blog.alteholz.eu – Page 12 – As time goes by …

5 November 2017

My Debian Activities in October 2017

FTP assistant

Again, this month almost the same numbers as last month appeared in the statistics. I accepted 214 packages and rejected 22 uploads. The overall number of packages that got accepted this month was only 339.

Debian LTS

This was my fortieth month that I did some work for the Debian LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian.

This month my all in all workload has been 20.75h. During that time I did LTS uploads of:

[DLA 1125-1] botan1.10 security update for one CVE
[DLA 1127-1] sam2p security update for 6 CVEs
[DLA 1143-1] curl security update for one CVE
[DLA 1149-1] wget security update for two CVEs

I also took care of radare2 twice and marked all four CVEs as not-affected for Wheezy and Jessie. As nobody else wanted to address the issues in wireshark yet, I now started to work on this package.

Last but not least I did one week of frontdesk duties.

Other stuff

During October I took care of some bugs and at one go uploaded new upstream versions of hoel and duktape (this had to be done twice as I introduced an new bug with the first upload :-(). I only fixed bugs in glewlwyd and smstools. This month I also sponsored an upload of printrun.

After about ten years of living without any power outage, some construction worker decided to cut a cable near my place. Unfortunately one of my computers used for recording TV shows did not boot after the cable had been repaired and I had to switch some timers to other boxes. All in all this was too much stress and I purchased some USVs from APC. As apcupsd was orphaned, I took the opportunity to adopt it as DOPOM for this month.

My license pasting project now contains 31 license templates for your debian/copyright. The list of available texts can be obtained with:
curl http://licapi.debian.net/template
The license text itself is available under the given links, for example with
curl http://licapi.debian.net/template/Apache-2

http://licapi.debian.net/template/Apache-2
http://licapi.debian.net/template/Artistic-2.0
http://licapi.debian.net/template/BSL-1.0
http://licapi.debian.net/template/CC0
http://licapi.debian.net/template/CC-BY-3.0
http://licapi.debian.net/template/CC-BY-4.0
http://licapi.debian.net/template/CC-BY-SA-3.0
http://licapi.debian.net/template/CC-BY-SA-4.0
http://licapi.debian.net/template/Cygwin
http://licapi.debian.net/template/EPL-1.0
http://licapi.debian.net/template/Expat
http://licapi.debian.net/template/GPL-2
http://licapi.debian.net/template/GPL-2+
http://licapi.debian.net/template/GPL-3
http://licapi.debian.net/template/GPL-3+
http://licapi.debian.net/template/ISC
http://licapi.debian.net/template/LGPL-2
http://licapi.debian.net/template/LGPL-2+
http://licapi.debian.net/template/LGPL-2.1
http://licapi.debian.net/template/LGPL-2.1+
http://licapi.debian.net/template/LGPL-3
http://licapi.debian.net/template/LGPL-3+
http://licapi.debian.net/template/LPPL-1.2
http://licapi.debian.net/template/LPPL-1.3a
http://licapi.debian.net/template/LPPL-1.3c
http://licapi.debian.net/template/MPL-1.0
http://licapi.debian.net/template/MPL-1.1
http://licapi.debian.net/template/MPL-2.0
http://licapi.debian.net/template/OFL-1.0
http://licapi.debian.net/template/OFL-1.1
http://licapi.debian.net/template/Zlib

1 October 2017

My Debian Activities in September 2017

FTP assistant

This month almost the same numbers as last month appeared in the statistics. I accepted 213 packages and rejected 15 uploads. The overall number of packages that got accepted this month was 425.

Debian LTS

This was my thirty-ninth month that I did some work for the Debian LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian.

This month my all in all workload has been 15.75h. During that time I did LTS uploads of:

[DLA 1109-1] libraw security update for one CVE
[DLA 1117-1] opencv security update for 13 CVEs

I also took care of libstrusts1.2-java and marked all CVEs as not-affected and I marked all CVEs for jasper as no-dsa. I also started to work on sam2p.

Just as I wanted to upload a new version of libofx, a new CVE was discovered that was not closed in time. I tried to find a patch on my own but had difficulties in reproducing this issue.

Other stuff

This month I made myself familiar with glewlwyd and according to upstream, the Debian packages work out-of-the box. However upstream does not stop working on that software, so I uploaded new versions of hoel, ulfius and glewlwyd.

