Finally there is a thing people can agree on:

• 2023-08-28, OSNews: The end of the Googleverse
• 2023-07-28, Cory Doctorow: Microincentives and Enshittification
• 2023-10-03, Cory Doctorow: Google s enshittification memos
• 2024-01-15, Tim Bray: Mourning Google

Apparently, Google Search is not good anymore. And I m not the only one thinking about decentralization to fix it: Honey I federated the search engine - finding stuff online post-big tech - a lightning talk at the recent chaos communication congress The speaker however did not mention, that there have already been many attempts at building distributed search engines. So why do I think that such an attempt could finally succeed?

• More people are searching for alternatives to Google.
• Mainstream hard discs are incredibly big.
• Mainstream internet connection is incredibly fast.
• Google is bleeding talent.
• Most of the building blocks are available as free software.
• Success depends on your definition

My definition of success is:

A mildly technical computer user (able to install software) has access to a search engine that provides them with superior search results compared to Google for at least a few predefined areas of interest.

The exact algorithm used by Google Search to rank websites is a secret even to most Googlers. Still it is clear, that it relies heavily on big data: billions of queries, a comprehensive web index and user behaviour data. - All this is not available to us. A distributed search engine however can instead rely on user input. Every admin of one node seeds the node ranking with their personal selection of trusted sites. They connect their node with nodes of people they trust. This results in a web of (transitive) trust much like pgp. For comparison, imagine you are searching for something in a world without computers: You ask the people around you. They probably forward your question to their peers. I already had a look at YaCy. It is active, somewhat usable and has a friendly maintainer. Unfortunately I consider the codebase to show its age. It takes a lot of time for a newcomer to find their way around and it contains a lot of cruft. Nevertheless, YaCy is a good example that a decentralized search software can be done even by a small team or just one person. I myself started working on a software in Haskell and keep my notes here: Populus:DezInV. Since I m learning Haskell along the way, there is nothing there to see yet. Additionally I took a yak shaving break to learn nix. By the way: DuckDuckGo is not the alternative. And while I would encourage you to also try Yandex for a second opinion, I don t consider this a solution.

Like each month, have a look at the work funded by Freexian s Debian LTS offering.

Debian LTS contributors In March, 19 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:

• Abhijith PA did 0.0h (out of 10.0h assigned and 4.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 14.0h to the next month.
• Adrian Bunk did 59.5h (out of 47.5h assigned and 52.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 40.5h to the next month.
• Bastien Roucari s did 22.0h (out of 20.0h assigned and 2.0h from previous period).
• Ben Hutchings did 9.0h (out of 2.0h assigned and 22.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 15.0h to the next month.
• Chris Lamb did 18.0h (out of 18.0h assigned).
• Daniel Leidert did 12.0h (out of 12.0h assigned).
• Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 0.0h (out of 3.0h assigned and 57.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 60.0h to the next month.
• Guilhem Moulin did 22.5h (out of 7.25h assigned and 15.25h from previous period).
• Holger Levsen did 0.0h (out of 0.5h assigned and 11.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 12.0h to the next month.
• Lee Garrett did 0.0h (out of 0.0h assigned and 60.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 60.0h to the next month.
• Markus Koschany did 40.0h (out of 40.0h assigned).
• Ola Lundqvist did 19.5h (out of 24.0h assigned), thus carrying over 4.5h to the next month.
• Roberto C. S nchez did 9.25h (out of 3.5h assigned and 8.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 2.75h to the next month.
• Santiago Ruano Rinc n did 19.0h (out of 16.5h assigned and 2.5h from previous period).
• Sean Whitton did 4.5h (out of 4.5h assigned and 1.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 1.5h to the next month.
• Sylvain Beucler did 25.0h (out of 24.5h assigned and 35.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 35.0h to the next month.
• Thorsten Alteholz did 14.0h (out of 14.0h assigned).
• Tobias Frost did 12.0h (out of 12.0h assigned).
• Utkarsh Gupta did 19.5h (out of 0.0h assigned and 48.75h from previous period), thus carrying over 29.25h to the next month.

Evolution of the situation In March, we have released 31 DLAs. Adrian Bunk was responsible for updating gtkwave not only in LTS, but also in unstable, stable, and old-stable as well. This update involved an upload of a new upstream release of gtkwave to each target suite to address 82 separate CVEs. Guilhem Moulin prepared an update of libvirt which was particularly notable, as it fixed multiple vulnerabilities which would lead to denial of service or information disclosure. In addition to the normal security updates, multiple LTS contributors worked at getting various packages updated in more recent Debian releases, including gross for bullseye/bookworm (by Adrian Bunk), imlib2 for bullseye, jetty9 and tomcat9/10 for bullseye/bookworm (by Markus Koschany), samba for bullseye, py7zr for bullseye (by Santiago Ruano Rinc n), cacti for bullseye/bookwork (by Sylvain Beucler), and libmicrohttpd for bullseye (by Thorsten Alteholz). Additionally, Sylvain actively coordinated with cacti upstream concerning an incomplete fix for CVE-2024-29894.

Thanks to our sponsors Sponsors that joined recently are in bold.

• Platinum sponsors:
  • TOSHIBA (for 103 months)
  • Civil Infrastructure Platform (CIP) (for 71 months)
• Gold sponsors:
  • Roche Diagnostics International AG (for 114 months)
  • Linode (for 108 months)
  • Babiel GmbH (for 97 months)
  • Plat Home (for 97 months)
  • CINECA (for 71 months)
  • University of Oxford (for 53 months)
  • Deveryware (for 40 months)
  • VyOS Inc (for 35 months)
  • EDF SA (for 24 months)
• Silver sponsors:
  • Domeneshop AS (for 118 months)
  • Nantes M tropole (for 112 months)
  • Univention GmbH (for 104 months)
  • Universit Jean Monnet de St Etienne (for 104 months)
  • Ribbon Communications, Inc. (for 98 months)
  • Exonet B.V. (for 88 months)
  • Leibniz Rechenzentrum (for 82 months)
  • Minist re de l Europe et des Affaires trang res (for 65 months)
  • Cloudways by DigitalOcean (for 55 months)
  • Dinahosting SL (for 53 months)
  • Bauer Xcel Media Deutschland KG (for 47 months)
  • Platform.sh SAS (for 47 months)
  • Moxa Inc. (for 41 months)
  • sipgate GmbH (for 38 months)
  • OVH US LLC (for 36 months)
  • Tilburg University (for 36 months)
  • GSI Helmholtzzentrum f r Schwerionenforschung GmbH (for 28 months)
  • Soliton Systems K.K. (for 25 months)
  • THINline s.r.o.
• Bronze sponsors:
  • Evolix (for 119 months)
  • Seznam.cz, a.s. (for 119 months)
  • Intevation GmbH (for 116 months)
  • Linuxhotel GmbH (for 116 months)
  • Daevel SARL (for 114 months)
  • Bitfolk LTD (for 113 months)
  • Megaspace Internet Services GmbH (for 113 months)
  • Greenbone AG (for 112 months)
  • NUMLOG (for 112 months)
  • WinGo AG (for 112 months)
  • Ecole Centrale de Nantes - LHEEA (for 108 months)
  • Entr ouvert (for 103 months)
  • Adfinis AG (for 100 months)
  • GNI MEDIA (for 95 months)
  • Laboratoire LEGI - UMR 5519 / CNRS (for 95 months)
  • Tesorion (for 95 months)
  • Bearstech (for 86 months)
  • LiHAS (for 86 months)
  • Catalyst IT Ltd (for 81 months)
  • Supagro (for 76 months)
  • Demarcq SAS (for 75 months)
  • Universit Grenoble Alpes (for 61 months)
  • TouchWeb SAS (for 53 months)
  • SPiN AG (for 50 months)
  • CoreFiling (for 45 months)
  • Institut des sciences cognitives Marc Jeannerod (for 40 months)
  • Observatoire des Sciences de l Univers de Grenoble (for 37 months)
  • Tem Innovations GmbH (for 32 months)
  • WordFinder.pro (for 31 months)
  • CNRS DT INSU R sif (for 30 months)
  • Alter Way (for 23 months)
  • Institut Camille Jordan (for 12 months)

Welcome to the March 2024 report from the Reproducible Builds project! In our reports, we attempt to outline what we have been up to over the past month, as well as mentioning some of the important things happening more generally in software supply-chain security. As ever, if you are interested in contributing to the project, please visit our Contribute page on our website. Table of contents:

1. Arch Linux minimal container userland now 100% reproducible
2. Validating Debian s build infrastructure after the XZ backdoor
3. Making Fedora Linux (more) reproducible
4. Increasing Trust in the Open Source Supply Chain with Reproducible Builds and Functional Package Management
5. Software and source code identification with GNU Guix and reproducible builds
6. Two new Rust-based tools for post-processing determinism
7. Distribution work
8. Mailing list highlights
9. Website updates
10. Delta chat clients now reproducible
11. diffoscope updates
12. Upstream patches
13. Reproducibility testing framework

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Arch Linux minimal container userland now 100% reproducible In remarkable news, Reproducible builds developer kpcyrd reported that that the Arch Linux minimal container userland is now 100% reproducible after work by developers dvzv and Foxboron on the one remaining package. This represents a real world , widely-used Linux distribution being reproducible. Their post, which kpcyrd suffixed with the question now what? , continues on to outline some potential next steps, including validating whether the container image itself could be reproduced bit-for-bit. The post, which was itself a followup for an Arch Linux update earlier in the month, generated a significant number of replies.

