Russell Coker: Wayland
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2022/03/25/wayland/
March 25, 2022, 7:52 AM
The Wayland protocol [1] is designed to be more secure than X, when X was designed there wasn’t much thought given to the possibility of programs with different access levels displaying on the same desktop. The Xephyr nested X server [2] is good for running an entire session from a remote untrusted host on a local display but isn’t suitable for multiple applications in the same session.
GNOME supported Wayland by default in Debian since the Bullseye release and for KDE support you can instal...
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Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 208 released
https://diffoscope.org/news/diffoscope-208-released/
March 25, 2022, 12:00 AM
The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope
version 208. This version includes the following changes:
[ Brent Spillner ]
* Add graceful handling for UNIX sockets and named pipes.
(Closes: reproducible-builds/diffoscope#292)
* Remove a superfluous log message and reformatt comment lines.
[ Chris Lamb ]
* Reformat various files to satisfy current version of Black.
You find out more by visiting the project homepage....
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Ingo Juergensmann: New Server – NVMe Issues
https://blog.windfluechter.net/2022/03/24/new-server-nvme-issues/
March 24, 2022, 9:49 AM
My current server is somewhat aged. I bought it new in July 2014 with a 6-core Xeon E5-2630L, 32 GB RAM and 4x 3.5″ hot-swappable drives. Gladly I had the opportunity to extend the memory to 128 GB RAM at no additional cost by using memory from my ex-employer. It also has 4x 2 TB WD Red HDDs with 5400 rpm hooked up to the SATA backplane, but unfortunately only two of them are SATA-3 with 6 Gbit/s.
The new server is a used/refurbished Supermicro server with 2x 14-core Xeon E5-2683 and 256 G...
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Matthew Garrett: AMD's Pluton implementation seems to be controllable
https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/58879.html
March 23, 2022, 8:42 AM
I've been digging through the firmware for an AMD laptop with a Ryzen 6000 that incorporates Pluton for the past couple of weeks, and I've got some rough conclusions. Note that these are extremely preliminary and may not be accurate, but I'm going to try to encourage others to look into this in more detail. For those of you at home, I'm using an image from here, specifically version 309. The installer is happy to run under Wine, and if you tell it to "Extract" rather than "Install" it'll leave a...
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Ulrike Uhlig: Workshops about anger, saying NO, and mapping one’s capacities and desires
https://curlybracket.net/2022/03/23/workshops.html
March 22, 2022, 11:00 PM
For the second year in a row, I proposed some workshops at the feminist
hackers assembly at the remote C3. I’m sharing them here because I
believe they might be useful to others.
Anger workshop
Based on my readings about the subject and a mediation training, I
created a first workshop about dealing with one’s own anger for the
feminist hackers assembly in 2020. Many women who attended said they
recognized themselves in what I was talking about. I created the
exercises in the workshop with...
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Tollef Fog Heen: DNSSEC, ssh and VerifyHostKeyDNS
https://err.no/personal/blog/tech/2022-03-22-dnssec-ssh/
March 22, 2022, 7:30 PM
OpenSSH has this very nice setting, VerifyHostKeyDNS, which when enabled, will pull SSH host keys from DNS, and you no longer need to either trust on first use, or copy host keys around out of band.
Naturally, trusting unsecured DNS is a bit scary, so this requires the record to be signed using DNSSEC. This has worked for a long time, but then broke, seemingly out of the blue. Running ssh -vvv gave output similar to
debug1: found 4 insecure fingerprints in DNS debug3: verify_host_key_dns: checki...
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Gunnar Wolf: Long, long, long live Emacs after 39 years
https://gwolf.org/2022/03/long-long-long-live-emacs_after_39_years.html
March 21, 2022, 5:45 PM
Reading Planet Debian (see, Sam, we are
still having a conversation over
there? 😉), I read
Anarcat’s 20+ years of
Emacs. And.. Well,
should I brag contribute to the discussion? Of
course, why not?
Emacs is the first computer program I can name that I ever learnt to
use to do something minimally useful. 39 years ago.
From the Space Cadet keyboard that (obviously…)
influenced Emacs’ early design
The Emacs editor was born, according to
Wikipedia, in 1976, same year as
myself. I am clear...
