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30 January 2024

Antoine Beaupr : router archeology: the Soekris net5001

Roadkiller was a Soekris net5501 router I used as my main gateway between 2010 and 2016 (for r seau and t l phone). It was upgraded to FreeBSD 8.4-p12 (2014-06-06) and pkgng. It was retired in favor of octavia around 2016. Roughly 10 years later (2024-01-24), I found it in a drawer and, to my surprised, it booted. After wrangling with a RS-232 USB adapter, a null modem cable, and bit rates, I even logged in: 
comBIOS ver. 1.33  20070103  Copyright (C) 2000-2007 Soekris Engineering.
net5501
0512 Mbyte Memory                        CPU Geode LX 500 Mhz 
Pri Mas  WDC WD800VE-00HDT0              LBA Xlt 1024-255-63  78 Gbyte
Slot   Vend Dev  ClassRev Cmd  Stat CL LT HT  Base1    Base2   Int 
-------------------------------------------------------------------
0:01:2 1022 2082 10100000 0006 0220 08 00 00 A0000000 00000000 10
0:06:0 1106 3053 02000096 0117 0210 08 40 00 0000E101 A0004000 11
0:07:0 1106 3053 02000096 0117 0210 08 40 00 0000E201 A0004100 05
0:08:0 1106 3053 02000096 0117 0210 08 40 00 0000E301 A0004200 09
0:09:0 1106 3053 02000096 0117 0210 08 40 00 0000E401 A0004300 12
0:20:0 1022 2090 06010003 0009 02A0 08 40 80 00006001 00006101 
0:20:2 1022 209A 01018001 0005 02A0 08 00 00 00000000 00000000 
0:21:0 1022 2094 0C031002 0006 0230 08 00 80 A0005000 00000000 15
0:21:1 1022 2095 0C032002 0006 0230 08 00 00 A0006000 00000000 15
 4 Seconds to automatic boot.   Press Ctrl-P for entering Monitor.
 
                                            
                                                  ______
                                                    ____  __ ___  ___ 
            Welcome to FreeBSD!                     __   '__/ _ \/ _ \
                                                    __       __/  __/
                                                                      
    1. Boot FreeBSD [default]                     _     _   \___ \___ 
    2. Boot FreeBSD with ACPI enabled             ____   _____ _____
    3. Boot FreeBSD in Safe Mode                    _ \ / ____   __ \
    4. Boot FreeBSD in single user mode             _)   (___         
    5. Boot FreeBSD with verbose logging            _ < \___ \        
    6. Escape to loader prompt                      _)  ____)    __   
    7. Reboot                                                         
                                                  ____/ _____/ _____/
                                            
                                            
                                            
    Select option, [Enter] for default      
    or [Space] to pause timer  5            
  
Copyright (c) 1992-2013 The FreeBSD Project.
Copyright (c) 1979, 1980, 1983, 1986, 1988, 1989, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994
        The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.
FreeBSD is a registered trademark of The FreeBSD Foundation.
FreeBSD 8.4-RELEASE-p12 #5: Fri Jun  6 02:43:23 EDT 2014
    root@roadkiller.anarc.at:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/ROADKILL i386
gcc version 4.2.2 20070831 prerelease [FreeBSD]
Timecounter "i8254" frequency 1193182 Hz quality 0
CPU: Geode(TM) Integrated Processor by AMD PCS (499.90-MHz 586-class CPU)
  Origin = "AuthenticAMD"  Id = 0x5a2  Family = 5  Model = a  Stepping = 2
  Features=0x88a93d<FPU,DE,PSE,TSC,MSR,CX8,SEP,PGE,CMOV,CLFLUSH,MMX>
  AMD Features=0xc0400000<MMX+,3DNow!+,3DNow!>
real memory  = 536870912 (512 MB)
avail memory = 506445824 (482 MB)
kbd1 at kbdmux0
K6-family MTRR support enabled (2 registers)
ACPI Error: A valid RSDP was not found (20101013/tbxfroot-309)
ACPI: Table initialisation failed: AE_NOT_FOUND
ACPI: Try disabling either ACPI or apic support.
cryptosoft0: <software crypto> on motherboard
pcib0 pcibus 0 on motherboard
pci0: <PCI bus> on pcib0
Geode LX: Soekris net5501 comBIOS ver. 1.33 20070103 Copyright (C) 2000-2007
pci0: <encrypt/decrypt, entertainment crypto> at device 1.2 (no driver attached)
vr0: <VIA VT6105M Rhine III 10/100BaseTX> port 0xe100-0xe1ff mem 0xa0004000-0xa00040ff irq 11 at device 6.0 on pci0
vr0: Quirks: 0x2
vr0: Revision: 0x96
miibus0: <MII bus> on vr0
ukphy0: <Generic IEEE 802.3u media interface> PHY 1 on miibus0
ukphy0:  none, 10baseT, 10baseT-FDX, 100baseTX, 100baseTX-FDX, auto, auto-flow
vr0: Ethernet address: 00:00:24:cc:93:44
vr0: [ITHREAD]
vr1: <VIA VT6105M Rhine III 10/100BaseTX> port 0xe200-0xe2ff mem 0xa0004100-0xa00041ff irq 5 at device 7.0 on pci0
vr1: Quirks: 0x2
vr1: Revision: 0x96
miibus1: <MII bus> on vr1
ukphy1: <Generic IEEE 802.3u media interface> PHY 1 on miibus1
ukphy1:  none, 10baseT, 10baseT-FDX, 100baseTX, 100baseTX-FDX, auto, auto-flow
vr1: Ethernet address: 00:00:24:cc:93:45
vr1: [ITHREAD]
vr2: <VIA VT6105M Rhine III 10/100BaseTX> port 0xe300-0xe3ff mem 0xa0004200-0xa00042ff irq 9 at device 8.0 on pci0
vr2: Quirks: 0x2
vr2: Revision: 0x96
miibus2: <MII bus> on vr2
ukphy2: <Generic IEEE 802.3u media interface> PHY 1 on miibus2
ukphy2:  none, 10baseT, 10baseT-FDX, 100baseTX, 100baseTX-FDX, auto, auto-flow
vr2: Ethernet address: 00:00:24:cc:93:46
vr2: [ITHREAD]
vr3: <VIA VT6105M Rhine III 10/100BaseTX> port 0xe400-0xe4ff mem 0xa0004300-0xa00043ff irq 12 at device 9.0 on pci0
vr3: Quirks: 0x2
vr3: Revision: 0x96
miibus3: <MII bus> on vr3
ukphy3: <Generic IEEE 802.3u media interface> PHY 1 on miibus3
ukphy3:  none, 10baseT, 10baseT-FDX, 100baseTX, 100baseTX-FDX, auto, auto-flow
vr3: Ethernet address: 00:00:24:cc:93:47
vr3: [ITHREAD]
isab0: <PCI-ISA bridge> at device 20.0 on pci0
isa0: <ISA bus> on isab0
atapci0: <AMD CS5536 UDMA100 controller> port 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6,0x170-0x177,0x376,0xe000-0xe00f at device 20.2 on pci0
ata0: <ATA channel> at channel 0 on atapci0
ata0: [ITHREAD]
ata1: <ATA channel> at channel 1 on atapci0
ata1: [ITHREAD]
ohci0: <OHCI (generic) USB controller> mem 0xa0005000-0xa0005fff irq 15 at device 21.0 on pci0
ohci0: [ITHREAD]
usbus0 on ohci0
ehci0: <AMD CS5536 (Geode) USB 2.0 controller> mem 0xa0006000-0xa0006fff irq 15 at device 21.1 on pci0
ehci0: [ITHREAD]
usbus1: EHCI version 1.0
usbus1 on ehci0
cpu0 on motherboard
pmtimer0 on isa0
orm0: <ISA Option ROM> at iomem 0xc8000-0xd27ff pnpid ORM0000 on isa0
atkbdc0: <Keyboard controller (i8042)> at port 0x60,0x64 on isa0
atkbd0: <AT Keyboard> irq 1 on atkbdc0
kbd0 at atkbd0
atkbd0: [GIANT-LOCKED]
atkbd0: [ITHREAD]
atrtc0: <AT Real Time Clock> at port 0x70 irq 8 on isa0
ppc0: parallel port not found.
uart0: <16550 or compatible> at port 0x3f8-0x3ff irq 4 flags 0x10 on isa0
uart0: [FILTER]
uart0: console (19200,n,8,1)
uart1: <16550 or compatible> at port 0x2f8-0x2ff irq 3 on isa0
uart1: [FILTER]
Timecounter "TSC" frequency 499903982 Hz quality 800
Timecounters tick every 1.000 msec
IPsec: Initialized Security Association Processing.
usbus0: 12Mbps Full Speed USB v1.0
usbus1: 480Mbps High Speed USB v2.0
ad0: 76319MB <WDC WD800VE-00HDT0 09.07D09> at ata0-master UDMA100 
ugen0.1: <AMD> at usbus0
uhub0: <AMD OHCI root HUB, class 9/0, rev 1.00/1.00, addr 1> on usbus0
ugen1.1: <AMD> at usbus1
uhub1: <AMD EHCI root HUB, class 9/0, rev 2.00/1.00, addr 1> on usbus1
GEOM: ad0s1: geometry does not match label (255h,63s != 16h,63s).
uhub0: 4 ports with 4 removable, self powered
Root mount waiting for: usbus1
Root mount waiting for: usbus1
uhub1: 4 ports with 4 removable, self powered
Trying to mount root from ufs:/dev/ad0s1a
The last log rotation is from 2016: 
[root@roadkiller /var/log]# stat /var/log/wtmp      
65 61783 -rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 208219 1056 "Nov  1 05:00:01 2016" "Jan 18 22:29:16 2017" "Jan 18 22:29:16 2017" "Nov  1 05:00:01 2016" 16384 4 0 /var/log/wtmp
Interestingly, I switched between eicat and teksavvy on December 11th. Which year? Who knows! 
Dec 11 16:38:40 roadkiller mpd: [eicatL0] LCP: authorization successful
Dec 11 16:41:15 roadkiller mpd: [teksavvyL0] LCP: authorization successful
Never realized those good old logs had a "oh dear forgot the year" issue (that's something like Y2K except just "Y", I guess). That was probably 2015, because the log dates from 2017, and the last entry is from November of the year after the above: 
[root@roadkiller /var/log]# stat mpd.log 
65 47113 -rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 193008 71939195 "Jan 18 22:39:18 2017" "Jan 18 22:39:59 2017" "Jan 18 22:39:59 2017" "Apr  2 10:41:37 2013" 16384 140640 0 mpd.log
It looks like the system was installed in 2010: 
[root@roadkiller /var/log]# stat /
63 2 drwxr-xr-x 21 root wheel 2120 512 "Jan 18 22:34:43 2017" "Jan 18 22:28:12 2017" "Jan 18 22:28:12 2017" "Jul 18 22:25:00 2010" 16384 4 0 /
... so it lived for about 6 years, but still works after almost 14 years, which I find utterly amazing. Another amazing thing is that there's tuptime installed on that server! That is a software I thought I discovered later and then sponsored in Debian, but turns out I was already using it then! 
[root@roadkiller /var]# tuptime 
System startups:        19   since   21:20:16 11/07/15
System shutdowns:       0 ok   -   18 bad
System uptime:          85.93 %   -   1 year, 11 days, 10 hours, 3 minutes and 36 seconds
System downtime:        14.07 %   -   61 days, 15 hours, 22 minutes and 45 seconds
System life:            1 year, 73 days, 1 hour, 26 minutes and 20 seconds
Largest uptime:         122 days, 9 hours, 17 minutes and 6 seconds   from   08:17:56 02/02/16
Shortest uptime:        5 minutes and 4 seconds   from   21:55:00 01/18/17
Average uptime:         19 days, 19 hours, 28 minutes and 37 seconds
Largest downtime:       57 days, 1 hour, 9 minutes and 59 seconds   from   20:45:01 11/22/16
Shortest downtime:      -1 years, 364 days, 23 hours, 58 minutes and 12 seconds   from   22:30:01 01/18/17
Average downtime:       3 days, 5 hours, 51 minutes and 43 seconds
Current uptime:         18 minutes and 23 seconds   since   22:28:13 01/18/17
Actual up/down times: 
[root@roadkiller /var]# tuptime -t
No.        Startup Date                                         Uptime       Shutdown Date   End                                                  Downtime
1     21:20:16 11/07/15      1 day, 0 hours, 40 minutes and 12 seconds   22:00:28 11/08/15   BAD                                  2 minutes and 37 seconds
2     22:03:05 11/08/15      1 day, 9 hours, 41 minutes and 57 seconds   07:45:02 11/10/15   BAD                                  3 minutes and 24 seconds
3     07:48:26 11/10/15    20 days, 2 hours, 41 minutes and 34 seconds   10:30:00 11/30/15   BAD                        4 hours, 50 minutes and 21 seconds
4     15:20:21 11/30/15                      19 minutes and 40 seconds   15:40:01 11/30/15   BAD                                   6 minutes and 5 seconds
5     15:46:06 11/30/15                      53 minutes and 55 seconds   16:40:01 11/30/15   BAD                           1 hour, 1 minute and 38 seconds
6     17:41:39 11/30/15     6 days, 16 hours, 3 minutes and 22 seconds   09:45:01 12/07/15   BAD                4 days, 6 hours, 53 minutes and 11 seconds
7     16:38:12 12/11/15   50 days, 17 hours, 56 minutes and 49 seconds   10:35:01 01/31/16   BAD                                 10 minutes and 52 seconds
8     10:45:53 01/31/16     1 day, 21 hours, 28 minutes and 16 seconds   08:14:09 02/02/16   BAD                                  3 minutes and 48 seconds
9     08:17:56 02/02/16    122 days, 9 hours, 17 minutes and 6 seconds   18:35:02 06/03/16   BAD                                 10 minutes and 16 seconds
10    18:45:18 06/03/16   29 days, 17 hours, 14 minutes and 43 seconds   12:00:01 07/03/16   BAD                                 12 minutes and 34 seconds
11    12:12:35 07/03/16   31 days, 17 hours, 17 minutes and 26 seconds   05:30:01 08/04/16   BAD                                 14 minutes and 25 seconds
12    05:44:26 08/04/16     15 days, 1 hour, 55 minutes and 35 seconds   07:40:01 08/19/16   BAD                                  6 minutes and 51 seconds
13    07:46:52 08/19/16     7 days, 5 hours, 23 minutes and 10 seconds   13:10:02 08/26/16   BAD                                  3 minutes and 45 seconds
14    13:13:47 08/26/16   27 days, 21 hours, 36 minutes and 14 seconds   10:50:01 09/23/16   BAD                                  2 minutes and 14 seconds
15    10:52:15 09/23/16   60 days, 10 hours, 52 minutes and 46 seconds   20:45:01 11/22/16   BAD                 57 days, 1 hour, 9 minutes and 59 seconds
16    21:55:00 01/18/17                        5 minutes and 4 seconds   22:00:04 01/18/17   BAD                                 11 minutes and 15 seconds
17    22:11:19 01/18/17                       8 minutes and 42 seconds   22:20:01 01/18/17   BAD                                   1 minute and 20 seconds
18    22:21:21 01/18/17                       8 minutes and 40 seconds   22:30:01 01/18/17   BAD   -1 years, 364 days, 23 hours, 58 minutes and 12 seconds
19    22:28:13 01/18/17                      20 minutes and 17 seconds
The last few entries are actually the tests I'm running now, it seems this machine thinks we're now on 2017-01-18 at ~22:00, while we're actually 2024-01-24 at ~12:00 local: 
Wed Jan 18 23:05:38 EST 2017
FreeBSD/i386 (roadkiller.anarc.at) (ttyu0)
login: root
Password:
Jan 18 23:07:10 roadkiller login: ROOT LOGIN (root) ON ttyu0
Last login: Wed Jan 18 22:29:16 on ttyu0
Copyright (c) 1992-2013 The FreeBSD Project.
Copyright (c) 1979, 1980, 1983, 1986, 1988, 1989, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994
        The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.
FreeBSD 8.4-RELEASE-p12 (ROADKILL) #5: Fri Jun  6 02:43:23 EDT 2014
Reminders:
 * commit stuff in /etc
 * reload firewall (in screen!):
    pfctl -f /etc/pf.conf ; sleep 1
 * vim + syn on makes pf.conf more readable
 * monitoring the PPPoE uplink:
   tail -f /var/log/mpd.log
Current problems:
 * sometimes pf doesn't start properly on boot, if pppoe failed to come up, use
   this to resume:
     /etc/rc.d/pf start
   it will kill your shell, but fix NAT (2012-08-10)
 * babel fails to start on boot (2013-06-15):
     babeld -D -g 33123 tap0 vr3
 * DNS often fails, tried messing with unbound.conf (2014-10-05) and updating
   named.root (2016-01-28) and performance tweaks (ee63689)
 * asterisk and mpd4 are deprecated and should be uninstalled when we're sure
   their replacements (voipms + ata and mpd5) are working (2015-01-13)
 * if IPv6 fails, it's because netblocks are not being routed upstream. DHCPcd
   should do this, but doesn't start properly, use this to resume (2015-12-21):
     /usr/local/sbin/dhcpcd -6 --persistent --background --timeout 0 -C resolv.conf ng0
This machine is doomed to be replaced with the new omnia router, Indiegogo
campaign should ship in april 2016: http://igg.me/at/turris-omnia/x
(I really like the motd I left myself there. In theory, I guess this could just start connecting to the internet again if I still had the same PPPoE/ADSL link I had almost a decade ago; obviously, I do not.) Not sure how the system figured the 2017 time: the onboard clock itself believes we're in 1980, so clearly the CMOS battery has (understandably) failed: 
> ?
comBIOS Monitor Commands
boot [drive][:partition] INT19 Boot
reboot                   cold boot
download                 download a file using XMODEM/CRC
flashupdate              update flash BIOS with downloaded file
time [HH:MM:SS]          show or set time
date [YYYY/MM/DD]        show or set date
d[b w d] [adr]           dump memory bytes/words/dwords
e[b w d] adr value [...] enter bytes/words/dwords
i[b w d] port            input from 8/16/32-bit port
o[b w d] port value      output to 8/16/32-bit port
run adr                  execute code at adr
cmosread [adr]           read CMOS RAM data
cmoswrite adr byte [...] write CMOS RAM data
cmoschecksum             update CMOS RAM Checksum
set parameter=value      set system parameter to value
show [parameter]         show one or all system parameters
?/help                   show this help
> show
ConSpeed = 19200
ConLock = Enabled
ConMute = Disabled
BIOSentry = Enabled
PCIROMS = Enabled
PXEBoot = Enabled
FLASH = Primary
BootDelay = 5
FastBoot = Disabled
BootPartition = Disabled
BootDrive = 80 81 F0 FF 
ShowPCI = Enabled
Reset = Hard
CpuSpeed = Default
> time
Current Date and Time is: 1980/01/01 00:56:47
Another bit of archeology: I had documented various outages with my ISP... back in 2003! 
[root@roadkiller ~/bin]# cat ppp_stats/downtimes.txt
11/03/2003 18:24:49 218
12/03/2003 09:10:49 118
12/03/2003 10:05:57 680
12/03/2003 10:14:50 106
12/03/2003 10:16:53 6
12/03/2003 10:35:28 146
12/03/2003 10:57:26 393
12/03/2003 11:16:35 5
12/03/2003 11:16:54 11
13/03/2003 06:15:57 18928
13/03/2003 09:43:36 9730
13/03/2003 10:47:10 23
13/03/2003 10:58:35 5
16/03/2003 01:32:36 338
16/03/2003 02:00:33 120
16/03/2003 11:14:31 14007
19/03/2003 00:56:27 11179
19/03/2003 00:56:43 5
19/03/2003 00:56:53 0
19/03/2003 00:56:55 1
19/03/2003 00:57:09 1
19/03/2003 00:57:10 1
19/03/2003 00:57:24 1
19/03/2003 00:57:25 1
19/03/2003 00:57:39 1
19/03/2003 00:57:40 1
19/03/2003 00:57:44 3
19/03/2003 00:57:53 0
19/03/2003 00:57:55 0
19/03/2003 00:58:08 0
19/03/2003 00:58:10 0
19/03/2003 00:58:23 0
19/03/2003 00:58:25 0
19/03/2003 00:58:39 1
19/03/2003 00:58:42 2
19/03/2003 00:58:58 5
19/03/2003 00:59:35 2
19/03/2003 00:59:47 3
19/03/2003 01:00:34 3
19/03/2003 01:00:39 0
19/03/2003 01:00:54 0
19/03/2003 01:01:11 2
19/03/2003 01:01:25 1
19/03/2003 01:01:48 1
19/03/2003 01:02:03 1
19/03/2003 01:02:10 2
19/03/2003 01:02:20 3
19/03/2003 01:02:44 3
19/03/2003 01:03:45 3
19/03/2003 01:04:39 2
19/03/2003 01:05:40 2
19/03/2003 01:06:35 2
19/03/2003 01:07:36 2
19/03/2003 01:08:31 2
19/03/2003 01:08:38 2
19/03/2003 01:10:07 3
19/03/2003 01:11:05 2
19/03/2003 01:12:03 3
19/03/2003 01:13:01 3
19/03/2003 01:13:58 2
19/03/2003 01:14:59 5
19/03/2003 01:15:54 2
19/03/2003 01:16:55 2
19/03/2003 01:17:50 2
19/03/2003 01:18:51 3
19/03/2003 01:19:46 2
19/03/2003 01:20:46 2
19/03/2003 01:21:42 3
19/03/2003 01:22:42 3
19/03/2003 01:23:37 2
19/03/2003 01:24:38 3
19/03/2003 01:25:33 2
19/03/2003 01:26:33 2
19/03/2003 01:27:30 3
19/03/2003 01:28:55 2
19/03/2003 01:29:56 2
19/03/2003 01:30:50 2
19/03/2003 01:31:42 3
19/03/2003 01:32:36 3
19/03/2003 01:33:27 2
19/03/2003 01:34:21 2
19/03/2003 01:35:22 2
19/03/2003 01:36:17 3
19/03/2003 01:37:18 2
19/03/2003 01:38:13 3
19/03/2003 01:39:39 2
19/03/2003 01:40:39 2
19/03/2003 01:41:35 3
19/03/2003 01:42:35 3
19/03/2003 01:43:31 3
19/03/2003 01:44:31 3
19/03/2003 01:45:53 3
19/03/2003 01:46:48 3
19/03/2003 01:47:48 2
19/03/2003 01:48:44 3
19/03/2003 01:49:44 2
19/03/2003 01:50:40 3
19/03/2003 01:51:39 1
19/03/2003 11:04:33 19   
19/03/2003 18:39:36 2833 
19/03/2003 18:54:05 825  
19/03/2003 19:04:00 454  
19/03/2003 19:08:11 210  
19/03/2003 19:41:44 272  
19/03/2003 21:18:41 208  
24/03/2003 04:51:16 6
27/03/2003 04:51:20 5
30/03/2003 04:51:25 5
31/03/2003 08:30:31 255  
03/04/2003 08:30:36 5
06/04/2003 01:16:00 621  
06/04/2003 22:18:08 17   
06/04/2003 22:32:44 13   
09/04/2003 22:33:12 28   
12/04/2003 22:33:17 6
15/04/2003 22:33:22 5
17/04/2003 15:03:43 18   
20/04/2003 15:03:48 5
23/04/2003 15:04:04 16   
23/04/2003 21:08:30 339  
23/04/2003 21:18:08 13   
23/04/2003 23:34:20 253  
26/04/2003 23:34:45 25   
29/04/2003 23:34:49 5
02/05/2003 13:10:01 185  
05/05/2003 13:10:06 5
08/05/2003 13:10:11 5
09/05/2003 14:00:36 63928
09/05/2003 16:58:52 2
11/05/2003 23:08:48 2
14/05/2003 23:08:53 6
17/05/2003 23:08:58 5
20/05/2003 23:09:03 5
23/05/2003 23:09:08 5
26/05/2003 23:09:14 5
29/05/2003 23:00:10 3
29/05/2003 23:03:01 10   
01/06/2003 23:03:05 4
04/06/2003 23:03:10 5
07/06/2003 23:03:38 28   
10/06/2003 23:03:50 12   
13/06/2003 23:03:55 6
14/06/2003 07:42:20 3
14/06/2003 14:37:08 3
15/06/2003 20:08:34 3
18/06/2003 20:08:39 6
21/06/2003 20:08:45 6
22/06/2003 03:05:19 138  
22/06/2003 04:06:28 3
25/06/2003 04:06:58 31   
28/06/2003 04:07:02 4
01/07/2003 04:07:06 4
04/07/2003 04:07:11 5
07/07/2003 04:07:16 5
12/07/2003 04:55:20 6
12/07/2003 19:09:51 1158 
12/07/2003 22:14:49 8025 
15/07/2003 22:14:54 6
16/07/2003 05:43:06 18   
19/07/2003 05:43:12 6
22/07/2003 05:43:17 5
23/07/2003 18:18:55 183  
23/07/2003 18:19:55 9
23/07/2003 18:29:15 158  
23/07/2003 19:48:44 4604 
23/07/2003 20:16:27 3
23/07/2003 20:37:29 1079 
23/07/2003 20:43:12 342  
23/07/2003 22:25:51 6158
Fascinating. I suspect the (IDE!) hard drive might be failing as I saw two new files created in /var that I didn't remember seeing before: 
-rw-r--r--   1 root    wheel        0 Jan 18 22:55 3@T3
-rw-r--r--   1 root    wheel        0 Jan 18 22:55 DY5
So I shutdown the machine, possibly for the last time: 
Waiting (max 60 seconds) for system process  bufdaemon' to stop...done
Waiting (max 60 seconds) for system process  syncer' to stop...
Syncing disks, vnodes remaining...3 3 0 1 1 0 0 done
All buffers synced.
Uptime: 36m43s
usbus0: Controller shutdown
uhub0: at usbus0, port 1, addr 1 (disconnected)
usbus0: Controller shutdown complete
usbus1: Controller shutdown
uhub1: at usbus1, port 1, addr 1 (disconnected)
usbus1: Controller shutdown complete
The operating system has halted.
Please press any key to reboot.
I'll finally note this was the last FreeBSD server I personally operated. I also used FreeBSD to setup the core routers at Koumbit but those were replaced with Debian recently as well. Thanks Soekris, that was some sturdy hardware. Hopefully this new Protectli router will live up to that "decade plus" challenge. Not sure what the fate of this device will be: I'll bring it to the next Montreal Debian & Stuff to see if anyone's interested, contact me if you can't show up and want this thing.