Validating Debian s build infrastructure after the XZ backdoor From our mailing list this month, Vagrant Cascadian wrote about being asked about trying to perform concrete reproducibility checks for recent Debian security updates, in an attempt to gain some confidence about Debian s build infrastructure given that they performed builds in environments running the high-profile XZ vulnerability. Vagrant reports (with some caveats):

So far, I have not found any reproducibility issues; everything I tested I was able to get to build bit-for-bit identical with what is in the Debian archive.

That is to say, reproducibility testing permitted Vagrant and Debian to claim with some confidence that builds performed when this vulnerable version of XZ was installed were not interfered with.

Making Fedora Linux (more) reproducible In March, Davide Cavalca gave a talk at the 2024 Southern California Linux Expo (aka SCALE 21x) about the ongoing effort to make the Fedora Linux distribution reproducible. Documented in more detail on Fedora s website, the talk touched on topics such as the specifics of implementing reproducible builds in Fedora, the challenges encountered, the current status and what s coming next. (YouTube video)

Increasing Trust in the Open Source Supply Chain with Reproducible Builds and Functional Package Management Julien Malka published a brief but interesting paper in the HAL open archive on Increasing Trust in the Open Source Supply Chain with Reproducible Builds and Functional Package Management:

Functional package managers (FPMs) and reproducible builds (R-B) are technologies and methodologies that are conceptually very different from the traditional software deployment model, and that have promising properties for software supply chain security. This thesis aims to evaluate the impact of FPMs and R-B on the security of the software supply chain and propose improvements to the FPM model to further improve trust in the open source supply chain. PDF

Julien s paper poses a number of research questions on how the model of distributions such as GNU Guix and NixOS can be leveraged to further improve the safety of the software supply chain , etc.

Software and source code identification with GNU Guix and reproducible builds In a long line of commendably detailed blog posts, Ludovic Court s, Maxim Cournoyer, Jan Nieuwenhuizen and Simon Tournier have together published two interesting posts on the GNU Guix blog this month. In early March, Ludovic Court s, Maxim Cournoyer, Jan Nieuwenhuizen and Simon Tournier wrote about software and source code identification and how that might be performed using Guix, rhetorically posing the questions: What does it take to identify software ? How can we tell what software is running on a machine to determine, for example, what security vulnerabilities might affect it? Later in the month, Ludovic Court s wrote a solo post describing adventures on the quest for long-term reproducible deployment. Ludovic s post touches on GNU Guix s aim to support time travel , the ability to reliably (and reproducibly) revert to an earlier point in time, employing the iconic image of Harold Lloyd hanging off the clock in Safety Last! (1925) to poetically illustrate both the slapstick nature of current modern technology and the gymnastics required to navigate hazards of our own making.

Two new Rust-based tools for post-processing determinism Zbigniew J drzejewski-Szmek announced add-determinism, a work-in-progress reimplementation of the Reproducible Builds project s own strip-nondeterminism tool in the Rust programming language, intended to be used as a post-processor in RPM-based distributions such as Fedora In addition, Yossi Kreinin published a blog post titled refix: fast, debuggable, reproducible builds that describes a tool that post-processes binaries in such a way that they are still debuggable with gdb, etc.. Yossi post details the motivation and techniques behind the (fast) performance of the tool.

Distribution work In Debian this month, since the testing framework no longer varies the build path, James Addison performed a bulk downgrade of the bug severity for issues filed with a level of normal to a new level of wishlist. In addition, 28 reviews of Debian packages were added, 38 were updated and 23 were removed this month adding to ever-growing knowledge about identified issues. As part of this effort, a number of issue types were updated, including Chris Lamb adding a new ocaml_include_directories toolchain issue [ ] and James Addison adding a new filesystem_order_in_java_jar_manifest_mf_include_resource issue [ ] and updating the random_uuid_in_notebooks_generated_by_nbsphinx to reference a relevant discussion thread [ ]. In addition, Roland Clobus posted his 24th status update of reproducible Debian ISO images. Roland highlights that the images for Debian unstable often cannot be generated due to changes in that distribution related to the 64-bit time_t transition. Lastly, Bernhard M. Wiedemann posted another monthly update for his reproducibility work in openSUSE.

Mailing list highlights Elsewhere on our mailing list this month:

• Alexander Railean of Siemens asked the list to aid in understanding how one can independently verify the reproducibility of Java projects from the Maven Central repository. Having explored those repositories, Alexander could not find examples where the buildinfo file was present. Arnout Engelen responded with some details.
• Fay Stegerman resuscitated a long-dormant thread to report that she added support in her diff-zip-meta.py tool to expose extra timestamps embedded in .zip and .apk metadata.

Website updates There were made a number of improvements to our website this month, including:

• Pol Dellaiera noticed the frequent need to correctly cite the website itself in academic work. To facilitate easier citation across multiple formats, Pol contributed a Citation File Format (CIF) file. As a result, an export in BibTeX format is now available in the Academic Publications section. Pol encourages community contributions to further refine the CITATION.cff file. Pol also added an substantial new section to the buy in page documenting the role of Software Bill of Materials (SBOMs) and ephemeral development environments. [ ][ ]
• Bernhard M. Wiedemann added a new commandments page to the documentation [ ][ ] and fixed some incorrect YAML elsewhere on the site [ ].
• Chris Lamb add three recent academic papers to the publications page of the website. [ ]
• Mattia Rizzolo and Holger Levsen collaborated to add Infomaniak as a sponsor of amd64 virtual machines. [ ][ ][ ]
• Roland Clobus updated the stable outputs page, dropping version numbers from Python documentation pages [ ] and noting that Python s set data structure is also affected by the PYTHONHASHSEED functionality. [ ]

Delta chat clients now reproducible Delta Chat, an open source messaging application that can work over email, announced this month that the Rust-based core library underlying Delta chat application is now reproducible.

diffoscope 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 such as uploading versions 259, 260 and 261 to Debian and made the following additional changes:

• New features:
  • Add support for the zipdetails tool from the Perl distribution. Thanks to Fay Stegerman and Larry Doolittle et al. for the pointer and thread about this tool. [ ]
• Bug fixes:
  • Don t identify Redis database dumps as GNU R database files based simply on their filename. [ ]
  • Add a missing call to File.recognizes so we actually perform the filename check for GNU R data files. [ ]
  • Don t crash if we encounter an .rdb file without an equivalent .rdx file. (#1066991)
  • Correctly check for 7z being available and not lz4 when testing 7z. [ ]
  • Prevent a traceback when comparing a contentful .pyc file with an empty one. [ ]
• Testsuite improvements:
  • Fix .epub tests after supporting the new zipdetails tool. [ ]
  • Don t use parenthesis within test skipping messages, as PyTest adds its own parenthesis. [ ]
  • Factor out Python version checking in test_zip.py. [ ]
  • Skip some Zip-related tests under Python 3.10.14, as a potential regression may have been backported to the 3.10.x series. [ ]
  • Actually test 7z support in the test_7z set of tests, not the lz4 functionality. (Closes: reproducible-builds/diffoscope#359). [ ]

In addition, Fay Stegerman updated diffoscope s monkey patch for supporting the unusual Mozilla ZIP file format after Python s zipfile module changed to detect potentially insecure overlapping entries within .zip files. (#362) Chris Lamb also updated the trydiffoscope command line client, dropping a build-dependency on the deprecated python3-distutils package to fix Debian bug #1065988 [ ], taking a moment to also refresh the packaging to the latest Debian standards [ ]. Finally, Vagrant Cascadian submitted an update for diffoscope version 260 in GNU Guix. [ ]

Upstream patches This month, we wrote a large number of patches, including:

• Bernhard M. Wiedemann:
  • helm (SSL-related build failure)
  • java-21-openjdk (parallelism)
  • libressl (SSL-related build failure)
  • nfdump (date issue)
  • python-django-q (avoid stuck build)
  • python-smart-open (fails to build on single-CPU machines)
  • python-stdnum (fails to build in 2039)
  • python-yarl (regression)
  • qemu (build failure)
  • rabbitmq-java-client (with Fridrich Strba; Maven timestamp issue)
  • rmw (build fails in 2038)
  • warewulf (with Egbert Eich; cpio modification time and inode issue)
  • wxWidgets (fails to build in 2038)
• Chris Lamb:
  • #1066042 filed against python-quantities.
  • #1066083 filed against gnome-maps.
  • #1066084 filed against tox.
  • #1066085 filed against q2cli.
  • #1067098 filed against mpl-sphinx-theme.
  • #1067099 filed against woof-doom.
  • #1067100 filed against bochs.
  • #1067101 filed against storm-lang.
  • #1067102 filed against librsvg.
  • #1067218 filed against gretl.
  • #1067483 filed against postfix.
  • #1067484 filed against node-function-bind.
  • #1067485 filed against python-pysaml2.
  • #1067947 filed against golang-github-stvp-tempredis.
• James Addison:
  • #1065124 filed against matplotlib.
  • #1066014 filed against pathos.
  • #1066016 filed against rdflib.
  • #1066017 filed against xonsh.
  • #1066045 filed against maven-bundle-plugin. (This patch was then uploaded by Mattia Rizzollo.)
• Ji Techet:
  • geany (toolchain-related issue for glfw)

Bernhard M. Wiedemann used reproducibility-tooling to detect and fix packages that added changes in their %check section, thus failing when built with the --no-checks option. Only half of all openSUSE packages were tested so far, but a large number of bugs were filed, including ones against caddy, exiv2, gnome-disk-utility, grisbi, gsl, itinerary, kosmindoormap, libQuotient, med-tools, plasma6-disks, pspp, python-pypuppetdb, python-urlextract, rsync, vagrant-libvirt and xsimd. Similarly, Jean-Pierre De Jesus DIAZ employed reproducible builds techniques in order to test a proposed refactor of the ath9k-htc-firmware package. As the change produced bit-for-bit identical binaries to the previously shipped pre-built binaries:

I don t have the hardware to test this firmware, but the build produces the same hashes for the firmware so it s safe to say that the firmware should keep working.

