I’m 19 today. However, this comes with no new privileges or abilities. 2 more years until I can drink, 6 more until I can rent a car, etc. Still, it’s been a good birthday so far.

Recently, I’ve been playing a bit of Second Life (Wikipedia has a good page on it here). This is not so much a MMORPG as a virtual world, a metaverse if you will. There is no set of goals or levels in second life like a game. Second Life allows you to interact with other players (Residents) and to build and create anything you can imagine (skill permitting).

I started playing Second Life with a very close friend, and the two of do most things in the game together. I find that it’s a lot more fun to experience everything together and we find the game to be a great way to interact with each other. I’d post a picture, but she’d kill me since she’s dramatically changed her appearance since I took it.
Second Life just recently open sourced their client, and has pledged to eventually opening the entire platform. When I get around to it, I want to take a look at packaging it for Debian, unless someone beats me too it. However, the build process is a bit daunting, and there is apparently a performance gap between their build and the open source build due to libraries they can’t distribute.

Dear Benjamin E. Seidenberg,

Thank you for booking your travel on continental.com. Your flight purchase is confirmed. Your eTicket Itinerary and Receipt will be sent separately.
=========================
Travel Summary
=========================
Confirmation Number: XXXXXX
CO334 - Raleigh/Durham, NC (RDU) to New York/Newark, NJ (EWR - Liberty) on
Fri., Jun. 15, 2007
CO108 - New York/Newark, NJ (EWR - Liberty) to Edinburgh, Scotland (EDI) on
Fri., Jun. 15, 2007
CO109 - Edinburgh, Scotland (EDI) to New York/Newark, NJ (EWR - Liberty) on
Sun., Jun. 24, 2007
CO445 - New York/Newark, NJ (EWR - Liberty) to Raleigh/Durham, NC (RDU) on
Sun., Jun. 24, 2007

Anyone else on this flight?

For those of you who don’t know, this is for DebConf7, the Debian Developer’s Conference in Edinburgh this summer.

Introduction:

This guide will walk you through the creation of an encrypted filesystem using LUKS. LUKS is the Linux Unified Key Setup and is a standard format for linux hard disk encryption. It has a lot of interesting features such as using a key on a removable disk, keeping multiple keys, and more. This is the technology used by the Debian Installer (since etch beta3) and is quickly becoming a standard in the linux world.

Who this guide is for:

This guide is for anyone who wants to secure their data using an encrypted partition. While it is tailored to users of Debian, it should apply elsewhere in the linux world. This guide is intended to add an encrypted device to an existing install, if you are contemplating a fresh install, the Debian Installer will configure encrypted filesystems for you.

Ready? Then let’s begin

Prepare the partition (or other block device) to be used

This can be a partition on disk, a logical volume in LVM or some other block device. For this example, I created a 40 GB volume in LVM.

• For a physical partition, you would need to have an entire partition available on disk. Instructions for this can be found from many other sources
• For LVM, create a partition like this
  lvcreate -n crypto_test --size 40g asimov-vol

Install cryptsetup

This utility provides an interface into the code in the linux kernel that handles encrypted block devices. It’s packaged for Debian in both testing and unstable, stable has an older version and I don’t know whether or not it will work in the same manner.
apt-get install cryptsetup

Set up encryption on the partition:

This initializes the partition for encryption and sets the initial key. People not using LVM will want a path like /dev/hdxY where hdxY is the partition on their hard drive that will be used for encryption.

Important! This command will wipe out anything on that partition

cryptsetup luksFormat /dev/mapper/asimov--vol-crypto_test

WARNING!
========
This will overwrite data on /dev/mapper/asimov–vol-crypto_test irrevocably. Are you sure? (Type uppercase yes): YES
Enter LUKS passphrase:
Verify passphrase:
Command successful.

Congratulation! You now have an encrypted block device! However, it’s not quite ready to use.

Open and map the device:

This opens the device (prompting for a passphrase) and maps it to a block device in /dev/mapper. This can be used like any other block device, and the encryption/decryption is transparent. The first path (/dev/mapper/asimov–vol-crypto_test) is the encrypted partition you set up earlier. The name (crypto_test) is the name of the volume, the block device will be mapped as /dev/mapper/<name>.

cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/mapper/asimov--vol-crypto_test crypto_test
Enter LUKS passphrase:
key slot 0 unlocked.
Command successful.

Create the filesystem of your choice on the device:

This is just like setting up any other block device. I use ext3, others may prefer different formats.
mkfs.ext3 /dev/mapper/crypto-test

Add the definition to /etc/crypttab:

/etc/crypttab is a list of encrypted devices that are mapped on boot. The format is <map name> <path to device> <key file> <options> Since we’re using a passphrase, we don’t have a key file.
crypto_test /dev/mapper/asimov--vol-crypto_test none luks

Create a mount point:

This is where the encrypted device will be mounted on your filesystem.
mkdir /mnt/crypto_test

Add the device to /etc/fstab:

/etc/fstab tells the computer where to mount different devices on the filesystem. The format is
<source path> <mount path> <type of filesystem> <options> <mount options options> <dump frequency> <fsck pass> More information can be found by reading man 5 fstab. You will want to add a line like this: /dev/mapper/crypto_test /mnt/crypto_test ext3 defaults 0 2 somewhere in this file.

Update the initial ramdisk.

