Search Results: "swan"

30 March 2017

Shirish Agarwal: The tale of the dancing girl #nsfw

Demonstration of a Lapdance - Wikipedia

Demonstration of a Lapdance Wikipedia

The post will be adult/mature in nature. So those below 18 please excuse. The post is about an anecdote almost 20 years to date, The result its being posted is I had a dinner with a friend to whom I shared this and he thought it would be nice if I shared this hence sharing it. The conversation was about being young and foolish in which I shared the anecdote. The blog post was supposed to be about Aadhar which shocked me both in the way no political discourse happened and the way the public as well as public policy was gamed but that would have to wait for another day. History I left college in 1995. The anecdote/incident probably happened couple of years earlier so probably 1992-1993. At that time, I was in my teens and as a typical teenager I made few friends. One of those friends, who would remain nameless as since we drifted apart, and as I have not take permission from him, taking his name would not be a good idea. Anyway, this gentleman, let s call him Mr. X as an example. Couple of months before, he had bought an open jeep, similar but very different from the jeep being shown below. Open Jeep had become a fashion statement few months back (in those days) as a Salman khan starred movie had that and anybody who had money wanted one just like that.
Illustration of an open jeep, sadly its a military one - wikipedia

Illustration of an open jeep, sadly its a military one wikipedia

Those days we didn t have cell-phones and I had given my land-line phone number to very few friends as in those days, as the land-lines were a finicky instrument. One fine morning, I get a call from my friend telling he is going to come near my place and I should meet him at some xyz place and we would go for a picnic for the whole day and it is possible that we might return next day. As it was holidays and only a fool would throw away a chance to have a ride in open air jeep, I immediately agreed. I shared that my friends had organized a picnic and giving another friend s number (who didn t know anything) got permission and went to meet Mr. X. This was very early morning, around 0600 hrs. . After meeting him, he told that we would be going to Mumbai, take some more friends from there and then move on. In those days, a railway ticket from Shivaji Nagar to V.T. (now C.S.T.) costed INR 30/- . I had been to Mumbai few times before for various technical conferences and knew few cheap places to eat, I knew that going via train, we could go and come back spending at the most INR 150/- and still have some change left-over (today s meal at a roadside/street vendor easily passes that mark). The Journey I shared with him that it will be costly and I don t have any money to cover the fuel expenses and he said he would shoulder the expenses, he just wanted my company for the road. Those days, it was the scenic Old Mumbai-Pune highway and we took plenty of stops to admire that ghats (hills and valleys together). That journey must have taken around 7-8 hours while today by new Expressway, you could do the same thing by 2.5/3 hours. Anyhow, we reached to some swanky hotel in South Mumbai. South Mumbai was not the financial powerhouse that it today is, there was mix of very old buildings and new buildings like the swanky hotel that we had checked in. I have no memory nor any idea whether it was 1 class, 3 class or 5 class and could have cared less as had been tired from the journey. We checked in, I had a long warm water bath and then slept in the king-size bed with curtains drawn. Evening came and we took the jeep and picked up 2-3 of his friends who were from my age or a year or two older and we went to Nariman Point. Seeing the Queen s necklace from Nariman Point at night is a sight in itself. Keeping with the innocence, I was under the impression that we had arrived at our destination, at this our host, Mr. X and his Bombaiya friends had a quiet laugh saying its a young night still. We must have whiled away couple of hours, having chai and throwing rocks in the sea. The Meeting After a while, Mr. X took us to another swanky place. My eyes were out of my sockets as this seemed to be as elitist a place as could be. I saw many White European women in various stages of undress pole-dancing and lap-dancing. I had recently (in those days) come to know the term but was under the impression that it was something that happened in Europe and States only. I had no idea that lap-dancing was older than my birth as according to Wikipedia. So looking back now, I am not surprised that in two decades the concept crossed the oceans. Again, Mr. X being the host, agreed to bear all the costs and all of us had food, drink and a lap-dance from any of the dancers on the floor. As I was young and probably shy (still am) I asked Mr. X s help to pick a girl/woman for me. The woman whom he picked was auburn-aired, was either my age or a year or two older/younger to me. What proceeded next was about 20-30 minutes of totally sexualized erotic experience. While he and all his friends picked girls to go all the way, I was hesitant to let loose. Maybe it was due to my lack of courage or inexperience, maybe it was not in my city so couldn t predict the outcome, maybe was just afraid that reality might mar fantasy, I dunno till date. Although we kissed and necked a lot, I guess that should count for something. The conversation After all my friends had gone to the various rooms, sometime after I excused myself, went to the loo myself, peed a bit, splashed cold water on self, came out and had couple of glasses of water and came back to my seat. The lady came back and I shared that I was not interested in going further and while she was beautiful, I just didn t have the guts. I did ask her if she would give me company though for sometime as I didn t know anyone else at that place. Our conversation was more about her than me as I had more or less an average life upto that moment. There were only three unorthodox things that I had done before meeting her. I had drunk wines of different types, smoked weed and had a Magic Mushrooms experience the year before with another group of friends I had made there. Goa in those days was simply magical in those days but that probably would need its story/own blog post. When I enquired about her, she shared she was from Russia and she rattled off more than half a dozen places around the world where she had been to and this was her second or third stint in Mumbai and she wasn t at all unhappy about the lifestyle and choices she was leading. I had no answer for her as a young penniless college-going student. Her self-confidence and the way she carried herself was impressive, with or without clothes. During course of the conversation she shared a couple of contacts from whom I could get better weed at slightly higher price if I were in Goa. Few months later, those contacts turned out to be true. After sometime, we took all the women and ourselves, around 8-9 people in his jeep (how he negotiated that is beyond me) went to a hygienic Pani puri and Bhel (puffed rice mixed with variety of spices typically tomato, potato, coriander chutney as well as Tamarind Chutney among other things) place and moved them to tears (the spices in bhel and Pani puri did it for them) and this was when we had explicitly asked the bhel-wala guy to make it extremely mild with just a hint of spice in it. Anyways, sometime later, we dropped them at the same place, dropped his friends and came back to the hotel we booked and got drunk again. After-effects Few years later, it came in the newspapers/media that while India had broken out of financial isolation just few years back (1991) and were profiting from it, many countries of the former USSR were going the other way around and hence there was huge human trafficking and immigration that had taken place. This was in-line with what the lady/woman/Miss X had shared with me. The latest trigger The latest trigger happened couple of months back where I learnt of a hero flight attendant saving a girl from human-trafficking. Till date, I am unsure whether she was doing it willingly or putting a brave smile in front of me, because even if she had confided me in any way, I probably would have been too powerless to help her in any-way. I just don t know. Foolishness thy name While my friend took advantage of my innocence and introduced me to a world which otherwise I would probably not know exists, it could have easily have gone some other way as well. While I m still unsure of the choices I made, I was and am happy that I was able to strike a conversation with her and attempt to reach the person therein. Was it the truth or an elaborate fabricated lie to protect myself and herself, this I will never know. Oppression I understand the fact that as a customer or somebody who is taking part in either of those performances or experiences it isn t easy in any way to know/say that whether the performer is doing it wilfully or not as the experiences are in tightly controlled settings.
Filed under: Miscellenous Tagged: #anecdote, #confusion, #elitist, #growing up, #lap dance, #NSFW, #Open Jeep, Mumbai

25 March 2017

Russ Allbery: Spring haul

Work has been hellishly busy lately, so that's pretty much all I've been doing. The major project I'm working on should be basically done in the next couple of weeks, though (fingers crossed), so maybe I'll be able to surface a bit more after that. In the meantime, I'm still acquiring books I don't have time to read, since that's my life. In this case, two great Humble Book Bundles were too good of a bargain to pass up. There are a bunch of books in here that I already own in paperback (and hence showed up in previous haul posts), but I'm running low on shelf room, so some of those paper copies may go to the used bookstore to make more space. Kelley Armstrong Lost Souls (sff)
Clive Barker Tortured Souls (horror)
Jim Butcher Working for Bigfoot (sff collection)
Octavia E. Butler Parable of the Sower (sff)
Octavia E. Butler Parable of the Talents (sff)
Octavia E. Butler Unexpected Stories (sff collection)
Octavia E. Butler Wild Seed (sff)
Jacqueline Carey One Hundred Ablutions (sff)
Richard Chizmar A Long December (sff collection)
Jo Clayton Skeen's Leap (sff)
Kate Elliot Jaran (sff)
Harlan Ellison Can & Can'tankerous (sff collection)
Diana Pharoh Francis Path of Fate (sff)
Mira Grant Final Girls (sff)
Elizabeth Hand Black Light (sff)
Elizabeth Hand Saffron & Brimstone (sff collection)
Elizabeth Hand Wylding Hall (sff)
Kevin Hearne The Purloined Poodle (sff)
Nalo Hopkinson Skin Folk (sff)
Katherine Kurtz Camber of Culdi (sff)
Katherine Kurtz Lammas Night (sff)
Joe R. Lansdale Fender Lizards (mainstream)
Robert McCammon The Border (sff)
Robin McKinley Beauty (sff)
Robin McKinley The Hero and the Crown (sff)
Robin McKinley Sunshine (sff)
Tim Powers Down and Out in Purgatory (sff)
Cherie Priest Jacaranda (sff)
Alastair Reynolds Deep Navigation (sff collection)
Pamela Sargent The Shore of Women (sff)
John Scalzi Miniatures (sff collection)
Lewis Shiner Glimpses (sff)
Angie Thomas The Hate U Give (mainstream)
Catherynne M. Valente The Bread We Eat in Dreams (sff collection)
Connie Willis The Winds of Marble Arch (sff collection)
M.K. Wren Sword of the Lamb (sff)
M.K. Wren Shadow of the Swan (sff)
M.K. Wren House of the Wolf (sff)
Jane Yolen Sister Light, Sister Dark (sff)

2 January 2017

Shirish Agarwal: India Tourism, E-Visa and Hong Kong

A Safe and Happy New Year to all. While Debconf India is still a pipe-dream as of now, did see that India has been gradually doing it easier for tourists and casual business visitors to come visit India. This I take as very positive development for India itself. The 1st condition is itself good for anybody visiting India
Eligibility International Travellers whose sole objective of visiting India is recreation , sight-seeing , casual visit to meet friends or relatives, short duration medical treatment or casual business visit.
https://indianvisaonline.gov.in/visa/tvoa.html That this facility is being given to 130 odd countries is better still
Albania, Andorra, Anguilla, Antigua & Barbuda, Argentina, Armenia, Aruba, Australia, Austria, Bahamas, Barbados, Belgium, Belize, Bolivia, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Botswana, Brazil, Brunei, Bulgaria, Cambodia, Canada, Cape Verde, Cayman Island, Chile, China, China- SAR Hong-Kong, China- SAR Macau, Colombia, Comoros, Cook Islands, Costa Rica, Cote d lvoire, Croatia, Cuba, Czech Republic, Denmark, Djibouti, Dominica, Dominican Republic, East Timor, Ecuador, El Salvador, Eritrea, Estonia, Fiji, Finland, France, Gabon, Gambia, Georgia, Germany, Ghana, Greece, Grenada, Guatemala, Guinea, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, Hungary, Iceland, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Jamaica, Japan, Jordan, Kenya, Kiribati, Laos, Latvia, Lesotho, Liberia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Madagascar, Malawi, Malaysia, Malta, Marshall Islands, Mauritius, Mexico, Micronesia, Moldova, Monaco, Mongolia, Montenegro, Montserrat, Mozambique, Myanmar, Namibia, Nauru, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Niue Island, Norway, Oman, Palau, Palestine, Panama, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Republic of Korea, Republic of Macedonia, Romania, Russia, Saint Christopher and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent & the Grenadines, Samoa, San Marino, Senegal, Serbia, Seychelles, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, Solomon Islands, South Africa, Spain, Sri Lanka, Suriname, Swaziland, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Tajikistan, Tanzania, Thailand, Tonga, Trinidad & Tobago, Turks & Caicos Island, Tuvalu, UAE, Ukraine, United Kingdom, Uruguay, USA, Vanuatu, Vatican City-Holy See, Venezuela, Vietnam, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
This should make it somewhat easier for any Indian organizer as well as any participants from any of the member countries shared. There is possibility that this list would even get longer, provided we are able to scale our airports and all and any necessary infrastructure that would be needed for International Visitors to have a good experience. What has been particularly interesting is to know which ports of call are being used by International Visitors as well as overall growth rate
The Percentage share of Foreign Tourist Arrivals (FTAs) in India during November, 2016 among the top 15 source countries was highest from USA (15.53%) followed by UK (11.21%), Bangladesh (10.72%), Canada (4.66%), Russian Fed (4.53%), Australia (4.04%), Malaysia (3.65%), Germany (3.53%), China (3.14%), France (2.88%), Sri Lanka (2.49%), Japan (2.49%), Singapore (2.16%), Nepal (1.46%) and Thailand (1.37%).
And port of call
The Percentage share of Foreign Tourist Arrivals (FTAs) in India during November 2016 among the top 15 ports was highest at Delhi Airport (32.71%) followed by Mumbai Airport (18.51%), Chennai Airport (6.83%), Bengaluru Airport (5.89%), Haridaspur Land check post (5.87%), Goa Airport (5.63%), Kolkata Airport (3.90%), Cochin Airport (3.29%), Hyderabad Airport (3.14%), Ahmadabad Airport (2.76%), Trivandrum Airport (1.54%), Trichy Airport (1.53%), Gede Rail (1.16%), Amritsar Airport (1.15%), and Ghojadanga land check post (0.82%) .
The Ghojadanga land check post seems to be between West Bengal, India and Bangladesh. Gede Railway Station is also in West Bengal as well. So all and any overlanders could take any of those ways.Even Hardispur Land Check post comes in the Bengal-Bangladesh border only. In the airports, Delhi Airport seems to be attracting lot more business than the Mumbai Airport. Part of the reason I *think* is the direct link of Delhi Airport to NDLS via the Delhi Airport Express Line . The same when it will happen in Mumbai should be a game-changer for city too. Now if you are wondering why I have been suddenly talking about visas and airports in India, it came because Hong Kong is going to Withdraw Visa Free Entry Facility For Indians. Although, as rightly pointed out in the article doesn t make sense from economic POV and seems to be somewhat politically motivated. Not that I or anybody else can do anything about that. Seeing that, I thought it was a good opportunity to see how good/Bad our Government is and it seems to be on the right path. Although the hawks (Intelligence and Counter-Terrorist Agencies) will probably become a bit more paranoid , their work becomes tougher.
Filed under: Miscellenous Tagged: #Airport Metro Line 3, #CSIA, #Incredible India, #India, #International Tourism

1 December 2016

Daniel Pocock: Using a fully free OS for devices in the home

There are more and more devices around the home (and in many small offices) running a GNU/Linux-based firmware. Consider routers, entry-level NAS appliances, smart phones and home entertainment boxes. More and more people are coming to realize that there is a lack of security updates for these devices and a big risk that the proprietary parts of the code are either very badly engineered (if you don't plan to release your code, why code it properly?) or deliberately includes spyware that calls home to the vendor, ISP or other third parties. IoT botnet incidents, which are becoming more widely publicized, emphasize some of these risks. On top of this is the frustration of trying to become familiar with numerous different web interfaces (for your own devices and those of any friends and family members you give assistance to) and the fact that many of these devices have very limited feature sets. Many people hail OpenWRT as an example of a free alternative (for routers), but I recently discovered that OpenWRT's web interface won't let me enable both DHCP and DHCPv6 concurrently. The underlying OS and utilities fully support dual stack, but the UI designers haven't encountered that configuration before. Conclusion: move to a device running a full OS, probably Debian-based, but I would consider BSD-based solutions too. For many people, the benefit of this strategy is simple: use the same skills across all the different devices, at home and in a professional capacity. Get rapid access to security updates. Install extra packages or enable extra features if really necessary. For example, I already use Shorewall and strongSwan on various Debian boxes and I find it more convenient to configure firewall zones using Shorewall syntax rather than OpenWRT's UI. Which boxes to start with? There are various considerations when going down this path:
  • Start with existing hardware, or buy new devices that are easier to re-flash? Sometimes there are other reasons to buy new hardware, for example, when upgrading a broadband connection to Gigabit or when an older NAS gets a noisy fan or struggles with SSD performance and in these cases, the decision about what to buy can be limited to those devices that are optimal for replacing the OS.
  • How will the device be supported? Can other non-technical users do troubleshooting? If mixing and matching components, how will faults be identified? If buying a purpose-built NAS box and the CPU board fails, will the vendor provide next day replacement, or could it be gone for a month? Is it better to use generic components that you can replace yourself?
  • Is a completely silent/fanless solution necessary?
  • Is it possibly to completely avoid embedded microcode and firmware?
  • How many other free software developers are using the same box, or will you be first?
Discussing these options I recently started threads on the debian-user mailing list discussing options for routers and home NAS boxes. A range of interesting suggestions have already appeared, it would be great to see any other ideas that people have about these choices.