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Bits from Debian: New Debian Developers and Maintainers (January and February 2022)
https://bits.debian.org/2022/03/new-developers-2022-02.html
March 21, 2022, 4:00 PM
The following contributor got his Debian Developer account in the last two months:
Francisco Vilmar Cardoso Ruviaro (vilmar)
The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:
Lu YaNing
Mathias Gibbens
Markus Blatt
Peter Blackman
David da Silva Polverari
Congratulations!...
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Antoine Beaupré: 20+ years of Emacs
https://anarc.at/blog/2022-03-20-20-years-emacs/
March 21, 2022, 3:08 AM
I enjoyed reading this article named "22 years of Emacs"
recently. It's kind of fascinating, because I realised I don't exactly
know for how long I've been using Emacs. It's lost in the mists of
history. If I would
have to venture a guess, it was back in the "early days", which in
that history is mapped around 1996-1997, when I installed my very own
"PC" with FreeBSD 2.2.x and painstakingly managed to make
XFree86 run on it.
Modelines. Those were the days... But I digress.
I am old...
The onl...
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Joerg Jaspert: Another shell script moved to rust
https://blog.ganneff.de/2022/03/another-shell-script-moved-to-rust.html
March 20, 2022, 12:23 PM
Shell? Rust!
Not the first shell script I took and made a rust version of, but
probably my largest yet. This time I took my little tm (tmux
helper) tool which is (well, was) a
bit more than 600 lines of shell, and converted it to
Rust.
I got most of the functionality done now, only one major part is
missing.
What’s tm?
tm started as a tiny shell script to make handling
tmux easier. The first commit in
git was in July 2013, but I started writing and using it in 2011. It
started out as a kind-...
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Russell Coker: More About the Librem 5
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2022/03/19/more-librem5/
March 19, 2022, 12:31 AM
I concluded my previous post about the Purism Librem 5 [1] with the phone working as a Debian/GNOME system with SSH access over the LAN. Before I published that post I managed to render it unbootable, making a new computer unbootable on the first day of owning it isn’t uncommon for me. In this case I tried to get SE Linux running on it and changing the kernel commandline parameter “security=apparmor” to “security=selinux” caused it to fail the checksum on kernel parameters and halt the...
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Bits from Debian: DebConf22 registration and call for proposals are open!
https://bits.debian.org/2022/03/debconf22-registration-and-call-for-proposals-are-open.html
March 18, 2022, 8:10 PM
Registration for DebConf22 is now open.
The the 23rd edition of DebConf will take place
from July 17th to 24th, 2022 at the
Innovation and Training Park (ITP) in Prizren,
Kosovo, and will be preceded by DebCamp, from July 10th to 16th.
Along with the registration, the DebConf content team announced the
call for proposals. Deadline to submit a
proposal to be considered in the main schedule is April 15th, 2022 23:59:59 UTC
(Friday).
DebConf is an event open to everyone, no matter how
you identify ...
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Louis-Philippe Véronneau: Debian Clojure Team Sprint --- May 13-14th 2022
https://veronneau.org/debian-clojure-team-sprint-may-13-14th-2022.html
March 18, 2022, 6:45 PM
I'm happy to announce the Debian Clojure Team will hold a remote sprint from
May 13th to May 14th 2022.
The goal of this sprint is to improve various aspects of the Clojure ecosystem
in Debian. As such, everyone is welcome to participate!
Here are a few items we are planning to work on, in no particular order:
Update leiningen to the latest upstream version, to let some libraries in
experimental migrate to unstable.
Work towards replacing our custom Clojure script with upstream's and package...
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Enrico Zini: Context-dependent logger in Python
http://www.enricozini.org/blog/2022/python/context-dependent-logger-in-python
March 18, 2022, 10:53 AM
This is a common logging pattern in Python, to have loggers related to module
names:
import logging
log = logging.getLogger(__name__)
class Bill:
def load_bill(self, filename: str):
log.info("%s: loading file", filename)
I often however find myself wanting to have loggers related to something
context-dependent, like the kind of file that is being processed. For example,
I'd like to log loading of bill loading when done by the expenses module, and
not when done by the printing mo...
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Gunnar Wolf: Speaking about the OpenPGP WoT on LibrePlanet this Saturday
https://gwolf.org/2022/03/speaking-about-the-openpgp-wot-on-libreplanet-this-saturday.html
March 17, 2022, 4:55 PM
So, LibrePlanet, the FSF’s conference, is coming!
I much enjoyed attending this conference in person in March 2018. This
year I submitted a talk again, and it got accepted — of course, given
the conference is still 100% online, I doubt I will be able to go 100%
conference-mode (I hope to catch a couple of other talks, but… well,
we are all eager to go back to how things were before 2020!)