Matthew Palmer: Why Certificate Lifecycle Automation Matters

If you ve perused the ActivityPub feed of certificates whose keys are known to be compromised, and clicked on the Show More button to see the name of the certificate issuer, you may have noticed that some issuers seem to come up again and again. This might make sense after all, if a CA is issuing a large volume of certificates, they ll be seen more often in a list of compromised certificates. In an attempt to see if there is anything that we can learn from this data, though, I did a bit of digging, and came up with some illuminating results.

The Procedure I started off by finding all the unexpired certificates logged in Certificate Transparency (CT) logs that have a key that is in the pwnedkeys database as having been publicly disclosed. From this list of certificates, I removed duplicates by matching up issuer/serial number tuples, and then reduced the set by counting the number of unique certificates by their issuer. This gave me a list of the issuers of these certificates, which looks a bit like this: 
/C=BE/O=GlobalSign nv-sa/CN=AlphaSSL CA - SHA256 - G4
/C=GB/ST=Greater Manchester/L=Salford/O=Sectigo Limited/CN=Sectigo RSA Domain Validation Secure Server CA
/C=GB/ST=Greater Manchester/L=Salford/O=Sectigo Limited/CN=Sectigo RSA Organization Validation Secure Server CA
/C=US/ST=Arizona/L=Scottsdale/O=GoDaddy.com, Inc./OU=http://certs.godaddy.com/repository//CN=Go Daddy Secure Certificate Authority - G2
/C=US/ST=Arizona/L=Scottsdale/O=Starfield Technologies, Inc./OU=http://certs.starfieldtech.com/repository//CN=Starfield Secure Certificate Authority - G2
/C=AT/O=ZeroSSL/CN=ZeroSSL RSA Domain Secure Site CA
/C=BE/O=GlobalSign nv-sa/CN=GlobalSign GCC R3 DV TLS CA 2020
Rather than try to work with raw issuers (because, as Andrew Ayer says, The SSL Certificate Issuer Field is a Lie), I mapped these issuers to the organisations that manage them, and summed the counts for those grouped issuers together.

The Data
Lieutenant Commander Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation Insert obligatory "not THAT data" comment here
The end result of this work is the following table, sorted by the count of certificates which have been compromised by exposing their private key:
IssuerCompromised Count
Sectigo170
ISRG (Let's Encrypt)161
GoDaddy141
DigiCert81
GlobalSign46
Entrust3
SSL.com1
If you re familiar with the CA ecosystem, you ll probably recognise that the organisations with large numbers of compromised certificates are also those who issue a lot of certificates. So far, nothing particularly surprising, then. Let s look more closely at the relationships, though, to see if we can get more useful insights.

Volume Control Using the issuance volume report from crt.sh, we can compare issuance volumes to compromise counts, to come up with a compromise rate . I m using the Unexpired Precertificates colume from the issuance volume report, as I feel that s the number that best matches the certificate population I m examining to find compromised certificates. To maintain parity with the previous table, this one is still sorted by the count of certificates that have been compromised.
IssuerIssuance VolumeCompromised CountCompromise Rate
Sectigo88,323,0681701 in 519,547
ISRG (Let's Encrypt)315,476,4021611 in 1,959,480
GoDaddy56,121,4291411 in 398,024
DigiCert144,713,475811 in 1,786,586
GlobalSign1,438,485461 in 31,271
Entrust23,16631 in 7,722
SSL.com171,81611 in 171,816
If we now sort this table by compromise rate, we can see which organisations have the most (and least) leakiness going on from their customers:
IssuerIssuance VolumeCompromised CountCompromise Rate
Entrust23,16631 in 7,722
GlobalSign1,438,485461 in 31,271
SSL.com171,81611 in 171,816
GoDaddy56,121,4291411 in 398,024
Sectigo88,323,0681701 in 519,547
DigiCert144,713,475811 in 1,786,586
ISRG (Let's Encrypt)315,476,4021611 in 1,959,480
By grouping by order-of-magnitude in the compromise rate, we can identify three bands :
  • The Super Leakers: Customers of Entrust and GlobalSign seem to love to lose control of their private keys. For Entrust, at least, though, the small volumes involved make the numbers somewhat untrustworthy. The three compromised certificates could very well belong to just one customer, for instance. I m not aware of anything that GlobalSign does that would make them such an outlier, either, so I m inclined to think they just got unlucky with one or two customers, but as CAs don t include customer IDs in the certificates they issue, it s not possible to say whether that s the actual cause or not.
  • The Regular Leakers: Customers of SSL.com, GoDaddy, and Sectigo all have compromise rates in the 1-in-hundreds-of-thousands range. Again, the low volumes of SSL.com make the numbers somewhat unreliable, but the other two organisations in this group have large enough numbers that we can rely on that data fairly well, I think.
  • The Low Leakers: Customers of DigiCert and Let s Encrypt are at least three times less likely than customers of the regular leakers to lose control of their private keys. Good for them!
Now we have some useful insights we can think about.

