Search Results: "ingo"

20 June 2021

Mike Gabriel: BBB Packaging for Debian, a short Heads-Up

Over the past days, I have received tons of positive feedback on my previous blog post about forming the Debian BBB Packaging Team [1]. Feedback arrived via mail, IRC, [matrix] and Mastodon. Awesome. Thanks for sharing your thoughts, folks... Therefore, here comes a short ... Heads-Up on the current Ongoings ... around packaging BigBlueButton for Debian: Credits light+love
Mike Gabriel

[1] https://sunweavers.net/blog/node/133
[2] https://bigbluebutton.org/event-page/
[3] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kpYJxYFVuWhB84bB73kmAQoGIS59ari1_hn2...

15 June 2021

Raphaël Hertzog: Freexian s report about Debian Long Term Support, May 2021

A Debian LTS logo
Like each month, have a look at the work funded by Freexian s Debian LTS offering. Debian project funding In May, we again put aside 2100 EUR to fund Debian projects. There was no proposals for new projects received, thus we re looking forward to receive more projects from various Debian teams! Please do not hesitate to submit a proposal, if there is a project that could benefit from the funding! We re looking forward to receive more projects from various Debian teams! Learn more about the rationale behind this initiative in this article. Debian LTS contributors In May, 12 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available: Evolution of the situation In May we released 33 DLAs and mostly skipped our public IRC meeting and the end of the month. In June we ll have another team meeting using video as lined out on our LTS meeting page.
Also, two months ago we announced that Holger would step back from his coordinator role and today we are announcing that he is back for the time being, until a new coordinator is found.
Finally, we would like to remark once again that we are constantly looking for new contributors. Please contact Holger if you are interested! The security tracker currently lists 41 packages with a known CVE and the dla-needed.txt file has 21 packages needing an update. Thanks to our sponsors Sponsors that joined recently are in bold.

28 May 2021

Raphaël Hertzog: Freexian s report about Debian Long Term Support, April 2021

A Debian LTS logo
Like each month, have a look at the work funded by Freexian s Debian LTS offering. Debian project funding In April, we put aside 5775 EUR to fund Debian projects. There was no proposals for new projects received, thus we re looking forward to receive more projects from various Debian teams! Please do not hesitate to submit a proposal, if there is a project that could benefit from the funding! Debian LTS contributors In April, 11 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available: Evolution of the situation In April we released 33 DLAs and held a LTS team meeting using video conferencing. The security tracker currently lists 53 packages with a known CVE and the dla-needed.txt file has 26 packages needing an update. We are please to welcome VyOS as a new gold sponsor! Thanks to our sponsors Sponsors that joined recently are in bold.

1 May 2021

Ingo Juergensmann: The Fediverse What About Resources?

Today ist May, 1st. In about two weeks on May, 15th WhatsApp will put their changed Terms of Service into action and when you don t accept their rules you won t be able to use WhatsApp any longer. Early this year there was already a strong movement away from WhatsApp towards other solutions. Mainly to Signal, but also some other services like the Fediverse gained some new users. And also XMPP got their fair share of new users. So, what to do about the WhatsApp ToS change then? Shall we go all to Signal? Surely not. Signal is another vendor lock-in silo. It s centralistic and recent development plans want to implement some crypto payment system. Even Bruce Schneier thinks that this is a bad idea. Other alternatives often named include Matrix/Element or XMPP. Today, Don di Dislessia in the (german) Fediverse asked about power consumption of the Fediverse incl. Matrix and XMPP and how much renewable energy is being used. Of course this is no easy answer to this question, but I tried my best at least for my own server. Here are my findings and conclusions Power
screenshot showing power consumption of serverscreenshot showing power consumption of server
Currently my server in the colocation is using about 93W in average with 6c Xeon E5-2630L, 128 GB RAM, 4x 2 TB WD Red + 1 Samsung 960pro NVMe. The server is 7 years old. When I started with that server the power consumption was about 75W, but back then there were far less users on the server. So, 20W more over the past year Users I m running my Friendica node on Nerdica.net since 2013. Over the years it became one of the largest Friendica servers in the Fediverse, for some time it was the largest one. It has currently like 700 total users and 180 monthly active users. My Mastodon instance on Nerdculture.de has about 1000 total users and about 300 monthly active users. Since last year I also run a Matrix-Synapse server. Although I invited my family I m in fact the only active user on that server and have joined some channels. My XMPP server is even older than my Friendica node. For long time I had like maybe 20 users. Now I setup a new website and added some domains like hookipa.net and xmpp.social the user count increased and currently I have like 130 users on those two domains and maybe like 50 monthly active users. Also note that all my Friendica and Mastodon users can use XMPP with their accounts, but won t be counted the same way as on native users on ejabberd, because the auth backend is different. So, let s assume I do have like 2000 total users and 500 monthly active users. CPU, Database Sizes and Disk I/O Let s have a look about how many resources are being used by those users. Database Sizes: CPU times according to xentop: Friendica does use the largest database and causes most disk I/O on NVMe, but it s difficult to differentiate between the load between the web apps on the webserver. So, let s have a quick look on an simple metric: Number of lines in webserver logfile: These metrics correlate to some degree with the database I/O load, at least for Friendica. If you take into account the number of users, things look quite different. Conclusion Overall, and my personal impression, is that Matrix is really bad in regards of resource usage. Given that I m the only active user it uses exceptionally many resources. When you also consider that Matrix is using a distributed database for its chat rooms, you can assume that the resource usage is multiplied across the network, making things even worse. Friendica is using a large database and many disk accesses, but has a fairly large user base, so it seems ok, but of course should be improved. Mastodon seems to be quite good, considering the database size, the number of log lines and the user count. XMPP turns out to be the most efficient contestant in this comparison: it uses much less CPU cycles and database disk I/O. Of course, Mastdon/Friendica are different services than XMPP or Matrix. So, coming back to the initial question about alternatives to WhatsApp, the answer for me is: you should prefer XMPP over Matrix alone for reasons of saving resources and thus reducing power consumption. Less power consumption also means a smaller ecological footprint and fewer CO2 emissions for your communication with your family and friends. XMPP is surely not the perfect replacement for WhatsApp, but I think it is the best thing to recommend. As said above, I don t think that Signal is an viable option. It s just another proprierary silo with all the problems that come with it. Matrix is a resource hog and not a messenger but a MS Teams replacement. Element as the main Matrix client is laggy and not multi-account/multi-server capable. Other Matrix clients do support multiple accounts but are not as feature-complete as Element. In the end the Matrix ecosystem will suffer from the same issues as XMPP did already a decade ago. But XMPP has learned to deal with it. Also XMPP is proceeding fast in the last years and it has solved many problems many people are still complaining about. Sure, there still some open issues. The situation on IOS is still not as good as on Android with Conversations, but it is fairly close to it. There are many efforts to improve XMPP. There is Quicksy IM, which is a service that will use your phone number as Jabber ID/JID and is thus comparable to Signal which uses phone numbers as well as unique identifier. But Quicksy is compatible with XMPP standards. Snikket is another new XMPP ecosystem aiming at smaller groups hosting their own server by simply installing a Docker container and setup some basic SRV records in the DNS. Or there is Mailcow, a Docker based mailserver setup that added XMPP server in their setup as well, so you can have the same mail and XMPP address. Snikket even got EU based funding for implementing XMPP Account Portability which also will improve the decentralization even further. Additionally XMPP helps vaccination in Canada and USA with vaxbot by Monal. Be smart and use ecofriendly infrastructure.