Anyway, what is my talk about?
My talk is titled Current challenges for the OpenPGP keyserver
netw...
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Raphaël Hertzog: Freexian’s report about Debian Long Term Support, February 2022
https://raphaelhertzog.com/2022/03/17/freexians-report-about-debian-long-term-support-february-2022/
March 17, 2022, 11:32 AM
Every month we review the work funded by Freexian’s Debian LTS offering. Please find the report for February below.
Debian project funding
In February Raphaël and the LTS worked on a survey of Debian developers meant to solicit ideas for improvements in the Debian project at large. You can see the results of the initial discussion here in the list of ideas of which there are already over 30.The full survey is due to be emailed to Debian Developers shortly.In February € 2250 was put as...
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Michael Ablassmeier: python logging messages and exit codes
https://abbbi.github.io//logging/
March 16, 2022, 12:00 AM
Everyone knows that an application exit code should change based on
the success, error or maybe warnings that happened during execution.
Lately i came along some python code that was structured the following way:
#!/usr/bin/python3
import sys
import logging
def warnme():
# something bad happens
logging.warning("warning")
sys.exit(2)
def evil():
# something evil happens
logging.error("error")
sys.exit(1)
def main():
logging.basicConfig(
level=logging.DEBUG...
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Russell Coker: Librem 5 First Impression
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2022/03/15/librem-5-first-impression/
March 15, 2022, 10:24 AM
I just received the Purism Librem 5 that I paid for years ago (I think it was 2018). The process of getting the basic setup done was typical (choosing keyboard language, connecting to wifi, etc). Then I tried doing things. One thing I did was update to the latest PureOS release which gave me a list of the latest Debian packages installed which is nice.
The first problem I found was the lack of notification when the phone is trying to do something. I’d select to launch an app, nothing would hap...
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Kunal Mehta: How to mirror the Russian Wikipedia with Debian and Kiwix
https://blog.legoktm.com/2022/03/15/how-to-mirror-the-russian-wikipedia-with-debian-and-kiwix.html
March 15, 2022, 1:02 AM
It has been reported that the Russian government has threatened to block access to Wikipedia for documenting narratives that do not agree with the official position of the Russian government.
One of the anti-censorship strategies I've been working on is Kiwix, an offline Wikipedia reader (and plenty of other content too). Kiwix is free and open source software developed by a great community
of people that I really enjoy working with.
With threats of censorship, traffic to Kiwix has increased fif...
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Sam Hartman: Nostalgia for Blogging
https://hartmans.dreamwidth.org/99374.html
March 14, 2022, 12:51 AM
Recently, I migrated this blog from Livejournal over to Dreamwidth. As part of the process, I was looking back at my blog entries from around 2007 or so.I miss those days. I miss the days when blogging was more of an interactive community. Comments got exchanged, and at least among my circle of friends people wrote thoughtful, well-considered entries. There was introspection into what was going on in people's lives, as well as technical stuff, as well as just keeping up with people who were ...
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Steinar H. Gunderson: kitty rxvt-like config
http://blog.sesse.net/blog/tech/2022-03-12-19-03_kitty_rxvt_like_config.html
March 12, 2022, 6:03 PM
kitty is a terminal with some nice
features (I particularly like the focus on low latency, and the best-in-class
support for emoji) but with a rather unusual default configuration.
Since everybody's opinions are bad, I will offer my own configuration so far
to get a bit closer to classic terminals' defaults:
# If you're running GNOME with Wayland, you may or may not want to uncomment
# this to get your normal window decorations back (this may or may not be
# better in the future; see https://gi...
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Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppGSL 0.3.11: Small Maintenance
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2022/03/12#rcppgsl_0.3.11
March 12, 2022, 3:30 PM
A new release 0.3.11 of RcppGSL is now on CRAN. The RcppGSL package provides an interface from R to the GNU GSL by relying on the Rcpp package.
This release updates src/Makefile.ucrt to use the RTools42 libraries. Details follow from the NEWS file.
Changes in version 0.3.11 (2022-03-12)
The UCRT Makefile was updated
Minor edits to README.md were made
Courtesy of CRANberries, a summary of changes in the most recent release is also available.
More information is on the RcppGSL page. Questions,...
