I have been quite busy! I have been working on several projects so my cover image is a lovely sunset where I live. Debian: I have updated and uploaded several packages and working on more.

• Umbrello
• Squashfuse with the help of Scott Moser ( Thanks! )
• libappimage
• plasma-bigscreen WIP

KDE Snaps: I have reworked the CI to now do Core22 snaps! They will publish to the beta channel until we get them tested. First snap completed is the ever important KDE Frameworks / QT content snap + SDK! Applications will start after I tackle the kde-neon extention in snapcraft. GUI-Testing: I have begun learning/writing some GUI tests using python and https://invent.kde.org/sdk/selenium-webdriver-at-spi/, inspired by one of my favorite people, Harald. See https://apachelog.wordpress.com/2022/12/14/selenium-at-spi-gui-testing/ for more info and I hope to get these in repos near you soon! In closing, I am still seeking employment/sponsor amidst this terrible layoff season. If anyone knows of anyone with my diverse skill set please let me know. In the meantime if you can spare anything to keep the lights on I would be ever so grateful. Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/sgmoore Cash App: $ScarlettMoore0903 Stripe: https://buy.stripe.com/28o16y3PHcISfaE8ww Thank you, I want to wish everyone a very merry < insert your holiday here > !!!

I m currently reading the second book of the TriSolar Sci-Fi series by Cixin Liu, I ve only just started it so this post can t have spoilers for it and I will also only have minimal spoilers for the first book (nothing more than you will get from pop culture references to it). In the second book there are people called Wall Facers who have broad powers to shape the course of the Human response to an alien invasion in 400+ years time. The idea is that as the aliens have an ability to see everything that can be seen on Earth any ideas that leave the brain of one person can be snooped on, so if some people act independently without communicating their plans they can take the aliens by surprise. While that is probably going to work out well in the books history in general seems to show that people who act independently without any useful feedback from others tend to perform poorly, every king and dictator seems to demonstrate this. Efficient Work I ve been thinking about what I would do if I had significant powers to guide the response to an alien threat in some hundreds of years. The first thing to do would be to get all people working as efficiently as possible. Without the imminent threat of alien invasion we can have debates about how much time to spend working vs leisure time. Should we make 24 hours per week the new normal work week? But if the threat of annihilation is looming then the discussion should be about how to get as many people as possible working as much as possible. Currently 1/4 of the world population lack access to safe drinking water [1], there s a plan to achieve universal and equitable access to safe and affordable drinking water for all by 2030 . But 2030 isn t soon enough, another 8 years where 1/4 of children born won t reach their potential due to poor water is unacceptable. Currently 13% of the world population don t have access to electricity and 40% don t have access to clean fuels for cooking [2]. Lack of energy access reduces health and opportunities for education. Healthcare is another major obstacle to human development and therefore economic development. Even some allegedly first-world countries like the US lack universal affordable healthcare. I think we could reasonably get safe water to 99% of the world population before 2025 if we tried hard (IE applied a small fraction of the resources of a single war to it). Getting electricity to 95% of the world population and clean cooking fuels to 90% of the world population are probably achievable goals for 2025 as well. Healthcare is a slightly harder problem as we need to train more nurses and doctors. A registered nurse apparently needs 3 years of training after completing high school. We may have to improve high schools to get more students up to the standard of nursing degrees. If it takes 3 years to improve schools in year 9+ and then 3 years to get more high school graduates that would mean that it would take about 9 years to get an increase in nurses. Doing this would require increasing the capacity of universities and making university almost free (as it was for decades). So in about 2031 we could start sending a significant number of nurses from developed countries to help out developing countries. Becoming a doctor apparently requires 8 years of study plus a minimum of 3 years residency . So if doctors were entirely trained in first world countries then we wouldn t be able to send many doctors to developing countries until 2039. If the residency was performed in other countries then it could be as early as 2036. According to the WHO currently only half the world s population have adequate healthcare [3]. To get adequate healthcare to the world we need to more than double the number of doctors because currently we don t have enough in countries with decent healthcare systems such as Australia. It would probably take to at least 2060 to get enough doctors trained. The end goal of course would be to have every country able to train enough of it s citizens to provide all medical services, but countries that have serious widespread healthcare problems that reduce the number of people who can pursue higher education will have difficulty in that until some of the healthcare problems are alleviated. Education Obviously education is important to all achievements. Currently education seems very poorly run, it is possible to create a school system that teaches children effectively without the bullying that is common in Australia and without the sort of pressure that South Korea is infamous for. One of the main issues to resolve with the school system is the idea that everyone should learn at the same speed, that goal can only be achieved by making the majority of the students learn slowly. Students should be able to freely skip ahead as their skill permits and finish school at any age. Also high school isn t for everyone, the tech schools that teach trades need to be brought back. Deceiving Aliens A plot point in the TriSolar series is that the aliens can see each other s thoughts, the local communication (their equivalent to talking) is based on reading each other s thoughts without the possibility of deception. While deceptive written communication is potentially possible for them they haven t developed skills in that area. As a first step towards exploiting this humans could focus more on linguistic development that increases language complexity, such as the way the English language adopts words from other languages and gives them slightly different meanings for example the difference between driver and chauffeur and the difference between dog and hound is not obvious to many Europeans who otherwise speak English fluently. When involved in conversation it s possible to convey meaning without directly stating things, this is used extensively by people who are interested in security. My observations of this are based on conversations with people who do government work, but I imagine that criminal organisations also do similar things for similar reasons. An increased focus on poetry in schools might be helpful in developing skills for conveying ideas to people who think in human ways where the message is unclear to non-humans who have no experience of deception. I wonder whether the ability to understand human poetry would make aliens less hostile to humans, if they can think like us then they would be less likely to want to exterminate us. Poker is a game that depends on the ability to deceive others, I ve never been any good at it. I wonder if making it part of the school curriculum would help improve the overall human ability to deceive aliens. I don t think that such schools would become dens of sociopathy as depicted in Kakegurui, but it might have some negative results. Spreading education to a larger portion of the world s population requires more use of electronic education. Anything learned via text can be more easily assimilated by aliens than things that are learned directly from other people. For high school and the basics of a university degree this is fine. But for more advanced education it seems that having a large face to face component might help keep the value away from the aliens. More Ideas? What do you think I missed on this list? I wasn t trying to list every possibility, just the more important ones. Also for any goals other than increasing inequality for it s own sake we should improve health and education for the world.

• [1] https://ourworldindata.org/water-access
• [2] https://ourworldindata.org/energy-access
• [3] https://tinyurl.com/y7gyrjwu

Wayland First up, I read Antoine Beaupr s Wayland to Sway migration with interest. While he said it s done and dusted or something similar, the post shows there s still quite a ways to go. I wouldn t say it s done or whatever till it s integrated so well that a person installs it and doesn t really need to fiddle with config files as an average user. For specific use-cases you may need to, but that should be outside of a normal user (layperson) experience. I have been using mate for a long long time and truth be told been very happy with it. The only thing I found about Wayland on mate is this discussion or rather this entry. The roadmap on Ubuntu Mate is also quite iffy. The Mate Wayland entry on Debian wiki also perhaps need an updation but dunno much as the latest update it shares is 2019 and it s 2022. One thing to note, at least according to Antoine, things should be better as and when it gets integrated even on legacy hardware. I would be interested to know how it would work on old desktops and laptops rather than new or is there some barrier? I, for one would have liked to see or know about why lightdm didn t work on Wayland and if there s support. From what little I know lightdm is much lighter than gdm3 and doesn t require much memory and from what little I have experienced works very well with mate. I have been using it since 2015/16 although the Debian changelog tells me that it has been present since 2011. I was hoping to see if there was a Wayland specific mailing list, something like debian-wayland but apparently there s not :(. Using mate desktop wayland (tried few other variations on the keywords) but search fails to find any meaningful answer :(. FWIW and I don t know the reason why but Archwiki never fails to amaze me. Interestingly, it just says No for mate. I probably would contact upstream in the coming days to know what their plans are and hopefully they will document what their plans are on integrating Wayland in both short-term and long-term with an update, or if there is something more recent they have documented elsewhere, get that update on the Debian wiki so people know. The other interesting thread I read was Russel Coker s Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen5 entry. I would be in the market in a few months to find/buy a Thinkpad but probably of AMD rather than Intel because part of recent past history with Intel as well as AMD having a bit of an edge over Intel as far as graphics is concerned. I wonder why Russel was looking into Intel and not AMD. Would be interested to know why Intel and not AMD? Any specific reason ???

Hearing Aids I finally bought hearing aids about a couple of weeks back and have been practicing using them. I was able to have quite a few conversations although music is still I m not able to listen clearly but it is still a far cry from before and for the better. I am able to have conversations with people and also reply and they do not have to make that extra effort that they needed to. Make things easier for everybody. The one I bought is at the starting range although the hearing aids go all the way to 8 lakhs for a pair (INR 800,000), the more expensive ones having WiFi, Bluetooth and more channels, it all depends on how much can one afford. And AFAIK there is not a single Indian manufacturer who is known in this business.

One thing I did notice is while the hearing aids are remarkably sturdy if they fall down as they are small, yet you have to be careful of both dust and water . That does makes life a bit difficult as my house and city both gets sand quite a bit everyday. I don t think they made any India-specific changes, if they had, would probably make things better. I haven t yet looked at it, but it may be possible to hack it remotely. There may or may not be security issues involved, probably would try once I ve bit more time am bit more comfortable to try and see what I can find out. If I had bought it before, maybe I would have applied for the Debian event happening in Kerala, if nothing else, would have been to document what happened there in detail. I probably would have to get a new motherboard for my desktop probably in a year or two as quite a few motherboards also have WiFi (WiFi 6 ?) think on the southbridge. I at least would have a look in new year and know more as to what s been happening. For last at least 2-3 years there has been a rumor which has been confirmed time and again that the Tata Group has been in talks with multiple vendors to set chip fabrication and testing business but to date they haven t been able to find one. They do keep on giving press conferences about the same but that s all they do :(. Just shared the latest one above.

The Long War Terry Pratchett, Stephen Braxter Long Earth Terry Pratchett, Stephen Braxter ISBN13: 9780062067777 Last month there was also a seconds books sale where I was lucky enough to get my hands on the Long War. But before I share about the book itself, I had a discussion with another of my friends and had to re-share part of that conversation. While the gentleman was adamant that non-fiction books are great, my point as always is both are equal. As I shared perhaps on this blog itself, perhaps multiple times, that I had seen a YT video in which a professor shared multiple textbooks of physics and shared how they are wrong and have been wrong and kept them in a specific corner. He took the latest book which he honestly said doesn t have any mistakes as far as he know and yet still kept in that same corner denoting that it is highly possible that future understanding will make the knowledge or understanding we know different. An example of physics in the nano world and how that is different and basically turns our understanding than what we know. Now as far as the book is concerned, remember Michael Crichton s Timeline. Now that book was originally written in the 1960 s while this one was written by both the honorable gentleman in 2013. So almost 50+ years difference between the two books, and that even shows how they think about things. In this book, you no longer need a big machine, but have something called a stepper machine which is say similar to a cellphone, that size and that frame, thickness etc. In this one, the idea of multiverse is also there but done a tad differently. In this, we do not have other humans or copy humans but have multiple earths that may have same or different geography as how evolution happened. None of the multiverse earths have humans but have different species depending on the evolution that happened there. There are something called as trolls but they have a much different meaning and way about them about how most fantasy authors portray trolls. While they are big in this as well, they are as gentle as bears or rabbits. So the whole thing is about real estate and how humans have spread out on multiple earths and the politics therein. Interestingly, the story was trashed or given negative reviews on Goodreads. The sad part is/was that it was written and published in 2013 when perhaps the possibility of war or anything like that was very remote especially in the States, but now we are now in 2022 and just had an insurrection happen and whole lot of Americans are radicalized, whether you see the left or the right depending on your ideology. An American did share few weeks ago how some shares are looking at Proportional Representation and that should make both parties come more towards the center and be a bit more transparent. What was interesting to me is the fact that states have much more rights to do elections and electioneering the way they want rather than a set model which everyone has common which is what happens in India. This also does poke holes into the whole Donald Trump stolen democracy drama but that s a different story altogether. One of the more interesting things I came to know about is that there are 4 books in the long series and this was the second book in itself. I do not want to dwell on the characters themselves as frankly speaking I haven t read all the four books and it would be gross injustice on my part to talk about the characters themselves. Did I enjoy reading the book, for sure. What was interesting and very true of human nature is that even if we have the ability or had the ability to have whole worlds to ourselves, we are bound to mess it up. And in that aspect, I don t think he is too far off the mark. If I had a whole world, wouldn t I try to exploit it to the best or worse of my ability. One of the more interesting topics in the book is the barter system they have thought of that is called as favors. If you are in multiple worlds, then having a currency, even fiat money is of no use and they have to find ways and means to trade with one another. The book also touches a bit on slavery but only just and doesn t really explore it as much as it could have.

Identity Now this has many meanings to it. Couple of weeks ago, saw a transgender meet. For the uninitiated or rather people like me, basically it is about people who are born in one gender but do not identify with it but the other and they express it first through their clothes and expression and the end of the journey perhaps is with having the organs but this may or may not be feasible, as such surgery is expensive and also not available everywhere. After section 377 was repealed few years ago, we do have a third gender on forms as well as have something called a Transgender Act but how much the needle has moved in society is still a question. They were doing a roadshow near my house hence I was able to talk with them with my new hearing aids and while there was lot of traffic was able to understand some of their issues. For e.g. they find it difficult to get houses on rent, but then it is similar for bachelor guys or girls also. One could argue to what degree it is, and that perhaps maybe. Also, there is a myth that they are somehow promiscuous but that I believe is neither here or there. Osho said an average person thinks about the opposite sex every few seconds or a minute. I am sure even Freud would have similar ideas. So, if you look in that way everybody is promiscuous as far as thought is concerned. The other part being opportunity but that again is function of so many other things. Some people are able to attract a lot of people, others might not. And then whether they chose to act on that opportunity or not is another thing altogether. Another word that is or was used is called gender fluid, but that too is iffy as gender fluid may or may not mean transgender. Also, while watching some nature documentary few days/weeks back had come to know that trees have something like 18 odd genders. That just blows me out of the mind and does re-question this whole idea of sexuality and identity to only two which seems somewhat regressive at least to me. If we think humans are part of nature, then we need to be open up perhaps a bit more. But identity as I shared above has more than one meaning. For e.g. citizenship, that one is born in India is even messier to know, understand and define. I had come across this article about couple of months back. Now think about this. Now, there have been studies and surveys about citizenship and it says something like 60% birth registrations are done in metro cities. Now Metro cities are 10 as defined by Indian state. But there are roughly an odd 4k cities in India and probably twice the number of villages and those are conservative numbers as we still don t record things meticulously, maybe due to the Indian oral tradition or just being lazy or both, one part is also that if you document people and villages and towns, then you are also obligated to give them some things as a state and that perhaps is not what the Indian state wants. A small village in India could be anywhere from few hundreds of people to a few thousand. And all the new interventions whether it is PAN, Aadhar has just made holes rather than making things better. They are not inclusive but exclusive. And none of this takes into account Indian character and the way things are done in India. In most households, excluding the celebs (they are in a world of pain altogether when it comes to baby names but then it s big business but that s an entire different saga altogether, so not going to touch that.) I would use or say my individual case as that is and seems to be something which is regular even today. I was given a nickname when I was 3 years old and given a name when I was 5-6 when I was put in school. I also came to know in school few kids who didn t like their names and couple of them cajoled and actually changed their names while they were kids, most of us just stayed with what we got. I do remember sharing about nakushi or something similar a name given to few girls in Maharashtra by their parents and the state intervened and changed their names. But that too is another story in itself. What I find most problematic is that the state seems to be blind, and this seems to be by design rather than a mistake. Couple of years back, Assam did something called NRC (National Register of Citizens) and by the Govt s own account it was a failure of massive proportions. And they still want to bring in CAA, screwing up Assam more. And this is the same Govt. went shown how incorrect it was, blamed it all on the High Court and it s the same Govt. that shopped around for judges to put somebody called Mr. Saibaba (an invalid 90 year adivasi) against whom the Govt. hasn t even a single proof as of date. Apparently, they went to 6 judges who couldn t give what the decision the Govt. wanted. All this info. is in public domain. So the current party ruling, i.e. BJP just wants to make more divisions rather than taking people along as they don t have answers either on economy, inflation or issues that people are facing. One bright light has been Rahul Gandhi who has been doing a padhyatra (walking) from Kanyakumari to Kashmir and has had tremendous success although mainstream media has showed almost nothing what he is doing or why he is doing that. Not only he had people following him, there are and were many who took his example and using the same values of inclusiveness are walking where they can. And this is not to do with just a political party but more with a political thought of inclusiveness, that we are one irrespective of what I believe, eat, wear etc. And that gentleman has been giving press conferences while our dear P.M. even after 8 years doesn t have the guts to do a single press conference. Before closing, I do want to take another aspect, Rahul Gandhi s mother is an Italian or was from Italy before she married. But for BJP she is still Italian. Rishi Sunak, who has become the UK Prime Minister they think of him as Indian and yet he has sworn using the Queen s name. And the same goes for Canada Kumar (Akshay Kumar) and many others. How the right is able to blind and deaf to what it thinks is beyond me. All these people have taken an oath in the name of the Queen and they have to be loyal to her or rather now King Charles III. The disconnect continues.

