For quite some time we had a package named ec2-api-tools in the Cloud:EC2 project and I suspect many that work with EC2 had found the package and were using the ec2-* commands to manage stuff in EC2. Along with the ec2-api-tools Amazon maintained a separate ec2-* tool set for various services. Keeping up with the armada of Amazon developers is not easy and thus the other ec2-* tool sets never got packaged.

Now a new integrated set of tools is available called with the “aws” command and provided by the aws-cli package. The package is available from the Cloud:Tools project and a submit request to Factory is pending. The new package does not obsolete the ec2-api-tools package as there is no issue with having both packages installed. However, I did take the liberty to remove the ec2-api-tool package from the Cloud:EC2 project as it would no longer receive updates considering that we have a nice new tool that unifies all Amazon services. The documentation for the new command can be found .

The aws code is hosted on github and thus contribution of fixes is easy and that is another big plus over the ec2-* tool sets.

Yes, and of course we need to get openSUSE 13.1 into EC2, and I am working on that, stay tuned….

This is more for my own self reference as I go through fits and starts of having to touch the kernel and end up forgetting WTF I need to do, but it may come in handy for others; especially if people want to enable new hardware etc. As we all know openSUSE follows the mainline kernel source pretty closely. We have as few patches as possible, but sometimes those patches build up as time goes on (think backporting etc.

Two days ago, a new vulnerability on rails was made public. Since I am subscribed to different mailing lists, and use different security services, I got the information multiple times, and I though it could be interesting to draw a timeline on those alerts, to see which tools/services were faster and how the information flows:


12.Feb.2014 - 02:36 CET - Rafael Modença França commits the fix (private)[1]

14.Feb.2014 - 21:41 CET - RedHat create bugzilla entry (private)[2]

18.Feb.2014 - 17:06 CET - SUSE creates bugzilla entry (private)[3]

18.Feb.2014 - 20:00 CET - Rafael Modença França merges the fix to master[4]
                                         - version 4.1.0.beta2 is released [5]
                                         - version 4.0.3 is released [5]
                                         - version3.2.17 is released [5]

18.Feb.2014 - 20:03 CET - aaron patterson sends email to rubyonrails-security@googlegroups.com, oss-security@lists.openwall.com, secalert@redhat.com[6][7]

18.Feb.2014 - 20:10 CET - redruby.io service sends me an email[8]

18.Feb.2014 - 20:12 CET - aaron patterson sends email to ruby-security-ann@googlegroups.com[9]

18.Feb.2014 - 20:17 CET - Rafael França publishes on weblog.rubyonrails.org [10]

18.Feb.2014 - 20:33 CET - hakiri.io service sends me an email[11]

18.Feb.2014 - 20:36 CET - holepicker adds the security alerts in its database[12]

18.Feb.2014 - 21:06 CET - hacker news publishes in its blog[13]

18.Feb.2014 - 21:38 CET - RedHat removes embargoed[2]

19.Feb.2014 - 03:30 CET - Added to osvdb[14]

19.Feb.2014 - 09:03 CET - SUSE removes embargoed[3]

19.Feb.2014 - 11:49 CET - gemnasium.com sends me an email [15]

20.Feb.2014 - 15:24 CET - ruby weekly publishes the new (ruby weekly is released every Thursday)[16]



[1] https://github.com/rails/rails/commit/08d0a11a3f62718d601d39e617c834759cf59bbb
[2] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1065520
[3] https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=864433
[4] https://github.com/rails/rails/commit/1879c259b870938c42d5d52f63123bfa0b8c81c8
[5] http://rubygems.org/gems/rails/versions
[6] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/rubyonrails-security/tfp6gZCtzr4
[7] http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2014/02/18/8
[8] https://www.redruby.io
[9] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/ruby-security-ann/1PWnwW4jRkY
[10] http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2014/2/18/Rails_3_2_17_4_0_3_and_4_1_0_beta2_have_been_released/
[11] https://haikiri.io
[12] https://github.com/jsuder/holepicker/commits/master/lib/holepicker/data/data.json
[13] https://www.facebook.com/hnbot
[14] http://osvdb.org/103439
[15] https://gemnasium.com
[16] http://rubyweekly.com

El 27 de Març a les 18:00 de la tarda faré una presentació al coworking loficina (loficina.cat) sobre com fer negoci amb software lliure. Animeu-vos a venir :) !

Dear lazyweb,

Do you know of any way to catch OS X sandbox violations as they happen (in a huge program like LibreOffice where you don't have a clue what is going on in all places in the codebase) in a debugger (either gdb on the command line, or lldb under Xcode)? The trick using Dtrace in https://devforums.apple.com/message/874181#874181 does not seem to work in 10.9.1 at least.