10 October 2016

Daniel Pocock: DVD-based Clean Room for PGP and PKI

There is increasing interest in computer security these days and more and more people are using some form of PKI, whether it is signing Git tags, signing packages for a GNU/Linux distribution or just signing your emails. There are also more home networks and small offices who require their own in-house Certificate Authority (CA) to issue TLS certificates for VPN users (e.g. StrongSWAN) or IP telephony. Back in April, I started discussing the PGP Clean Room idea (debian-devel discussion and gnupg-users discussion), created a wiki page and started development of a script to build the clean room ISO using live-build on Debian. Keeping the master keys completely offline and putting subkeys onto smart cards and other devices dramatically lowers the risk of mistakes and security breaches. Using a read-only DVD to operate the clean-room makes it convenient and harder to tamper with. Trying it out in VirtualBox It is fairly easy to clone the Git repository, run the script to create the ISO and boot it in VirtualBox to see what is inside: At the moment, it contains a number of packages likely to be useful in a PKI clean room, including GnuPG, smartcard drivers, the lightweight pki utility from StrongSWAN and OpenSSL. I've been trying it out with an SPR-532, one of the GnuPG-supported smartcard readers with a pin-pad and the OpenPGP card. Ready to use today More confident users will be able to build the ISO and use it immediately by operating all the utilities from the command line. For example, you should be able to fully configure PGP smart cards by following this blog from Simon Josefsson. The ISO includes some useful scripts, for example, create-raid will quickly partition and RAID a set of SD cards to store your master key-pair offline. Getting involved To make PGP accessible to a wider user-base and more convenient for those who don't use GnuPG frequently enough to remember all the command line options, it would be interesting to create a GUI, possibly using python-newt to create a similar look-and-feel to popular text-based installer and system administration tools. If you are keen on this project and would like to discuss it further, please come and join the new pki-clean-room mailing list and feel free to ask questions or share your thoughts about it. One way to proceed may be to recruit an Outreachy or GSoC intern to develop the UI. Before they can get started, it would be necessary to more thoroughly document workflow requirements.

31 August 2016

Chris Lamb: Free software activities in August 2016

Here is my monthly update covering what I have been doing in the free software world (previously):

Reproducible builds

Whilst anyone can inspect the source code of free software for malicious flaws, most Linux distributions provide binary (or "compiled") packages to end users. The motivation behind the Reproducible Builds effort is to allow verification that no flaws have been introduced either maliciously and accidentally during this compilation process by promising identical binary packages are always generated from a given source.

Diffoscope diffoscope is our "diff on steroids" that will not only recursively unpack archives but will transform binary formats into human-readable forms in order to compare them:
  • Added a command-line interface to the try.diffoscope.org web service.
  • Added a JSON comparator.
  • In the HTML output, highlight lines when hovering to make it easier to visually track.
  • Ensure that we pass str types to our Difference class, otherwise we can't be sure we can render them later.
  • Testsuite improvements:
    • Generate test coverage reports.
    • Add tests for Haskell and GitIndex comparators.
    • Completely refactored all of the comparator tests, extracting out commonly-used routines.
    • Confirm rendering of text and HTML presenters when checking non-existing files.
    • Dropped a squashfs test as it was simply too unreliable and/or has too many requirements to satisfy.
  • A large number of miscellaneous cleanups, including:
    • Reworking the comparator setup/preference internals by dynamically importing classes via a single list.
    • Split exceptions out into dedicated diffoscope.exc module.
    • Tidying the PROVIDERS dict in diffoscope/__init__.py.
    • Use html.escape over xml.sax.saxutils.escape, cgi.escape, etc.
    • Removing hard-coding of manual page targets names in debian/rules.
    • Specify all string format arguments as logging function parameters, not using interpolation.
    • Tidying imports, correcting indentation levels and drop unnecessary whitespace.

disorderfs disorderfs is our FUSE filesystem that deliberately introduces nondeterminism in system calls such as readdir(3).
  • Added a testsuite to prevent regressions. (f124965)
  • Added a --sort-dirents=yes no option for forcing deterministic ordering. (2aae325)

Other
  • Improved strip-nondeterminism, our tool to remove specific nondeterministic information after a build:
    • Match more styles of Java .properties files.
    • Remove hyphen from "non-determinism" and "non-deterministic" throughout package for consistency.
  • Improvements to our testing infrastucture:
    • Improve the top-level navigation so that we can always get back to "home" of a package.
    • Give expandable elements cursor: pointer CSS styling to highlight they are clickable.
    • Drop various trailing underlined whitespaces after links.
    • Explicitly log that build was successful or not.
    • Various code-quality improvements, including prefering str.format over concatentation.
  • Miscellaneous updates to our filter-packages internal tool:
    • Add --random=N and --url options.
    • Add support for --show=comments.
    • Correct ordering so that --show-version runs after --filter-ftbfs.
    • Rename --show-ftbfs to --filter-ftbfs and --show-version to --show=version.
  • Created a proof-of-concept reproducible-utils package to contain commonly-used snippets aimed at developers wishing to make their packages reproducible.


I also submitted 92 patches to fix specific reproducibility issues in advi, amora-server, apt-cacher-ng, ara, argyll, audiotools, bam, bedtools, binutils-m68hc1x, botan1.10, broccoli, congress, cookiecutter, dacs, dapl, dateutils, ddd, dicom3tools, dispcalgui, dnssec-trigger, echoping, eekboek, emacspeak, eyed3, fdroidserver, flashrom, fntsample, forkstat, gkrellm, gkrellm, gnunet-gtk, handbrake, hardinfo, ircd-irc2, ircd-ircu, jack-audio-connection-kit, jpy, kxmlgui, libbson, libdc0, libdevel-cover-perl, libfm, libpam-ldap, libquvi, librep, lilyterm, mozvoikko, mp4h, mp4v2, myghty, n2n, nagios-nrpe, nikwi, nmh, nsnake, openhackware, pd-pdstring, phpab, phpdox, phpldapadmin, pixelmed-codec, pleiades, pybit, pygtksourceview, pyicu, python-attrs, python-gflags, quvi, radare2, rc, rest2web, roaraudio, rt-extension-customfieldsonupdate, ruby-compass, ruby-pg, sheepdog, tf5, ttf-tiresias, ttf-tiresias, tuxpaint, tuxpaint-config, twitter-bootstrap3, udpcast, uhub, valknut, varnish, vips, vit, wims, winswitch, wmweather+ & xshisen.

Debian GNU/Linux
Debian LTS

This month I have been paid to work 15 hours on Debian Long Term Support (LTS). In that time I did the following:
  • "Frontdesk" duties, triaging CVEs, etc.
  • Authored the patch & issued DLA 596-1 for extplorer, a web-based file manager, fixing an archive traversal exploit.
  • Issued DLA 598-1 for suckless-tools, fixing a segmentation fault in the slock screen locking tool.
  • Issued DLA 599-1 for cracklib2, a pro-active password checker library, fixing a stack-based buffer overflow when parsing large GECOS fields.
  • Improved the find-work internal tool adding optional colour highlighting and migrating it to Python 3.
  • Wrote an lts-missing-uploads tool to find mistakes where there was no correponding package in the archive after an announcement.
  • Added optional colour highlighting to the lts-cve-triage tool.

Uploads
  • redis 2:3.2.3-1 New upstream release, move to the DEP-5 debian/copyright format, ensure that we are running as root in LSB initscripts and add a README.Source regarding our local copies of redis.conf and sentinel.conf.
  • python-django:
    • 1:1.10-1 New upstream release.
    • 1:1.10-2 Fix test failures due to mishandled upstream translation updates.

  • gunicorn:
    • 19.6.0-2 Reload logrotate in the postrotate action to avoid processes writing to the old files and move to DEP-5 debian/copyright format.
    • 19.6.0-3 Drop our /usr/sbin/gunicorn ,3 -debian and related Debian-specific machinery to be more like upstream.
    • 19.6.0-4 Drop "template" systemd .service files and point towards examples and documentation instead.

  • adminer:
    • 4.2.5-1 Take over package maintenance, completely overhauling the packaging with a new upstream version, move to virtual-mysql-server to support MariaDB, updating package names of dependencies and fix the outdated Apache configuration.
    • 4.2.5-2 Correct the php5 package names.




FTP Team As a Debian FTP assistant I ACCEPTed 90 packages: android-platform-external-jsilver, android-platform-frameworks-data-binding, camlpdf, consolation, dfwinreg, diffoscope, django-restricted-resource, django-testproject, django-testscenarios, gitlab-ci-multi-runner, gnome-shell-extension-taskbar, golang-github-flynn-archive-go-shlex, golang-github-jamesclonk-vultr, golang-github-weppos-dnsimple-go, golang-golang-x-time, google-android-ndk-installer, haskell-expiring-cache-map, haskell-hclip, haskell-hdbc-session, haskell-microlens-ghc, haskell-names-th, haskell-persistable-record, haskell-should-not-typecheck, haskell-soap, haskell-soap-tls, haskell-th-reify-compat, haskell-with-location, haskell-wreq, kbtin, libclipboard-perl, libgtk3-simplelist-perl, libjs-jquery-selectize.js, liblemon, libplack-middleware-header-perl, libreoffice, libreswan, libtest-deep-json-perl, libtest-timer-perl, linux, linux-signed, live-tasks, llvm-toolchain-3.8, llvm-toolchain-snapshot, lua-luv, lua-torch-image, lua-torch-nn, magic-wormhole, mini-buildd, ncbi-vdb, node-ast-util, node-es6-module-transpiler, node-es6-promise, node-inline-source-map, node-number-is-nan, node-object-assign, nvidia-graphics-drivers, openhft-chronicle-bytes, openhft-chronicle-core, openhft-chronicle-network, openhft-chronicle-threads, openhft-chronicle-wire, pycodestyle, python-aptly, python-atomicwrites, python-click-log, python-django-casclient, python-git-os-job, python-hypothesis, python-nosehtmloutput, python-overpy, python-parsel, python-prov, python-py, python-schema, python-tackerclient, python-tornado, pyvo, r-cran-cairo, r-cran-mi, r-cran-rcppgsl, r-cran-sem, ruby-curses, ruby-fog-rackspace, ruby-mixlib-archive, ruby-tzinfo-data, salt-formula-swift, scapy3k, self-destructing-cookies, trollius-redis & websploit.

18 August 2016

Norbert Tretkowski: No MariaDB MaxScale in Debian

Last weekend I started working on a MariaDB MaxScale package for Debian, of course with the intention to upload it into the official Debian repository. Today I got pointed to an article by Michael "Monty" Widenius he published two days ago. It explains the recent license change of MaxScale from GPL so BSL with the release of MaxScale 2.0 beta. Justin Swanhart summarized the situation, and I could not agree more. Looks like we will not see MaxScale 2.0 in Debian any time soon...

30 June 2016

Chris Lamb: Free software activities in June 2016

Here is my monthly update covering a large part of what I have been doing in the free software world (previously):
Debian My work in the Reproducible Builds project was covered in our weekly reports. (#58, #59 & #60)
Debian LTS

This month I have been paid to work 18 hours on Debian Long Term Support (LTS). In that time I did the following:
  • "Frontdesk" duties, triaging CVEs, etc.
  • Extended the lts-cve-triage.py script to ignore packages that are not subject to Long Term Support.

  • Issued DLA 512-1 for mantis fixing an XSS vulnerability.
  • Issued DLA 513-1 for nspr correcting a buffer overflow in a sprintf utility.
  • Issued DLA 515-1 for libav patching a memory corruption issue.
  • Issued DLA 524-1 for squidguard fixing a reflected cross-site scripting vulnerability.
  • Issued DLA 525-1 for gimp correcting a use-after-free vulnerability in the channel and layer properties parsing process.

Uploads
  • redis (2:3.2.1-1) New upstream bugfix release, plus subsequent upload to the backports repository.
  • python-django (1.10~beta1-1) New upstream experimental release.
  • libfiu (0.94-5) Misc packaging updates.