The Road to Gandolfo I think I had read this book almost 10-12 years back and somehow ended up reading it up again. Apparently, he had put this fiction, story, book under some other pen name earlier. It is possible that I might have read it under that name and hence forgotten all about it. This book/story is full of innuendo, irony, sarcasm and basically the thrill of life. There are two main characters in the book, the first is General Mackenzie who has spent almost 3 to 4 decades being a spy/a counterintelligence expert in the Queen s service. And while he outclasses them all even at the ripe age of 50, he is thrown out under the pretext of conduct unbecoming of an officer. The other main character is Sam Devereaux. This gentleman is an army lawyer and is basically counting the days when he completes his tour of duty as a military lawyer and start his corporate civil law with somebody he knows. It is much to his dismay that while under a week is left for his tour of duty to be left over he is summoned to try and extradite General MacKenzie who has been put on house arrest. Apparently, in China there was a sculpture of a great Chinese gentleman in the nude. For reasons unknown or rather not being shared herein, he basically breaks part of the sculpture. This of course, enrages the Chinese and they call it a diplomatic accident and try to put the General into house arrest. Unfortunately for both the General and his captors, he decides to escape/go for it. While he does succeed entering the American embassy, he finds himself to be person non-grata and is thrown back outside where the Chinese recapture him. This is where the Embassy & the Govt. decide it would be better if somehow the General could be removed from China permanently so he doesn t cause any further diplomatic accidents. In order to do that Sam s services are bought. Now in order to understand the General, Sam learns that he has 4 ex-wives. He promptly goes and meet them to understand why the general behaved as he did. He apparently also peed on the American flag. To his surprise, all the four ex-wives are still very much in with the general. During the course of interviewing the ladies he is seduced by them and also gives names to their chests in order to differentiate between each one of them. Later he is seduced by the eldest of the four wives and they spend the evening together. Next day Sam meets and is promptly manhandled by the general and the diplomatic papers are seen by the general. After meeting the general and the Chinese counterpart, they quickly agree to extradite him as they do not know how to keep the general control. During his stay of house arrest, the General reads one of the communist rags as he puts it and gets the idea to kidnap the pope and that forms the basis of the story. Castel Gandolfo seems to be a real place which is in Italy and is apparently is the papal residence where s/he goes to reside every winter. The book is written in 1976 hence in the book, the General decides to form a corporation for which he would raise funds in order to make the kidnapping. The amount in 1976 was 40 million dollars and it was a big sum, to be with times, let s think of say 40 billion dollars so gets the scale of things. Now while a part of me wants to tell the rest of the story, the story isn t really mine to tell. Read The Road to Gandolfo for the rest. While I can t guarantee you much, I can say you might find yourself constantly amused by the antics of both the General, Sam and the General s ex-wives. There are also a few minute characters that you will meet on the way, hope you discover them and enjoy it immensely as I have. One thing I have to say, while I was reading it, I very much got vibes of Not a penny more, not a penny less by Jeffrey Archer. As shared before, lots of twists and turns, enjoy the ride

Webforms Webforms are nothing but a form you fill on the web or www. Webforms are and were a thing from early 90s to today. I was supposed to register for https://www.swavlambancard.gov.in/ almost a month back but procrastinated till few couple of days back and with good reason. I was hoping one of my good friends would help me but they had their own thing. So finally, I tried to fill the form few days back. It took me almost 30 odd attempts to finally fill the form and was given an enrollment number. Why it took me 30 odd attempts and with what should tell you the reason

1. I felt like I was filling the form from 1990 s rather than today because
   
2. The form doesn t know either its state or saves data during a session This lesson has been learned a long time back by almost all service providers except Govt. of India. Both the browsers on a mobile as well as desktop can save data during session. If you don t know what I mean by that go to about:preferences#privacy in Firefox and look at Manage Data. There you will find most sites do put some data along with cookies arguably to help make your web experience better. Chrome or Chromium has the same thing perhaps shared under a different name but its the same thing. But that is not all.
   
3. None of the fields have any verification. The form is of 3 pages. The verification at the end of the document doesn t tell you what is wrong and what needs to be corrected. Really think on this, I am on a 24 LED monitor and I m filling the form and I had to do it at least 20-30 times before it was accepted. And guess what, I have no clue even about why it was selected. The same data, the same everything and after the nth time it accepted. Now if I am facing such a problem when I have some idea how technology works somewhat how are people who are trying to fill this form on 6 mobiles supposed to do? And many of them not at all clued in technology as I am.
   

I could go on outlining many of the issues that I faced but they are all similar in many ways the problems faced while filling the NEW Income Tax forms. Of course the New Income Tax portal is a whole ball-game in itself as it gives new errors every time instead of solving them. Most C.A. s have turned to third-party xml tools that enable you to upload xml compliant data to the New Income tax portal but this is for businesses and those who can afford it. Again, even that is in a sort of messy state but that is a whole another tale altogether. One of the reasons to my mind why the forms are designed the way they are so that people go to specific cybercafes or get individual people to fill and upload it and make more money. I was told to go to a specific cybercafe and meet a certain individual and he asked for INR 500/- to do the work. While I don t have financial problems, I was more worried about my data going into the wrong hands. But I can see a very steady way to make money without doing much hard work.

Hearing Loss info. Now because I had been both to Kamla Nehru Hospital as well as Sasoon and especially the deaf department, I saw many kids with half-formed ears. I had asked the doctors and they had shared this is due to malnutrition. We do know that women during pregnancies need more calories, more everything as they are eating for two bodies, not one. And this is large-scale, apparently more than 5 percent of population have children like this. And this number was of 2014, what is it today nobody knows. I also came to know that at least for some people like me, due to Covid they became deaf. I had asked the doctors if they knew of people who had become deaf due to Covid. They basically replied in the negative as they don t have the resources to monitor the same. The Govt. has an idea of health ID but just like Aadhar has to many serious sinister implications. Somebody had shared with me a long time back that in India systems work inspite of Govt. machinery rather than because of it. Meaning that the Government itself ties itself into several knots and then people have to be creative to try and figure a way out to help people. I found another issue while dealing with them. Apparently, even though I have 60% hearing loss I would be given a certificate of 40% hearing loss and they call it Temporary Progressive Loss. I saw almost all the people who had come, many of them having far severe defencies than me getting the same/similar certificate. All of them got Temporary Progressive. Some of the cases were real puzzling. For e.g. I met another Agarwal who had a severe accident few months ago and there is some kind of paralysis & bone issue. The doctors have given up but even that gentleman was given Temporary Progressive. From what little I could understand, the idea is that over period if there is possibility of things becoming better then it should be given. Another gentleman suffered a case of dwarfism. Even he was given the same certificate. Think there have been orders from above so that people even having difficulties are not helped. Another point if you look in a macro sense, it presents a somewhat rosy picture. If someone were to debunk the Govt. data either from India or abroad then from GOI perspective they have an agenda even though the people who are suffering are our brothers and sisters And all of this is because I can read, write, articulate. Perhaps many of them may not even have a voice or a platform. Even to get this temporary progressive disability certificate there is more than 4 months of running from one place to the other, 4 months of culmination of work. This I can share and tell from my experience, who knows how much else others might have suffered for the same. In my case a review will happen after 5 years, in most other cases they have given only 1 year. Of course, this does justify people s jobs and perhaps partly it may be due to that. Such are times where I really miss that I am unable to hear otherwise could have fleshed out lot more other people s sufferings. And just so people know/understand this is happening in the heart of the city whose population easily exceeds 6 million plus and is supposed to be a progressive city. I do appreciate and understand the difficulties that the doctors are placed under.

Mum s Birthday & Social Engineering. While I don t want to get into details, in the last couple of weeks mum s birthday was there and that had totally escaped me. I have been trying to disassociate myself from her and at times it s hard and then you don t remember and somebody makes you remember. So, on one hand guilty, and the other do not know what to do. If she were alive I would have bought a piece of cake or something. Didn t feel like it, hence donated some money to the local aged home. This way at least I hope they have some semblance of peace. All of them are of her similar age group. The other thing that I began to observe in the earnest, fake identities have become the norm. Many people took elon musk s potrait using their own names in the handles, but even then Elon Free Speech Musk banned them. So much for free speech. Then I saw quite a few handles that have cute women as their profile picture but they are good at social engineering. This has started only a couple of weeks back and have seen quite a few handles leaving Twitter and joining Mastodon. Also, have been hearing that many admins of Mastodon pods are unable to get on top of this. Also, lot of people complaining as it isn t user-friendly UI as twitter is. Do they not realize that Twitter has its own IP and any competing network can t copy or infringe on their product. Otherwise, they will be sued like how Ford was & potentially win. I am not really gonna talk much about it as the blog post has become quite long and that needs its own post to do any sort of justice to it. Till later people

Shantaram I know I have been quite behind in review of books but then that s life. First up is actually not as much as a shocker but somewhat of a pleasant surprise. So, a bit of background before I share the news. If you have been living under a rock, then about 10-12 years ago a book called Shantaram was released. While the book is said to have been released in 2003/4 I got it in my hand around 2008/09 or somewhere around that. The book is like a good meal, a buffet. To share the synopsis, Lin a 20 something Australian guy gets involved with a girl, she encourages him to get into heroin, he becomes a heroin user. And drugs, especially hard drugs need constant replenishment, it is a chemical thing. So, to fund those cravings, he starts to steal, rising to rob a bank and while getting away shoots a cop who becomes dead. Now either he surrenders or is caught is unclear, but he is tortured in the jail. So one day, he escapes from prison, lands up at home of somebody who owes him a favor, gets some money, gets a fake passport and lands up in Mumbai/Bombay as it was then known. This is from where the actual story starts. And how a 6 foot something Australian guy relying on his street smartness and know how the transformation happens from Lin to Shantaram. Now what I have shared is perhaps just 5% of the synopsis, as shared the real story starts here. Now the good news, last week 4 episodes of Shantaram were screened by Apple TV. Interestingly, I have seen quite a number people turning up to buy or get this book and also sharing it on Goodreads. Now there seems to have been some differences from the book to TV. Now I m relying on 10-12 year back memory but IIRC Khaderbhai, one of the main characters who sort of takes Lin/Shantaram under his wing is an Indian. In the series, he is a western or at least looks western/Middle Eastern to me. Also, they have tried to reproduce 1980s in Mumbai/Bombay but dunno how accurate they were My impression of that city from couple of visits at that point in time where they were still more tongas (horse-ridden carriages), an occasional two wheelers and not many three wheelers. Although, it was one of the more turbulent times as lot of agitation for worker rights were happening around that time and a lot of industrial action. Later that led to lot of closure of manufacturing in Bombay and it became more commercial. It would be interesting to know whether they shot it in actual India or just made a set somewhere in Australia, where it possibly might have been shot. The chawl of the book needs a bit of arid land and Australia has lots of it. It is also interesting as this was a project that had who s who interested in it for a long time but somehow none of them was able to bring the project to fruition, the project seems to largely have an Australian cast as well as second generations of Indians growing in Australia. To take names, Amitabh Bacchan, Johnny Depp, Russel Crowe each of them wanted to make it into a feature film. In retrospect, it is good it was not into a movie, otherwise they would have to cut a lot of material and that perhaps wouldn t have been sufficient. Making it into a web series made sure they could have it in multiple seasons if people like it. There is a lot between now and 12 episodes to even guess till where it would leave you then. So, if you have not read the book and have some holidays coming up, can recommend it. The writing IIRC is easy and just flows. There is a bit of action but much more nuance in the book while in the web series they are naturally more about action. There is also quite a bit of philosophy between him and Kaderbhai and while the series touches upon it, it doesn t do justice but then again it is being commercially made. Read the book, see the series and share your thoughts on what you think. It is possible that the series might go up or down but am sharing from where I see it, may do another at the end of the season, depending on where they leave it and my impressions. Update A slight update from the last blog post. Seems Rishi Sunak seems would be made PM of UK. With Hunt as chancellor and Rishi Sunak, Austerity 2.0 seems complete. There have been numerous articles which share how austerity gives rises to fascism and vice-versa. History gives lot of lessons about the same. In Germany, when the economy was not good, it was all blamed on the Jews for number of years. This was the reason for rise of Hitler, and while it did go up by a bit, propaganda by him and his loyalists did the rest. And we know and have read about the Holocaust. Today quite a few Germans deny it or deny parts of it but that s how misinformation spreads. Also Hitler is looked now more as an aberration rather than something to do with the German soul. I am not gonna talk more as there is still lots to share and that actually perhaps requires its own blog post to do justice for the same.

The Pyramid by Henning Mankell I had actually wanted to review this book but then the bomb called Shantaram appeared and I had to post it above. I had read two-three books before it, but most of them were about multiple beheadings and serial killers. Enough to put anybody into depression. I do not know if modern crime needs to show crime and desperation of and to such a level. Why I and most loved and continue to love Sherlock Holmes as most stories were not about gross violence but rather a homage to the art of deduction, which pretty much seems to be missing in modern crime thrillers rather than grotesque stuff. In that, like a sort of fresh air I read/am reading the Pyramid by Henning Mankell. The book is about a character made by Monsieur Henning Mankell named Kurt Wallender. I am aware of the series called Wallender but haven t yet seen it. The book starts with Wallender as a beat cop around age 20 and on his first case. He is ambitious, wants to become a detective and has a narrow escape with death. I wouldn t go much into it as it basically gives you an idea of the character and how he thinks and what he does. He is more intuitive by nature and somewhat of a loner. Probably most detectives IRL are, dunno, have no clue. At least in the literary world it makes sense, in real world think there would be much irony for sure. This is speculation on my part, who knows. Back to the book though. The book has 5 stories a sort of prequel one could say but also not entirely true. The first case starts when he is a beat cop in 1969 and he is just a beat cop. It is a kind of a prequel and a kind of an anthology as he covers from the first case to the 1990s where he is ending his career sort of. Before I start sharing about the stories in the book, I found the foreword also quite interesting. It asks questions about the interplay of the role of welfare state and the Swedish democracy. Incidentally did watch couple of videos about a sort of mixed sort of political representation that happens in Sweden. It uses what is known as proportional representation. Ironically, Sweden made a turn to the far right this election season. The book was originally in Swedish and were translated to English by Ebba Segerberg and Laurie Thompson. While all the stories are interesting, would share the last three or at least ask the questions of intrigue. Of course, to answer them you would need to read the book So the last three stories I found the most intriguing. The first one is titled Man on the Beach. Apparently, a gentleman goes to one of the beaches, a sort of lonely beach, hails a taxi and while returning suddenly dies. The Taxi driver showing good presence of mind takes it to hospital where the gentleman is declared dead on arrival. Unlike in India, he doesn t run away but goes to the cafeteria and waits there for the cops to arrive and take his statement. Now the man is in his early 40s and looks to be fit. Upon searching his pockets he is found to relatively well-off and later it turns out he owns a couple of shops. So then here are the questions ? What was the man doing on a beach, in summer that beach is somewhat popular but other times not so much, so what was he doing there? How did he die, was it a simple heart attack or something more? If he had been drugged or something then when and how? These and more questions can be answered by reading the story Man on the Beach . 2. The death of a photographer Apparently, Kurt lives in a small town where almost all the residents have been served one way or the other by the town photographer. The man was polite and had worked for something like 40 odd years before he is killed/murdered. Apparently, he is murdered late at night. So here come the questions a. The shop doesn t even stock any cameras and his cash box has cash. Further investigation reveals it is approximate to his average takeout for the day. So if it s not for cash, then what is the motive ? b. The body was discovered by his cleaning staff who has worked for almost 20 years, 3 days a week. She has her own set of keys to come and clean the office? Did she give the keys to someone, if yes why? c. Even after investigation, there is no scandal about the man, no other woman or any vices like gambling etc. that could rack up loans. Also, nobody seems to know him and yet take him for granted till he dies. The whole thing appears to be quite strange. Again, the answers lie in the book. 3. The Pyramid Kurt is sleeping one night when the telephone rings. The scene starts with a Piper Cherokee, a single piston aircraft flying low and dropping something somewhere or getting somebody from/on the coast of Sweden. It turns and after a while crashes. Kurt is called to investigate it. Turns out, the plane was supposed to be destroyed. On crash, both the pilot and the passenger are into pieces so only dental records can prove who they are. Same day or a day or two later, two seemingly ordinary somewhat elderly women, spinsters, by all accounts, live above the shop where they sell buttons and all kinds of sewing needs of the town. They seem middle-class. Later the charred bodies of the two sisters are found :(. So here come the questions a.Did the plane drop something or pick something somebody up ? The Cherokee is a small plane so any plane field or something it could have landed up or if a place was somehow marked then could be dropped or picked up without actually landing. b. The firefighter suspects arson started at multiple places with the use of petrol? The question is why would somebody wanna do that? The sisters don t seem to be wealthy and practically everybody has bought stuff from them. They weren t popular but weren t also unpopular. c. Are the two crimes connected or unconnected? If connected, then how? d. Most important question, why the title Pyramid is given to the story. Why does the author share the name Pyramid. Does he mean the same or the original thing? He could have named it triangle. Again, answers to all the above can be found in the book. One thing I also became very aware of during reading the book that it is difficult to understand people s behavior and what they do. And this is without even any criminality involved in. Let s say for e.g. I die in some mysterious circumstances, the possibility of the police finding my actions in last days would be limited and this is when I have hearing loss. And this probably is more to do with how our minds are wired. And most people I know are much more privacy conscious/aware than I am.

Japan s Hikikomori Japan has been a curious country. It was more or less a colonizer and somewhat of a feared power till it dragged the U.S. unnecessarily in World War 2. The result of the two atom bombs and the restitution meant that Japan had to build again from the ground up. It is also in a seismically unstable place as they have frequent earthquakes although the buildings are hardened/balanced to make sure that vibrations don t tear buildings apart. Had seen years ago on Natgeo a documentary that explains all that. Apart from that, Japan was helped by the Americans and there was good kinship between them till the 1980s till it signed the Plaza Accord which enhanced asset price bubbles that eventually burst. Something from which they are smarting even today. Japan has a constitutional monarchy. A somewhat history lesson or why it exists even today can be found here. Asset price bubbles of the 1980s, more than 50 percent of the population on zero hour contracts and the rest tend to suffer from overwork. There is a term called Karoshi that explains all. An Indian pig-pen would be two, two and a half times larger than a typical Japanese home. Most Japanese live in micro-apartments called konbachiku . All of the above stresses meant that lately many young Japanese people have become Hikikomori. Bloomberg featured about the same a couple of years back. I came to know about it as many Indians are given the idea of Japan being a successful country without knowing the ills and issues it faces. Even in that most women get the wrong end of the short stick i.e. even it they manage to find jobs, it would be most back-breaking menial work. The employment statistics of Japan s internal ministry tells its own story.