30 April 2021

Raphaël Hertzog: Freexian s report about Debian Long Term Support, March 2021

A Debian LTS logo
Like each month, have a look at the work funded by Freexian s Debian LTS offering. Debian project funding In March, we put aside 3225 EUR to fund Debian projects but sadly nobody picked up anything, so this one of the many reasons Raphael posted as series of blog posts titled Challenging times for Freexian , posted in 4 parts on the last two days of March and the first two of April. [Part one, two, three and four] So we re still looking forward to receive more projects from various Debian teams! Learn more about the rationale behind this initiative in this article! Debian LTS contributors In March, 11 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available: Evolution of the situation In March we released 28 DLAs and held our second LTS team meeting for 2021 on IRC, with the next public IRC meeting coming up at the end of May. At that meeting Holger announced that after 2.5 years he wanted to step back from his role helping Rapha l in coordinating/managing the LTS team. We would like to thank Holger for his continuous work on Debian LTS (which goes back to 2014) and are happy to report that we already found a successor which we will introduce in the upcoming April report from Freexian. Finally, we would like to remark once again that we are constantly looking for new contributors. For a last time, please contact Holger if you are interested! The security tracker currently lists 42 packages with a known CVE and the dla-needed.txt file has 28 packages needing an update. We are also pleased to report that we got 4 new sponsors over the last 2 months : thanks to sipgate GmbH, OVH US LLC, Tilburg University and Observatoire des Sciences de l Univers de Grenoble ! Thanks to our sponsors Sponsors that joined recently are in bold.

22 March 2021

Raphaël Hertzog: Freexian s report about Debian Long Term Support, February 2020

A Debian LTS logo
Like each month, have a look at the work funded by Freexian s Debian LTS offering. Debian project funding In February, we put aside 5475 EUR to fund Debian projects. The first project from this initiative was finished and thus Carles Pina was able to issue the first invoice! We are looking forward to receive more projects from various Debian teams and contributors. Learn more about the rationale behind this initiative in this article. Debian LTS contributors In February, 12 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available: Evolution of the situation In February we released 28 DLAs (including one regression update) and we held an internal team meeting using video chat.
Finally, as every month we would like to remark once again that we are constantly looking for new contributors. Please contact Holger if you are interested! The security tracker currently lists 46 packages with a known CVE and the dla-needed.txt file has 34 packages needing an update. Thanks to our sponsors Sponsors that joined recently are in bold.