Reproducibility testing framework The Reproducible Builds project operates a comprehensive testing framework running primarily at tests.reproducible-builds.org in order to check packages and other artifacts for reproducibility. In March, an enormous number of changes were made by Holger Levsen:

• Debian-related changes:
  • Sleep less after a so-called 404 package state has occurred. [ ]
  • Schedule package builds more often. [ ][ ]
  • Regenerate all our HTML indexes every hour, but only every 12h for the released suites. [ ]
  • Create and update unstable and experimental base systems on armhf again. [ ][ ]
  • Don t reschedule so many depwait packages due to the current size of the i386 architecture queue. [ ]
  • Redefine our scheduling thresholds and amounts. [ ]
  • Schedule untested packages with a higher priority, otherwise slow architectures cannot keep up with the experimental distribution growing. [ ]
  • Only create the stats_buildinfo.png graph once per day. [ ][ ]
  • Reproducible Debian dashboard: refactoring, update several more static stats only every 12h. [ ]
  • Document how to use systemctl with new systemd-based services. [ ]
  • Temporarily disable armhf and i386 continuous integration tests in order to get some stability back. [ ]
  • Use the deb.debian.org CDN everywhere. [ ]
  • Remove the rsyslog logging facility on bookworm systems. [ ]
  • Add zst to the list of packages which are false-positive diskspace issues. [ ]
  • Detect failures to bootstrap Debian base systems. [ ]
• Arch Linux-related changes:
  • Temporarily disable builds because the pacman package manager is broken. [ ][ ]
  • Split reproducible_html_live_status and split the scheduling timing . [ ][ ][ ]
  • Improve handling when database is locked. [ ][ ]
• Misc changes:
  • Show failed services that require manual cleanup. [ ][ ]
  • Integrate two new Infomaniak nodes. [ ][ ][ ][ ]
  • Improve IRC notifications for artifacts. [ ]
  • Run diffoscope in different systemd slices. [ ]
  • Run the node health check more often, as it can now repair some issues. [ ][ ]
  • Also include the string Bot in the userAgent for Git. (Re: #929013). [ ]
  • Document increased tmpfs size on our OUSL nodes. [ ]
  • Disable memory account for the reproducible_build service. [ ][ ]
  • Allow 10 times as many open files for the Jenkins service. [ ]
  • Set OOMPolicy=continue and OOMScoreAdjust=-1000 for both the Jenkins and the reproducible_build service. [ ]

Mattia Rizzolo also made the following changes:

• Debian-related changes:
  • Define a systemd slice to group all relevant services. [ ][ ]
  • Add a bunch of quotes in scripts to assuage the shellcheck tool. [ ]
  • Add stats on how many packages have been built today so far. [ ]
  • Instruct systemd-run to handle diffoscope s exit codes specially. [ ]
  • Prefer the pgrep tool over grepping the output of ps. [ ]
  • Re-enable a couple of i386 and armhf architecture builders. [ ][ ]
  • Fix some stylistic issues flagged by the Python flake8 tool. [ ]
  • Cease scheduling Debian unstable and experimental on the armhf architecture due to the time_t transition. [ ]
  • Start a few more i386 & armhf workers. [ ][ ][ ]
  • Temporarly skip pbuilder updates in the unstable distribution, but only on the armhf architecture. [ ]
• Other changes:
  • Perform some large-scale refactoring on how the systemd service operates. [ ][ ]
  • Move the list of workers into a separate file so it s accessible to a number of scripts. [ ]
  • Refactor the powercycle_x86_nodes.py script to use the new IONOS API and its new Python bindings. [ ]
  • Also fix nph-logwatch after the worker changes. [ ]
  • Do not install the stunnel tool anymore, it shouldn t be needed by anything anymore. [ ]
  • Move temporary directories related to Arch Linux into a single directory for clarity. [ ]
  • Update the arm64 architecture host keys. [ ]
  • Use a common Postfix configuration. [ ]

The following changes were also made by:

• Jan-Benedict Glaw:
  • Initial work to clean up a messy NetBSD-related script. [ ][ ]
• Roland Clobus:
  • Show the installer log if the installer fails to build. [ ]
  • Avoid the minus character (i.e. -) in a variable in order to allow for tags in openQA. [ ]
  • Update the schedule of Debian live image builds. [ ]
• Vagrant Cascadian:
  • Maintenance on the virt* nodes is completed so bring them back online. [ ]
  • Use the fully qualified domain name in configuration. [ ]

Node maintenance was also performed by Holger Levsen, Mattia Rizzolo [ ][ ] and Vagrant Cascadian [ ][ ][ ][ ]

---

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:

• IRC: #reproducible-builds on irc.oftc.net.
• Twitter: @ReproBuilds
• Mastodon: @reproducible_builds@fosstodon.org
• Mailing list: rb-general@lists.reproducible-builds.org

ceb and I are members of the Derril Water Solar Park cooperative. We were recently invited to vote on whether the coop should bid for a Contract for Difference, in a government green electricity auction. We ve voted No.

• Green electricity from your mainstream supplier is a lie
• Ripple
• Contracts for Difference
• Ripple and CfD
• Voting No

Green electricity from your mainstream supplier is a lie For a while ceb and I have wanted to contribute directly to green energy provision. This isn t really possible in the mainstream consumer electricy market. Mainstream electricity suppliers 100% green energy tariffs are pure greenwashing. In a capitalist boondoogle, they basically divvy up the electricity so that customers on the (typically more expensive) green tariff get the green electricity, and the other customers get whatever is left. (Of course the electricity is actually all mixed up by the National Grid.) There are fewer people signed up for these tariffs than there is green power generated, so this basically means signing up for a green tariff has no effect whatsoever, other than giving evil people more money. Ripple About a year ago we heard about Ripple. The structure is a little complicated, but the basic upshot is: Ripple promote and manage renewable energy schemes. The schemes themselves are each an individual company; the company is largely owned by a co-operative. The co-op is owned by consumers of electricity in the UK., To stop the co-operative being an purely financial investment scheme, shares ownership is limited according to your electricity usage. The electricity is be sold on the open market, and the profits are used to offset members electricity bills. (One gotcha from all of this is that for this to work your electricity billing provider has to be signed up with Ripple, but ours, Octopus, is.) It seemed to us that this was a way for us to directly cause (and pay for!) the actual generation of green electricity. So, we bought shares in one these co-operatives: we are co-owners of the Derril Water Solar Farm. We signed up for the maximum: funding generating capacity corresponding to 120% of our current electricity usage. We paid a little over 5000 for our shares. Contracts for Difference The UK has a renewable energy subsidy scheme, which goes by the name of Contracts for Difference. The idea is that a renewable energy generation company bids in advance, saying that they ll sell their electricity at Y price, for the duration of the contract (15 years in the current round). The lowest bids win. All the electricity from the participating infrastructure is sold on the open market, but if the market price is low the government makes up the difference, and if the price is high, the government takes the winnings. This is supposedly good for giving a stable investment environment, since the price the developer is going to get now doesn t depends on the electricity market over the next 15 years. The CfD system is supposed to encourage development, so you can only apply before you ve commissioned your generation infrastructure. Ripple and CfD Ripple recently invited us to agree that the Derril Water co-operative should bid in the current round of CfDs. If this goes ahead, and we are one of the auction s winners, the result would be that, instead of selling our electricity at the market price, we ll sell it at the fixed CfD price. This would mean that our return on our investment (which show up as savings on our electricity bills) would be decoupled from market electricity prices, and be much more predictable. They can t tell us the price they d want to bid at, and future electricity prices are rather hard to predict, but it s clear from the accompanying projections that they think we d be better off on average with a CfD. The documentation is very full of financial projections and graphs; other factors aren t really discussed in any detail. The rules of the co-op didn t require them to hold a vote, but very sensibly, for such a fundamental change in the model, they decided to treat it roughly the same way as for a rules change: they re hoping to get 75% Yes votes. Voting No The reason we re in this co-op at all is because we want to directly fund renewable electricity. Participating in the CfD auction would involve us competing with capitalist energy companies for government subsidies. Subsidies which are supposed to encourage the provision of green electricity. It seems to us that participating in this auction would remove most of the difference between what we hoped to do by investing in Derril Water, and just participating in the normal consumer electricity market. In particular, if we do win in the auction, that s probably directly removing the funding and investment support model for other, market-investor-funded, projects. In other words, our buying into Derril Water ceases to be an additional green energy project, changing (in its minor way) the UK s electricity mix. It becomes a financial transaction much more tenously connected (if connected at all) to helping mitigate the climate emergency. So our conclusion was that we must vote against.

comments

• I updated the Linux (4.19) package for buster to upstream version 4.19.311, but I did not make an upload this month.
• I triaged recent CVE IDs assigned for kernel security issues, and queried some duplicate and trivial issues, which have now been rejected.
• I reviewed and applied a fix for klibc s inet_pton() function. I then added some test cases for it, and made further fixes.

