Debian

Posts related to Debian, the universal operating system.

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FLOSS Activities August 2017

Changes

Issues

Review

Administration

  • myrepos: get commit/admin access from joeyh at DebConf17, add commit/admin access for other patch submitters, apply my stack of patches
  • Debian: fix weird log file issues, redirect hardware donor, cleaned up a weird dir, fix some OOB info, ask for TLS on meetings-archive.d.n, check an I/O error, restart broken stunnels, powercycle 1 borked machine,
  • Debian mentors: lintian/security updates & reboot
  • Debian wiki: remove some stray cache files, whitelist 3 email domains, whitelist some email addresses, disable 1 spammer account, disable 1 accounts with bouncing email,
  • Debian QA: apply patch to fix PTS watch file errors, deploy changes
  • Debian derivatives census: run scripts for Purism, remove some noise from logs, trigger a recheck, merge fix by Unit193, deploy changes
  • Openmoko: security updates, reboots, enable unattended-upgrades

Communication

  • Attended DebConf17 and provided some input in BoFs
  • Sent Misc Dev News #44
  • Invite Google gLinux (on IRC) to the Debian derivatives census
  • Welcome Sven Haardiek (of GreenboneOS) to the Debian derivatives census
  • Inquire about the status of Canaima

Sponsors

The samba bug report was sponsored by my employer. All other work was done on a volunteer basis.

Posted Thu Aug 31 23:45:16 2017 Tags: debian
FLOSS Activities July 2017

Changes

Issues

Review

Administration

  • Debian: fsck/reboot a buildd, reboot a segfaulting buildd, report/fix broken hoster contact, ping hoster about down machines, forcibly reset backup machine, merged cache patch for network-test.d.o, do some samhain dances, fix two stunnel services, update an IP address in LDAP, fix /etc/aliases on one host, reboot 1 non-responsive VM
  • Debian mentors: security updates, reboot
  • Debian wiki: whitelist several email addresses
  • Debian build log scanner: deploy my changes
  • Debian PTS: deploy my changes
  • Openmoko: security updates & reboots

Communication

  • Ping Advogato users on Planet Debian about updating/removing their feeds since it shut down
  • Invite deepin to the Debian derivatives census
  • Welcome Deepin to the Debian derivatives census
  • Inquire about the status of GreenboneOS, HandyLinux

Sponsors

All work was done on a volunteer basis.

Posted Tue Aug 1 18:19:07 2017 Tags: debian
FLOSS Activities June 2017

Changes

Issues

Review

Administration

  • Debian: redirect 2 users to support channels, redirect 1 person to the mirrors team, investigate SMTP TLS question, fix ACL issue, restart dead exim4 service
  • Debian mentors: service restarts, security updates & reboot
  • Debian QA: deploy my changes
  • Debian website: release related rebuilds, rebuild installation-guide
  • Debian wiki: whitelist several email addresses, whitelist 1 domain
  • Debian package tracker: deploy my changes
  • Debian derivatives census: deploy my changes
  • Openmoko: security updates & reboots.

Communication

Sponsors

All work was done on a volunteer basis.

Posted Sat Jul 1 02:51:40 2017 Tags: debian
FLOSS Activities May 2017

Changes

Issues

Review

Administration

  • Debian: discuss mail bounces with a hoster, check perms of LE results, add 1 user to a group, re-sent some TLS cert expiry mail, clean up mail bounce flood, approve some debian.net TLS certs, do the samhain dance thrice, end 1 samhain mail flood, diagnose/fix LDAP update issue, relay DebConf cert expiry mails, reboot 2 non-responsive VM, merged patches for debian.org-sources.debian.org meta-package,
  • Debian mentors: lintian/security updates & reboot
  • Debian wiki: delete stray tmp file, whitelist 14 email addresses, disable 1 accounts with bouncing email, ping 3 persons with bouncing email
  • Debian website: update/push index/CD/distrib
  • Debian QA: deploy my changes, disable some removed suites in qadb
  • Debian PTS: strip whitespace from existing pages, invalidate sigs so pages get a rebuild
  • Debian derivatives census: deploy changes
  • Openmoko: security updates & reboots.