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Thomas Koch: lsp-java coming to debian
https://blog.koch.ro/posts/2022-03-12-lsp-java-coming-to-debian.html
March 12, 2022, 2:55 PM
Posted on March 12, 2022


Tags: debian

The Language Server Protocol (LSP) standardizes communication between editors and so called language servers for different programming languages. This reduces the old problem that every editor had to implement many different plugins for all different programming languages. With LSP an editor just needs to talk LSP and can immediately provide typicall IDE features.
I already packaged the Emacs packages lsp-mode and lsp-haskell for Debia...
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Thomas Koch: Waiting for a STATE folder in the XDG basedir spec
https://blog.koch.ro/posts/2014-02-18-state-folder-in-xdg-basedir.html
March 12, 2022, 2:55 PM
Posted on February 18, 2014


Tags: debian, free software

The XDG Basedirectory specification proposes default homedir folders for the categories DATA (~/.local/share), CONFIG (~/.config) and CACHE (~/.cache). One category however is missing: STATE. This category has been requested several times but nothing happened.
Examples for state data are:
history files of shells, repls, anything that uses libreadline
logfiles
state of application windows on exit
recently opened files...
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Thomas Koch: shared infrastructure coop
https://blog.koch.ro/posts/2014-02-05-shared-infrastructure-coop.html
March 12, 2022, 2:55 PM
Posted on February 5, 2014


Tags: debian, free software

I’m working in a very small web agency with 4 employees, one of them part time and our boss who doesn’t do programming. It shouldn’t come as a surprise, that our development infrastructure is not perfect. We have many ideas and dreams how we could improve it, but not the time. Now we have two obvious choices: Either we just do nothing or we buy services from specialized vendors like github, atlassian, travis-ci,...
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Petter Reinholdtsen: Publish Hargassner wood chip boiler state to MQTT
https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Publish_Hargassner_wood_chip_boiler_state_to_MQTT.html
March 12, 2022, 5:30 AM
Recently I had a look at a
Hargassner
wood
chip boiler, and what kind of free software can be used to monitor
and control it. The boiler can be connected to some cloud service via
what the producer call an Internet Gateway, which seem to be a
computer connecting to the boiler and passing the information gathered
to the cloud. I discovered the boiler controller got an IP address on
the local network and listen on TCP port 23 to provide status
information as a text line of numbers. It also prov...
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Dirk Eddelbuettel: Rcpp 1.0.8.2: Hotfix release per CRAN request
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2022/03/11#rcpp_1.0.8.2
March 12, 2022, 12:00 AM
A new hot-fix release 1.0.8.2 of Rcpp just got to CRAN. It will also be uploaded to Debian shortly, and Windows and macOS binaries will appear at CRAN in the next few days. This release breaks with the six-months cycle started with release 1.0.5 in July 2020 as CRAN desired an update to silence nags from the newest clang version which turned a little loud over a feature deprecated in C++11 (namely std::unary_function() and std::binary_function()). This was easy to replace with std::function() wh...
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Santiago García Mantiñán: tcpping-nmap a substitute for tcpping based on nmap
http://blog.manty.net/2022/03/tcpping-nmap-substitute-for-tcpping.html
March 11, 2022, 11:20 PM
I was about to setup a tcpping based monitoring on smokeping but then I discovered this was based on tcptraceroute which on Debian comes setuid root and the alternative is to use sudo, so, anyway you put it... this runs with root privileges.I didn't like what I saw, so, I said... couldn't we do this with nmap without needing root?And so I started to write a little script that could mimic what tcpping and tcptraceroute were outputing but using nmap.The result is tcpping-nmap which does this. The ...
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Dirk Eddelbuettel: dtts 0.1.0 on CRAN: New Package
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2022/03/10#dtts_0.1.0
March 11, 2022, 2:14 AM
Leonardo and I are thrilled to announce the first CRAN release of dtts. The dtts package builds on top of both our nanotime package and the well-loved and widely-used data.table package by Matt, Arun, Jan, and numerous collaborators.
In a very rough nutshell, you can think of dtts as combining both these potent ingredients to produce something not-entirely-unlike the venerable xts package by our friends Jeff and Josh—but using highest-precision nanosecond increments rather than not-quite-micro...
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Holger Levsen: 20220310-Debian-Reunion-Hamburg-2022
http://layer-acht.org/thinking/blog/20220310-Debian-Reunion-Hamburg-2022/
March 10, 2022, 12:04 PM
Debian Reunion Hamburg 2022 from May 23 to 30
As last year there will be a Debian Reunion Hamburg 2022 event taking place at the same location as previous years, from May 23rd until the 30th.