RC bugs

I also filed 170 FTBFS bugs against a7xpg, acepack, android-platform-dalvik, android-platform-frameworks-base, android-platform-system-extras, android-platform-tools-base, apache-directory-api, aplpy, appstream-generator, arc-gui-clients, assertj-core, astroml, bamf, breathe, buildbot, cached-property, calf, celery-haystack, charmtimetracker, clapack, cmake, commons-javaflow, dataquay, dbi, django-celery, django-celery-transactions, django-classy-tags, django-compat, django-countries, django-floppyforms, django-hijack, django-localflavor, django-markupfield, django-model-utils, django-nose, django-pipeline, django-polymorphic, django-recurrence, django-sekizai, django-sitetree, django-stronghold, django-taggit, dune-functions, elementtidy, epic4-help, fcopulae, fextremes, fnonlinear, foreign, fort77, fregression, gap-alnuth, gcin, gdb-avr, ggcov, git-repair, glance, gnome-twitch, gnustep-gui, golang-github-audriusbutkevicius-go-nat-pmp, golang-github-gosimple-slug, gprbuild, grafana, grantlee5, graphite-api, guacamole-server, ido, jless, jodreports, jreen, kdeedu-data, kdewebdev, kwalify, libarray-refelem-perl, libdbusmenu, libdebian-package-html-perl, libdevice-modem-perl, libindicator, liblrdf, libmail-milter-perl, libopenraw, libvisca, linuxdcpp, lme4, marble, mgcv, mini-buildd, mu-cade, mvtnorm, nose, octave-epstk, onioncircuits, opencolorio, parsec47, phantomjs, php-guzzlehttp-ringphp, pjproject, pokerth, prayer, pyevolve, pyinfra, python-asdf, python-ceilometermiddleware, python-django-bootstrap-form, python-django-compressor, python-django-contact-form, python-django-debug-toolbar, python-django-extensions, python-django-feincms, python-django-formtools, python-django-jsonfield, python-django-mptt, python-django-openstack-auth, python-django-pyscss, python-django-registration, python-django-tagging, python-django-treebeard, python-geopandas, python-hdf5storage, python-hypothesis, python-jingo, python-libarchive-c, python-mhash, python-oauth2client, python-proliantutils, python-pytc, python-restless, python-tidylib, python-websockets, pyvows, qct, qgo, qmidinet, quodlibet, r-cran-gss, r-cran-runit, r-cran-sn, r-cran-stabledist, r-cran-xml, rgl, rglpk, rkt, rodbc, ruby-devise-two-factor, ruby-json-schema, ruby-puppet-syntax, ruby-rspec-puppet, ruby-state-machine, ruby-xmlparser, ryu, sbd, scanlogd, signond, slpvm, sogo, sphinx-argparse, squirrel3, sugar-jukebox-activity, sugar-log-activity, systemd, tiles, tkrplot, twill, ucommon, urca, v4l-utils, view3dscene, xqilla, youtube-dl & zope.interface.

FTP Team

As a Debian FTP assistant I ACCEPTed 186 packages: akonadi4, alljoyn-core-1509, alljoyn-core-1604, alljoyn-gateway-1504, alljoyn-services-1504, alljoyn-services-1509, alljoyn-thin-client-1504, alljoyn-thin-client-1509, alljoyn-thin-client-1604, apertium-arg, apertium-arg-cat, apertium-eo-fr, apertium-es-it, apertium-eu-en, apertium-hbs, apertium-hin, apertium-isl, apertium-kaz, apertium-spa, apertium-spa-arg, apertium-tat, apertium-urd, arc-theme, argus-clients, ariba, beast-mcmc, binwalk, bottleneck, colorfultabs, dh-runit, django-modeltranslation, dq, dublin-traceroute, duktape, edk2, emacs-pdf-tools, eris, erlang-p1-oauth2, erlang-p1-sqlite3, erlang-p1-xmlrpc, faba-icon-theme, firefox-branding-iceweasel, golang-1.6, golang-defaults, golang-github-aelsabbahy-gonetstat, golang-github-howeyc-gopass, golang-github-oleiade-reflections, golang-websocket, google-android-m2repository-installer, googler, goto-chg-el, gr-radar, growl-for-linux, guvcview, haskell-open-browser, ipe, labplot, libalt-alien-ffi-system-perl, libanyevent-fcgi-perl, libcds-savot-java, libclass-ehierarchy-perl, libconfig-properties-perl, libffi-checklib-perl, libffi-platypus-perl, libhtml-element-library-perl, liblwp-authen-oauth2-perl, libmediawiki-dumpfile-perl, libmessage-passing-zeromq-perl, libmoosex-types-portnumber-perl, libmpack, libnet-ip-xs-perl, libperl-osnames-perl, libpodofo, libprogress-any-perl, libqtpas, librdkafka, libreoffice, libretro-beetle-pce-fast, libretro-beetle-psx, libretro-beetle-vb, libretro-beetle-wswan, libretro-bsnes-mercury, libretro-mupen64plus, libservicelog, libtemplate-plugin-datetime-perl, libtext-metaphone-perl, libtins, libzmq-ffi-perl, licensecheck, link-grammar, linux, linux-signed, lua-busted, magics++, mkalias, moka-icon-theme, neutron-vpnaas, newlisp, node-absolute-path, node-ejs, node-errs, node-has-flag, node-lodash-compat, node-strip-ansi, numba, numix-icon-theme, nvidia-graphics-drivers, nvidia-graphics-drivers-legacy-304xx, nvidia-graphics-drivers-legacy-340xx, obs-studio, opencv, pacapt, pgbackrest, postgis, powermock, primer3, profile-sync-daemon, pyeapi, pypandoc, pyssim, python-cutadapt, python-cymruwhois, python-fisx, python-formencode, python-hkdf, python-model-mommy, python-nanomsg, python-offtrac, python-social-auth, python-twiggy, python-vagrant, python-watcherclient, python-xkcd, pywps, r-bioc-deseq2, r-bioc-dnacopy, r-bioc-ensembldb, r-bioc-geneplotter, r-cran-adegenet, r-cran-adephylo, r-cran-distory, r-cran-fields, r-cran-future, r-cran-globals, r-cran-htmlwidgets, r-cran-listenv, r-cran-mlbench, r-cran-mlmrev, r-cran-pheatmap, r-cran-pscbs, r-cran-r.cache, refind, relatorio, reprotest, ring, ros-ros-comm, ruby-acts-as-tree, ruby-chronic-duration, ruby-flot-rails, ruby-numerizer, ruby-u2f, selenium-firefoxdriver, simgrid, skiboot, smtpping, snap-confine, snapd, sniffles, sollya, spin, subuser, superlu, swauth, swift-plugin-s3, syncthing, systemd-bootchart, tdiary-theme, texttable, tidy-html5, toxiproxy, twinkle, vmtk, wait-for-it, watcher, wcslib & xapian-core.

14 March 2016

Simon Richter: IPsec settings for FortiNet VPN

So, a customer uses a FortiNet VPN gateway. Because I have perfectly fine IPsec software already installed, the only thing missing are appropriate settings. As they use IKEv1 in aggressive mode, there is not much of an error reply if you get any of them wrong. So, here's a StrongSwan setup that works for me:
conn fortinet
        left=%any
        leftauth=psk
        leftid=""
        leftauth2=xauth
        xauth_identity="your username"
        leftsourceip=%config
        right=gateway IP address
        rightsubnet=VPN subnet
        rightauth=psk
        keyexchange=ikev1
        aggressive=yes
        ike=aes128-sha1-modp1536!
        esp=aes128-sha1-modp1536!
        auto=add
Not sure if that can be optimized further by getting the VPN subnet through mode_config as well, but I'm basically happy with the current state. In addition to that, you need the PSK and XAUTH secrets, obviously.

16 November 2015

Norbert Preining: Movies: Monuments Men and Interstellar

Over the rainy weekend we watched two movies: Monuments Men (in Japanese it is called Michelangelo Project!) and Interstellar. Both blockbuster movies from the usual American companies, they are light-years away when it comes to quality. The Monuments Men are boring, without a story, without depth, historically inaccurate, a complete failure. Interstellar, although a long movie, keeps you frozen in the seat while being as scientific as possible and starts your brain working heavily. monuments-men-interstellar My personal verdict: 3 rotten eggs (because Rotten Tomatoes are not stinky enough) for the Monuments Men, and 4 stars for Interstellar. Story First for the plot of the two movies: The Monuments Men is loosely based on a true story about rescuing pieces of art at the end of the second world war, before the Nazis destroy them or the Russian take them away. A group of art experts is sent into Europe and manages to find several hiding places of art taken by the Nazis. Interstellar is set in near future where the conditions on the earth are deteriorating to a degree that human life seems to be soon impossible. Some years before the movie plays a group of astronauts were sent through a wormhole into a different galaxy to search for new inhabitable planets. Now it is time to check out these planets, and try to establish colonies there. Cooper, a retired NASA officer and pilot, now working as farmer, and his daughter are guided by some mysterious way to a secret NASA facility. Cooper is drafted for being a pilot on the reconnaissance mission, and leaves earth and our galaxy through the same wormhole. (Not telling more!) Monuments Men Looking at the cast of Monuments Men (George Clooney, Matt Damon, Bill Murray, John Goodman, Jean Dujardin, Bob Balaban, Hugh Bonneville, and Cate Blanchett) one would expect a great movie but from the very first to the very last scene, it is a slowly meandering shallow flow of sticked together scenes without much coherence. Tension is generated only through unrelated events (stepping onto a landmine, patting a horse), but never developed properly. Dialogs are shallow and boring with one exception: When Frank Stokes (George Clooney) meets the one German and inquires general about the art, predicting his future being hanged. Historically, the movie is as inaccurate as it can be despite Clooney stating that 80 percent of the story is still completely true and accurate, and almost all of the scenes happened . That contrasts starkly with the verdict of Nigel Pollard (Swansea University): There s a kernel of history there, but The Monuments Men plays fast and loose with it in ways that are probably necessary to make the story work as a film, but the viewer ends up with a fairly confused notion of what the organisation was, and what it achieved. The movie leaves a bitter aftertaste, hailing of American heroism paired with the usual stereotypes (French amour, German retarded, Russian ignorance, etc). Together with the half baked dialogues it feels like a permanent coitus interruptus. Interstellar Interstellar cannot serve with a similar cast, but still a few known people (Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, and Michael Caine!). But I believe this is actually a sign of quality. Well balancing scientific accuracy and the requirements for blockbusters, the movie successfully spans the bridge between complicated science, in particular general gravity, and entertainment. While not going so far to call the move edutainment (like both the old and new Cosmos), it is surprising how much of hard science is packed into this movie. This is mostly thanks to the theoretical physicist Kip Thorne acting as scientific consultant for the movie, but also due to the director Christopher Nolan being serious about it and studying relativity at Caltech. Of course, scientific accuracy has limits nobody knows what happens if one crosses the event horizon of a black hole, and even the existence of wormholes is purely theoretical by now. Still, throughout the movie it follows the two requirements laid out by Kip Thorne: First, that nothing would violate established physical laws. Second, that all the wild speculations would spring from science and not from the fertile mind of a screenwriter. I think the biggest compliment was that, despite the length, despite a long day out (see next blog), despite the rather unfamiliar topic, my wife, who is normally not interested in space movies and that kind, didn t fall asleep throughout the movie, and I had to stop several times to explain details of the theory of gravity and astronomy. So in some sense it was perfect edutainment!

6 October 2015

Norbert Preining: Craft Beer Kanazawa 2015

Last weekend the yearly Craft Beer Kanazawa Festival took place in central Kanazawa. This year 14 different producers brought about 80 different kind of beers for us to taste. Compared with 6 years ago when I came to Japan and Japan was still more or less Kirin-Asahi-Sapporo country without any distinguishable taste, the situation as improved vastly, and we can now enjoy lots of excellent local beers!
beer-festival-1 Returning from a trip to Swansea and a conference in Fukuoka, I arrived at Kanazawa train station and went directly to the beer festival. A great welcome back in Kanazawa, but due to excessive sleep deprivation and the feeling of finally I want to come home , I only enjoyed 6 beers from 6 different producers. In the gardens behind the Shinoki Cultural Center lots of small tents with beer and food were set up. Lots of tables and chairs were also available, but most people enjoyed flocking around in the grass around the tents. What a difference to last year s rainy and cold beer festival!
beer-festival-5 This year s producers were (in order from left to right, page links according to language): beer-festival-3 With only 6 beers to my avail (due to ticket system), I choose the ones I don t have nearby. Mind that the following comments are purely personal and do not define a quality standards  I just say what I like from worst to best: beer-festival-2 A great beer festival and I am looking for next years festival to try a few more. In the mean time I will stock up beers at home, so that I have always a good Yoho Brewery beer at hand! Enjoy

1 July 2015

Steve McIntyre: Quick trip to Sweden

Jo and I spent a few days in Sweden and had an awesome time! The main reason for being there was Leif and Maria's wedding way up north in Skellefte . They cunningly organised their ceremony for the Midsummer weekend, which was an excellent plan - we had a full weekend of partying while we were there. :-) the happy couple We had some time to ourselves while we were there, so we wandered about a little and got to see some of the beautiful coastal countryside. Trund n Then on the way home we stopped off in Ume to visit Mattias Wadenstein (maswan) and his wife Melanie, and he showed me around some of the machines that he's been admining on behalf of Debian. Maybe I'm a sad geek, but I feel quite a bond with one of the machines there, pettersson.debian.org. It's the official CD build machine for Debian, and I've been responsible for thrashing it really hard for the last 5 years or so... :-) Pettersson and friends Massive thanks to the University of Ume and their Academic Computer Club for hosting Debian machines and serving all the CD images for us! maswan and a lot of disks The only downsides from the trip were the massive tiredness (midnight sun is pretty, but notconducive to sleep!) the mosquito bites and the nasty plague^Wcold that we picked up while we were there... Ah well. :-)

20 March 2015

Steve McIntyre: Tour of Australia

Jo and I just got back from our massive holiday in Australia. We had an awesome time overall, fitting in lots of stuff in 4 weeks. Time for a quick write-up and some photos! Ayers Rock We flew into Sydney, then straight onto Uluru for the obligatory sunset and sunrise viewings. We didn't climb the Rock, both for sensitivity reasons and (to be more honest!) it looked way too much like hard work in 40-plus degree heat. Ghan train Coach over to Alice Springs, where we had a very quick look around before taking the Ghan train down to Adelaide. The train was fun for a day, and we got to see a lot of desert. In Adelaide, we had a look around the city (lovely colonial feel!) and got a couple of evenings in fun comedy shows at the Fringe. Great fun! Cuddling a sleepy wombat! On to Tasmania, where we did a quick (3 days) run around the island by car: into Hobart, up the east coast. Stopped in Swansea (a nice version!) for some heavenly Devonshire teas, then on up to Grindelwald near Launceston. Visited Trowunna Wildlife Park to see (and cuddle!) lots of local animals, which was amazing - Jo's favourite day of the holiday. Then on to Queenstown and drive back down to Hobart past some impossibly beautiful views around Cradle Mountain. Tassie's gorgeous - like the best bits of Scotland, Wales and Cornwall but with even fewer people and better weather. Sydney Opera House Next, on to Sydney for Harry and Cath's wedding. We stayed up in Chatswood. Not knowing anything about the area beforehand, we were a little surprised to basically find ourselves back in Hong Kong! We spent most of the weekend catching up with friends from the wedding group, and the wedding itself was at Quarantine Station, overlooking the harbour. It couldn't have been a more perfect location / weather / view for our friends' big day! We squeezed in a couple of the open-top bus tours of Sydney on the Sunday, but got caught in the horrendous storm that hit and ended up sheltering downstairs under cover on the bus. I'm told Bondi is lovely, but it all looked grey from the bus. :-P Puffing Billy, Yarra Valley Down to Melbourne on the train (bit of a wasted day, in hindsight), where we wandered around the city quite a bit. Caught up with an old friend who lives there for a day, and we did a wine tour up the Yarra Valley which was fun too. Snorkelling at the Reef - all OK! Up to Port Douglas, where we headed out to the Reef for my highlight of the holiday: a snorkelling tour with some local marine experts who showed us the local flora and fauna. We also visited a local Aboriginal cultural centre, skyrail and scenic railway around Kuranda village. Koala! :-) Down to Hervey Bay and a 1-day tour of Fraser Island - an amazing place in combination with quite a thrill-ride experience just being driven around on the sand tracks. Finally, down to Brisbane where we wandered around and visited both the Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary (more cuddles!) and the Gold Coast. Then the long flights home. Whew! We're knackered now. We knew we could't fit everything in, but we're glad we travelled all over and got tastes of almost everything. Now we can work out where we want to spend more time on our future visit(s). We'll definitely want to head over and see Perth and some of WA next time, and definitely more time in Tasmania, Sydney and Adelaide.

