The code we write is the extension of our emotions and thinking. A few months back a twitter thread on Gnome's account made Anwesha and me think about it once again. I think the most important reply in that thread came from Miguel de Icaza.

The contribution to Free Software happens over 2 forms, for many it helps to solve or support a personal cause. Sometimes it is something we deeply care about (actually the 2 points are not that different). That is why people come back to home from their daily jobs, and then continue contributing upstream till late night. Many jobs now also allow working on upstream Free Software projects as part of the work. The word Open Source helped to create a bridge between businesses and creators. But, we still have to keep fighting for Freedom in various levels in life, even including for the basic human rights.

More than a month back, the Supreme Court of India ruled that privacy is a fundamental right to every Indian citizen. It was a huge win for every privacy advocate, but it was one of the big battles in the whole fight for right to privacy. Even though governments are using public money to develop software infrastructure, almost none of them are Free Software. There is a current campaign happening for having publicly financed software developer for people to be Free Software. No one knows what is going on in the closed source infrastructure, and if people point out the issues, they are getting punished. If you never heard about Aadhaar project in India, feel free to visit this site to learn about how much destruction it is bringing in.

Journalists were the most common people in the movies (in our childhood days) who used to find out all bad things people in power were doing, and at the end of the movie, public used to win with help of court (and sometimes fights between the hero and villains). Things have changed a lot over the years. Now technology enables many to be in a condition to find out the wrongdoings of the state, or private companies. It is much easier to send across that information to the journalists, and we can see how those revelations are helping the world. But, technology also enables the wrong-doers to attack the whistleblowers and the journalists who publish the truth to the people.

At this point if the government can identify the whistleblower, it is too dangerous to be a whistleblower. If we want to find what the state is doing, so that, we, the people, can have control over it, we need to make whistleblowers safe. -- RMS in his talk last year.

Freedom of the Press Foundation is one such organization working to protect and defend journalism, to support journalists and whistleblowers worldwide. One of the major development from the foundation is SecureDrop project. SecureDrop is an open-source whistleblower submission system that media organizations can use to securely accept documents from and communicate with anonymous sources. It was originally created by the late Aaron Swartz. The project also won The Award for Projects of Social Benefit from Free Software Foundation in 2016. This week I joined the Freedom of the Press Foundation as a staff member to help on the SecureDrop and other projects.

As I started writing the post with Why Free Software?, helping the journalists and whistleblowers with Free Software is vital cause I can personally relate to. In the last month, we saw at least 3 journalists killed in India, from 1992, we have the second highest deaths of the journalists due to their work. We also saw the increased death threats to the journalists in India and other parts of the world. The freedom of the press stands as a pillar of the democracy, and we will continue to protect it.

Red Hat, the name means a lot of things to me. Red Hat Linux was the first Linux distribution I ever saw and worked with. Later I moved into Fedora, and it became my defacto distribution from Core 1 days. Started contributing to the project formally from 2006, and joined in Red Hat for the first time back in 2008. People kept asking me why do I wear my Red Fedora everywhere, why do I feel so enthusiastic all the time? For me, it is always the people, the company itself started to provide a healthy relationship with the businesses and Free Software vendors (including itself). It is still standing tall and growing because of the people in the company, who still cares about Freedom. I left Red Hat for 11 months in between, and then came back to work on Fedora itself as Fedora Cloud Engineer in the Fedora Engineering team. Later Sayan also joined the team.

The last 3 years were full of fun in different levels. There were last-minute breakages, heated discussion over IRC or on emails. But, the community stayed above of everything, the goal of releasing a better distribution for everyone, and kept inventing at the same time was in sync. I actually have to admit that I can not express my feelings about working on Fedora as a full-time job. It was the dream coming true. Friendships became deeper, found many complete new points of view at things in life. It is never only about technology. The 4 foundations always remind us why the community is still growing and why we are in love with the project. I should mention that most of my technical know-how about Fedora and many related things actually came from Patrick. He taught me a lot of things over the years.

I am now back as a community contributor to the project. This was a personal decision, and I got support from Anwesha and friends to go ahead with this. I always worked on upstream projects with my personal email ID, means there is nothing changed in Fedora directly for me.

At the end, I want to thank Paul Frields, Matthew Miller, Denise Dumas, and rest of the Fedora Engineering team and the community to give me this opportunity.

In this post, I am going to talk about the isolation of network for different domains using VPN on Qubes. The following shows the default network configuration in Qubes.

The network hardware is attached to a special domain called sys-net. This is the only domain which directly talks to the outside network. Then a domain named sys-firewall connects to sys-net and all other VMs use sys-firewall to access the outside network. These kinds of special domains are also known as NetVM as they can provide network access to other VMs.

Creating new NetVMs for VPN

The easiest way is to clone the existing sys-net domain to a new domain. In my case, I have created two different domains, mynetwork and vpn2 as new NetVMs in dom0.

