Dropbear

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  • procps using GitLab CI

    procps-ciThe procps project for a few years has been hosted at Gitorious.  With the announcement that Gitorious has been acquired by GitLab and that all repositories need to move there, procps moved along to GitLab. At first I thought it would just be a like for like thing, but then I noticed that GitLab has this GitLab CI feature and had to try it out.

    CI here stands for Continuous Integration and is a way of automatically testing your program builds using a bunch of test scripts.  procps already has a set of tests, with some a level of coverage that has room for improvement, so it was a good candidate to use for CI. The way GitLab works is they have a central control point that is linked to the git repo and you create runners, which are the systems that actually compile the programs and run the tests. The runners then feed back their results and GitLab CI shows it all in pretty red or green.

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  • Backporting and git-buildpackage

    For working with Debian packages, one method of maintaining them is to put them in git and use git-buildpackage to build them right out of the git repository.  There are a few pitfalls with it, notably around if you forget to import the upstream you get this strange treeish related error which still throws me at first when I see it.

    Part of maintaining packages is to be able to fix security bugs in older versions of them that are found in stable and even sometimes old stable (jessie and wheezy respectively at the time of writing).  At first I used to do this outside git because to me there wasn’t a clear way of doing it within it.  This is not too satisfactory because it means you lose the benefits of using git in the first place, and for distributions you are more likely to need collaboration with, such as working with the security team or help with backporting.

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  • 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/

  • Juniper Firewalls and IPv6

    A little firewall

    I found an interesting side-effect of the Juniper firewalls when you introduce IPv6.  In hindsight it appears perfectly reasonable but if you are not aware of it in the first place you may have a much more permissive firewall than you thought.  My setup is such that my internet address changes every time I connect to an ISP. I have services “behind” the Juniper that I want to expose onto the Internet, in this case a mailserver.

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  • Mudlet 3 beta

    Mudlet - Graphical MUD client

    A break from wordpress, I was trying to get the beta version of mudlet 3.0 compiling. On the surface the program looks a lot like the existing v2.0 that is currently within Debian.  The developers have switched from qt4 to qt5 which means a lot of dependency fun for me but I got there in the end.

    As it is only a beta and not their final release, the package is located within the Debian experimental release. Once 3.0 hits a final release, I’ll switch it to sid.  If you do use the current mudlet, give 3.0 a try. I’d be interested to know what you think.

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  • WordPress 4.1 for Debian

    Release 4.1 of WordPress came out on Friday so after some work to fit in with the Debian standards, the Debian package 4.1-1 of WordPress will be uploaded shortly.  WordPress have also updated their themes with a 14-day early theme called twentyfifteen.  This is the default theme for WordPress 4.1 on-wards.

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  • WordPress 4.0.1 fixes for Debian stable

    Previously I posted a short article about the WordPress package for Debian and how that SID was getting the updated WordPress 4.0.1 which had some security fixes.

    The question a lot of people were asking was: What about stable (or Wheezy).  After way too much time due to other pressing issues, I have just uploaded the patched WordPress debian package for stable.  The fixed version has the catchy number of 3.6.1~deb7u5.  This package has all of the relevant patches that went in from WordPress 3.7.4 to 3.7.5 and there are even CVE IDs for this package (and 4.0.1 which all this stems from).

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  • WordPress 4.0.1 for Debian

    WordPress recently released an update that had multiple security patches for their (then) current version 4.0. This release is 4.0.1 and includes important security fixes.  The Debian packages got just uploaded, if you are running the Debian packaged wordpress, you should update to 4.0.1+dfsg-1 or later.

    I am going to look at these patches and see if they can and need to be backported to wordpress 3.6.1. Unfortunately I believe they will be. I’m also asking it to be unblocked into Jessie as it is a security fix.

    There was, at the time of writing, no CVE numbers.

  • IPv6 and bridges

    I’ve reported a bug on bridge-utils, but perhaps someone has already seen this and has a fix. My virtual IPv6 machines often lose connectivity from time to time. Tracking this down, it seems that the router sends Neighbor Solicitations (IPv6 ARPs basically). The physical interface of the bridge group receives it, but the vnet0 one does not.

    Using tshark I can see the pings on vnet0 but on br0 and eth1 I see the ping requests and the NS packets. So there is something odd going on with the bridge interface.

    If I remove and add the vnet0 interface from the bridge group, the connectivity comes back.

  • 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.