StartSSL: finally, a trustworthy certifier*

Matt Brown writes about StartCom, the Israeli issuer providing basic SSL certificates for nothing. In fact I’ve been using StartSSL certificates for about three years now, but I get them issued to Level 2 verification which incurs a fee. (It’s more expensive now than when I was first validated, but still good value.) StartCom are…

Point Release Security Co-ordinator

In ‘Bits from the Security Team‘ a few weeks ago, Thijs Kinkhorst wrote: Since a couple of years we’ve been handing off security issues of minor or theoretical impact but for which a fix would be desirable at some point, like certain classes of denial-of-service attacks, off to stable point updates. We’re looking for a…

RCBW, week… fourish.

Just one this week: #609304 (pimd): backport the unstable fix for testing-proposed-updates (which nearly gave me heart failure when it FTBFS on mipsel, but it was an unrelated problem).

RCBW, week three

This week: #607958 (apt): replied and tagged ‘moreinfo’; jmm later downgraded it to normal #606951 (nsca): agreed with the submitter and reverted the change, uploaded straight to unstable #605784 (nagios-statd): thanks to the great debugging work of the submitter, uploaded a fix to DELAYED/2 (giving the maintainer time to make his own planned upload) #598588…

RCBW, week two

This week: #606151 (nordugrid-arc-nox): cherry-picked a patch from upstream and uploaded to DELAYED/1 #606670 (minitube): removal bug filed at request of maintainer #607762 (dbus-glib): bumped the build-dependency and uploaded to DELAYED/7 (later pushed into DELAYED/0 at maintainer’s request) #607427 (opensc): applied security fixes from upstream and uploaded immediately Not quite one fix per day, as…

The perfect gpg-agent setup

When I first started using Debian properly, I played with gpg-agent and pinentry but I didn’t really understand the various bash initialisation scripts, and my botched setup annoyed me so much I disabled it again quite quickly (for example, if I left the machine logged in to GDM at home then logged in through SSH,…

Getting stuck into RC bugs

Now that it’s much more convenient for me to do NMUs, and simultaneously there a handful of bugs that I can actually deal with, I guess it’s about time I got stuck into some RC bugs. Here’s my (rather modest) list of fixes for Squeeze the past few days: #606298 (deal.ii): can’t be reproduced by…

Locusts

I came across the mingetty changelog by chance while researching something totally unrelated. Paul Martin, you are a genius. mingetty (1.07-2) unstable; urgency=high * Critical security patch: Fix unsafe chroot call. (Closes: #597382) * Checked dependencies for locusts. (Closes: http://xkcd.com/797/) — Paul Martin <masked> Sat, 25 Sep 2010 01:51:12 +0100 Original cartoon: http://xkcd.com/797/

Batch importing caff signatures

Having swapped details with many, many people at Debconf, and then been away for a week after that, I found myself with an overflowing mailbox and a long task of “open mail, provide pass-phrase, pipe to gpg –import“. I wanted a way to batch-import all these signatures (there are three times as many, because my…

Home, James

Since I didn’t actually come home from Debconf, but instead took a further week’s holiday and lazed around by the beach, I haven’t sat down to write anything about it yet. Most importantly, I should say thank you to Joey Hess, Steve McIntyre and Stefano Zacchiroli for arranging the Debconf Newbies programme, without which I…