Wanna work on Debian LTS (and get funded)?

If you are in Curitiba and are interested to work on Debian LTS (and get paid for that work), please come and talk to me, Debian LTS is still looking for more contributors! Also, if you want a bigger challenge, extended LTS also needs more contributors, though I'd suggest you start with regular LTS

On Thursday, July 25th, there will also be a talk titled "Debian LTS, the good, the bad and the better" where we plan to present what we think works nicely and what doesn't work so nicely yet and where we also want to gather your wishes and requests.

If cannot make it to Curitiba, there will be a video stream (and the possibility to ask questions via IRC) and you can always send me an email or ping on IRC if you want to work on LTS.

16 Jul 2019 3:56pm GMT

The last release of DocKnot failed a whole bunch of CPAN tests that didn't fail locally or on Travis-CI, so this release cleans that up and adds a few minor things to the dist command (following my conventions to run cppcheck and Valgrind tests). The test failures are moderately interesting corners of Perl module development that I hadn't thought about, so seem worth blogging about.

First, the more prosaic one: as part of the tests of docknot dist, the test suite creates a new Git repository because the release process involves git archive and needs a repository to work from. I forgot to use git config to set user.email and user.name, so that broke on systems without Git global configuration. (This would have been caught by the Debian package testing, but sadly I forgot to add git to the build dependencies, so that test was being skipped.) I always get bitten by this each time I write a test suite that uses Git; someday I'll remember the first time.

Second, the build system runs perl Build.PL to build a tiny test package using Module::Build, and it was using system Perl. Slaven Rezic pointed out that this fails if Module::Build isn't installed system-wide or if system Perl doesn't work for whatever reason. Using system Perl is correct for normal operation of docknot dist, but the test suite should use the same Perl version used to run the test suite. I added a new module constructor argument for this, and the test suite now passes in $^X for that argument.

Finally, there was a more obscure problem on Windows: the contents of generated and expected test files didn't match because the generated file content was supposedly just the file name. I think I fixed this, although I don't have Windows on which to test. The root of the problem is another mistake I've made before with Perl: File::Temp->new() does not return a file name, but it returns an object that magically stringifies to the file name, so you can use it that way in many situations and it appears to magically work. However, on Windows, it was not working the way that it was on my Debian system. The solution was to explicitly call the filename method to get the actual file name and use it consistently everywhere; hopefully tests will now pass on Windows.

You can get the latest version from CPAN or from the DocKnot distribution page. A Debian package is also available from my personal archive. I'll probably upload DocKnot to Debian proper during this release cycle, since it's gotten somewhat more mature, although I'd like to make some backward-incompatible changes and improve the documentation first.

15 Jul 2019 4:15am GMT

Here is how I installed Debian 10 / buster on my GnuBee Personal Cloud 2, a free hardware device designed as a network file server / NAS.

Flashing the LibreCMC firmware with Debian support

Before we can install Debian, we need a firmware that includes all of the necessary tools.

On another machine, do the following:

1. Download the latest librecmc-ramips-mt7621-gb-pc1-squashfs-sysupgrade_*.bin.
2. Mount a vfat-formatted USB stick.
3. Copy the file onto it and rename it to gnubee.bin.
4. Unmount the USB stick

Then plug a network cable between your laptop and the black network port and plug the USB stick into the GnuBee before rebooting the GnuBee via ssh:

ssh 192.68.10.0
reboot

If you have a USB serial cable, you can use it to monitor the flashing process:

screen /dev/ttyUSB0 57600

otherwise keep an eye on the LEDs and wait until they are fully done flashing.

Getting ssh access to LibreCMC

Once the firmware has been updated, turn off the GnuBee manually using the power switch and turn it back on.

Now enable SSH access via the built-in LibreCMC firmware:

1. Plug a network cable between your laptop and the black network port.
2. Open web-based admin panel at http://192.168.10.0.
3. Go to System | Administration.
4. Set a root password.
5. Disable ssh password auth and root password logins.
6. Paste in your RSA ssh public key.
7. Click Save & Apply.
8. Go to Network | Firewall.
9. Select "accept" for WAN Input.
10. Click Save & Apply.

Finaly, go to Network | Interfaces and note the ipv4 address of the WAN port since that will be needed in the next step.

Installing Debian

The first step is to install Debian jessie on the GnuBee.

Connect the blue network port into your router/switch and ssh into the GnuBee using the IP address you noted earlier:

ssh root@192.168.1.xxx

and the root password you set in the previous section.

Then use fdisk /dev/sda to create the following partition layout on the first drive:

Device       Start       End   Sectors   Size Type
/dev/sda1     2048   8390655   8388608     4G Linux swap
/dev/sda2  8390656 234441614 226050959 107.8G Linux filesystem

Note that I used an 120GB solid-state drive as the system drive in order to minimize noise levels.

Then format the swap partition:

mkswap /dev/sda1

and download the latest version of the jessie installer:

wget --no-check-certificate https://raw.githubusercontent.com/gnubee-git/GnuBee_Docs/master/GB-PCx/scripts/jessie_3.10.14/debian-jessie-install

(Yes, the --no-check-certificate is really unfortunate. Please leave a comment if you find a way to work around it.)

The stock installer fails to bring up the correct networking configuration on my network and so I have modified the install script by changing the eth0.1 blurb to:

auto eth0.1
iface eth0.1 inet static
    address 192.168.10.1
    netmask 255.255.255.0

Then you should be able to run the installer succesfully:

sh ./debian-jessie-install

and reboot:

reboot

Restore ssh access in Debian jessie

Once the GnuBee has finished booting, login using the serial console:

• username: root
• password: GnuBee

and change the root password using passwd.

Look for the IPv4 address of eth0.2 in the output of the ip addr command and then ssh into the GnuBee from your desktop computer:

ssh root@192.168.1.xxx  # type password set above
mkdir .ssh
vim .ssh/authorized_keys  # paste your ed25519 ssh pubkey

Finish the jessie installation

With this in place, you should be able to ssh into the GnuBee using your public key:

ssh root@192.168.1.172

and then finish the jessie installation:

wget --no-check-certificate https://raw.githubusercontent.com/gnubee-git/gnubee-git.github.io/master/debian/debian-modules-install
bash ./debian-modules-install
reboot

After rebooting, I made a few tweaks to make the system more pleasant to use:

update-alternatives --config editor  # choose vim.basic
dpkg-reconfigure locales  # enable the locale that your desktop is using

Upgrade to stretch and then buster

To upgrade to stretch, put this in /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://httpredir.debian.org/debian stretch main
deb http://httpredir.debian.org/debian stretch-updates main
deb http://security.debian.org/ stretch/updates main

Then upgrade the packages:

apt update
apt full-upgrade
apt autoremove
reboot

To upgrade to buster, put this in /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://httpredir.debian.org/debian buster main
deb http://httpredir.debian.org/debian buster-updates main
deb http://security.debian.org/debian-security buster/updates main

and upgrade the packages:

apt update
apt full-upgrade
apt autoremove
reboot

Next steps

At this point, my GnuBee is running the latest version of Debian stable, however there are two remaining issues to fix:

1. openssh-server doesn't work and I am forced to access the GnuBee via the serial interface.

2. The firmware is running an outdated version of the Linux kernel though this is being worked on by community members.

I hope to resolve these issues soon, and will update this blog post once I do, but you are more than welcome to leave a comment if you know of a solution I may have overlooked.

14 Jul 2019 10:30pm GMT