Petter Reinholdtsen

Her er noen lenker til tekster jeg har satt pris på å lese de siste månedene. Det er mye om varsleren Edward Snowden, som burde få all hjelp, støtte og beskyttelse Norge kan stille opp med for å ha satt totalitær overvåkning på sakskartet, men også endel annet tankevekkende og interessant.

• 2013-12-21 - NSA tenker som Stasi - Dagbladet.no
• 2013-12-19 - Staten har ikke rett til å vite alt om deg - DN.no
• 2013-12-21 Nye mål for NSAs spionasje avslørt - Dagbladet.no
• 2013-12-19 «NSA bør fjernes fra sin makt til å samle inn metadata fra amerikanske telefonsamtaler» - Dagbladet.no
• 2013-12-18 Etterretning, overvåking, frihet og sikkerhet - Dagbladet.no
• 2013-12-17 Snowden angriper USA i åpent brev - nrk.no
• 2013-12-17 Rettslig nederlag for etterretning - digi.no
• 2013-12-21 Truende nedkjøling - dagbladet.no
• 2013-12-20 Matematikk og forståelse - aftenposten.no
• 2013-10-20 Vi søv for å reinse hjernen vår, ifølgje ny studie - nrk.no
• 2013-12-11 Rotterace i kloakken - nrk.no
• 2013-12-30 Åpne brev og frie tanker - aftenposten.no
• 2014-01-12 Stopp dagens kunnskapsapartheid! - aftenposten.no
• 2014-01-09 EU-rapport: Britisk og amerikansk overvåking ser ut til å være ulovlig - aftenposten.no
• 2013-10-23 Professor Jan Arild Audestad Advarer mot konspirasjonsteori i digi.no og sier han ikke tror NSA kan avlytte mobiltelefoner, mens han noen måneder senere forteller:
• 2014-01-09 - Vi ble presset til å svekke mobilsikkerheten på 80-tallet - aftenposten.no
• 2014-02-12 Et møte med Edward Snowden - intervju sendt av nrk, tilgjengelig til 2015-01-31
• 2014-02-17 Litteraturredaktøren: Helle Thornings tavshed om Snowden er en skandale - politiken.dk
• 2014-02-21 Bra å ha en «Storebror» - aftenposten.no
• 2014-02-28 "Narkotikasiktet Stortingsmann" - Spillet bak kulissene - John Christian Eldens blogg
• 2014-02-28 Heksejakt på hasjbrukere - aftenposten.no

Many years ago, I wrote a GPL licensed version of the netgroup and innetgr tools, because I needed them in Skolelinux. I called the project ng-utils, and it has served me well. I placed the project under the Hungry Programmer umbrella, and it was maintained in our CVS repository. But many years ago, the CVS repository was dropped (lost, not migrated to new hardware, not sure), and the project have lacked a proper home since then.

Last summer, I had a look at the package and made a new release fixing a irritating crash bug, but was unable to store the changes in a proper source control system. I applied for a project on Alioth, but did not have time to follow up on it. Until today. :)

After many hours of cleaning and migration, the ng-utils project now have a new home, and a git repository with the highlight of the history of the project. I published all release tarballs and imported them into the git repository. As the project is really stable and not expected to gain new features any time soon, I decided to make a new release and call it 1.0. Visit the new project home on https://alioth.debian.org/projects/ng-utils/ if you want to check it out. The new version is also uploaded into Debian Unstable.

A few days ago I decided to try to help the Hurd people to get their changes into sysvinit, to allow them to use the normal sysvinit boot system instead of their old one. This follow up on the great Google Summer of Code work done last summer by Justus Winter to get Debian on Hurd working more like Debian on Linux. To get started, I downloaded a prebuilt hard disk image from http://ftp.debian-ports.org/debian-cd/hurd-i386/current/debian-hurd.img.tar.gz, and started it using virt-manager.

The first think I had to do after logging in (root without any password) was to get the network operational. I followed the instructions on the Debian GNU/Hurd ports page and ran these commands as root to get the machine to accept a IP address from the kvm internal DHCP server:

settrans -fgap /dev/netdde /hurd/netdde
kill $(ps -ef|awk '/[p]finet/ { print $2}')
kill $(ps -ef|awk '/[d]evnode/ { print $2}')
dhclient /dev/eth0

After this, the machine had internet connectivity, and I could upgrade it and install the sysvinit packages from experimental and enable it as the default boot system in Hurd.

But before I did that, I set a password on the root user, as ssh is running on the machine it for ssh login to work a password need to be set. Also, note that a bug somewhere in openssh on Hurd block compression from working. Remember to turn that off on the client side.

Run these commands as root to upgrade and test the new sysvinit stuff:

cat > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/experimental.list <<EOF
deb http://http.debian.net/debian/ experimental main
EOF
apt-get update
apt-get dist-upgrade
apt-get install -t experimental initscripts sysv-rc sysvinit \
    sysvinit-core sysvinit-utils
update-alternatives --config runsystem

To reboot after switching boot system, you have to use reboot-hurd instead of just reboot, as there is not yet a sysvinit process able to receive the signals from the normal 'reboot' command. After switching to sysvinit as the boot system, upgrading every package and rebooting, the network come up with DHCP after boot as it should, and the settrans/pkill hack mentioned at the start is no longer needed. But for some strange reason, there are no longer any login prompt in the virtual console, so I logged in using ssh instead.

Note that there are some race conditions in Hurd making the boot fail some times. No idea what the cause is, but hope the Hurd porters figure it out. At least Justus said on IRC (#debian-hurd on irc.debian.org) that they are aware of the problem. A way to reduce the impact is to upgrade to the Hurd packages built by Justus by adding this repository to the machine:

cat > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/hurd-ci.list <<EOF
deb http://darnassus.sceen.net/~teythoon/hurd-ci/ sid main
EOF

At the moment the prebuilt virtual machine get some packages from http://ftp.debian-ports.org/debian, because some of the packages in unstable do not yet include the required patches that are lingering in BTS. This is the completely list of "unofficial" packages installed:

# aptitude search '?narrow(?version(CURRENT),?origin(Debian Ports))'
i   emacs                   - GNU Emacs editor (metapackage)
i   gdb                     - GNU Debugger
i   hurd-recommended        - Miscellaneous translators
i   isc-dhcp-client         - ISC DHCP client
i   isc-dhcp-common         - common files used by all the isc-dhcp* packages
i   libc-bin                - Embedded GNU C Library: Binaries
i   libc-dev-bin            - Embedded GNU C Library: Development binaries
i   libc0.3                 - Embedded GNU C Library: Shared libraries
i A libc0.3-dbg             - Embedded GNU C Library: detached debugging symbols
i   libc0.3-dev             - Embedded GNU C Library: Development Libraries and Hea
i   multiarch-support       - Transitional package to ensure multiarch compatibilit
i A x11-common              - X Window System (X.Org) infrastructure
i   xorg                    - X.Org X Window System
i A xserver-xorg            - X.Org X server
i A xserver-xorg-input-all  - X.Org X server -- input driver metapackage
#

All in all, testing hurd has been an interesting experience. :) X.org did not work out of the box and I never took the time to follow the porters instructions to fix it. This time I was interested in the command line stuff.