Arch Planet
Planet Arch Linux is a window into the world, work and lives of Arch Linux developers, trusted users and support staff.
Xandikos CardDAV/CalDAV server
In looking to moving my phone to LineageOS, I've started thinking about moving
my mail, contacts and calendar data to my own server. After researching solutions for a while, I decided to try out xandikos. A simple Python carddav/caldav server intended for a single user with a basic feature …
Monthly Report (August 2021)
This is the monthly report of what I’ve been up to in August 2021. 🙌
Reproducible Builds
There are many different reasons to be interested in Reproducible Builds. When I originally got involved in the project I wasn’t a maintainer in any Linux distribution yet, instead I was wondering if there’s a way to distribute pre-compiled artifacts as an independent open source dev without carrying all the responsibility alone.
A few years later I’ve now published a manual called i-probably-didnt-backdoor-this. It contains a hello world program and instructions on how to reproduce the various pre-compiled artifacts, explains all build …
mkinitcpio v31 and UEFI stubs
A few months ago I wrote up some code for mkinitcpio which teaches it how to create UEFI executables utilizing the systemd stub.
The change can be found here: https://github.com/archlinux/mkinitcpio/pull/53
This is a short introduction to why the feature is great, how it makes it easier to boot your system, and how it can be used to better secure your system with something like secure boot.
The Boot Process For the past decade most computers have two ways to boot.
Enumerating .gov.af
Due to recent political events there’s an increased interest in Afghanistan’s websites. This is a tutorial on how to run sn0int on
.gov.af to enumerate as many sites as possible for archival purpose.
Installation
sn0int can be installed with pacman -S sn0int or brew install sn0int.
Enumerating an eTLD
We’re going to start sn0int in a new workspace that we call gov-af. This can be any name, it’s just a way to organize our data.
We’re then creating a gov.af domain object in sn0int so we can run investigations on it. This is technically not how the …
Reproducible Python Bytecode
Some Linux distributions (like Alpine and Arch Linux) are shipping something called “python bytecode” in their packages. It’s stored in
.pyc files and is generated during the package build. They’re stored in __pycache__ folders and can be seen here:
% tar tvvf /var/cache/pacman/pkg/python-wsproto-1.0.0-1-any.pkg.tar.zst
-rw-r--r-- root/root 5053 2020-12-09 16:24 .BUILDINFO
-rw-r--r-- root/root 2497 2020-12-09 16:24 .MTREE
-rw-r--r-- root/root 436 2020-12-09 16:24 .PKGINFO
drwxr-xr-x root/root 0 2020-12-09 16:24 usr/
drwxr-xr-x root/root 0 2020-12-09 16:24 usr/lib/
drwxr-xr-x root/root 0 2020-12-09 16:24 usr/lib/python3.9/
drwxr-xr-x root/root 0 2020-12-09 16:24 usr/lib/python3.9/site-packages/
drwxr-xr-x root/root 0 2020-12-09 16:24 usr/lib/python3.9/site-packages/wsproto/
drwxr-xr-x root/root 0 2020-12-09 16:24 usr/lib/python3.9/site-packages/wsproto-1.0.0-py3.9.egg-info/
-rw-r--r-- root/root 6997 …
Arch Reproducible Progress July 2021
At the end of July, I had some days off and some more time to focus on some unreproducible packages in Arch Linux and get some of the issues resolved. This post goes through the resolved issues by category.
gzipped man pages
By default if a manpage is compressed with …
Kubermatic on Hetzner
Hello and welcome to another article about Kubernetes. In this article we will go through the Kubermatic installation on Hetzner Cloud. But first of all let us go through a few questions:
What is Kubermatic and why do I need it? Kubermatic abstracts different Kubernetes clusters and providers for you. It does not matter if you want a cluster on Amazon, Google, Hetzner, vSphere or on-premise. With Kubermatic you can easily bootstrap new clusters in your favorite location with your favorite cloud provider or on-premise.