27 May 2014

Jon Dowland: 2012 In Review

2013 is nearly all finished up and so I thought I'd spend a little time writing up what was noteable in the last twelve months. When I did so I found an unfinished draft from the year before. It would be a shame for it to go to waste, so here it is. 2012 was an interesting year in many respects with personal highs and lows. Every year I see a lots of "round-up"-style blog posts on the web, titled things like "2012 in music", which attempt to summarize the highlights of the year in that particular context. Here's JWZ's effort, for example. Often they are prefixed with statements like "2012 was a strong year for music" or whatever. For me, 2012 was not a particularly great year. I discovered quite a lot of stuff that I love that was new to me, but not new in any other sense. In Music, there were a bunch of come-back albums that made the headlines. I picked up both of Orbital's Wonky and Brian Eno's Lux (debatably a comeback: his first ambient record since 1983, his first solo effort since 2005, but his fourth collaborative effort on Warp in the naughties). I've enjoyed them both, but I've already forgotten Wonky and I still haven't fully embraced Lux (and On Land has not been knocked from the top spot when I want to listen to ambience.) There was also Throbbing Gristle's (or X-TG) final effort, a semi/post-TG, partly posthumous double-album swan song effort which, even more than Lux, I still haven't fully digested. In all honesty I think it was eclipsed by the surprise one-off release of a live recording of a TG side project featuring Nik Void of Factory Floor: Carter Tutti Void's Transverse, which is excellent. Ostensibly a four-track release, there's a studio excerpt V4 studio (Slap 1) which is available from (at least) Amazon. There's also a much more obscure fifth "unreleased" track cruX which I managed to "buy" from one of the web shops for zero cost. The other big musical surprise for me last year was Beth Jeans Houghton and the Hooves of Destiny: Yours Truly, Cellophane Nose. I knew nothing of BJH, although it turns out I've heard some of her singles repeatedly on Radio 6, but her band's guitarist Ed Blazey and his partner lived in the flat below me briefly. In that time I managed to get to the pub with him just once, but he kindly gave me a copy of their album on 12" afterwards. It reminds me a bit of Goldfrapp circa "Seventh Tree": I really like it and I'm looking forward to whatever they do next. Reznor's How To Destroy Angels squeezed out An Omen EP which failed to set my world on fire as a coherent collection, despite a few strong songs individually. In movies, sadly once again I'd say most of the things I recall seeing would be "also rans". Prometheus was a disappointment, although I will probably rewatch it in 2D at least once. The final Batman was fun although not groundbreaking to me and it didn't surpass Ledger's efforts in The Dark Knight. Inception remains my favourite Nolan by a long shot. Looper is perhaps the stand-out, not least because it came from nowhere and I managed to avoid any hype. In games, I moaned about having moaning about too many games, most of which are much older than 2012. I started Borderlands 2 after enjoying Borderlands (disqualified on age grounds) but to this day haven't persued it much further. I mostly played the two similar meta-games: The Playstation Plus download free games in a fixed time period and the more sporadic but bountiful humble bundle whack-a-mole. More on these another time. In reading, as is typical I mostly read stuff that was not written in 2012. Of that which was, Charles Stross's The Apocalypse Codex was an improvement over The Fuller Memorandum which I did not enjoy much, but in general I'm finding I much prefer Stross's older work to his newer; David Byrne's How Music Works was my first (and currently last) Google Books ebook purchase, and I read it entirely on a Nexus 7. I thoroughly enjoyed the book but the experience has not made a convert of me away from paper. He leans heavily on his own experiences which is inevitable but fortunately they are wide and numerous. Iain Banks' Stonemouth was an enjoyable romp around a fictional Scottish town (one which, I am reliably informed, is incredibly realistical rendered). One of his "mainstream" novels, It avoided a particular plot pattern that I've grown to dread with Banks, much to my suprise (and pleasure). Finally, the stand-out pleasant surprise novel of the year was Pratchett and Baxter's The Long Earth. With a plot device not unlike Banks' Transition or Stross's Family Trade series, the pair managed to write a journey-book capturing the sense-of-wonder that these multiverse plots are good for. (Or perhaps I have a weakness for them). It's hard to find the lines between Baxter and Pratchett's writing, but the debatably-reincarnated Tibetan Monk-cum-Artificial Intelligence 'Lobsang' must surely be Pratchett's. Pratchett managed to squeeze out another non-Discworld novel (Dodger) as well as a long-overdue short story collection, although I haven't read either of them yet. On to 2013's write-up...

13 April 2014

C.J. Adams-Collier: When was the last time you upgraded from squeeze to wheezy?

