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Showing posts from 2016

Ubuntu Archive and CD/USB images complete migration to 4096 RSA signing keys

Enigma machine photo by Alessandro Nassiri [ CC BY-SA 4.0 ], via Wikimedia Commons Ubuntu Archive and CD/USB image use OpenPGP cryptography for verification and integrity protection. In 2012, a new archive signing key was created and we have started to dual-sign everything with both old and new keys. In April 2017, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) will go end of life. Precise was the last release that was signed with just the old signing key. Thus when Zesty Zapus is released as Ubuntu 17.04, there will no longer be any supported Ubuntu release that require the 2004 signing keys for validation. The Zesty Zapus release is now signed with just the 2012 signing key, which is 4096 RSA based key. The old 2004 signing keys, where were 1024 DSA based, have been removed from the default keyring and are no longer trusted by default in Zesty and up. The old keys are available in the removed keys keyring in the ubuntu-keyring package, for example in case one wants to verify things

Swapfiles by default in Ubuntu

4MB RAM card By default, in Ubuntu, we usually create a swap partition. Back in the day of 4MB RAM cards this made total sense, as the ration of RAM to disk space, was still very low. Things have changed since. Server, desktop, embedded systems have migrated to newer generations of both RAM and persistent storage. On the high performance side of things we see machines with faster storage in the form of NVMe and SSD drives. Reserving space for swap on such storage, can be seen as expensive and wasteful. This is also true for recent enough laptops and desktops too. Mobile phones have substantial amounts of RAM these days, and at times, coupled with eMMC storage - it is flash storage of lower performance, which have limited number of write cycles, hence should not be overused for volatile swap data. And there are also unicorns in a form of high performance computing of high memory (shared memory) systems with little or no disk space. Today, carving a partition and reserving twice

/boot less LVM rootfs in Zesty

On Ubuntu many of the default boot loaders support booting kernels located on LVM volumes. This includes following platforms i686, x86_64 bios grub2 arm64, armhf, i686, x86_64 UEFI grub2 PReP partitions on IBM PowerPC zipl on IBM zSystems For all of the above the d-i has been modified in Zesty to create LVM based installations without a dedicated /boot partition. We shall celebrate this achievement. Hopefully this means one doesn't need to remove kernels as much, or care about sizing /boot volume appropriately any more. If there are more bootloaders in Ubuntu that support booting off LVM, please do get in touch with me. I'm interested if I can safely enable following platforms as well: armhf with u-boot arm64 with u-boot ppc64el with PReP volume ps. boots pic is from here

Post-Brexit - The What Now?

Out of 46,500,001 electorate 17,410,742 voted to leave, which is a mere 37.4% or just over a third. [ source ]. On my books this is not a clear expression of the UK wishes. The reaction that the results have caused are devastating. The Scottish First Minister has announced plans for 2nd Scottish Independence referendum [ source ]. Londoners are filing petitions calling for Independent London [ source , source ]. The Prime Minister announced his resignation [ source ]. Things are not stable. I do not believe that super majority of the electorate are in favor of leaving the EU. I don't even believe that those who voted to leave have considered the break up of the UK as the inevitable outcome of the leave vote. There are numerous videos on the internet about that, impossible to quantify or reliably cite, but for example this [ source ] So What Now? P R O T E S T I urge everyone to start protesting the outcome of the mistake that happened last Thursday. 4th of July

Blogging about Let's encrypt over HTTP

So let's encrypt thing started. And it can do challenges over http (serving text files) and over dns (serving .txt records). My "infrastructure" is fairly modest. I've seen too many of my email accounts getting swamped with spam, and or companies going bust. So I got my own domain name surgut.co.uk . However, I don't have money or time to run my own services. So I've signed up for the Google Apps account for my domain to do email, blogging, etc. Then later i got the libnih.la domain to host API docs for the mentioned library. In the world of .io startups, I thought it's an incredibly funny domain name. But I also have a VPS to host static files on ad-hoc basis, run VPN, and an irc bouncer. My irc bouncer is ZNC and I used a self-signed certificate there, thus i had "ignore" ssl errors in all of my irc clients... which kind of defeats the purposes somewhat. I run my VPS on i386 (to save on memory usage) and on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS managed w

Four gunmen outside

There are four gunmen outside of my hotel. They are armed with automatic rifles and pistols. I am scared for my life having sneaked past them inside. Everyone else is acting as if everything is normal. Nobody is scared or running for cover. Nobody called the police. I've asked the reception to talk to the gunmen and ask them to leave. They looked at me as if I am mad. Maybe I am. Is this what shizophrenia feels like?! Can you see them on the picture?! Please help. There are four gunmen outside of my hotel. I am not in central Beirut, I am in central Brussels.