As libjwt needs libb64, which was orphanded, I used it as DOPOM and adopted it.

Does anybody still know the Mayhem-bugs? I could close one by uploading an updated version of siggen.

I also went through my packages and looked for patches that piled up in the BTS. As a result i uploaded updated versions of radlib, te923con, node-starttls, harminv and uucp.

New upstream versions of openoverlayrouter and fasttree also made it into the archive.

Last but not least I moved several packages to the debian-mobcom group.

3 September 2017

My Debian Activities in August 2017

FTP assistant

This month I accepted 217 packages and rejected 16 uploads. Though this might seem to be a low number this month, I am very pleased about the total number of packages that have been accepted: 558.

Debian LTS

This was my thirty-eight month that I did some work for the Debian LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian.

This month my all in all workload has been 20.25h. During that time I did LTS uploads of:

[DLA 1055-1] libgd2 security update for one CVE
[DLA 1060-1] libxml2 security update for two CVEs
[DLA 1062-1] curl security update for one CVE
[DLA 1063-1] extplorer security update for one CVE
[DLA 1065-1] fontforge security update for 8 CVEs
[DLA 1082-1] graphicsmagick security update for 8 CVEs

I also did the upload and sent the DLA for [DLA 1061-1] newsbeuter security update

Last but not least I also spent some time for frontdesk duties.

Other stuff

As announced last month I finished uploading all dependencies of glewlwyd and now we have an oauth2 server available in Debian. This month I am trying to really use it and will tell you about my experiences.

As the severity of the gcc-7 bugs have been raised, I took care of: #853501, #853304, #853305, #853306, #853307, #853308 and #871088

I also uploaded a new version of duktape and now try to also provide a library that can be used in other packages.

Last but not least my DOPOM of this month has been oysttyer. Actually it is a new package, but as ttytter has been abandonded upstream, this is the replacement. It is a fork so you should only get a new authorization key and simply use it as ttytter before.

1 August 2017

My Debian Activities in July 2017

FTP assistant

This month I am back to normal numbers and accepted 319 packages. I also kept the promise from last month and rejected 26 uploads.

Debian LTS

This was my thirty-seventh month that I did some work for the Debian LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian.

This month my all in all workload went up to 23.5h. During that time I did LTS uploads of:

[DLA 1025-1] bind9 security update for two CVEs
[DLA 1038-1] libtasn1-3 security update for one CVE
[DLA 1025-2] bind9 regression update
[DLA 1039-1] rkhunter security update for one CVE
[DLA 1040-1] resiprocate security update for one CVE
[DLA 1041-1] nasm security update for two CVEs
[DLA 1042-1] libquicktime security update for seven CVEs

I could also remove libtorrent-rasterbar and pspp from dla-needed.txt as the affected code was not in the Wheezy version or it was just a simple bug.

Last but not least I also had a few days of frontdesk duties.

Other stuff

This month I uploaded a new version of entropybroker with a revised set of systemd service files. At the moment there is public instance of entropybroker running at eb.debian.net. Its entropy is fed by several Entropy Keys made by Simtec Electronics. Though it is public, it is not yet anonymous, so if you need some entropy please drop me a line. At the moment there are two consumers, but the buffers are still filled.

I also uploaded several new packages, orcania, yder, hoel and ulfius. If everything works as expected, there will be soon an oauth2 server available in Debian.

Last but not least my DOPOM of this month has been ptunnel.

1 July 2017

My Debian Activities in June 2017

FTP assistant

This month I marked 100 packages for accept and rejected zero packages. I promise, I will reject more in July!

Debian LTS

This was my thirty-sixth month that I did some work for the Debian LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian.

This month my all in all workload went down again to 16h. During that time I did LTS uploads of:

[DLA 994-1] zziplib security update for seven CVEs
[DLA 995-1] swftools security update for two CVEs
[DLA 998-1] c-ares security update for one CVE
[DLA 1008-1] libxml2 security update for five CVEs

I also tested the proposed apache2 package prepared by Roberto and started to work on a new bind9 upload

Last but not least I had five days of frontdesk duties.

Other stuff

This month was filled with updating lots of machines to Stretch. Everything went fine, so thanks a lot to everybody involved in that release.

Nevertheless I also did a DOPOM upload and now take care of otpw. Luckily most of the accumulated bugs already contained a patch, so that I just had to upload a new version and close them.