Why Is It So?
Professor Julius Sumner Miller If you don't know who Professor Julius Sumner Miller is, I highly recommend finding out
All of the organisations on the list, with the exception of Let s Encrypt, are what one might term traditional CAs. To a first approximation, it s reasonable to assume that the vast majority of the customers of these traditional CAs probably manage their certificates the same way they have for the past two decades or more. That is, they generate a key and CSR, upload the CSR to the CA to get a certificate, then copy the cert and key somewhere. Since humans are handling the keys, there s a higher risk of the humans using either risky practices, or making a mistake, and exposing the private key to the world. Let s Encrypt, on the other hand, issues all of its certificates using the ACME (Automatic Certificate Management Environment) protocol, and all of the Let s Encrypt documentation encourages the use of software tools to generate keys, issue certificates, and install them for use. Given that Let s Encrypt has 161 compromised certificates currently in the wild, it s clear that the automation in use is far from perfect, but the significantly lower compromise rate suggests to me that lifecycle automation at least reduces the rate of key compromise, even though it doesn t eliminate it completely.

Explaining the Outlier The difference in presumed issuance practices would seem to explain the significant difference in compromise rates between Let s Encrypt and the other organisations, if it weren t for one outlier. This is a largely traditional CA, with the manual-handling issues that implies, but with a compromise rate close to that of Let s Encrypt. We are, of course, talking about DigiCert. The thing about DigiCert, that doesn t show up in the raw numbers from crt.sh, is that DigiCert manages the issuance of certificates for several of the biggest hosted TLS providers, such as CloudFlare and AWS. When these services obtain a certificate from DigiCert on their customer s behalf, the private key is kept locked away, and no human can (we hope) get access to the private key. This is supported by the fact that no certificates identifiably issued to either CloudFlare or AWS appear in the set of certificates with compromised keys. When we ask for all certificates issued by DigiCert , we get both the certificates issued to these big providers, which are very good at keeping their keys under control, as well as the certificates issued to everyone else, whose key handling practices may not be quite so stringent. It s possible, though not trivial, to account for certificates issued to these hosted TLS providers, because the certificates they use are issued from intermediates branded to those companies. With the crt.sh psql interface we can run this query to get the total number of unexpired precertificates issued to these managed services: 
SELECT SUM(sub.NUM_ISSUED[2] - sub.NUM_EXPIRED[2])
  FROM (
    SELECT ca.name, max(coalesce(coalesce(nullif(trim(cc.SUBORDINATE_CA_OWNER), ''), nullif(trim(cc.CA_OWNER), '')), cc.INCLUDED_CERTIFICATE_OWNER)) as OWNER,
           ca.NUM_ISSUED, ca.NUM_EXPIRED
      FROM ccadb_certificate cc, ca_certificate cac, ca
     WHERE cc.CERTIFICATE_ID = cac.CERTIFICATE_ID
       AND cac.CA_ID = ca.ID
  GROUP BY ca.ID
  ) sub
 WHERE sub.name ILIKE '%Amazon%' OR sub.name ILIKE '%CloudFlare%' AND sub.owner = 'DigiCert';
The number I get from running that query is 104,316,112, which should be subtracted from DigiCert s total issuance figures to get a more accurate view of what DigiCert s regular customers do with their private keys. When I do this, the compromise rates table, sorted by the compromise rate, looks like this:
IssuerIssuance VolumeCompromised CountCompromise Rate
Entrust23,16631 in 7,722
GlobalSign1,438,485461 in 31,271
SSL.com171,81611 in 171,816
GoDaddy56,121,4291411 in 398,024
"Regular" DigiCert40,397,363811 in 498,732
Sectigo88,323,0681701 in 519,547
All DigiCert144,713,475811 in 1,786,586
ISRG (Let's Encrypt)315,476,4021611 in 1,959,480
In short, it appears that DigiCert s regular customers are just as likely as GoDaddy or Sectigo customers to expose their private keys.

What Does It All Mean? The takeaway from all this is fairly straightforward, and not overly surprising, I believe.

The less humans have to do with certificate issuance, the less likely they are to compromise that certificate by exposing the private key. While it may not be surprising, it is nice to have some empirical evidence to back up the common wisdom. Fully-managed TLS providers, such as CloudFlare, AWS Certificate Manager, and whatever Azure s thing is called, is the platonic ideal of this principle: never give humans any opportunity to expose a private key. I m not saying you should use one of these providers, but the security approach they have adopted appears to be the optimal one, and should be emulated universally. The ACME protocol is the next best, in that there are a variety of standardised tools widely available that allow humans to take themselves out of the loop, but it s still possible for humans to handle (and mistakenly expose) key material if they try hard enough. Legacy issuance methods, which either cannot be automated, or require custom, per-provider automation to be developed, appear to be at least four times less helpful to the goal of avoiding compromise of the private key associated with a certificate.

Humans Are, Of Course, The Problem
Bender, the robot from Futurama, asking if we'd like to kill all humans No thanks, Bender, I'm busy tonight
This observation that if you don t let humans near keys, they don t get leaked is further supported by considering the biggest issuers by volume who have not issued any certificates whose keys have been compromised: Google Trust Services (fourth largest issuer overall, with 57,084,529 unexpired precertificates), and Microsoft Corporation (sixth largest issuer overall, with 22,852,468 unexpired precertificates). It appears that somewhere between most and basically all of the certificates these organisations issue are to customers of their public clouds, and my understanding is that the keys for these certificates are managed in same manner as CloudFlare and AWS the keys are locked away where humans can t get to them. It should, of course, go without saying that if a human can never have access to a private key, it makes it rather difficult for a human to expose it. More broadly, if you are building something that handles sensitive or secret data, the more you can do to keep humans out of the loop, the better everything will be.

Your Support is Appreciated If you d like to see more analysis of how key compromise happens, and the lessons we can learn from examining billions of certificates, please show your support by buying me a refreshing beverage. Trawling CT logs is thirsty work.

Appendix: Methodology Limitations In the interests of clarity, I feel it s important to describe ways in which my research might be flawed. Here are the things I know of that may have impacted the accuracy, that I couldn t feasibly account for.
  • Time Periods: Because time never stops, there is likely to be some slight mismatches in the numbers obtained from the various data sources, because they weren t collected at exactly the same moment.
  • Issuer-to-Organisation Mapping: It s possible that the way I mapped issuers to organisations doesn t match exactly with how crt.sh does it, meaning that counts might be skewed. I tried to minimise that by using the same data sources (the CCADB AllCertificates report) that I believe that crt.sh uses for its mapping, but I cannot be certain of a perfect match.
  • Unwarranted Grouping: I ve drawn some conclusions about the practices of the various organisations based on their general approach to certificate issuance. If a particular subordinate CA that I ve grouped into the parent organisation is managed in some unusual way, that might cause my conclusions to be erroneous. I was able to fairly easily separate out CloudFlare, AWS, and Azure, but there are almost certainly others that I didn t spot, because hoo boy there are a lot of intermediate CAs out there.

29 January 2024

Russell Coker: Thinkpad X1 Yoga Gen3

I just bought myself a Thinkpad X1 Yoga Gen3 for $359.10. I have been quite happy with the Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen5 I ve had for just over a year (apart from my mistake in buying one with lost password) [1] and I normally try to get more use out of a computer than that. If I divide total cost by the time that I ve had it working that comes out to about $1.30 per day. I would pay more than that for a laptop and I have paid much more than that for laptops in the past, but I prefer not to. I was initially tempted to buy a new Thinkpad by the prices of high end X1 devices dropping, this new Yoga has 16G of RAM and a 2560*1440 screen that s a good upgrade from 8G with 1920*1080. The CPU of my new Thinkpad is a quad core i5-8350U that rates 6226 [2] and is a decent upgrade from the dual core i5-6300U that rates 3239 [3] although that wasn t a factor as I found the old CPU fast enough. The Yoga Gen3 has a minimum weight of 1.4Kg and mine might not be the lightest model in the range while the old Carbon weighs 1.14Kg. I can really feel the difference. It s also slightly larger but fortunately still fits in the pocket of my Scottware jacket. The higher resolution screen and more RAM were not sufficient to make me want to spend some money. The deciding factor is that as I m working on phones with touch screens it is a benefit to use a laptop with a touch screen so I can do more testing. The Yoga I bought was going cheap because the touch part of the touch screen is broken but the stylus still works, this is apparently a common failure mode of the Yoga. The Yoga has a brighter screen than the Carbon and seems to have better contrast. I think Lenovo had some newer technology for that generation of laptops or maybe my Carbon is slightly defective in that regard. It s a hazard of buying second hand that if something basically works but isn t quite as good as it should be then you will never know. I m happy with this purchase and I recommend that everyone who buys laptops secondhand the way I do only get 1440p or better displays. I ve currently got the Kitty terminal emulator [4] setup with 9 windows that each have 103 or 104 columns and 26 or 28 rows of text. That s a lot of terminals on a laptop screen!
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Russ Allbery: Review: Bluebird

Review: Bluebird, by Ciel Pierlot
Publisher: Angry Robot
Copyright: 2022
ISBN: 0-85766-967-2
Format: Kindle
Pages: 458
Bluebird is a stand-alone far-future science fiction adventure. Ten thousand years ago, a star fell into the galaxy carrying three factions of humanity. The Ascetics, the Ossuary, and the Pyrites each believe that only their god survived and the other two factions are heretics. Between them, they have conquered the rest of the galaxy and its non-human species. The only thing the factions hate worse than each other are those who attempt to stay outside the faction system. Rig used to be a Pyrite weapon designer before she set fire to her office and escaped with her greatest invention. Now she's a Nightbird, a member of an outlaw band that tries to help refugees and protect her fellow Kashrini against Pyrite genocide. On her side, she has her girlfriend, an Ascetic librarian; her ship, Bluebird; and her guns, Panache and Pizzazz. And now, perhaps, the mysterious Ginka, a Zazra empath and remarkably capable fighter who helps Rig escape from an ambush by Pyrite soldiers. Rig wants to stay alive, help her people, and defy the factions. Pyrite wants Rig's secrets and, as leverage, has her sister. What Ginka wants is not entirely clear even to Ginka. This book is absurd, but I still had fun with it. It's dangerous for me to compare things to anime given how little anime that I've watched, but Bluebird had that vibe for me: anime, or maybe Japanese RPGs or superhero comics. The storytelling is very visual, combat-oriented, and not particularly realistic. Rig is a pistol sharpshooter and Ginka is the type of undefined deadly acrobatic fighter so often seen in that type of media. In addition to her ship, Rig has a gorgeous hand-maintained racing hoverbike with a beautiful paint job. It's that sort of book. It's also the sort of book where the characters obey cinematic logic designed to maximize dramatic physical confrontations, even if their actions make no logical sense. There is no facial recognition or screening, and it's bizarrely easy for the protagonists to end up in same physical location as high-up bad guys. One of the weapon systems that's critical to the plot makes no sense whatsoever. At critical moments, the bad guys behave more like final bosses in a video game, picking up weapons to deal with the protagonists directly instead of using their supposedly vast armies of agents. There is supposedly a whole galaxy full of civilizations with capital worlds covered in planet-spanning cities, but politics barely exist and the faction leaders get directly involved in the plot. If you are looking for a realistic projection of technology or society, I cannot stress enough that this is not the book that you're looking for. You probably figured that out when I mentioned ten thousand years of war, but that will only be the beginning of the suspension of disbelief problems. You need to turn off your brain and enjoy the action sequences and melodrama. I'm normally good at that, and I admit I still struggled because the plot logic is such a mismatch with the typical novels I read. There are several points where the characters do something that seems so monumentally dumb that I was sure Pierlot was setting them up for a fall, and then I got wrong-footed because their plan worked fine, or exploded for unrelated reasons. I think this type of story, heavy on dramatic eye-candy and emotional moments with swelling soundtracks, is a lot easier to pull off in visual media where all the pretty pictures distract your brain. In a novel, there's a lot of time to think about the strategy, technology, and government structure, which for this book is not a good idea. If you can get past that, though, Rig is entertainingly snarky and Ginka, who turns out to be the emotional heart of the book, is an enjoyable character with a real growth arc. Her background is a bit simplistic and the villains are the sort of pure evil that you might expect from this type of cinematic plot, but I cared about the outcome of her story. Some parts of the plot dragged and I think the editing could have been tighter, but there was enough competence porn and banter to pull me through. I would recommend Bluebird only cautiously, since you're going to need to turn off large portions of your brain and be in the right mood for nonsensically dramatic confrontations, but I don't regret reading it. It's mostly in primary colors and the emotional conflicts are not what anyone would call subtle, but it delivers a character arc and a somewhat satisfying ending. Content warning: There is a lot of serious physical injury in this book, including surgical maiming. If that's going to bother you, you may want to give this one a pass. Rating: 6 out of 10

28 January 2024

Russell Coker: Links January 2024

Long Now has an insightful article about domestication that considers whether humans have evolved to want to control nature [1]. The OMG Elite hacker cable is an interesting device [2]. A Wifi device in a USB cable to allow remote control and monitoring of data transfer, including remote keyboard control and sniffing. Pity that USB-C cables have chips in them so you can t use a spark to remove unwanted chips from modern cables. David Brin s blog post The core goal of tyrants: The Red-Caesar Cult and a restored era of The Great Man has some insightful points about authoritarianism [3]. Ron Garret wrote an interesting argument against Christianity [4], and a follow-up titled Why I Don t Believe in Jesus [5]. He has a link to a well written article about the different theologies of Jesus and Paul [6]. Dimitri John Ledkov wrote an interesting blog post about how they reduced disk space for Ubuntu kernel packages and RAM for the initramfs phase of boot [7]. I hope this gets copied to Debian soon. Joey Hess wrote an interesting blog post about trying to make LLM systems produce bad code if trained on his code without permission [8]. Arstechnica has an interesting summary of research into the security of fingerprint sensors [9]. Not surprising that the products of the 3 vendors that supply almost all PC fingerprint readers are easy to compromise. Bruce Schneier wrote an insightful blog post about how AI will allow mass spying (as opposed to mass surveillance) [10]. ZDnet has an informative article How to Write Better ChatGPT Prompts in 5 Steps [11]. I sent this to a bunch of my relatives. AbortRetryFail has an interesting article about the Itanic Saga [12]. Erberus sounds interesting, maybe VLIW designs could give a good ration of instructions to power unlike the Itanium which was notorious for being power hungry. Bruce Schneier wrote an insightful article about AI and Trust [13]. We really need laws controlling these things! David Brin wrote an interesting blog post on the obsession with historical cycles [14].
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25 January 2024

Dimitri John Ledkov: Ubuntu Livepatch service now supports over 60 different kernels

Linux kernel getting a livepatch whilst running a marathon. Generated with AI.
Livepatch service eliminates the need for unplanned maintenance windows for high and critical severity kernel vulnerabilities by patching the Linux kernel while the system runs. Originally the service launched in 2016 with just a single kernel flavour supported.Over the years, additional kernels were added: new LTS releases, ESM kernels, Public Cloud kernels, and most recently HWE kernels too.Recently livepatch support was expanded for FIPS compliant kernels, Public cloud FIPS compliant kernels, and as well IBM Z (mainframe) kernels. Bringing the total of kernel flavours support to over 60 distinct kernel flavours supported in parallel. The table of supported kernels in the documentation lists the supported kernel flavours ABIs, the duration of individual build's support window, supported architectures, and the Ubuntu release. This work was only possible thanks to the collaboration with the Ubuntu Certified Public Cloud team, engineers at IBM for IBM Z (s390x) support, Ubuntu Pro team, Livepatch server & client teams.It is a great milestone, and I personally enjoy seeing the non-intrusive popup on my Ubuntu Desktop that a kernel livepatch was applied to my running system. I do enable Ubuntu Pro on my personal laptop thanks to the free Ubuntu Pro subscription for individuals.What's next? The next frontier is supporting ARM64 kernels. The Canonical kernel team has completed the gap analysis to start supporting Livepatch Service for ARM64. Upstream Linux requires development work on the consistency model to fully support livepatch on ARM64 processors. Livepatch code changes are applied on a per-task basis, when the task is deemed safe to switch over. This safety check depends mostly on kernel stacktraces. For these checks, CONFIG_HAVE_RELIABLE_STACKTRACE needs to be available in the upstream ARM64 kernel. (see The Linux Kernel Documentation). There are preliminary patches that enable reliable stacktraces on ARM64, however these turned out to be problematic as there are lots of fix revisions that came after the initial patchset that AWS ships with 5.10. This is a call for help from any interested parties. If you have engineering resources and are interested in bringing Livepatch Service to your ARM64 platforms, please reach out to the Canonical Kernel team on the public Ubuntu Matrix, Discourse, and mailing list. If you want to chat in person, see you at FOSDEM next weekend.