15 February 2021

Raphaël Hertzog: Freexian s report about Debian Long Term Support, January 2020

A Debian LTS logo Like each month, have a look at the work funded by Freexian s Debian LTS offering. Debian project funding In January, we put aside 2175 EUR to fund Debian projects. As part of this Carles Pina i Estany started to work on better no-dsa support for the PTS which recently resulted in two merge requests which will hopefully be deployed soon. We re looking forward to receive more projects from various Debian teams! Learn more about the rationale behind this initiative in this article. Debian LTS contributors In January, 13 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available: Evolution of the situation In January we released 28 DLAs and held our first LTS team meeting for 2021 on IRC, with the next public IRC meeting coming up at the end of March. During that meeting Utkarsh shared that after he rolled out the python-certbot update (on December 8th 2020) the maintainer told him: I just checked with Let s Encrypt, and the stats show that you just saved 142,500 people from having their certificates start failing next month. I didn t know LTS was still that used!

Finally, we would like to welcome sipgate GmbH as a new silver sponsor. Also remember that we are constantly looking for new contributors. Please contact Holger if you are interested. The security tracker currently lists 43 packages with a known CVE and the dla-needed.txt file has 23 packages needing an update. Thanks to our sponsors Sponsors that joined recently are in bold.

26 January 2021

Ingo Juergensmann: Migrating from Drupal to WordPress

If you can read this on planet.debian.org then migrating my blog from Drupal to WordPress was successful and the feed has been successfully changed by the Debian Planet Maintainers (thanks!). I ve been a long term Drupal user. I think I started to use Drupal since it was included in Debian. At some point Drupal was removed from Debian and I started to use Serendipity instead. Later Drupal was included in Debian again and I moved back to Drupal. I think this must have been around Drupal 4 or Drupal 5. No idea. I even became active in the Drupal community and went to one of the first Drupal barcamps in Germany, namely in Cologne. This was shortly before Dries Buytaert started a business off of Drupal and went to the USA. I met with many devs of Drupal in Cologne and enjoyed the community and started with others a local Drupal User Group in Rostock. In 2011 we organized a Drupal Barcamp in Rostock, which was quite successful. But at that time it was already apparent that Drupal became more and more complex. It was far away from its original idea of providing a simple to use website and blogging site. Now I m still on Drupal 7 and this is some sort of a showstopper. Older major version upgrades had a upgrade path, like from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6 to Drupal 7. But for Drupal 8 there is no easy upgrade path. There are some ways to upgrade, but nothing as smooth as the prior major upgrades. In fact the upgrade from 6 to 7 was already painful. My impression of Drupal today is that it is a framework suitable for agencies to built complex websites for their customers. It s too much of a hassle to use it for your hobbyist websites. So, after all the years my Drupal journey will come to an end. It was a long time with you. Sometimes joyful, sometimes painful. I wish you all the best, Drupal! Maybe I stay with WordPress, maybe I ll use Hugo in the future. Having a static website is very appealing, though

20 January 2021

Raphaël Hertzog: Freexian s report about Debian Long Term Support, December 2020

A Debian LTS logo Like each month, have a look at the work funded by Freexian s Debian LTS offering. Debian project funding In December, we put aside 2100 EUR to fund Debian projects. The first project proposal (a tracker.debian.org improvement for the security team) was received and quickly approved by the paid contributors, then we opened a request for bids and the bid winner was announced today (it was easy, we had only one candidate). Hopefully this first project will be completed until our next report. We re looking forward to receive more projects from various Debian teams! Learn more about the rationale behind this initiative in this article. Debian LTS contributors In December, 12 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available: Evolution of the situation December was a quiet month as we didn t have a team meeting nor any other unusual activity and we released 43 DLAs. The security tracker currently lists 30 packages with a known CVE and the dla-needed.txt file has 25 packages needing an update. This month we are pleased to welcome Deveryware as new sponsor! Thanks to our sponsors Sponsors that joined recently are in bold.

12 January 2021

Petter Reinholdtsen: Latest Jami back in Debian Testing, and scriptable using dbus

After a lot of hard work by its maintainer Alexandre Viau and others, the decentralized communication platform Jami (earlier known as Ring), managed to get its latest version into Debian Testing. Several of its dependencies has caused build and propagation problems, which all seem to be solved now. In addition to the fact that Jami is decentralized, similar to how bittorrent is decentralized, I first of all like how it is not connected to external IDs like phone numbers. This allow me to set up computers to send me notifications using Jami without having to find get a phone number for each computer. Automatic notification via Jami is also made trivial thanks to the provided client side API (as a DBus service). Here is my bourne shell script demonstrating how to let any system send a message to any Jami address. It will create a new identity before sending the message, if no Jami identity exist already: 
#!/bin/sh
#
# Usage: $0  
#
# Send  to , create local jami account if
# missing.
#
# License: GPL v2 or later at your choice
# Author: Petter Reinholdtsen
if [ -z "$HOME" ] ; then
    echo "error: missing \$HOME, required for dbus to work"
    exit 1
fi
# First, get dbus running if not already running
DBUSLAUNCH=/usr/bin/dbus-launch
PIDFILE=/run/asterisk/dbus-session.pid
if [ -e $PIDFILE ] ; then
    . $PIDFILE
    if ! kill -0 $DBUS_SESSION_BUS_PID 2>/dev/null ; then
        unset DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS
    fi
fi
if [ -z "$DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS" ] && [ -x "$DBUSLAUNCH" ]; then
    DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS="unix:path=$HOME/.dbus"
    dbus-daemon --session --address="$DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS" --nofork --nopidfile --syslog-only < /dev/null > /dev/null 2>&1 3>&1 &
    DBUS_SESSION_BUS_PID=$!
    (
        echo DBUS_SESSION_BUS_PID=$DBUS_SESSION_BUS_PID
        echo DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS=\""$DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS"\"
        echo export DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS
    ) > $PIDFILE
    . $PIDFILE
fi &
dringop()  
    part="$1"; shift
    op="$1"; shift
    dbus-send --session \
        --dest="cx.ring.Ring" /cx/ring/Ring/$part cx.ring.Ring.$part.$op $*
 
