Search Results: "James Valleroy"

17 February 2024

James Valleroy: snac2: a minimalist ActivityPub server in Debian

snac2, currently available in Debian testing and unstable, is described by its upstream as A simple, minimalistic ActivityPub instance written in portable C. It provides an ActivityPub server with a bare-bones web interface. It does not use JavaScript or require a database.
Basic forms for creating a new post, or following someone
ActivityPub is the protocol for federated social networks that is implemented by Mastodon, Pleroma, and other similar server software. Federated social networks are most often used for micro-blogging , or making many small posts. You can decide to follow another user (or bot) to see their posts, even if they happen to be on a different server (as long as the server software is compatible with the ActivityPub standard).
The timeline shows posts from accounts that you follow
In addition, snac2 has preliminary support for the Mastodon Client API. This allows basic support for mobile apps that support Mastodon, but you should expect that many features are not available yet. If you are interested in running a minimalist ActivityPub server on Debian, please try out snac2, and report any bugs that you find.

8 August 2023

James Valleroy: FreedomBox backport automatic update issue

When run on Debian stable, FreedomBox has an optional feature called Frequent Feature Updates . If this feature is enabled, it has 2 effects:
  1. The stable-backports repository is added to the system.
  2. Apt pinning is configured so that FreedomBox itself, and a small number of other carefully selected packages, will be kept updated to the latest version available in the backports repository.
However for bookworm-backports, there was a small change in the repository for bookworm-backports, which meant that our approach to apt pinning was no longer correct. The change is a difference between the repository s Suite and Codename . For bullseye-backports, these were the same, but for bookworm-backports, they are now different (stable-backports vs bookworm-backports). The issue is described in [1]. The result is that a FreedomBox on the current Debian stable release, bookworm, will not automatically upgrade to new versions in bookworm-backports, even if the Frequent Feature Updates option is selected. The fix for a issue is a very small change to two configuration files (for apt and unattended-upgrades), so that they refer to the Codename instead of the Suite. (See [2] for details.) So far, the fixed version of the freedombox package, 23.14~bpo12+1, is available in bookworm-backports. For FreedomBox users who would like to get the newer versions right away, you can get the latest package installed by running the following command through SSH or Cockpit s terminal: $ sudo apt install -t bookworm-backports freedombox We are also planning to update the version of FreedomBox in bookworm to have the fix. Once this update is available, then running the above command won t be necessary to receive FreedomBox feature updates. [1] https://salsa.debian.org/freedombox-team/freedombox/-/issues/2368 [2] https://salsa.debian.org/freedombox-team/freedombox/-/merge_requests/2409

5 February 2023

James Valleroy: A look back at FreedomBox project in 2022

This post is very late, but better late than never! I want to take a look back at the work that was done on FreedomBox during 2022. Several apps were added to FreedomBox in 2022. The email server app (that was developed by a Google Summer of Code student back in 2021) was finally made available to the general audience of FreedomBox users. You will find it under the name Postfix/Dovecot , which are the main services configured by this app. Another app that was added is Janus, which has the description video room . It is called video room instead of video conference because the room itself is persistent. People can join the room or leave, but there isn t a concept of calling or ending the call . Actually, Janus is a lightweight WebRTC server that can be used as a backend for many different types of applications. But as implemented currently, there is just the simple video room app. In the future, more advanced apps such as Jangouts may be packaged in Debian and made available to FreedomBox. RSS-Bridge is an app that generates RSS feeds for websites that don t provide their own (for example, YouTube). It can be used together with any RSS news feed reader application, such as TT-RSS which is also available in FreedomBox. There is now a Privacy page in the System menu, which allows enabling or disabling the Debian popularity-contest tool. If enabled, it reports the Debian packages that are installed on the system. The results can be seen at https://popcon.debian.org, which currently shows over 400 FreedomBoxes are reporting data. A major feature added to FreedomBox in 2022 is the ability to uninstall apps. This feature is still considered experimental (it won t work for every app), but many issues have been fixed already. There is an option to take a backup of the app s data before uninstalling. There is also now an operations queue in case the user starts multiple install or uninstall operations concurrently. XEP-0363 (HTTP File Upload) has been enabled for Ejabberd Chat Server. This allows files to be transferred between XMPP clients that support this feature. There were a number of security improvements to FreedomBox, such as adding fail2ban jails for Dovecot, Matrix Synapse, and WordPress. Firewall rules were added to ensure that authentication and authorization for services proxied through Apache web server cannot be bypassed by programs running locally on the system. Also, we are no longer using libpam-tmpdir to provide temporary folder isolation, because it causes issues for several packages. Instead we use systemd s sandboxing features, which provide even better isolation for services. Some things were removed in 2022. The ez-ipupdate package is no longer used for Dynamic DNS, since it is replaced by a Python implementation of GnuDIP. An option to restrict who can log in to the system was removed, due to various issues that arose from it. Instead there is an option to restrict who can login through SSH. The DNSSEC diagnostic test was removed, because it caused confusion for many users (although use of DNSSEC is still recommended). Finally, some statistics. There were 31 releases in 2022 (including
point releases). There were 68 unique contributors to the git
repository; this includes code contributions and translations (but not
contributions to the manual pages). In total, there were 980 commits to the git repository.

