need a driver bundle that includes the old "VXD" drivers, not just the "WDM" drivers supported by Second Edition and newer. The easiest way to get that into qemu seems to be to turn it into a CD image: 
genisoimage -o /srv/virt/discworldnoir-drivers.iso WDM_A400.exe
qemu-system-i386 -hda /srv/virt/discworldnoir.qcow2 \
    -drive media=cdrom,format=raw,file=/srv/virt/windows98.iso \
    -drive media=cdrom,format=raw,file=/srv/virt/discworldnoir-drivers.iso \
    -no-kvm -vga cirrus -m 256 -cpu pentium3 -localtime -soundhw ac97
Run the installer from E:, then reboot with the Windows 98 CD inserted, and Windows should install the driver. Installing Discworld Noir Boot up the virtual machine with CD 1 in the emulated drive: 
qemu-system-i386 -hda /srv/virt/discworldnoir.qcow2 \
    -drive media=cdrom,format=raw,file=/srv/virt/DWN_ENG_1.iso \
    -no-kvm -vga cirrus -m 256 -cpu pentium3 -localtime -soundhw ac97
You might be thinking "... why not insert all three CDs into D:, E: and F:?" but the installer expects subsequent disks to appear in the same drive where CD 1 was initially, so that won't work. Instead, when prompted for a new CD, switch to the qemu monitor with Ctrl+Alt+2 (note that this is 2, not F2). At the (qemu) prompt, use info block to see a list of emulated drives, then issue a command like 
change ide0-cd1 /srv/virt/DWN_ENG_2.iso
to swap the CD. Then switch back to Windows' console with Ctrl+Alt+1 and continue installation. I used a Full installation of Discworld Noir. Transferring the virtual machine to GNOME Boxes Having finished the "control freak" phase of installation, I wanted a slightly more user-friendly way to run this game, so I transferred the virtual machine to be used by libvirtd, which is the backend for both GNOME Boxes and virt-manager: 
virsh create discworldnoir.xml
Here is the configuration I used. It's a mixture of automatic configuration from virt-manager, and hand-edited configuration to make it match the qemu-system-i386 command-line. Running the game If all goes well, you should now see a discworldnoir virtual machine in GNOME Boxes, in which you can boot Windows 98 and play the game. Have fun!

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?