If you look at the data above, it seems that the between 2002 and 2019, the share of zero hour contracts has increased while regular work has decreased. This also means that those on the bottom of the ladder can no longer afford a home. There is and was a viral video called Lost in Manboo that went viral few years ago. It is a perfect set of storms. Add to that the Fukushima nuclear incident about which I had shared a few years ago. While the workers are blamed but all design decisions are taken by the management. And as was shown in numerous movies, documentaries etc. Interestingly, and somewhat ironically, the line workers knew the correct things to do and correct decisions to take unlike the management. The shut-ins story is almost a decade or two decades old. It is similar story in South Korea but not as depressive as the in Japan. It is somewhat depressive story but needed to be shared. The stories shared in the bloomberg article makes your heart ache

Backpacks In and around 2015, I had bought a Targus backpack, very much similar to the Targus TSB194US-70 Motor 16-inch Backpack. That bag has given me a lot of comfort over the years but now has become frayed the zip sometimes work and sometimes doesn t. Unlike those days there are a bunch of companies now operating in India. There are eight different companies that I came to know about, Aircase, Harrisons Sirius, HP Oddyssey, Mokobara, Artic Hunter, Dell Pro Hybrid, Dell Roller Backpack and lastly the Decathlon Quechua Hiking backpack 32L NH Escape 500 . Now of all the above, two backpacks seem the best, the first one is Harrisons Sirius, with 45L capacity, I don t think I would need another bag at all. The runner-up is the Decathlon Quecha Hiking Backpack 32L. One of the better things in all the bags is that all have hidden pockets for easy taking in and out of passport while having being ant-theft. I do not have to stress how stressful it is to take out the passport and put it back in. Almost all the vendors have made sure that it is not a stress point anymore. The good thing about the Quecha is that they are giving 10 years warranty, the point to be asked is if that is does the warranty cover the zip. Zips are the first thing that goes out in bags.That actually has what happened to my current bag. Decathlon has a store in Wakad, Pune while I have reached out to the gentleman in charge of Harrisons India to see if they have a reseller in Pune. So hopefully, in next one week I should have a backpack that isn t spilling with things all over the place, whichever I m able to figure out.

While trying to stay warm in our first snow of the year, I got several apps tested and released in round 3 of https://www.scarlettgatelymoore.dev/kde-gear-snaps-round-2/ ! All of these are being ( re ) tested on both arm64 and amd64. Hence, the release is going slower than it will in the future. Thank you for your patience.

• Kalzium ( again ) Molecule editor works. Known bug downloading molecules. Just go to Home/Documents and rename the file hotsuff-access.xml to themolecule.cml and load molecule as a temporary work around until a permanent fix comes about. https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=461027
• Ktuberling
• Kbounce
• Kmplot
• Kbreakout
• Knavalbattle
• Kubrick ( Not on chromebook unfortunately, opengl errors need looking into. )
• Kbruch
• Knetwalk
• Kwordquiz
• Knights ( Sound is fixed! )
• Kollision
• Lokalize
• Kfourinline

More rounds of bug gardening has been done, if you find bugs, or know one of your bugs is related to it being a snap, please assign to me. https://bugs.kde.org Please consider a donation so I may bring many more apps your way. https://www.patreon.com/sgmoore I am working on one time donations.

As a continuation of https://www.scarlettgatelymoore.dev/new-kde-gear-snaps-in-the-works/ Todays releases, tested on both amd64 and arm64, are:

• Falkon
• Umbrello
• Step
• Kompare
• Rocs ( First time release on arm! )
• Kgoldrunner
• Gwenview

This week has also been a busy week gardening snap bugs in bugs.kde.org. They are all over the place I am trying to sort out getting them there own section. I have assigned all snap bugs I have found to myself and requested that this is default. If you have bugs, please report them at bugs.kde.org , for now under neon / Snaps. More coming next week!

Pune Rains Lemme start with a slightly funny picture that tells as much about Pune, my city as anything else does.

Pune- Leave your attitude behind, we have our own

This and similar tags, puns and whatnot you will find if you are entering Pune from the road highway. You can also find similar similar symbols and Puns all over the city and they are partly sarcasm and ironic and partly the truth. Puneities work from the attitude that they know everything rather than nothing, including yours truly . What is the basis of that or why is there such kind of confidence I have no clue or idea, it is what it is. Approximately 24 hrs. ago, apparently we had a cloudburst. What I came to know later is that we got 100 mm of rain. Sharing from local news site. Much more interesting was a thread made on Reddit where many people half-seriously asked where they can buy a boat. One of the reasons being even if it s October, in fact, we passed middle of October and it s still raining. Even today in the evening, it rained for quite a while. As I had shared in a few blog posts before, June where rains should have started, it didn t, it actually started late July or even August, so something has shifted. The current leadership does not believe in Anthropogenic Climate Change or human activity induced climate change even though that is a reality. I could share many links and even using the term above should give links to various studies. Most of the people who are opposed to it are either misinformed or influenced from the fossil fuel industry. Again, could share many links, but will share just one atm. I have talked to quite a few people about it but nobody has ever been able to give a convincing answer as to why GM had to crush the cars. Let s even take the argument that it was the worst manufactured car in history and there have been quite a few, have the others been crushed? If not, then the reason shared or given by most people sounds hollow. And if you look into it, they had an opportunity that they let go, and now most of them are scrambling and yet most of the legacy auto manufacturers will be out of existence if they don t get back into the game in the next 2-3 years. There have been a bunch of announcements but we are yet to see. The Chinese though have moved far ahead, although one has to remark that they have been doing that for the last decade, so they have a 10-year head start, hardly surprising then. But I need to get back to the subject, another gentleman on Reddit remarked that if you start to use boat, and others start to use boat, then the Govt. will tax it. In fact, somebody had shared the below the other day

Different types of taxes collected by GOI

Many of the taxes that I have shared above are by the Modi Govt. who came on the platform, manifesto that once they come to power they will reduce taxes for the common man, they have reduced taxes but only for the Corporates. For the common man, the taxes have only gone up, both direct tax and indirect tax. Any reference to the Tory party who have also done similar things and have also shared that it is labor who had done large expenditures even though they have been 8 years in power, I am sure for most is purely coincidental. Incidentally, that is the same tack that was taken even by the Republican party. They all like to give tax benefits to the 1% while for the rest is austerity claiming some reason, even if it has been proven to be false.

Corporate Tax Rate, Revenue Loss to Govt.

The figures mentioned above are findings of parliamentary panel so nobody can accuse of anybody having a bias. Also, I probably had shared this but still feel the need to re-share it as people still believe that 2G scam happened even though there are plenty of arguments I can share to prove how it was all a fabricated lie.

Vinod Rai Mafinama in Uttarakhand High Court.

Part 2 of the same Mafinama.

How pathetic Mr. Rai s understanding of economics is can be gauged from the fact that he was made Chairman of IDFC and subsequently had to be thrown out. That whole lie was engineered to throw UPA out and it worked. There are and have been many such coincidences happening over the last 8 years, parallel stories happening in India and UK. This was just yesterday, about a year back Air India was given back to the Tatas, There was controversy about the supposed auctions as only Indigo was the only other party allowed to be at auction but not allowed to buy but more as a spectator as they already have 60% of the Indian civil aviation market. And there was lot of cheering from the Govt. side that finally Air India has been bought home to its true owners, the Tatas. The Tatas too started cheering and sharing how they will take down all the workers, worker unions and everything will be happy glory within a year. In fact, just couple of days back they shared new plans. Btw for the takeover of Air India, they had bought loans from the Banks and they are in the category of too big to fail. As I have shared couple of times before, RBI has not shared any inspection reports of nationalized or private banks after 2013/14. While by law, RBI is supposed to do inspection reports every 3 months and share them in the Public domain. And if you ask any of their supporter, for everything they will say UPA did x or y, which only goes to show morally bankrupt the present Govt. is. Coming back to the topic, before I forget, the idea of sharing their plans is so that they can again borrow money from the banks. But that is not the only story. Just one day back, Smita Prakash, one of the biggest cheerleaders of the present Govt. (she is the boss at Asia News International (ANI)) posted how Air India had treated her sister and other 21 passengers. Basically, they had bought business tickets but the whole cabin was dirty, they complained and they were forced to sit in economy class, not just her cousin sister but the other 21 odd passengers too. Of course Ms Smita became calm as her sister was given free air tickets on Vistara and other goodies. Of course, after that she didn t post anything about the other 21 odd passengers after that. And yes, I understand she is supposed to be a reporter but as can be seen from the twitter thread, there is or was no follow up. Incidentally, she is one of many who has calling others about Revdi culture (freebies to the masses.) but guess that only applies to other people not her or her sister. Again, if there are any coincidences of similar nature in the UK or when Trump was P.M. of the U.S. they are just coincidental .

The Uncosted budget India and the UK have many parallels, it s mind boggling. Before we get into the nitty-gritties, saw something that would be of some interest to the people here.

For those who might not be able to see above, apparently there is place in UK called Tufton Street where there are quite a few organizations that are shadowy and whose finances are not known as to how they are financed. Ms. Truss and quite a few of the people in the cabinet are from the same shadowy organizations. Mr. Kwasi Kwarteng, the just-departed chancellor is and was part of the same group. Now even for me it was a new term to learn and understand what is an uncosted budget is. To make it much more easier I share the example using a common person who goes to the bank for a loan

Now M/S X wants a loan of say Rs. 1000/- for whatever reason. He/she/they go to the bank and asks give me a loan of say INR 1000/- The banks asks them to produce a statement of accounts to show what their financial position is. They produce a somewhat half-filled statement of accounts In which all liabilities are shown, but incomes are not. The bank says you already have so much liabilities, how are you gonna pay those, accounts have to be matched otherwise you are not solvent. M/s X adamantly refuses to do any changes citing that they don t need to. At this point, M/s X credit rating goes down and nobody in the market will give them a loan. At the same time, the assets they had held, their value also depreciates because it became known that they can t act responsibly. So whose to say whether or not M/s X has those number of assets and priced them accurately. But the drama doesn t end there, M/s X says this is the responsibility of actually Mr. Z ( cue The Bank of England) as they are my accountant/lawyer etc. M/s Z says as any lawyer/accountant should. This is not under my remit. If the clients either gives incomplete information or false information or whatever then it is their responsibility not mine. And in fact, the Chancellor is supposed to be the one who is given the responsibility of making the budget. The Chancellor is very similar to our Finance Minister. Because the UK has constitutional monarchy, I am guessing the terms are slightly different, otherwise the functionality seems to be the same. For two weeks, there was lot of chaos, lot of pension funds lost quite a bit in the market and in the end Mr. Kwasi Kwarteng was ousted out of the job. Incredibly, the same media and newspapers who had praised Mr. Kwarteng just few weeks back as the best Tory budget, they couldn t wait to bury him. And while I have attempted to simplify what happened, the best explanation of what has happened can be found in an article from the guardian. Speculation is rife in the UK as to who s ruling atm as the new Chancellor has reversed almost all the policies that Ms. Truss had bought and she is now more or less a figurehead. Mr. Hunt, the new chancellor doesn t have anybody behind him. Apparently, the gentleman wanted to throw his hat the ring in the Tory leadership contest that was held about a month back and he couldn t get 20 MP s to support him. Another thing that is different between UK and India is that in UK by law the PM has to answer questions put up to him or her by the opposition leaders. That is the way accountability is measured there. This is known as PMQ s or Prime Minister Questions and Answers. One can just go to YouTube or any streaming service and give Liz Truss and PMQ s and if they are interested of a certain date, give a date and they can see how she answered the questions thrown at her. Unfortunately, all she could do in both times were non-answers. In fact, the Tories seem to be using some of Labor s policies after they had bad-mouthed the same policies. Politics of right-wing both in the UK and the US seems so out of touch with the people whom they are supposed to protect and administer. An article about cyclists which is sort of half-truth, half irony shows how screwed up the policies are of the RW (right-wing). Now they are questions about the pensions triple-lock. Sadly, it is the working class who would suffer the most, most of the rich have already moved their money abroad several years ago. The Financial Times, did share a video about how things have been unfolding

Seems Ms. Truss forgot to add Financial Times in the list of anti-growth coalition she is so fond of. Also, the Tory party seems to want to create more tax havens in the UK and calling them investment zones. Of course, most of the top tax havens are situated around the UK itself. I wouldn t go more into as that would probably require its own article, although most of that information is all in public domain. Fracking I don t really want to take much time as the blog post has become long. There have been many articles written why Fracking is bad and that is why even the Tories had put in their Manifesto that they won t allow Fracking but apparently, today they are trying to reopen Fracking. And again how bad it is and can be found out by the article in Guardian.

KDE Extras 22.08.2 was released! https://kde.org/announcements/gear/22.08.2/ So I am working on new snaps! This release also includes a new content snap I made with frameworks 5.98 and Qt 5.15.6. With all the new goodness, I am (Re) testing all snaps to make sure they are working as expected. You can find a link to all of my snap releases from the KDE Snap Store Releases on the menu above. Some notable releases that have new fixes and improvements are:

• Kalzium: Molecular editor now works!
• Artikulate: Now works on arm64 ( eg. Rasberry Pi )
• Dragon: Now works on arm64
• Minuet: Now works on arm64

New 22.08.2 releases re-tested on arm64 and amd64:

• Picmi
• Kturtle
• Ksudoku
• Konquest

More coming soon! Please consider donating! I am seeking employment, but until then, I need assistance with gas to power my generator to power my laptop. Solar doesn t work great in these coming winter months Thank you for your consideration! https://www.patreon.com/sgmoore

I first installed Ubuntu when Ubuntu 6.06 LTS Dapper Drake was released. I was brand new to Linux. This was Ubuntu s first LTS release; the very first release of Ubuntu was only a year and a half before. I was impressed by how usable and useful the system was. It soon became my primary home operating system and I wanted to help make it better. On October 15, 2009, I was helping test the release candidates ISOs for the Ubuntu 9.10 release. Specifically, I tested Edubuntu. Edubuntu has since been discontinued but at the time it was an official Ubuntu flavor preloaded with lots of education apps. One of those education apps was Moodle, an e-learning platform. When testing Moodle, I found that a default installation would make Moodle impossible to use locally. I figured out how to fix this issue. This was really exciting: I finally found an Ubuntu bug I knew how to fix. I filed the bug report. This was very late in the Ubuntu 9.10 release process and Ubuntu was in the Final Freeze state. In Final Freeze, every upload to packages included in the default install need to be individually approved by a member of the Ubuntu Release Team. Also, I didn t have upload rights to Ubuntu. Jordan Mantha (LaserJock), an Edubuntu maintainer, sponsored my bug fix upload. I also forwarded my patch to Debian. While trying to figure out what wasn t working with Moodle, I stumbled across a packaging bug. Edubuntu provided a choice of MySQL or PostgreSQL for the system default database. MySQL was the default, but if PostgreSQL were chosen instead, Moodle wouldn t work. I figured out how to fix this bug too a week later. Jordan sponsored this upload and Steve Langasek from the Release Team approved it so it also was able to be fixed before 9.10 was released. Although the first bug was new to 9.10 because of a behavior change in a low-level dependency, this PostgreSQL bug existed in stable Ubuntu releases. Therefore, I prepared Stable Release Updates for Ubuntu 9.04 and Ubuntu 8.04 LTS. Afterwards Six months later, I was able to attend my first Ubuntu Developer Summit. I was living in Bahrain (in the Middle East) at the time and a trip to Belgium seemed easier to me than if I were living in the United States where I usually live. This was the Ubuntu Developer Summit where planning for Ubuntu 10.10 took place. I like to believe that I helped with the naming since I added Maverick to the wiki page where people contribute suggestions. I did not apply for financial sponsorship to attend and I stayed in a budget hotel on the other side of Brussels. The event venue was on the outskirts of Brussels so there wasn t a direct bus or metro line to get there. I rented a car. I didn t yet have a smartphone and I had a LOT of trouble navigating to and from the site every day. I learned then that it s best to stay close to the conference site since a lot of the event is actually in the unstructured time in the evenings. Fortunately, I managed to arrive in time for Mark Shuttleworth s keynote where the Unity desktop was first announced. This was released in Ubuntu 10.10 in the Ubuntu Netbook Remix and became the default for Ubuntu Desktop in Ubuntu 11.04. Ubuntu s switch to Unity provided me with a huge opportunity. In April 2011, GNOME 3.0 was released. I wanted to try it but it wasn t yet packaged in Ubuntu or Debian. It was suggested that I could help work on packaging the major new version in a PPA. The PPA was convenient because I was able to get permission to upload there easier than being able to upload directly to Ubuntu. My contributions there then enabled me to get upload rights to the Ubuntu Desktop packages later that year. At a later Ubuntu Developer Summit, it was suggested that I start an official Ubuntu flavor for GNOME. So along with Tim Lunn (darkxst), I co-founded Ubuntu GNOME. Years later, Canonical stopped actively developing Unity; instead, Ubuntu GNOME was merged into Ubuntu Desktop. Along the way, I became an Ubuntu Core Developer and a Debian Developer. And in January 2022, I joined Canonical on the Desktop Team. This all still feels amazing to me. It took me a long time to be comfortable calling myself a developer! Conclusion My first Ubuntu bugfix was 13 years ago this week. Because Ubuntu historically uses alphabetical adjective animal release names, 13 years means that we have rolled around to the letter K again! Later today, we begin release candidate ISO testing for Ubuntu 22.10 Kinetic Kudu . I encourage you to help us test the release candidates and report bugs that you find. If you figure out how to fix a bug, we still sponsor bug fixes. If you are an Ubuntu contributor, I highly encourage you to attend an Ubuntu Summit if you can. The first Ubuntu Summit in years will be in 3 weeks in Prague, but the intent is for the Ubuntu Summits to be recurring events again.