Wow. 3G delta. I haven t booted this laptop for a while I think I m finally ready to make the move from gnome2 to gnome3. There are bits that still annoy me, but I think it s off to a good start. Upgrading perl from 5.10 to 5.14.
cjac@calcifer:~$ sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
Calculating upgrade... Done
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  at-spi capplets-data compiz compiz-gnome compiz-gtk defoma deskbar-applet g++-4.3 gcc-4.3 gcj-4.4-base gcj-4.4-jre gcj-4.4-jre-headless gcj-4.4-jre-lib
  gdm3 gir1.0-clutter-1.0 gir1.0-freedesktop gir1.0-glib-2.0 gir1.0-gstreamer-0.10 gir1.0-gtk-2.0 gir1.0-json-glib-1.0 glade-gnome gnome-about
  gnome-accessibility gnome-applets gnome-core gnome-panel gnome-utils-common lib32readline5-dev libbrasero-media0 libclass-mop-perl libdb4.7-java
  libdb4.8-dev libdevhelp-1-1 libdigest-sha1-perl libdirectfb-dev libebook1.2-9 libecal1.2-7 libedata-book1.2-2 libedata-cal1.2-7 libedataserverui1.2-8
  libepc-1.0-2 libepc-ui-1.0-2 libept1 libgcj10 libgcj10-awt libgd2-noxpm libgstfarsight0.10-0 libgtkhtml-editor0 libjpeg62-dev libmetacity-private0
  libmono-accessibility1.0-cil libmono-bytefx0.7.6.1-cil libmono-cairo1.0-cil libmono-cil-dev libmono-corlib1.0-cil libmono-cscompmgd7.0-cil
  libmono-data-tds1.0-cil libmono-data1.0-cil libmono-debugger-soft0.0-cil libmono-getoptions1.0-cil libmono-i18n-west1.0-cil libmono-i18n1.0-cil
  libmono-ldap1.0-cil libmono-microsoft7.0-cil libmono-npgsql1.0-cil libmono-oracle1.0-cil libmono-peapi1.0-cil libmono-posix1.0-cil
  libmono-relaxng1.0-cil libmono-security1.0-cil libmono-sharpzip0.6-cil libmono-sharpzip0.84-cil libmono-sqlite1.0-cil libmono-system-data1.0-cil
  libmono-system-ldap1.0-cil libmono-system-messaging1.0-cil libmono-system-runtime1.0-cil libmono-system-web1.0-cil libmono-system1.0-cil
  libmono-webbrowser0.5-cil libmono-winforms1.0-cil libmono1.0-cil libmtp8 libnautilus-extension1 libpango1.0-common libperl5.10 libpolkit-gtk-1-0
  libpulse-browse0 librpm1 librpmbuild1 libsdl1.2-dev libsdl1.2debian-pulseaudio libseed0 libstdc++6-4.3-dev libtelepathy-farsight0 libupnp3 libvlccore4
  libxmlrpc-c3 linphone-nox linux-headers-2.6.32-5-amd64 linux-sound-base metacity mono-2.0-devel mono-devel mysql-client-5.1 mysql-query-browser
  mysql-server-5.1 mysql-server-core-5.1 openoffice.org-base-core openoffice.org-core openoffice.org-gcj openoffice.org-report-builder-bin
  openoffice.org-style-andromeda php5-suhosin portmap python-beagle python-brasero python-docky python-encutils python-evince python-gnomeapplet
  python-gtop python-mediaprofiles python-metacity python-totem-plparser seahorse-plugins smbfs speedbar totem-coherence tqsllib1c2a unixcw vlc
  xserver-xorg-video-nv
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  accountsservice acl aisleriot apg aptdaemon-data aptitude-common asterisk-core-sounds-en asterisk-modules asterisk-moh-opsound-gsm at-spi2-core
  ax25-node bluez btrfs-tools caribou caribou-antler chromium chromium-inspector colord console-setup console-setup-linux cpp-4.6 cpp-4.7 crda
  cryptsetup-bin cups-filters db-util db5.1-util dconf-gsettings-backend dconf-service dconf-tools distro-info-data docutils-common docutils-doc enchant
  extlinux finger folks-common fonts-cantarell fonts-droid fonts-freefont-ttf fonts-horai-umefont fonts-lg-aboriginal fonts-liberation fonts-lyx
  fonts-opensymbol fonts-sil-gentium fonts-sil-gentium-basic fonts-sipa-arundina fonts-stix fonts-takao fonts-takao-gothic fonts-takao-mincho
  fonts-thai-tlwg fonts-tlwg-garuda fonts-tlwg-kinnari fonts-tlwg-loma fonts-tlwg-mono fonts-tlwg-norasi fonts-tlwg-purisa fonts-tlwg-sawasdee
  fonts-tlwg-typewriter fonts-tlwg-typist fonts-tlwg-typo fonts-tlwg-umpush fonts-tlwg-waree fonts-umeplus fuse g++-4.7 g++-4.7-multilib gcc-4.6
  gcc-4.6-base gcc-4.7 gcc-4.7-base gcc-4.7-multilib gcj-4.7-base gcj-4.7-jre gcj-4.7-jre-headless gcj-4.7-jre-lib gconf-service gcr
  gir1.2-accountsservice-1.0 gir1.2-atk-1.0 gir1.2-atspi-2.0 gir1.2-caribou-1.0 gir1.2-clutter-1.0 gir1.2-clutter-gst-1.0 gir1.2-cogl-1.0
  gir1.2-coglpango-1.0 gir1.2-evince-3.0 gir1.2-folks-0.6 gir1.2-freedesktop gir1.2-gck-1 gir1.2-gconf-2.0 gir1.2-gcr-3 gir1.2-gdesktopenums-3.0
  gir1.2-gdkpixbuf-2.0 gir1.2-gee-1.0 gir1.2-gkbd-3.0 gir1.2-glib-2.0 gir1.2-gmenu-3.0 gir1.2-gnomebluetooth-1.0 gir1.2-gnomekeyring-1.0
  gir1.2-gst-plugins-base-0.10 gir1.2-gstreamer-0.10 gir1.2-gtk-3.0 gir1.2-gtkclutter-1.0 gir1.2-gtksource-3.0 gir1.2-gtop-2.0 gir1.2-gucharmap-2.90
  gir1.2-javascriptcoregtk-3.0 gir1.2-json-1.0 gir1.2-mutter-3.0 gir1.2-networkmanager-1.0 gir1.2-notify-0.7 gir1.2-panelapplet-4.0 gir1.2-pango-1.0
  gir1.2-peas-1.0 gir1.2-polkit-1.0 gir1.2-rb-3.0 gir1.2-soup-2.4 gir1.2-telepathyglib-0.12 gir1.2-telepathylogger-0.2 gir1.2-totem-1.0
  gir1.2-totem-plparser-1.0 gir1.2-upowerglib-1.0 gir1.2-vte-2.90 gir1.2-webkit-3.0 gir1.2-wnck-3.0 gir1.2-xkl-1.0 git-man gjs gkbd-capplet glchess
  glib-networking glib-networking-common glib-networking-services glines gnect gnibbles gnobots2 gnome-bluetooth gnome-contacts gnome-control-center-data
  gnome-desktop3-data gnome-font-viewer gnome-icon-theme-extras gnome-icon-theme-symbolic gnome-online-accounts gnome-packagekit gnome-packagekit-data
  gnome-shell gnome-shell-common gnome-sudoku gnome-sushi gnome-themes-standard gnome-themes-standard-data gnome-user-share gnome-video-effects gnomine
  gnotravex gnotski gnuplot gnuplot-nox grilo-plugins-0.1 groff growisofs gsettings-desktop-schemas gstreamer0.10-gconf gtali guile-2.0-libs gvfs-common
  gvfs-daemons gvfs-libs hardening-includes hwdata iagno ienglish-common imagemagick-common ioquake3 ioquake3-server iputils-tracepath ipxe-qemu iw
  keyutils kmod krb5-locales lib32itm1 lib32quadmath0 lib32tinfo-dev lib32tinfo5 libaacplus2 libaacs0 libabiword-2.9 libaccountsservice0 libamd2.2.0
  libapache-pom-java libapol4 libapt-inst1.5 libapt-pkg4.12 libaqbanking-plugins-libgwenhywfar60 libaqbanking34 libaqbanking34-plugins libaqhbci20
  libaqofxconnect7 libarchive12 libasprintf0c2 libassuan0 libatk-adaptor libatk-adaptor-data libatk-bridge2.0-0 libatkmm-1.6-1 libatkmm-1.6-dev
  libatspi2.0-0 libaudiofile1 libavahi-ui-gtk3-0 libavcodec53 libavcodec54 libavformat53 libavformat54 libavutil51 libbabl-0.1-0 libbind9-80 libbison-dev
  libblas3 libbluray1 libboost-iostreams1.49.0 libboost-program-options1.49.0 libboost-python1.49.0 libboost-serialization1.49.0 libboost-thread1.49.0
  libbrasero-media3-1 libcairo-gobject2 libcairo-script-interpreter2 libcamel-1.2-33 libcanberra-dev libcanberra-gtk3-0 libcanberra-gtk3-module
  libcanberra-pulse libcapi20-3 libcaribou-common libcaribou-gtk-module libcaribou-gtk3-module libcaribou0 libccrtp0 libcdio-cdda1 libcdio-paranoia1
  libcdio13 libcfg4 libchamplain-0.12-0 libchamplain-gtk-0.12-0 libcheese-gtk21 libcheese3 libclass-factory-util-perl libclass-isa-perl libclass-load-perl
  libclass-load-xs-perl libclutter-1.0-common libclutter-gst-1.0-0 libclutter-gtk-1.0-0 libclutter-imcontext-0.1-0 libclutter-imcontext-0.1-bin
  libcluttergesture-0.0.2-0 libcmis-0.2-0 libcogl-common libcogl-pango0 libcogl9 libcolord1 libcommons-parent-java libconfdb4 libcoroipcc4 libcoroipcs4
  libcpg4 libcryptsetup4 libcrystalhd3 libcupsfilters1 libcw3 libdata-alias-perl libdatetime-format-builder-perl libdatetime-format-iso8601-perl
  libdb-java libdb5.1 libdb5.1-dev libdb5.1-java libdb5.1-java-jni libdbus-c++-1-0 libdbus-glib1.0-cil libdbus1.0-cil libdconf0 libdee-1.0-4
  libdevel-partialdump-perl libdevhelp-3-0 libdevmapper-event1.02.1 libdistro-info-perl libdmapsharing-3.0-2 libdns88 libdotconf1.0 libdvbpsi7
  libebackend-1.2-2 libebml3 libebook-1.2-13 libecal-1.2-11 libecore1 libedata-book-1.2-13 libedata-cal-1.2-15 libedataserver-1.2-16
  libedataserverui-3.0-1 libeina1 libemail-valid-perl libencode-locale-perl libepc-1.0-3 libepc-ui-1.0-3 libept1.4.12 libescpr1 libev4
  libeval-closure-perl libevdocument3-4 libevent-2.0-5 libevent-perl libevs4 libevview3-3 libexiv2-12 libexosip2-7 libexporter-lite-perl
  libexttextcat-data libexttextcat0 libfakechroot libfarstream-0.1-0 libfdk-aac0 libfdt1 libfile-basedir-perl libfile-desktopentry-perl
  libfile-fcntllock-perl libfile-listing-perl libfile-mimeinfo-perl libfltk-images1.3 libfltk1.3 libfolks-eds25 libfolks-telepathy25 libfolks25
  libfont-afm-perl libgail-3-0 libgcj13 libgcj13-awt libgck-1-0 libgconf-2-4 libgconf2-doc libgcr-3-1 libgcr-3-common libgd2-xpm libgdata13
  libgdata2.1-cil libgdict-common libgdk-pixbuf2.0-0 libgdk-pixbuf2.0-common libgdk-pixbuf2.0-dev libgegl-0.2-0 libgeocode-glib0 libgettextpo0 libgexiv2-1
  libgirepository-1.0-1 libgjs0b libgkeyfile1.0-cil libgladeui-2-0 libgladeui-common libglapi-mesa libglew1.7 libglib2.0-bin libgmime-2.6-0
  libgmime2.6-cil libgmp10 libgnome-bluetooth10 libgnome-desktop-3-2 libgnome-keyring-common libgnome-media-profiles-3.0-0 libgnome-menu-3-0 libgnomekbd7
  libgnutls-openssl27 libgnutlsxx27 libgoa-1.0-0 libgoa-1.0-common libgphoto2-l10n libgraphite2-2.0.0 libgrilo-0.1-0 libgs9 libgs9-common libgssdp-1.0-3
  libgstreamer-plugins-bad0.10-0 libgtk-3-0 libgtk-3-bin libgtk-3-common libgtk-3-dev libgtk-3-doc libgtk-sharp-beans-cil libgtk-vnc-2.0-0
  libgtkhtml-4.0-0 libgtkhtml-4.0-common libgtkhtml-editor-4.0-0 libgtkmm-3.0-1 libgtksourceview-3.0-0 libgtksourceview-3.0-common libgucharmap-2-90-7
  libgudev1.0-cil libgupnp-1.0-4 libgupnp-av-1.0-2 libgupnp-igd-1.0-4 libgusb2 libgvnc-1.0-0 libgweather-3-0 libgwenhywfar-data libgwenhywfar60 libgxps2
  libhcrypto4-heimdal libheimbase1-heimdal libhtml-form-perl libhtml-format-perl libhttp-cookies-perl libhttp-daemon-perl libhttp-date-perl
  libhttp-message-perl libhttp-negotiate-perl libhunspell-1.3-0 libicu48 libimobiledevice2 libio-aio-perl libisc84 libisccc80 libisccfg82 libiscsi1
  libiso9660-8 libisoburn1 libitm1 libjavascriptcoregtk-1.0-0 libjavascriptcoregtk-3.0-0 libjbig0 libjs-sphinxdoc libjs-underscore libjson0 libjte1
  libkadm5clnt-mit8 libkadm5srv-mit8 libkarma0 libkdb5-6 libkmod2 libkpathsea6 liblapack3 liblavfile-2.0-0 liblavjpeg-2.0-0 liblavplay-2.0-0 liblcms2-2
  liblensfun-data liblensfun0 liblinear-tools liblinear1 liblinphone4 liblockfile-bin liblogsys4 liblvm2app2.2 liblwp-mediatypes-perl
  liblwp-protocol-https-perl liblwres80 liblzma5 libmaa3 libmagick++5 libmagickcore5 libmagickcore5-extra libmagickwand5 libmath-bigint-perl
  libmath-round-perl libmatroska5 libmediastreamer1 libmhash2 libminiupnpc5 libmission-control-plugins0 libmjpegutils-2.0-0 libmodule-implementation-perl
  libmodule-runtime-perl libmono-2.0-1 libmono-2.0-dev libmono-accessibility4.0-cil libmono-cairo4.0-cil libmono-codecontracts4.0-cil
  libmono-compilerservices-symbolwriter4.0-cil libmono-corlib4.0-cil libmono-csharp4.0-cil libmono-custommarshalers4.0-cil libmono-data-tds4.0-cil
  libmono-debugger-soft2.0-cil libmono-debugger-soft4.0-cil libmono-http4.0-cil libmono-i18n-cjk4.0-cil libmono-i18n-mideast4.0-cil
  libmono-i18n-other4.0-cil libmono-i18n-rare4.0-cil libmono-i18n-west4.0-cil libmono-i18n4.0-all libmono-i18n4.0-cil libmono-ldap4.0-cil
  libmono-management4.0-cil libmono-messaging-rabbitmq4.0-cil libmono-messaging4.0-cil libmono-microsoft-build-engine4.0-cil
  libmono-microsoft-build-framework4.0-cil libmono-microsoft-build-tasks-v4.0-4.0-cil libmono-microsoft-build-utilities-v4.0-4.0-cil
  libmono-microsoft-csharp4.0-cil libmono-microsoft-visualc10.0-cil libmono-microsoft-web-infrastructure1.0-cil libmono-npgsql4.0-cil
  libmono-opensystem-c4.0-cil libmono-oracle4.0-cil libmono-peapi4.0-cil libmono-posix4.0-cil libmono-rabbitmq4.0-cil libmono-relaxng4.0-cil
  libmono-security4.0-cil libmono-sharpzip4.84-cil libmono-simd4.0-cil libmono-sqlite4.0-cil libmono-system-componentmodel-composition4.0-cil
  libmono-system-componentmodel-dataannotations4.0-cil libmono-system-configuration-install4.0-cil libmono-system-configuration4.0-cil
  libmono-system-core4.0-cil libmono-system-data-datasetextensions4.0-cil libmono-system-data-linq4.0-cil libmono-system-data-services-client4.0-cil
  libmono-system-data-services4.0-cil libmono-system-data4.0-cil libmono-system-design4.0-cil libmono-system-drawing-design4.0-cil
  libmono-system-drawing4.0-cil libmono-system-dynamic4.0-cil libmono-system-enterpriseservices4.0-cil libmono-system-identitymodel-selectors4.0-cil
  libmono-system-identitymodel4.0-cil libmono-system-ldap4.0-cil libmono-system-management4.0-cil libmono-system-messaging4.0-cil
  libmono-system-net4.0-cil libmono-system-numerics4.0-cil libmono-system-runtime-caching4.0-cil libmono-system-runtime-durableinstancing4.0-cil
  libmono-system-runtime-serialization-formatters-soap4.0-cil libmono-system-runtime-serialization4.0-cil libmono-system-runtime4.0-cil
  libmono-system-security4.0-cil libmono-system-servicemodel-discovery4.0-cil libmono-system-servicemodel-routing4.0-cil
  libmono-system-servicemodel-web4.0-cil libmono-system-servicemodel4.0-cil libmono-system-serviceprocess4.0-cil libmono-system-transactions4.0-cil
  libmono-system-web-abstractions4.0-cil libmono-system-web-applicationservices4.0-cil libmono-system-web-dynamicdata4.0-cil
  libmono-system-web-extensions-design4.0-cil libmono-system-web-extensions4.0-cil libmono-system-web-routing4.0-cil libmono-system-web-services4.0-cil
  libmono-system-web4.0-cil libmono-system-windows-forms-datavisualization4.0-cil libmono-system-windows-forms4.0-cil libmono-system-xaml4.0-cil
  libmono-system-xml-linq4.0-cil libmono-system-xml4.0-cil libmono-system4.0-cil libmono-tasklets4.0-cil libmono-web4.0-cil libmono-webbrowser2.0-cil
  libmono-webbrowser4.0-cil libmono-webmatrix-data4.0-cil libmono-windowsbase4.0-cil libmount1 libmozjs10d libmozjs17d libmozjs185-1.0 libmpeg2encpp-2.0-0
  libmplex2-2.0-0 libmtdev1 libmtp-common libmtp-runtime libmtp9 libmupen64plus2 libmusicbrainz-discid-perl libmusicbrainz5-0 libmutter0 libmx-1.0-2
  libmx-bin libmx-common libmysqlclient18 libnatpmp1 libnautilus-extension1a libnet-domain-tld-perl libnet-http-perl libnet-ip-minimal-perl libnetcf1
  libnetfilter-conntrack3 libnettle4 libnewtonsoft-json4.5-cil libnice10 libnl-3-200 libnl-genl-3-200 libnl-route-3-200 libnm-glib4 libnm-gtk-common
  libnm-gtk0 libnm-util2 libnotify4 libnspr4 libnss-winbind libnss3 libnuma1 libnunit2.6-cil liboauth0 libodbc1 liboobs-1-5 libopal3.10.4 libopenal-data
  libopus0 libosip2-7 libp11-2 libp11-kit-dev libp11-kit0 libpackage-stash-xs-perl libpackagekit-glib2-14 libpam-cap libpam-modules-bin libpam-winbind