8 December 2022

Louis-Philippe V ronneau: Debian Python Team 2022 Sprint Report

This is the report for the Debian Python Team remote sprint that took place on December 2-3-4 2022. Many thanks to those who participated, namely: Here is a list of issues we worked on: pybuild autodep8 feature About a year ago, Antonio Terceiro contributed code to pybuild to make it possible to automatically run the upstream test suite as autopkgtests. This feature has now been merged and uploaded to unstable. Although you can find out more about it in the pybuild-autopkgtest manpage, an email providing more details should be sent to the debian-python mailing list relatively soon. Fixing packages that run tests via python3 setup.py test Last August, Stefano Rivera poked the team about the deprecation of the python3 setup.py test command to run tests in pybuild. Although this feature has been deprecated upstream for 6 years now, many packages in the archive still use it to run the upstream test suite during build. Around 29 of the 67 packages that are team-maintained by the Debian Python Team were fixed during the sprint. Ideally, all of them would be before the feature is removed from pybuild. if a package you maintain still runs this command, please consider fixing it! Fixing packages that use nose nose, provided by the python3-nose package, is an obsolete testing framework for Python and has been unmaintained since 2015. During the sprint, people worked on fixing some of the many bugs filled against packages still running tests via nose, but there are still around 240 packages affected by this issue in the archive. Again, if a package you maintain still runs this command, please consider fixing it! Removal of the remaining Python2 packages With the upload of dh-python 5.20221202, Stefano Rivera officially removed support for dh_python2 and dh_pypy, thus closing the "Python2 removal in sid/bullseye" bug. It seems some work still needs to be done for complete Python2 removal from Sid, but I expect this will be done in time for the Bookworm release. Working on Lintian tags for the Team During the sprint, I managed to work on some Lintian issues that we had targeted, namely: I also worked on a few other Lintian tags, but they were unrelated to the Debian Python Team itself. I'm also happy to report many of the tags I wrote for the team in the past few months were merged by the awesome Russ Allbery and should land in unstable as soon as a new release is made. I'm particularly looking forward the new "uses-python-distutils" tag that should help us flag packages that still use the deprecated distutils library. Patching distro-tracker (tracker.debian.org) to show pending team MRs It's often hard to have a good overview of pending merge requests when working with team-maintained packages, as by default, Salsa doesn't notify anyone when a MR is opened. Although our workflow typically does not involve creating merge requests, some people still do and they end up sitting there, unnoticed. During the sprint, Kurt Kremitzki worked on solving this issue by having distro-tracker show the pending MRs on our team's tracker page. Sadly, it seems little progress was made, as the removal of python3-django-jsonfield from the archive and breaking changes in python3-selenium has broken the test suite. Migrate packages building with the flit plugin to the generic pyproject one pybuild has been supporting building with PEP-517 style pyproject.toml files via a generic plugin (pybuild-plugin-pyproject) for a while now. As this plugin supersedes the old flit plugin, we've been thinking of deprecating it in time for the Bookworm release. To make this possible, most of the packages in the archive that still used this plugin were migrated to the generic one and I opened bugs on the last handful of packages that were not team-maintained. Other work Many other things were done during the sprint, such as: Thanks Thanks again to everyone who joined the sprint, and three big cheers for all the folks who donate to Debian and made it possible for us to have a food budget for the event.