17 October 2015

Joey Hess: it's a bird, it's a plane, it's a super monoid for propellor

I've been doing a little bit of dynamically typed programming in Haskell, to improve Propellor's Info type. The result is kind of interesting in a scary way. Info started out as a big record type, containing all the different sorts of metadata that Propellor needed to keep track of. Host IP addresses, DNS entries, ssh public keys, docker image configuration parameters... This got quite out of hand. Info needed to have its hands in everything, even types that should have been private to their module. To fix that, recent versions of Propellor let a single Info contain many different types of values. Look at it one way and it contains DNS entries; look at it another way and it contains ssh public keys, etc. As an migr from lands where you can never know what type of value is in a $foo until you look, this was a scary prospect at first, but I found it's possible to have the benefits of dynamic types and the safety of static types too. The key to doing it is Data.Dynamic. Thanks to Joachim Breitner for suggesting I could use it here. What I arrived at is this type (slightly simplified): 
newtype Info = Info [Dynamic]
    deriving (Monoid)
So Info is a monoid, and it holds of a bunch of dynamic values, which could each be of any type at all. Eep! So far, this is utterly scary to me. To tame it, the Info constructor is not exported, and so the only way to create an Info is to start with mempty and use this function: 
addInfo :: (IsInfo v, Monoid v) => Info -> v -> Info
addInfo (Info l) v = Info (toDyn v : l)
The important part of that is that only allows adding values that are in the IsInfo type class. That prevents the foot shooting associated with dynamic types, by only allowing use of types that make sense as Info. Otherwise arbitrary Strings etc could be passed to addInfo by accident, and all get concated together, and that would be a total dynamic programming mess. Anything you can add into an Info, you can get back out: 
getInfo :: (IsInfo v, Monoid v) => Info -> v
getInfo (Info l) = mconcat (mapMaybe fromDynamic (reverse l))
Only monoids can be stored in Info, so if you ask for a type that an Info doesn't contain, you'll get back mempty. Crucially, IsInfo is an open type class. Any module in Propellor can make a new data type and make it an instance of IsInfo, and then that new data type can be stored in the Info of a Property, and any Host that uses the Property will have that added to its Info, available for later introspection.
For example, this weekend I'm extending Propellor to have controllers: Hosts that are responsible for running Propellor on some other hosts. Useful if you want to run propellor once and have it update the configuration of an entire network of hosts. There can be whole chains of controllers controlling other controllers etc. The problem is, what if host foo has the property controllerFor bar and host bar has the property controllerFor foo? I want to avoid a loop of foo running Propellor on bar, running Propellor on foo, ... To detect such loops, each Host's Info should contain a list of the Hosts it's controlling. Which is not hard to accomplish: 
newtype Controlling = Controlled [Host]
    deriving (Typeable, Monoid)
isControlledBy :: Host -> Controlling -> Bool
h  isControlledBy  (Controlled hs) = any (== hostName h) (map hostName hs)
instance IsInfo Controlling where
    propigateInfo _ = True
mkControllingInfo :: Host -> Info
mkControllingInfo controlled = addInfo mempty (Controlled [controlled])
getControlledBy :: Host -> Controlling
getControlledBy = getInfo . hostInfo
isControllerLoop :: Host -> Host -> Bool
isControllerLoop controller controlled = go S.empty controlled
  where
    go checked h
          controller  isControlledBy  c = True
        -- avoid checking loops that have been checked before
          hostName h  S.member  checked = False
          otherwise = any (go (S.insert (hostName h) checked)) l
      where
        c@(Controlled l) = getControlledBy h
This is all internal to the module that needs it; the rest of propellor doesn't need to know that the Info is using used for this. And yet, the necessary information about Hosts is gathered as propellor runs.
So, that's a useful technique. I do wonder if I could somehow make addInfo combine together values in the list that have the same type; as it is the list can get long. And, to show Info, the best I could do was this: 
 instance Show Info where
            show (Info l) = "Info " ++ show (map dynTypeRep l)
The resulting long list of the types of vales stored in a host's info is not a useful as it could be. Of course, getInfo can be used to get any particular type of value: 
*Main> hostInfo kite
Info [InfoVal System,PrivInfo,PrivInfo,Controlling,DnsInfo,DnsInfo,DnsInfo,AliasesInfo, ...
*Main> getInfo (hostInfo kite) :: AliasesInfo
AliasesInfo (fromList ["downloads.kitenet.net","git.joeyh.name","imap.kitenet.net","nntp.olduse.net" ...
And finally, I keep trying to think of a better name than "Info".

16 October 2015

Vincent Sanders: Raspberries are not the only fruit

I have worked with ARM based systems for longer than I care to admit to myself. From the Acorn Archimedes 305 in 1987 through to modern 64bit systems I have seen many many changes in the ARM community. One big change has been the rise of the inexpensive single board computer (SBC).

Arguably the Raspberry Pi (RPi) was responsible for starting this trend. Before RPi there were small development boards available, I was even involved in producing some of them, none of these really became a big thing and were principally vehicles for silicon vendors to showcase their SoC in an accessible way. When I say accessible I mean for silicon vendors who were previously used to charging many thousands of pounds for their development boards now only charging hundreds.

Raspberry Pi 2 B+ in my case
In my opinion the RPi was a complete disruption to the SBC market. In early 2012 a complete ARM computer system could now be purchased for $35 ( 25) which was substantially cheaper than the best contemporary competitor the Beaglebone $89 ( 60)

To be clear, the reason the RPi succeeded (millions sold, household name) was not on price alone but also the large amount of good supporting software and how easy it was made for teachers and makers to use.