• I updated the Linux (4.19) package for buster to upstream version 4.19.311, but I did not make an upload this month.
• I triaged recent CVE IDs assigned for kernel security issues, and queried some duplicate and trivial issues, which have now been rejected.
• I reviewed and applied a fix for klibc s inet_pton() function. I then added some test cases for it, and made further fixes.

Uptime is often considered a measure of system reliability, an indication that the running software is stable and can be counted on. However, this hides the insidious build-up of state throughout the system as it runs, the slow drift from the expected to the strange. As Nolan Lawson highlights in an excellent post entitled Programmers are bad at managing state, state is the most challenging part of programming. It s why did you try turning it off and on again is a classic tech support response to any problem.

You: uptime

Me: Every machine gets rebooted at 1AM to clear the slate for maintenance, and at 3:30AM to push through any pending updates. @SwiftOnSecurity, December 27, 2020

In addition to the problem of state, installing regular updates periodically requires a reboot, even if the rest of the process is automated through a tool like unattended-upgrades. For my personal homelab, I manage a handful of different machines running various services. I used to just schedule a day to update and reboot all of them, but that got very tedious very quickly. I then moved the reboot to a cronjob, and then recently to a systemd timer and service. I figure that laying out my path to better management of this might help others, and will almost certainly lead to someone telling me a better way to do this. UPDATE: Turns out there s another option for better systemd cron integration. See systemd-cron below.

Ultimately, uptime only measures the duration since you last proved you can turn the machine on and have it boot. @SwiftOnSecurity, May 7, 2016

Stage One: Reboot Cron The first, and easiest approach, is a simple cron job. Just adding the following line to /var/spool/cron/crontabs/root¹ is enough to get your machine to reboot once a month² on the 6th at 8:00 AM³:

0 8 6 * * reboot

I had this configured for many years and it works well. But you have no indication as to whether it succeeds except for checking your uptime regularly yourself.

Stage Two: Reboot systemd Timer The next evolution of this approach for me was to use a systemd timer. I created a regular-reboot.timer with the following contents:

[Unit]
Description=Reboot on a Regular Basis
[Timer]
Unit=regular-reboot.service
OnBootSec=1month
[Install]
WantedBy=timers.target

This timer will trigger the regular-reboot.service systemd unit when the system reaches one month of uptime. I ve seen some guides to creating timer units recommend adding a Wants=regular-reboot.service to the [Unit] section, but this has the consequence of running that service every time it starts the timer. In this case that will just reboot your system on startup which is not what you want. Care needs to be taken to use the OnBootSec directive instead of OnCalendar or any of the other time specifications, as your system could reboot, discover its still within the expected window and reboot again. With OnBootSec your system will not have that problem. Technically, this same problem could have occurred with the cronjob approach, but in practice it never did, as the systems took long enough to come back up that they were no longer within the expected window for the job. I then added the regular-reboot.service:

[Unit]
Description=Reboot on a Regular Basis
Wants=regular-reboot.timer
[Service]
Type=oneshot
ExecStart=shutdown -r 02:45

You ll note that this service is actually scheduling a specific reboot time via the shutdown command instead of just immediately rebooting. This is a bit of a hack needed because I can t control when the timer runs exactly when using OnBootSec. This way different systems have different reboot times so that everything doesn t just reboot and fail all at once. Were something to fail to come back up I would have some time to fix it, as each machine has a few hours between scheduled reboots. One you have both files in place, you ll simply need to reload configuration and then enable and start the timer unit:

systemctl daemon-reload
systemctl enable --now regular-reboot.timer

You can then check when it will fire next:

# systemctl status regular-reboot.timer
  regular-reboot.timer - Reboot on a Regular Basis
     Loaded: loaded (/etc/systemd/system/regular-reboot.timer; enabled; preset: enabled)
     Active: active (waiting) since Wed 2024-03-13 01:54:52 EDT; 1 week 4 days ago
    Trigger: Fri 2024-04-12 12:24:42 EDT; 2 weeks 4 days left
   Triggers:   regular-reboot.service
Mar 13 01:54:52 dorfl systemd[1]: Started regular-reboot.timer - Reboot on a Regular Basis.

Sidenote: Replacing all Cron Jobs with systemd Timers More generally, I ve now replaced all cronjobs on my personal systems with systemd timer units, mostly because I can now actually track failures via prometheus-node-exporter. There are plenty of ways to hack in cron support to the node exporter, but just moving to systemd units provides both support for tracking failure and logging, both of which make system administration much easier when things inevitably go wrong.

systemd-cron An alternative to converting everything by hand, if you happen to have a lot of cronjobs is systemd-cron. It will make each crontab and /etc/cron.* directory into automatic service and timer units. Thanks to Alexandre Detiste for letting me know about this project. I have few enough cron jobs that I ve already converted, but for anyone looking at a large number of jobs to convert you ll want to check it out!

Stage Three: Monitor that it s working The final step here is confirm that these units actually work, beyond just firing regularly. I now have the following rule in my prometheus-alertmanager rules:

  - alert: UptimeTooHigh
    expr: (time() - node_boot_time_seconds job="node" ) / 86400 > 35
    annotations:
      summary: "Instance  Has Been Up Too Long!"
      description: "Instance  Has Been Up Too Long!"

This will trigger an alert anytime that I have a machine up for more than 35 days. This actually helped me track down one machine that I had forgotten to set up this new unit on⁴.

Not everything needs to scale One of the most common fallacies programmers fall into is that we will jump to automating a solution before we stop and figure out how much time it would even save. In taking a slow improvement route to solve this problem for myself, I ve managed not to invest too much time⁵ in worrying about this but also achieved a meaningful improvement beyond my first approach of doing it all by hand.

1. You could also add a line to /etc/crontab or drop a script into /etc/cron.monthly depending on your system.
2. Why once a month? Mostly to avoid regular disruptions, but still be reasonably timely on updates.
3. If you re looking to understand the cron time format I recommend crontab guru.
4. In the long term I really should set up something like ansible to automatically push fleetwide changes like this but with fewer machines than fingers this seems like overkill.
5. Of course by now writing about it, I ve probably doubled the amount of time I ve spent thinking about this topic but oh well

Like each month, have a look at the work funded by Freexian s Debian LTS offering.

Debian LTS contributors In February, 18 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:

• Abhijith PA did 10.0h (out of 14.0h assigned), thus carrying over 4.0h to the next month.
• Adrian Bunk did 13.5h (out of 24.25h assigned and 41.75h from previous period), thus carrying over 52.5h to the next month.
• Bastien Roucari s did 20.0h (out of 20.0h assigned).
• Ben Hutchings did 2.0h (out of 14.5h assigned and 9.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 22.0h to the next month.
• Chris Lamb did 18.0h (out of 18.0h assigned).
• Daniel Leidert did 10.0h (out of 10.0h assigned).
• Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 3.0h (out of 28.25h assigned and 31.75h from previous period), thus carrying over 57.0h to the next month.
• Guilhem Moulin did 7.25h (out of 4.75h assigned and 15.25h from previous period), thus carrying over 12.75h to the next month.
• Holger Levsen did 0.5h (out of 3.5h assigned and 8.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 11.5h to the next month.
• Lee Garrett did 0.0h (out of 18.25h assigned and 41.75h from previous period), thus carrying over 60.0h to the next month.
• Markus Koschany did 40.0h (out of 40.0h assigned).
• Roberto C. S nchez did 3.5h (out of 8.75h assigned and 3.25h from previous period), thus carrying over 8.5h to the next month.
• Santiago Ruano Rinc n did 13.5h (out of 13.5h assigned and 2.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 2.5h to the next month.
• Sean Whitton did 4.5h (out of 0.5h assigned and 5.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 1.5h to the next month.
• Sylvain Beucler did 24.5h (out of 27.75h assigned and 32.25h from previous period), thus carrying over 35.5h to the next month.
• Thorsten Alteholz did 14.0h (out of 14.0h assigned).
• Tobias Frost did 12.0h (out of 12.0h assigned).
• Utkarsh Gupta did 11.25h (out of 26.75h assigned and 33.25h from previous period), thus carrying over 48.75 to the next month.

Evolution of the situation In February, we have released 17 DLAs. The number of DLAs published during February was a bit lower than usual, as there was much work going on in the area of triaging CVEs (a number of which turned out to not affect Debia buster, and others which ended up being duplicates, or otherwise determined to be invalid). Of the packages which did receive updates, notable were sudo (to fix a privilege management issue), and iwd and wpa (both of which suffered from authentication bypass vulnerabilities). While this has already been already announced in the Freexian blog, we would like to mention here the start of the Long Term Support project for Samba 4.17. You can find all the important details in that post, but we would like to highlight that it is thanks to our LTS sponsors that we are able to fund the work from our partner, Catalyst, towards improving the security support of Samba in Debian 12 (Bookworm).

Thanks to our sponsors Sponsors that joined recently are in bold.