This is just a preliminary announcement to get the word out, that this event will happen, so you can ponder attending. The wiki page has more information and some fine folks have even already registered!
A few things still need to be sorted out, eg a call for papers and a call for sponsors. If you want t...
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Michael Ablassmeier: fscom switch shell
https://abbbi.github.io//fscom/
March 10, 2022, 12:00 AM
fs.com s5850 and s8050 series type switches have a secret mode which
lets you enter a regular shell from the switch cli, like so:
hostname # start shell
Password:
The command and password are not documented by the manufacturer,
i wondered wether if its possible to extract that password from
the firmware. After all: its my device, and i want to have access
to all the features!
Download the latest firmware image for those switch types and let binwalk do
its magic:
$ wget https://img-en.fs.com/...
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Jonathan Dowland: Broken webcam aspect ratio
https://jmtd.net/log/webcam_aspect_ratio/
March 9, 2022, 2:21 PM
Sony RX100-III, relegated to a webcam
Sometimes I have remote meetings with Google Meet. Unlike the other
video-conferencing services that I use (Bluejeans, Zoom), my video
was stretched out of proportion under Google Meet with Firefox.
I haven't found out why this was happening, but I did figure out a
work-around.
Thanks to Daniel Silverstone, Rob Kendrick, Gregor Herrmann and Ben Allen for
pointing me in the right direction!
Hardware
The lovely Sony RX-100 mk3 that I bought in 2015 has
s...
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Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppRedis 0.2.0: Major Updates
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2022/03/08#rcppredis_0.2.0
March 9, 2022, 2:09 AM
A new major release of RcppRedis arrived on CRAN today. RcppRedis is one of several packages connecting R to the fabulous Redis in-memory datastructure store (and much more). RcppRedis does not pretend to be feature complete, but it may do some things faster than the other interfaces, and also offers an optional coupling with MessagePack binary (de)serialization via RcppMsgPack. The package has carried production loads for several years now.
This release integrates support for pub/sub, a popular...
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François Marier: Using a Streamzap remote control with MythTV on Debian Bullseye
https://feeding.cloud.geek.nz/posts/using-streamzap-remote-with-mythtv-debian-bullseye/
March 9, 2022, 12:00 AM
After upgrading my MythTV machine to Debian
Bullseye and MythTV
31, my Streamzap remote
control stopped working correctly: the up and down buttons were
working, but the OK button wasn't.
Here's the complete solution that made it work with the built-in kernel
support (i.e. without LIRC).
Button re-mapping
Since some of the buttons were working, but not others, I figured that the
buttons were probably not mapped to the right keys.
Inspired by these old v4l-utils-based
instructions,
I made my o...
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Ayoyimika Ajibade: Progress Report!! Modifying Expectations... 📝
https://ayoyimika.hashnode.dev/progress-report-modifying-expectations
March 7, 2022, 1:09 PM
Wait! Just like yesterday when I was accepted as an Outreachy intern and the first half of the internship is finished😲. How time flies when you are having a good time🎃
As part of the requirements for the final application during the contribution period for the Outreachy internship, I needed to provide a timeline to achieve our goal on my outreachy task which is transitioning of dependencies in node16 and webpack5. Having consulted my mentors who implied that the packages depending on webp...
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Dirk Eddelbuettel: nanotime 0.3.6 on CRAN: Updates
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2022/03/06#nanotime_0.3.6
March 6, 2022, 8:20 PM
Leonardo and I are pleased to another update to our nanotime package bringing it to version 0.3.6 which landed on CRAN earlier today.
nanotime relies on the RcppCCTZ package (as well as the RcppDate package for additional C++ operations) and offers efficient high(er) resolution time parsing and formatting up to nanosecond resolution, and the bit64 package for the actual integer64 arithmetic. Initially implemented using the S3 system, it has benefitted greatly from a rigorous refactoring by Leona...
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Thorsten Alteholz: My Debian Activities in February 2022
http://blog.alteholz.eu/2022/03/my-debian-activities-in-february-2022/
March 5, 2022, 12:43 PM
FTP master
This month I accepted 484 and rejected 73 packages. The overall number of packages that got accepted was 495.