There were several areas that the RPi managed to change perceived issues into opportunities for using what was already available or third parties to provide. There were also several issues raised about the original RPi:
Some of these have been addressed since release as the foundation now sells cases, hardware revisions with much more powerful processors, pre-configured storage, cameras and displays. The important thing to note here though is the RPi has made the bare SBC a much more widely accepted product where all the non critical parts are considered "extras" and a lot is forgiven because of the price.

With that acceptance there have been many, many new SBC coming to market with better peripherals and increasingly competitive pricing. These are technically not clones as none of them use the Broadcom processor of the RPi but they often share many features and possibly even a compatible expansion header.

Banana pi in my case with a 2.5inch drive bay
The Banana Pi was one of these copycats which I acquired for a similar price as an RPi in 2014. The main processor of this system was a 1Ghz dual core Allwinner A20 processor (a considerable advance on the 700MHz single core of the original RPi) coupled to a gigabyte of memory. Additionally the board benefited from having SATA and gigabit Ethernet MAC which made for a much more versatile system. Various third parties filled in the missing peripherals including my own attempt at a case.

I acquired a cubietruck for the NetSurf project to use as a build node in their CI system this is again based on the A20 but with more memory and somewhat better peripheral support but at a substantial cost over the Banana Pi.

The most recent addition to this form factor is the introduction by Xunlong Software of the Orange Pi PC. This little board is the same footprint as the RPi2 B+ design but with differing connector placement. The processor is a quad core 1.6GHz Allwinner H3 with a gigabyte of memory and has has Ethernet and USB but no SATA.

Pile of Orange Pi PC in my cases
The big news about this board though is the price, at $15 ( 10) it resets the price expectations just as the RPi did before it. I was initially sceptical of the quality of the product (or if it would arrive at all) but I have acquired five of these boards and every one of them came well packaged, boxed and in a static bag, just like the RPi does, and they all worked.

I created a case design based on my RPi slimline case so they would be protected when piled up with all the other boards. The use of a DC barrel jack instead of micro USB for power is better in that the connector is more robust and intended for higher current draws but does mean additional leads are needed. There are, however, two flies in the ointment, neither are showstoppers but make the board a little more difficult to use.

Orange Pi in my case with heatsinkOne is a simple necessity of a substantial heatsink on the H3 processor. Initially I used a small 20 x 20mm copper heatsink (around 800mm square surface area) but this was insufficient under full load. I did not want to have to use a fan so I milled some slots into copper round bar, then cut off sections and faced them on a lathe. The completed design had more than 2200 square mm surface area and cost around $2.5 ( 1.5) in material (and a couple of hours in the workshop but that was fun and I made something)

The second issue and arguably much more serious is that of software. Let me be honest, it is dreadful, I mean very bad indeed. The images provided from the Orange Pi website are some of the worst examples of "do something quick" I have experienced.

Fortunately a user on the forums named loboris decided to create scripts that generate a Debian (and Ubuntu and Fedora) distribution images that can be installed from SD card. He relies on a somewhat patched 3.4 kernel full of Allwinner vendor changes and the inevitable binary blobs for the Marli GPU but the result does work.

I have had a few units acting as distcc compiler slaves for two weeks now at 100% CPU loading and they are still running. The processor does not get overly warm with the heatsink installed and Debian behaves just fine. The main caveat being that it is definitely not going to work if you try and update the kernel through packaging.

My ARM build farm as a pile of SBC
The state of software support and Xunlong Software relying on a forum user to complete their product does tarnish an otherwise impressive and possibly market changing SBC.

Perhaps I expect too much for fifteen bucks? I guess when the cost of the case, heatsink, cables and memory storage card is similar to the rest of the computer there is simply no margin left for anything else.

In conclusion hopefully this brief overview has provided some insight into what is available in this market and that the Raspberry Pi is indeed not the only option.