1 June 2017

My Debian Activities in May 2017

FTP assistant

This month I only marked 39 packages for accept and rejected 5 packages.

Debian LTS

This was my thirty-fifth month that I did some work for the Debian LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian.

This month my all in all workload has been 27.25h. During that time I did LTS uploads or prepared one for Jessie/Sid:

[DLA 934-1] radicale security update for one CVE
[DLA 942-1] jbig2dec security update for three CVEs
[DLA 947-1] icu security update for two CVEs
[DLA 950-1] libtasn1-3 security update for one CVE
[DSA 3861-1] libtasn1-6 security update for one CVE
[DLA 956-1] libsndfile security update for four CVE
[DLA 957-1] bind9 security update for three CVEs
[DLA 962-1] tnef security update for one CVE
[DSA 3869-1] tnef security update for one CVE

For [DLA 948-1] dropbear and [DLA 958-1] libonig I only did the LTS bookkeeping and sent the DLA.

The icu upload would not have been possible without the help of Roberto.

I also tried to work on jasper, libxml2, libytnef and swftools but unfortunately all upstreams did not finish their respective patches this month, so maybe there will be an upload in June.

Other stuff

Again this has been a busy LTS month, so I only uploaded a new version of smstools, which closed most of its bugs and adopted adopted ptpd as DOPOM.

As a prerequisite of wview I uploaded radlib. Unfortunately I could not do anything for wview, so work on this has to be postponed. Another new package is te923con, which I hope is able to read data from my weather station.

Last but no least I fixed an RC bug in alljoyn-services-1504.

1 May 2017

My Debian Activities in April 2017

FTP assistant

This month I marked 72 packages for accept and sent one email to a maintainer asking questions. The number of rejections went down to 15. I would name that a good level again.

Debian LTS

This was my thirty-fourth month that I did some work for the Debian LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian.

As others reduced their workload for this month, my all in all workload has been 23.75h. During that time I did uploads of

In addition I had one week of frontdesk duties.

I also started to work on icu and bind9. The patches for icu applied fine but the corresponding test did not work but stopped somewhere in the middle!? I am open for any suggestions why this could happen.

Other stuff

This has been a busy LTS month, so I only created node-tunein and adopted smstools as DOPOM.

1 April 2017

My Debian Activities in March 2017

FTP assistant

This month I marked 111 packages for accept and sent four emails to maintainers asking questions. The bad number of the month are the 41 packages I had to reject. This rejection rate was the worst of all my NEW-months.

May I ask everybody to pay a bit more attention before uploading/sponsoring a package?

Debian LTS

This was my thirty-third month that I did some work for the Debian LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian.

This month my all in all workload has been 14.75h. During that time I did uploads of

[DSA 3798-1] tnef security update for four CVEs
[DLA 839-2] tnef regression update
[DSA 3798-2] tnef regression update
tnef security update in unstable/testing for four CVEs
[DLA 878-1] libytnef security update for ten CVEs

I also took care of radare and marked all CVEs as not-affected in Wheezy. My next package on the list will be qbittorrent.

Other stuff

I uploaded a new version of entropybroker to fix a bug with the handling of return codes of ppoll. This version will also make it to Stretch. The same happens with a bug in alljoyn-services-1509. I don’t know why everybody talks about unblock-bugs that need to be filed!? The release team was always faster in granting the unblock than me in filing the corresponding bug.

As my DOPOM for this month I adopted httperf, took care of some bugs and sent patches upstream.

I also created a new project on Alioth that is called debian-mobcom (Alioth page), which shall be a place for all packages concerning mobile communication on the network part. I only uploaded libosmocore to experimental yet, so the package list is rather short.

19 March 2017

Let other devices use my own NTP server

I have these fine set-top boxes here, that try to synchronize their time with some external NTP servers.

The names of the NTP servers are coded into the firmware and can not be changed in the network settings menu. They are called ntp1.technibutler.de, ntp2.technibutler.de and ntp3.technibutler.de. Though they are already Stratum 2 servers, I would rather use my own, local DCF77 radio clock. Obviously it makes no sense to contact some server in the wide internet to get information that is already available locally.

Luckily those servers are just used for time synchronization and nobody wants to get web pages from them or wants to send emails to them. So all that needs to be done is to redefine their address resolution in DNS.