The overall number of rejected packages was 76, which is about 15% of the uploads to NEW. While most of the maintainers do a great job when creating their debian/copyright, others are a bit lax. Unfortunately those people seem to be more enthusiastic when fighting for changes in NEW processing or even removing NEW.
One argument in discussions about NEW is that the copyright ve...
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Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in February 2022
https://reproducible-builds.org/reports/2022-02/
March 5, 2022, 11:17 AM
Welcome to the February 2022 report from the Reproducible Builds project. In these reports, we try to round-up the important things we and others have been up to over the past month. As ever, if you are interested in contributing to the project, please visit our Contribute page on our website.
Jiawen Xiong, Yong Shi, Boyuan Chen, Filipe R. Cogo and Zhen Ming Jiang have published a new paper titled Towards Build Verifiability for Java-based Systems (PDF). The abstract of the paper contains t...
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Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 207 released
https://diffoscope.org/news/diffoscope-207-released/
March 4, 2022, 12:00 AM
The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope
version 207. This version includes the following changes:
* Fix a gnarly regression when comparing directories against non-directories.
(Closes: reproducible-builds/diffoscope#292)
* Use our assert_diff utility where we can within test_directory.py
You find out more by visiting the project homepage....
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Abiola Ajadi: Outreachy-And it’s a wrap!
https://ajadi-abiola.github.io/blog/Outreachy-Wrap-up
March 4, 2022, 12:00 AM
Outreachy Wrap-up
Project Improve Debian Continuous Integration UX
Project Link: https://www.outreachy.org/outreachy-december-2021-internship-round/communities/debian/#improve-debian-continuous-integration-ux
Code Repository: https://salsa.debian.org/ci-team/debci
Mentors: Antonio Terceiro, Paul Gevers and Pavit Kaur
About the project
Debci exist to make sure packages work currently after an update, How it does this is by testing all of the packages that have tests written in them to make su...
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Joerg Jaspert: Scan for SSH private keys without passphrase
https://blog.ganneff.de/2022/03/scan-for-ssh-private-keys-without-passphrase.html
March 3, 2022, 8:32 PM
SSH private key scanner (keys without passphrase)
So for policy reasons, customer wanted to ensure that every SSH
private key in use by a human on their systems has a passphrase set.
And asked us to make sure this is the case.
There is no way in SSH to check this during connection, so client side
needs to be looked at. Which means looking at actual files on the
system.
Turns out there are multiple formats for the private keys - and I
really do not want to implement something able to deal with...
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Jonathan McDowell: Neat uses for a backlit keyboard
https://www.earth.li/~noodles/blog/2022/03/backlit-keyboard-uses.html
March 3, 2022, 6:32 PM
I bought myself a new keyboard last November, a Logitech G213. True keyboard fans will tell me it’s not a real mechanical keyboard, but it was a lot cheaper and met my requirements of having some backlighting and a few media keys (really all I use are the volume control keys). Oh, and being a proper UK layout.
While the G213 isn’t fully independent RGB per key it does have a set of zones that can be controlled. Also this has been reverse engineered, so there are tools to do this under Linux...
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Enrico Zini: Migrating from procmail to sieve
http://www.enricozini.org/blog/2022/debian/migrating-from-procmail-to-sieve
March 3, 2022, 2:03 PM
Anarcat's "procmail considered harmful" post
convinced me to get my act together and finally migrate my venerable procmail based setup to sieve.
My setup was nontrivial, so I migrated with an intermediate step in which sieve
scripts would by default pipe everything to procmail, which allowed me to
slowly move rules from procmailrc to sieve until nothing remained in
procmailrc.
Here's what I did.
Literature review
https://brokkr.net/2019/10/31/lets-do-dovecot-slowly-and-properly-part-3-lmtp/
has ...
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Jamie McClelland: LVM Cache Surprises
https://current.workingdirectory.net/posts/2022/lvm-cache/
March 3, 2022, 12:27 PM
By far the biggest LVM Cache surprise is just how well it works.
Between 2010 and 2020, my single, biggest and most consistent headache managing
servers at May First has been disk i/o. We run a
number of physical hosts with encrypted disks, with each providing a dozen or
so sundry KVM guests. And they consume a lot of disk i/o.
This problem kept me awake at night and made me want to put my head on the
table and cry during the day as I monitored the output of vmstat 1 and
watched each disk i/o de...
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John Goerzen: Tools for Communicating Offline and in Difficult Circumstances
https://changelog.complete.org/archives/10356-tools-for-communicating-offline-and-in-difficult-circumstances
March 3, 2022, 2:49 AM
Note: this post is also available on my website, where it will be updated periodically.
