Hi! Every once in a while, in the Foundations team, we do a coding day. A year ago, Lukasz and I wrote a script, following an idea from Steve Langasek, to provide "hints" and help for the next ...
http://blog.cyphermox.net/2018/09/help-needed-to-improve-proposed.html
OVERVIEW I'm presenting here the technical aspects of setting up a small-scale testing lab in my basement, using as little hardware as possible, and keeping costs to a minimum. For one thing, ...
http://blog.cyphermox.net/2018/05/building-local-testing-lab-with-ubuntu_16.html
Since 17.10, netplan has been the default network configuration tool in Ubuntu. Since then, it has grown in features, bug fixes, and even got its package renamed in the archive from "nplan" to ne...
http://blog.cyphermox.net/2018/03/call-for-testing-netplanio-in-1804.html
Using PGP/GPG keys for a long period of time (either expiring keys, or extending expiration dates) and the potential for travel, for hardware to fail, or for life's other events means that eventu...
SECURE BOOT SIGNING The whole concept of Secure Boot requires that there exists a trust chain, from the very first thing loaded by the hardware (the firmware code), all the way through to the ...
http://blog.cyphermox.net/2017/08/how-to-sign-things-for-secure-boot.html
Friday, I uploaded an updated NPLAN package (version 0.24) to change its Priority: field to important, as well as an update of UBUNTU-META (following a seeds update), to replace ifupdown with npl...
http://blog.cyphermox.net/2017/06/netplan-by-default-in-1710.html
SECURE BOOT IS HERE Ubuntu has now supported UEFI booting and Secure Boot for long enough that it is available, and reasonably up to date, on all supported releases. Here is how Secure Boot wo...
http://blog.cyphermox.net/2017/05/an-overview-of-uefi-secure-boot-on.html
In my last blog post I mentioned SS, another tool that comes with the iproute2 package and allows you to query statistics about sockets. The same thing that can be done with NETSTAT, with the ad...
http://blog.cyphermox.net/2017/05/ss-another-way-to-get-socket-statistics.html
THE WORLD EVOLVES I regularly see "recommendations" to use ifconfig to get interface information in mailing list posts or bug reports and other places. I might even be guilty of it myself. Sti...
http://blog.cyphermox.net/2017/05/if-youre-still-using-ifconfig-youre.html
Earlier this week I uploaded netplan 0.21 in artful, with SRUs in progress for the stable releases. There are still lots of features coming up, but it's also already quite useful. You can alrea...
http://blog.cyphermox.net/2017/05/quick-and-easy-network-configuration.html
A few days ago, after enjoying the use of a pretty much static IP address for a long while from my ISP (it hadn't changed in easily a year), my IP changed. This took down my IPv6 tunnel, which I ...
http://blog.cyphermox.net/2016/06/netflix-or-pains-of-dealing-with.html
Hi! The Ubuntu Developer Membership Board is in need of new blood. Of the seven members of the board, five (5) will be expiring on March 9th. Members of the Developer Membership Board are elect...
http://blog.cyphermox.net/2016/02/nominations-wanted-for-developer.html
Breaking OPSEC for a bit to write a how-to on using GPG keys with smartcards... I've thought about experimenting with smartcards for a while. Turns out that my Thinkpad has a built-in smartcard...
http://blog.cyphermox.net/2016/01/in-full-tinfoil-hat-mode-using-gpg-with.html
I first heard of this in a Google Doc, which was linked to by a wiki page in Swedish I was shown by someone on IRC. Unfortunately, I can't find any of these links anymore... Documentation in so...
If you're interested in how Ubuntu gets installed on systems, want to ask about specific features, or have already filed bugs that you'd like to bring to our attention, watch for my session on th...
http://blog.cyphermox.net/2015/05/installer-session-at-uos.html
In early February, I completed a move from Canonical's Phonedations team to the Foundations team. Part of this new work means debugging a lot of different failure cases in the installer, grub, an...
http://blog.cyphermox.net/2015/03/preseeding-installations.html
I don't think anyone can argue against the fact that to be an effective developer, you need to somehow attain sufficient focus to fully take in the task at hand, and be sufficiently in the zone t...
http://blog.cyphermox.net/2014/08/focusing-and-manual-skills.html
Last month, I blogged about urfkill, and what it's meant to be used for. The truth is, flight mode and proper killswitch (read: disabling radios on devices) handling is something that needs to ...
http://blog.cyphermox.net/2014/01/call-for-testing-urfkill-getting-flight.html
Here's another project of the u-daemon variety. The latest addition to upower, udev, etc. Meet urfkill. urfkill is meant to be a daemon that centralizes killswitch handling, rather than having ...
http://blog.cyphermox.net/2013/12/urfkill-daemon-to-centrally-control-rf.html
So I decided it was about time to update / reinstall my Samsung Chromebook (the ARM one...) to Trusty, or at least to use Saucy. Turns out it's not that simple. First, you need to know where to ...
http://blog.cyphermox.net/2013/10/hacking-with-samsung-arm-chromebook-on.html
Some of the fun parts of working at Canonical is how you get to work on so many different things. I've spent the last few days working on an implementation of the MTP protocol for Ubuntu Touch,...
http://blog.cyphermox.net/2013/09/implementing-mtp-on-ubuntu-touch.html
We're working really hard to get the Ubuntu Touch images into a state where the UI is really polished, the experience rocks, and just to make it a truly amazing product that reflects the core pri...
http://blog.cyphermox.net/2013/05/protocol-stacks-on-ubuntu-touch.html
Dnsmasq currently only listens on 127.0.0.1; that's done on purpose. If the only nameserver you have is 127.0.0.1, both IPv4 and IPv6 queries will go through it. It doesn't listen on an IPv6 addr...
http://blog.cyphermox.net/2012/08/bug-1010724-why-doesnt-dnsmasq-listen.html
> "Don't hate the media, become the media" ~Jello Biafra TL;DR: Ôtez-vous de mon chemin. Je suis pour la hausse. Pas de raison de manifester, pour l'instant. Je ne veux rien savoi...
http://blog.cyphermox.net/2012/05/heres-quarter-go-buy-yourself-clue.html
We just landed bluez 4.98-2ubuntu2 in Precise. The key change was to enable the Source and Gateway profiles by default, which will now allow people to use their system as an audio output device....
http://blog.cyphermox.net/2012/03/call-for-testing-bluez-a2dp-and-hsphfp.html