The FOSDEM organizers have captured more than 16h of video for 22 DevRooms and they are still working hard on getting all of these videos cut and transcoded and put on their site. This is a mammoth task, and some talks in the graphics devroom are still up in the air because of this.

Luckily, some people from the sunxi community took the livestream of sunxi related talks, and produced some quick dumps of it. I have now copied the Mali driver talk over to my fd.o account so that the sunxi server doesn't become too overloaded. Slides are also available.

This talk mentions where i am at with my mesa driver, why i am taking the route i am taking, the importance of SoC communities, and how the lack thereof hampers driver development, and also talks about the company ARM and their stance towards the open driver.

Enjoy!

In our previous summary, we talked about some basic research and some ground work to build on. This time we have some first exciting results!

openQA

Last week we rearranged the repository a little bit, creating a new branch called "devel" where all the exciting (and not so exciting) changes are taking place. Our little Factory

The main difference between this branch as master is that, as you could read in the previous blog, the devel branch is openQA build on Mojolicious, a nice web development framework. And having a proper web framework is starting to show its benefits: we have openID login available! Unfortunately the current openSUSE openID provider is a little bit weird, so it doesn’t play well with our tool yet, but some others are working and openSUSE accounts will be the next step. Having working user accounts is necessary to be able to start defining permissions and to make openQA truly multiuser. And to be able to deploy the new version on a public server!

The other main focus of this week has been internal polishing. We have revamped the database layout and changed the way in which the different openQA components communicate with each other. The openQA functionality is spread out over several parts: the workers are responsible of actually executing the tests in virtual machines reporting the result after every execution; some client utilities are used to load new ISO images and similar tasks and, finally, we have the one openQA Server to rule them all. Until now, the communication between the server and the other components was done using JSON-RPC (a lightweight alternative to XML-RPC). We have dropped JSON-RPC in favor of a REST-like API with just JSON over plain HTTP. This change allowed us to implement exactly the same functionality in a way that is simpler, perfectly supported by any web framework, natively spoken by browsers and easier to authenticate (using, for example, plain HTTP authentication or openID). This is also the first step to future integration with other services (think OBS, as the ultimate goal is to use openQA to test staging projects).

But, who tests the tester? openQA is growing and changing quite fast so we have continued with the task of creating a good testing infrastructure to tests openQA itself to make sure that all our changes do not result in breakage. We only have a few tests right now, but we now have a solid foundation to write more and more tests.

Staging and package manipulation

In the last blog post we told you we were investigating a code test suite to test the abilities of a osc plugin we are writing. osc is the commandline tool for handling the Open Build Service, and this plugin is meant to help with the administration of staging projects. We’ve been thinking about how to move forward with the testing part as we want to make sure the functionality works as advertised. More important, we write tests to make sure that our additions and changes do not break existing functionality. We have started merging functionality from various scripts handling staging thingies and rings we had into this plugin. This is partially done so we can do basic staging project tasks! We can take a request (be it submit or delete) and put it to test in a staging project. We can also move packages between staging projects and we have a simple YAML in project descriptions to indicate what packages and what requests are there.

Coolo already started using the plugin for some tasks, so you can see pretty titles and metadata in staging projects descriptions. Not impressive enough? Let me provide you a good headline:

Thanks to staging projects, no single regression have been introduced this year in the core of Factory

You can enjoy a more detailed description in this announcement written by coolo to the Factory mailing list and have some visual joy in the included screenshot (genuine pr0n for QA engineers).

Last but not least, we also did some cleanup of the sources in the repo and of course we added more tests (as functionality grows). And there has been work on other parts of the plugin, like taking rings into account.

Result

We already have some useful functionality which we are going to expand and build on. Not that much to show yet, but we are progressing towards our goal. You can follow our progress either in the way of tasks (openQA and staging projects) or just follow our commit history on github (again for both openQA and staging plugin).

We are very much looking forward to feedback and thoughts – these changes aim to make Factory development easier and thus we need to hear from all you!

I’m somewhat late in an openSUSE Board related task, sorry for that :-(. I would like to say a HUGE THANK YOU to all in the openSUSE community for voting in the Board elections, and to those who voted for me! Thank you for having the confidence trust and hope that I can represent your and the wider openSUSE community’s interests. I am deeply honoured to be able to serve a second term as your representative on the Board.

It's been brought to my attention that the Icecream documentation more or less suggests it is necessary to manually set up $ICECC_VERSION (which also involves creating the environment tarball with the compiler and so on). That is incorrect. I've already updated the documentation to say that, like with pretty much everything, Icecream simply figures it out itself by default.

So if you happen to use $ICECC_VERSION, unless you know why you do that (e.g. cross-compilation), don't. It's not only simpler but also better to leave it up to Icecream to package the system compiler as necessary, as it simply works, and avoids possible problems (such as updating the system compiler and forgetting to update the tarball).