dringopreply()  
    part="$1"; shift
    op="$1"; shift
    dbus-send --session --print-reply \
        --dest="cx.ring.Ring" /cx/ring/Ring/$part cx.ring.Ring.$part.$op $*
 
firstaccount()  
    dringopreply ConfigurationManager getAccountList   \
      grep string   awk -F'"' ' print $2 '   head -n 1
 
account=$(firstaccount)
if [ -z "$account" ] ; then
    echo "Missing local account, trying to create it"
    dringop ConfigurationManager addAccount \
      dict:string:string:"Account.type","RING","Account.videoEnabled","false"
    account=$(firstaccount)
    if [ -z "$account" ] ; then
        echo "unable to create local account"
        exit 1
    fi
fi
# Not using dringopreply to ensure $2 can contain spaces
dbus-send --print-reply --session \
  --dest=cx.ring.Ring \
  /cx/ring/Ring/ConfigurationManager \
  cx.ring.Ring.ConfigurationManager.sendTextMessage \
  string:"$account" string:"$1" \
  dict:string:string:"text/plain","$2"
If you want to check it out yourself, visit the the Jami system project page to learn more, and install the latest Jami client from Debian Unstable or Testing. As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address 15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.

25 December 2020

Niels Thykier: Improvements to IntelliJ/PyCharm support for Debian packaging files

I have updated my debpkg plugin for IDEA (e.g. IntelliJ, PyCharm, Android Studios) to v0.0.8. Here are some of the changes since last time I wrote about the plugin. New file types supported Links for URLs and bug closes There are often links in deb822 files or the debian/changelog and as of v0.0.8, the plugin will now highlight them and able you to easily open them via your browser. In the deb822 case, they generally appear in the Homepage field, the Vcs-* fields or the Format field of the debian/copyright field. For the changelog file, they often appear in the form of bug Closes statements such as the #123456 in Closes: #123456 , which is a reference to https://bugs.debian.org/123456. Improvements to debian/control The dependency validator now has per-field knowledge. This enables it to flag dependency relations in the Provides field that uses operators other than = (which is the only operator that is supported in that field). It also knows which fields support build-profile restrictions. It in theory also do Architecture restrictions, but I have not added it among other because it gets a bit spicy around binary packages. (Fun fact, you can have Depends: foo [amd64] but only for arch:any packages.) The plugin now suggests adding a Rules-Requires-Root field to the Source stanza along with a quick fix for adding the field. Admittedly, it was mostly done as exercise for me to learn how to do that kind of feature. Support for machine-readable debian/copyright The plugin now has a dedicated file type for debian/copyright that follows the machine-readable format. It should auto-detect it automatically based on the presence of the Format field being set to https://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/copyright-format/1.0. Sadly, I have not found the detection reliable in all cases, so you may have to apply it manually. With the copyright format, the plugin now scans the Files fields for common issues like pointing on non-existing paths and invalid escape sequences. When the plugin discovers a path that does not match anything, it highlights the part of the path that cannot be found. As an example, consider the pattern src/foo/data.c and that src/foo exist but data.c does not exist, then the plugin will only flag the data.c part of src/foo/data.c as invalid. The plugin will also suggest a quick fix if you a directory into the Files field to replace it with a directory wildcard (e.g. src/foo -> src/foo/* ), which is how the spec wants you to reference every file beneath a given directory. Finally, when the plugin can identify part of the path, then it will turn it into a link (reference in IDEA lingo). This means that you can CTRL + click on it to jump to the file. As a side-effect, it also provides refactoring assistance for renaming files, where renaming a file will often be automatically reflected in debian/copyright. This use case is admittedly mostly relevant people, who are both upstream and downstream maintainer. Folding support improvement for .dsc/.changes/.buildinfo files The new field types appeared with two cases, where I decided to improve the folding support logic. The first was the GPG signature (if present), which consists of two parts. The top part with is mostly a single line marker but often followed by a GPG armor header (e.g. Hash: SHA512 ) and then the signature blob with related marker lines around it. Both cases are folded into a single marker line by default to reduce their impact on content in the editor view. The second case was the following special-case pattern: 
Files:
 <md5> <size> filename
Checksums-Sha256:
 <sha256> <size> filename
In the above example, where there is exactly on file name, those fields will by default now be folded into: 
Files: <md5> <size> filename
Checksums-Sha256: <sha256> <size> filename
For all other multi-line fields, the plugin still falls back to a list of known fields to fold by default as in previous versions. Spellchecking improvements The plugin already supported selective spell checking in v0.0.3, where it often omitted spell checking for fields (in deb822 files) where it did not make sense. The spell check feature has been improved by providing a list of known packaging terms/jargo used by many contributors (so autopkgtests is no longer considered a typo). This applies to all file types (probably also those not handled by the plugin as it is just a dictionary). Furthermore, the plugin also attempts discover common patterns (e.g. file names or command arguments) and exempt these from spell checking in the debian/changelog. This also includes manpage references such as foo.1 or foo(1) . It is far from perfect and relies on common patterns to exclude spell checking. Nonetheless, it should reduce the number of false positive considerably. Feedback welcome Please let me know if you run into bugs or would like a particular feature implemented. You can submit bug reports and feature requests in the issue tracker on github.