The initial ramdisk is used to jumpstart the boot process and load modules for the kernel that it can’t load itself (such as drivers for block devices that contain the modules it uses). I’m not sure if this is needed or not, but I wanted to be on the safe side.
update-initramfs -u -k all

Congratulations

Now your encrypted filesystem is completely set up! Reboot the system and you will see it prompt you for your passphrase during the boot cycle. Once the password has entered, the encryption is completely transparent. If you want to use your encrypted filesystem before rebooting, simply type mount /path/to/mountpoint.

Dear Benjamin Seidenberg!

Your account ‘benjamin’ has just been created in the central LDAP
database of the Debian project.  Please note that it needs a bit of time
until this information is synced with all developer-accessible machines.
You should be able to login or upload packages after about 30-60 minutes.
The password for this account can be found appended to this message,
encrypted with your GPG key.
Email sent to benjamin@debian.org will be forwarded to astronut@dlgeek.net,
to change this visit http://db.debian.org/forward.html.

This has definately made my day. I would like to thank my sponsor and advocate, Anibal Monsalve Salazar, the Debian Cyrus Team (especially Sven and Henrique) and especially my AM, Clément Stenac (Zorglub). I couldn’t have asked for a better AM; he answered every mail within a day as far as I remember, was extremely supportive and helpful. I remember when I sent him the last T&S response he appologized on IRC that he couldn’t write the recommendation until that evening, whereas some AMs have taken months to do it.
For those interested in the NM queue’s proccessing time, here is an approximate summery of my progress through NM:
Waiting for advocate: 2.5 weeks (This should have been shorter, I had my advocate lined up, but then there was a question about me signing the key of the guy who signed mine, but I hadn’t checked his ID).
Waiting for AM: 6 months
Going through the checks: 2.5 months. (This would have been shorter had it not been right around the end of my senior year of high school, with the mad rush to cram everything in before exams)
Waiting for FD: 1.5 Months
Waiting for DAM: 1.5 Months
Waiting for account creation after DAM approval: 2 months.

Thjis: This is the right time to automatically search for RC bugs. So was a year ago. Although we want the RC bug count to drop, an RC bug is still an RC bug regardless of whether we know about it or not. And many RC bugs didn’t exist a year ago. Take for example #392121. A package name change in a build-dependency caused my package to FTBFS. This bug would not have existed a year ago, but needed to get fixed for etch.

Incidentally, when you go through a package rename for a development package, it would be nice to check what packages build-depend on the old package. A september changelog entry for cli-common says:

- Removed transition dependency for cli-common on cli-common-dev.

(7 month for a package rename transition should be more than enough)

However, at no point in that seven months did anyone email me or file a bug report to tell me that the name changed. This bug wasn’t caught until someone rebuilding the archive noticed.
Actually, this might be a good idea for an infrastructural change. Would it be possible to set up a script that notices when packages are removed and sends a notice to the maintainers of any packages build depending on them?

One thing that has always appealed to me about Debian is the strength of the community behind it. A somewhat recent incident has reminded me of how strong this community really is. When several members of the Debian community became concerned about a situation in the life of another member, they immediately tried to contact that member, and that member’s friends and family to insure that person would be ok. Phone calls were made halfway across the world in the middle of the night (in various timezones) to insure the well-being of a member of our community. It is a strong reminder that even though the Debian community may have vigorous arguements about technical and social issues, we still take care of our own.

Well, I’m off. Leaving in about an hour. College, here I come!

[This is the first post in the new “Cornell” Category]
Well, my room looks quite empty and the van is quite full. We weren’t sure if all the stuff we were planning on taking was going to fit, but it did. Now, the question is will it fit in the 10×10 dorm room that is typical of the building I’m in. We’ll soon find out. We are driving up to Ithaca Thursday, and I move in Friday. Now that it’s getting close, I am starting to get more and more excited.
If anyone recently out of college, or still in it (Ari, joshk, and others) wants to offer any advice for a rising freshman, feel free to leave a comment.

In other news (those of you who were helping me in #d-d already know), my server was out of commision for a few days. Grub and lilo both refused to boot off the 200 hard drive that I had moved my data to using a live system, and sarge D-I saw it as the wrong size, and did not see the partitions (perhaps why grub and lilo both failed). This was apparently a kernel issue, and so I installed using the etch beta3 netinst. G-I was working fine, but after partitioning got in a loop where it would drop to console and complain about some fatal error then go back to graphics again (somewhere around setting time zone) so I eventually used the old text system, which worked flawlessly. The only thing that I found I forgot to backup was my wordpress theme directory, so not only do I have to find my theme again (whose name I forget), I have to modify it, since I had customized the CSS. Pity.
The last bit of this post is a thank you to Joerg for approving my NM application. Now all that’s left is for elmo to proccess his backlog.

Today marks the 1 year anniversary of my application to become a Debian Developer. Here is an approximate break down of my time in the NM Queue:

Waiting for advocate: 2.5 weeks (This should have been shorter, I had my advocate lined up, but then there was a question about me signing the key of the guy who signed mine, but I hadn’t checked his ID).

Waiting for AM: 6 months

Going through the checks: 2.5 months. (This would have been shorter had it not been right around the end of school, with the mad rush to cram everything in before exams)
Waiting for FD: 1.5 Months

Waiting for DAM: almost 7 weeks so far…

Total: 1 year and counting…