Dowry Few days back, had posted about the movie Raksha Bandhan and whatever I felt about it. Sadly, just couple of days back, somebody shared this link. Part of me was shocked and part of me was not. Couple of acquaintances of mine in the past had said the same thing for their daughters. And in such situations you are generally left speechless because you don t know what the right thing to do is. If he has shared it with you being an outsider, how many times he must have told the same to their wife and daughters? And from what little I have gathered in life, many people have justified it on similar lines. And while the protests were there, sadly the book was not removed. Now if nurses are reading such literature, how their thought process might be forming, you can tell :(. And these are the ones whom we call for when we are sick and tired :(. And I have not taken into account how the girls/women themselves might be feeling. There are similar things in another country but probably not the same, nor the same motivations though although feeling helplessness in both would be a common thing. But such statements are not alone. Another gentleman in slightly different context shared this as well

The above is a statement shared in a book recommended for CTET (Central Teacher s Eligibility Test that became mandatory to be taken as the RTE (Right To Education) Act came in.). The statement says People from cold places are white, beautiful, well-built, healthy and wise. And people from hot places are black, irritable and of violent nature. Now while I can agree with one part of the statement that people residing in colder regions are more fair than others but there are loads of other factors that determine fairness or skin color/skin pigmentation. After a bit of search came to know that this and similar articulation have been made in an idea/work called Environmental Determinism . Now if you look at that page, you would realize this was what colonialism is and was all about. The idea that the white man had god-given right to rule over others. Similarly, if you are fair, you can lord over others. Seems simplistic, but yet it has a powerful hold on many people in India. Forget the common man, this thinking is and was applicable to some of our better-known Freedom fighters. Pune s own Bal Gangadhar Tilak The Artic Home to the Vedas. It sort of talks about Aryans and how they invaded India and became settled here. I haven t read or have access to the book so have to rely on third-party sources. The reason I m sharing all this is that the right-wing has been doing this myth-making for sometime now and unless and until you put a light on it, it will continue to perpetuate . For those who have read this blog, do know that India is and has been in casteism from ever. They even took the fair comment and applied it to all Brahmins. According to them, all Brahmins are fair and hence have god-given right to lord over others. What is called the Eton boy s network serves the same in this casteism. The only solution is those idea under limelight and investigate. To take the above, how does one prove that all fair people are wise and peaceful while all people black and brown are violent. If that is so, how does one count for Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Junior, Nelson Mandela, Michael Jackson the list is probably endless. And not to forget that when Mahatma Gandhiji did his nonviolent movements either in India or in South Africa, both black and brown people in millions took part. Similar examples of Martin Luther King Jr. I know and read of so many non-violent civl movements that took place in the U.S. For e.g. Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott. So just based on these examples, one can conclude that at least the part about the fair having exclusive rights to being fair and noble is not correct. Now as far as violence goes, while every race, every community has had done violence in the past or been a victim of the same. So no one is and can be blameless, although in light of the above statement, the question can argumentated as to who were the Vikings? Both popular imagination and serious history shares stories about Vikings. The Vikings were somewhat nomadic in nature even though they had permanent settlements but even then they went on raids, raped women, captured both men and women and sold them at slaves. So they are what pirates came to be, but not the kind Hollywood romanticizes about. Europe in itself has been a tale in conflict since time immemorial. It is only after the formation of EU that most of these countries stopped fighting each other From a historical point perspective, it is too new. So even the part of fair being non-violent dies in face of this evidence. I could go on but this is enough on that topic.

Railways and Industrial Action around the World. While I have shared about Railways so many times on this blog, it continues to fascinate me that how people don t understand the first things about Railways. For e.g. Railways is a natural monopoly. What that means is and you can look at all and any type of privatization around the world, you will see it is a monopoly. Unlike the road or Skies, Railways is and would always be limited by infrastructure and the ability to have new infrastructure. Unlike in road or Skies (even they have their limits) you cannot run train services on a whim. At any particular point in time, only a single train could and should occupy a stretch of Railway network. You could have more trains on one line, but then the likelihood of front or rear-end collisions becomes a real possibility. You also need all sorts of good and reliable communications, redundant infrastructure so if one thing fails then you have something in place. The reason being a single train can carry anywhere from 2000 to 5000 passengers or more. While this is true of Indian Railways, Railways around the world would probably have some sort of similar numbers.It is in this light that I share the below videos.

To be more precise, see the fuller video

Now to give context to the recording above, Mike Lynch is the general secretary at RMT. For those who came in late, both UK and the U.S. have been threatened by railway strikes. And the reason for the strikes or threat of strikes is similar. Now from the company perspective, all they care is to invest less and make the most profits that can be given to equity shareholders. At the same time, they have freezed the salaries of railway workers for the last 3 years. While the politicians who were asking the questions, apparently gave themselves raise twice this year. They are asking them to negotiate at 8% while inflation in the UK has been 12.3% and projected to go higher. And it is not only the money. Since the 1980s when UK privatized the Railways, they stopped investing in the infrastructure. And that meant that the UK Railway infrastructure over period of time started getting behind and is even behind say Indian Railways which used to provide most bang for the buck. And Indian Railways is far from ideal. Ironically, most of the operators on UK are nationalized Railways of France, Germany etc. but after the hard Brexit, they too are mulling to cut their operations short, they have too There is also the EU Entry/Exit system that would come next year. Why am I sharing about what is happening in UK Rail, because the Indian Government wants to follow the same thing, and fooling the public into saying we would do it better. What inevitably will happen is that ticket prices go up, people no longer use the service, the number of services go down and eventually they are cancelled. This has happened both in Indian Railways as well as Airlines. In fact, GOI just recently announced a credit scheme just a few days back to help Airlines stay afloat. I was chatting with a friend who had come down to Pune from Chennai and the round-trip cost him INR 15k/- on that single trip alone. We reminisced how a few years ago, 8 years to be precise, we could buy an Air ticket for 2.5k/- just a few days before the trip and did it. I remember doing/experiencing at least a dozen odd trips via air in the years before 2014. My friend used to come to Pune, almost every weekend because he could afford it, now he can t do that. And these are people who are in the above 5-10% of the population. And this is not just in UK, but also in the United States. There is one big difference though, the U.S. is mainly a freight carrier while the UK Railway Operations are mostly passenger based. What was and is interesting that Scotland had to nationalize their services as they realized the Operators cannot or will not function when they were most needed. Most of the public even in the UK seem to want a nationalized rail service, at least their polls say so. So, it would definitely be interesting to see what happens in the UK next year. In the end, I know I promised to share about books, but the above incidents have just been too fascinating to not just share the news but also share what I think about them. Free markets function good where there is competition, for example what is and has been happening in China for EV s but not where you have natural monopolies. In all Railway privatization, you have to handover the area to one person, then they have no motivation. If you have multiple operators, then there would always be haggling as to who will run the train and at what time. In either scenario, it doesn t work and raises prices while not delivering anything better I do take examples from UK because lot of things are India are still the legacy of the British. The whole civil department that was created in 1953 is/was a copy of the British civil department at that time and it is to this day. P.S. Just came to know that the UK Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng was just sacked as UK Chancellor. I do commend Truss for facing the press even though she might be dumped a week later unlike our PM who hasn t faced a single press conference in the last 8 odd years.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTP6ogBqU7of The difference in Indian and UK politics seems to be that the English are now asking questions while here in India, most people are still sleeping without a care in the world. Another thing to note Minidebconf Palakkad is gonna happen 12-13th November 2022. I am probably not gonna go but would request everyone who wants to do something in free software to attend it. I am not sure whether I would be of any use like this and also when I get back, it would be an empty house. But for people young and old, who want to do anything with free/open source software it is a chance not to be missed. Registration of the same closes on 1st of November 2022. All the best, break a leg Just read this, beautifully done.

This entry explains how I have configured a linux bridge, dnsmasq and iptables to be able to run and communicate different virtualization systems and containers on laptops running Debian GNU/Linux. I ve used different variations of this setup for a long time with VirtualBox and KVM for the Virtual Machines and Linux-VServer, OpenVZ, LXC and lately Docker or Podman for the Containers.

Required packagesI m running Debian Sid with systemd and network-manager to configure the WiFi and Ethernet interfaces, but for the bridge I use bridge-utils with ifupdown (as I said this setup is old, I guess ifupdow2 and ifupdown-ng will work too). To start and stop the DNS and DHCP services and add NAT rules when the bridge is brought up or down I execute a script that uses:

• ip from iproute2 to get the network information,
• dnsmasq to provide the DNS and DHCP services (currently only the dnsmasq-base package is needed and it is recommended by network-manager, so it is probably installed),
• iptables to configure NAT (for now docker kind of forces me to keep using iptables, but at some point I d like to move to nftables).

To make sure you have everything installed you can run the following command:

sudo apt install bridge-utils dnsmasq-base ifupdown iproute2 iptables

Bridge configurationThe bridge configuration for ifupdow is available on the file /etc/network/interfaces.d/vmbr0:

# Virtual servers NAT Bridge
auto vmbr0
iface vmbr0 inet static
    address         10.0.4.1
    network         10.0.4.0
    netmask         255.255.255.0
    broadcast       10.0.4.255
    bridge_ports    none
    bridge_maxwait  0
    up              /usr/local/sbin/vmbridge $ IFACE  start nat
    pre-down        /usr/local/sbin/vmbridge $ IFACE  stop nat

Warning: To use a separate file with ifupdown make sure that /etc/network/interfaces contains the line:

source /etc/network/interfaces.d/*

or add its contents to /etc/network/interfaces directly, if you prefer.

This configuration creates a bridge with the address 10.0.4.1 and assumes that the machines connected to it will use the 10.0.4.0/24 network; you can change the network address if you want, as long as you use a private range and it does not collide with networks used in your Virtual Machines all should be OK. The vmbridge script is used to start the dnsmasq server and setup the NAT rules when the interface is brought up and remove the firewall rules and stop the dnsmasq server when it is brought down.

The vmbridge scriptThe vmbridge script launches an instance of dnsmasq that binds to the bridge interface (vmbr0 in our case) that is used as DNS and DHCP server. The DNS server reads the /etc/hosts file to publish local DNS names and forwards all the other requests to the the dnsmasq server launched by NetworkManager that is listening on the loopback interface. As this server already does catching we disable it for our server, with the added advantage that, if we change networks, new requests go to the new resolvers because the DNS server handled by NetworkManager gets restarted and flushes its cache (this is useful if we connect to a new network that has internal DNS servers that are configured to do split DNS for internal services; if we use this model all requests get the internal address as soon as the DNS server is queried again). The DHCP server is configured to provide IPs to unknown hosts for a sub range of the addresses on the bridge network and use fixed IPs if the /etc/ethers file has a MAC with a matching hostname on the /etc/hosts file. To make things work with old DHCP clients the script also adds checksums to the DHCP packets using iptables (when the interface is not linked to a physical device the kernel does not add checksums, but we can fix it adding a rule on the mangle table). If we want external connectivity we can pass the nat argument and then the script creates a MASQUERADE rule for the bridge network and enables IP forwarding. The script source code is the following:

/usr/local/sbin/vmbridge

#!/bin/sh
set -e
# ---------
# VARIABLES
# ---------
LOCAL_DOMAIN="vmnet"
MIN_IP_LEASE="192"
MAX_IP_LEASE="223"
# ---------
# FUNCTIONS
# ---------
get_net()  
  NET="$(
    ip a ls "$ BRIDGE " 2>/dev/null   sed -ne 's/^.*inet \(.*\) brd.*$/\1/p'
  )"
  [ "$NET" ]   return 1
 
checksum_fix_start()  
  iptables -t mangle -A POSTROUTING -o "$ BRIDGE " -p udp --dport 68 \
    -j CHECKSUM --checksum-fill 2>/dev/null   true
 
checksum_fix_stop()  
  iptables -t mangle -D POSTROUTING -o "$ BRIDGE " -p udp --dport 68 \
    -j CHECKSUM --checksum-fill 2>/dev/null   true
 
nat_start()  
  [ "$NAT" = "yes" ]   return 0
  # Configure NAT
  iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -s "$ NET " ! -d "$ NET " -j MASQUERADE
  # Enable forwarding (just in case)
  echo 1 >/proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward
 
nat_stop()  
  [ "$NAT" = "yes" ]   return 0
  iptables -t nat -D POSTROUTING -s "$ NET " ! -d "$ NET " \
    -j MASQUERADE 2>/dev/null   true
 
do_start()  
  # Bridge address
  _addr="$ NET%%/* "
  # DNS leases (between .MIN_IP_LEASE and .MAX_IP_LEASE)
  _dhcp_range="$ _addr%.* .$ MIN_IP_LEASE ,$ _addr%.* .$ MAX_IP_LEASE "
  # Bridge mtu
  _mtu="$(
    ip link show dev "$ BRIDGE "  
      sed -n -e '/mtu/   s/^.*mtu \([0-9]\+\).*$/\1/p  '
  )"
  # Compute extra dnsmasq options
  dnsmasq_extra_opts=""
  # Disable gateway when not using NAT
  if [ "$NAT" != "yes" ]; then
    dnsmasq_extra_opts="$dnsmasq_extra_opts --dhcp-option=3"
  fi
  # Adjust MTU size if needed
  if [ -n "$_mtu" ] && [ "$_mtu" -ne "1500" ]; then
    dnsmasq_extra_opts="$dnsmasq_extra_opts --dhcp-option=26,$_mtu"
  fi
  # shellcheck disable=SC2086
  dnsmasq --bind-interfaces \
    --cache-size="0" \
    --conf-file="/dev/null" \
    --dhcp-authoritative \
    --dhcp-leasefile="/var/lib/misc/dnsmasq.$ BRIDGE .leases" \
    --dhcp-no-override \
    --dhcp-range "$ _dhcp_range " \
    --domain="$ LOCAL_DOMAIN " \
    --except-interface="lo" \
    --expand-hosts \
    --interface="$ BRIDGE " \
    --listen-address "$ _addr " \
    --no-resolv \
    --pid-file="$ PIDF " \
    --read-ethers \
    --server="127.0.0.1" \
    $dnsmasq_extra_opts
  checksum_fix_start
  nat_start
 
do_stop()  
  nat_stop
  checksum_fix_stop
  if [ -f "$ PIDF " ]; then
    kill "$(cat "$ PIDF ")"   true
    rm -f "$ PIDF "
  fi
 
do_status()  
  if [ -f "$ PIDF " ] && kill -HUP "$(cat "$ PIDF ")"; then
    echo "dnsmasq RUNNING"
  else
    echo "dnsmasq NOT running"
  fi
 
do_reload()  
  [ -f "$ PIDF " ] && kill -HUP "$(cat "$ PIDF ")"
 
usage()  
  echo "Uso: $0 BRIDGE (start stop [nat]) status reload"
  exit 1
 
# ----
# MAIN
# ----
[ "$#" -ge "2" ]   usage
BRIDGE="$1"
OPTION="$2"
shift 2
NAT="no"
for arg in "$@"; do
  case "$arg" in
  nat) NAT="yes" ;;
  *) echo "Unknown arg '$arg'" && exit 1 ;;
  esac
done
PIDF="/var/run/vmbridge-$ BRIDGE -dnsmasq.pid"
case "$OPTION" in
start) get_net && do_start ;;
stop) get_net && do_stop ;;
status) do_status ;;
reload) get_net && do_reload ;;
*) echo "Unknown command '$OPTION'" && exit 1 ;;
esac
# vim: ts=2:sw=2:et:ai:sts=2

NetworkManager ConfigurationThe default /etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf file has the following contents:

[main]
plugins=ifupdown,keyfile
[ifupdown]
managed=false

Which means that it will leave interfaces managed by ifupdown alone and, by default, will send the connection DNS configuration to systemd-resolved if it is installed. As we want to use dnsmasq for DNS resolution, but we don t want NetworkManager to modify our /etc/resolv.conf we are going to add the following file (/etc/NetworkManager/conf.d/dnsmasq.conf) to our system:

/etc/NetworkManager/conf.d/dnsmasq.conf

[main]
dns=dnsmasq
rc-manager=unmanaged

and restart the NetworkManager service:

$ sudo systemctl restart NetworkManager.service

From now on the NetworkManager will start a dnsmasq service that queries the servers provided by the DHCP servers we connect to on 127.0.0.1:53 but will not touch our /etc/resolv.conf file.

Configuring systemd-resolvedIf we start using our own name server but our system has systemd-resolved installed we will no longer need or use the DNS stub; programs using it will use our dnsmasq server directly now, but we keep running systemd-resolved for the host programs that use its native api or access it through /etc/nsswitch.conf (when libnss-resolve is installed). To disable the stub we add a /etc/systemd/resolved.conf.d/disable-stub.conf file to our machine with the following content:

# Disable the DNS Stub Listener, we use our own dnsmasq
[Resolve]
DNSStubListener=no

and restart the systemd-resolved to make sure that the stub is stopped:

$ sudo systemctl restart systemd-resolved.service

Adjusting /etc/resolv.confFirst we remove the existing /etc/resolv.conf file (it does not matter if it is a link or a regular file) and then create a new one that contains at least the following line (we can add a search line if is useful for us):

nameserver 10.0.4.1

From now on we will be using the dnsmasq server launched when we bring up the vmbr0 for multiple systems:

• as our main DNS server from the host (if we use the standard /etc/nsswitch.conf and libnss-resolve is installed it is queried first, but the systemd-resolved uses it as forwarder by default if needed),
• as the DNS server of the Virtual Machines or containers that use DHCP for network configuration and attach their virtual interfaces to our bridge,
• as the DNS server of docker containers that get the DNS information from /etc/resolv.conf (if we have entries that use loopback addresses the containers that don t use the host network tend to fail, as those addresses inside the running containers are not linked to the loopback device of the host).