18 December 2020

Rapha&#235;l Hertzog: Freexian s report about Debian Long Term Support, November 2020

A Debian LTS logo Like each month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS. Individual reports In November, 239.25 work hours have been dispatched among 13 paid contributors. Their reports are available: Evolution of the situation In November we held the last LTS team meeting for 2020 on IRC, with the next one coming up at the end of January.
We announced a new formalized initiative for Funding Debian projects with money from Freexian s LTS service.
Finally, we would like to remark once again that we are constantly looking for new contributors. Please contact Holger if you are interested! We re also glad to welcome two new sponsors, Moxa, a device manufacturer, and a French research lab (Institut des Sciences Cognitives Marc Jeannerod). The security tracker currently lists 37 packages with a known CVE and the dla-needed.txt file has 40 packages needing an update. Thanks to our sponsors Sponsors that joined recently are in bold.

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17 November 2020

Rapha&#235;l Hertzog: Freexian s report about Debian Long Term Support, October 2020

A Debian LTS logo Like each month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS. Individual reports In October, 221.50 work hours have been dispatched among 13 paid contributors. Their reports are available: Evolution of the situation October was a regular LTS month with a LTS team meeting done via video chat thus there s no log to be shared. After more than five years of contributing to LTS (and ELTS), Mike Gabriel announced that he founded a new company called Frei(e) Software GmbH and thus would leave us to concentrate on this new endeavor. Best of luck with that, Mike! So, once again, this is a good moment to remind that we are constantly looking for new contributors. Please contact Holger if you are interested! The security tracker currently lists 42 packages with a known CVE and the dla-needed.txt file has 39 packages needing an update. Thanks to our sponsors Sponsors that joined recently are in bold.

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15 October 2020

Rapha&#235;l Hertzog: Freexian s report about Debian Long Term Support, September 2020

A Debian LTS logo Like each month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS. Individual reports In September, 208.25 work hours have been dispatched among 13 paid contributors. Their reports are available: Evolution of the situation September was a regular LTS month with an IRC meeting. The security tracker currently lists 45 packages with a known CVE and the dla-needed.txt file has 48 packages needing an update. Thanks to our sponsors Sponsors that joined recently are in bold.

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15 September 2020

Rapha&#235;l Hertzog: Freexian s report about Debian Long Term Support, August 2020

A Debian LTS logo Like each month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS. Individual reports In August, 237.25 work hours have been dispatched among 14 paid contributors. Their reports are available: Evolution of the situation August was a regular LTS month once again, even though it was only our 2nd month with Stretch LTS.
At the end of August some of us participated in DebConf 20 online where we held our monthly team meeting. A video is available.
As of now this video is also the only public resource about the LTS survey we held in July, though a written summary is expected to be released soon. The security tracker currently lists 56 packages with a known CVE and the dla-needed.txt file has 55 packages needing an update. Thanks to our sponsors Sponsors that recently joined are in bold.

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28 August 2020

Rapha&#235;l Hertzog: Freexian s report about Debian Long Term Support, July 2020

A Debian LTS logo Like each month, albeit a bit later due to vacation, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS. Individual reports In July, 249.25 work hours have been dispatched among 14 paid contributors. Their reports are available: Evolution of the situation July was our first month of Stretch LTS! Given this is our fourth LTS release we anticipated a smooth transition and it seems everything indeed went very well. Many thanks to the members of the Debian ftpmaster-, security, release- and publicity- teams who helped us make this happen!
Stretch LTS begun on July 18th 2020 after the 13th and final Stretch point release. and is currently scheduled to end on June 30th 2022. Last month, we asked you to participate in a survey and we got 1764 submissions, which is pretty awesome. Thank you very much for participating!. Right now we are still busy crunching the results, but we already shared some early analysis during the Debconf LTS bof this week. The security tracker currently lists 54 packages with a known CVE and the dla-needed.txt file has 52 packages needing an update. Thanks to our sponsors New sponsors are in bold.

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23 July 2020

Rapha&#235;l Hertzog: Freexian s report about Debian Long Term Support, June 2020

A Debian LTS logo Like each month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS. Individual reports In June, 202.00 work hours have been dispatched among 12 paid contributors. Their reports are available: Evolution of the situation June was the last month of Jessie LTS which ended on 2020-06-20. If you still need to run Jessie somewhere, please read the post about keeping Debian 8 Jessie alive for longer than 5 years.
So, as (Jessie) LTS is dead, long live the new LTS, Stretch LTS! Stretch has received its last point release, so regular LTS operations can now continue.
Accompanying this, for the first time, we have prepared a small survey about our users and contributors, who they are and why they are using LTS. Filling out the survey should take less than 10 minutes. We would really appreciate if you could participate in the survey online! On July 27th 2020 we will close the survey, so please don t hesitate and participate now! After that, there will be a followup with the results. The security tracker for Stretch LTS currently lists 29 packages with a known CVE and the dla-needed.txt file has 44 packages needing an update in Stretch LTS. Thanks to our sponsors New sponsors are in bold. We welcome CoreFiling this month!