• Platinum sponsors:
  • TOSHIBA (for 102 months)
  • Civil Infrastructure Platform (CIP) (for 70 months)
• Gold sponsors:
  • Roche Diagnostics International AG (for 113 months)
  • Linode (for 107 months)
  • Babiel GmbH (for 96 months)
  • Plat Home (for 96 months)
  • CINECA (for 70 months)
  • University of Oxford (for 52 months)
  • Deveryware (for 39 months)
  • VyOS Inc (for 34 months)
  • EDF SA (for 23 months)
• Silver sponsors:
  • Domeneshop AS (for 117 months)
  • Nantes M tropole (for 112 months)
  • Univention GmbH (for 103 months)
  • Universit Jean Monnet de St Etienne (for 103 months)
  • Ribbon Communications, Inc. (for 97 months)
  • Exonet B.V. (for 87 months)
  • Leibniz Rechenzentrum (for 81 months)
  • Minist re de l Europe et des Affaires trang res (for 64 months)
  • Cloudways by DigitalOcean (for 54 months)
  • Dinahosting SL (for 52 months)
  • Bauer Xcel Media Deutschland KG (for 46 months)
  • Platform.sh SAS (for 46 months)
  • Moxa Inc. (for 40 months)
  • sipgate GmbH (for 37 months)
  • OVH US LLC (for 35 months)
  • Tilburg University (for 35 months)
  • GSI Helmholtzzentrum f r Schwerionenforschung GmbH (for 27 months)
  • Soliton Systems K.K. (for 24 months)
• Bronze sponsors:
  • Evolix (for 118 months)
  • Seznam.cz, a.s. (for 118 months)
  • Intevation GmbH (for 115 months)
  • Linuxhotel GmbH (for 115 months)
  • Daevel SARL (for 113 months)
  • Bitfolk LTD (for 112 months)
  • Megaspace Internet Services GmbH (for 112 months)
  • NUMLOG (for 112 months)
  • Greenbone AG (for 111 months)
  • WinGo AG (for 111 months)
  • Ecole Centrale de Nantes - LHEEA (for 107 months)
  • Entr ouvert (for 102 months)
  • Adfinis AG (for 99 months)
  • GNI MEDIA (for 94 months)
  • Laboratoire LEGI - UMR 5519 / CNRS (for 94 months)
  • Tesorion (for 94 months)
  • Bearstech (for 85 months)
  • LiHAS (for 85 months)
  • Catalyst IT Ltd (for 80 months)
  • Supagro (for 75 months)
  • Demarcq SAS (for 74 months)
  • Universit Grenoble Alpes (for 60 months)
  • TouchWeb SAS (for 52 months)
  • SPiN AG (for 49 months)
  • CoreFiling (for 44 months)
  • Institut des sciences cognitives Marc Jeannerod (for 39 months)
  • Observatoire des Sciences de l Univers de Grenoble (for 36 months)
  • Tem Innovations GmbH (for 31 months)
  • WordFinder.pro (for 30 months)
  • CNRS DT INSU R sif (for 29 months)
  • Alter Way (for 22 months)
  • Institut Camille Jordan (for 11 months)

Posted on March 9, 2024
Tags: madeof:atoms, craft:sewing, FreeSoftWear

After making my Elastic Neck Top I knew I wanted to make another one less constrained by the amount of available fabric. I had a big cut of white cotton voile, I bought some more swimsuit elastic, and I also had a spool of n 100 sewing cotton, but then I postponed the project for a while I was working on other things. Then FOSDEM 2024 arrived, I was going to remote it, and I was working on my Augusta Stays, but I knew that in the middle of FOSDEM I risked getting to the stage where I needed to leave the computer to try the stays on: not something really compatible with the frenetic pace of a FOSDEM weekend, even one spent at home. I needed a backup project¹, and this was perfect: I already had everything I needed, the pattern and instructions were already on my site (so I didn t need to take pictures while working), and it was mostly a lot of straight seams, perfect while watching conference videos. So, on the Friday before FOSDEM I cut all of the pieces, then spent three quarters of FOSDEM on the stays, and when I reached the point where I needed to stop for a fit test I started on the top. Like the first one, everything was sewn by hand, and one week after I had started everything was assembled, except for the casings for the elastic at the neck and cuffs, which required about 10 km of sewing, and even if it was just a running stitch it made me want to reconsider my lifestyle choices a few times: there was really no reason for me not to do just those seams by machine in a few minutes. Instead I kept sewing by hand whenever I had time for it, and on the next weekend it was ready. We had a rare day of sun during the weekend, so I wore my thermal underwear, some other layer, a scarf around my neck, and went outside with my SO to have a batch of pictures taken (those in the jeans posts, and others for a post I haven t written yet. Have I mentioned I have a backlog?). And then the top went into the wardrobe, and it will come out again when the weather will be a bit warmer. Or maybe it will be used under the Augusta Stays, since I don t have a 1700 chemise yet, but that requires actually finishing them. The pattern for this project was already online, of course, but I ve added a picture of the casing to the relevant section, and everything is as usual #FreeSoftWear.

---

1. yes, I could have worked on some knitting WIP, but lately I m more in a sewing mood.

Posted on March 8, 2024
Tags: madeof:atoms, craft:sewing, FreeSoftWear

I had finished sewing my jeans, I had a scant 50 cm of elastic denim left. Unrelated to that, I had just finished drafting a vest with Valentina, after the Cutters Practical Guide to the Cutting of Ladies Garments. A new pattern requires a (wearable) mockup. 50 cm of leftover fabric require a quick project. The decision didn t take a lot of time. As a mockup, I kept things easy: single layer with no lining, some edges finished with a topstitched hem and some with bias tape, and plain tape on the fronts, to give more support to the buttons and buttonholes. I did add pockets: not real welt ones (too much effort on denim), but simple slits covered by flaps.

piece; there is a slit in the middle that has been finished with topstitching.

To do them I marked the slits, then I cut two rectangles of pocketing fabric that should have been as wide as the slit + 1.5 cm (width of the pocket) + 3 cm (allowances) and twice the sum of as tall as I wanted the pocket to be plus 1 cm (space above the slit) + 1.5 cm (allowances). Then I put the rectangle on the right side of the denim, aligned so that the top edge was 2.5 cm above the slit, sewed 2 mm from the slit, cut, turned the pocketing to the wrong side, pressed and topstitched 2 mm from the fold to finish the slit.

other sides; it does not lay flat on the right side of the fabric because the finished slit (hidden in the picture) is pulling it.

Then I turned the pocketing back to the right side, folded it in half, sewed the side and top seams with a small allowance, pressed and turned it again to the wrong side, where I sewed the seams again to make a french seam. And finally, a simple rectangular denim flap was topstitched to the front, covering the slits. I wasn t as precise as I should have been and the pockets aren t exactly the right size, but they will do to see if I got the positions right (I think that the breast one should be a cm or so lower, the waist ones are fine), and of course they are tiny, but that s to be expected from a waistcoat. The other thing that wasn t exactly as expected is the back: the pattern splits the bottom part of the back to give it sufficient spring over the hips . The book is probably published in 1892, but I had already found when drafting the foundation skirt that its idea of hips includes a bit of structure. The enough steel to carry a book or a cup of tea kind of structure. I should have expected a lot of spring, and indeed that s what I got. To fit the bottom part of the back on the limited amount of fabric I had to piece it, and I suspect that the flat felled seam in the center is helping it sticking out; I don t think it s exactly bad, but it is a peculiar look. Also, I had to cut the back on the fold, rather than having a seam in the middle and the grain on a different angle. Anyway, my next waistcoat project is going to have a linen-cotton lining and silk fashion fabric, and I d say that the pattern is good enough that I can do a few small fixes and cut it directly in the lining, using it as a second mockup. As for the wrinkles, there is quite a bit, but it looks something that will be solved by a bit of lightweight boning in the side seams and in the front; it will be seen in the second mockup and the finished waistcoat. As for this one, it s definitely going to get some wear as is, in casual contexts. Except. Well, it s a denim waistcoat, right? With a very different cut from the get a denim jacket and rip out the sleeves , but still a denim waistcoat, right? The kind that you cover in patches, right? And I may have screenprinted a home sewing is killing fashion patch some time ago, using the SVG from wikimedia commons / the Home Taping is Killing Music page. And. Maybe I ll wait until I have finished the real waistcoat. But I suspect that one, and other sewing / costuming patches may happen in the future. No regrets, as the words on my seam ripper pin say, right? :D

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.

Happy 2024! DAIS have continued their programme of posthumous Coil remasters and re-issues. Constant Shallowness Leads To Evil was remastered by Josh Bonati in 2021 and re-released in 2022 in a dizzying array of different packaging variants. The original releases in 2000 had barely any artwork, and given that void I think Nathaniel Young has done a great job of creating something compelling. A limited number of the original re-issue have special lenticular covers, although these were not sold by any distributors outside the US. I tried to find a copy on my trip to Portland in 2022, to no avail. Last year DAIS followed Constant with Queens Of The Circulating Library, same deal: limited lenticular covers, US only. Both are also available digital-only, e.g. on Bandcamp: Constant , Queens . The original, pre-remastered releases have been freely available on archive.org for a long time: Constant , Queens Both of these releases feel to me that they were made available by the group somewhat as an afterthought, having been produced primarily as part of their live efforts. (I'm speculating freely here, it might not be true). Live takes of some of this material exist in the form of Coil Presents Time Machines, which has not (yet) been reissued. In my opinion this is a really compelling recording. I vividly remember listening to this whilst trying to get an hour's rest in a hotel somewhere on a work trip. It took me to some strange places! I'll leave you from one of my favourite moments from "Colour Sound Oblivion", Coil's video collection of live backdrops. When this was performed live it was also called "Constant Shallowness Leads To Evil", although it's distinct from the material on the LP: also available on archive.org. A version of this Constant made it onto a Russian live bootleg, which is available on Spotify and Bandcamp complete with some John Balance banter: we only do this on religious holidays Constant Shallowness Leads to Evil by Coil

Like each month, have a look at the work funded by Freexian s Debian LTS offering.