TestingAfter all the configuration files and scripts are in place we just need to bring up the bridge interface and check that everything works:

$ # Bring interface up
$ sudo ifup vmbr0
$ # Check that it is available
$ ip a ls dev vmbr0
4: vmbr0: <NO-CARRIER,BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP> mtu 1500 qdisc noqueue state DOWN
          group default qlen 1000
    link/ether 0a:b8:ef:b8:07:6c brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
    inet 10.0.4.1/24 brd 10.0.4.255 scope global vmbr0
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
$ # View the listening ports used by our dnsmasq servers
$ sudo ss -tulpan   grep dnsmasq
udp UNCONN 0 0  127.0.0.1:53     0.0.0.0:* users:(("dnsmasq",pid=1733930,fd=4))
udp UNCONN 0 0  10.0.4.1:53      0.0.0.0:* users:(("dnsmasq",pid=1705267,fd=6))
udp UNCONN 0 0  0.0.0.0%vmbr0:67 0.0.0.0:* users:(("dnsmasq",pid=1705267,fd=4))
tcp LISTEN 0 32 10.0.4.1:53      0.0.0.0:* users:(("dnsmasq",pid=1705267,fd=7))
tcp LISTEN 0 32 127.0.0.1:53     0.0.0.0:* users:(("dnsmasq",pid=1733930,fd=5))
$ # Verify that the DNS server works on the vmbr0 address
$ host www.debian.org 10.0.4.1
Name: 10.0.4.1
Address: 10.0.4.1#53
Aliases:
www.debian.org has address 130.89.148.77
www.debian.org has IPv6 address 2001:67c:2564:a119::77

Managing running systemsIf we want to update DNS entries and/or MAC addresses we can edit the /etc/hosts and /etc/ethers files and reload the dnsmasq configuration using the vmbridge script:

$ sudo /usr/local/sbin/vmbridge vmbr0 reload

That call sends a signal to the running dnsmasq server and it reloads the files; after that we can refresh the DHCP addresses from the client machines or start using the new DNS names immediately.

Death Certificate After waiting for almost two, two, and a half months, I finally got mum s death certificate last week. A part of me was saddened as it felt like I was nailing her or putting nails to the coffin or whatever it is, (even though I m an Agarwal) I just felt sad and awful. I was told just get a death certificate and your problems will be over. Some people wanted me to give some amount under the table or something which I didn t want to party of and because of that perhaps it took a month, month and a half more as I came to know later that it had been issued almost a month and a half back. The inflation over the last 8 years of the present Govt. has made the corrupt even more corrupt, all the while projecting and telling others that the others are corrupt. There had been also a few politicians who were caught red-handed but then pieces of evidence & witnesses vanish overnight. I don t really wanna go in that direction as it would make for an unpleasant reading with no solutions at all unless the present Central Govt. goes out.

Intestate and Will I came to know the word Intestate. This was a new word/term for me. A lookup told me that intestate means a person dying without putting a will. That legal term comes from U.K. law. I had read a long long time back that almost all our laws have and were made or taken from U.K. law. IIRC, massive sections of the CRPC Act even today have that colonial legacy. While in its (BJP) manifesto that had been shared with the public at the time of the election, they had shared that they will remove a whole swathe of laws that don t make sense in today s environment. But when hard and good questions were asked, they trimmed a few, modified a few, and left most of them as it is. Sadly, most of the laws that they did modify increased Government control over people instead of decreasing, It s been 8 years and yet we still don t have a Privacy law. They had made something but it was too vague and would have invited suits from day 1 so pretty much on backburner :(. A good insight into what I mean is an article in the Hindu I read a few days back. Once you read that article, I am sure you will have as many questions as I have but sadly no answers. Law is not supposed to be partisan but today it is. I could cite examples from both the U.S. and UK courts about progressive judgments or the way they go about it, but then again when our people think they know better But this again does not help me apart from setting some kind of background of where we are.) I have on this blog also shared how Africans have been setting new records in transparency and they did it almost 5 years back. For those new to the blog, African countries have been now broadcasting proceedings of their SC for almost 5 years now. I noticed it when privacy law was being debated and a few handles that I follow on Twitter and elsewhere had gone and given their submission in their SC. It was fascinating to not only hear but also read about the case from multiple viewpoints. And just to remind people, I am sharing all of this from Pune, Maharashtra which is the second-biggest city in Maharashtra that has something like six million people and probably a million or more transitory students, and casual laborers but then again that doesn t help me other than providing a kind of context to what I m sharing.. Now a couple of years back or more I had asked mum to make a will. If she wanted to bequeath something to somebody else she could do that, had shared about that. There was some article in Indian Express or elsewhere that told people what they should be doing, especially if they had cost the barrier of age 60. Now for reasons best known to her, she refused and now I have to figure out what is the right way to go about doing things.

Twitter Experiences Now before Twitter, a few people had been asking me about having a legal heir certificate, while others are asking about a succession certificate and some claim a Death Certificate is enough. Now I asked the same question on Twitter hoping at the max of 5-10 responses but was overwhelmed by the response. I got something like 50-60 odd replies. Probably, one of the better responses was given by Dr. Paras Jain who shared the following

Answer is qualified Movable assets nothing required Bank LIC flat with society nomination done nothing required except death certificate. However, each will insist on a notarized indemnity bond If the nomination is not done. Depends on whims & fancy of each mind legal heir certificate,+ all Dr. Paras Jain. (cleared up the grammar a little, otherwise, views are of Dr. Paras.) What was interesting for me is that most people just didn t give me advice, many of them also shared their own experiences or what they did or went through. I was surprised to learn e.g. that a succession certificate can take up to 6 months or more. Part of me isn t surprised to learn that as do know we have a huge pendency of cases in High Courts, District Courts leading all the way to the Supreme Court. India Today shared a brief article sharing the same and similar issues. Such delays have become far too common now

Supertech Demolition and Others Over the last couple of months, a number of high-profile demolitions have taken place and in most cases, the loss has been of homebuyers. See for e.g. the case of Supertech. A much more detailed article was penned by Moneylife. There were a few Muslims whose homes were demolished just a couple of months back that were being celebrated, but now just 2-3 days back a politician by the name of Shrikant Tyagi, a BJP leader, his flat was partly demolished and there was a lot of hue and cry. Although we shouldn t be discussing on the basis of religion but legality, somehow the idea has been put that there are two kinds of laws, one for the majority, the other for the minority. And this has been going on for the last 8 odd years, hence you see different reactions to the same incidents instead of similar reactions. In all the cases, no strictures are passed either against the Municipality or against lenders. The most obvious question, let s say for argument s sake, I was a homeowner in Supertech. I bought a flat for say 10 lakhs in 2012. According to the courts, today I am supposed to get 22 lakhs at 12% simple interest for 10 years. Let s say even if the builder was in a position and does honor the order, the homeowner will not get a house in the same area as the circle rate would probably have quadrupled by then at the very least. The circle rate alone might be the above amount. The reason is very simple, a builder buys land on the cheap when there is no development around. His/her/their whole idea is once development happens due to other builders also building flats, the whole area gets developed and they are able to sell the flats at a premium. Even Circle rates get affected as the builder pays below the table and asks the officers of the municipal authority to hike the circle rate every few months. Again, wouldn t go into much depth as the whole thing is rotten to the core. There are many such projects. I have shared Krishnaraj Rao s videos on this blog a few times. I am sure there are a few good men like him. At the end, sadly this is where we are P.S. I haven t shared any book reviews this week as this post itself has become too long. I probably may blog about a couple of books in the next couple of days, till later.

Well this is a mouthful. I recently worked on a neat hack called puppet-package-check. It is designed to warn about manually installed packages, to make sure "everything is in Puppet". But it turns out it can (probably?) dramatically decrease the bootstrap time of Puppet bootstrap when it needs to install a large number of packages.

Detecting manual packages On a cleanly filed workstation, it looks like this:

root@emma:/home/anarcat/bin# ./puppet-package-check -v
listing puppet packages...
listing apt packages...
loading apt cache...
0 unmanaged packages found

A messy workstation will look like this:

root@curie:/home/anarcat/bin# ./puppet-package-check -v
listing puppet packages...
listing apt packages...
loading apt cache...
288 unmanaged packages found
apparmor-utils beignet-opencl-icd bridge-utils clustershell cups-pk-helper davfs2 dconf-cli dconf-editor dconf-gsettings-backend ddccontrol ddrescueview debmake debootstrap decopy dict-devil dict-freedict-eng-fra dict-freedict-eng-spa dict-freedict-fra-eng dict-freedict-spa-eng diffoscope dnsdiag dropbear-initramfs ebtables efibootmgr elpa-lua-mode entr eog evince figlet file file-roller fio flac flex font-manager fonts-cantarell fonts-inconsolata fonts-ipafont-gothic fonts-ipafont-mincho fonts-liberation fonts-monoid fonts-monoid-tight fonts-noto fonts-powerline fonts-symbola freeipmi freetype2-demos ftp fwupd-amd64-signed gallery-dl gcc-arm-linux-gnueabihf gcolor3 gcp gdisk gdm3 gdu gedit gedit-plugins gettext-base git-debrebase gnome-boxes gnote gnupg2 golang-any golang-docker-credential-helpers golang-golang-x-tools grub-efi-amd64-signed gsettings-desktop-schemas gsfonts gstreamer1.0-libav gstreamer1.0-plugins-base gstreamer1.0-plugins-good gstreamer1.0-plugins-ugly gstreamer1.0-pulseaudio gtypist gvfs-backends hackrf hashcat html2text httpie httping hugo humanfriendly iamerican-huge ibus ibus-gtk3 ibus-libpinyin ibus-pinyin im-config imediff img2pdf imv initramfs-tools input-utils installation-birthday internetarchive ipmitool iptables iptraf-ng jackd2 jupyter jupyter-nbextension-jupyter-js-widgets jupyter-qtconsole k3b kbtin kdialog keditbookmarks keepassxc kexec-tools keyboard-configuration kfind konsole krb5-locales kwin-x11 leiningen lightdm lintian linux-image-amd64 linux-perf lmodern lsb-base lvm2 lynx lz4json magic-wormhole mailscripts mailutils manuskript mat2 mate-notification-daemon mate-themes mime-support mktorrent mp3splt mpdris2 msitools mtp-tools mtree-netbsd mupdf nautilus nautilus-sendto ncal nd ndisc6 neomutt net-tools nethogs nghttp2-client nocache npm2deb ntfs-3g ntpdate nvme-cli nwipe obs-studio okular-extra-backends openstack-clients openstack-pkg-tools paprefs pass-extension-audit pcmanfm pdf-presenter-console pdf2svg percol pipenv playerctl plymouth plymouth-themes popularity-contest progress prometheus-node-exporter psensor pubpaste pulseaudio python3-ldap qjackctl qpdfview qrencode r-cran-ggplot2 r-cran-reshape2 rake restic rhash rpl rpm2cpio rs ruby ruby-dev ruby-feedparser ruby-magic ruby-mocha ruby-ronn rygel-playbin rygel-tracker s-tui sanoid saytime scrcpy scrcpy-server screenfetch scrot sdate sddm seahorse shim-signed sigil smartmontools smem smplayer sng sound-juicer sound-theme-freedesktop spectre-meltdown-checker sq ssh-audit sshuttle stress-ng strongswan strongswan-swanctl syncthing system-config-printer system-config-printer-common system-config-printer-udev systemd-bootchart systemd-container tardiff task-desktop task-english task-ssh-server tasksel tellico texinfo texlive-fonts-extra texlive-lang-cyrillic texlive-lang-french texlive-lang-german texlive-lang-italian texlive-xetex tftp-hpa thunar-archive-plugin tidy tikzit tint2 tintin++ tipa tpm2-tools traceroute tree trocla ucf udisks2 unifont unrar-free upower usbguard uuid-runtime vagrant-cachier vagrant-libvirt virt-manager vmtouch vorbis-tools w3m wamerican wamerican-huge wfrench whipper whohas wireshark xapian-tools xclip xdg-user-dirs-gtk xlax xmlto xsensors xserver-xorg xsltproc xxd xz-utils yubioath-desktop zathura zathura-pdf-poppler zenity zfs-dkms zfs-initramfs zfsutils-linux zip zlib1g zlib1g-dev
157 old: apparmor-utils clustershell davfs2 dconf-cli dconf-editor ddccontrol ddrescueview decopy dnsdiag ebtables efibootmgr elpa-lua-mode entr figlet file-roller fio flac flex font-manager freetype2-demos ftp gallery-dl gcc-arm-linux-gnueabihf gcolor3 gcp gdu gedit git-debrebase gnote golang-docker-credential-helpers golang-golang-x-tools gtypist hackrf hashcat html2text httpie httping hugo humanfriendly iamerican-huge ibus ibus-pinyin imediff input-utils internetarchive ipmitool iptraf-ng jackd2 jupyter-qtconsole k3b kbtin kdialog keditbookmarks keepassxc kexec-tools kfind konsole leiningen lightdm lynx lz4json magic-wormhole manuskript mat2 mate-notification-daemon mktorrent mp3splt msitools mtp-tools mtree-netbsd nautilus nautilus-sendto nd ndisc6 neomutt net-tools nethogs nghttp2-client nocache ntpdate nwipe obs-studio openstack-pkg-tools paprefs pass-extension-audit pcmanfm pdf-presenter-console pdf2svg percol pipenv playerctl qjackctl qpdfview qrencode r-cran-ggplot2 r-cran-reshape2 rake restic rhash rpl rpm2cpio rs ruby-feedparser ruby-magic ruby-mocha ruby-ronn s-tui saytime scrcpy screenfetch scrot sdate seahorse shim-signed sigil smem smplayer sng sound-juicer spectre-meltdown-checker sq ssh-audit sshuttle stress-ng system-config-printer system-config-printer-common tardiff tasksel tellico texlive-lang-cyrillic texlive-lang-french tftp-hpa tikzit tint2 tintin++ tpm2-tools traceroute tree unrar-free vagrant-cachier vagrant-libvirt vmtouch vorbis-tools w3m wamerican wamerican-huge wfrench whipper whohas xdg-user-dirs-gtk xlax xmlto xsensors xxd yubioath-desktop zenity zip
131 new: beignet-opencl-icd bridge-utils cups-pk-helper dconf-gsettings-backend debmake debootstrap dict-devil dict-freedict-eng-fra dict-freedict-eng-spa dict-freedict-fra-eng dict-freedict-spa-eng diffoscope dropbear-initramfs eog evince file fonts-cantarell fonts-inconsolata fonts-ipafont-gothic fonts-ipafont-mincho fonts-liberation fonts-monoid fonts-monoid-tight fonts-noto fonts-powerline fonts-symbola freeipmi fwupd-amd64-signed gdisk gdm3 gedit-plugins gettext-base gnome-boxes gnupg2 golang-any grub-efi-amd64-signed gsettings-desktop-schemas gsfonts gstreamer1.0-libav gstreamer1.0-plugins-base gstreamer1.0-plugins-good gstreamer1.0-plugins-ugly gstreamer1.0-pulseaudio gvfs-backends ibus-gtk3 ibus-libpinyin im-config img2pdf imv initramfs-tools installation-birthday iptables jupyter jupyter-nbextension-jupyter-js-widgets keyboard-configuration krb5-locales kwin-x11 lintian linux-image-amd64 linux-perf lmodern lsb-base lvm2 mailscripts mailutils mate-themes mime-support mpdris2 mupdf ncal npm2deb ntfs-3g nvme-cli okular-extra-backends openstack-clients plymouth plymouth-themes popularity-contest progress prometheus-node-exporter psensor pubpaste pulseaudio python3-ldap ruby ruby-dev rygel-playbin rygel-tracker sanoid scrcpy-server sddm smartmontools sound-theme-freedesktop strongswan strongswan-swanctl syncthing system-config-printer-udev systemd-bootchart systemd-container task-desktop task-english task-ssh-server texinfo texlive-fonts-extra texlive-lang-german texlive-lang-italian texlive-xetex thunar-archive-plugin tidy tipa trocla ucf udisks2 unifont upower usbguard uuid-runtime virt-manager wireshark xapian-tools xclip xserver-xorg xsltproc xz-utils zathura zathura-pdf-poppler zfs-dkms zfs-initramfs zfsutils-linux zlib1g zlib1g-dev

Yuck! That's a lot of shit to go through. Notice how the packages get sorted between "old" and "new" packages. This is because popcon is used as a tool to mark which packages are "old". If you have unmanaged packages, the "old" ones are likely things that you can uninstall, for example. If you don't have popcon installed, you'll also get this warning:

popcon stats not available: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/var/log/popularity-contest'

The error can otherwise be safely ignored, but you won't get "help" prioritizing the packages to add to your manifests. Note that the tool ignores packages that were "marked" (see apt-mark(8)) as automatically installed. This implies that you might have to do a little bit of cleanup the first time you run this, as Debian doesn't necessarily mark all of those packages correctly on first install. For example, here's how it looks like on a clean install, after Puppet ran:

root@angela:/home/anarcat# ./bin/puppet-package-check -v
listing puppet packages...
listing apt packages...
loading apt cache...
127 unmanaged packages found
ca-certificates console-setup cryptsetup-initramfs dbus file gcc-12-base gettext-base grub-common grub-efi-amd64 i3lock initramfs-tools iw keyboard-configuration krb5-locales laptop-detect libacl1 libapparmor1 libapt-pkg6.0 libargon2-1 libattr1 libaudit-common libaudit1 libblkid1 libbpf0 libbsd0 libbz2-1.0 libc6 libcap-ng0 libcap2 libcap2-bin libcom-err2 libcrypt1 libcryptsetup12 libdb5.3 libdebconfclient0 libdevmapper1.02.1 libedit2 libelf1 libext2fs2 libfdisk1 libffi8 libgcc-s1 libgcrypt20 libgmp10 libgnutls30 libgpg-error0 libgssapi-krb5-2 libhogweed6 libidn2-0 libip4tc2 libiw30 libjansson4 libjson-c5 libk5crypto3 libkeyutils1 libkmod2 libkrb5-3 libkrb5support0 liblocale-gettext-perl liblockfile-bin liblz4-1 liblzma5 libmd0 libmnl0 libmount1 libncurses6 libncursesw6 libnettle8 libnewt0.52 libnftables1 libnftnl11 libnl-3-200 libnl-genl-3-200 libnl-route-3-200 libnss-systemd libp11-kit0 libpam-systemd libpam0g libpcre2-8-0 libpcre3 libpcsclite1 libpopt0 libprocps8 libreadline8 libselinux1 libsemanage-common libsemanage2 libsepol2 libslang2 libsmartcols1 libss2 libssl1.1 libssl3 libstdc++6 libsystemd-shared libsystemd0 libtasn1-6 libtext-charwidth-perl libtext-iconv-perl libtext-wrapi18n-perl libtinfo6 libtirpc-common libtirpc3 libudev1 libunistring2 libuuid1 libxtables12 libxxhash0 libzstd1 linux-image-amd64 logsave lsb-base lvm2 media-types mlocate ncurses-term pass-extension-otp puppet python3-reportbug shim-signed tasksel ucf usr-is-merged util-linux-extra wpasupplicant xorg zlib1g
popcon stats not available: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/var/log/popularity-contest'

Normally, there should be unmanaged packages here. But because of the way Debian is installed, a lot of libraries and some core packages are marked as manually installed, and are of course not managed through Puppet. There are two solutions to this problem:

• really manage everything in Puppet (argh)
• mark packages as automatically installed

I typically chose the second path and mark a ton of stuff as automatic. Then either they will be auto-removed, or will stop being listed. In the above scenario, one could mark all libraries as automatically installed with:

apt-mark auto $(./bin/puppet-package-check   grep -o 'lib[^ ]*')

... but if you trust that most of that stuff is actually garbage that you don't really want installed anyways, you could just mark it all as automatically installed:

apt-mark auto $(./bin/puppet-package-check)

In my case, that ended up keeping basically all libraries (because of course they're installed for some reason) and auto-removing this:

dh-dkms discover-data dkms libdiscover2 libjsoncpp25 libssl1.1 linux-headers-amd64 mlocate pass-extension-otp pass-otp plocate x11-apps x11-session-utils xinit xorg

You'll notice xorg in there: yep, that's bad. Not what I wanted. But for some reason, on other workstations, I did not actually have xorg installed. Turns out having xserver-xorg is enough, and that one has dependencies. So now I guess I just learned to stop worrying and live without X(org).