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24 June 2020

Rapha&#235;l Hertzog: Freexian s report about Debian Long Term Support, May 2020

A Debian LTS logo Like each month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS. Individual reports In May, 198 work hours have been dispatched among 14 paid contributors. Their reports are available: Evolution of the situation In May 2020 we had our second (virtual) contributors meeting on IRC, Logs and minutes are available online. Then we also moved our ToDo from the Debian wiki to the issue tracker on salsa.debian.org.
Sadly three contributors went inactive in May: Adrian Bunk, Anton Gladky and Dylan A ssi. And while there are currently still enough active contributors to shoulder the existing work, we like to use this opportunity that we are always looking for new contributors. Please mail Holger if you are interested.
Finally, we like to remind you for a last time, that the end of Jessie LTS is coming in less than a month!
In case you missed it (or missed to act), please read this post about keeping Debian 8 Jessie alive for longer than 5 years. If you expect to have Debian 8 servers/devices running after June 30th 2020, and would like to have security updates for them, please get in touch with Freexian. The security tracker currently lists 6 packages with a known CVE and the dla-needed.txt file has 30 packages needing an update. Thanks to our sponsors New sponsors are in bold. With the upcoming start of Jessie ELTS, we are welcoming a few new sponsors and others should join soon.

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19 June 2020

Ingo Juergensmann: Jitsi Meet and ejabberd

Since the more or less global lockdown caused by Covid-19 there was a lot talk about video conferencing solutions that can be used for e.g. those people that try to coordinate with coworkers while in home office. One of the solutions is Jitsi Meet, which is NOT packaged in Debian. But there are Debian packages provided by Jitsi itself. Jitsi relies on an XMPP server. You can see the network overview in the docs. While Jitsi itself uses Prosody as XMPP and their docs only covers that one. But it's basically irrelevant which XMPP you want to use. Only thing is that you can't follow the official Jitsi documentation when you are not using Prosody but instead e.g. ejabberd. As always, it's sometimes difficult to find the correct/best non-official documentation or how-to, so I try to describe what helped me in configuring Jitsi Meet with ejabberd as XMPP server and my own coturn STUN/TURN server... This is not a step-by-step description, but anyway... here we go with some links: One of the first issues I stumpled across was that my Java was too old, but this can be quickly solved by update-alternatives:
There are 3 choices for the alternative java (providing /usr/bin/java). Selection Path Priority Status
------------------------------------------------------------
* 0 /usr/lib/jvm/java-11-openjdk-amd64/bin/java 1111 auto mode
1 /usr/lib/jvm/java-11-openjdk-amd64/bin/java 1111 manual mode
2 /usr/lib/jvm/java-8-openjdk-amd64/jre/bin/java 1081 manual mode
3 /usr/lib/jvm/jre-7-oracle-x64/bin/java 316 manual mode
It was set to jre-7, but I guess this was from years ago when I ran OpenFire as XMPP server. If something is not working with Jitsi Meet, it helps to not watch the log files only, but also to open the Debug Console in your web browser. That way I catched some XMPP Failures and saw that it tries to connect to some components where the DNS records were missing:
meet IN A yourIP
chat.meet IN A yourIP
focus.meet IN A yourIP
pubsub.meet IN A yourIP
Of course you also need to add some config to your ejabberd.yml:
host_config:
domain.net:
auth_password_format: scram
meet.domain.net:
## Disable s2s to prevent spam
s2s_access: none
auth_method: anonymous
allow_multiple_connections: true
anonymous_protocol: both
modules:
mod_bosh:
mod_caps:
mod_carboncopy:
#mod_disco:
mod_stun_disco:
secret: "YOURSECRETTURNCREDENTIALS"
services:
-
host: yourIP # Your coturn's public address.
type: stun
transport: udp
-
host: yourIP # Your coturn's public address.
type: stun
transport: tcp
-
host: yourIP # Your coturn's public address.
type: turn
transport: udp
mod_muc:
access: all
access_create: local
access_persistent: local
access_admin: admin
host: "chat.@"