Debian LTS contributors In December, 18 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:

• Abhijith PA did 7.0h (out of 7.0h assigned and 7.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 7.0h to the next month.
• Adrian Bunk did 16.0h (out of 26.25h assigned and 8.75h from previous period), thus carrying over 19.0h to the next month.
• Bastien Roucari s did 16.0h (out of 16.0h assigned and 4.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 4.0h to the next month.
• Ben Hutchings did 8.0h (out of 7.25h assigned and 16.75h from previous period), thus carrying over 16.0h to the next month.
• Chris Lamb did 18.0h (out of 18.0h assigned).
• Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 8.0h (out of 26.75h assigned and 8.25h from previous period), thus carrying over 27.0h to the next month.
• Guilhem Moulin did 25.0h (out of 18.0h assigned and 7.0h from previous period).
• Holger Levsen did 5.5h (out of 5.5h assigned).
• Jochen Sprickerhof did 0.0h (out of 0h assigned and 10.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 10.0h to the next month.
• Lee Garrett did 0.0h (out of 25.75h assigned and 9.25h from previous period), thus carrying over 35.0h to the next month.
• Markus Koschany did 35.0h (out of 35.0h assigned).
• Roberto C. S nchez did 9.5h (out of 5.5h assigned and 6.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 2.5h to the next month.
• Santiago Ruano Rinc n did 8.255h (out of 3.26h assigned and 12.745h from previous period), thus carrying over 7.75h to the next month.
• Sean Whitton did 4.25h (out of 3.25h assigned and 6.75h from previous period), thus carrying over 5.75h to the next month.
• Sylvain Beucler did 16.5h (out of 21.25h assigned and 13.75h from previous period), thus carrying over 18.5h to the next month.
• Thorsten Alteholz did 14.0h (out of 14.0h assigned).
• Tobias Frost did 10.25h (out of 12.0h assigned), thus carrying over 1.75h to the next month.
• Utkarsh Gupta did 18.75h (out of 11.25h assigned and 13.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 6.0h to the next month.

Evolution of the situation In December, we have released 29 DLAs. A particularly notable update in December was prepared by LTS contributor Santiago Ruano Rinc n for the openssh package. The updated produced DLA-3694-1 and included a fix for the Terrapin Attack (CVE-2023-48795), which was a rather serious flaw in the SSH protocol itself. The package bluez was the subject of another notable update by LTS contributor Chris Lamb, which resulted in DLA-3689-1 to address an insecure default configuration which allowed attackers to inject keyboard commands over Bluetooth without first authenticating. The LTS team continues its efforts to have a positive impact beyond the boundaries of LTS. Several contributors worked on packages, preparing LTS updates, but also preparing patches or full updates which were uploaded to the unstable, stable, and oldstable distributions, including: Guilhem Moulin s update of tinyxml (uploads to LTS and unstable and patches submitted to the security team for stable and oldstable); Guilhem Moulin s update of xerces-c (uploads to LTS and unstable and patches submitted to the security team for oldstable); Thorsten Alteholz s update of libde265 (uploads to LTS and stable and additional patches submitted to the maintainer for stable and oldstable); Thorsten Alteholz s update of cjson (upload to LTS and patches submitted to the maintainer for stable and oldstable); and Tobias Frost s update of opendkim (sponsor maintainer-prepared upload to LTS and additionally prepared updates for stable and oldstable). Going beyond Debian and looking to the broader community, LTS contributor Bastien Roucari s was contacted by SUSE concerning an update he had prepared for zbar. He was able to assist by coordinating with the former organization of the original zbar author to secure for SUSE access to information concerning the exploits. This has enabled another distribution to benefit from the work done in support of LTS and from the assistance of Bastien in coordinating the access to information. Finally, LTS contributor Santiago Ruano Rinc n continued work relating to how updates for packages in statically-linked language ecosystems (e.g., Go, Rust, and others) are handled. The work is presently focused on more accurately and reliably identifying which packages are impacted in a given update scenario to enable notifications to be published so that users will be made aware of these situations as they occur. As the work continues, it will eventually result in improvements to Debian infrustructure so that the LTS team and Security team are able to manage updates of this nature in a more consistent way.

Thanks to our sponsors Sponsors that joined recently are in bold.

• Platinum sponsors:
  • TOSHIBA (for 100 months)
  • Civil Infrastructure Platform (CIP) (for 68 months)
• Gold sponsors:
  • Roche Diagnostics International AG (for 111 months)
  • Linode (for 105 months)
  • Babiel GmbH (for 94 months)
  • Plat Home (for 94 months)
  • University of Oxford (for 50 months)
  • Deveryware (for 37 months)
  • VyOS Inc (for 32 months)
  • EDF SA (for 21 months)
• Silver sponsors:
  • Domeneshop AS (for 115 months)
  • Nantes M tropole (for 109 months)
  • Univention GmbH (for 101 months)
  • Universit Jean Monnet de St Etienne (for 101 months)
  • Ribbon Communications, Inc. (for 95 months)
  • Exonet B.V. (for 85 months)
  • Leibniz Rechenzentrum (for 79 months)
  • CINECA (for 68 months)
  • Minist re de l Europe et des Affaires trang res (for 62 months)
  • Cloudways by DigitalOcean (for 52 months)
  • Dinahosting SL (for 50 months)
  • Bauer Xcel Media Deutschland KG (for 44 months)
  • Platform.sh SAS (for 44 months)
  • Moxa Inc. (for 38 months)
  • sipgate GmbH (for 35 months)
  • OVH US LLC (for 33 months)
  • Tilburg University (for 33 months)
  • GSI Helmholtzzentrum f r Schwerionenforschung GmbH (for 25 months)
  • Soliton Systems K.K. (for 22 months)
• Bronze sponsors:
  • Evolix (for 116 months)
  • Seznam.cz, a.s. (for 116 months)
  • Intevation GmbH (for 113 months)
  • Linuxhotel GmbH (for 113 months)
  • Daevel SARL (for 111 months)
  • Bitfolk LTD (for 110 months)
  • Megaspace Internet Services GmbH (for 110 months)
  • Greenbone AG (for 109 months)
  • NUMLOG (for 109 months)
  • WinGo AG (for 109 months)
  • Ecole Centrale de Nantes - LHEEA (for 105 months)
  • Entr ouvert (for 100 months)
  • Adfinis AG (for 97 months)
  • GNI MEDIA (for 92 months)
  • Laboratoire LEGI - UMR 5519 / CNRS (for 92 months)
  • Tesorion (for 92 months)
  • Bearstech (for 83 months)
  • LiHAS (for 83 months)
  • Catalyst IT Ltd (for 78 months)
  • Supagro (for 73 months)
  • Demarcq SAS (for 72 months)
  • Universit Grenoble Alpes (for 58 months)
  • TouchWeb SAS (for 50 months)
  • SPiN AG (for 47 months)
  • CoreFiling (for 42 months)
  • Institut des sciences cognitives Marc Jeannerod (for 37 months)
  • Observatoire des Sciences de l Univers de Grenoble (for 34 months)
  • Tem Innovations GmbH (for 29 months)
  • WordFinder.pro (for 28 months)
  • CNRS DT INSU R sif (for 27 months)
  • Alter Way (for 20 months)
  • Institut Camille Jordan (for 9 months)