I finish with an image is of my ARM build farm consisting of every SBC I mention here (including a couple of RPi)

Norbert Preining: Debian/TeX Live multiarch update

A big update of all related packages (tex-common 6.04, texlive-bin 2015.20150524.37493-7, texlive-base/lang/extra package 2015.20151016-1) due to the move to support multi-arch. Of course, the regular updates of the TeX Live are included, too. With this change it should be possible to run a multi-arch system with only one TeX Live installed. Debian - TeX Live 2015 Thanks to the excellent support and testing of the Multi-arch guys, in particular Thorsten Glaser, Helmut Grohne, Johannes Schauer, and Wookey, I learned a lot about multi-arch, and I hope that the current setup is safe. All the packages but the various lib* packages are tagged as Multi-Arch: foreign, while the lib packages are tagged Multi-Arch: same. Anyway, if you find a bug concerning multi-arch, that is that some of the programs exhibit architecture information, please let us know via a bug report. Updated packages acro, alegreya, amiri, assoccnt, attachfile, babel-french, babel-hungarian, barr, beebe, biblatex-philosophy, bidi, bnumexpr, caption, chemfig, chemformula, chemmacros, cjk-gs-integrate, csplain, dantelogo, dataref, dtxgen, dvipdfmx-def, dvips, eledmac, elements, fcolumn, fithesis, fontspec, genealogytree, gradstudentresume, gtl, jfontmaps, knuth-local, koma-script, kotex-oblivoir, kotex-plain, kotex-utf, kpathsea, l3build, l3experimental, l3kernel, l3packages, latex, latexconfig, ledmac, ltxfileinfo, lualatex-math, luamplib, luatex, luatexbase, luatexja, luatexko, make4ht, mcf2graph, mflogo, modiagram, multiexpand, newtx, odsfile, old-arrows, paracol, pdfpages, pdftex, plain, pst-stru, pxchfon, randomwalk, reledmac, resumecls, rubik, selnolig, showhyphens, siunitx, suftesi, tetex, teubner, tex4ebook, tex4ht, texlive-scripts, tikzsymbols, tipfr, tools, tudscr, uassign, unicode-math, unravel, visualfaq, xepersian, xetex-def, xint. New packages archaeologie, ctablestack, dynamicnumber, exercises, fibeamer, h2020proposal, imfellenglish, lstbayes, tempora, xellipsis. Enjoy.

17 September 2015

Norbert Preining: Debian/TeX Live 2015.20150917-1

Usual regular update of the TeX Live packages. Now that Debian/unstable is back to full development speed thanks to the end of the bit gcc transition, probably this TeX Live update will be lost between the hundreds of others. Anyway a few interesting changes are still in there. Debian - TeX Live 2015 Most importantly the fix for unicode-math that was broken for a short time, and for the Japanese users it seems that the LaTeX3 packages have gained support for upTeX. Good to hear. Of course, these are not the only updates and newcomers, see the list below. Updated packages abc, acro, alegreya, animate, arabxetex, babel-bosnian, babel-french, babel-greek, babel-latin, babel-welsh, beamer-FUBerlin, bidi, bigfoot, blochsphere, bxjscls, chemformula, chemmacros, chet, classicthesis, crossrefware, csplain, ctable, ctanify, datetime2, datetime2-basque, detlev-cm, disser, doclicense, drm, dtxgen, dtxtut, dvips, ecclesiastic, eledmac, embrac, etex-pkg, etoc, factura, fbb, fithesis, font-change, fontname, glossaries, gothic, greek-fontenc, IEEEtran, l3build, l3experimental, l3kernel, l3packages, latexconfig, lettrine, luatexja, mathastext, mcf2graph, media9, metrix, mhequ, minted, moderntimeline, newtx, ocgx2, pagecolor, pdftex, pgf, pstricks, reledmac, resphilosophica, roboto, shdoc, siunitx, suftesi, tetex, tex4ht, texlive-scripts, tikz-bayesnet, translations, ucharcat, udesoftec, ulthese, unicode-math, ut-thesis, withargs, xint. New packages checklistings, cleanthesis, easyreview, fei, medstarbeamer, mfirstuc, nevelok, old-arrows, proofread, uassign, xebaposter. Enjoy.