  libpanel-applet-4-0 libparams-classify-perl libpcre3-dev libpcrecpp0 libpeas-1.0-0 libpeas-common libperl5.14 libpipeline1 libpload4 libpodofo0.9.0
  libpoe-component-resolver-perl libpoppler-glib8 libpoppler19 libportsmf0 libpostproc52 libprocps0 libpst4 libpt2.10.4 libptexenc1 libpython2.7
  libqt4-declarative libqtassistantclient4 libqtdbus4 libqtwebkit4 libquadmath0 libquicktime2 libquorum4 libquvi-scripts libquvi7 libraptor2-0 librasqal3
  libraw5 libregexp-reggrp-perl libreoffice libreoffice-base libreoffice-base-core libreoffice-calc libreoffice-common libreoffice-core libreoffice-draw
  libreoffice-emailmerge libreoffice-evolution libreoffice-filter-binfilter libreoffice-filter-mobiledev libreoffice-gnome libreoffice-gtk
  libreoffice-help-en-us libreoffice-impress libreoffice-java-common libreoffice-math libreoffice-officebean libreoffice-report-builder-bin
  libreoffice-style-galaxy libreoffice-style-tango libreoffice-writer libresid-builder0c2a librest-0.7-0 librest-extras-0.7-0 librhythmbox-core6 librpm3
  librpmbuild3 librpmio3 librpmsign1 libruby1.9.1 libsaamf3 libsackpt3 libsaclm3 libsaevt3 libsalck3 libsam4 libsamsg4 libsane-common
  libsane-extras-common libsatmr3 libsbsms10 libseed-gtk3-0 libsidplay2 libsigsegv2 libsocialweb-client2 libsocialweb-common libsocialweb-service
  libsocialweb0 libsocket-getaddrinfo-perl libsocket-perl libsonic0 libsoundtouch0 libsox2 libspeechd2 libspice-client-glib-2.0-1
  libspice-client-gtk-2.0-1 libspice-server1 libssl-doc libssl1.0.0 libstdc++6-4.7-dev libsvm-tools libswitch-perl libswscale2 libsystemd-daemon0
  libsystemd-login0 libtagc0 libtelepathy-farstream2 libtelepathy-logger2 libtest-warn-perl libtinfo-dev libtinfo5 libtirpc1 libtokyocabinet9 libtotem-pg4
  libtotem0 libtqsllib1 libtracker-sparql-0.14-0 libtree-dagnode-perl libts-dev libucommon5 libumfpack5.4.0 libunique-3.0-0 libupnp6 libusbredirhost1
  libusbredirparser0 libv4lconvert0 libverto-libev1 libverto1 libvisio-0.0-0 libvlccore5 libvo-aacenc0 libvo-amrwbenc0 libvorbisidec1 libvotequorum4
  libvpx1 libvte-2.90-9 libvte-2.90-common libwacom-common libwacom2 libwebkitgtk-1.0-0 libwebkitgtk-1.0-common libwebkitgtk-3.0-0 libwebkitgtk-3.0-common
  libwebp2 libwebrtc-audio-processing-0 libwildmidi-config libwireshark-data libwireshark2 libwiretap2 libwnck-3-0 libwnck-3-common libwpd-0.9-9
  libwpg-0.2-2 libwps-0.2-2 libwsutil2 libwv-1.2-4 libwww-robotrules-perl libx11-doc libx11-protocol-perl libx264-123 libx264-124 libx264-130 libx264-132
  libxalan2-java libxcb-composite0 libxcb-glx0 libxcb-shape0 libxcb-shm0-dev libxcb-util0 libxen-4.1 libxml-commons-external-java
  libxml-commons-resolver1.1-java libxml-sax-base-perl libxmlrpc-c++4 libxmlrpc-core-c3 libxz-java libyajl2 libyaml-0-2 libyaml-perl libyelp0 libzrtpcpp2
  libzvbi-common libzvbi0 lightsoff linphone-nogtk linux-headers-3.2.0-4-amd64 linux-headers-3.2.0-4-common linux-headers-amd64 linux-image-3.2.0-4-amd64
  linux-image-amd64 linux-kbuild-3.2 live-boot-doc live-config-doc live-manual-html mahjongg memtest86+ minissdpd mono-4.0-gac mono-dmcs mscompress
  multiarch-support mupen64plus-audio-all mupen64plus-audio-sdl mupen64plus-data mupen64plus-input-all mupen64plus-input-sdl mupen64plus-rsp-all
  mupen64plus-rsp-hle mupen64plus-rsp-z64 mupen64plus-ui-console mupen64plus-video-all mupen64plus-video-arachnoid mupen64plus-video-glide64
  mupen64plus-video-rice mupen64plus-video-z64 mutter-common mysql-client-5.5 mysql-server-5.5 mysql-server-core-5.5 mythes-en-us openarena-081-maps
  openarena-081-misc openarena-081-players openarena-081-players-mature openarena-081-textures openarena-085-data openarena-088-data packagekit
  packagekit-backend-aptcc packagekit-tools planner-data planner-doc poppler-data printer-driver-all printer-driver-c2050 printer-driver-c2esp
  printer-driver-cjet printer-driver-escpr printer-driver-foo2zjs printer-driver-gutenprint printer-driver-hpcups printer-driver-hpijs
  printer-driver-m2300w printer-driver-min12xxw printer-driver-pnm2ppa printer-driver-postscript-hp printer-driver-ptouch printer-driver-pxljr
  printer-driver-sag-gdi printer-driver-splix psutils python-aptdaemon.gtk3widgets python-aptdaemon.gtkwidgets python-bzrlib python-dbus-dev
  python-debianbts python-defer python-dnspython python-fpconst python-gi python-gi-cairo python-gi-dev python-gobject-2 python-gobject-2-dev
  python-keyring python-launchpadlib python-lazr.restfulclient python-lazr.uri python-liblarch python-liblarch-gtk python-magic python-oauth
  python-packagekit python-pyatspi2 python-pyparsing python-repoze.lru python-routes python-setools python-simplejson python-soappy python-speechd
  python-spice-client-gtk python-wadllib python-webob python-zeitgeist python2.7 python2.7-dev python2.7-minimal qdbus quadrapassel remmina-common
  rhythmbox-data rpcbind rtkit ruby ruby1.9.1 shotwell-common smartdimmer software-properties-common sound-theme-freedesktop speech-dispatcher
  sphinx-common sphinx-doc swell-foop syslinux-themes-debian syslinux-themes-debian-wheezy tdb-tools telepathy-haze telepathy-logger telepathy-rakia
  tex-gyre ttf-marvosym wireless-regdb xbrlapi xorg-sgml-doctools xorriso xserver-xorg-input-mouse xserver-xorg-input-vmmouse xulrunner-17.0 yelp-xsl
  zeitgeist-core zenity-common
The following packages have been kept back:
  acroread-debian-files db4.8-util hibernate ia32-libs ia32-libs-gtk libboost-dev libboost-serialization-dev opensc wine
The following packages will be upgraded:
  abcde abiword abiword-common abiword-plugin-grammar abiword-plugin-mathview acpi acpi-fakekey acpi-support acpi-support-base acpid acroread-data
  acroread-dictionary-en acroread-l10n-en adduser alacarte alsa-base alsa-utils amb-plugins anacron analog ant ant-optional apache2 apache2-doc
  apache2-mpm-prefork apache2-utils apache2.2-bin apache2.2-common app-install-data apt apt-file apt-utils apt-xapian-index aptdaemon aptitude
  aqbanking-tools aspell aspell-en asterisk asterisk-config asterisk-core-sounds-en-gsm asterisk-doc asterisk-voicemail astyle at audacity audacity-data
  augeas-lenses augeas-tools autoconf autoconf-doc automake automake1.9 autopoint autotools-dev avahi-autoipd avahi-daemon avidemux avidemux-common
  avidemux-plugins aview ax25-tools banshee baobab base-files base-passwd bash bash-completion bc bind9-doc bind9-host bind9utils binfmt-support binutils
  bison bluez-cups bogofilter bogofilter-bdb bogofilter-common brasero brasero-common bridge-utils browser-plugin-gnash bsd-mailx bsdmainutils bsdutils
  busybox buzztard buzztard-data bwidget bzip2 bzr bzrtools ca-certificates calibre calibre-bin ccache cd-discid cdebootstrap cdparanoia cdrdao
  checkpolicy cheese cheese-common chromium-browser chromium-browser-inspector cifs-utils cl-asdf cli-common clisp comerr-dev common-lisp-controller
  console-common console-data console-tools consolekit coreutils cowbuilder cowdancer cpio cpp cpp-4.4 cpufrequtils cracklib-runtime crawl-common
  crawl-tiles cron cryptsetup cups cups-bsd cups-client cups-common cups-driver-gutenprint cups-pk-helper cups-ppdc cupsddk curl curlftpfs cvs cw dash
  dasher dasher-data dbus dbus-x11 dc dcraw dctrl-tools debconf debconf-i18n debhelper debian-archive-keyring debian-faq debian-keyring debianutils debirf
  debootstrap desktop-base desktop-file-utils devhelp devhelp-common devscripts dialog dict dictionaries-common diffstat diffutils djtools dkms dmidecode
  dmsetup dnsmasq-base dnsutils doc-debian docbook docbook-dsssl docbook-to-man docbook-utils docbook-xml docbook-xsl docbook-xsl-doc-html docky dosemu
  dosfstools dpatch dpkg dpkg-dev dput dvd+rw-tools dvi2ps dynagen dynamips e2fslibs e2fsprogs ebtables ed eject ekiga emacs23-bin-common emacs23-common
  emacs23-nox emacsen-common emdebian-archive-keyring empathy empathy-common eog epiphany-browser epiphany-browser-data epiphany-extensions esound-common
  espeak espeak-data ethtool evince evince-common evolution evolution-common evolution-data-server evolution-data-server-common evolution-exchange
  evolution-plugins evolution-webcal exif exiftags exim4 exim4-base exim4-config exim4-daemon-light exiv2 f-spot fakechroot fakeroot fancontrol fceu
  fcrackzip fdupes feynmf file file-roller finch findutils firmware-iwlwifi firmware-linux-free firmware-linux-nonfree flac flashrom fldigi flex
  fontconfig fontconfig-config foo2zjs foomatic-db foomatic-db-engine foomatic-db-gutenprint foomatic-filters fping freedesktop-sound-theme freeglut3
  freetds-common ftp fuse-utils g++ g++-4.4 g++-4.4-multilib g++-multilib gawk gcalctool gcc gcc-4.4 gcc-4.4-base gcc-4.4-doc gcc-4.4-multilib
  gcc-doc-base gcc-multilib gcj-jre gcj-jre-headless gconf-defaults-service gconf-editor gconf2 gconf2-common gddrescue gdebi gdebi-core gedit
  gedit-common gedit-plugins genisoimage geoclue geoclue-hostip geoclue-localnet geoclue-manual geoclue-yahoo geoip-database gettext gettext-base
  ghostscript ghostscript-cups gimp gimp-data git git-buildpackage git-core git-svn gitk gksu glade gnash gnash-common gnash-opengl
  gnome-accessibility-themes gnome-applets-data gnome-backgrounds gnome-cards-data gnome-common gnome-control-center gnome-control-center-dev
  gnome-desktop-data gnome-dictionary gnome-disk-utility gnome-do gnome-do-plugins gnome-doc-utils gnome-games gnome-games-data gnome-games-extra-data
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  openoffice.org-officebean openoffice.org-style-tango openoffice.org-thesaurus-en-us openoffice.org-writer openprinting-ppds openssh-blacklist
  openssh-blacklist-extra openssh-client openssh-server openssl openssl-blacklist openvpn openvpn-blacklist orbit2 org-mode os-prober oss-compat p7zip
  p7zip-full parted passwd patch patchutils pavucontrol pavumeter pbuilder pbzip2 pciutils pcmciautils pcsc-tools perl perl-base perl-doc perl-modules
  perlmagick perltidy pgf php-pear php-services-json php5-cli php5-common php5-dev pidgin pidgin-data pidgin-otr pidgin-sipe pinentry-gtk2 pkg-config
  planner pm-utils po-debconf po4a policycoreutils policykit-1 policykit-1-gnome poppler-utils popularity-contest powertop ppp ppp-dev pristine-tar
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  python-sqlitecachec python-support python-tagpy python-twisted-bin python-twisted-conch python-twisted-core python-twisted-web python-uno
  python-utidylib python-vte python-webkit python-wnck python-xapian python-xdg python-zope.interface python2.6 python2.6-dev python2.6-minimal
  qemu-keymaps qemu-kvm qemu-system qemu-user-static qemu-utils qt4-qtconfig quagga quagga-doc quilt radeontool rdesktop readline-common realpath recode
  remmina reportbug resolvconf rhythmbox rhythmbox-plugins rinse ripit rpm rpm-common rpm2cpio rsync rsyslog samba samba-common samba-common-bin samba-doc
  sane-utils scons screen seabios seahorse sed selinux-policy-default sensible-utils sensors-applet setools sflphone-daemon sflphone-data sflphone-gnome
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  snd snd-gtk-pulse snmp software-center software-properties-gtk sound-juicer soundmodem sox sp spidermonkey-bin squashfs-tools ssh-krb5 sshfs ssl-cert
  strace strongswan strongswan-ikev1 strongswan-ikev2 strongswan-starter subversion sudo svn-buildpackage swat synaptic synergy syslinux syslinux-common
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  tipa tk tk8.4 tk8.5 tofrodos tomboy toshset totem totem-common totem-mozilla totem-plugins traceroute transfig transmission-cli transmission-common
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  ttf-opensymbol ttf-sil-gentium ttf-sil-gentium-basic ttf-takao ttf-takao-gothic ttf-takao-mincho ttf-thai-arundina ttf-thai-tlwg ttf-umefont ttf-umeplus
  ttf-unifont twm twolame tzdata ucf udev udisks ufraw-batch unattended-upgrades unetbootin unetbootin-translations unifont unixodbc uno-libs3 unp unrar
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  wget whiptail whois winbind wireless-tools wireshark wireshark-common wordnet wordnet-base wordnet-gui wpasupplicant wvdial wwwconfig-common x11-apps
  x11-common x11-session-utils x11-utils x11-xfs-utils x11-xkb-utils x11-xserver-utils x11proto-composite-dev x11proto-core-dev x11proto-damage-dev
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  x11proto-render-dev x11proto-resource-dev x11proto-video-dev x11proto-xext-dev x11proto-xf86dri-dev x11proto-xf86vidmode-dev x11proto-xinerama-dev xauth
  xbase-clients xbitmaps xca xclip xdemorse xdg-user-dirs xdg-user-dirs-gtk xdg-utils xen-tools xen-utils-common xenstore-utils xfonts-100dpi
  xfonts-100dpi-transcoded xfonts-75dpi xfonts-75dpi-transcoded xfonts-a12k12 xfonts-ayu xfonts-baekmuk xfonts-base xfonts-bitmap-mule
  xfonts-biznet-100dpi xfonts-biznet-75dpi xfonts-biznet-base xfonts-cyrillic xfonts-efont-unicode xfonts-efont-unicode-ib xfonts-encodings
  xfonts-jisx0213 xfonts-kaname xfonts-kapl xfonts-mathml xfonts-mona xfonts-naga10 xfonts-scalable xfonts-terminus xfonts-terminus-dos
  xfonts-terminus-oblique xfonts-thai xfonts-thai-etl xfonts-thai-manop xfonts-thai-nectec xfonts-thai-poonlap xfonts-thai-vor xfonts-tipa xfonts-unifont
  xfonts-utils xfonts-wqy xindy xindy-rules xinit xkb-data xml-core xorg xorg-docs-core xoscope xsane xsane-common xserver-common xserver-xephyr
  xserver-xorg xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-dev xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-wacom
  xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-chips xserver-xorg-video-cirrus xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
  xserver-xorg-video-i128 xserver-xorg-video-intel xserver-xorg-video-mach64 xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
  xserver-xorg-video-openchrome xserver-xorg-video-r128 xserver-xorg-video-radeon xserver-xorg-video-rendition xserver-xorg-video-s3
  xserver-xorg-video-s3virge xserver-xorg-video-savage xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion xserver-xorg-video-sis xserver-xorg-video-sisusb
  xserver-xorg-video-tdfx xserver-xorg-video-trident xserver-xorg-video-tseng xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vmware xserver-xorg-video-voodoo
  xsltproc xterm xtightvncviewer xtrans-dev xutils-dev xz-utils yelp yum zenity zip zlib1g zlib1g-dev
2160 upgraded, 944 newly installed, 133 to remove and 9 not upgraded.
Need to get 90.5 MB/2,928 MB of archives.
After this operation, 1,287 MB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]? 