Posted on December 30, 2023
Tags: madeof:atoms

By the influencers on the famous proprietary video platform¹. When I m crafting with no powertools I tend to watch videos, and this autumn I ve seen a few in a row that were making red wool dresses, at least one or two medieval kirtles. I don t remember which channels they were, and I ve decided not to go back and look for them, at least for a time. Anyway, my brain suddenly decided that I needed a red wool dress, fitted enough to give some bust support. I had already made a dress that satisfied the latter requirement and I still had more than half of the red wool faille I ve used for the Garibaldi blouse (still not blogged, but I will get to it), and this time I wanted it to be ready for this winter. While the pattern I was going to use is Victorian, it was designed for underwear, and this was designed to be outerwear, so from the very start I decided not to bother too much with any kind of historical details or techniques. I knew that I didn t have enough fabric to add a flounce to the hem, as in the cotton dress, but then I remembered that some time ago I fell for a piece of fringed trim in black, white and red. I did a quick check that the red wasn t clashing (it wasn t) and I knew I had a plan for the hem decoration. Then I spent a week finishing other projects, and the more I thought about this dress, the more I was tempted to have spiral lacing at the front rather than buttons, as a nod to the kirtle inspiration. It may end up be a bit of a hassle, but if it is too much I can always add a hidden zipper on a side seam, and only have to undo a bit of the lacing around the neckhole to wear the dress. Finally, I could start working on the dress: I cut all of the main pieces, and since the seam lines were quite curved I marked them with tailor s tacks, which I don t exactly enjoy doing or removing, but are the only method that was guaranteed to survive while manipulating this fabric (and not leave traces afterwards). While cutting the front pieces I accidentally cut the high neck line instead of the one I had used on the cotton dress: I decided to go for it also on the back pieces and decide later whether I wanted to lower it. Since this is a modern dress, with no historical accuracy at all, and I have access to a serger, I decided to use some dark blue cotton voile I ve had in my stash for quite some time, cut into bias strip, to bind the raw edges before sewing. This works significantly better than bought bias tape, which is a bit too stiff for this. For the front opening, I ve decided to reinforce the areas where the lacing holes will be with cotton: I ve used some other navy blue cotton, also from the stash, and added two lines of cording to stiffen the front edge. So I ve cut the front in two pieces rather than on the fold, sewn the reinforcements to the sewing allowances in such a way that the corded edge was aligned with the center front and then sewn the bottom of the front seam from just before the end of the reinforcements to the hem. The allowances are then folded back, and then they are kept in place by the worked lacing holes. The cotton was pinked, while for the wool I used the selvedge of the fabric and there was no need for any finishing. Behind the opening I ve added a modesty placket: I ve cut a strip of red wool, a strip of cotton, folded the edge of the strip of cotton to the center, added cording to the long sides, pressed the allowances of the wool towards the wrong side, and then handstitched the cotton to the wool, wrong sides facing. This was finally handstitched to one side of the sewing allowance of the center front. I ve also decided to add real pockets, rather than just slits, and for some reason I decided to add them by hand after I had sewn the dress, so I ve left opening in the side back seams, where the slits were in the cotton dress. I ve also already worn the dress, but haven t added the pockets yet, as I m still debating about their shape. This will be fixed in the near future. Another thing that will have to be fixed is the trim situation: I like the fringe at the bottom, and I had enough to also make a belt, but this makes the top of the dress a bit empty. I can t use the same fringe tape, as it is too wide, but it would be nice to have something smaller that matches the patterned part. And I think I can make something suitable with tablet weaving, but I m not sure on which materials to use, so it will have to be on hold for a while, until I decide on the supplies and have the time for making it. Another improvement I d like to add are detached sleeves, both matching (I should still have just enough fabric) and contrasting, but first I want to learn more about real kirtle construction, and maybe start making sleeves that would be suitable also for a real kirtle. Meanwhile, I ve worn it on Christmas (over my 1700s menswear shirt with big sleeves) and may wear it again tomorrow (if I bother to dress up to spend New Year s Eve at home :D )

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1. yep, that s YouTube, of course.

Review: The Afterward, by E.K. Johnston

Publisher:	Dutton Books
Copyright:	February 2019
Printing:	2020
ISBN:	0-7352-3190-7
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	339

The Afterward is a standalone young adult high fantasy with a substantial romance component. The title is not misspelled. Sir Erris and her six companions, matching the number of the new gods, were successful in their quest for the godsgem. They defeated the Old God and destroyed Him forever, freeing King Dorrenta from his ensorcellment, and returned in triumph to Cadrium to live happily ever after. Or so the story goes. Sir Erris and three of the companions are knights. Another companion is the best mage in the kingdom. Kalanthe Ironheart, who distracted the Old God at a critical moment and allowed Sir Erris to strike, is only an apprentice due to her age, but surely will become a great knight. And then there is Olsa Rhetsdaughter, the lowborn thief, now somewhat mockingly called Thief of the Realm for all the good that does her. The reward was enough for her to buy her freedom from the Thief's Court. It was not enough to pay for food after that, or enough for her to change her profession, and the Thief's Court no longer has any incentive to give her easy (or survivable) assignments. Kalanthe is in a considerably better position, but she still needs a good marriage. Her reward paid off half of her debt, which broadens her options, but she's still a debt-knight, liable for the full cost of her training once she reaches the age of nineteen. She's mostly made her peace with the decisions she made given her family's modest means, but marriages of that type are usually for heirs, and Kalanthe is not looking forward to bearing a child. Or, for that matter, sleeping with a man. Olsa and Kalanthe fell in love during the Quest. Given Kalanthe's debt and the way it must be paid, and her iron-willed determination to keep vows, neither of them expected their relationship to survive the end of the Quest. Both of them wish that it had. The hook is that this novel picks up after the epic fantasy quest is over and everyone went home. This is not an entirely correct synopsis; chapters of The Afterward alternate between "After" and "Before" (and one chapter delightfully titled "More or less the exact moment of"), and by the end of the book we get much of the story of the Quest. It's not told from the perspective of the lead heroes, though; it's told by following Kalanthe and Olsa, who would be firmly relegated to supporting characters in a typical high fantasy. And it's largely told through the lens of their romance. This is not the best fantasy novel I've read, but I had a fun time with it. I am now curious about the intended audience and marketing, though. It was published by a YA imprint, and both the ages of the main characters and the general theme of late teenagers trying to chart a course in an adult world match that niche. But it's also clearly intended for readers who have read enough epic fantasy quests that they will both be amused by the homage and not care that the story elides a lot of the typical details. Anyone who read David Eddings at an impressionable age will enjoy the way Johnston pokes gentle fun at The Belgariad (this book is dedicated to David and Leigh Eddings), but surely the typical reader of YA fantasy these days isn't also reading Eddings. I'm therefore not quite sure who this book was for, but apparently that group included me. Johnston thankfully is not on board with the less savory parts of Eddings's writing, as you might have guessed from the sapphic romance. There is no obnoxious gender essentialism here, although there do appear to be gender roles that I never quite figured out. Knights are referred to as sir, but all of the knights in this story are women. Men still seem to run a lot of things (kingdoms, estates, mage colleges), but apart from the mage, everyone on the Quest was female, and there seems to be an expectation that women go out into the world and have adventures while men stay home. I'm not sure if there was an underlying system that escaped me, or if Johnston just mixed things up for the hell of it. (If the latter, I approve.) This book does suffer a bit from addressing some current-day representation issues without managing to fold them naturally into the story or setting. One of the Quest knights is transgender, something that's revealed in a awkward couple of paragraphs and then never mentioned again. Two of the characters have a painfully earnest conversation about the word "bisexual," complete with a strained attempt at in-universe etymology. Racial diversity (Olsa is black, and Kalanthe is also not white) seemed to be handled a bit better, although I am not the reader to notice if the discussions of hair maintenance were similarly awkward. This is way better than no representation and default-white characters, to be clear, but it felt a bit shoehorned in at times and could have used some more polish. These are quibbles, though. Olsa was the heart of the book for me, and is exactly the sort of character I like to read about. Kalanthe is pure stubborn paladin, but I liked her more and more as the story continued. She provides a good counterbalance to Olsa's natural chaos. I do wish Olsa had more opportunities to show her own competence (she's not a very good thief, she's just the thief that Sir Erris happened to know), but the climax of the story was satisfying. My main grumble is that I badly wanted to dwell on the happily-ever-after for at least another chapter, ideally two. Johnston was done with the story before I was. The writing was serviceable but not great and there are some bits that I don't think would stand up to a strong poke, but the characters carried the story for me. Recommended if you'd like some sapphic romance and lightweight class analysis complicating your Eddings-style quest fantasy. Rating: 7 out of 10

Like each month, have a look at the work funded by Freexian s Debian LTS offering. Some notable fixes which were made in LTS during the month of November include the gnutls28 cryptographic library and the freerdp2 Remote Desktop Protocol client/server implementation. The gnutls28 update was prepared by LTS contributor Markus Koschany and dealt with a timing attack which could be used to compromise a cryptographic system, while the freerdp2 update was prepared by LTS contributor Tobias Frost and is the result of work spanning 3 months to deal with dozens of vulnerabilities. In addition to the many ordinary LTS tasks which were completed (CVE triage, patch backports, package updates, etc), there were several contributions by LTS contributors for the benefit of Debian stable and old-stable releases, as well as for the benefit of upstream projects. LTS contributor Abhijith PA uploaded an update of the puma package to unstable in order to fix a vulnerability in that package while LTS contributor Thosten Alteholz sponsored an upload to unstable of libde265 and himself made corresponding uploads of libde265 to Debian stable and old-stable. LTS contributor Bastien Roucari s developed patches for vulnerabilities in zbar and audiofile which were then provided to the respective upstream projects. Updates to packages in Debian stable were made by Markus Koschany to deal with security vulnerabilities and by Chris Lamb to deal with some non-security bugs. As always, the LTS strives to provide high quality updates to packages under the direct purview of the LTS team while also rendering assistance to maintainers, the stable security team, and upstream developers whenever practical.