17 September 2022

James Valleroy: How I avoid sysadmin work

The server running this blog is a RockPro64 sitting in my living room. Besides WordPress (the blogging software), I run various other services on it: Most of these are for my personal use, and a few of them have pages for public viewing (linked at the top of this page). Despite running a server, I don t really consider myself to be a system administrator (or sysadmin for short). I generally try to avoid doing system administration work as much as possible. I think this is due to a number of reasons: These reasons might be surprising to some, but they also suggest that an alternative approach: So my approach is this: if I want to run an additional service, enhance an existing one, or fix a bug, I don t do those changes directly on my server. Instead, I will make (or suggest, or request) the change somewhere upstream of my server: So basically my system administration task turns into a software development task instead. And (in my opinion) there are much better tools available for this: source control systems such as git, test suites and Continuous Integration (CI) pipelines, and code review processes. These make it easier to keep track of and understand the changes, and reduce the possibility of making a catastrophic mistake. Besides this, there is one other major advantage to working upstream: the work is not just benefiting the server running in my home, but many others. Anyone who is using the same software or packages will also get the improvements or bug fixes. And likewise, I get to benefit from the work done by many other contributors. Some final notes about this approach:

3 September 2022

James Valleroy: File sharing with bepasty

One of the apps running on my FreedomBox that I use frequently is bepasty. bepasty is essentially a self-hosted, free software pastebin. It allows you to paste text, or upload any type of file. You can also set an expiration date for when the file or text will automatically be deleted. If you are uploading multiple related files, you can organize them into a list. bepasty does not have user accounts. Instead, it has shared passwords, where each password is linked to a set of permissions. There are five permissions: Read, List, Create, Delete, and Admin. (The meanings are mostly straightforward, except for Admin, which means the ability to lock and unlock files.) This allows very fine-grained control. For example, if you want someone to be able to upload files to your bepasty, but not view or download anything, than you can generate a password with only the Create permission, and give this password to the person who will be uploading files. To simplify the initial setup in FreedomBox, we generate three passwords by default: one for viewers (List and Read), one for editors (List, Read, Create, and Delete), and one for admins (all permissions). In addition, when no password has been provided, the Read (but not List) permission is provided by default. This allows files to be easily shared by sending just their URLs (and no password required). The URLs contain some random characters, so it is not easy to guess. I mostly use bepasty for moving files between systems, whether its a physical machine or VPS, or a VM or container that I will use only briefly. Especially in the latter case, it s nice that I don t need to do any extra setup (such as copying SSH keys) before I copy my files over. The bepasty package is available in Debian stable (with a newer version in stable-backports and testing). The many use-cases that it provides, and the well-maintained Debian packaging, made it a compelling choice for integration into FreedomBox, which has included bepasty for one-click installation since version 20.14.

27 August 2022

James Valleroy: FreedomBox Packages in Debian

FreedomBox is a Debian pure blend that reduces the effort needed to run and maintain a small personal server. Being a pure blend means that all of the software packages which are used in FreedomBox are included in Debian. Most of these packages are not specific to FreedomBox: they are common things such as Apache web server, firewalld, slapd (LDAP server), etc. But there are a few packages which are specific to FreedomBox: they are named freedombox, freedombox-doc-en, freedombox-doc-es, freedom-maker, fbx-all and fbx-tasks. freedombox is the core package. You could say, if freedombox is installed, then your system is a FreedomBox (or a derivative). It has dependencies on all of the packages that are needed to get a FreedomBox up and running, such as the previously mentioned Apache, firewalld, and slapd. It also provides a web interface for the initial setup, configuration, and installing apps. (The web interface service is called Plinth and is written in Python using Django framework.) The source package of freedombox also builds freedombox-doc-en and freedombox-doc-es. These packages install the FreedomBox manuals for English and Spanish, respectively. freedom-maker is a tool that is used to build FreedomBox disk images. An image can be copied to a storage device such as a Solid State Disk (SSD), eMMC (internal flash memory chip), or a microSD card. Each image is meant for a particular hardware device (or target device), or a set of devices. In some cases, one image can be used across a wide range of devices. For example, the amd64 image is for all 64-bit x86 architecture machines (including virtual machines). The arm64 image is for all 64-bit ARM machines that support booting a generic image using UEFI. fbx-all and fbx-tasks are special metapackages, both built from a single source package named debian-fbx. They are related to tasksel, a program that displays a curated list of packages that can be installed, organized by interest area. Debian blends typically provide task files to list their relevant applications in tasksel. fbx-tasks only installs the tasks for FreedomBox (without actually installing FreedomBox). fbx-all goes one step further and also installs freedombox itself. In general, FreedomBox users won t need to interact with these two packages. Links:

16 November 2020

Bits from Debian: New Debian Developers and Maintainers (September and October 2020)

The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months: The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months: Congratulations!

2 July 2017

Bits from Debian: New Debian Developers and Maintainers (May and June 2017)

The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months: The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months: Congratulations!