22 January 2024

Paul Tagliamonte: Writing a simulator to check phased array beamforming

Interested in future updates? Follow me on mastodon at @paul@soylent.green. Posts about hz.tools will be tagged #hztools.

If you're on the Fediverse, I'd very much appreciate boosts on my toot!
While working on hz.tools, I started to move my beamforming code from 2-D (meaning, beamforming to some specific angle on the X-Y plane for waves on the X-Y plane) to 3-D. I ll have more to say about that once I get around to publishing the code as soon as I m sure it s not completely wrong, but in the meantime I decided to write a simple simulator to visually check the beamformer against the textbooks. The results were pretty rad, so I figured I d throw together a post since it s interesting all on its own outside of beamforming as a general topic. I figured I d write this in Rust, since I ve been using Rust as my primary language over at zoo, and it s a good chance to learn the language better.
This post has some large GIFs

It make take a little bit to load depending on your internet connection. Sorry about that, I'm not clever enough to do better without doing tons of complex engineering work. They may be choppy while they load or something. I tried to compress an ensmall them, so if they're loaded but fuzzy, click on them to load a slightly larger version.
This post won t cover the basics of how phased arrays work or the specifics of calculating the phase offsets for each antenna, but I ll dig into how I wrote a simple simulator and how I wound up checking my phase offsets to generate the renders below.

Assumptions I didn t want to build a general purpose RF simulator, anything particularly generic, or something that would solve for any more than the things right in front of me. To do this as simply (and quickly all this code took about a day to write, including the beamforming math) I had to reduce the amount of work in front of me. Given that I was concerend with visualizing what the antenna pattern would look like in 3-D given some antenna geometry, operating frequency and configured beam, I made the following assumptions: All anetnnas are perfectly isotropic they receive a signal that is exactly the same strength no matter what direction the signal originates from. There s a single point-source isotropic emitter in the far-field (I modeled this as being 1 million meters away 1000 kilometers) of the antenna system. There is no noise, multipath, loss or distortion in the signal as it travels through space. Antennas will never interfere with each other.

2-D Polar Plots The last time I wrote something like this, I generated 2-D GIFs which show a radiation pattern, not unlike the polar plots you d see on a microphone. These are handy because it lets you visualize what the directionality of the antenna looks like, as well as in what direction emissions are captured, and in what directions emissions are nulled out. You can see these plots on spec sheets for antennas in both 2-D and 3-D form. Now, let s port the 2-D approach to 3-D and see how well it works out.

Writing the 3-D simulator As an EM wave travels through free space, the place at which you sample the wave controls that phase you observe at each time-step. This means, assuming perfectly synchronized clocks, a transmitter and receiver exactly one RF wavelength apart will observe a signal in-phase, but a transmitter and receiver a half wavelength apart will observe a signal 180 degrees out of phase. This means that if we take the distance between our point-source and antenna element, divide it by the wavelength, we can use the fractional part of the resulting number to determine the phase observed. If we multiply that number (in the range of 0 to just under 1) by tau, we can generate a complex number by taking the cos and sin of the multiplied phase (in the range of 0 to tau), assuming the transmitter is emitting a carrier wave at a static amplitude and all clocks are in perfect sync. 
 let observed_phases: Vec<Complex> = antennas
.iter()
.map( antenna   
let distance = (antenna - tx).magnitude();
let distance = distance - (distance as i64 as f64);
((distance / wavelength) * TAU)
 )
.map( phase  Complex(phase.cos(), phase.sin()))
.collect();
At this point, given some synthetic transmission point and each antenna, we know what the expected complex sample would be at each antenna. At this point, we can adjust the phase of each antenna according to the beamforming phase offset configuration, and add up every sample in order to determine what the entire system would collectively produce a sample as. 
 let beamformed_phases: Vec<Complex> = ...;
let magnitude = beamformed_phases
.iter()
.zip(observed_phases.iter())
.map( (beamformed, observed)  observed * beamformed)
.reduce( acc, el  acc + el)
.unwrap()
.abs();
Armed with this information, it s straight forward to generate some number of (Azimuth, Elevation) points to sample, generate a transmission point far away in that direction, resolve what the resulting Complex sample would be, take its magnitude, and use that to create an (x, y, z) point at (azimuth, elevation, magnitude). The color attached two that point is based on its distance from (0, 0, 0). I opted to use the Life Aquatic table for this one. After this process is complete, I have a point cloud of ((x, y, z), (r, g, b)) points. I wrote a small program using kiss3d to render point cloud using tons of small spheres, and write out the frames to a set of PNGs, which get compiled into a GIF. Now for the fun part, let s take a look at some radiation patterns!

1x4 Phased Array The first configuration is a phased array where all the elements are in perfect alignment on the y and z axis, and separated by some offset in the x axis. This configuration can sweep 180 degrees (not the full 360), but can t be steared in elevation at all. Let s take a look at what this looks like for a well constructed 1x4 phased array: And now let s take a look at the renders as we play with the configuration of this array and make sure things look right. Our initial quarter-wavelength spacing is very effective and has some outstanding performance characteristics. Let s check to see that everything looks right as a first test. Nice. Looks perfect. When pointing forward at (0, 0), we d expect to see a torus, which we do. As we sweep between 0 and 360, astute observers will notice the pattern is mirrored along the axis of the antennas, when the beam is facing forward to 0 degrees, it ll also receive at 180 degrees just as strong. There s a small sidelobe that forms when it s configured along the array, but it also becomes the most directional, and the sidelobes remain fairly small.

Long compared to the wavelength (1 ) Let s try again, but rather than spacing each antenna of a wavelength apart, let s see about spacing each antenna 1 of a wavelength apart instead. The main lobe is a lot more narrow (not a bad thing!), but some significant sidelobes have formed (not ideal). This can cause a lot of confusion when doing things that require a lot of directional resolution unless they re compensated for.

Going from ( to 5 ) The last model begs the question - what do things look like when you separate the antennas from each other but without moving the beam? Let s simulate moving our antennas but not adjusting the configured beam or operating frequency. Very cool. As the spacing becomes longer in relation to the operating frequency, we can see the sidelobes start to form out of the end of the antenna system.

2x2 Phased Array The second configuration I want to try is a phased array where the elements are in perfect alignment on the z axis, and separated by a fixed offset in either the x or y axis by their neighbor, forming a square when viewed along the x/y axis. Let s take a look at what this looks like for a well constructed 2x2 phased array: Let s do the same as above and take a look at the renders as we play with the configuration of this array and see what things look like. This configuration should suppress the sidelobes and give us good performance, and even give us some amount of control in elevation while we re at it. Sweet. Heck yeah. The array is quite directional in the configured direction, and can even sweep a little bit in elevation, a definite improvement from the 1x4 above.

Long compared to the wavelength (1 ) Let s do the same thing as the 1x4 and take a look at what happens when the distance between elements is long compared to the frequency of operation say, 1 of a wavelength apart? What happens to the sidelobes given this spacing when the frequency of operation is much different than the physical geometry? Mesmerising. This is my favorate render. The sidelobes are very fun to watch come in and out of existence. It looks absolutely other-worldly.

Going from ( to 5 ) Finally, for completeness' sake, what do things look like when you separate the antennas from each other just as we did with the 1x4? Let s simulate moving our antennas but not adjusting the configured beam or operating frequency. Very very cool. The sidelobes wind up turning the very blobby cardioid into an electromagnetic dog toy. I think we ve proven to ourselves that using a phased array much outside its designed frequency of operation seems like a real bad idea.

Future Work Now that I have a system to test things out, I m a bit more confident that my beamforming code is close to right! I d love to push that code over the line and blog about it, since it s a really interesting topic on its own. Once I m sure the code involved isn t full of lies, I ll put it up on the hztools org, and post about it here and on mastodon.

Russell Coker: Storage Trends 2024

It has been less than a year since my last post about storage trends [1] and enough has changed to make it worth writing again. My previous analysis was that for <2TB only SSD made sense, for 4TB SSD made sense for business use while hard drives were still a good option for home use, and for 8TB+ hard drives were clearly the best choice for most uses. I will start by looking at MSY prices, they aren't the cheapest (you can get cheaper online) but they are competitive and they make it easy to compare the different options. I'll also compare the cheapest options in each size, there are more expensive options but usually if you want to pay more then the performance benefits of SSD (both SATA and NVMe) are even more appealing. All prices are in Australian dollars and of parts that are readily available in Australia, but the relative prices of the parts are probably similar in most countries. The main issue here is when to use SSD and when to use hard disks, and then if SSD is chosen which variety to use. Small Storage For my last post the cheapest storage devices from MSY were $19 for a 128G SSD, now it s $24 for a 128G SSD or NVMe device. I don t think the Australian dollar has dropped much against foreign currencies, so I guess this is partly companies wanting more profits and partly due to the demand for more storage. Items that can t sell in quantity need higher profit margins if they are to have them in stock. 500G SSDs are around $33 and 500G NVMe devices for $36 so for most use cases it wouldn t make sense to buy anything smaller than 500G. The cheapest hard drive is $45 for a 1TB disk. A 1TB SATA SSD costs $61 and a 1TB NVMe costs $79. So 1TB disks aren t a good option for any use case. A 2TB hard drive is $89. A 2TB SATA SSD is $118 and a 2TB NVMe is $145. I don t think the small savings you can get from using hard drives makes them worth using for 2TB. For most people if you have a system that s important to you then $145 on storage isn t a lot to spend. It seems hardly worth buying less than 2TB of storage, even for a laptop. Even if you don t use all the space larger storage devices tend to support more writes before wearing out so you still gain from it. A 2TB NVMe device you buy for a laptop now could be used in every replacement laptop for the next 10 years. I only have 512G of storage in my laptop because I have a collection of SSD/NVMe devices that have been replaced in larger systems, so the 512G is essentially free for my laptop as I bought a larger device for a server. For small business use it doesn t make sense to buy anything smaller than 2TB for any system other than a router. If you buy smaller devices then you will sometimes have to pay people to install bigger ones and when the price is $145 it s best to just pay that up front and be done with it. Medium Storage A 4TB hard drive is $135. A 4TB SATA SSD is $319 and a 4TB NVMe is $299. The prices haven t changed a lot since last year, but a small increase in hard drive prices and a small decrease in SSD prices makes SSD more appealing for this market segment. A common size range for home servers and small business servers is 4TB or 8TB of storage. To do that on SSD means about $600 for 4TB of RAID-1 or $900 for 8TB of RAID-5/RAID-Z. That s quite affordable for that use. For 8TB of less important storage a 8TB hard drive costs $239 and a 8TB SATA SSD costs $899 so a hard drive clearly wins for the specific case of non-RAID single device storage. Note that the U.2 devices are more competitive for 8TB than SATA but I included them in the next section because they are more difficult to install. Serious Storage With 8TB being an uncommon and expensive option for consumer SSDs the cheapest price is for multiple 4TB devices. To have multiple NVMe devices in one PCIe slot you need PCIe bifurcation (treating the PCIe slot as multiple slots). Most of the machines I use don t support bifurcation and most affordable systems with ECC RAM don t have it. For cheap NVMe type storage there are U.2 devices (the enterprise form of NVMe). Until recently they were too expensive to use for desktop systems but now there are PCIe cards for internal U.2 devices, $14 for a card that takes a single U.2 is a common price on AliExpress and prices below $600 for a 7.68TB U.2 device are common that s cheaper on a per-TB basis than SATA SSD and NVMe! There are PCIe cards that take up to 4*U.2 devices (which probably require bifurcation) which means you could have 8+ U.2 devices in one not particularly high end PC for 56TB of RAID-Z NVMe storage. Admittedly $4200 for 56TB is moderately expensive, but it s in the price range for a small business server or a high end home server. A more common configuration might be 2*7.68TB U.2 on a single PCIe card (or 2 cards if you don t have bifurcation) for 7.68TB of RAID-1 storage. For SATA SSD AliExpress has a 6*2.5 hot-swap device that fits in a 5.25 bay for $63, so if you have 2*5.25 bays you could have 12*4TB SSDs for 44TB of RAID-Z storage. That wouldn t be much cheaper than 8*7.68TB U.2 devices and would be slower and have less space. But it would be a good option if PCIe bifurcation isn t possible. 16TB SATA hard drives cost $559 which is almost exactly half the price per TB of U.2 storage. That doesn t seem like a good deal. If you want 16TB of RAID storage then 3*7.68TB U.2 devices only costs about 50% more than 2*16TB SATA disks. In most cases paying 50% more to get NVMe instead of hard disks is a good option. As sizes go above 16TB prices go up in a more than linear manner, I guess they don t sell much volume of larger drives. 15.36TB U.2 devices are on sale for about $1300, slightly more than twice the price of a 16TB disk. It s within the price range of small businesses and serious home users. Also it should be noted that the U.2 devices are designed for enterprise levels of reliability and the hard disk prices I m comparing to are the cheapest available. If NAS hard disks were compared then the price benefit of hard disks would be smaller. Probably the biggest problem with U.2 for most people is that it s an uncommon technology that few people have much experience with or spare parts for testing. Also you can t buy U.2 gear at your local computer store which might mean that you want to have spare parts on hand which is an extra expense. For enterprise use I ve recently been involved in discussions with a vendor that sells multiple petabyte arrays of NVMe. Apparently NVMe is cheap enough that there s no need to use anything else if you want a well performing file server. Do Hard Disks Make Sense? There are specific cases like comparing a 8TB hard disk to a 8TB SATA SSD or a 16TB hard disk to a 15.36TB U.2 device where hard disks have an apparent advantage. But when comparing RAID storage and counting the performance benefits of SSD the savings of using hard disks don t seem to be that great. Is now the time that hard disks are going to die in the market? If they can t get volume sales then prices will go up due to lack of economy of scale in manufacture and increased stock time for retailers. 8TB hard drives are now more expensive than they were 9 months ago when I wrote my previous post, has a hard drive price death spiral already started? SSDs are cheaper than hard disks at the smallest sizes, faster (apart from some corner cases with contiguous IO), take less space in a computer, and make less noise. At worst they are a bit over twice the cost per TB. But the most common requirements for storage are small enough and cheap enough that being twice as expensive as hard drives isn t a problem for most people. I predict that hard disks will become less popular in future and offer less of a price advantage. The vendors are talking about 50TB hard disks being available in future but right now you can fit more than 50TB of NVMe or U.2 devices in a volume less than that of a 3.5 hard disk so for storage density SSD can clearly win. Maybe in future hard disks will be used in arrays of 100TB devices for large scale enterprise storage. But for home users and small businesses the current sizes of SSD cover most uses. At the moment it seems that the one case where hard disks can really compare well is for backup devices. For backups you want large storage, good contiguous write speeds, and low prices so you can buy plenty of them. Further Issues The prices I ve compared for SATA SSD and NVMe devices are all based on the cheapest devices available. I think it s a bit of a market for lemons [2] as devices often don t perform as well as expected and the incidence of fake products purporting to be from reputable companies is high on the cheaper sites. So you might as well buy the cheaper devices. An advantage of the U.2 devices is that you know that they will be reliable and perform well. One thing that concerns me about SSDs is the lack of knowledge of their failure cases. Filesystems like ZFS were specifically designed to cope with common failure cases of hard disks and I don t think we have that much knowledge about how SSDs fail. But with 3 copies of metadata BTFS or ZFS should survive unexpected SSD failure modes. I still have some hard drives in my home server, they keep working well enough and the prices on SSDs keep dropping. But if I was buying new storage for such a server now I d get U.2. I wonder if tape will make a comeback for backup. Does anyone know of other good storage options that I missed?
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19 January 2024