Communication

  • Invite Purism (on IRC), XBian (also on IRC), DuZeru to the Debian derivatives census
  • Respond to the shutdown of Parsix
  • Report BlankOn fileserver and Huayra webserver issues
  • Organise a transition of Ubuntu/Endless Debian derivatives census maintainers
  • Advocate against Debian having a monopoly on hardware certification
  • Advocate working with existing merchandise vendors
  • Start a discussion about Debian membership in other organisations
  • Advocate for HPE to join the LVFS & support fwupd

Sponsors

All work was done on a volunteer basis.

Posted Thu Jun 1 00:44:15 2017 Tags: debian
FLOSS Activities April 2017

Changes

Issues

Review

Administration

  • Debian systems: quiet a logrotate warning, investigate issue with DNSSEC and alioth, deploy fix on our first stretch buildd, restore alioth git repo after history rewrite, investigate iptables segfaults on buildd and investigate time issues on a NAS
  • Debian derivatives census: delete patches over 5 MiB, re-enable the service
  • Debian wiki: investigate some 403 errors, fix alioth KGB config, deploy theme changes, close a bogus bug report, ping 1 user with bouncing email, whitelist 9 email addresses and whitelist 2 domains
  • Debian QA: deploy my changes
  • Debian mentors: security upgrades and service restarts
  • Openmoko: debug mailing list issue, security upgrades and reboots

Communication

  • Invite Wazo to the Debian derivatives census
  • Welcome ubilinux, Wazo and Roopa Prabhu (of Cumulus Linux) to the Debian derivatives census
  • Discuss HP/ProLiant wiki page with HPE folks
  • Inform git history rewriter about the git mailmap feature

Sponsors

The libconfig-crontab-perl backports and pyvmomi issue were sponsored by my employer. All other work was done on a volunteer basis.

Posted Sun Apr 30 22:56:02 2017 Tags: debian
FLOSS Activities March 2017

Changes

Issues

Review

Administration

  • Debian systems: apply a patch to userdir-ldap, ask a local admin to reset a dead powerpc buildd, remove dead SH4 porterboxen from LDAP, fix perms on www.d.o OC static mirror, report false positives in an an automated abuse report, redirect 1 student to FAQs/support/DebianEdu, redirect 1 event organiser to partners/trademark/merchandise/DPL, redirect 1 guest account seeker to NM, redirect 1 @debian.org desirer to NM, redirect 1 email bounce to a changes@db.d.o user, redirect 2 people to the listmasters, redirect 1 person to Debian Pure Blends, redirect 1 user to a service admin and redirect 2 users to support
  • Debian packages site: deploy my ports/cruft changes
  • Debian wiki: poke at HP page history and advise a contributor, whitelist 13 email address, whitelist 1 domain, check out history of a banned IP, direct 1 hoster to DebConf17 sponsors team, direct 1 user to OpenStack packaging, direct 1 user to InstallingDebianOn and h-node.org, direct 2 users to different ways to help Debian and direct 1 emeritus DD on repository wiki page reorganisation
  • Debian QA: fix an issue with the PTS news, remove some debugging cruft I left behind, fix the usertags on a QA bug and deploy some code fixes
  • Debian mentors: security upgrades and service restarts
  • Openmoko: security upgrades and reboots

Communication

Sponsors

The valgrind backport, samba and libthrift-perl bug reports were sponsored by my employer. All other work was done on a volunteer basis.