Debian LTS contributors In November, 18 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:

• Abhijith PA did 7.0h (out of 0h assigned and 14.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 7.0h to the next month.
• Adrian Bunk did 15.0h (out of 14.0h assigned and 9.75h from previous period), thus carrying over 8.75h to the next month.
• Anton Gladky did 10.0h (out of 9.5h assigned and 5.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 5.0h to the next month.
• Bastien Roucari s did 16.0h (out of 18.25h assigned and 1.75h from previous period), thus carrying over 4.0h to the next month.
• Ben Hutchings did 12.0h (out of 16.5h assigned and 12.25h from previous period), thus carrying over 16.75h to the next month.
• Chris Lamb did 18.0h (out of 17.25h assigned and 0.75h from previous period).
• Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 15.5h (out of 23.5h assigned and 0.25h from previous period), thus carrying over 8.25h to the next month.
• Guilhem Moulin did 13.0h (out of 12.0h assigned and 8.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 7.0h to the next month.
• Lee Garrett did 14.5h (out of 16.75h assigned and 7.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 9.25h to the next month.
• Markus Koschany did 30.0h (out of 30.0h assigned).
• Ola Lundqvist did 6.5h (out of 8.25h assigned and 15.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 17.25h to the next month.
• Roberto C. S nchez did 5.5h (out of 12.0h assigned), thus carrying over 6.5h to the next month.
• Santiago Ruano Rinc n did 3.25h (out of 13.62h assigned and 2.375h from previous period), thus carrying over 12.745h to the next month.
• Sean Whitton did 3.25h (out of 10.0h assigned), thus carrying over 6.75h to the next month.
• Sylvain Beucler did 10.0h (out of 13.5h assigned and 10.25h from previous period), thus carrying over 13.75h to the next month.
• Thorsten Alteholz did 14.0h (out of 14.0h assigned).
• Tobias Frost did 12.0h (out of 12.0h assigned).
• Utkarsh Gupta did 0.0h (out of 6.0h assigned and 17.75h from previous period), thus carrying over 23.75h to the next month.

Evolution of the situation In November, we have released 35 DLAs.

Thanks to our sponsors Sponsors that joined recently are in bold.

• Platinum sponsors:
  • TOSHIBA (for 99 months)
  • Civil Infrastructure Platform (CIP) (for 67 months)
• Gold sponsors:
  • Roche Diagnostics International AG (for 110 months)
  • Linode (for 104 months)
  • Babiel GmbH (for 93 months)
  • Plat Home (for 93 months)
  • University of Oxford (for 49 months)
  • Deveryware (for 36 months)
  • VyOS Inc (for 31 months)
  • EDF SA (for 20 months)
• Silver sponsors:
  • Domeneshop AS (for 114 months)
  • Nantes M tropole (for 108 months)
  • Univention GmbH (for 100 months)
  • Universit Jean Monnet de St Etienne (for 100 months)
  • Ribbon Communications, Inc. (for 94 months)
  • Exonet B.V. (for 84 months)
  • Leibniz Rechenzentrum (for 78 months)
  • CINECA (for 67 months)
  • Minist re de l Europe et des Affaires trang res (for 61 months)
  • Cloudways Ltd (for 51 months)
  • Dinahosting SL (for 49 months)
  • Bauer Xcel Media Deutschland KG (for 43 months)
  • Platform.sh SAS (for 43 months)
  • Moxa Inc. (for 37 months)
  • sipgate GmbH (for 34 months)
  • OVH US LLC (for 32 months)
  • Tilburg University (for 32 months)
  • GSI Helmholtzzentrum f r Schwerionenforschung GmbH (for 23 months)
  • Soliton Systems K.K. (for 21 months)
• Bronze sponsors:
  • Evolix (for 115 months)
  • Seznam.cz, a.s. (for 115 months)
  • Intevation GmbH (for 112 months)
  • Linuxhotel GmbH (for 112 months)
  • Daevel SARL (for 110 months)
  • Bitfolk LTD (for 109 months)
  • Megaspace Internet Services GmbH (for 109 months)
  • Greenbone AG (for 108 months)
  • NUMLOG (for 108 months)
  • WinGo AG (for 108 months)
  • Ecole Centrale de Nantes - LHEEA (for 104 months)
  • Entr ouvert (for 99 months)
  • Adfinis AG (for 96 months)
  • GNI MEDIA (for 91 months)
  • Laboratoire LEGI - UMR 5519 / CNRS (for 91 months)
  • Tesorion (for 91 months)
  • Bearstech (for 82 months)
  • LiHAS (for 82 months)
  • Catalyst IT Ltd (for 77 months)
  • Supagro (for 72 months)
  • Demarcq SAS (for 71 months)
  • Universit Grenoble Alpes (for 57 months)
  • TouchWeb SAS (for 49 months)
  • SPiN AG (for 46 months)
  • CoreFiling (for 41 months)
  • Institut des sciences cognitives Marc Jeannerod (for 36 months)
  • Observatoire des Sciences de l Univers de Grenoble (for 33 months)
  • Tem Innovations GmbH (for 27 months)
  • WordFinder.pro (for 27 months)
  • CNRS DT INSU R sif (for 26 months)
  • Alter Way (for 19 months)
  • Institut Camille Jordan (for 8 months)

I haven't done one of these in quite a while, long enough that I've already read and reviewed many of these books. John Joseph Adams (ed.) The Far Reaches (sff anthology)
Poul Anderson The Shield of Time (sff)
Catherine Asaro The Phoenix Code (sff)
Catherine Asaro The Veiled Web (sff)
Travis Baldree Bookshops & Bonedust (sff)
Sue Burke Semiosis (sff)
Jacqueline Carey Cassiel's Servant (sff)
Rob Copeland The Fund (nonfiction)
Mar Delaney Wolf Country (sff)
J.S. Dewes The Last Watch (sff)
J.S. Dewes The Exiled Fleet (sff)
Mike Duncan Hero of Two Worlds (nonfiction)
Mike Duncan The Storm Before the Storm (nonfiction)
Kate Elliott King's Dragon (sff)
Zeke Faux Number Go Up (nonfiction)
Nicola Griffith Menewood (sff)
S.L. Huang The Water Outlaws (sff)
Alaya Dawn Johnson The Library of Broken Worlds (sff)
T. Kingfisher Thornhedge (sff)
Naomi Kritzer Liberty's Daughter (sff)
Ann Leckie Translation State (sff)
Michael Lewis Going Infinite (nonfiction)
Jenna Moran Magical Bears in the Context of Contemporary Political Theory (sff collection)
Ari North Love and Gravity (graphic novel)
Ciel Pierlot Bluebird (sff)
Terry Pratchett A Hat Full of Sky (sff)
Terry Pratchett Going Postal (sff)
Terry Pratchett Thud! (sff)
Terry Pratchett Wintersmith (sff)
Terry Pratchett Making Money (sff)
Terry Pratchett Unseen Academicals (sff)
Terry Pratchett I Shall Wear Midnight (sff)
Terry Pratchett Snuff (sff)
Terry Pratchett Raising Steam (sff)
Terry Pratchett The Shepherd's Crown (sff)
Aaron A. Reed 50 Years of Text Games (nonfiction)
Dashka Slater Accountable (nonfiction)
Rory Stewart The Marches (nonfiction)
Emily Tesh Silver in the Wood (sff)
Emily Tesh Drowned Country (sff)
Valerie Vales Chilling Effect (sff)
Martha Wells System Collapse (sff)
Martha Wells Witch King (sff)

A new release of my mixed collection of things package dang package arrived at CRAN a little while ago. The dang package regroups a few functions of mine that had no other home as for example lsos() from a StackOverflow question from 2009 (!!), the overbought/oversold price band plotter from an older blog post, the market monitor blogged about as well as the checkCRANStatus() function tweeted about by Tim Taylor. And more so take a look. This release brings a number of updates, including a rather nice improvement to the market monitor making updates buttery smooth and not flickering (with big thanks to Paul Murrell who calmly pointed out once again that base R does of course have the functionality I was seeking) as well as three new functions (!!) and then a little maintenance on the -Wformat print format string issue that kept everybody busy this week. The NEWS entry follows.

Changes in version 0.0.16 (2023-12-02)

• Added new function str.language() based on post by Bill Dunlap
• Added new argument sleep in intradayMarketMonitor
• Switched to dev.hold() and dev.flush() in intradayMarketMonitor with thanks to Paul Murrell
• Updated continued integration setup, twice, and package badges
• Added new function shadowedPackages
• Added new function limitDataTableCores
• Updated two error() calls to updated tidyCpp signature to not tickle -Wformat warnings under R-devel
• Updated two URL to please link checks in R-devel
• Switch two tests for variable of variable to is.* and inherits(), respectively

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is a comparison to [the previous release][previous releases]. For questions or comments use the the issue tracker at the GitHub repo. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:

• Fran ois Mazen (mzf)
• Andrew Ruthven (puck)
• Christopher Obbard (obbardc)
• Salvo Tomaselli (ltworf)

The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:

• Bo YU
• Athos Coimbra Ribeiro
• Marc Leeman
• Filip Str mb ck

Congratulations!

This week I stumbled across a footgun in the Dockerfile/Containerfile ARG instruction. ARG is used to define a build-time variable, possibly with a default value embedded in the Dockerfile, which can be overridden at build-time (by passing --build-arg). The value of a variable FOO is interpolated into any following instructions that include the token $FOO. This behaves a little similar to the existing instruction ENV, which, for RUN instructions at least, can also be interpolated, but can't (I don't think) be set at build time, and bleeds through to the resulting image metadata. ENV has been around longer, and the documentation indicates that, when both are present, ENV takes precedence. This fits with my mental model of how things should work, but, what the documentation does not make clear is, the ENV doesn't need to have been defined in the same Dockerfile: environment variables inherited from the base image also override ARGs. To me this is unexpected and far less sensible: in effect, if you are building a layered image and want to use ARG, you have to be fairly sure that your base image doesn't define an ENV of the same name, either now or in the future, unless you're happy for their value to take precedence. In our case, we broke a downstream build process by defining a new environment variable USER in our image. To defend against the unexpected, I'd recommend using somewhat unique ARG names: perhaps prefix something unusual and unlikely to be shadowed. Or don't use ARG at all, and push that kind of logic up the stack to a Dockerfile pre-processor like CeKit.