In a first step, I configure my own DNS server. The example below are config files for bind9. Any other DNS server should work as well, just pretend that you are authorized to answer queries for the technibutler NTP servers. As long as there is no DNSSEC or secure NTP involved, everything is fine.

First I need to define the different zones. As there might be other services within the technibutler.de zone, that I still want to use, I will define an extra zone for each hostname of the NTP servers.

;
$TTL    86400
@       IN      SOA     ntp1.technibutler.de. redefined-dns.alteholz.de. (
                              1         ; Serial
                         604800         ; Refresh
                          86400         ; Retry
                        2419200         ; Expire
                          86400 )       ; Negative Cache TTL
;
@       IN      NS      localhost.
@       IN      A       10.10.10.1

;
$TTL    86400
@       IN      SOA     ntp2.technibutler.de. redefined-dns.alteholz.de. (
                              1         ; Serial
                         604800         ; Refresh
                          86400         ; Retry
                        2419200         ; Expire
                          86400 )       ; Negative Cache TTL
;
@       IN      NS      localhost.
@       IN      A       10.10.10.1

;
$TTL    86400
@       IN      SOA     ntp3.technibutler.de. redefined-dns.alteholz.de. (
                              1         ; Serial
                         604800         ; Refresh
                          86400         ; Retry
                        2419200         ; Expire
                          86400 )       ; Negative Cache TTL
;
@       IN      NS      localhost.
@       IN      A       10.10.10.1

I store those configs in /etc/bind/redefined/db.ntp1.technibutler.de, /etc/bind/redefined/db.ntp3.technibutler.de and /etc/bind/redefined/db.ntp3.technibutler.de. The only IP address that is needed in these files are the actual IP address of my local NTP server. As I just have only one, all NTP servers from technibutler.de need to point to this address.

Now I have to tell bind that my zones are the master zone. This is done in /etc/bind/redefined/redefined-zones.conf:

zone "ntp1.technibutler.de" {
   type master;
   file "/etc/bind/redefined/db.ntp1.technibutler.de";
};

zone "ntp2.technibutler.de" {
   type master;
   file "/etc/bind/redefined/db.ntp2.technibutler.de";
};

zone "ntp3.technibutler.de" {
   type master;
   file "/etc/bind/redefined/db.ntp3.technibutler.de";
};

And last but not least I have to tell bind9 to load this config during startup. So I add a line:

include "/etc/bind/redefined/redefined-zones.conf";

at the beginning of /etc/bind/named.conf.local

And voila, before that configuration:

$ nslookup ntp1.technibutler.de
Server:         10.10.10.254
Address:        10.10.10.254#53

Non-authoritative answer:
Name:   ntp1.technibutler.de
Address: 62.138.2.9

and after that configuration:

$ nslookup ntp1.technibutler.de
Server:         10.10.10.254
Address:        10.10.10.254#53

Non-authoritative answer:
Name:   ntp1.technibutler.de
Address: 10.10.10.1

After the configuration of your DNS server is done, you just need to point the set-top boxes or any other device in your home network to your own DNS server. You can either deliver this information via “option domain-name-servers” with DHCP, or manually put your DNS server in the network settings of your device.

5 March 2017

My Debian Activities in February 2017

FTP assistant

This month you didn’t hear much of me, as I only marked 97 packages for accept and rejected 17 packages. I only sent one email to maintainers asking questions.

Nevertheless the NEW queue is down to 46 packages at the moment, so my fellows in misery do a really good job :-).

Debian LTS

This was my thirty-second month that I did some work for the Debian LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian.

This month my all in all workload has been 13.00h. During that time I did uploads of

[DLA 832-1] bitlbee security update for three CVEs
[DLA 837-1] radare2 security update for one CVE
[DLA 839-1] tnef security update for four CVEs
[DLA 843-1] bind9 security update for one CVE

Thanks again to all the people who complied with my requests to test a package!

I also prepared the Jessie DSA for tnef which resulted in DSA 3798-1.

At the end of the month I did another week of frontdesk work and among other things I filed some bugs against packages from [1].

[1] https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/status/unreported

Other stuff

Reading about openoverlayrouter in the German magazine c’t, I uploaded that software to Debian.

I also uploaded npd6, which helped me to reach github from a IPv6-only-machine.
Further I uploaded pyicloud.

As my DOPOM for this mont I adopted bottlerocket. Though you can’t buy the hardware anymore, there still seem to be some users around.