$ qvm-clone sys-net mynetwork
$ qvm-clone sys-net vpn2

As the next step, I have opened the settings for these VMs and marked sys-net as the NetVM for these. I have also install openvpn package in the templateVM so that both the new NetVM can find that package.

Setting up openvpn

I am not running openvpn as proper service as I want to switch to different VPN services I have access to. That also means a bit of manual work to setup the right /etc/resolv.conf file in the NetVMs and any corresponding VMs which access the network through these.

$ sudo /usr/sbin/openvpn --config connection_service_name.ovpn

So, the final network right now looks like the following diagram. The domains (where I am doing actual work) are connected into different VPN services.

The CFP for PyCon Pune 2018 will close at the end of 15th September AOE. If you are thinking about submitting a talk, this is a good time to do that. The conference will happen from 8-11th February in Pune, India. The first 2 days are the main conference, a single track event where will have around 650 people. The last two days will be devsprints.

We have already announced all the 6 keynote speakers of the conference.

• Brett Cannon
• Carol Willing
• Nicholas Tollervey
• Paul Hildebrandt
• Paul Everitt
• Andrew Godwin

Go ahead and submit your talk today.

Using updated software is a normal thing, also a few of us get more excited and use latest (not so stable) packages from the testing branch. This helps to detect bugs in the software before they go out the general availability.

As I was already using the RC1 release of Qubes, I thought of upgrading to the latest testing packages.

$ sudo qubes-dom0-update --enablerepo=qubes-dom0-current-testing

As we already know that dom0 does not connect to the network, it actually uses an UpdateVM to download the packages first, and then the packages are sent to dom0. DNF takes care of the actual install/update of the package.

I rebooted the box after the update was done. One of the major change I can see is with copy/pasting text. It is not asking to confirm the extra dialog box while pasting. I can simply copy text, press Ctrl+shift+c and then go to another domain and press Ctrl+shift+v, and then right click and paste (or press Ctrl+v).

I have also updated the Fedora25 templateVM to the latest from my local Fedora mirror. While trying to attach a local image file using loop device (in dom0) to a VM I got into this issue.

I could not find any Fedora 26 repo for Qubes yet, Fedora 25 is the latest there. Fedora 27 release date is in less than 2 months. And then in another month Fedora 25 will be EOL. I hope developers will release packages to upgrade to F26 at least by then.

In this post, I am going to talk about sharing data between domains. You can read part one here.

Update: Read part 3 about network isolation.

One of the most common operation while working on many domains is copy/pasting text or files. Though it is something very much necessary, at the same time this can be a security risk. Randomly copy pasting data or file into a trusted domain, can be dangerous. We also have to make sure that random scripts can not copy paste without proper authorization. Qubes uses Xen shared memory for copying files instead of any block device.

Copy pasting text

One can copy text to the clipboard of the VM as usual, and then one can press Ctrl+Shift+c, then if one press Ctrl+Shift+v in any VM, it will ask for a menu like below screenshot to confirm if you want to paste to that VM's clipboard. After that, you can normally paste with Ctrl+v or from the GUI.

Copying file to another VM

We can copy a file to another VM using the file browser. Just right click on any file, and click copy to the right VM. The following screenshots shows this way.

The other way to copy paste is using the command line. For example, the following command copies hello.txt file to the personal VM.

$ qvm-copy-to-vm personal hello.txt
sent 0/1 KB

Executing any command on a given VM

dom0 is the privileged domain in the system. From that, you can actually execute any command to another domain. In the following example, I am running the date command in the personal domain. With the --pass-io command line flag, we are saying to pass across the STDOUT and STDIN from the remote VM to dom0.

$ qvm-run --pass-io personal date
Tue Sep  5 17:42:11 IST 2017

I heard the name Qubes OS as an Operating System which was built while keeping security in mind, and also they used Fedora as the base Operating System. A reasonably secure operating system is the tagline and they also have a few testimonials in the site, I guess the most famous one is the following tweet.

The name again came up this week. This time I thought of trying it out, but, this is something I had to do on a bare-metal box, than on a VM. Luckily I bought extra drives in the last PyCon trip. I downloaded the stable 3.2 release, but the installer was failing into a Dracut shell saying /dev/mapper/live-rw is write protected. So, I moved on to the 4.0RC1 image. The installer is a modified Anaconda, means something very familiar to any Fedora/CentOS/Red Hat user. 4.0RC1 is based on Fedora 25, means more known points there.

Qubes uses Xen to manage VMs (for the rest of the post, I will keep using both VM, and domain interchangeably). The dom0 is the initial domain which comes up on boot. It is a short form of Domain 0. This is a privileged domain which manages all the other domains (domU). The default desktop for 4.0rc1 is XFCE. The dom0 does not have standard networking enabled. Actually, to have a working network to connect to outside world, the OS creates two special VMs.

sys-firewall

This special VM is the firewall for every other application VMs. You can actually create more than one firewall VMs and have a different set of rules.

sys-net

This VM has access to the network hardware and can create a connection with your local Wi-Fi or LAN/cable network. In my case, Fedora was failing to create internal interfaces which are being used by sys-firewall, so I rebooted the VM with a Debian-8 template. It solved my networking issue.