11 January 2014

C.J. Adams-Collier: I m back on the internet 6 it seems.

cjac@foxtrot:/usr/src/deb/strongswan-5.1.0$ ping6 -c 5 google.com tail -3
google.com ping statistics
5 packets transmitted, 5 received, 0% packet loss, time 4004ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 65.235/74.957/103.039/14.122 ms go go gadget ipsec

5 November 2013

Russ Allbery: Review: Asimov's, August 2011

Review: Asimov's Science Fiction, August 2011
Editor: Sheila Williams
Issue: Volume 35, No. 8
ISSN: 1065-2698
Pages: 112
The editorial this issue is about the Dell Magazines Award, so newsy without a lot of content (particularly since we don't get to read the winners). Silverberg's column is much more interesting, focusing on the complex rules of the honor code of the Albanian highlands and pointing out that there's more complexity and strangeness in things we can find on Earth than in a lot of science fiction. Even within the rules of real human cultures. James Patrick Kelly's column this issue is an interesting summary of what graduates of the Clarion writing workshop learned, in their own words. It's a nice barrage of quick writing tips, and an interesting view of what people take away from a writing workshop. The book review column this issue is Peter Heck's normal workman-like job. "The End of the Line" by Robert Silverberg: Someday, I really should read Lord Valentine's Castle. As you might guess from this comment, this is another Majipoor story. This one follows an official who is part of an advance party for the Coronal Lord, the ruler (of sorts). He's decided, as part of those duties, to take the opportunity to learn more about the aboriginal people of Majipoor: the somewhat mysterious metamorphs, or Piurivar. I'm not that familiar with the history of Majipoor, since all I've read is this story and one other, none of the novels. Apparently, knowing that the official in question is named Stiamot will place this story for more familiar readers. For the unfamiliar, such as myself, there's a lot of politics here and what's clearly background for a major event in the world, but as a standalone story it's a bit unsatisfying (and grim). It's not that clear why things had to turn out the way they did, and the characters seem largely without agency. It's well-written, but mostly a story for fans of the series, I think. (6) "Corn Teeth" by Melanie Tem: This is a tight third-person story about a human child raised by alien foster parents, and it's deeply disturbing. Not because of the fostering, which appears wonderful and loving, but because it's a train wreck sort of story: the reader can see the horrible coming and can't do anything about it (and it turns out even worse than one might expect). It's also a story built around failure of communication and failure of empathy, and has a monumentally depressing ending, the kind that leaves scars. I'm sure all of this is entirely intentional; it seems very well-written. But I really didn't want this much horrible misunderstanding and depressing hopelessness in my reading. (2) "Watch Bees" by Philip Brewer: I rather liked this story even if the protagonist is an awful person. The story is set in a future of bioengineered insects and hard economic times, and it features a man who is supposedly working his way from farm to farm to get back home. What he's actually after is more complicated and is closely related to the defense systems that keep intruders off of farms. You might guess some of the rest from the title. It's a story about understanding layered defense systems, and about economic warfare. I didn't care much for any of the characters, but the story is well-plotted and kept me interested in seeing what would happen next. (6) "For I Have Lain Me Down on the Stones of Loneliness and I'll Not Be Back Again" by Michael Swanwick: By Swanwick, so it's a little odd, but I found this story surprisingly moving and ambiguous. It's about an American of Irish descent, a trip to Ireland, and a love affair with a fierce Irish nationalist, all set against an SF background of an Earth conquered by benevolent aliens. It's angry, uncertain, fanatical, and realistic by turns, and left me with profound mixed feelings. I think it does a good job capturing in a brief story the emotional complexities of what it means to give onself to a cause. (7) "We Were Wonder Scouts" by Will Ludwigsen: This is a short and odd story about a variant of the Boy Scouts founded by a man who is a little too obsessed with the paranormal, and an outing in the woods that turns rather creepy. It's a type of story that I'm not very fond of: one that twists the delight of discovery into something dark and mundane. I suppose you could call it horror; it's more horror than fantasy, at least. Anyway, not my thing. (3) "Pairs" by Zachary Jernigan: This story, on the other hand, isn't as dark as it seems like it should be from the setup. Humans have been conquered and enslaved by more powerful alien races, and now human souls are a profitable business. The protagonist is a person who has been embodied in a spaceship, and who works with (and monitors) another largely insane embodied person as they work as couriers, carrying souls to their buyers. But neither of them are as fully under control as they might appear, which is the point of the story. There is no grand tale of redemption, and the price is high, but I found the psychological portrayal oddly satisfying and faintly hopeful, and I was intrigued by the world background. (7) "Paradise is a Walled Garden" by Lisa Goldstein: The cover story, this is by far the best story of the issue. It's steampunk, set in a world where Muslim civilization was not pressed back by Christianity and continues to thrive into the reign of Queen Elizabeth as, among other things, makers of automata. A girl has managed to get herself a job in a British factory by posing as a boy and is the first to sound the alarm when the automata that do most of the work go strangely (and violently) haywire. That leads to her being assigned to the subsequent delegation to Al-Andulus (Muslim Spain, if you're not familiar with that name from history). The protagonist is the best part of this story. She's thoughtful, resourceful, and delights in learning things, something that she's rarely had the opportunity to do. She's also utterly unintimidated. In Al-Andulus, she thrives, despite the contempt of the leader of the expedition and some dangerous intrigues around the source of the anomalous behavior. I won't spoil the ending, but it's a delight, leaving the reader with a lot of hope for her future. I also liked the portrayal of the Muslim world, which is engrossed in its own business and has its own advantages and disadvantages, but is at least open to and focused on learning and technological development. The contrast with the superstitious British delegation is both pointed and historically grounded in Muslim relations with Europe around the point of divergence of Goldstein's world. (8) Rating: 7 out of 10

10 October 2013

Russ Allbery: Review: 2312

Review: 2312, by Kim Stanley Robinson
Publisher: Orbit
Copyright: 2012
ISBN: 0-316-19280-5
Format: Kindle
Pages: 563
Swan Er Hong is a native of Mercury, granddaughter of one of the most influential women in the solar system. Alex, known as the Lion of Mercury, has just died as the story opens, and Swan is mourning. But she's also discovering that something else has been going on, something that Alex had not confided in her. Something that involves an inspector from the asteroids, a scientist from Titan, and a message Alex left in the event of her death, asking Swan to convey something personally to another scientist on Io. And then Mercury is attacked and the situation becomes much more complicated. 2312 is, like most Robinson novels, built on top of monumental world-building. The date is given away by the title; the setting is a solar system full of terraforming, habitats, and explosive human colonization. There are human settlements on every world that could possibly sustain them, including a terraformed Mars and a vast in-progress terraforming project on Venus. Mercury, Song's home, supports the city known as Terminator, a shielded habitat that travels around the planet on rails, pushed forward by the thermal expansion of metal at sunrise. Humans have scattered across the solar system and changed everything they've touched, even the asteroids. Many of those have been repurposed as long-haul shuttles: self-contained habitats on carefully-designed routes on which people live for months or years until they get to their destinations. Parts of this book are gorgeous. One of Robinson's strengths is creating images of the vastness of space, science, and human endeavor that feel plausible and inspiring at the same time. The setting of 2312 frees him to go wild with mega construction projects, and he takes full advantage. Parts of the book inspire the same sense of awe as the Hoover Dam or the Great Wall of China, transplanted into space and backed with neat scientific ideas to ponder. (Even if the more skeptical will note certain human habitation hazards, such as prolonged weightlessness and radiation, are mostly hand-waved away.) Unusually for a Robinson novel, 2312 also features an interesting and vibrant protagonist. Usually I can barely remember Robinson's protagonists five minutes after I finish the book, but Swan is so impulsive, erratic, and emotionally intense that I doubt I'll forget her. Her past is stuffed with outrageous risks and intense creativity: having songbird neurons transplanted into her brain, ingesting extraterrestrial bacteria, designing habitats in the asteroid belt, and creating art on the plains of Mercury. As the story gets underway, she meets the oversized and mellow Wahram; at first, she finds him boring, but then they're thrown together by one of the best set pieces of the book, and both they and the reader discover they work well together. Wahram serves as a straight man and as a stand-in for the reader's opinion, showing Swan all the more clearly in contrast. All this sounds quite promising. Unfortunately, what makes 2312 an ambitious failure rather than an excellent story is the story part. Robinson has built an amazing world, but he doesn't seem to know what to do with it. His economy, at least outside of Earth (and more on that in a moment), is essentially post-scarcity. Few of the characters we meet seem to have any concept of fiscal or practical limitation. They head across the solar system on a moment's notice, take vacations in habitats, or head to favorite spots for the view. It felt like Robinson was trying to write a Culture story. Unlike Banks, however, he struggles with generating a plot. 2312 is, in structure, a murder mystery. The characters witness a crime, survive it, and then intend to investigate it, and the crime appears to grow and link to fault lines in their society. This could have worked, but it has two problems: their society is only barely coherent enough for the reader to perceive the potential fault lines, and Robinson seems to have no idea how to construct a mystery plot. There is no sense of coherence to Swan and Wahram's approach, no sense of a gathering of clues, and very little sense of drama. All of the plot revelations are either dropped in Swan's lap by another character at a convenient moment or generated by Swan refusing to take the plot of the book seriously. The characters do essentially no meaningful investigation on-camera and show almost no investment in the outcome of the plot. When the climax comes, it's all weirdly forgettable. There are also large sections of the book that appear to have nothing to do with the rest of the plot, and that's where the unfortunate interval on Earth comes in. Robinson takes advantage of the scenes on Earth to do a bit of alienation and shows how foreign and strange and stifling Earth feels to someone who grew up outside of its atmosphere. Parts of this work, but he puts the plot on hold to do it. And parts of it do not work at all. The most glaring example is Swan and Wahram's bizarre bit of attempted charity in Africa, which comes across as stunningly high-handed and arrogant. This could be in character, particularly for Swan (who is not long on empathy), but, if so, the book doesn't signal to the reader that it should be read that way. Instead, there are some side (or snide) comments that seem to indicate Robinson knows nothing about the economic arc of Africa from the past twenty years. And when their absurd, botched, condescending charity plan fails for all the obvious reasons, the characters, and apparently the novel, throw up their hands and write Earth off as a stagnant lost cause that can't accept the imposition of a good idea and go back to the plot, never apparently caring about Earth again. Almost as frustrating is the way that these interludes are tied back into the story, which is usually through Swan getting ridiculously lucky on her random encounter rolls. It felt like whenever Robinson needed to make progress in the plot, Swan would just accidentally run into exactly the right person or situation to bring up the next plot point or to have some investigation make sense. (Not that Swan usually figured this out. Normally, the inspector explains it to her.) The author's finger was planted so firmly on the scales that it destroyed my suspension of disbelief and made a mockery of the idea that the characters were actually investigating anything. 2312 is built around a skeleton of a plot, but the lack of engagement with it, the lack of tension and emotion, the way the next developments are generally narrated to the protagonists and the reader, and the repeated use of random encounters to steer it left me without much reason to care. Robinson tries a few twists, but since the story never felt committed to its plot anyway, those twists feel less like planned complications and more like another random veer in the road. It didn't help that the final outcome was more prosaic and forgettable than the book had been implying it would be. There is a lot to like here. I'm very pleased to see Robinson finally write a memorable protagonist, and he's very good at both world-building and set pieces. But it needed a plot, and it needed a more coherent and complete cultural backdrop for its characters. Without both, it fell back into the typical Robinson trap: gorgeous moments separated by a whole lot of boring, and an overall impression of a construction tour rather than a story. There are bits of it I loved and still remember, particularly Song and Wahram in the tunnels of Mercury (which is possibly the best extended characterization Robinson has ever written). But the book as a whole is a mess, and I can't recommend wading through it for the good parts. Rating: 5 out of 10

12 July 2013

Daniel Pocock: Practical VPNs with strongSwan, Shorewall, Linux firewalls and OpenWRT routers