mod_muc_admin:
mod_ping:
mod_pubsub:
access_createnode: local
db_type: sql
host: "pubsub.@"
ignore_pep_from_offline: false
last_item_cache: true
max_items_node: 5000 # For Jappix this must be set to 1000000
plugins:
- "flat"
- "pep" # requires mod_caps
force_node_config:
"eu.siacs.conversations.axolotl.*":
access_model: open
## Avoid buggy clients to make their bookmarks public
"storage:bookmarks":
access_model: whitelist
There is more config that needs to be done, but one of the XMPP Failures I spotted from debug console in Firefox was that it tried to connect to conference.domain.net while I prefer to use chat.domain.net for its brevity. If you prefer conference instead of chat, then you shouldn't be affected by this. Just make just that your config is consistent with what Jitsi Meet wants to connect to. Maybe not all of the above lines are necessary, but this works for me. Jitsi config is like this for me with short domains (/etc/jitsi/meet/meet.domain.net-config.js):
var config = hosts:
domain: 'domain.net',
anonymousdomain: 'meet.domain.net',
authdomain: 'meet.domain.net',
focus: 'focus.meet.domain.net',
muc: 'chat.hookipa.net'
, bosh: '//meet.domain.net:5280/http-bind',
//websocket: 'wss://meet.domain.net/ws',
clientNode: 'http://jitsi.org/jitsimeet',
focusUserJid: 'focus@domain.net', useStunTurn: true, p2p:
// Enables peer to peer mode. When enabled the system will try to
// establish a direct connection when there are exactly 2 participants
// in the room. If that succeeds the conference will stop sending data
// through the JVB and use the peer to peer connection instead. When a
// 3rd participant joins the conference will be moved back to the JVB
// connection.
enabled: true, // Use XEP-0215 to fetch STUN and TURN servers.
useStunTurn: true, // The STUN servers that will be used in the peer to peer connections
stunServers: [
// urls: 'stun:meet-jit-si-turnrelay.jitsi.net:443' ,
// urls: 'stun:stun.l.google.com:19302' ,
// urls: 'stun:stun1.l.google.com:19302' ,
// urls: 'stun:stun2.l.google.com:19302' ,
urls: 'stun:turn.domain.net:5349' ,
urls: 'stun:turn.domain.net:3478'
], ....
In the above config snippet one of the issues solved was to add the port to the bosh setting. Of course you can also take care that your bosh requests get forwarded by your webserver as reverse proxy. Using the port in the config might be a quick way to test whether or not your config is working. It's easier to solve one issue after the other and make one config change at a time instead of needing to make changes in several places. /etc/jitsi/jicofo/sip-communicator.properties:
org.jitsi.jicofo.auth.URL=XMPP:meet.domain.net
org.jitsi.jicofo.BRIDGE_MUC=jvbbrewery@chat.meet.domain.net
/etc/jitsi/videobridge/sip-communicator.properties:
org.jitsi.videobridge.ENABLE_STATISTICS=true
org.jitsi.videobridge.STATISTICS_TRANSPORT=muc
org.jitsi.videobridge.STATISTICS_INTERVAL=5000 org.jitsi.videobridge.xmpp.user.shard.HOSTNAME=localhost
org.jitsi.videobridge.xmpp.user.shard.DOMAIN=domain.net
org.jitsi.videobridge.xmpp.user.shard.USERNAME=jvb
org.jitsi.videobridge.xmpp.user.shard.PASSWORD=SECRET
org.jitsi.videobridge.xmpp.user.shard.MUC_JIDS=JvbBrewery@chat.meet.domain.net
org.jitsi.videobridge.xmpp.user.shard.MUC_NICKNAME=videobridge1 org.jitsi.videobridge.DISABLE_TCP_HARVESTER=true
org.jitsi.videobridge.TCP_HARVESTER_PORT=4443
org.ice4j.ice.harvest.NAT_HARVESTER_LOCAL_ADDRESS=yourIP
org.ice4j.ice.harvest.NAT_HARVESTER_PUBLIC_ADDRESS=yourIP
org.ice4j.ice.harvest.DISABLE_AWS_HARVESTER=true
org.ice4j.ice.harvest.STUN_MAPPING_HARVESTER_ADDRESSES=turn.domain.net:3478
org.ice4j.ice.harvest.ALLOWED_INTERFACES=eth0
Sometimes there might be stupid errors like (in my case) wrong hostnames like "chat.meet..domain.net" (a double dot in the domain), but you can spot those easily in the debug console of your browser. There tons of config options where you can easily make mistakes, but watching your logs and your debug console should really help you in sorting out these kind of errors. The other URLs above are helpful as well and more elaborate then my few lines here. Especially Mike Kuketz has some advanced configuration tips like disabling third party requests with "disableThirdPartyRequests: true" or limiting the number of video streams and such. Hope this helps...
Kategorie:
Debian
Tags:
Debian
XMPP
WebRTC
ejabberd
Jitsi