Russell Coker: 2.5Gbit Ethernet

I just decided to upgrade the core of my home network from 1Gbit to 2.5Gbit. I didn t really need to do this, it was only about 5 years ago that I upgrade from 100Mbit to 1Gbit. but it s cheap and seemed interesting. I decided to do it because a 2.5Gbit switch was listed as cheap on Ozbargain Computing [1], that was $40.94 delivered. If you are in Australia and like computers then Ozbargain is a site worth polling, every day there s interesting things at low prices. The seller of the switch is KeeplinkStore [2] who distinguished themselves by phoning me from China to inform me that I had ordered a switch with a UK plug for delivery to Australia and suggesting that I cancel the order and make a new order with an Australian plug. It wouldn t have been a big deal if I had received a UK plug as I ve got a collection of adaptors but it was still nice of them to make it convenient for me. The switch basically does what it s expected to do and has no fan so it s quiet. I got a single port 2.5Gbit PCIe card for $18.77 and a dual port card for $34.07. Those cards are a little expensive when compared to 1Gbit cards but very cheap when compared to the computers they are installed in. These cards use the Realtek RTL8125 chipset and work well. I got a USB-3 2.5Gbit device for $17.43. I deliberately didn t get USB-C because I still use laptops without USB-C and most of the laptops with USB-C only have a single USB-C port which is used for power. I don t plan to stop using my 100Mbit USB ethernet device because most of the time I don t need a lot of speed. But sometimes I do things like testing auto-install on laptops and then having something faster than Gigabit is good. This card worked at 1Gbit speed on a 1Gbit network when used with a system running Debian/Bookworm with kernel 6.1 and worked at 2.5Gbit speed when connected to my LicheePi RISC-V system running Linux 5.10, but it would only do 100Mbit on my laptop running Debian/Unstable with kernel 6.6 (Debian Bug #1061095) [3]. It s a little disappointing but not many people have such hardware so it probably doesn t get a lot of testing. For the moment I plan to just use a 1Gbit USB Ethernet device most of the time and if I really need the speed I ll just use an older kernel. I did some tests with wget and curl to see if I could get decent speeds. When using wget 1.21.3 on Debian/Bookworm I got transfer speeds of 103MB/s and 18.8s of system CPU time out of 23.6s of elapsed time. Curl on Debian/Bookworm did 203MB/s and took 10.7s of system CPU time out of 11.8s elapsed time. The difference is that curl was using 100KB read buffers and a mix of 12K and 4K write buffers while wget was using 8KB read buffers and 4KB write buffers. On Debian/Unstable wget 1.21.4 uses 64K read buffers and a mix of 4K and 60K write buffers and gets a speed of 208MB/s. As an experiment I changed the read buffer size for wget to 256K and that got the speed up to around 220MB/s but it was difficult to measure as the occasional packet loss slowed things down. The pattern of writing 4K and then writing the rest continued, it seemed related to fwrite() buffering. For anyone else who wants to experiment with the code, the wget code is simpler (due to less features) and the package builds a lot faster (due to fewer tests) so that s the one to work on. The client machine for these tests has a E5-2696 v3 CPU, this doesn t compare well to some of the recent AMD CPUs on single-core performance but is still a decently powerful system. Getting good performance at Gigabit speeds on an ARM or RISC-V system is probably going to be a lot harder than getting good performance at 2.5Gbit speeds on this system. In conclusion 2.5Gbit basically works apart from a problem with new kernels and a problem with the old version of wget. I expect that when Debian/Trixie is released (probably mid 2025) things will work well. For good transfer rates use wget version 1.21.4 or newer or use curl. As an aside I use a 1500byte MTU because I have some 100baseT systems on my LAN and the settings regarding TCP acceleration etc are all the defaults.
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18 January 2024

Russell Coker: LicheePi 4A (RISC-V) First Look

I Just bought a LicheePi 4A RISC-V embedded computer (like a RaspberryPi but with a RISC-V CPU) for $322.68 from Aliexpress (the official site for buying LicheePi devices). Here is the Sipheed web page about it and their other recent offerings [1]. I got the version with 16G of RAM and 128G of storage, I probably don t need that much storage (I can use NFS or USB) but 16G of RAM is good for VMs. Here is the Wiki about this board [2]. Configuration When you get one of these devices you should make setting up ssh server your first priority. I found the HDMI output to be very unreliable. The first monitor I tried was a Samsung 4K monitor dating from when 4K was a new thing, the LicheePi initially refused to operate at a resolution higher than 1024*768 but later on switched to 4K resolution when resuming from screen-blank for no apparent reason (and the window manager didn t support this properly). On the Dell 4K monitor I use on my main workstation it sometimes refused to talk to it and occasionally worked. I got it running at 1920*1080 without problems and then switched it to 4K and it lost video sync and never talked to that monitor again. On my Desklab portabable 4K monitor I got it to display in 4K resolution but only the top left 1/4 of the screen displayed. The issues with HDMI monitor support greatly limit the immediate potential for using this as a workstation. It doesn t make it impossible but would be fiddly at best. It s quite likely that a future OS update will fix this. But at the moment it s best used as a server. The LicheePi has a custom Linux distribution based on Ubuntu so you want too put something like the following in /etc/network/interfaces to make it automatically connect to the ethernet when plugged in: 
auto end0
iface end0 inet dhcp
Then to get sshd to start you have to run the following commands to generate ssh host keys that aren t zero bytes long: 
rm /etc/ssh/ssh_host_*
systemctl restart ssh.service
It appears to have wifi hardware but the OS doesn t recognise it. This isn t a priority for me as I mostly want to use it as a server. Performance For the first test of performance I created a 100MB file from /dev/urandom and then tried compressing it on various systems. With zstd -9 it took 16.893 user seconds on the LicheePi4A, 0.428s on my Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen5 with a i5-6300U CPU (Debian/Unstable), 1.288s on my E5-2696 v3 workstation (Debian/Bookworm), 0.467s on the E5-2696 v3 running Debian/Unstable, 2.067s on a E3-1271 v3 server, and 7.179s on the E3-1271 v3 system emulating a RISC-V system via QEMU running Debian/Unstable. It s very impressive that the QEMU emulation is fast enough that emulating a different CPU architecture is only 3.5* slower for this test (or maybe 10* slower if it was running Debian/Unstable on the AMD64 code)! The emulated RISC-V is also more than twice as fast as real RISC-V hardware and probably of comparable speed to real RISC-V hardware when running the same versions (and might be slightly slower if running the same version of zstd) which is a tribute to the quality of emulation. One performance issue that most people don t notice is the time taken to negotiate ssh sessions. It s usually not noticed because the common CPUs have got faster at about the same rate as the algorithms for encryption and authentication have become more complex. On my i5-6300U laptop it takes 0m0.384s to run ssh -i ~/.ssh/id_ed25519 localhost id with the below server settings (taken from advice on ssh-audit.com [3] for a secure ssh configuration). On the E3-1271 v3 server it is 0.336s, on the QMU system it is 28.022s, and on the LicheePi it is 0.592s. By this metric the LicheePi is about 80% slower than decent x86 systems and the QEMU emulation of RISC-V is 73* slower than the x86 system it runs on. Does crypto depend on instructions that are difficult to emulate? 
HostKey /etc/ssh/ssh_host_ed25519_key
KexAlgorithms -ecdh-sha2-nistp256,ecdh-sha2-nistp384,ecdh-sha2-nistp521,diffie-hellman-group14-sha256
MACs -umac-64-etm@openssh.com,hmac-sha1-etm@openssh.com,umac-64@openssh.com,umac-128@openssh.com,hmac-sha2-256,hmac-sha2-512,hmac-sha1
I haven t yet tested the performance of Ethernet (what routing speed can you get through the 2 gigabit ports?), emmc storage, and USB. At the moment I ve been focused on using RISC-V as a test and development platform. My conclusion is that I m glad I don t plan to compile many kernels or anything large like LibreOffice. But that for typical development that I do it will be quite adequate. The speed of Chromium seems adequate in basic tests, but the video output hasn t worked reliably enough to do advanced tests. Hardware Features Having two Gigabit Ethernet ports, 4 USB-3 ports, and Wifi on board gives some great options for using this as a router. It s disappointing that they didn t go with 2.5Gbit as everyone seems to be doing that nowadays but Gigabit is enough for most things. Having only a single HDMI port and not supporting USB-C docks (the USB-C port appears to be power only) limits what can be done for workstation use and for controlling displays. I know of people using small ARM computers attached to the back of large TVs for advertising purposes and that isn t going to be a great option for this. The CPU and RAM apparently uses a lot of power (which is relative the entire system draws up to 2A at 5V so the CPU would be something below 5W). To get this working a cooling fan has to be stuck to the CPU and RAM chips via a layer of thermal stuff that resembles a fine sheet of blu-tack in both color and stickyness. I am disappointed that there isn t any more solid form of construction, to mount this on a wall or ceiling some extra hardware would be needed to secure this. Also if they just had a really big copper heatsink I think that would be better. 80386 CPUs with similar TDP were able to run without a fan. I wonder how things would work with all USB ports in use. It s expected that a USB port can supply a minimum of 2.5W which means that all the ports could require 10W if they were active. Presumably something significantly less than 5W is available for the USB ports. Other Devices Sipheed has a range of other devices in the works. They currently sell the LicheeCluster4A which support 7 compute modules for a cluster in a box. This has some interesting potential for testing and demonstrating cluster software but you could probably buy an AMD64 system with more compute power for less money. The Lichee Console 4A is a tiny laptop which could be useful for people who like the 7 laptop form factor, unfortunately it only has a 1280*800 display if it had the same resolution display as a typical 7 phone I would have bought one. The next device that appeals to me is the soon to be released Lichee Pad 4A which is a 10.1 tablet with 1920*1200 display, Wifi6, Bluetooth 5.4, and 16G of RAM. It also has 1 USB-C connection, 2*USB-3 sockets, and support for an external card with 2*Gigabit ethernet. It s a tablet as a laptop without keyboard instead of the more common larger phone design model. They are also about to release the LicheePadMax4A which is similar to the other tablet but with a 14 2240*1400 display and which ships with a keyboard to make it essentially a laptop with detachable keyboard. Conclusion At this time I wouldn t recommend that this device be used as a workstation or laptop, although the people who want to do such things will probably do it anyway regardless of my recommendations. I think it will be very useful as a test system for RISC-V development. I have some friends who are interested in this sort of thing and I can give them VMs. It is a bit expensive. The Sipheed web site boasts about the LicheePi4 being faster than the RaspberryPi4, but it s not a lot faster and the RaspberryPi4 is much cheaper ($127 or $129 for one with 8G of RAM). The RaspberryPi4 has two HDMI ports but a limit of 8G of RAM while the LicheePi has up to 16G of RAM and two Gigabit Ethernet ports but only a single HDMI port. It seems that the RaspberryPi4 might win if you want a cheap low power desktop system. At this time I think the reason for this device is testing out RISC-V as an alternative to the AMD64 and ARM64 architectures. An open CPU architecture goes well with free software, but it isn t just people who are into FOSS who are testing such things. I know some corporations are trying out RISC-V as a way of getting other options for embedded systems that don t involve paying monopolists. The Lichee Console 4A is probably a usable tiny laptop if the resolution is sufficient for your needs. As an aside I predict that the tiny laptop or pocket computer segment will take off in the near future. There are some AMD64 systems the size of a phone but thicker that run Windows and go for reasonable prices on AliExpress. Hopefully in the near future this device will have better video drivers and be usable as a small and quiet workstation. I won t rule out the possibility of making this my main workstation in the not too distant future, all it needs is reliable 4K display and the ability to decode 4K video. It s performance for web browsing and as an ssh client seems adequate, and that s what matters for my workstation use. But for the moment it s just for server use.
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17 January 2024