10 August 2015

Norbert Preining: Debian/TeX Live 2015.20150810-1

For those who are starving for some updates while the big gcc5 transitions brings the rest of Debian/sid to a halt, here is some fresh meat, a new TeX Live checkout. Nothing spectacular new here, just the usual big bunch of updates of and several new packages. Maybe worthwhile mentioning is that luasseq has been reincorporated into the TeX Live packages. Thanks to the maintainer for his work till now! Debian - TeX Live 2015 From the long list of changes let me pick one update and one new package: pgf has been updated to 3.0.1, which is just a small change in number, but incorporates 1.5 years of fixes, and the list of fixes is long. And a very interesting newcomer is pdfpagediff by C. V. Rad hakr ish nan. It allows visual comparison of two pdf files by overlaying them in a transparent way, making even slight changes in the layout immediately visible. Of course, these are not the only updates and newcomers, see the list below. Updated packages academicons, addlines, algorithms, archaic, babel, babel-estonian, biber, biblatex-source-division, bidi, bxjscls, chronology, cjk-ko, conteq, csplain, csquotes, curve2e, datatool, doclicense, dvips, eledmac, enotez, esami, eso-pic, etex-pkg, etoolbox, exsheets, fandol, fithesis, fontawesome, fontspec, forest, glossaries, greek-inputenc, jslectureplanner, kotex-oblivoir, kotex-utf, l3build, l3experimental, l3kernel, l3packages, latex, leadsheets, ledmac, lshort-english, luamplib, luasseq, luatexko, maths-symbols, media9, memoir, metrix, mhchem, minitoc, moderncv, modiagram, morefloats, mptopdf, msu-thesis, nameauth, ndsu-thesis, newpx, newtx, newtxsf, newtxtt, notes, ocgx2, pageslts, pdfpages, pdftex, pgf, phonrule, plain, polyglossia, pstricks, ptex, pxchfon, reflectgraphics, rsfso, sectionbox, siunitx, skrapport, standalone, tcolorbox, tetex, tex4ht, texfot, texinfo, texlive-scripts, todonotes, translations, tudscr, ucbthesis, unicode-math, xcharter, xgreek. New packages alertmessage, bewerbung, bidihl, bxpdfver, cloze, comicneue, copyedit, fcavtex, gradstudentresume, make4ht, mcf2graph, multiaudience, nmbib, pdfpagediff, quran, reledmac, roundrect, screenplay-pkg, shapes, tex4ebook. Enjoy.

6 August 2015

Christoph Egger

TinyTiny-RSS has some nice failure modes. And upstream support forums aren't really helpfull so when you search for your current problem, chances are that there is one mention of it on the web, in the forum, and the only thing happening there is people making fun of the reporter. Anyway. This installation has seen lots of error messages from the updater in the last several months: 
Warning: Fatal error, unknown preferences key: ALLOW_DUPLICATE_POSTS (owner: 3) in /srv/www/tt-rss.faui2k9.de/root/classes/db/prefs.php on line 108
Warning: Fatal error, unknown preferences key: ALLOW_DUPLICATE_POSTS (owner: 3) in /srv/www/tt-rss.faui2k9.de/root/classes/db/prefs.php on line 108
Warning: Fatal error, unknown preferences key: ALLOW_DUPLICATE_POSTS (owner: 3) in /srv/www/tt-rss.faui2k9.de/root/classes/db/prefs.php on line 108
Warning: Fatal error, unknown preferences key: ALLOW_DUPLICATE_POSTS (owner: 3) in /srv/www/tt-rss.faui2k9.de/root/classes/db/prefs.php on line 108
And, more recently, the android app stopped working with ERROR:JSON Parse failed.. Turns out both things are related. First thing I noticed was changing preferences in the web panel stopped working until you use the reset to Defaults option and then changed settings. Plugging wireshark in between showed what was going on (Note: API was displayed as enabled in Preferences/Preferences): 
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: nginx/1.8.0
Date: Thu, 06 Aug 2015 11:00:31 GMT
Content-Type: text/json
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Connection: keep-alive
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.4.43
Content-Language: auto
Set-Cookie: [...]
Expires: Thu, 19 Nov 1981 08:52:00 GMT
Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0
Pragma: no-cache
Api-Content-Length: 234
ea


