Dropbear

Category: Uncategorized

  • WordPress 5.4

    Debian packages for WordPress version 5.4 will be uploaded shortly. I’m just going through the install testing now.

    One problem I have noticed is, at least for my setup, there is an issue with network updates. The problem is that WordPress will ask me if I want to update the network sites, I say yes and get a SSL error.

    After lots of debugging, the problem is that the fsockopen option to use SNI is turned off for network updates. My sites need SNI so without this they just bomb out with a SSL handshake error.

    I’m not sure what the real fix is, but my work-around was to temporary set the SNI in the fsockopen transport while doing the site updates.

    The file you want wp-includes/Requests/Transport/fsockopen.php and in the request method of Requests_Transport_fsockopen you’ll see something like:

                           stream_context_set_option($context, array('ssl' => $context_options)); 
                } 
                else { 
                        $remote_socket = 'tcp://' . $host; 
                }

    Just before the stream_context_set_option put the line:

                            $context_options['SNI_enabled'] = true;

    Ugly but it works

    Update May 2020

    Looking into this more, there is a bug in the fsockopen transport. If you have verify_peer turned off (which network upgrades do) then it turns SNI off. You still need SNI even if you are going to not verify the certificate. I raised https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/50288#ticket but its simply commenting out the line that disables SNI in Requests/Transport/fsockopen.php around line 444.

  • Another ActivityPub quirk

    I’m wondering now if the problem with the activitypub is because the user object was already in the remote site and somehow the two were not being linked up properly.

    Removing the user information off the mastodn instance may help, or not.

  • wordpress 4.9.7

    No sooner than I had patched WordPress 4.9.5 to fix the arbitrary unlink bug than I realised there is a WordPress 4.9.7 out there. This release (just out for Debian, if my Internet behaves) fixes the unlink bug found by RIPS Technologies.  However, the WordPress developers used a different method to fix it.

    There will be Debian backports for WordPress that use one of these methods. It will come down to do those older versions use hooks and how different the code is in post.php

    You should update, and if you don’t like WordPress deleting or editing its own files, perhaps consider using AppArmor.

  • Back Online

    I now have Internet back! Which means I can try to get the Debian WordPress packages bashed into shape. Unfortunately they still have the problem with the json horrible “no evil” license which causes so many problems all over the place.

    I’m hoping there is a simple way of just removing that component and going from there.

  • Renaming RoseNMS

    Today I have pushed all (or hopefully all) the required differences in the source files to change the name of the project.  Originally it was called Rosenberg NMS, named after a lizard or heath monitor that lives in this parts.  The name was cute but cumbersome.

    I’ve cut it down now to just RoseNMS with no space in between. This will also fix the nightmare of using a space, hyphen or underscore in various pieces of the code. All three were used but with no space in between, there is no confusion.

    The site URL remains the same at https://rmns.org/ however the read-the-docs url has changed to fit with the new name: https://rosenms.readthedocs.org/

  • How not to get Galaxy Tab into Safe Mode

    For weeks my Galaxy Tab 10.1 has reasonably consistently gone into safe mode. Not booting into it but I’d use it fine then put it away and next time I looked at it, Safe Mode was there. It wasn’t every time, but averaged to be about every second time.

    So the first thing was a bit of googling to see what this Safe Mode was. Most of the suggestions were around how to put it into safe mode during the boot process but my problem was opposite; it wasn’t during booting and I wanted something to stop safe mode, not put the device into it. The closest I got to it was there was some misbehaving program that kicked the thing into safe mode.

    The problem was, I checked several times and there were no running programs. I really did start to worry I had a hardware fault or something wrong deep within the OS.

    When you have problems in IT, you’re usually asked “What’s new? What’s changed?”. The answer is generally “Nothing” which gets a switch “No really, what did change”. The only answer I could come up with was a hardware keyboard. This slim aluminum uses bluetooth to communicate to the tablet and clips onto the front screen to protect it when not in use. Could this be the change I was looking for?

    The clue was that sometimes when you boot Android, if you hold down some keys it boots into safemode. It seems that holding down some combination of keys (volume up/down, power) puts into safe mode. The keyboard can clip onto the tablet in two ways, one long edge has some raised edges while one doesn’t. If the raised edge was connected to the same side as the buttons, I’d get safe mode sometimes as the edge pushed some of those buttons. More importantly, putting the raised edge on the side with no buttons meant no more safe mode.

    Not really a software or electrical fault, more one of just mechanics.

     

  • Rnms now using TurboGears 2.3.2

    While the website might of been idle there has been a great deal of work behind the scenes (unless you’re looking at github) updating and improving RoseNMS, the python based Network Management System. The code has had a great many changes including:

    • Updating the TurboGears based code to 2.3.2
    • Simplifying the admin back to TG standard using the Twitter Bootstrap option
    • Making several GUI changes to make it easier to switch screens or get more information
    • Update to the pysnmp module to the latest, which is a much better module
    • Changing from paste to cliff for the command lines and bringing it all into one binary

    I’m hoping to get to release one in the next few months. The back-end is largely complete with some work required on the daemon and also more webGUI work to make sure its easy to get the right information at the right time.

     

  • WordPress 3.9.1

    The Debian package of WordPress version 3.9.1 was uploaded to the ftp master recently.  While the update was pretty simple, the upload took a lot more doing. I’m not sure why the Debian ftp-master server didn’t like me, but it was so slow. Strangely, even dcut uploads were slow and they are only a few lines of text.

    Apologies for the delay too, I’m not sure why I didn’t notice the update from 3.9 to 3.9.1 but there you go.

    The other change is that the package uses the system CA certificates rather than the ones pre-shipped with wordpress. This is done so that if the administrator makes decisions on what certificates to trust, then the wordpress client http libraries will follow that decision.

  • A python utf gotcha

    This one had me stumped for a while:

    # -*- coding: utf-7 -*-
import datetime
from sqlalchemy import ForeignKey, Column
from sqlalchemy.types import Integer, Unicode, Boolean, DateTime

default_due_date = datetime.datetime.now() + datetime.timedelta(days=30)

    Syntax error found on last line.

    Hmm, bring up a python interpreter and type the last line in with the imports. Works fine.

    It’s the first line that is the problem, I typoed it and made it utf-7 not utf-8. I suppose it means that it is case-insenstive. Still, it wasn’t too clear to me at least, what was going on.

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  • mutt ate my i key

    I did a large upgrade tonight and noticed there was a mutt upgrade, no biggie really….Except my I have for years (incorrectly?) used the “i” key when reading a specific email to jump back to the list of emails, or from index to pager in mutt speak.

    Instead of my pager of mails, I got “No news servers defined!” The fix is rather simple, in muttrc put

    bind pager i exit

    and you’re back to using the i key the wrong way again like me.

     

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