Colin Watson: Task management

Now that I m freelancing, I need to actually track my time, which is something I ve had the luxury of not having to do before. That meant something of a rethink of the way I ve been keeping track of my to-do list. Up to now that was a combination of things like the bug lists for the projects I m working on at the moment, whatever task tracking system Canonical was using at the moment (Jira when I left), and a giant flat text file in which I recorded logbook-style notes of what I d done each day plus a few extra notes at the bottom to remind myself of particularly urgent tasks. I could have started manually adding times to each logbook entry, but ugh, let s not. In general, I had the following goals (which were a bit reminiscent of my address book): I didn t do an elaborate evaluation of multiple options, because I m not trying to come up with the best possible solution for a client here. Also, there are a bazillion to-do list trackers out there and if I tried to evaluate them all I d never do anything else. I just wanted something that works well enough for me. Since it came up on Mastodon: a bunch of people swear by Org mode, which I know can do at least some of this sort of thing. However, I don t use Emacs and don t plan to use Emacs. nvim-orgmode does have some support for time tracking, but when I ve tried vim-based versions of Org mode in the past I ve found they haven t really fitted my brain very well. Taskwarrior and Timewarrior One of the other Freexian collaborators mentioned Taskwarrior and Timewarrior, so I had a look at those. The basic idea of Taskwarrior is that you have a task command that tracks each task as a blob of JSON and provides subcommands to let you add, modify, and remove tasks with a minimum of friction. task add adds a task, and you can add metadata like project:Personal (I always make sure every task has a project, for ease of filtering). Just running task shows you a task list sorted by Taskwarrior s idea of urgency, with an ID for each task, and there are various other reports with different filtering and verbosity. task <id> annotate lets you attach more information to a task. task <id> done marks it as done. So far so good, so a redacted version of my to-do list looks like this: 
$ task ls
ID A Project     Tags                 Description
17   Freexian                         Add Incus support to autopkgtest [2]
 7   Columbiform                      Figure out Lloyds online banking [1]
 2   Debian                           Fix troffcvt for groff 1.23.0 [1]
11   Personal                         Replace living room curtain rail
Once I got comfortable with it, this was already a big improvement. I haven t bothered to learn all the filtering gadgets yet, but it was easy enough to see that I could do something like task all project:Personal and it d show me both pending and completed tasks in that project, and that all the data was stored in ~/.task - though I have to say that there are enough reporting bells and whistles that I haven t needed to poke around manually. In combination with the regular backups that I do anyway (you do too, right?), this gave me enough confidence to abandon my previous text-file logbook approach. Next was time tracking. Timewarrior integrates with Taskwarrior, albeit in an only semi-packaged way, and it was easy enough to set that up. Now I can do: 
$ task 25 start
Starting task 00a9516f 'Write blog post about task tracking'.
Started 1 task.
Note: '"Write blog post about task tracking"' is a new tag.
Tracking Columbiform "Write blog post about task tracking"
  Started 2024-01-10T11:28:38
  Current                  38
  Total               0:00:00
You have more urgent tasks.
Project 'Columbiform' is 25% complete (3 of 4 tasks remaining).
When I stop work on something, I do task active to find the ID, then task <id> stop. Timewarrior does the tedious stopwatch business for me, and I can manually enter times if I forget to start/stop a task. Then the really useful bit: I can do something like timew summary :month <name-of-client> and it tells me how much to bill that client for this month. Perfect. I also started using VIT to simplify the day-to-day flow a little, which means I m normally just using one or two keystrokes rather than typing longer commands. That isn t really necessary from my point of view, but it does save some time. Android integration I left Android integration for a bit later since it wasn t essential. When I got round to it, I have to say that it felt a bit clumsy, but it did eventually work. The first step was to set up a taskserver. Most of the setup procedure was OK, but I wanted to use Let s Encrypt to minimize the amount of messing around with CAs I had to do. Getting this to work involved hitting things with sticks a bit, and there s still a local CA involved for client certificates. What I ended up with was a certbot setup with the webroot authenticator and a custom deploy hook as follows (with cert_name replaced by a DNS name in my house domain): 
#! /bin/sh
set -eu
cert_name=taskd.example.org
found=false
for domain in $RENEWED_DOMAINS; do
    case "$domain" in
        $cert_name)
            found=:
            ;;
    esac
done
$found   exit 0
install -m 644 "/etc/letsencrypt/live/$cert_name/fullchain.pem" \
    /var/lib/taskd/pki/fullchain.pem
install -m 640 -g Debian-taskd "/etc/letsencrypt/live/$cert_name/privkey.pem" \
    /var/lib/taskd/pki/privkey.pem
systemctl restart taskd.service
I could then set this in /etc/taskd/config (server.crl.pem and ca.cert.pem were generated using the documented taskserver setup procedure): 
server.key=/var/lib/taskd/pki/privkey.pem
server.cert=/var/lib/taskd/pki/fullchain.pem
server.crl=/var/lib/taskd/pki/server.crl.pem
ca.cert=/var/lib/taskd/pki/ca.cert.pem
Then I could set taskd.ca on my laptop to /usr/share/ca-certificates/mozilla/ISRG_Root_X1.crt and otherwise follow the client setup instructions, run task sync init to get things started, and then task sync every so often to sync changes between my laptop and the taskserver. I used TaskWarrior Mobile as the client. I have to say I wouldn t want to use that client as my primary task tracking interface: the setup procedure is clunky even beyond the necessity of copying a client certificate around, it expects you to give it a .taskrc rather than having a proper settings interface for that, and it only seems to let you add a task if you specify a due date for it. It also lacks Timewarrior integration, so I can only really use it when I don t care about time tracking, e.g. personal tasks. But that s really all I need, so it meets my minimum requirements. Next? Considering this is literally the first thing I tried, I have to say I m pretty happy with it. There are a bunch of optional extras I haven t tried yet, but in general it kind of has the vim nature for me: if I need something it s very likely to exist or easy enough to build, but the features I don t use don t get in my way. I wouldn t recommend any of this to somebody who didn t already spend most of their time in a terminal - but I do. I m glad people have gone to all the effort to build this so I didn t have to.

16 January 2024

Russ Allbery: Review: Making Money

Review: Making Money, by Terry Pratchett
Series: Discworld #36
Publisher: Harper
Copyright: October 2007
Printing: November 2014
ISBN: 0-06-233499-9
Format: Mass market
Pages: 473
Making Money is the 36th Discworld novel, the second Moist von Lipwig book, and a direct sequel to Going Postal. You could start the series with Going Postal, but I would not start here. The post office is running like a well-oiled machine, Adora Belle is out of town, and Moist von Lipwig is getting bored. It's the sort of boredom that has him picking his own locks, taking up Extreme Sneezing, and climbing buildings at night. He may not realize it, but he needs something more dangerous to do. Vetinari has just the thing. The Royal Bank of Ankh-Morpork, unlike the post office before Moist got to it, is still working. It is a stolid, boring institution doing stolid, boring things for rich people. It is also the battleground for the Lavish family past-time: suing each other and fighting over money. The Lavishes are old money, the kind of money carefully entangled in trusts and investments designed to ensure the family will always have money regardless of how stupid their children are. Control of the bank is temporarily in the grasp of Joshua Lavish's widow Topsy, who is not a true Lavish, but the vultures are circling. Meanwhile, Vetinari has grand city infrastructure plans, and to carry them out he needs financing. That means he needs a functional bank, and preferably one that is much less conservative. Moist is dubious about running a bank, and even more reluctant when Topsy Lavish sees him for exactly the con artist he is. His hand is forced when she dies, and Moist discovers he has inherited her dog, Mr. Fusspot. A dog that now owns 51% of the Royal Bank and therefore is the chairman of the bank's board of directors. A dog whose safety is tied to Moist's own by way of an expensive assassination contract. Pratchett knew he had a good story with Going Postal, so here he runs the same formula again. And yes, I was happy to read it again. Moist knows very little about banking but quite a lot about pretending something will work until it does, which has more to do with banking than it does with running a post office. The bank employs an expert, Mr. Bent, who is fanatically devoted to the gold standard and the correctness of the books and has very little patience for Moist. There are golem-related hijinks. The best part of this book is Vetinari, who is masterfully manipulating everyone in the story and who gets in some great lines about politics.
"We are not going to have another wretched empire while I am Patrician. We've only just got over the last one."
Also, Vetinari processing dead letters in the post office was an absolute delight. Making Money does have the recurring Pratchett problem of having a fairly thin plot surrounded by random... stuff. Moist's attempts to reform the city currency while staying ahead of the Lavishes is only vaguely related to Mr. Bent's plot arc. The golems are unrelated to the rest of the plot other than providing a convenient deus ex machina. There is an economist making water models in the bank basement with an Igor, which is a great gag but has essentially nothing to do with the rest of the book. One of the golems has been subjected to well-meaning older ladies and 1950s etiquette manuals, which I thought was considerably less funny (and somewhat creepier) than Pratchett did. There are (sigh) clowns, which continue to be my least favorite Ankh-Morpork world-building element. At least the dog was considerably less annoying than I was afraid it was going to be. This grab-bag randomness is a shame, since I think there was room here for a more substantial plot that engaged fully with the high weirdness of finance. Unfortunately, this was a bit like the post office in Going Postal: Pratchett dives into the subject just enough to make a few wry observations and a few funny quips, and then resolves the deeper issues off-camera. Moist tries to invent fiat currency, because of course he does, and Pratchett almost takes on the gold standard, only to veer away at the last minute into vigorous hand-waving. I suspect part of the problem is that I know a little bit too much about finance, so I kept expecting Pratchett to take the humorous social commentary a couple of levels deeper. On a similar note, the villains have great potential that Pratchett undermines by adding too much over-the-top weirdness. I wish Cosmo Lavish had been closer to what he appears to be at the start of the book: a very wealthy and vindictive man (and a reference to Cosimo de Medici) who doesn't have Moist's ability to come up with wildly risky gambits but who knows considerably more than he does about how banking works. Instead, Pratchett gives him a weird obsession that slowly makes him less sinister and more pathetic, which robs the book of a competent antagonist for Moist. The net result is still a fun book, and a solid Discworld entry, but it lacks the core of the best series entries. It felt more like a skit comedy show than a novel, but it's an excellent skit comedy show with the normal assortment of memorable Pratchettisms. Certainly if you've read this far, or even if you've only read Going Postal, you'll want to read Making Money as well. Followed by Unseen Academicals. The next Moist von Lipwig book is Raising Steam. Rating: 8 out of 10

15 January 2024

Russ Allbery: Review: The Library of Broken Worlds

Review: The Library of Broken Worlds, by Alaya Dawn Johnson
Publisher: Scholastic Press
Copyright: June 2023
ISBN: 1-338-29064-9
Format: Kindle
Pages: 446
The Library of Broken Worlds is a young-adult far-future science fantasy. So far as I can tell, it's stand-alone, although more on that later in the review. Freida is the adopted daughter of Nadi, the Head Librarian, and her greatest wish is to become a librarian herself. When the book opens, she's a teenager in highly competitive training. Freida is low-wetware, without the advanced and expensive enhancements of many of the other students competing for rare and prized librarian positions, which she makes up for by being the most audacious. She doesn't need wetware to commune with the library material gods. If one ventures deep into their tunnels and consumes their crystals, direct physical communion is possible. The library tunnels are Freida's second home, in part because that's where she was born. She was created by the Library, and specifically by Iemaja, the youngest of the material gods. Precisely why is a mystery. To Nadi, Freida is her daughter. To Quinn, Nadi's main political rival within the library, Freida is a thing, a piece of the library, a secondary and possibly rogue AI. A disruptive annoyance. The Library of Broken Worlds is the sort of science fiction where figuring out what is going on is an integral part of the reading experience. It opens with a frame story of an unnamed girl (clearly Freida) waking the god Nameren and identifying herself as designed for deicide. She provokes Nameren's curiosity and offers an Arabian Nights bargain: if he wants to hear her story, he has to refrain from killing her for long enough for her to tell it. As one might expect, the main narrative doesn't catch up to the frame story until the very end of the book. The Library is indeed some type of library that librarians can search for knowledge that isn't available from more mundane sources, but Freida's personal experience of it is almost wholly religious and oracular. The library's material gods are identified as AIs, but good luck making sense of the story through a science fiction frame, even with a healthy allowance for sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic. The symbolism and tone is entirely fantasy, and late in the book it becomes clear that whatever the material gods are, they're not simple technological AIs in the vein of, say, Banks's Ship Minds. Also, the Library is not solely a repository of knowledge. It is the keeper of an interstellar peace. The Library was founded after the Great War, to prevent a recurrence. It functions as a sort of legal system and grand tribunal in ways that are never fully explained. As you might expect, that peace is based more on stability than fairness. Five of the players in this far future of humanity are the Awilu, the most advanced society and the first to leave Earth (or Tierra as it's called here); the Mah m, who possess the material war god Nameren of the frame story; the Lunars and Martians, who dominate the Sol system; and the surviving Tierrans, residents of a polluted and struggling planet that is ruthlessly exploited by the Lunars. The problem facing Freida and her friends at the start of the book is a petition brought by a young Tierran against Lunar exploitation of his homeland. His name is Joshua, and Freida is more than half in love with him. Joshua's legal argument involves interpretation of the freedom node of the treaty that ended the Great War, a node that precedent says gives the Lunars the freedom to exploit Tierra, but which Joshua claims has a still-valid originalist meaning granting Tierrans freedom from exploitation. There is, in short, a lot going on in this book, and "never fully explained" is something of a theme. Freida is telling a story to Nameren and only explains things Nameren may not already know. The reader has to puzzle out the rest from the occasional hint. This is made more difficult by the tendency of the material gods to communicate only in visions or guided hallucinations, full of symbolism that the characters only partly explain to the reader. Nonetheless, this did mostly work, at least for me. I started this book very confused, but by about the midpoint it felt like the background was coming together. I'm still not sure I understand the aurochs, baobab, and cicada symbolism that's so central to the framing story, but it's the pleasant sort of stretchy confusion that gives my brain a good workout. I wish Johnson had explained a few more things plainly, particularly near the end of the book, but my remaining level of confusion was within my tolerances. Unfortunately, the ending did not work for me. The first time I read it, I had no idea what it meant. Lots of baffling, symbolic things happened and then the book just stopped. After re-reading the last 10%, I think all the pieces of an ending and a bit of an explanation are there, but it's absurdly abbreviated. This is another book where the author appears to have been finished with the story before I was. This keeps happening to me, so this probably says something more about me than it says about books, but I want books to have an ending. If the characters have fought and suffered through the plot, I want them to have some space to be happy and to see how their sacrifices play out, with more detail than just a few vague promises. If much of the book has been puzzling out the nature of the world, I would like some concrete confirmation of at least some of my guesswork. And if you're going to end the book on radical transformation, I want to see the results of that transformation. Johnson does an excellent job showing how brutal the peace of the powerful can be, and is willing to light more things on fire over the course of this book than most authors would, but then doesn't offer the reader much in the way of payoff. For once, I wish this stand-alone turned out to be a series. I think an additional book could be written in the aftermath of this ending, and I would definitely read that novel. Johnson has me caring deeply about these characters and fascinated by the world background, and I'd happily spend another 450 pages finding out what happens next. But, frustratingly, I think this ending was indeed intended to wrap up the story. I think this book may fall between a few stools. Science fiction readers who want mysterious future worlds to be explained by the end of the book are going to be frustrated by the amount of symbolism, allusion, and poetic description. Literary fantasy readers, who have a higher tolerance for that style, are going to wish for more focused and polished writing. A lot of the story is firmly YA: trying and failing to fit in, developing one's identity, coming into power, relationship drama, great betrayals and regrets, overcoming trauma and abuse, and unraveling lies that adults tell you. But this is definitely not a straight-forward YA plot or world background. It demands a lot from the reader, and while I am confident many teenage readers would rise to that challenge, it seems like an awkward fit for the YA marketing category. About 75% of the way in, I would have told you this book was great and you should read it. The ending was a let-down and I'm still grumpy about it. I still think it's worth your attention if you're in the mood for a sink-or-swim type of reading experience. Just be warned that when the ride ends, I felt unceremoniously dumped on the pavement. Content warnings: Rape, torture, genocide. Rating: 7 out of 10

11 January 2024

Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in December 2023

Welcome to the December 2023 report from the Reproducible Builds project! In these reports we outline the most important things that we have been up to over the past month. As a rather rapid recap, whilst anyone may inspect the source code of free software for malicious flaws, almost all software is distributed to end users as pre-compiled binaries (more).

Reproducible Builds: Increasing the Integrity of Software Supply Chains awarded IEEE Software Best Paper award In February 2022, we announced in these reports that a paper written by Chris Lamb and Stefano Zacchiroli was now available in the March/April 2022 issue of IEEE Software. Titled Reproducible Builds: Increasing the Integrity of Software Supply Chains (PDF). This month, however, IEEE Software announced that this paper has won their Best Paper award for 2022.