Optimizing large package installs But that, of course, is not all. Why make things simple when you can have an unreadable title that is trying to be both syntactically correct and click-baity enough to flatter my vain ego? Right. One of the challenges in bootstrapping Puppet with large package lists is that it's slow. Puppet lists packages as individual resources and will basically run apt install $PKG on every package in the manifest, one at a time. While the overhead of apt is generally small, when you add things like apt-listbugs, apt-listchanges, needrestart, triggers and so on, it can take forever setting up a new host. So for initial installs, it can actually makes sense to skip the queue and just install everything in one big batch. And because the above tool inspects the packages installed by Puppet, you can run it against a catalog and have a full lists of all the packages Puppet would install, even before I even had Puppet running. So when reinstalling my laptop, I basically did this:

apt install puppet-agent/experimental
puppet agent --test --noop
apt install $(./puppet-package-check --debug \
    2>&1   grep ^puppet\ packages 
      sed 's/puppet packages://;s/ /\n/g'
      grep -v -e onionshare -e golint -e git-sizer -e github-backup -e hledger -e xsane -e audacity -e chirp -e elpa-flycheck -e elpa-lsp-ui -e yubikey-manager -e git-annex -e hopenpgp-tools -e puppet
) puppet-agent/experimental

That massive grep was because there are currently a lot of packages missing from bookworm. Those are all packages that I have in my catalog but that still haven't made it to bookworm. Sad, I know. I eventually worked around that by adding bullseye sources so that the Puppet manifest actually ran. The point here is that this improves the Puppet run time a lot. All packages get installed at once, and you get a nice progress bar. Then you actually run Puppet to deploy configurations and all the other goodies:

puppet agent --test

I wish I could tell you how much faster that ran. I don't know, and I will not go through a full reinstall just to please your curiosity. The only hard number I have is that it installed 444 packages (which exploded in 10,191 packages with dependencies) in a mere 10 minutes. That might also be with the packages already downloaded. In any case, I have that gut feeling it's faster, so you'll have to just trust my gut. It is, after all, much more important than you might think.

Similar work The blueprint system is something similar to this:

It figures out what you ve done manually, stores it locally in a Git repository, generates code that s able to recreate your efforts, and helps you deploy those changes to production

That tool has unfortunately been abandoned for a decade at this point. Also note that the AutoRemove::RecommendsImportant and AutoRemove::SuggestsImportant are relevant here. If it is set to true (the default), a package will not be removed if it is (respectively) a Recommends or Suggests of another package (as opposed to the normal Depends). In other words, if you want to also auto-remove packages that are only Suggests, you would, for example, add this to apt.conf:

AutoRemove::SuggestsImportant false;

Paul Wise has tried to make the Debian installer and debootstrap properly mark packages as automatically installed in the past, but his bug reports were rejected. The other suggestions in this section are also from Paul, thanks!

This post describes how I ve put together a simple static content server for kubernetes clusters using a Pod with a persistent volume and multiple containers: an sftp server to manage contents, a web server to publish them with optional access control and another one to run scripts which need access to the volume filesystem. The sftp server runs using MySecureShell, the web server is nginx and the script runner uses the webhook tool to publish endpoints to call them (the calls will come from other Pods that run backend servers or are executed from Jobs or CronJobs).

HistoryThe system was developed because we had a NodeJS API with endpoints to upload files and store them on S3 compatible services that were later accessed via HTTPS, but the requirements changed and we needed to be able to publish folders instead of individual files using their original names and apply access restrictions using our API. Thinking about our requirements the use of a regular filesystem to keep the files and folders was a good option, as uploading and serving files is simple. For the upload I decided to use the sftp protocol, mainly because I already had an sftp container image based on mysecureshell prepared; once we settled on that we added sftp support to the API server and configured it to upload the files to our server instead of using S3 buckets. To publish the files we added a nginx container configured to work as a reverse proxy that uses the ngx_http_auth_request_module to validate access to the files (the sub request is configurable, in our deployment we have configured it to call our API to check if the user can access a given URL). Finally we added a third container when we needed to execute some tasks directly on the filesystem (using kubectl exec with the existing containers did not seem a good idea, as that is not supported by CronJobs objects, for example). The solution we found avoiding the NIH Syndrome (i.e. write our own tool) was to use the webhook tool to provide the endpoints to call the scripts; for now we have three:

• one to get the disc usage of a PATH,
• one to hardlink all the files that are identical on the filesystem,
• one to copy files and folders from S3 buckets to our filesystem.

Container definitions

mysecureshellThe mysecureshell container can be used to provide an sftp service with multiple users (although the files are owned by the same UID and GID) using standalone containers (launched with docker or podman) or in an orchestration system like kubernetes, as we are going to do here. The image is generated using the following Dockerfile:

ARG ALPINE_VERSION=3.16.2
FROM alpine:$ALPINE_VERSION as builder
LABEL maintainer="Sergio Talens-Oliag <sto@mixinet.net>"
RUN apk update &&\
 apk add --no-cache alpine-sdk git musl-dev &&\
 git clone https://github.com/sto/mysecureshell.git &&\
 cd mysecureshell &&\
 ./configure --prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc --mandir=/usr/share/man\
 --localstatedir=/var --with-shutfile=/var/lib/misc/sftp.shut --with-debug=2 &&\
 make all && make install &&\
 rm -rf /var/cache/apk/*
FROM alpine:$ALPINE_VERSION
LABEL maintainer="Sergio Talens-Oliag <sto@mixinet.net>"
COPY --from=builder /usr/bin/mysecureshell /usr/bin/mysecureshell
COPY --from=builder /usr/bin/sftp-* /usr/bin/
RUN apk update &&\
 apk add --no-cache openssh shadow pwgen &&\
 sed -i -e "s ^.*\(AuthorizedKeysFile\).*$ \1 /etc/ssh/auth_keys/%u "\
 /etc/ssh/sshd_config &&\
 mkdir /etc/ssh/auth_keys &&\
 cat /dev/null > /etc/motd &&\
 add-shell '/usr/bin/mysecureshell' &&\
 rm -rf /var/cache/apk/*
COPY bin/* /usr/local/bin/
COPY etc/sftp_config /etc/ssh/
COPY entrypoint.sh /
EXPOSE 22
VOLUME /sftp
ENTRYPOINT ["/entrypoint.sh"]
CMD ["server"]

The /etc/sftp_config file is used to configure the mysecureshell server to have all the user homes under /sftp/data, only allow them to see the files under their home directories as if it were at the root of the server and close idle connections after 5m of inactivity:

etc/sftp_config

# Default mysecureshell configuration
<Default>
   # All users will have access their home directory under /sftp/data
   Home /sftp/data/$USER
   # Log to a file inside /sftp/logs/ (only works when the directory exists)
   LogFile /sftp/logs/mysecureshell.log
   # Force users to stay in their home directory
   StayAtHome true
   # Hide Home PATH, it will be shown as /
   VirtualChroot true
   # Hide real file/directory owner (just change displayed permissions)
   DirFakeUser true
   # Hide real file/directory group (just change displayed permissions)
   DirFakeGroup true
   # We do not want users to keep forever their idle connection
   IdleTimeOut 5m
</Default>
# vim: ts=2:sw=2:et

The entrypoint.sh script is the one responsible to prepare the container for the users included on the /secrets/user_pass.txt file (creates the users with their HOME directories under /sftp/data and a /bin/false shell and creates the key files from /secrets/user_keys.txt if available). The script expects a couple of environment variables:

• SFTP_UID: UID used to run the daemon and for all the files, it has to be different than 0 (all the files managed by this daemon are going to be owned by the same user and group, even if the remote users are different).
• SFTP_GID: GID used to run the daemon and for all the files, it has to be different than 0.

And can use the SSH_PORT and SSH_PARAMS values if present. It also requires the following files (they can be mounted as secrets in kubernetes):

• /secrets/host_keys.txt: Text file containing the ssh server keys in mime format; the file is processed using the reformime utility (the one included on busybox) and can be generated using the gen-host-keys script included on the container (it uses ssh-keygen and makemime).
• /secrets/user_pass.txt: Text file containing lines of the form username:password_in_clear_text (only the users included on this file are available on the sftp server, in fact in our deployment we use only the scs user for everything).

And optionally can use another one:

• /secrets/user_keys.txt: Text file that contains lines of the form username:public_ssh_ed25519_or_rsa_key; the public keys are installed on the server and can be used to log into the sftp server if the username exists on the user_pass.txt file.

The contents of the entrypoint.sh script are:

entrypoint.sh

#!/bin/sh
set -e
# ---------
# VARIABLES
# ---------
# Expects SSH_UID & SSH_GID on the environment and uses the value of the
# SSH_PORT & SSH_PARAMS variables if present
# SSH_PARAMS
SSH_PARAMS="-D -e -p $ SSH_PORT:=22  $ SSH_PARAMS "
# Fixed values
# DIRECTORIES
HOME_DIR="/sftp/data"
CONF_FILES_DIR="/secrets"
AUTH_KEYS_PATH="/etc/ssh/auth_keys"
# FILES
HOST_KEYS="$CONF_FILES_DIR/host_keys.txt"
USER_KEYS="$CONF_FILES_DIR/user_keys.txt"
USER_PASS="$CONF_FILES_DIR/user_pass.txt"
USER_SHELL_CMD="/usr/bin/mysecureshell"
# TYPES
HOST_KEY_TYPES="dsa ecdsa ed25519 rsa"
# ---------
# FUNCTIONS
# ---------
# Validate HOST_KEYS, USER_PASS, SFTP_UID and SFTP_GID
_check_environment()  
  # Check the ssh server keys ... we don't boot if we don't have them
  if [ ! -f "$HOST_KEYS" ]; then
    cat <<EOF
We need the host keys on the '$HOST_KEYS' file to proceed.
Call the 'gen-host-keys' script to create and export them on a mime file.
EOF
    exit 1
  fi
  # Check that we have users ... if we don't we can't continue
  if [ ! -f "$USER_PASS" ]; then
    cat <<EOF
We need at least the '$USER_PASS' file to provision users.
Call the 'gen-users-tar' script to create a tar file to create an archive that
contains public and private keys for users, a 'user_keys.txt' with the public
keys of the users and a 'user_pass.txt' file with random passwords for them 
(pass the list of usernames to it).
EOF
    exit 1
  fi
  # Check SFTP_UID
  if [ -z "$SFTP_UID" ]; then
    echo "The 'SFTP_UID' can't be empty, pass a 'GID'."
    exit 1
  fi
  if [ "$SFTP_UID" -eq "0" ]; then
    echo "The 'SFTP_UID' can't be 0, use a different 'UID'"
    exit 1
  fi
  # Check SFTP_GID
  if [ -z "$SFTP_GID" ]; then
    echo "The 'SFTP_GID' can't be empty, pass a 'GID'."
    exit 1
  fi
  if [ "$SFTP_GID" -eq "0" ]; then
    echo "The 'SFTP_GID' can't be 0, use a different 'GID'"
    exit 1
  fi
 
# Adjust ssh host keys
_setup_host_keys()  
  opwd="$(pwd)"
  tmpdir="$(mktemp -d)"
  cd "$tmpdir"
  ret="0"
  reformime <"$HOST_KEYS"   ret="1"
  for kt in $HOST_KEY_TYPES; do
    key="ssh_host_$ kt _key"
    pub="ssh_host_$ kt _key.pub"
    if [ ! -f "$key" ]; then
      echo "Missing '$key' file"
      ret="1"
    fi
    if [ ! -f "$pub" ]; then
      echo "Missing '$pub' file"
      ret="1"
    fi
    if [ "$ret" -ne "0" ]; then
      continue
    fi
    cat "$key" >"/etc/ssh/$key"
    chmod 0600 "/etc/ssh/$key"
    chown root:root "/etc/ssh/$key"
    cat "$pub" >"/etc/ssh/$pub"
    chmod 0600 "/etc/ssh/$pub"
    chown root:root "/etc/ssh/$pub"
  done
  cd "$opwd"
  rm -rf "$tmpdir"
  return "$ret"
 
# Create users
_setup_user_pass()  
  opwd="$(pwd)"
  tmpdir="$(mktemp -d)"
  cd "$tmpdir"
  ret="0"
  [ -d "$HOME_DIR" ]   mkdir "$HOME_DIR"
  # Make sure the data dir can be managed by the sftp user
  chown "$SFTP_UID:$SFTP_GID" "$HOME_DIR"
  # Allow the user (and root) to create directories inside the $HOME_DIR, if
  # we don't allow it the directory creation fails on EFS (AWS)
  chmod 0755 "$HOME_DIR"
  # Create users
  echo "sftp:sftp:$SFTP_UID:$SFTP_GID:::/bin/false" >"newusers.txt"
  sed -n "/^[^#]/   s/:/ /p  " "$USER_PASS"   while read -r _u _p; do
    echo "$_u:$_p:$SFTP_UID:$SFTP_GID::$HOME_DIR/$_u:$USER_SHELL_CMD"
  done >>"newusers.txt"
  newusers --badnames newusers.txt
  # Disable write permission on the directory to forbid remote sftp users to
  # remove their own root dir (they have already done it); we adjust that
  # here to avoid issues with EFS (see before)
  chmod 0555 "$HOME_DIR"
  # Clean up the tmpdir
  cd "$opwd"
  rm -rf "$tmpdir"
  return "$ret"
 
# Adjust user keys
_setup_user_keys()  
  if [ -f "$USER_KEYS" ]; then
    sed -n "/^[^#]/   s/:/ /p  " "$USER_KEYS"   while read -r _u _k; do
      echo "$_k" >>"$AUTH_KEYS_PATH/$_u"
    done
  fi
 
# Main function
exec_sshd()  
  _check_environment
  _setup_host_keys
  _setup_user_pass
  _setup_user_keys
  echo "Running: /usr/sbin/sshd $SSH_PARAMS"
  # shellcheck disable=SC2086
  exec /usr/sbin/sshd -D $SSH_PARAMS
 
# ----
# MAIN
# ----
case "$1" in
"server") exec_sshd ;;
*) exec "$@" ;;
esac
# vim: ts=2:sw=2:et

The container also includes a couple of auxiliary scripts, the first one can be used to generate the host_keys.txt file as follows:

$ docker run --rm stodh/mysecureshell gen-host-keys > host_keys.txt

Where the script is as simple as:

bin/gen-host-keys

#!/bin/sh
set -e
# Generate new host keys
ssh-keygen -A >/dev/null
# Replace hostname
sed -i -e 's/@.*$/@mysecureshell/' /etc/ssh/ssh_host_*_key.pub
# Print in mime format (stdout)
makemime /etc/ssh/ssh_host_*
# vim: ts=2:sw=2:et

And there is another script to generate a .tar file that contains auth data for the list of usernames passed to it (the file contains a user_pass.txt file with random passwords for the users, public and private ssh keys for them and the user_keys.txt file that matches the generated keys). To generate a tar file for the user scs we can execute the following:

$ docker run --rm stodh/mysecureshell gen-users-tar scs > /tmp/scs-users.tar

To see the contents and the text inside the user_pass.txt file we can do:

$ tar tvf /tmp/scs-users.tar
-rw-r--r-- root/root        21 2022-09-11 15:55 user_pass.txt
-rw-r--r-- root/root       822 2022-09-11 15:55 user_keys.txt
-rw------- root/root       387 2022-09-11 15:55 id_ed25519-scs
-rw-r--r-- root/root        85 2022-09-11 15:55 id_ed25519-scs.pub
-rw------- root/root      3357 2022-09-11 15:55 id_rsa-scs
-rw------- root/root      3243 2022-09-11 15:55 id_rsa-scs.pem
-rw-r--r-- root/root       729 2022-09-11 15:55 id_rsa-scs.pub
$ tar xfO /tmp/scs-users.tar user_pass.txt
scs:20JertRSX2Eaar4x

The source of the script is:

bin/gen-users-tar

#!/bin/sh
set -e
# ---------
# VARIABLES
# ---------
USER_KEYS_FILE="user_keys.txt"
USER_PASS_FILE="user_pass.txt"
# ---------
# MAIN CODE
# ---------
# Generate user passwords and keys, return 1 if no username is received
if [ "$#" -eq "0" ]; then
  return 1
fi
opwd="$(pwd)"
tmpdir="$(mktemp -d)"
cd "$tmpdir"
for u in "$@"; do
  ssh-keygen -q -a 100 -t ed25519 -f "id_ed25519-$u" -C "$u" -N ""
  ssh-keygen -q -a 100 -b 4096 -t rsa -f "id_rsa-$u" -C "$u" -N ""
  # Legacy RSA private key format
  cp -a "id_rsa-$u" "id_rsa-$u.pem"
  ssh-keygen -q -p -m pem -f "id_rsa-$u.pem" -N "" -P "" >/dev/null
  chmod 0600 "id_rsa-$u.pem"
  echo "$u:$(pwgen -s 16 1)" >>"$USER_PASS_FILE"
  echo "$u:$(cat "id_ed25519-$u.pub")" >>"$USER_KEYS_FILE"
  echo "$u:$(cat "id_rsa-$u.pub")" >>"$USER_KEYS_FILE"
done
tar cf - "$USER_PASS_FILE" "$USER_KEYS_FILE" id_* 2>/dev/null
cd "$opwd"
rm -rf "$tmpdir"
# vim: ts=2:sw=2:et

nginx-scsThe nginx-scs container is generated using the following Dockerfile:

ARG NGINX_VERSION=1.23.1
FROM nginx:$NGINX_VERSION
LABEL maintainer="Sergio Talens-Oliag <sto@mixinet.net>"
RUN rm -f /docker-entrypoint.d/*
COPY docker-entrypoint.d/* /docker-entrypoint.d/

Basically we are removing the existing docker-entrypoint.d scripts from the standard image and adding a new one that configures the web server as we want using a couple of environment variables:

• AUTH_REQUEST_URI: URL to use for the auth_request, if the variable is not found on the environment auth_request is not used.
• HTML_ROOT: Base directory of the web server, if not passed the default /usr/share/nginx/html is used.