When things are difficult – maybe there’s been a disaster, or an invasion (this page is being written in 2022 just after Russia invaded Ukraine), or maybe you’re just backpacking off the grid – there are tools that can help you keep in touch, or move your data around. This page aims to survey some of them, roughly in order from easiest to more complex.
Simple radios
Handheld radios shouldn’t be for...
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Ian Jackson: 3D printed hard case for Fairphone 4
https://diziet.dreamwidth.org/11376.html
March 3, 2022, 12:11 AM
About 4 years ago, I posted about making a 3D printed case for my then-new phone. The FP2 was already a few years old when I got one and by now, some spares are unavailable - which is a problem, because I'm terribly hard on hardware. Indeed, that's why I need a very sturdy case for my phone - a case which can be ablative when necessary.
With the arrival of my new Fairphone 4, I've updated my case design. Sadly the FP4 doesn't have a notification LED - I guess we're supposed to be glued to t...
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Antoine Beaupré: procmail considered harmful
https://anarc.at/blog/2022-03-02-procmail-considered-harmful/
March 2, 2022, 6:16 PM
TL;DR: procmail is a security liability and has been abandoned
upstream for the last two decades. If you are still using it, you
should probably drop everything and at least remove its SUID
flag. There are plenty of alternatives to chose from, and conversion
is a one-time, acceptable trade-off.
Procmail is unmaintained
procmail is unmaintained. The "Final release", according to
Wikipedia, dates back to September 10, 2001 (3.22). That release
was shipped in Debian since then, all the way back f...
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Petter Reinholdtsen: Run your industrial metal working machine using Debian?
https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Run_your_industrial_metal_working_machine_using_Debian_.html
March 2, 2022, 5:40 PM
After many months of hard work by the good people involved in
LinuxCNC, the
system was accepted Sunday
into Debian.
Once it was available from Debian, I was surprised to discover from
its
popularity-contest numbers that people have been reporting its use
since 2012. Its project site might
be a good place to check out, but sadly is not working when visiting
via Tor.
But what is LinuxCNC, you are probably wondering? Perhaps a
Wikipedia quote is in place?
"LinuxCNC is a software system for num...
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Ben Hutchings: Debian LTS work, February 2022
https://www.decadent.org.uk/ben/blog/debian-lts-work-february-2022.html
March 2, 2022, 3:04 PM
In February I was assigned 16 hours of work by Freexian's Debian LTS
initiative and carried over 8 hours from January. I worked 16
hours, and will carry over the remaining time to March.
I spent most of my time triaging security issues for Linux, working
out which of them were fixed upstream and which actually applied to
the versions provided in Debian 9 "stretch". I also rebased the
Linux 4.9 (linux) package on the latest stable update, but did not
make an upload this month....
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Keith Packard: picolibc-testing
http://keithp.com/blogs/picolibc-testing/
March 2, 2022, 7:28 AM
Testing Picolibc with the glibc tests
Picolibc has a bunch of built-in tests, but more testing is always
better, right? I decided to see how hard it would be to run some of
the tests provided in the GNU C Library (glibc).
Parallel meson build files
Similar to how Picolibc uses meson build files to avoid modifying the
newlib autotools infrastructure, I decided to take the glibc code and
write meson build rules that would compile the tests against Picolibc
header files and link against Picolibc...
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François Marier: Ways to refer to locahost in Chromium
https://feeding.cloud.geek.nz/posts/ways-to-refer-to-localhost-chromium/
March 2, 2022, 2:45 AM
The filter rules preventing websites from portscanning the local
machine have recently
been tightened in Brave. It turns out there are a surprising number of ways
to refer to the local machine in Chromium.
localhost and friends
127.0.0.1 is the first address that comes to mind when thinking of the
local machine. localhost is typically aliased to that address (via
/etc/hosts), though that convention is not mandatory. The IPv6 equivalent
is [::1].
http://localhost/
http://foo.localhost/
http:/...
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Utkarsh Gupta: FOSS Activites in February 2022
https://utkarsh2102.com/posts/foss-in-feb-22/
March 1, 2022, 5:41 AM
Here’s my (twenty-ninth) monthly but brief update about the activities I’ve done in the F/L/OSS world.
Debian
This was my 38th month of actively contributing to Debian.