9 June 2020

Ingo Juergensmann: Jabber vs. XMPP

XMPP is widely - and mabye better - known as Jabber. This was more or less the same until Cisco bought Jabber Inc and the trademark. You can read more about the story on the XMPP.org website. But is there still a Jabber around? Yes, it is! But Cisco Jabber is a whole infrastructure environment: you can't use Cisco Jabber client on its own without the other required Cisco infrastructure as Cisco CUCM and CIsco IM&P servers. So you can't just setup Prosody or ejabberd on your Debian server and connect Cisco Jabber to it. But what are the differences of Cisco Jabber to "standard" XMPP clients? Cisco Jabber The above screenshot from the official Cisco Jabber product webpage shows the new, single view layout of the Cisco Webex Teams client, but you can configure the client to have the old, classic split view layout of Contact List and Chat Window. But as you can already see from above screenshot audio & video calls is one of the core functions of Cisco Jabber whereas this feature has been added only lately to the well-known Conversations XMPP client on Android. Conversations is using Jingle extension to XMPP whereas Jabber uses SIP for voice/video calls. You can even use Cisco Jabber to control your deskphone via CTI, which is a quite common setup for Jabber. In fact you can configure Jabber to be just a CTI client to you phone or a fully featured UC client. When you don't want to have Ciscos full set of on-premise servers, you can also use Cisco Jabber in conjunction with Cisco Webex as Cisco Webex Messenger. Or in conjunction with Webex Teams in Teams Messaging Mode. Last month Cisco announced general availability of XMPP federation for Webex Teams/Jabber in Teams Messaging Mode. With that you have basic functionality in Webex Teams. And when I say "basic" I really mean basic: you can have 1:1 chat only, no group chats (MUC) and no Presence status will be possible. Hopefully this is just the beginning and not the end of XMPP support in Webex Teams. XMPP Clients Well, I'm sure many of you know "normal" XMPP clients such as Gajim or Dino on Linux, Conversations on Android or Siskin/Monal/ChatSecure on Apple IOS. There are plenty of other clients of course and maybe you used an XMPP client in the past without knowing it. For example Jitsi Meet is based on XMPP and you can still download the Jitsi Desktop client and use it as a full-featured multi-protocol client, e.g. for XMPP and SIP. In fact Jitsi Desktop is maybe the client that comes closest to Cisco Jabber as a chat/voice/video client. In fact I already connected Jitsi Desktop to Cisco CUCM/IM&P infrastructure, but of course you won't be able to use all those Cisco proprietary extensions, but you can see the benefit of open, standardized protocols such as XMPP and SIP: you are free to use any standard compliant client that you want. So, while Jitsi supported voice/video calls for a long time, even before they focussed on Jitsi Meet as a WebRTC based conference service, Conversations added this feature last month, as already stated. This had a huge effect to the whole XMPP federation, because you need an XMPP server that supports XEP-0215 to make these audio/video calls work. The well-known Compliance Tester listed the STUN/TURN features first as "Informational Tests", but quickly made this a mandatory test to pass tests and gain 100% on the Compliance Tester. But you cannot place SIP calls to other sides, because that's a different thing. As many of you are familiar with standard XMPP clients, I'll focus now on some similarity and differences between Cisco Jabber and standard XMPP... Similarities & Differences First, you can federate with Cisco Jabber users. Cisco IM&P can use standard XMPP federation with all other XMPP standard compliant servers. This is really a big benefit and way better than other solutions that usually results in vendor lock-in. Depending on the setup, you can even join from your own XMPP client in MUCs (Multi User Chats), which Cisco calls "Persistent Chat Room". The other way is not that simple: basically it is possible to join with Cisco Jabber in a MUC on a random server, but it is not as easy as you might thing. Cisco Jabber simply lacks a way to enter a room JID (as you can find them on https://search.jabber.network/. Instead you need to be added as participant by a moderator or an admin in that 3rd party MUC. Managed File Transfers is another issue. Cisco Jabber supports Peer-to-Peer file transfers and Managed File Transfers, where the uploaded file get transferred to an SFTP server as storage backend and where the IM&P server is handling the transfer via HTTPS. You can find a schematic drawing in the Configuration Guides. Although it appears similar to HTTP Upload as defined in XEP-0363, it is not very likely that it will work. I haven't tested it yet, because in my test scenario there is a gatekeeper in the path: Cisco Expressway doesn't support (yet) Managed File Transfer, but you can upvote the idea in the ideas management of Cisco or other ideas such as OMEMO support. OMEMO support? Yes, there is no end-to-end encryption (E2EE) currently planned for Cisco Jabber, while it is common nowadays for most modern XMPP clients. I think it would be good for Cisco Jabber to also (optionally) support OMEMO or its successor. Messaging clients without E2EE are not state of the art anymore. Whereas Conversations is the de-facto standard on Android, Apple IOS devices are still lacking a similar well-working client. See my blog post "XMPP - Fun with Clients" for a summary. In that regard Cisco Jabber might be the best XMPP client for IOS to some degree: you have working messaging, voice/video calls, Push Notifications and integration into Apples Call Kit. There are most likely many, many more differences and issues between Cisco Jabber and standard compliant XMPP servers and clients. But basically Cisco Jabber is still based on XMPP and extends that by proprietary extensions. Summary While I have the impression that the free clients and servers are well doing and increased development in the past years (thanks to Conversations and the Compliance Tester), the situation of Cisco Jabber is a little different. As a customer you can sometimes get the impression that Cisco has lost interest in developing Cisco Jabber. It got better in the last years, but when Cisco Spark was introduced some years ago, the impression was that Cisco is heavily focussed on Spark (now: Webex Teams). It's not like Cisco is not listening to customers or the development has been stopped on Jabber, but my impression is that most customers don't give feedback or tell Cisco as the vendor what they want. You can either submit ideas via the Colaboration Customer Ideas Tool or provide feedback via your Cisco and partner channels. I think it is important for the XMPP community to also have a large enterprise level vendor like Cisco. Otherwise the Internet will become more and more an Internet of closed silos like MS Teams, Slack, Facebook, etc. Of course there are other companies like ProcessOne (ejabberd) or Tigase, but I think you agree that Cisco is another level.
Kategorie:
Debian
Tags:
Debian
Jabber
XMPP

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