Note that if we don t pass the variables everything works as if we were using the original nginx image. The contents of the configuration script are:

docker-entrypoint.d/10-update-default-conf.sh

#!/bin/sh
# Replace the default.conf nginx file by our own version.
set -e
if [ -z "$HTML_ROOT" ]; then
  HTML_ROOT="/usr/share/nginx/html"
fi
if [ "$AUTH_REQUEST_URI" ]; then
  cat >/etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf <<EOF
server  
  listen       80;
  server_name  localhost;
  location /  
    auth_request /.auth;
    root  $HTML_ROOT;
    index index.html index.htm;
   
  location /.auth  
    internal;
    proxy_pass $AUTH_REQUEST_URI;
    proxy_pass_request_body off;
    proxy_set_header Content-Length "";
    proxy_set_header X-Original-URI \$request_uri;
   
  error_page   500 502 503 504  /50x.html;
  location = /50x.html  
    root /usr/share/nginx/html;
   
 
EOF
else
  cat >/etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf <<EOF
server  
  listen       80;
  server_name  localhost;
  location /  
    root  $HTML_ROOT;
    index index.html index.htm;
   
  error_page   500 502 503 504  /50x.html;
  location = /50x.html  
    root /usr/share/nginx/html;
   
 
EOF
fi
# vim: ts=2:sw=2:et

As we will see later the idea is to use the /sftp/data or /sftp/data/scs folder as the root of the web published by this container and create an Ingress object to provide access to it outside of our kubernetes cluster.

webhook-scsThe webhook-scs container is generated using the following Dockerfile:

ARG ALPINE_VERSION=3.16.2
ARG GOLANG_VERSION=alpine3.16
FROM golang:$GOLANG_VERSION AS builder
LABEL maintainer="Sergio Talens-Oliag <sto@mixinet.net>"
ENV WEBHOOK_VERSION 2.8.0
ENV WEBHOOK_PR 549
ENV S3FS_VERSION v1.91
WORKDIR /go/src/github.com/adnanh/webhook
RUN apk update &&\
 apk add --no-cache -t build-deps curl libc-dev gcc libgcc patch
RUN curl -L --silent -o webhook.tar.gz\
 https://github.com/adnanh/webhook/archive/$ WEBHOOK_VERSION .tar.gz &&\
 tar xzf webhook.tar.gz --strip 1 &&\
 curl -L --silent -o $ WEBHOOK_PR .patch\
 https://patch-diff.githubusercontent.com/raw/adnanh/webhook/pull/$ WEBHOOK_PR .patch &&\
 patch -p1 < $ WEBHOOK_PR .patch &&\
 go get -d && \
 go build -o /usr/local/bin/webhook
WORKDIR /src/s3fs-fuse
RUN apk update &&\
 apk add ca-certificates build-base alpine-sdk libcurl automake autoconf\
 libxml2-dev libressl-dev mailcap fuse-dev curl-dev
RUN curl -L --silent -o s3fs.tar.gz\
 https://github.com/s3fs-fuse/s3fs-fuse/archive/refs/tags/$S3FS_VERSION.tar.gz &&\
 tar xzf s3fs.tar.gz --strip 1 &&\
 ./autogen.sh &&\
 ./configure --prefix=/usr/local &&\
 make -j && \
 make install
FROM alpine:$ALPINE_VERSION
LABEL maintainer="Sergio Talens-Oliag <sto@mixinet.net>"
WORKDIR /webhook
RUN apk update &&\
 apk add --no-cache ca-certificates mailcap fuse libxml2 libcurl libgcc\
 libstdc++ rsync util-linux-misc &&\
 rm -rf /var/cache/apk/*
COPY --from=builder /usr/local/bin/webhook /usr/local/bin/webhook
COPY --from=builder /usr/local/bin/s3fs /usr/local/bin/s3fs
COPY entrypoint.sh /
COPY hooks/* ./hooks/
EXPOSE 9000
ENTRYPOINT ["/entrypoint.sh"]
CMD ["server"]

Again, we use a multi-stage build because in production we wanted to support a functionality that is not already on the official versions (streaming the command output as a response instead of waiting until the execution ends); this time we build the image applying the PATCH included on this pull request against a released version of the source instead of creating a fork. The entrypoint.sh script is used to generate the webhook configuration file for the existing hooks using environment variables (basically the WEBHOOK_WORKDIR and the *_TOKEN variables) and launch the webhook service:

entrypoint.sh

#!/bin/sh
set -e
# ---------
# VARIABLES
# ---------
WEBHOOK_BIN="$ WEBHOOK_BIN:-/webhook/hooks "
WEBHOOK_YML="$ WEBHOOK_YML:-/webhook/scs.yml "
WEBHOOK_OPTS="$ WEBHOOK_OPTS:--verbose "
# ---------
# FUNCTIONS
# ---------
print_du_yml()  
  cat <<EOF
- id: du
  execute-command: '$WEBHOOK_BIN/du.sh'
  command-working-directory: '$WORKDIR'
  response-headers:
  - name: 'Content-Type'
    value: 'application/json'
  http-methods: ['GET']
  include-command-output-in-response: true
  include-command-output-in-response-on-error: true
  pass-arguments-to-command:
  - source: 'url'
    name: 'path'
  pass-environment-to-command:
  - source: 'string'
    envname: 'OUTPUT_FORMAT'
    name: 'json'
EOF
 
print_hardlink_yml()  
  cat <<EOF
- id: hardlink
  execute-command: '$WEBHOOK_BIN/hardlink.sh'
  command-working-directory: '$WORKDIR'
  http-methods: ['GET']
  include-command-output-in-response: true
  include-command-output-in-response-on-error: true
EOF
 
print_s3sync_yml()  
  cat <<EOF
- id: s3sync
  execute-command: '$WEBHOOK_BIN/s3sync.sh'
  command-working-directory: '$WORKDIR'
  http-methods: ['POST']
  include-command-output-in-response: true
  include-command-output-in-response-on-error: true
  pass-environment-to-command:
  - source: 'payload'
    envname: 'AWS_KEY'
    name: 'aws.key'
  - source: 'payload'
    envname: 'AWS_SECRET_KEY'
    name: 'aws.secret_key'
  - source: 'payload'
    envname: 'S3_BUCKET'
    name: 's3.bucket'
  - source: 'payload'
    envname: 'S3_REGION'
    name: 's3.region'
  - source: 'payload'
    envname: 'S3_PATH'
    name: 's3.path'
  - source: 'payload'
    envname: 'SCS_PATH'
    name: 'scs.path'
  stream-command-output: true
EOF
 
print_token_yml()  
  if [ "$1" ]; then
    cat << EOF
  trigger-rule:
    match:
      type: 'value'
      value: '$1'
      parameter:
        source: 'header'
        name: 'X-Webhook-Token'
EOF
  fi
 
exec_webhook()  
  # Validate WORKDIR
  if [ -z "$WEBHOOK_WORKDIR" ]; then
    echo "Must define the WEBHOOK_WORKDIR variable!" >&2
    exit 1
  fi
  WORKDIR="$(realpath "$WEBHOOK_WORKDIR" 2>/dev/null)"   true
  if [ ! -d "$WORKDIR" ]; then
    echo "The WEBHOOK_WORKDIR '$WEBHOOK_WORKDIR' is not a directory!" >&2
    exit 1
  fi
  # Get TOKENS, if the DU_TOKEN or HARDLINK_TOKEN is defined that is used, if
  # not if the COMMON_TOKEN that is used and in other case no token is checked
  # (that is the default)
  DU_TOKEN="$ DU_TOKEN:-$COMMON_TOKEN "
  HARDLINK_TOKEN="$ HARDLINK_TOKEN:-$COMMON_TOKEN "
  S3_TOKEN="$ S3_TOKEN:-$COMMON_TOKEN "
  # Create webhook configuration
    
    print_du_yml
    print_token_yml "$DU_TOKEN"
    echo ""
    print_hardlink_yml
    print_token_yml "$HARDLINK_TOKEN"
    echo ""
    print_s3sync_yml
    print_token_yml "$S3_TOKEN"
   >"$WEBHOOK_YML"
  # Run the webhook command
  # shellcheck disable=SC2086
  exec webhook -hooks "$WEBHOOK_YML" $WEBHOOK_OPTS
 
# ----
# MAIN
# ----
case "$1" in
"server") exec_webhook ;;
*) exec "$@" ;;
esac

The entrypoint.sh script generates the configuration file for the webhook server calling functions that print a yaml section for each hook and optionally adds rules to validate access to them comparing the value of a X-Webhook-Token header against predefined values. The expected token values are taken from environment variables, we can define a token variable for each hook (DU_TOKEN, HARDLINK_TOKEN or S3_TOKEN) and a fallback value (COMMON_TOKEN); if no token variable is defined for a hook no check is done and everybody can call it. The Hook Definition documentation explains the options you can use for each hook, the ones we have right now do the following:

• du: runs on the $WORKDIR directory, passes as first argument to the script the value of the path query parameter and sets the variable OUTPUT_FORMAT to the fixed value json (we use that to print the output of the script in JSON format instead of text).
• hardlink: runs on the $WORKDIR directory and takes no parameters.
• s3sync: runs on the $WORKDIR directory and sets a lot of environment variables from values read from the JSON encoded payload sent by the caller (all the values must be sent by the caller even if they are assigned an empty value, if they are missing the hook fails without calling the script); we also set the stream-command-output value to true to make the script show its output as it is working (we patched the webhook source to be able to use this option).

The du hook scriptThe du hook script code checks if the argument passed is a directory, computes its size using the du command and prints the results in text format or as a JSON dictionary:

hooks/du.sh

#!/bin/sh
set -e
# Script to print disk usage for a PATH inside the scs folder
# ---------
# FUNCTIONS
# ---------
print_error()  
  if [ "$OUTPUT_FORMAT" = "json" ]; then
    echo " \"error\":\"$*\" "
  else
    echo "$*" >&2
  fi
  exit 1
 
usage()  
  if [ "$OUTPUT_FORMAT" = "json" ]; then
    echo " \"error\":\"Pass arguments as '?path=XXX\" "
  else
    echo "Usage: $(basename "$0") PATH" >&2
  fi
  exit 1
 
# ----
# MAIN
# ----
if [ "$#" -eq "0" ]   [ -z "$1" ]; then
  usage
fi
if [ "$1" = "." ]; then
  DU_PATH="./"
else
  DU_PATH="$(find . -name "$1" -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1)"   true
fi
if [ -z "$DU_PATH" ]   [ ! -d "$DU_PATH/." ]; then
  print_error "The provided PATH ('$1') is not a directory"
fi
# Print disk usage in bytes for the given PATH
OUTPUT="$(du -b -s "$DU_PATH")"
if [ "$OUTPUT_FORMAT" = "json" ]; then
  # Format output as  "path":"PATH","bytes":"BYTES" 
  echo "$OUTPUT"  
    sed -e "s%^\(.*\)\t.*/\(.*\)$% \"path\":\"\2\",\"bytes\":\"\1\" %"  
    tr -d '\n'
else
  # Print du output as is
  echo "$OUTPUT"
fi
# vim: ts=2:sw=2:et:ai:sts=2

The hardlink hook scriptThe hardlink hook script is really simple, it just runs the util-linux version of the hardlink command on its working directory:

hooks/hardlink.sh

#!/bin/sh
hardlink --ignore-time --maximize .

We use that to reduce the size of the stored content; to manage versions of files and folders we keep each version on a separate directory and when one or more files are not changed this script makes them hardlinks to the same file on disc, reducing the space used on disk.

The s3sync hook scriptThe s3sync hook script uses the s3fs tool to mount a bucket and synchronise data between a folder inside the bucket and a directory on the filesystem using rsync; all values needed to execute the task are taken from environment variables:

hooks/s3sync.sh

#!/bin/ash
set -euo pipefail
set -o errexit
set -o errtrace
# Functions
finish()  
  ret="$1"
  echo ""
  echo "Script exit code: $ret"
  exit "$ret"
 
# Check variables
if [ -z "$AWS_KEY" ]   [ -z "$AWS_SECRET_KEY" ]   [ -z "$S3_BUCKET" ]  
  [ -z "$S3_PATH" ]   [ -z "$SCS_PATH" ]; then
  [ "$AWS_KEY" ]   echo "Set the AWS_KEY environment variable"
  [ "$AWS_SECRET_KEY" ]   echo "Set the AWS_SECRET_KEY environment variable"
  [ "$S3_BUCKET" ]   echo "Set the S3_BUCKET environment variable"
  [ "$S3_PATH" ]   echo "Set the S3_PATH environment variable"
  [ "$SCS_PATH" ]   echo "Set the SCS_PATH environment variable"
  finish 1
fi
if [ "$S3_REGION" ] && [ "$S3_REGION" != "us-east-1" ]; then
  EP_URL="endpoint=$S3_REGION,url=https://s3.$S3_REGION.amazonaws.com"
else
  EP_URL="endpoint=us-east-1"
fi
# Prepare working directory
WORK_DIR="$(mktemp -p "$HOME" -d)"
MNT_POINT="$WORK_DIR/s3data"
PASSWD_S3FS="$WORK_DIR/.passwd-s3fs"
# Check the moutpoint
if [ ! -d "$MNT_POINT" ]; then
  mkdir -p "$MNT_POINT"
elif mountpoint "$MNT_POINT"; then
  echo "There is already something mounted on '$MNT_POINT', aborting!"
  finish 1
fi
# Create password file
touch "$PASSWD_S3FS"
chmod 0400 "$PASSWD_S3FS"
echo "$AWS_KEY:$AWS_SECRET_KEY" >"$PASSWD_S3FS"
# Mount s3 bucket as a filesystem
s3fs -o dbglevel=info,retries=5 -o "$EP_URL" -o "passwd_file=$PASSWD_S3FS" \
  "$S3_BUCKET" "$MNT_POINT"
echo "Mounted bucket '$S3_BUCKET' on '$MNT_POINT'"
# Remove the password file, just in case
rm -f "$PASSWD_S3FS"
# Check source PATH
ret="0"
SRC_PATH="$MNT_POINT/$S3_PATH"
if [ ! -d "$SRC_PATH" ]; then
  echo "The S3_PATH '$S3_PATH' can't be found!"
  ret=1
fi
# Compute SCS_UID & SCS_GID (by default based on the working directory owner)
SCS_UID="$ SCS_UID:=$(stat -c "%u" "." 2>/dev/null) "   true
SCS_GID="$ SCS_GID:=$(stat -c "%g" "." 2>/dev/null) "   true
# Check destination PATH
DST_PATH="./$SCS_PATH"
if [ "$ret" -eq "0" ] && [ -d "$DST_PATH" ]; then
  mkdir -p "$DST_PATH"   ret="$?"
fi
# Copy using rsync
if [ "$ret" -eq "0" ]; then
  rsync -rlptv --chown="$SCS_UID:$SCS_GID" --delete --stats \
    "$SRC_PATH/" "$DST_PATH/"   ret="$?"
fi
# Unmount the S3 bucket
umount -f "$MNT_POINT"
echo "Called umount for '$MNT_POINT'"
# Remove mount point dir
rmdir "$MNT_POINT"
# Remove WORK_DIR
rmdir "$WORK_DIR"
# We are done
finish "$ret"
# vim: ts=2:sw=2:et:ai:sts=2

Deployment objectsThe system is deployed as a StatefulSet with one replica. Our production deployment is done on AWS and to be able to scale we use EFS for our PersistenVolume; the idea is that the volume has no size limit, its AccessMode can be set to ReadWriteMany and we can mount it from multiple instances of the Pod without issues, even if they are in different availability zones. For development we use k3d and we are also able to scale the StatefulSet for testing because we use a ReadWriteOnce PVC, but it points to a hostPath that is backed up by a folder that is mounted on all the compute nodes, so in reality Pods in different k3d nodes use the same folder on the host.

secrets.yamlThe secrets file contains the files used by the mysecureshell container that can be generated using kubernetes pods as follows (we are only creating the scs user):

$ kubectl run "mysecureshell" --restart='Never' --quiet --rm --stdin \
  --image "stodh/mysecureshell:latest" -- gen-host-keys >"./host_keys.txt"
$ kubectl run "mysecureshell" --restart='Never' --quiet --rm --stdin \
  --image "stodh/mysecureshell:latest" -- gen-users-tar scs >"./users.tar"

Once we have the files we can generate the secrets.yaml file as follows:

$ tar xf ./users.tar user_keys.txt user_pass.txt
$ kubectl --dry-run=client -o yaml create secret generic "scs-secret" \
  --from-file="host_keys.txt=host_keys.txt" \
  --from-file="user_keys.txt=user_keys.txt" \
  --from-file="user_pass.txt=user_pass.txt" > ./secrets.yaml

The resulting secrets.yaml will look like the following file (the base64 would match the content of the files, of course):

secrets.yaml

apiVersion: v1
data:
  host_keys.txt: TWlt...
  user_keys.txt: c2Nz...
  user_pass.txt: c2Nz...
kind: Secret
metadata:
  creationTimestamp: null
  name: scs-secret

pvc.yamlThe persistent volume claim for a simple deployment (one with only one instance of the statefulSet) can be as simple as this:

pvc.yaml

apiVersion: v1
kind: PersistentVolumeClaim
metadata:
  name: scs-pvc
  labels:
    app.kubernetes.io/name: scs
spec:
  accessModes:
  - ReadWriteOnce
  resources:
    requests:
      storage: 8Gi

On this definition we don t set the storageClassName to use the default one.