I became a DM in late March 2019 and a DD on Christmas ‘19! o/
I had been sick this month, so most of the time I spent away from system, recovering, et al,
and also went through the huge backlog that I had, which is starting to get smaller. :D
Anyway, I did the following stuff in Debian:
Uploads and bug fixes:
at (3.4....
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Paul Wise: FLOSS Activities February 2022
http://bonedaddy.net/pabs3/log/2022/03/01/floss-activities/
March 1, 2022, 4:16 AM
Focus
This month I didn't have any particular focus.
I just worked on issues in my info bubble.
Changes
gensim:
use datapath consistently,
enable a test,
rm cruft
git-remote-hg:
option to test installed code, fix shebang handling, check for Python/Mercurial
mpv-mpris:
add
CPPFLAGS,
smoke tests
purple-discord:
fix dead store,
fix crash
zxing-cpp:
drop code copy,
fix
crash,
spelling
iotop:
URL cleanup,
hide SWAPIN/IO when data collection is disabled,
promote
iotop-c,
distro packages
duck:
indi...
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Russell Coker: SAGE (ITPA) Spam
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2022/03/01/sage-itpa-spam/
March 1, 2022, 4:11 AM
In 2008 I joined SAGE (the System Administrators’ Guild of Australia). It was a professional society for people doing sysadmin work (running computer servers). I quit when I found that the level of clue was lower than hoped and that members used the code of ethics as nothing but a way to score points in online debates. After quitting SAGE kept emailing me and wouldn’t respect my request to be removed from all lists so I had to block their mail server.
SAGE has in recent times changed it’s ...
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Abiola Ajadi: Career Interest!
https://ajadi-abiola.github.io/blog/Career-Interests
March 1, 2022, 12:00 AM
Hi, Welcome back.
In this blog, I will be discussing my career interests and what I plan to pursue after my internship.
What comes next after the internship
After working a while with Debci project, I was able to learn better software development practices and love the open source community. I will love to build my career path around open-source.
What I am looking for
Prior to starting my internship, I have worked as a front-end developer with react and javascript. During my internship with De...
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Abiola Ajadi: Career Interest!
https://ajadi-abiola.github.io/blog/Career-Interests
March 1, 2022, 12:00 AM
Hi, Welcome back.
In this blog, I will be discussing my career interests and what I plan to pursue after my internship.
What comes next after the internship
After working a while with Debci project, I was able to learn better software development practices and love the open source community. I will love to build my career path around open-source.
What I am looking for
Prior to starting my internship, I have worked as a front-end developer with react and javascript. During my internship with De...
--------------------
Junichi Uekawa: The World is changing.
http://www.netfort.gr.jp/~dancer/diary/daily/2022-Mar-1.html.en#2022-Mar-1-08:45:37
February 28, 2022, 11:45 PM
The World is changing. People are not satisfied with COVID-19.
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Daniel Silverstone: Subplot and FOSDEM 2022 talk
http://blog.digital-scurf.org/posts/2022-fosdem/
February 26, 2022, 10:22 PM
As many of you may be aware, I work with Lars Wirzenius on a project
we call Subplot which is a tool for writing documentation which helps
all stakeholders involved with a proejct to understand how the project meets
its requirements.
At the start of February we had FOSDEM which was once again online, and
I decided to give a talk in the Safety and open source devroom to
introduce the concepts of safety argumentation and to bring some attention
to how I feel that Subplot could be used in that are...
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Russ Allbery: INN 2.6.5
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/journal/2022-02/001.html
February 26, 2022, 5:36 AM
This is a bit of a sneak preview announcement since I'm waiting for the
ISC mirror to update before sending the official announcement to the
normal channels, but INN 2.6.5 has been released. (The release was
finalized a few days ago, and I'm a bit behind in posting it.)
This is a bug fix and minor feature release over INN 2.6.4, and the
upgrade should be painless. You can download the new release from
ftp.isc.org (once it updates) or
my personal INN pages. The latter also has
links to the ...
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Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 206 released
https://diffoscope.org/news/diffoscope-206-released/
February 25, 2022, 12:00 AM
The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope
version 206. This version includes the following changes:
* Also allow "Unicode text, UTF-8 text" as well as "UTF-8 Unicode text" to
match for .buildinfo files too.
* Add a test for recent file(1) issue regarding .changes files.
(Re: reproducible-builds/diffoscope#291)
* Drop "_PATH" suffix from some module-level globals that are not paths.
You find out more by visiting the project homepage....
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