Posted Sat Apr 1 01:01:56 2017 Tags: debian
FLOSS Activities February 2017

Changes

Issues

Review

Administration

  • Debian: do the samhain dance, ask for new local contacts at one site, ask local admins to reset one machine, powercycle 2 dead machines, redirect 1 user to the support channels, redirect 1 user to a service admin, redirect 1 spam reporter to the right mechanisms, investigate mail logs for a missing bug report, ping bugs-search.d.o service admin about moving off glinka and remove data, poke cdimage-search.d.o service admin about moving off glinka, update a cron job on denis.d.o for the rename of letsencrypt.sh to dehydrated, debug planet.d.o issue and remove stray cron job lock file, check if ftp is used on a couple of security.d.o mirrors, discuss storage upgrade for LeaseWeb for snapshot.d.o/deriv.d.n/etc, investigate SSD SMART error and ignore the unknown attribute, ask 9 users to restart their processes, investigate apt-get update failure in nagios, swapoff/swapon a swap file to drain it, restart/disable some failed services, help restore the backup server, debug stretch /dev/log issue,
  • Debian QA: deploy merged PTS/tracker patches,
  • Debian wiki: answer 1 IP-blocked VPN user, pinged 1 user on IRC about their bouncing mail, disabled 4 accounts due to bouncing mail, redirect 1 person to documentation/lists, whitelist 5 email addresses, forward 1 password reset token, killed 1 spammer account, reverted 1 spammer edit,
  • Debian mentors: security upgrades, check which email a user signed up with
  • Openmoko: security upgrades, daemon restarts, reboot

Debian derivatives

  • Turned off the census cron job because it ran out of disk space
  • Update Armbian sources.list
  • Ping siduction folks about updating their sources.list
  • Start a discussion about DebConf17
  • Notify the derivatives based on jessie or older that stretch is frozen
  • Invite Rebellin Linux (again)

Sponsors

The libesedb Debian backport was sponsored by my employer. All other work was done on a volunteer basis.

Posted Wed Mar 1 02:37:54 2017 Tags: debian
FLOSS Activities January 2017

Changes

Issues

Review

Administration

  • Debian: reboot 1 non-responsive VM, redirect 2 users to support channels, redirect 1 contributor to xkb upstream, redirect 1 potential contributor, redirect 1 bug reporter to mirror team, ping 7 folks about restarting processes with upgraded libs, manually restart the sectracker process due to upgraded libs, restart the package tracker process due to upgraded libs, investigate failures connecting to the XMPP service, investigate /dev/shm issue on abel.d.o, clean up after rename of the fedmsg group.
  • Debian mentors: lintian/security updates & reboot
  • Debian packages: deploy 2 contributions to the live server
  • Debian wiki: unblacklist 1 IP address, whitelist 10 email addresses, disable 18 accounts with bouncing email, update email for 2 accounts with bouncing email, reported 1 Debian member as MIA, redirect 1 user to support channels, add 4 domains to the whitelist.
  • Reproducible builds: rescheduled Debian pyxplot:amd64/unstable for themill.
  • Openmoko: security updates & reboots.

Debian derivatives

  • Send the annual activity ping mail.
  • Happy new year messages on IRC, forward to the list.
  • Note that SerbianLinux does not provide source packages.
  • Expand URL shortener on SerbianLinux page.
  • Invite PelicanHPC, Netrunner, DietPi, Hamara Linux (on IRC), BitKey to the census.
  • Add research publications link to the census template
  • Fix Symbiosis sources.list
  • Enquired about SalentOS downtime
  • Fixed and removed some 404 BlankOn links (blog, English homepage)
  • Fixed changes to AstraLinux sources.list
  • Welcome Netrunner to the census

Sponsors

I renewed my support of Software Freedom Conservancy.

The openchange 1:2.2-6+deb8u1 upload was sponsored by my employer. All other work was done on a volunteer basis.

Posted Thu Feb 2 00:29:19 2017 Tags: debian
Check All The thingS!

check-all-the-things (aka cats, Meow!) is a tool that aims to make it easy to know which tools can be used to check a directory tree and to make it easy to run those tools on the directory tree. The tree could either be a source tree or a build tree or both. It aims to check as much of the tree as possible so the output can be very verbose and have many false positives. It is not for the busy, lazy or noise intolerant. It runs the checks by matching file names and MIME types against those registered for a list of checks. Each check has a set of dependencies, flags, filename wildcards, MIME type wildcards, comments and prerequisite commands. By default it:

  • doesn't check file MIME types as this is slower
  • shows which command is currently running
  • limits check output to 10 lines
  • hides checks that output nothing
  • kills checks when interrupted with Ctrl+C
  • exits when interrupted twice in quick succession
  • outputs various remarks at the end

It runs all checks for the current distro/release except:

  • dangerous ones that execute code in the current dir
  • ones that modify files in the current dir
  • ones that access the network (if there is no default route)
  • ones that need work to be usable
  • ones that need a human to run them

There are command-line options to customise the behaviour and automatic bash shell completion via argcomplete. There are 177 checks (including TODO ones) in 73 different categories. There are an additional 224 not-well-specified TODO items for new checks in comments. It is exceptionally easy to add new checks once one knows how to use the tool one wants to add.

At this point in time it is probably not a good idea to run it in an untrusted directory tree for several reasons:

  • there could be unknown vulnerabilities in the tools used
  • there could be unknown interactions with interpreters (known ones worked around)
  • there could be some commands doing unknown code execution
  • there could be other weirdness in some layers
  • there is no automatic sandboxing at all yet

The project initially started as really hacky wiki page full of commands to run. At some point I figured it was time to make this actually be maintainable and started on a project to do that. At around the same time Jakub Wilk was working on maquack to replace the wiki page. Somehow I found out about it and talked to him about it. It was vastly less hacky than my version so I ended up taking it over and continuing it under the check-all-the-things name. I polished it for the last two years and finally released it into Debian unstable during DebCamp16.

Posted Mon Jul 4 18:10:55 2016 Tags: debian
DebConf16 Open Festival day 1

Today was day one of the DebConf16 Open Festival and I attended the open hardware panel, part of the talk about Code For South Africa, shirish's experiences and the DebConf new folks session.

The open hardware panel was a wide ranging discussion between bdale, Andy and indiebio. bdate talked about the experiences he has had with his rocketry hardware. bdale said "Make concious decisions about what you are buying", referencing a case where he investigated, found a GPL violation and didn't buy. Various people care about openness of different layers of the hardware. Off-the-shelf products are very strongly integrated, which is great for makers but means that people who care about lower layers like CPU micro-architecture aren't able to participate. Andy said "We are just beginning to come out of the shareware stage [of open hardware]". bdale mentioned the companies who do hardware production as a service from design files. Later in the pub some folks mentioned j-core, an open re-implementation of SuperH processors.

I missed most of the code4sa talk unfortunately, but it was about government services and open data.

shirish covered his journey through life to Debian. His youth, how satellite TV and knowledge of the outside world came to India around the time of the Iraq war. His experience accessing the Internet for the first time, uncensored vs the usual censorship in India's media. His experiences of Windows 95 viruses and crashes. He learned of PCTwist Linux through a magazine cover. His initial install was not a success but eventually managed to break through and install a desktop, but experienced network and other issues. Eventually he encountered Ubuntu and began contributing bug reports. His experiences there led him to Debian. He began blogging about Debian. In the last few years he and others have been going around the country doing mini-DebConfs at institutes around India. The first question was predictably about having a DebConf in India and how shirish might like to get more involved. DebConf in India sounds like a possibility some day and shirish was thinking about getting involved in publicity, marketting and the Debian installer.

The DebConf new folks session was a great intro to DebConf for folks new to the community. There were some quite excellent touches added to this year's version of the event by indiebio and Rhonda.

I also got some things done. Usual spam reporting. Reviewed wiki RecentChanges. Talked to the chromium-bsu/MacPorts maintainer about AX_CHECK_GL brokenness. Filed Debian wishlist bug #829292 asking to update autoconf-archive. Redirected a Hurd porterbox request to the exodar admin and quickly found out I was wrong to do that, rectified. Then we found out the LDAP sync to exodar was broken. Replied to someone who intends to sell Debian pre-installs. Thanked BunsenLabs folks for joining the derivatives list. Applied reproducible builds patch for cats from Chris Lamb. Heard about awesome new terminal-mode screensaver. Moo! Prepared a blog post about check-all-the-things.

Posted Sun Jul 3 05:17:51 2016 Tags: debian