There is intense interest in communications privacy at the moment thanks to the Snowden scandal. Open source software has offered credible solutions for privacy and encryption for many years. Sadly, making these solutions work together is not always plug-and-play. In fact, secure networking, like VoIP, has been plagued by problems with interoperability and firewall/filtering issues although now the solutions are starting to become apparent. Here I will look at some of them, such as the use of firewall zones to simplify management or the use of ECDSA certificates to avoid UDP fragmentation problems. I've drawn together a lot of essential tips from different documents and mailing list discussions to demonstrate how to solve a real-world networking problem. A typical network scenario and requirements Here is a diagram of the network that will be used to help us examine the capabilities of these open source solutions. Some comments about the diagram:
  • The names in square brackets are the zones for Shorewall, they are explained later.
  • The dotted lines are IPsec tunnels over the untrusted Internet.
  • The road-warrior users (mobiles and laptops) get virtual IP addresses from the VPN gateway. The branch offices/home routers do not use virtual IPs.
  • The mobile phones are largely untrusted: easily lost or stolen, many apps have malware, they can only tunnel to the central VPN and only access a very limited range of services.
  • The laptops are managed devices so they are trusted with access to more services. For efficiency they can connect directly to branch office/home VPNs as well as the central server.
  • Smart-phone user browsing habits are systematically monitored by mobile companies with insidious links into mass-media and advertising. Road-warriors sometimes plug-in at client sites or hotels where IT staff may monitor their browsing. Therefore, all these users want to tunnel all their browsing through the VPN.
  • The central VPN gateway/firewall is running strongSwan VPN and Shorewall firewall on Linux. It could be Debian, Fedora or Ubuntu. Other open source platforms such as OpenBSD are also very well respected for building firewall and VPN solutions, but Shorewall, which is one of the key ingredients in this recipe, only works on Linux at present.
  • The branch office/home network could be another strongSwan/Shorewall server or it could also be an OpenWRT router
  • The default configuration for most wifi routers creates a bridge joining wifi users with wired LAN users. Not here, it has been deliberately configured as an independent network. Road-warriors who attach to the wifi must use VPN tunnelling to access the local wired network. In OpenWRT, it is relatively easy to make the Wifi network an independent subnet. This is an essential security precaution because wifi passwords should not be considered secure: they are often transmitted to third parties, for example, by the cloud backup service in many newer smart phones.
Package mayhem The major components are packaged on all the major Linux distributions. Nonetheless, in every case, I found that it is necessary to re-compile fresh strongSwan packages from sources. It is not so hard to do but it is necessary and worth the effort. Here are related blog entries where I provide the details about how to re-build fresh versions of the official packages with all necessary features enabled: Using X.509 certificates as a standard feature of the VPN For convenience, many people building a point-to-point VPN start with passwords (sometimes referred to as pre-shared keys (PSK)) as a security mechanism. As the VPN grows, passwords become unmanageable. In this solution, we only look at how to build a VPN secured by X.509 certificates. The certificate concept is not hard. In this scenario, there are a few things that make it particularly easy to work with certificates:
  • strongSwan comes with a convenient command line tool, ipsec pki. Many of it's functions are equivalent to things you can do with OpenSSL or GnuTLS. However, the ipsec pki syntax is much more lightweight and simply provides a convenient way to do the things you need to do when maintaining a VPN.
  • Many of the routine activities involved in certificate maintainence can be scripted. My recent blog about using Android clients with strongSwan gives a sample script demonstrating how ipsec pki commands can be used to prepare a PKCS#12 (.p12) file that can be easily loaded into an Android device using the SD-card.
  • For building a VPN, there is no need to use a public certificate authority such as Verisign. Consequently, there is no need to fill in all their forms or make any payments for each device/certificate. Some larger organisations do choose to outsource their certificate management to such firms. For smaller organisations, an effective and sometimes better solution can be achieved by maintaining the process in-house with a private root CA.
UDP fragmentation during IPsec IKEv2 key exchange and ECDSA A common problem for IPsec VPNs using X.509 certificates is the fragmentation of key exchange datagrams during session setup. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Various workarounds exist, such as keeping copies of all certificates from potential peers on every host. As the network grows, this becomes inconvenient to maintain and to some extent it eliminates the benefits of using PKI. Fortunately, there is a solution: Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC). Many people currently use RSA key-pairs. Best practice suggests using RSA keys of at least 2048 bits and often 4096 bits. Using ECC with a smaller 384-bit key is considered to be equivalent to a 7680 bit RSA key pair. Consequently, ECDSA certificates are much smaller than RSA certificates. Furthermore, at these key sizes, the key exchange packets are almost always smaller than the typical 1500 byte MTU. A further demand for ECDSA is arising due to the use of ECC within smart cards. Many smartcards don't support any RSA key larger than 2048 bits. The highly secure 384-bit ECC key is implemented in quite a few common smart cards. Smart card vendors have shown a preference for the ECC keys due to the US Government's preference for ECC and the lower computational overheads make them more suitable for constrained execution environments. Anyone who wants to use smart cards as part of their VPN or general IT security now, or in the future, needs to consider ECC/ECDSA. Making the network simple with Shorewall zones For this example, we are not just taking some easy point-to-point example. We have a real-world, multi-site, multi-device network with road warriors. Simplifying this architecture is important to help us understand and secure it. The solution? Each of these is abstracted to a "zone" in Shorewall. In the diagram above, the zone names are in square brackets. The purpose of each zone is described below:
Zone name Description
loc This is the private LAN and contains servers like databases, private source code respositories and NFS file servers
dmz This is the DMZ and contains web servers that are accessible from the public internet. Some of these servers talk to databases or message queues in the LAN network loc
vpn_a These are road warriors that are not very trustworthy, such as mobile devices. They are occasionally stolen and usually full of spyware (referred to by users as "apps"). They have limited access to ports on some DMZ servers, e.g. for sending and receiving mail using SMTP and IMAP (those ports are not exposed to the public Internet at large). They use the VPN tunnel for general internet access/browsing, to avoid surveillance by their mobile carrier.
vpn_b These are managed laptops that have a low probability of malware infection. They may well be using smart cards for access control. Consequently, they are more trusted than the vpn_a users and have access to some extra intranet pages and file servers. Like the smart-phone users, they use the VPN tunnel for general internet access/browsing, to avoid surveillance by third-party wifi hotspot operators.
vpn_c This firewall zone represents remote sites with managed hardware, such as branch offices or home networks with IPsec routers running OpenWRT.
cust These are servers hosted for third-parties or collaborative testing/development purposes. They have their own firewall arrangements if necessary.
net This zone represents traffic from the public Internet.
A practical Shorewall configuration Shorewall is chosen to manage the iptables and ip6tables firewall rules. Shorewall provides a level of abstraction that makes netfilter much more manageable than manual iptables scripting. The Shorewall concept of zones is very similar to the zones implemented in OpenWRT and this is an extremely useful paradigm for firewall management. Practical configuration of Shorewall is very well explained in the Shorewall quick start. The one thing that is not immediately obvious is a strategy for planning the contents of the /etc/shorewall/policy and /etc/shorewall/rules files. The exact details for making it work effectively with a modern IPsec VPN are not explained in a single document, so I've gathered those details below as well. An effective way to plan the Shorewall zone configuration is with a table like this:
Destination zone
loc dmz vpn_a vpn_b vpn_c cust net
Source zone loc \
dmz ? \ X X X
vpn_a ? ? \ X X
vpn_b ? ? X \ X
vpn_c X \
cust X ? X X X \
net X ? X X X \
The symbols in the table are defined:
Symbol Meaning
ACCEPT in policy file
X REJECT or DROP in policy file
? REJECT or DROP in policy file, but ACCEPT some specific ports in the rules file
Naturally, this modelling technique is valid for both IPv4 and IPv6 firewalling (with Shorewall6) Looking at the diagram in two dimensions, it is easy to spot patterns. Each pattern can be condensed into a single entry in the rules file. For example, it is clear from the first row that the loc zone can access all other zones. That can be expressed very concisely with a single line in the policy file:
loc all ACCEPT
Specific Shorewall tips for use with IPsec VPNs and strongSwan Shorewall has several web pages dedicated to VPNs, including the IPsec specific documentation.. Personally, I found that I had to gather a few details from several of these pages to make an optimal solution. Here are those tips:
  • Ignore everything about the /etc/shorewall/tunnels file. It is not needed and not used any more
  • Name the VPN zones (we call them vpn_a, vpn_b and vpn_c) in the zones file but there is no need to put them in the /etc/shorewall/interfaces file.
  • The /etc/shorewall/hosts file is not just for hosts and can be used to specify network ranges, such as those associated with the VPN virtual IP addresses. The ranges you put in this file should match the rightsourceip pool assignments in strongSwan's /etc/ipsec.conf
  • One of the examples suggests using mss=1400 in the /etc/shorewall/zones file. I found that is too big and leads to packets being dropped in some situations. To start with, try a small value such as 1024 and then try larger values later after you prove everything works. Setting mss for IPsec appears to be essential.
  • Do not use the routefilter feature in the /etc/shorewall/interfaces file as it is not compatible with IPsec
Otherwise, just follow the typical examples from the Shorewall quick start guide and configure it to work the way you want. Here is an example /etc/shorewall/zones file:
fw firewall
net ipv4
dmz ipv4
loc ipv4
cust ipv4
vpn_a ipsec mode=tunnel mss=1024
vpn_b ipsec mode=tunnel mss=1024
vpn_c ipsec mode=tunnel mss=1024
Here is an example /etc/shorewall/hosts file describing the VPN ranges from the diagram:
vpn_a eth0:10.1.100.0/24 ipsec
vpn_b eth0:10.1.200.0/24 ipsec
vpn_c eth0:192.168.1.0/24 ipsec
Here is an example /etc/shorewall/policy file based on the table above:
loc all ACCEPT
vpn_c all ACCEPT
cust net ACCEPT
net cust ACCEPT
all all REJECT
Here is an example /etc/shorewall/rules file based on the network:
SECTION ALL
# allow connections to the firewall itself to start VPNs:
# Rule  source    dest    protocol/port details
ACCEPT   all       fw                ah
ACCEPT   all       fw                esp
ACCEPT   all       fw                udp 500
ACCEPT   all       fw                udp 4500
# allow access to HTTP servers in DMZ:
ACCEPT   all       dmz               tcp 80
# allow connections from HTTP servers to MySQL database in private LAN:
ACCEPT   dmz       loc:10.2.0.43     tcp 3306
# allow connections from all VPN users to IMAPS server in private LAN:
ACCEPT vpn_a,vpn_b,vpn_c loc:10.2.0.58 tcp 993
# allow VPN users (but not the smartphones in vpn_a) to the
# PostgresQL database for PostBooks accounting system:
ACCEPT vpn_b,vpn_c loc:10.2.0.48      tcp 5432
SECTION ESTABLISHED
ACCEPT   all       all
SECTION RELATED
ACCEPT   all       all
Once the files are created, Shorewall can be easily activated with:
# shorewall compile && shorewall restart
strongSwan IPsec VPN setup Like Shorewall, strongSwan is also very well documented and I'm just going to focus on those specific areas that are relevant to this type of VPN project.
  • Allow the road-warriors to send all browsing traffic over the VPN means including leftsubnet=0.0.0.0/0 in the VPN server's /etc/ipsec.conf file. Be wary though: sometimes the road-warriors start sending the DHCP renewal over the tunnel instead of to their local DHCP server.
  • As we are using Shorewall zones for firewalling, you must set the options leftfirewall=no and lefthostaccess=no in ipsec.conf. Shorewall already knows about the remote networks as they are defined in the /etc/shorewall/hosts file and so firewall rules don't need to be manipulated each time a tunnel goes up or down.
  • As discussed above, X.509 certificates are used for peer authentication. In the certificate Distinguished Name (DN), store the zone name in the Organizational Unit (OU) component, for example, OU=vpn_c, CN=gw.branch1.example.org
  • In the ipsec.conf file, match the users to connections using wildcard specifications such as rightid="OU=vpn_a, CN=*"
  • Put a subjectAltName with hostname in every certificate. The --san option to the ipsec pki commands adds the subjectAltName.
  • Keep the certificate distinguished names (DN) short, this makes the certificate smaller and reduces the risk of fragmented authentication packets. Many examples show a long and verbose DN such as C=GB, O=Acme World Wide Widget Corporation, OU=Engineering, CN=laptop1.eng.acme.example.org. On a private VPN, it is rarely necessary to have all that in the DN, just include OU for the zone name and CN for the host name.
  • As discussed above, use the ECDSA scheme for keypairs (not RSA) to ensure that the key exchange datagrams don't suffer from fragmentation problems. For example, generate a keypair with the command ipsec pki --gen --type ecdsa --size 384 > user1Key.der
  • Road warriors should have leftid=%fromcert in their ipsec.conf file. This forces them to use the Distinguished Name and not the subjectAltName (SAN) to identify themselves.
  • For road warriors who require virtual tunnel IPs, configure them to request both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses (dual stack) with leftsourceip=%config4,%config6 and on the VPN gateway, configure the ranges as arguments to rightsourceip
  • To ensure that roadwarriors query the LAN DNS, add the DNS settings to strongswan.conf and make sure road warriors are using a more recent strongSwan version that can dynamically update /etc/resolv.conf. Protecting DNS traffic is important for privacy reasons. It also makes sure that the road-warriors can discover servers that are not advertised in public DNS records.
Central firewall/VPN gateway configuration Although they are not present in the diagram, IPv6 networks are also configured in these strongSwan examples. It is very easy to combine IPv4 and IPv6 into a single /etc/ipsec.conf file. As long as the road-warriors have leftsourceip=%config4,%config6 in their own configurations, they will operate dual-stack IPv4/IPv6 whenver they connect to the VPN. Here is an example /etc/ipsec.conf for the central VPN gateway:
config setup
        charonstart=yes
        charondebug=all
        plutostart=no
conn %default
        ikelifetime=60m
        keylife=20m
        rekeymargin=3m
        keyingtries=1
        keyexchange=ikev2
conn branch1
        left=198.51.100.1
        leftsubnet=203.0.113.0/24,10.0.0.0/8,2001:DB8:12:80:/64
        leftcert=fw1Cert.der
        leftid=@fw1.example.org
        leftfirewall=no
        lefthostaccess=no
        right=%any
        rightid=@branch1-fw.example.org
        rightsubnet=192.168.1.0/24
        auto=add
conn rw_vpn_a
        left=198.51.100.1
        leftsubnet=0.0.0.0/0,::0/0
        leftcert=fw1Cert.der
        leftid=@fw1.example.org
        leftfirewall=no
        lefthostaccess=no
        right=%any
        rightid="OU=vpn_a, CN=*"
        rightsourceip=10.1.100.0/24,2001:DB8:1000:100::/64
        auto=add
conn rw_vpn_b
        left=198.51.100.1
        leftsubnet=0.0.0.0/0,::0/0
        leftcert=fw1Cert.der
        leftid=@fw1.example.org
        leftfirewall=no
        lefthostaccess=no
        right=%any
        rightid="OU=vpn_b, CN=*"
        rightsourceip=10.1.200.0/24,2001:DB8:1000:200::/64
        auto=add
Sample branch office or home router VPN configuration Here is an example /etc/ipsec.conf for the Linux server or OpenWRT VPN at the branch office or home:
conn head_office
        left=%defaultroute
        leftid=@branch1-fw.example.org
        leftcert=branch1-fwCert.der
        leftsubnet=192.168.1.0/24,2001:DB8:12:80:/64
        leftfirewall=no
        lefthostaccess=no
        right=fw1.example.org
        rightid=@fw1.example.org
        rightsubnet=203.0.113.0/24,10.0.0.0/8,2001:DB8:1000::/52
        auto=start
# notice we only allow vpn_b users, not vpn_a
# these users are given virtual IPs from our own
# 192.168.1.0 subnet
conn rw_vpn_b
        left=branch1-fw.example.org
        leftsubnet=192.168.1.0/24,2001:DB8:12:80:/64
        leftcert=branch1-fwCert.der
        leftid=@branch1-fw.example.org
        leftfirewall=no
        lefthostaccess=no
        right=%any
        rightid="OU=vpn_b, CN=*"
        rightsourceip=192.168.1.160/27,2001:DB8:12:80::8000/116
        auto=add
Further topics Shorewall and Shorewall6 don't currently support a unified configuration. This can make it slightly tedious to duplicate rules between the two IP variations. However, the syntax for IPv4 and IPv6 configuration is virtually identical. Shorewall only currently supports Linux netfilter rules. In theory it could be extended to support other types of firewall API, such as pf used by OpenBSD and the related BSD family of systems. A more advanced architecture would split the single firewall into multiple firewall hosts, like the inner and outer walls of a large castle. The VPN gateway would also become a standalone host in the DMZ. This would require more complex routing table entries. Smart cards with PIN numbers provide an effective form of two-factor authentication that can protect certificates for remote users. Smart cards are documented well by strongSwan already so I haven't repeated any of that material in this article. Managing a private X.509 certificate authority in practice may require slightly more effort than I've described, especially when an organisation grows. Small networks and home users don't need to worry about these details too much, but for most deployments it is necessary to consider things like certificate revocation lists and special schemes to protect the root certificate's private key. EJBCA is one open source project that might help. Some users may want to consider ways to prevent the road-warriors from accidentally browsing the Internet when the IPsec tunnel is not active. Such policies could be implemented with some basic iptables firewalls rules in the road-warrior devices. Summary Using these strategies and configuration tips, planning and building a VPN will hopefully be much simpler. Please feel free to ask questions on the mailing lists for any of the projects discussed in this blog.

11 July 2013

Daniel Pocock: Using debcheckout to build strongSwan 5.0 on Debian wheezy

Normally most people try to use packages from a stable Linux distribution because of their convenience and security support. Sometimes it's necessary to use a newer version, I recently had to do this with strongSwan and I'm sharing the procedure for other people to try. These days, it is actually very very easy to build a new version of a package from source and this procedure will work for many Debian packages. Debian wheezy ships with strongSwan version 4.5 packages. These are lacking support for a couple of features I needed, including dual-stack IPv4/IPv6 virtual IPs on a single user connection and maintaining the DNS server list on road-warriors Oddly enough, for a variety of reasons, I had to rebuild strongSwan on all the platforms where I wanted to use it (not just on Debian). I recently described how to build it with ECDSA support on Fedora and also how to build it with ECDSA support on OpenWRT. Following all of these procedures you will end up with strongSwan packages on all systems that can interoperate using dual stack IPv4, IPv6 and establish connections quickly, securely and reliably using ECC certificates. Get the build dependencies Many packages require extra tools and header files when building. These are packages that are not usually installed or required when running the package. However, they are very easy to get. For strongSwan:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install devscripts fakeroot
sudo apt-get build-dep strongswan
This should download and install the necessary dependencies. Notice we also installed the devscripts package, it provides the very handy debcheckout utility. Obtain and build the package Now for the real work. Fortunately this is not too hard either:
mkdir ~/ws
cd ~/ws
debcheckout strongswan
cd strongswan
dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -uc -b
Look in the directory ~/ws and you will find the .deb package files. Problems? On my own system, I observed that I could upgrade from the existing packages to the v5.0.4-6 package without any change to the configuration files. It just worked. Hopefully, these packages will eventually end up in Debian's backports catalog where you can install them without compiling. Nonetheless, problems for these packages can still be submitted through Debian's bug tracker - just make sure you clearly indicate that you built the package from source and give the git commit number (output of the command cd ~/ws/strongswan && git show head -1) Before trying the package and definitely before reporting any problem, it is worth checking the bug tracker and the Package Tracking System for known issues

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