tales of a debian maintainer
This needs to be clear: systemd is under attack by a trolling campaign orchestrated by fascist elements. Nobody is forced to like or use systemd, but anybody who wants to pick a side should know the facts. Recently, the free software Nazi bar crowd styling themselves as "concerned citizens" has tried to start a moral panic by saying that systemd is implementing age verification checks or that…
Recently I found myself with a few hours to kill, but with the only available connectivity provided by an annoying firewall which would normally allow requests only to a few very specific web sites. This post shows how to work around this kind of restrictions by hiding SSH in an HTTPS connection, which then can be used as a SOCKS proxy to allow general connectivity. socat does all the hard work.…
Over the past year, the peering LAN of MIX-IT, the largest internet exchange point in Italy carrying 2.5-3 Tbps of traffic, has experienced multiple outages. The longest lasted 34 hours, which I understand has set a new world record. These incidents should clearly demonstrate to regulators that IXP s do not generally meet the criteria for critical infrastructure / essential entities, and this is a…
We want to use an hyperscaler cloud because it is cheaper to delegate operating a scalable and redundant database to an hyperscaler is something that can be debated from business and technical points of view. We want to use an hyperscaler cloud because our developers do not want to operate a scalable and redundant database just means that you need to hire competent developers and/or system…
More than two years after I last uploaded the purity-off Debian package, its autopkgtest (the Debian distribution-wide continuous integration system) started failing on arm64, and only on this architecture. The failing test is very simple: it prints a long stream of " y " or " n " characters to purity(6) 's standard input and then checks the output for the expected result. While investigating the…
A few days ago CISPE , a trade association of European cloud providers, published a press release complaining about the new VMware licensing scheme and asking for regulators and legislators to intervene . But VMware does not have a monopoly on virtualization software: I think that asking regulators to interfere is unnecessary and unwise, unless, of course, they wish to question the entire…
inn2 uses ephemeral UNIX domain sockets in /run/news/ to communicate with the ctlinnd program. Since the directory is only writeable by the "news" user, other unprivileged users are not able to use the command. I solved this by extending the inn2.service systemd unit with a drop-in file which uses setfacl to give access to my user "md" to the RuntimeDirectory created by systemd. This is the…
Now that Debian 12 has been released with proprietary firmwares on the official media , non-optional merged-/usr and systemd adopted by everybody, I want to take a moment to list, not without some pride, a few things that I was right about over the last 20 years: Distribution of proprietary firmwares ( #33 , #40 , #114 ) udev systemd ( #454 ) merged-/usr Accepting the obvious solution about…
I recently bought a Banana Pi BPI-M5 , which uses the Amlogic S905X3 SoC : these are my notes about installing Debian on it. While this SoC is supported by the upstream U-Boot it is not supported by the Debian U-Boot package, so debian-installer does not work. Do not be fooled by seeing the DTB file for this exact board being distributed with debian-installer: all DTB files are, and it does not…
To be able to investigate and work on the the measured boot features I have switched from grub to systemd-boot (sd-boot). This initial step is optional, but it is useful because this way /etc/kernel/cmdline will become the new place where the kernel command line can be configured: . /etc/default/grub echo "root=/dev/mapper/root $GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX $GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT" > /etc/kernel/cmdline…