Warning:  Fatal error, unknown preferences key: ENABLE_API_ACCESS (owner: 2) in /srv/www/tt-rss.faui2k9.de/root/classes/db/prefs.php on line 108

 "seq":0,"status":1,"content": "error":"API_DISABLED" 
0
Solution for fixing the Android app (and the logspam on the way as well) seems to be to reset the preferences and then configure tt-rss again (In the webapp, not in the android thing!). Also silences tt-rss update_daemon as well, yay! One last thing: someone out there who wants to explain to me how to fix 
Fatal error: Query INSERT INTO ttrss_enclosures
                                                        (content_url, content_type, title, duration, post_id, width, height) VALUES
                                                        ('https://2.gravatar.com/avatar/e6d6ceb7764252af8da058e30cd8cb5f?s=96&d=identicon&r=G', '', '', '', '0', 0, 0) failed: ERROR:  insert or update on table "ttrss_enclosures" violates foreign key constraint "ttrss_enclosures_post_id_fkey"
DETAIL:  Key (post_id)=(0) is not present in table "ttrss_entries". in /srv/www/tt-rss.faui2k9.de/root/classes/db/pgsql.php on line 46

Christoph Egger: unbreaking tt-rss

TinyTiny-RSS has some nice failure modes. And upstream support forums aren't really helpfull so when you search for your current problem, chances are that there is one mention of it on the web, in the forum, and the only thing happening there is people making fun of the reporter. Anyway. This installation has seen lots of error messages from the updater in the last several months: 
Warning: Fatal error, unknown preferences key: ALLOW_DUPLICATE_POSTS (owner: 3) in /srv/www/tt-rss.faui2k9.de/root/classes/db/prefs.php on line 108
Warning: Fatal error, unknown preferences key: ALLOW_DUPLICATE_POSTS (owner: 3) in /srv/www/tt-rss.faui2k9.de/root/classes/db/prefs.php on line 108
Warning: Fatal error, unknown preferences key: ALLOW_DUPLICATE_POSTS (owner: 3) in /srv/www/tt-rss.faui2k9.de/root/classes/db/prefs.php on line 108
Warning: Fatal error, unknown preferences key: ALLOW_DUPLICATE_POSTS (owner: 3) in /srv/www/tt-rss.faui2k9.de/root/classes/db/prefs.php on line 108
And, more recently, the android app stopped working with ERROR:JSON Parse failed.. Turns out both things are related. First thing I noticed was changing preferences in the web panel stopped working until you use the reset to Defaults option and then changed settings. Plugging wireshark in between showed what was going on (Note: API was displayed as enabled in Preferences/Preferences): 
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: nginx/1.8.0
Date: Thu, 06 Aug 2015 11:00:31 GMT
Content-Type: text/json
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Connection: keep-alive
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.4.43
Content-Language: auto
Set-Cookie: [...]
Expires: Thu, 19 Nov 1981 08:52:00 GMT
Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0
Pragma: no-cache
Api-Content-Length: 234
ea


Warning:  Fatal error, unknown preferences key: ENABLE_API_ACCESS (owner: 2) in /srv/www/tt-rss.faui2k9.de/root/classes/db/prefs.php on line 108