Volumes in our development environment (k3d)In our development deployment we create the following PersistentVolume as required by the Local Persistence Volume Static Provisioner (note that the /volumes/scs-pv has to be created by hand, in our k3d system we mount the same host directory on the /volumes path of all the nodes and create the scs-pv directory by hand before deploying the persistent volume):

k3d-pv.yaml

apiVersion: v1
kind: PersistentVolume
metadata:
  name: scs-pv
  labels:
    app.kubernetes.io/name: scs
spec:
  capacity:
    storage: 8Gi
  volumeMode: Filesystem
  accessModes:
  - ReadWriteOnce
  persistentVolumeReclaimPolicy: Delete
  claimRef:
    name: scs-pvc
  storageClassName: local-storage
  local:
    path: /volumes/scs-pv
  nodeAffinity:
    required:
      nodeSelectorTerms:
      - matchExpressions:
        - key: node.kubernetes.io/instance-type
          operator: In
          values:
          - k3s

And to make sure that everything works as expected we update the PVC definition to add the right storageClassName:

k3d-pvc.yaml

apiVersion: v1
kind: PersistentVolumeClaim
metadata:
  name: scs-pvc
  labels:
    app.kubernetes.io/name: scs
spec:
  accessModes:
  - ReadWriteOnce
  resources:
    requests:
      storage: 8Gi
  storageClassName: local-storage

Volumes in our production environment (aws)In the production deployment we don t create the PersistentVolume (we are using the aws-efs-csi-driver which supports Dynamic Provisioning) but we add the storageClassName (we set it to the one mapped to the EFS driver, i.e. efs-sc) and set ReadWriteMany as the accessMode:

efs-pvc.yaml

apiVersion: v1
kind: PersistentVolumeClaim
metadata:
  name: scs-pvc
  labels:
    app.kubernetes.io/name: scs
spec:
  accessModes:
  - ReadWriteMany
  resources:
    requests:
      storage: 8Gi
  storageClassName: efs-sc

statefulset.yamlThe definition of the statefulSet is as follows:

statefulset.yaml

apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: StatefulSet
metadata:
  name: scs
  labels:
    app.kubernetes.io/name: scs
spec:
  serviceName: scs
  replicas: 1
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: scs
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: scs
    spec:
      containers:
      - name: nginx
        image: stodh/nginx-scs:latest
        ports:
        - containerPort: 80
          name: http
        env:
        - name: AUTH_REQUEST_URI
          value: ""
        - name: HTML_ROOT
          value: /sftp/data
        volumeMounts:
        - mountPath: /sftp
          name: scs-datadir
      - name: mysecureshell
        image: stodh/mysecureshell:latest
        ports:
        - containerPort: 22
          name: ssh
        securityContext:
          capabilities:
            add:
            - IPC_OWNER
        env:
        - name: SFTP_UID
          value: '2020'
        - name: SFTP_GID
          value: '2020'
        volumeMounts:
        - mountPath: /secrets
          name: scs-file-secrets
          readOnly: true
        - mountPath: /sftp
          name: scs-datadir
      - name: webhook
        image: stodh/webhook-scs:latest
        securityContext:
          privileged: true
        ports:
        - containerPort: 9000
          name: webhook-http
        env:
        - name: WEBHOOK_WORKDIR
          value: /sftp/data/scs
        volumeMounts:
        - name: devfuse
          mountPath: /dev/fuse
        - mountPath: /sftp
          name: scs-datadir
      volumes:
      - name: devfuse
        hostPath:
          path: /dev/fuse
      - name: scs-file-secrets
        secret:
          secretName: scs-secrets
      - name: scs-datadir
        persistentVolumeClaim:
          claimName: scs-pvc

Notes about the containers:

• nginx: As this is an example the web server is not using an AUTH_REQUEST_URI and uses the /sftp/data directory as the root of the web (to get to the files uploaded for the scs user we will need to use /scs/ as a prefix on the URLs).
• mysecureshell: We are adding the IPC_OWNER capability to the container to be able to use some of the sftp-* commands inside it, but they are not really needed, so adding the capability is optional.
• webhook: We are launching this container in privileged mode to be able to use the s3fs-fuse, as it will not work otherwise for now (see this kubernetes issue); if the functionality is not needed the container can be executed with regular privileges; besides, as we are not enabling public access to this service we don t define *_TOKEN variables (if required the values should be read from a Secret object).

Notes about the volumes:

• the devfuse volume is only needed if we plan to use the s3fs command on the webhook container, if not we can remove the volume definition and its mounts.

service.yamlTo be able to access the different services on the statefulset we publish the relevant ports using the following Service object:

service.yaml

apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: scs-svc
  labels:
    app.kubernetes.io/name: scs
spec:
  ports:
  - name: ssh
    port: 22
    protocol: TCP
    targetPort: 22
  - name: http
    port: 80
    protocol: TCP
    targetPort: 80
  - name: webhook-http
    port: 9000
    protocol: TCP
    targetPort: 9000
  selector:
    app: scs

ingress.yamlTo download the scs files from the outside we can add an ingress object like the following (the definition is for testing using the localhost name):

apiVersion: networking.k8s.io/v1
kind: Ingress
metadata:
  name: scs-ingress
  labels:
    app.kubernetes.io/name: scs
spec:
  ingressClassName: nginx
  rules:
  - host: 'localhost'
    http:
      paths:
      - path: /scs
        pathType: Prefix
        backend:
          service:
            name: scs-svc
            port:
              number: 80

DeploymentTo deploy the statefulSet we create a namespace and apply the object definitions shown before:

$ kubectl create namespace scs-demo
namespace/scs-demo created
$ kubectl -n scs-demo apply -f secrets.yaml
secret/scs-secrets created
$ kubectl -n scs-demo apply -f pvc.yaml
persistentvolumeclaim/scs-pvc created
$ kubectl -n scs-demo apply -f statefulset.yaml
statefulset.apps/scs created
$ kubectl -n scs-demo apply -f service.yaml
service/scs-svc created
$ kubectl -n scs-demo apply -f ingress.yaml
ingress.networking.k8s.io/scs-ingress created

Once the objects are deployed we can check that all is working using kubectl:

$ kubectl  -n scs-demo get all,secrets,ingress
NAME        READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
pod/scs-0   3/3     Running   0          24s
NAME            TYPE       CLUSTER-IP  EXTERNAL-IP  PORT(S)                  AGE
service/scs-svc ClusterIP  10.43.0.47  <none>       22/TCP,80/TCP,9000/TCP   21s

NAME                   READY   AGE
statefulset.apps/scs   1/1     24s
NAME                         TYPE                                  DATA   AGE
secret/default-token-mwcd7   kubernetes.io/service-account-token   3      53s
secret/scs-secrets           Opaque                                3      39s
NAME                                   CLASS  HOSTS      ADDRESS     PORTS   AGE
ingress.networking.k8s.io/scs-ingress  nginx  localhost  172.21.0.5  80      17s

At this point we are ready to use the system.

Usage examples

File uploadsAs previously mentioned in our system the idea is to use the sftp server from other Pods, but to test the system we are going to do a kubectl port-forward and connect to the server using our host client and the password we have generated (it is on the user_pass.txt file, inside the users.tar archive):

$ kubectl -n scs-demo port-forward service/scs-svc 2020:22 &
Forwarding from 127.0.0.1:2020 -> 22
Forwarding from [::1]:2020 -> 22
$ PF_PID=$!
$ sftp -P 2020 scs@127.0.0.1                                                 1
Handling connection for 2020
The authenticity of host '[127.0.0.1]:2020 ([127.0.0.1]:2020)' can't be \
  established.
ED25519 key fingerprint is SHA256:eHNwCnyLcSSuVXXiLKeGraw0FT/4Bb/yjfqTstt+088.
This key is not known by any other names
Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no/[fingerprint])? yes
Warning: Permanently added '[127.0.0.1]:2020' (ED25519) to the list of known \
  hosts.
scs@127.0.0.1's password: **********
Connected to 127.0.0.1.
sftp> ls -la
drwxr-xr-x    2 sftp     sftp         4096 Sep 25 14:47 .
dr-xr-xr-x    3 sftp     sftp         4096 Sep 25 14:36 ..
sftp> !date -R > /tmp/date.txt                                               2
sftp> put /tmp/date.txt .
Uploading /tmp/date.txt to /date.txt
date.txt                                      100%   32    27.8KB/s   00:00
sftp> ls -l
-rw-r--r--    1 sftp     sftp           32 Sep 25 15:21 date.txt
sftp> ln date.txt date.txt.1                                                 3
sftp> ls -l
-rw-r--r--    2 sftp     sftp           32 Sep 25 15:21 date.txt
-rw-r--r--    2 sftp     sftp           32 Sep 25 15:21 date.txt.1
sftp> put /tmp/date.txt date.txt.2                                           4
Uploading /tmp/date.txt to /date.txt.2
date.txt                                      100%   32    27.8KB/s   00:00
sftp> ls -l                                                                  5
-rw-r--r--    2 sftp     sftp           32 Sep 25 15:21 date.txt
-rw-r--r--    2 sftp     sftp           32 Sep 25 15:21 date.txt.1
-rw-r--r--    1 sftp     sftp           32 Sep 25 15:21 date.txt.2
sftp> exit
$ kill "$PF_PID"
[1]  + terminated  kubectl -n scs-demo port-forward service/scs-svc 2020:22

1. We connect to the sftp service on the forwarded port with the scs user.
2. We put a file we have created on the host on the directory.
3. We do a hard link of the uploaded file.
4. We put a second copy of the file we created locally.
5. On the file list we can see that the two first files have two hardlinks

File retrievalsIf our ingress is configured right we can download the date.txt file from the URL http://localhost/scs/date.txt:

$ curl -s http://localhost/scs/date.txt
Sun, 25 Sep 2022 17:21:51 +0200

Use of the webhook containerTo finish this post we are going to show how we can call the hooks directly, from a CronJob and from a Job.

Direct script call (du)In our deployment the direct calls are done from other Pods, to simulate it we are going to do a port-forward and call the script with an existing PATH (the root directory) and a bad one:

$ kubectl -n scs-demo port-forward service/scs-svc 9000:9000 >/dev/null &
$ PF_PID=$!
$ JSON="$(curl -s "http://localhost:9000/hooks/du?path=.")"
$ echo $JSON
 "path":"","bytes":"4160" 
$ JSON="$(curl -s "http://localhost:9000/hooks/du?path=foo")"
$ echo $JSON
 "error":"The provided PATH ('foo') is not a directory" 
$ kill $PF_PID

As we only have files on the base directory we print the disk usage of the . PATH and the output is in json format because we export OUTPUT_FORMAT with the value json on the webhook configuration.

Cronjobs (hardlink)As explained before, the webhook container can be used to run cronjobs; the following one uses an alpine container to call the hardlink script each minute (that setup is for testing, obviously):

webhook-cronjob.yaml

apiVersion: batch/v1
kind: CronJob
metadata:
  name: hardlink
  labels:
    cronjob: 'hardlink'
spec:
  schedule: "* */1 * * *"
  concurrencyPolicy: Replace
  jobTemplate:
    spec:
      template:
        metadata:
          labels:
            cronjob: 'hardlink'
        spec:
          containers:
          - name: hardlink-cronjob
            image: alpine:latest
            command: ["wget", "-q", "-O-", "http://scs-svc:9000/hooks/hardlink"]
          restartPolicy: Never

The following console session shows how we create the object, allow a couple of executions and remove it (in production we keep it running but once a day, not each minute):

$ kubectl -n scs-demo apply -f webhook-cronjob.yaml                          1
cronjob.batch/hardlink created
$ kubectl -n scs-demo get pods -l "cronjob=hardlink" -w                      2
NAME                      READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
hardlink-27735351-zvpnb   0/1     Pending   0          0s
hardlink-27735351-zvpnb   0/1     ContainerCreating   0          0s
hardlink-27735351-zvpnb   0/1     Completed           0          2s
^C
$ kubectl -n scs-demo logs pod/hardlink-27735351-zvpnb                       3
Mode:                     real
Method:                   sha256
Files:                    3
Linked:                   1 files
Compared:                 0 xattrs
Compared:                 1 files
Saved:                    32 B
Duration:                 0.000220 seconds
$ sleep 60
$ kubectl -n scs-demo get pods -l "cronjob=hardlink"                         4
NAME                      READY   STATUS      RESTARTS   AGE
hardlink-27735351-zvpnb   0/1     Completed   0          83s
hardlink-27735352-br5rn   0/1     Completed   0          23s
$ kubectl -n scs-demo logs pod/hardlink-27735352-br5rn                       5
Mode:                     real
Method:                   sha256
Files:                    3
Linked:                   0 files
Compared:                 0 xattrs
Compared:                 0 files
Saved:                    0 B
Duration:                 0.000070 seconds
$ kubectl -n scs-demo delete -f webhook-cronjob.yaml                         6
cronjob.batch "hardlink" deleted

1. This command creates the cronjob object.
2. This checks the pods with our cronjob label, we interrupt it once we see that the first run has been completed.
3. With this command we see the output of the execution, as this is the fist execution we see that date.txt.2 has been replaced by a hardlink (the summary does not name the file, but it is the only option knowing the contents from the original upload).
4. After waiting a little bit we check the pods executed again to get the name of the latest one.
5. The log now shows that nothing was done.
6. As this is a demo, we delete the cronjob.

Jobs (s3sync)The following job can be used to synchronise the contents of a directory in a S3 bucket with the SCS Filesystem:

job.yaml

apiVersion: batch/v1
kind: Job
metadata:
  name: s3sync
  labels:
    cronjob: 's3sync'
spec:
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        cronjob: 's3sync'
    spec:
      containers:
      - name: s3sync-job
        image: alpine:latest
        command: 
        - "wget"
        - "-q"
        - "--header"
        - "Content-Type: application/json"
        - "--post-file"
        - "/secrets/s3sync.json"
        - "-O-"
        - "http://scs-svc:9000/hooks/s3sync"
        volumeMounts:
        - mountPath: /secrets
          name: job-secrets
          readOnly: true
      restartPolicy: Never
      volumes:
      - name: job-secrets
        secret:
          secretName: webhook-job-secrets

The file with parameters for the script must be something like this:

s3sync.json

 
  "aws":  
    "key": "********************",
    "secret_key": "****************************************"
   ,
  "s3":  
    "region": "eu-north-1",
    "bucket": "blogops-test",
    "path": "test"
   ,
  "scs":  
    "path": "test"
   
 

Once we have both files we can run the Job as follows:

$ kubectl -n scs-demo create secret generic webhook-job-secrets \            1
  --from-file="s3sync.json=s3sync.json"
secret/webhook-job-secrets created
$ kubectl -n scs-demo apply -f webhook-job.yaml                              2
job.batch/s3sync created
$ kubectl -n scs-demo get pods -l "cronjob=s3sync"                           3
NAME           READY   STATUS      RESTARTS   AGE
s3sync-zx2cj   0/1     Completed   0          12s
$ kubectl -n scs-demo logs s3sync-zx2cj                                      4
Mounted bucket 's3fs-test' on '/root/tmp.jiOjaF/s3data'
sending incremental file list
created directory ./test
./
kyso.png
Number of files: 2 (reg: 1, dir: 1)
Number of created files: 2 (reg: 1, dir: 1)
Number of deleted files: 0
Number of regular files transferred: 1
Total file size: 15,075 bytes
Total transferred file size: 15,075 bytes
Literal data: 15,075 bytes
Matched data: 0 bytes
File list size: 0
File list generation time: 0.147 seconds
File list transfer time: 0.000 seconds
Total bytes sent: 15,183
Total bytes received: 74
sent 15,183 bytes  received 74 bytes  30,514.00 bytes/sec
total size is 15,075  speedup is 0.99
Called umount for '/root/tmp.jiOjaF/s3data'
Script exit code: 0
$ kubectl -n scs-demo delete -f webhook-job.yaml                             5
job.batch "s3sync" deleted
$ kubectl -n scs-demo delete secrets webhook-job-secrets                     6
secret "webhook-job-secrets" deleted

1. Here we create the webhook-job-secrets secret that contains the s3sync.json file.
2. This command runs the job.
3. Checking the label cronjob=s3sync we get the Pods executed by the job.
4. Here we print the logs of the completed job.
5. Once we are finished we remove the Job.
6. And also the secret.

Final remarksThis post has been longer than I expected, but I believe it can be useful for someone; in any case, next time I ll try to explain something shorter or will split it into multiple entries.