Reproducibility to affect package migration policy in Debian In a post summarising the activities of the Debian Release Team at a recent in-person Debian event in Cambridge, UK, Paul Gevers announced a change to the way packages are migrated into the staging area for the next stable Debian release based on its reproducibility status:
The folks from the Reproducibility Project have come a long way since they started working on it 10 years ago, and we believe it s time for the next step in Debian. Several weeks ago, we enabled a migration policy in our migration software that checks for regression in reproducibility. At this moment, that is presented as just for info, but we intend to change that to delays in the not so distant future. We eventually want all packages to be reproducible. To stimulate maintainers to make their packages reproducible now, we ll soon start to apply a bounty [speedup] for reproducible builds, like we ve done with passing autopkgtests for years. We ll reduce the bounty for successful autopkgtests at that moment in time.

Speranza: Usable, privacy-friendly software signing Kelsey Merrill, Karen Sollins, Santiago Torres-Arias and Zachary Newman have developed a new system called Speranza, which is aimed at reassuring software consumers that the product they are getting has not been tampered with and is coming directly from a source they trust. A write-up on TechXplore.com goes into some more details:
What we have done, explains Sollins, is to develop, prove correct, and demonstrate the viability of an approach that allows the [software] maintainers to remain anonymous. Preserving anonymity is obviously important, given that almost everyone software developers included value their confidentiality. This new approach, Sollins adds, simultaneously allows [software] users to have confidence that the maintainers are, in fact, legitimate maintainers and, furthermore, that the code being downloaded is, in fact, the correct code of that maintainer. [ ]
The corresponding paper is published on the arXiv preprint server in various formats, and the announcement has also been covered in MIT News.

Nondeterministic Git bundles Paul Baecher published an interesting blog post on Reproducible git bundles. For those who are not familiar with them, Git bundles are used for the offline transfer of Git objects without an active server sitting on the other side of a network connection. Anyway, Paul wrote about writing a backup system for his entire system, but:
I noticed that a small but fixed subset of [Git] repositories are getting backed up despite having no changes made. That is odd because I would think that repeated bundling of the same repository state should create the exact same bundle. However [it] turns out that for some, repositories bundling is nondeterministic.
Paul goes on to to describe his solution, which involves forcing git to be single threaded makes the output deterministic . The article was also discussed on Hacker News.

Output from libxlst now deterministic libxslt is the XSLT C library developed for the GNOME project, where XSLT itself is an XML language to define transformations for XML files. This month, it was revealed that the result of the generate-id() XSLT function is now deterministic across multiple transformations, fixing many issues with reproducible builds. As the Git commit by Nick Wellnhofer describes: 
Rework the generate-id() function to return deterministic values. We use
a simple incrementing counter and store ids in the 'psvi' member of
nodes which was freed up by previous commits. The presence of an id is
indicated by a new "source node" flag.
This fixes long-standing problems with reproducible builds, see
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=751621
This also hardens security, as the old implementation leaked the
difference between a heap and a global pointer, see
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1356211
The old implementation could also generate the same id for dynamically
created nodes which happened to reuse the same memory. Ids for namespace
nodes were completely broken. They now use the id of the parent element
together with the hex-encoded namespace prefix.

Community updates There were made a number of improvements to our website, including Chris Lamb fixing the generate-draft script to not blow up if the input files have been corrupted today or even in the past [ ], Holger Levsen updated the Hamburg 2023 summit to add a link to farewell post [ ] & to add a picture of a Post-It note. [ ], and Pol Dellaiera updated the paragraph about tar and the --clamp-mtime flag [ ]. On our mailing list this month, Bernhard M. Wiedemann posted an interesting summary on some of the reasons why packages are still not reproducible in 2023. diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility that can locate and diagnose reproducibility issues. This month, Chris Lamb made a number of changes, including processing objdump symbol comment filter inputs as Python byte (and not str) instances [ ] and Vagrant Cascadian extended diffoscope support for GNU Guix [ ] and updated the version in that distribution to version 253 [ ].

Challenges of Producing Software Bill Of Materials for Java Musard Balliu, Benoit Baudry, Sofia Bobadilla, Mathias Ekstedt, Martin Monperrus, Javier Ron, Aman Sharma, Gabriel Skoglund, C sar Soto-Valero and Martin Wittlinger (!) of the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden, have published an article in which they:
deep-dive into 6 tools and the accuracy of the SBOMs they produce for complex open-source Java projects. Our novel insights reveal some hard challenges regarding the accurate production and usage of software bills of materials.
The paper is available on arXiv.

Debian Non-Maintainer campaign As mentioned in previous reports, the Reproducible Builds team within Debian has been organising a series of online and offline sprints in order to clear the huge backlog of reproducible builds patches submitted by performing so-called NMUs (Non-Maintainer Uploads). During December, Vagrant Cascadian performed a number of such uploads, including: In addition, Holger Levsen performed three no-source-change NMUs in order to address the last packages without .buildinfo files in Debian trixie, specifically lorene (0.0.0~cvs20161116+dfsg-1.1), maria (1.3.5-4.2) and ruby-rinku (1.7.3-2.1).

Reproducibility testing framework The Reproducible Builds project operates a comprehensive testing framework (available at tests.reproducible-builds.org) in order to check packages and other artifacts for reproducibility. In December, a number of changes were made by Holger Levsen:
  • Debian-related changes:
    • Fix matching packages for the [R programming language](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_(programming_language). [ ][ ][ ]
    • Add a Certbot configuration for the Nginx web server. [ ]
    • Enable debugging for the create-meta-pkgs tool. [ ][ ]
  • Arch Linux-related changes
    • The asp has been deprecated by pkgctl; thanks to dvzrv for the pointer. [ ]
    • Disable the Arch Linux builders for now. [ ]
    • Stop referring to the /trunk branch / subdirectory. [ ]
    • Use --protocol https when cloning repositories using the pkgctl tool. [ ]
  • Misc changes:
    • Install the python3-setuptools and swig packages, which are now needed to build OpenWrt. [ ]
    • Install pkg-config needed to build Coreboot artifacts. [ ]
    • Detect failures due to an issue where the fakeroot tool is implicitly required but not automatically installed. [ ]
    • Detect failures due to rename of the vmlinuz file. [ ]
    • Improve the grammar of an error message. [ ]
    • Document that freebsd-jenkins.debian.net has been updated to FreeBSD 14.0. [ ]
In addition, node maintenance was performed by Holger Levsen [ ] and Vagrant Cascadian [ ].

Upstream patches The Reproducible Builds project detects, dissects and attempts to fix as many currently-unreproducible packages as possible. We endeavour to send all of our patches upstream where appropriate. This month, we wrote a large number of such patches, including:
If you are interested in contributing to the Reproducible Builds project, please visit our Contribute page on our website. However, you can get in touch with us via:

10 January 2024

Simon Josefsson: Trisquel on arm64: Ampere Altra

Having had success running Trisquel on the ppc64 Talos II, I felt ready to get an arm64 machine running Trisquel. I have a Ampere Altra Developer Platform from ADLINK, which is a fairly powerful desktop machine. While there were some issues during installation, I m happy to say the machine is stable and everything appears to work fine.
ISO images for non-amd64 platforms are unfortunately still hidden from the main Trisquel download area, so you will have to use the following procedure to download and extract a netinst ISO image (using debian-installer) and write it to a USB memory device. Another unfortunate problem is that there are no OpenPGP signatures or hash checksums, but below I publish one checksum. 
wget -q http://builds.trisquel.org/debian-installer-images/debian-installer-images_20210731+deb11u9+11.0trisquel15_arm64.tar.gz
tar xfa debian-installer-images_20210731+deb11u9+11.0trisquel15_arm64.tar.gz ./installer-arm64/20210731+deb11u9+11/images/netboot/mini.iso
echo '311732519cc8c7c1bb2fe873f134fdafb211ef3bcb5b0d2ecdc6ea4e3b336357  installer-arm64/20210731+deb11u9+11/images/netboot/mini.iso'   sha256sum -c
sudo wipefs -a /dev/sdX
sudo dd if=installer-arm64/20210731+deb11u9+11/images/netboot/mini.iso of=/dev/sdX conv=sync status=progress
Insert the USB stick in a USB slot in the machine, and power up. Press ESCAPE at the BIOS prompt and select the USB device as the boot device. The first problem that hit me was that translations didn t work, I selected Swedish but the strings were garbled. Rebooting and selecting the default English worked fine. For installation, you need Internet connectivity and I use the RJ45 port closest to VGA/serial which is available as enP5p1s0 in the installer. I wouldn t connect the BMC RJ45 port to anything unless you understand the security implications. During installation you have to create a EFI partition for booting, and I ended up with one 1GB EFI partition, one 512GB ext4 partition for / with discard/noatime options, and a 32GB swap partition. The installer did not know about any Trisquel mirrors, but only had the default archive.trisquel.org, so if you need to use a mirror, take a note of the necessary details. The installation asks me about which kernel to install, and I went with the default linux-generic which results in a 5.15 linux-libre kernel. At the end of installation, unfortunately grub failed with a mysterious error message: Unable to install GRUB in dummy. Executing 'grub-install dummy' failed. On another console there is a better error message: failed to register the EFI boot entry. There are some references to file descriptor issues. Perhaps I partitioned the disk in a bad way, or this is a real bug in the installer for this platform. I continued installation, and it appears the installer was able to write GRUB to the device, but not add the right boot menu. So I was able to finish the installation properly, and then reboot and manually type the following GRUB commands: linux (hd0,gpt2)/boot/vmlinuz initrd (hd0,gpt2)/boot/initrd.img boot. Use the GRUB ls command to find the right device. See images below for more information.
Booting and installing GRUB again manually works fine: 
root@ampel:~# update-grub
Sourcing file  /etc/default/grub'
Sourcing file  /etc/default/grub.d/background.cfg'
Sourcing file  /etc/default/grub.d/init-select.cfg'
Generating grub configuration file ...
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-5.15.0-91-generic
Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-5.15.0-91-generic
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-5.15.0-58-generic
Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-5.15.0-58-generic
Warning: os-prober will not be executed to detect other bootable partitions.
Systems on them will not be added to the GRUB boot configuration.
Check GRUB_DISABLE_OS_PROBER documentation entry.
Adding boot menu entry for UEFI Firmware Settings ...
done
root@ampel:~#
During installation I tend to avoid selecting any tasksel components, in part because it didn t use a local mirror to gain network speed, and in part because I don t want to generate OpenSSH keys in a possibly outdated environment that is harder to audit and reproducible rebuild than the finally installed system. When I selected the OpenSSH and GNOME tasksel, I get an error, but fortunately using apt get directly is simple. 
root@ampel:~# tasksel
Tasksel GNOME failed:
tasksel: apt-get failed (100)
root@ampel:~# apt-get install trisquel-gnome ssh
Graphics in GNOME was slow using the built-in ASPEED AST2500 VGA controller with linux-libre 5.15. There are kernels labeled 64k but I haven t tested them, and I m not sure they would bring any significant advantage. I simply upgraded to a more recent linux-libre 6.2 kernel via the linux-image-generic-hwe-11.0 virtual package. After a reboot, graphics in GNOME is usable. 
root@ampel:~# apt-get install linux-image-generic-hwe-11.0
There seems to be some issue with power-saving inside GNOME, since the machine becomes unresponsive after 20 minutes, and I m unable to make it resume via keyboard or power button. Disabling the inactivity power setting in GNOME works fine to resolve this. I will now put this machine to some more heavy use and see how it handles it. I hope to find more suitable arm64-based servers to complement my ppc64el-based servers in the future, as this ADLINK Ampere Altra Developer Platform with liquid-cooling is more of a toy than a serious server for use in a datacentre. Happy Trisquel-on-arm64 Hacking!

Russell Coker: SAS vs SATA and Recovery

SAS and SATA are electrically compatible to a degree that allows connecting a SATA storage device to a SAS controller. The SAS controller understands the SATA protocol so this works. A SAS device can t be physically connected to a SATA controller and if you did manage to connect it then it wouldn t work. Some SAS RAID controllers don t permit mixing SAS and SATA devices in the same array, this is a software issue and could be changed. I know that the PERC controllers used by Dell (at least the older versions) do this and it might affect many/most MegaRAID controllers (which is what PERC is). If you have a hardware RAID array of SAS disks and one fails then you need a spare SAS disk and as the local computer store won t have any you need some on hand. The Linux kernel has support for the MegaRAID/PERC superblocks so for at least some of the RAID types supported by MegaRAID/PERC you can just connect the disks to a Linux system and have it work (I ve only tested on JBOD AKA a single-disk RAID-0). So if you have a server from Dell or IBM or any other company that uses MegaRAID which fails you can probably just put the disks into a non-RAID SAS controller and have them work. As Linux doesn t care about the difference between SAS and SATA at the RAID level you could then add a SATA disk to an array of SAS disks. If you want to move an array from a dead Dell to a working IBM server or the other way around then you need it to be all SATA or all SAS. You can use a Linux system to mount an array used by Windows or any other OS and then migrate the data to a different array. If you have an old array of SAS disks and one fails then it might be a reasonable option to just migrate the data to a new array of SATA SSDs. EG if you had 6*600G SAS disks you could move to 2*4TB SATA SSDs and get more storage, much higher performance, less power use, and less noise for a cost of $800 or so (you can spend more to get better performance) and some migration time. Having a spare SAS controller for data recovery is convenient. Having a spare SAS disk for any RAID-5/RAID-6 is a good thing. Having lots of spare SAS disks probably isn t useful as migrating to SATA is a better choice. SATA SSDs are bigger and faster than most SAS disks that are in production. I m sure that someone uses SAS SSDs but I haven t yet seen them in production, if you have a SAS system and need the performance that SSDs can give then a new server with U.2 (the SAS equivalent of NVMe) is the way to go). SATA hard drives are also the solution for seriously large storage, 16TB SATA hard drives are cheap and work in all the 3.5 SAS systems. It s hard to sell old SAS disks as there isn t much use for them.
Related posts:
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8 January 2024

Antoine Beaupr : Last year on this blog

So this blog is now celebrating its 21st birthday (or 20 if you count from zero, or 18 if you want to be pedantic), and I figured I would do this yearly thing of reviewing how that went.

Number of posts 2022 was the official 20th anniversary in any case, and that was one of my best years on record, with 46 posts, surpassed only by the noisy 2005 (62) and matching 2006 (46). 2023, in comparison, was underwhelming: a feeble 11 posts! What happened! Well, I was busy with other things, mostly away from keyboard, that I will not bore you with here... The other thing that happened is that the one-liner I used to collect stats was broken (it counted folders and other unrelated files) and wildly overestimated 2022! Turns out I didn't write that much then: 
anarc.at$ ls blog   grep '^[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9].*.md'   se
d s/-.*//   sort   uniq -c    sort -n -k2
     57 2005
     43 2006
     20 2007
     20 2008
      7 2009
     13 2010
     16 2011
     11 2012
     13 2013
      5 2014
     13 2015
     18 2016
     29 2017
     27 2018
     17 2019
     18 2020
     14 2021
     28 2022
     10 2023
      1 2024
But even that is inaccurate because, in ikiwiki, I can tag any page as being featured on the blog. So we actually need to process the HTML itself because we don't have much better on hand without going through ikiwiki's internals: 
anarcat@angela:anarc.at$ curl -sSL https://anarc.at/blog/   grep 'href="\./'   grep -o 20[0-9][0-9]   sort   uniq -c 
     56 2005
     42 2006
     19 2007
     18 2008
      6 2009
     12 2010
     15 2011
     10 2012
     11 2013
      3 2014
     15 2015
     32 2016
     50 2017
     37 2018
     19 2019
     19 2020
     15 2021
     28 2022
     13 2023
Which puts the top 10 years at: 
$ curl -sSL https://anarc.at/blog/   grep 'href="\./'   grep -o 20[0-9][0-9]   sort   uniq -c    sort -nr   head -10
     56 2005
     50 2017
     42 2006
     37 2018
     32 2016
     28 2022
     19 2020
     19 2019
     19 2007
     18 2008
Anyway. 2023 is certainly not a glorious year in that regard, in any case.