Hardening Executables
Quite a while ago, Arch Linux has turned on many binary security features via compilation flags (2016)1 or turned off options that are known to help exploit software (debugging symbols, RPATH). Now we have 2021 and Arch Linux made good experience with the additional security options.
We made good experience on Arch Linux with the following flags so far:
FULL RELRO (Full Relocation Read-Only)2 STACK CANARY3 NX-Bit4 PIE (Position Independent Executable/Code)5 Setting no RPATH6 Setting no Symbols FORTIFY7 Some of these flags are known to have effects on performance.
Monthly Report (July 2021)
During summer 2017 I picked up Rust as one of my programming languages. Since this was my first compiled programming language (ignoring some of my early C antics), I was faced with one inherent problem: “How do I distribute pre-compiled binaries without getting SolarWinded?”. Granted, those might not have been my exact words back in Fall 2017, but I was intrigued by this problem and got involved in the reproducible builds project as a volunteer contributor.
About 4 years later this is now changing to part-time open source security research thanks to sponsoring by Google & The Linux Foundation! …
Disagreeing rebuilders and what that means
Today we’ve noticed a disagreement between the Arch Linux rebuilders about the “cross” package, a popular @rustlang cross-compile tool. One rebuilder reported they’ve succesfully reproduced the package, while the other reported they couldn’t. Let’s have a look what that means.
The official rebuilder says “yup, we took the official package, took the source code, built it in the same environment and got a bit-for-bit identical package, there was probably no build-server compromise (or if there was, they at least didn’t mess with this build)”.
Another rebuilder also tried but had less luck. It periodically retries to get a match with …
Vim setup 2021
Feeling inspired by watching togglebit's Rust/Vim setup and having some spare time due to my summer vacation I started re-investigating my Vim setup. For my setup I was looking for the following features/areas to improve:
- Git integration
- Debugging projects in vim
- Language server features, completion, go to …
Reproducible Raspi images with Alpine (Part 2)
Alrighty, we initially planned a part two with NixOS, but 1) we’d have to learn scheme (and we’d rather not) 2) somebody needs to to do it for alpine anyway. Pack yo toothbrush, we got supplychains that need securin’!
First of all, @ariadneconill went up and beyond and un-dead-ended us by implementing –ignore-devno and –renumber-inodes in cpio.c, sending patches to busybox and then uploading a patched busybox 1.33.1-r3 to alpine for us to continue with. Outstanding work!
This looks really good, the initramfs is indeed reproducible now as it’s not showing up in the diff anymore. The APKINDEX.tar.gz is a …
Reproducible Raspi images with Alpine (Part 1)
Ever wondered if that raspi is actually running the code it’s supposed to? Today we’re taking Alpine Linux as a base and trying to make a reproducible image, so an independent party can verify the image is legitimately built from source. All patches are going to be sent upstream.
It’s mostly mtimes, so we’re starting by editing ./mkimg.base.sh and introducing SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH support to normalize it. After that diffoscope shows 3 files that actually differ in content. We’re going to focus on the initramfs first and look into the APKINDEX.tar.gz later.
This turned out slightly tricky, we’re excluding rpi2 support to …
Automated Website Testing with Selenium
Today’s blog article is a more unusual one. If you know me in person you would not connect me to web development, but yet here we are. So, how do I got here? One student at my university has asked me if I could help and have a look on their code. He was working on unit tests with Selenium on a very beginner friendly level. This is how I got more interested in this topic.
Sorting out old password hashes
Starting with
libxcrypt 4.4.21, weak password hashes (such as MD5 and
SHA1) are no longer accepted for new passwords. Users that still have
their passwords stored with a weak hash will be asked to update their
password on their next login.
If the login just fails (for example from display manager) switch to a
virtual terminal (Ctrl-Alt-F2) and log in there once.
Move of official IRC channels to libera.chat
As some of you may have read over the past days, there has been an ownership dispute over the freenode.net network. The IRC network has been used by Arch Linux and many other projects over the past decades as a platform for discussion and support.
