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  • 25 Years of Free Software

    When did I start writing Free Software, now called Open Source? That’s a tricky question. Does the time start with the first file edited, the first time it compiles or perhaps even some proto-program you use to work out a concept for the real program formed later on.

    So using the date you start writing, especially in a era before decent version control systems, is problematic. That is why I use the date of the first release of the first package as the start date. For me, that was Monday 24th July 1995.

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  • Sending data in a signal

    The well-known kill system call has been around for decades and is used to send a signal to another process. The most common use is to terminate or kill another process by sending the KILL or TERM signal but it can be used for a form of IPC, usually around giving the other process a “kick” to do something.

    One thing that isn’t as well known is besides sending a signal to a process, you can send some data to it. This can either be an integer or a pointer and uses similar semantics to the known kill and signal handler. I came across this when there was a merge request for procps. The main changes are using sigqueue instead of kill in the sender and using a signal action not a signal handler in the receiver.

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  • 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.

  • procps-ng 3.3.16

    procps-ng version 3.3.16 was released today. Besides some documentation and library updates, there were a few incremental changes.

    Zombie Hunting with pgrep

    Ever wanted to find zombies? Perhaps processes with other states? pgrep has a shiny new runstate flag to help you which will match process against the runstate. I’m curious to see the use-cases for this flag; it certainly will get used (e.g. find my zombies) but as some processes bounce in and out of states (think Run to Sleep and back) it might add some confusion.

    Snice plays nice with PIDs

    Top Enhancements

    Top got a bunch of love again in this release. If you ever wanted your processes to be shown in fuchsia? Perhaps goldenrod? With some earlier versions of top, you could by directly editing the toprc file but now everyone can have more than the standard 8 colours!

    If you use the other filters parameter for some fancy process filtering in top, it now will save that configuration.

    Collapsed children (process names are weird) get some help. If you are in tree view, you can collapse or fold the children processes under the parent. Their CPU is also added to the parent so there are no “missing” CPU ticks.

    For people who use the One True Editor (which is, of course, VIM) you can use the vim navigation keys to move through the process list.

    Where to find it?

    You’ll find the latest version of procps either at our git repository or download a tarball.

  • WordPress 5.2.4

    Hot on the heels of WordPress version 5.2.3 which fixed a bunch of stuff we have WordPress 5.2.4 with fixes for six security issues.

    There is a certain trick to matching up what the WordPress Blog thinks has been fixed and the changsets between the old version and the new. The curious thing is there were 6 changsets backported to older versions of WordPress, so you might think “six issues, six changesets, what’s the problem?”. The problem is that two of them fix the same thing (or one sort-of fixed it and the second really did) and another I couldn’t link to any vulnerability, BUT it was to do with directory traversal issue.

    The hardest part of maintaining the Debian WordPress packages is the backporting. Trying to link the changes to the bugs is next to impossible so I generally import all the ones they have in the specific major version and hope for the best. This isn’t ideal, but information about what the actual bugs are and how they are fixed is not forthcoming.

  • WordPress 5.1.1

    The Debian packages for WordPress version 5.1.1 are being updated as I write this. This is a security fix for WordPress that stops comments causing a cross-site scripting bug. It’s an important one to update.

    The backports should happen soon so even if you are using Debian stable you’ll be covered.

  • WordPress 5.0.1

    While I missed the WordPress 5.0 release, it was only a few more days before there was a security release out.

    So WordPress 5.0.1 will be available in Debian soon. This is both a security update from 5.0.1 and a huge feature update from the 4.9.x versions to the 5.0 versions.

    The WordPress website, in their 5.0 announcement describe all the changes better, but one of the main things is the new editor (which I’m using as I write this).  It’s certainly cleaner, or perhaps more sparse. I’m not sure if I like it yet.

    The security fixes (there are 7) are the usual things you expect from a WordPress security update. The usual XSS and permission problems type stuff.

    I have also in the 5.0.1 Debian package removed the build dependency to libphp-phpmailer. The issue with that package is there won’t be any more security updates for the version in Debian. WordPress has an embedded version of it which *I hope* they maintain. There is an issue about the phpmailer in WordPress, so hopefully it gets fixed soon.

  • 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.

  • Odd dependency on Google Chrome

    For weeks I have had problems with Google Chrome. It would work very few times and then for reasons I didn’t understand, would stop working. On the command line you would get several screens of text, but never would the Chrome window appear.

    So I tried the Beta, and it worked… once.

    Deleted all the cache and configuration and it worked… once.

    Every time the process would be in an infinite loop listening to a Unix socket (fd 7) but no window for the second and subsequent starts of Chrome.

    By sheer luck in the screenfulls of spam I noticed this:

    Gkr-Message: 21:07:10.883: secret service operation failed: The name org.freedesktop.secrets was not provided by any .service files

    Hmm, so I noticed every time I started a fresh new Chrome, I logged into my Google account. So, once again clearing things I started Chrome, didn’t login and closed and reopened.  I had Chrome running the second time! Alas, not with all the stuff synchronised.

    An issue for Mailspring put me onto the right path. installing gnome-keyring (or the dependencies p11-kit and gnome-keyring-pkcs11) fixed Chrome.

    So if Chrome starts but you get no window, especially if you use cinnamon, try that trick.