 "seq":0,"status":1,"content": "error":"API_DISABLED" 
0
Solution for fixing the Android app (and the logspam on the way as well) seems to be to reset the preferences and then configure tt-rss again (In the webapp, not in the android thing!). Also silences tt-rss update_daemon as well, yay! One last thing: someone out there who wants to explain to me how to fix 
Fatal error: Query INSERT INTO ttrss_enclosures
                                                        (content_url, content_type, title, duration, post_id, width, height) VALUES
                                                        ('https://2.gravatar.com/avatar/e6d6ceb7764252af8da058e30cd8cb5f?s=96&d=identicon&r=G', '', '', '', '0', 0, 0) failed: ERROR:  insert or update on table "ttrss_enclosures" violates foreign key constraint "ttrss_enclosures_post_id_fkey"
DETAIL:  Key (post_id)=(0) is not present in table "ttrss_entries". in /srv/www/tt-rss.faui2k9.de/root/classes/db/pgsql.php on line 46

Christoph Egger: unbreaking tt-rss

TinyTiny-RSS has some nice failure modes. And upstream support forums aren't really helpfull so when you search for your current problem, chances are that there is one mention of it on the web, in the forum, and the only thing happening there is people making fun of the reporter. Anyway. This installation has seen lots of error messages from the updater in the last several months: 
Warning: Fatal error, unknown preferences key: ALLOW_DUPLICATE_POSTS (owner: 3) in /srv/www/tt-rss.faui2k9.de/root/classes/db/prefs.php on line 108
Warning: Fatal error, unknown preferences key: ALLOW_DUPLICATE_POSTS (owner: 3) in /srv/www/tt-rss.faui2k9.de/root/classes/db/prefs.php on line 108
Warning: Fatal error, unknown preferences key: ALLOW_DUPLICATE_POSTS (owner: 3) in /srv/www/tt-rss.faui2k9.de/root/classes/db/prefs.php on line 108
Warning: Fatal error, unknown preferences key: ALLOW_DUPLICATE_POSTS (owner: 3) in /srv/www/tt-rss.faui2k9.de/root/classes/db/prefs.php on line 108
And, more recently, the android app stopped working with ERROR:JSON Parse failed.. Turns out both things are related. First thing I noticed was changing preferences in the web panel stopped working until you use the reset to Defaults option and then changed settings. Plugging wireshark in between showed what was going on (Note: API was displayed as enabled in Preferences/Preferences): 
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: nginx/1.8.0
Date: Thu, 06 Aug 2015 11:00:31 GMT
Content-Type: text/json
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Connection: keep-alive
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.4.43
Content-Language: auto
Set-Cookie: [...]
Expires: Thu, 19 Nov 1981 08:52:00 GMT
Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0
Pragma: no-cache
Api-Content-Length: 234
ea


Warning:  Fatal error, unknown preferences key: ENABLE_API_ACCESS (owner: 2) in /srv/www/tt-rss.faui2k9.de/root/classes/db/prefs.php on line 108

 "seq":0,"status":1,"content": "error":"API_DISABLED" 
0
Solution for fixing the Android app (and the logspam on the way as well) seems to be to reset the preferences and then configure tt-rss again (In the webapp, not in the android thing!). Also silences tt-rss update_daemon as well, yay! One last thing: someone out there who wants to explain to me how to fix 
Fatal error: Query INSERT INTO ttrss_enclosures
                                                        (content_url, content_type, title, duration, post_id, width, height) VALUES
                                                        ('https://2.gravatar.com/avatar/e6d6ceb7764252af8da058e30cd8cb5f?s=96&d=identicon&r=G', '', '', '', '0', 0, 0) failed: ERROR:  insert or update on table "ttrss_enclosures" violates foreign key constraint "ttrss_enclosures_post_id_fkey"
DETAIL:  Key (post_id)=(0) is not present in table "ttrss_entries". in /srv/www/tt-rss.faui2k9.de/root/classes/db/pgsql.php on line 46

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