The dispute led to the exodus of most former freenode staff from the network and the founding of a new network: libera.chat
Starting today, Arch Linux and its sister projects Arch Linux ARM and Arch Linux 32 will begin migrating the official IRC channels from freenode.net to libera.chat. Please bear with us as this can take some time to be fully settled in.
We thank the freenode community for the many years of great service and collaboration.
Boost your productivity with ZSH and Alacritty
In today’s article I would like to shine some light on my local terminal setup. My setup consists of ZSH and Alacritty. ZSH or the Z shell is an extended variant of the Bourne shell (bash). It comes with a few useful features and extensions. Many people use the ZSH mostly for nice shell prompts or tab completion. This article will be about more advanced features, like custom shortcuts. Alacritty is a terminal emulator written in Rust.
FOSS Activities in April 2021
Yo!
Hope people have had a lovely spring. This month has passed quickly! I have put off writing the monthly post because I was busy with a weekend project.
My master thesis was about how to apply transparency logs and reproducible builds to give package rebuilders the ability to produce tamper evident logs. This is handy since any one package build can easily be proven to be part of the log, and you can very easily fill inn the history from one point in time to another by hashing files in the correct order.
Go Embed and Angular
Hi, there. Today’s article will be a rather short article. In this article I would like to showcase Go 1.16 new embed package. If you are familiar with Go you might know embedding functionality already from famous other libraries like go-bindata. The problem with go-bindata has been that upstream vanished one day and then multiple forks appeared and every company or person was doing their own thing with embedding assets into Go programs.
FOSS Activities in March 2021
Yoooo!
Another month has passed which means another status update.
The python2 removal has been steady and several packages has been removed this month. Currently a query for python2 on archweb returns 139 matches. At the start of the month it was around 160-170. Progress!
I have suggested we remove checkdepends on python2 packages to ease the cleanup of dependency cycles. The response has been lukewarm at best so we’ll see how that progresses.
Installation medium with installer
The installation medium now provides a guided installer.
This addition to the default method of installation (based on the installation guide) is similar to the other methods.
If you use this installer, do not forget to mention it when asking for support and also to provide the archinstall log, when asked.
Monitoring Arch Linux with Prometheus
For monitoring the Arch Linux infrastructure we've moved on from Zabbix to Prometheus as it fits more into our infrastructure is code goal. This required some research into how we could achieve the same monitoring with Prometheus. Our Zabbix setup monitored Host, MySQL, Borg and Arch Linux related metrics. For …
Wayland in 2021
A year ago I wrote about my Wayland setup on Linux. This year I would like to give you a small update on how I am going with Wayland on Arch Linux and how it is my daily driver at home and work. The setup itself stayed pretty much the same:
Operating System: Arch Linux Window Manager: Sway Status bar: Heavily customized Barista bar Screenshots: Bash script utilizing Grim + Slurp Screen recordings: Bash script utilizing wf-recorder Sharing Text: Bash script utilizing wl-clipboard Dynamic Menu: bemenu Password Management: A combination of gopass, bemenu and bash Screensharing: xdg-desktop-portal-wlr + pipewire You can find my full setup in my dotfiles repository on Github.
FOSS Activities in February 2021
Yo!
New month, new update!
The start of this month was marked with FOSDEM! I held a talk about secure boot and the tooling stuff I have written, sbctl. It’s a tool to help you manage secure boot keys and signing files. With help from sbsigntools it also does live enrollment of keys.
The talk went great (I think) and it was fun to see how FOSDEM pulled off the conference with matrix and jitsi.
Moving to Zstandard images by default on mkinitcpio
As linux-lts moved to the 5.10 version, all official kernels of Arch Linux now support zstd compressed
initramfs images, so mkinitcpio is switching to zstd compressed images by default with version 30,
which is currently on [testing].
If, for any reason, you are using a kernel version prior to 5.9, make sure to change mkinitcpio.conf
COMPRESSION to use one of the compressors supported, like gzip, otherwise you will not be able to
boot images generated by mkinitcpio.