Visitors In terms of visits, however, we had quite a few hits. According to Goatcounter, I had 122 300 visits in 2023! 2022, in comparison, had 89 363, so that's quite a rise.

What you read I seem to have hit the Hacker News front page at least twice. I say "seem" because it's actually pretty hard to tell what the HN frontpage actually is on any given day. I had 22k visits on 2023-03-13, in any case, and you can't see me on the front that day. We do see a post of mine on 2023-09-02, all the way down there, which seem to have generated another 10k visits. In any case, here were the most popular stories for you fine visitors:
  • Framework 12th gen laptop review: 24k visits, which is surprising for a 13k words article "without images", as some critics have complained. 15k referred by Hacker News. Good reference and time-consuming benchmarks, slowly bit-rotting. That is, by far, my most popular article ever. A popular article in 2021 or 2022 was around 6k to 9k, so that's a big one. I suspect it will keep getting traffic for a long while.
  • Calibre replacement considerations: 15k visits, most of which without a referrer. Was actually an old article, but I suspect HN brought it back to light. I keep updating that wiki page regularly when I find new things, but I'm still using Calibre to import ebooks.
  • Hacking my Kobo Clara HD: is not new but always gathering more and more hits, it had 1800 hits in the first year, 4600 hits last year and now brought 6400 visitors to the blog! Not directly related, but this iFixit battery replacement guide I wrote also seem to be quite popular
Everything else was published before 2023. Replacing Smokeping with Prometheus is still around and Looking at Wayland terminal emulators makes an entry in the top five.

Where you've been People send less and less private information when they browse the web. The number of visitors without referrers was 41% in 2021, it rose to 44% in 2023. Most of the remaining traffic comes from Google, but Hacker News is now a significant chunk, almost as big as Google. In 2021, Google represented 23% of my traffic, in 2022, it was down to 15% so 18% is actually a rise from last year, even if it seems much smaller than what I usually think of.
Ratio Referrer Visits
18% Google 22 098
13% Hacker News 16 003
2% duckduckgo.com 2 640
1% community.frame.work 1 090
1% missing.csail.mit.edu 918
Note that Facebook and Twitter do not appear at all in my referrers.

Where you are Unsurprisingly, most visits still come from the US:
Ratio Country Visits
26% United States 32 010
14% France 17 046
10% Germany 11 650
6% Canada 7 425
5% United Kingdom 6 473
3% Netherlands 3 436
Those ratios are nearly identical to last year, but quite different from 2021, where Germany and France were more or less reversed. Back in 2021, I mentioned there was a long tail of countries with at least one visit, with 160 countries listed. I expanded that and there's now 182 countries in that list, almost all of the 193 member states in the UN.

What you were Chrome's dominance continues to expand, even on readers of this blog, gaining two percentage points from Firefox compared to 2021.
Ratio Browser Visits
49% Firefox 60 126
36% Chrome 44 052
14% Safari 17 463
1% Others N/A
It seems like, unfortunately, my Lynx and Haiku users have not visited in the past year. It seems like trying to read those metrics is like figuring out tea leaves... In terms of operating systems:
Ratio OS Visits
28% Linux 34 010
23% macOS 28 728
21% Windows 26 303
17% Android 20 614
10% iOS 11 741
Again, Linux and Mac are over-represented, and Android and iOS are under-represented.

What is next I hope to write more next year. I've been thinking about a few posts I could write for work, about how things work behind the scenes at Tor, that could be informative for many people. We run a rather old setup, but things hold up pretty well for what we throw at it, and it's worth sharing that with the world... So anyway, thanks for coming, faithful reader, and see you in the coming 2024 year...

Russ Allbery: Review: The Faithless

Review: The Faithless, by C.L. Clark
Series: Magic of the Lost #2
Publisher: Orbit
Copyright: March 2023
ISBN: 0-316-54283-0
Format: Kindle
Pages: 527
The Faithless is the second book in a political fantasy series that seems likely to be a trilogy. It is a direct sequel to The Unbroken, which you should read first. As usual, Orbit made it unnecessarily hard to get re-immersed in the world by refusing to provide memory aids for readers who read books as they come out instead of only when the series is complete, but this is not the fault of Clark or the book and you've heard me rant about this before. The Unbroken was set in Qaz l (not-Algeria). The Faithless, as readers of the first book might guess from the title, is set in Balladaire (not-France). This is the palace intrigue book. Princess Luca is fighting for her throne against her uncle, the regent. Touraine is trying to represent her people. Whether and to what extent those interests are aligned is much of the meat of this book. Normally I enjoy palace intrigue novels for the competence porn: watching someone navigate a complex political situation with skill and cunning, or upend the entire system by building unlikely coalitions or using unexpected routes to power. If you are similar, be warned that this is not what you're going to get. Touraine is a fish out of water with no idea how to navigate the Balladairan court, and does not magically become an expert in the course of this novel. Luca has the knowledge, but she's unsure, conflicted, and largely out-maneuvered. That means you will have to brace for some painful scenes of some of the worst people apparently getting what they want. Despite that, I could not put this down. It was infuriating, frustrating, and a much slower burn than I prefer, but the layers of complex motivations that Clark builds up provided a different sort of payoff. Two books in, the shape of this series is becoming clearer. This series is about empire and colonialism, but with considerably more complexity than fantasy normally brings to that topic. Power does not loosen its grasp easily, and it has numerous tools for subtle punishment after apparent upstart victories. Righteous causes rarely call banners to your side; instead, they create opportunities for other people to maneuver to their own advantage. Touraine has some amount of power now, but it's far from obvious how to use it. Her life's training tells her that exercising power will only cause trouble, and her enemies are more than happy to reinforce that message at every opportunity. Most notable to me is Clark's bitingly honest portrayal of the supposed allies within the colonial power. It is clear that Luca is attempting to take the most ethical actions as she defines them, but it's remarkable how those efforts inevitably imply that Touraine should help Luca now in exchange for Luca's tenuous and less-defined possible future aid. This is not even a lie; it may be an accurate summary of Balladairan politics. And yet, somehow what Balladaire needs always matters more than the needs of their abused colony. Underscoring this, Clark introduces another faction in the form of a populist movement against the Balladairan monarchy. The details of that setup in another fantasy novel would make them allies of the Qaz l. Here, as is so often the case in real life, a substantial portion of the populists are even more xenophobic and racist than the nobility. There are no easy alliances. The trump card that Qaz l holds is magic. They have it, and (for reasons explored in The Unbroken) Balladaire needs it, although that is a position held by Luca's faction and not by her uncle. But even Luca wants to reduce that magic to a manageable technology, like any other element of the Balladairan state. She wants to understand it, harness it, and bring it under local control. Touraine, trained by Balladaire and facing Balladairan political problems, has the same tendency. The magic, at least in this book, refuses not in the flashy, rebellious way that it would in most fantasy, but in a frustrating and incomprehensible lack of predictable or convenient rules. I think this will feel like a plot device to some readers, and that is to some extent true, but I think I see glimmers of Clark setting up a conflict of world views that will play out in the third book. I think some people are going to bounce off this book. It's frustrating, enraging, at times melodramatic, and does not offer the cathartic payoff typically offered in fantasy novels of this type. Usually these are things I would be complaining about as well. And yet, I found it satisfyingly challenging, engrossing, and memorable. I spent a lot of the book yelling "just kill him already" at the characters, but I think one of Clark's points is that overcoming colonial relationships requires a lot more than just killing one evil man. The characters profoundly fail to execute some clever and victorious strategy. Instead, as in the first book, they muddle through, making the best choice that they can see in each moment, making lots of mistakes, and paying heavy prices. It's realistic in a way that has nothing to do with blood or violence or grittiness. (Although I did appreciate having the thin thread of Pruett's story and its highly satisfying conclusion.) This is also a slow-burn romance, and there too I think opinions will differ. Touraine and Luca keep circling back to the same arguments and the same frustrations, and there were times that this felt repetitive. It also adds a lot of personal drama to the politics in a way that occasionally made me dubious. But here too, I think Clark is partly using the romance to illustrate the deeper political points. Luca is often insufferable, cruel and ambitious in ways she doesn't realize, and only vaguely able to understand the Qaz l perspective; in short, she's the pragmatic centrist reformer. I am dubious that her ethics would lead her to anything other than endless compromise without Touraine to push her. To Luca's credit, she also realizes that and wants to be a better person, but struggles to have the courage to act on it. Touraine both does and does not want to manipulate her; she wants Luca's help (and more), but it's not clear Luca will give it under acceptable terms, or even understand how much she's demanding. It's that foundational conflict that turns the romance into a slow burn by pushing them apart. Apparently I have more patience for this type of on-again, off-again relationship than one based on artificial miscommunication. The more I noticed the political subtext, the more engaging I found the romance on the surface. I picked this up because I'd read several books about black characters written by white authors, and while there was nothing that wrong with those books, the politics felt a little too reductionist and simplified. I wanted a book that was going to force me out of comfortable political assumptions. The Faithless did exactly what I was looking for, and I am definitely here for the rest of the series. In that sense, recommended, although do not go into this book hoping for adroit court maneuvering and competence porn. Followed by The Sovereign, which does not yet have a release date. Content warnings: Child death, attempted cultural genocide. Rating: 7 out of 10

5 January 2024

Valhalla's Things: Random Sashiko + Crazy Quilt Pocket

Posted on January 5, 2024
Tags: madeof:atoms
A 18th century pocket in black jeans with a random pattern of pink running stitches forming squares and other shapes. The unfinished edges of the pieces of jeans can be seen, running more or less diagonally. Lately I ve seen people on the internet talking about victorian crazy quilting. Years ago I had watched a Numberphile video about Hitomezashi Stitch Patterns based on numbers, words or randomness. Few weeks ago I had cut some fabric piece out of an old pair of jeans and I had a lot of scraps that were too small to do anything useful on their own. It easy to see where this can go, right? The wrong side of a pocket piece, showing a light coloured fabric with a grid drawn in pencil, a line of small stitches all around the edges and a mess of thread ends left hanging. I cut a pocket shape out of old garment mockups (this required some piecing), drew a square grid, arranged scraps of jeans to cover the other side, kept everything together with a lot of pins, carefully avoided basting anything, and started covering everything in sashiko / hitomezashi stitches, starting each line with a stitch on the front or the back of the work based on the result of: 
import random
random.choice(["front", "back"])
The wrong side of the other pocket piece, with just three lines of stitching and a piece of paper to mark the pattern. There are bits of jeans peeking out of the sides. For the second piece I tried to use a piece of paper with the square grid instead of drawing it on the fabric: it worked, mostly, I would not do it again as removing the paper was more of a hassle than drawing the lines in the first place. I suspected it, but had to try it anyway. The front of the pocket seen from the wrong side, with a machine seam around the lit, whose end has been cut in a triangle so that it can be turned. Then I added a lining from some plain black cotton from the stash; for the slit I put the lining on the front right sides together, sewn at 2 mm from the marked slit, cut it, turned the lining to the back side, pressed and then topstitched as close as possible to the slit from the front. The finished pocket attached to a belt made from the waistband of a pair of jeans (with button, buttonhole and belt loops still attached) whose raw edges (left when unpicking away the jeans) have been sewn shut by hand. I bound everything with bias tape, adding herringbone tape loops at the top to hang it from a belt (such as one made from the waistband of one of the donor pair of jeans) and that was it. The back of the pocket, showing another random pattern in two different shades of pink for the vertical and horizontal lines of stitching. I like the way the result feels; maybe it s a bit too stiff for a pocket, but I can see it work very well for a bigger bag, and maybe even a jacket or some other outer garment.

1 January 2024

Russ Allbery: 2023 Book Reading in Review

In 2023, I finished and reviewed 53 books, continuing a trend of year-over-year increases and of reading the most books since 2012 (the last year I averaged five books a month). Reviewing continued to be uneven, with a significant slump in the summer and smaller slumps in February and November, and a big clump of reviews finished in October in addition to my normal year-end reading and reviewing vacation. The unevenness this year was mostly due to finishing books and not writing reviews immediately. Reviews are much harder to write when the finished books are piling up, so one goal for 2024 is to not let that happen again. I enter the new year with one book finished and not yet reviewed, after reading a book about every day and a half during my December vacation. I read two all-time favorite books this year. The first was Emily Tesh's debut novel Some Desperate Glory, which is one of the best space opera novels I have ever read. I cannot improve on Shelley Parker-Chan's blurb for this book: "Fierce and heartbreakingly humane, this book is for everyone who loved Ender's Game, but Ender's Game didn't love them back." This is not hard science fiction but it is fantastic character fiction. It was exactly what I needed in the middle of a year in which I was fighting a "burn everything down" mood. The second was Night Watch by Terry Pratchett, the 29th Discworld and 6th Watch novel. Throughout my Discworld read-through, Pratchett felt like he was on the cusp of a truly stand-out novel, one where all the pieces fit and the book becomes something more than the sum of its parts. This was that book. It's a book about ethics and revolutions and governance, but also about how your perception of yourself changes as you get older. It does all of the normal Pratchett things, just... better. While I would love to point new Discworld readers at it, I think you do have to read at least the Watch novels that came before it for it to carry its proper emotional heft. This was overall a solid year for fiction reading. I read another 15 novels I rated 8 out of 10, and 12 that I rated 7 out of 10. The largest contributor to that was my Discworld read-through, which was reliably entertaining throughout the year. The run of Discworld books between The Fifth Elephant (read late last year) and Wintersmith (my last of this year) was the best run of Discworld novels so far. One additional book I'll call out as particularly worth reading is Thud!, the Watch novel after Night Watch and another excellent entry. I read two stand-out non-fiction books this year. The first was Oliver Darkshire's delightful memoir about life as a rare book seller, Once Upon a Tome. One of the things I will miss about Twitter is the regularity with which I stumbled across fascinating people and then got to read their books. I'm off Twitter permanently now because the platform is designed to make me incoherently angry and I need less of that in my life, but it was very good at finding delightfully quirky books like this one. My other favorite non-fiction book of the year was Michael Lewis's Going Infinite, a profile of Sam Bankman-Fried. I'm still bemused at the negative reviews that this got from people who were upset that Lewis didn't turn the story into a black-and-white morality play. Bankman-Fried's actions were clearly criminal; that's not in dispute. Human motivations can be complex in ways that are irrelevant to the law, and I thought this attempt to understand that complexity by a top-notch storyteller was worthy of attention. Also worth a mention is Tony Judt's Postwar, the first book I reviewed in 2023. A sprawling history of post-World-War-II Europe will never have the sheer readability of shorter, punchier books, but this was the most informative book that I read in 2023. 2024 should see the conclusion of my Discworld read-through, after which I may return to re-reading Mercedes Lackey or David Eddings, both of which I paused to make time for Terry Pratchett. I also have another re-read similar to my Chronicles of Narnia reviews that I've been thinking about for a while. Perhaps I will start that next year; perhaps it will wait for 2025. Apart from that, my intention as always is to read steadily, write reviews as close to when I finished the book as possible, and make reading time for my huge existing backlog despite the constant allure of new releases. Here's to a new year full of more new-to-me books and occasional old favorites. The full analysis includes some additional personal reading statistics, probably only of interest to me.

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