Regular Application VMs

When you first install the system, the installer will create a few domains for you, personal, work, untrusted, vault. It will create proper application shortcuts in the menu. This means when you click on the application menu for the Terminal for personal domain, it will first start the domain, and then open up the gnome-terminal for you. Each domain also gets a /rw partition which gets mounted as home. For every reboot, they start from a clean template, with only home consistent between boots.

This also means there is no easy way for applications/malware to talk between different VMs. If you open up a wrong website (with malware) on the untrusted domain, it will not have access to the filesystem under your work domain. There are special ways to copy/paste text between domains.

You can see in the above screenshot, the applications from each domain have different colors, that helps for quick recognition of each application for different domains. You can also see details about the running VMs by clicking on the Qubes icon on the tray in the menubar.

Disposable domains

There are times when you want to open a downloaded file (say PDF or a spreadsheet) on a VM which is only for single use. As soon as you close the application, the VM gets destroyed. For more details, read this document.

VMs without network access

The Vault is a special domain which does not connect to any network. You can also create new VMs in the same way, which does not connect to any firewall VM. The isolation from the network means nothing will go out in case of a malware in the file.

The following screenshot is showing the output of the qvm-ls command in dom0.

I will write more posts in future as I figure out things. Running F26 on the VMs is one them, because Python3.6 :) #qubes channel on Freenode is not that very active, but you will be able to find help in the channel if you wait.

Even though the whole travel plan was ready, the recent health issues became a bigger problem. Both of my doctor and my physiotherapist told me not to travel. Now, I find it a great suggestion as I am having pain to sit on a chair for few hours, the 24+ hours' travel would have been a disaster.

But, this also means I am going to miss my only chance to meet the whole Fedora family. I will have to wait till next year to meet everyone. This is the 2nd time I became sick before the Flock travel. Just bad timing.

Encrypting hard drives should be a common step in our regular computer usage. If nothing else, this will help you sleep well, in case you lose your computer (theft) or that small USB disk you were carrying in your pocket. In this guide, I’ll explain how to encrypt your USB disks so that you have peace of mind, in case you lose them.

But, before we dig into the technical details, always remember the following from XKCD.

What is LUKS?

LUKS or Linux Unified Key Setup is a disk encryption specification, first introduced in 2004 by Clemens Fruhwirth. Notice the word specification; instead of trying to implement something of its own, LUKS is a standard way of doing drive encryption across tools and distributions. You can even use drives from Windows using the LibreCrypt application.

For the following example, I am going to use a standard 16 GB USB stick as my external drive.

Formatting the drive

Note: check the drive name/path twice before you press enter for any of the commands below. A mistake, might destroy your primary drive, and there is no way to recover the data. So, execute with caution.

In my case, the drive is detected as /dev/sdb. It is always a good idea to format the drive before you start using it. You can use wipefs tool to clean any signature from the device,

$ sudo wipefs -a /dev/sdb1

Then you can use fdisk tool to delete the old partitions , and create a new primary partition.

Next step is to create the LUKS partition.

$ sudo cryptsetup luksFormat /dev/sdb1

WARNING!
========
This will overwrite data on /dev/sdb1 irrevocably.

Are you sure? (Type uppercase yes): YES
Enter passphrase: 
Verify passphrase:

Opening up the encrypted drive and creating a filesystem

Next, we will open up the drive using the passphrase we just gave, and create a filesystem on the device.

$ sudo cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sdb1 reddrive
Enter passphrase for /dev/sdb1
$ ls -l /dev/mapper/reddrive
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 7 Jul 17 10:18 /dev/mapper/reddrive -> ../dm-5

I am going to create an EXT4 filesystem on here.
Feel free to create which ever filesystem you want.

$ sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/mapper/reddrive -L reddrive
mke2fs 1.43.4 (31-Jan-2017)
Creating filesystem with 3815424 4k blocks and 954720 inodes
Filesystem UUID: b00be39d-4656-4022-92ea-6a518b08f1e1
Superblock backups stored on blocks: 
        32768, 98304, 163840, 229376, 294912, 819200, 884736, 1605632, 2654208

Allocating group tables: done                            
Writing inode tables: done                            
Creating journal (16384 blocks): done
Writing superblocks and filesystem accounting information: done   

Mounting, using, and unmounting the drive

The device is now ready to use. You can manually mount it with the mount command. Any of the modern desktops will ask you to unlock using the passphrase if you connect the device (or try to double click on the file browser).

I will show the command line option. I will create a file hello.txt as an example.

$ sudo mount /dev/mapper/reddrive /mnt/red
$ su -c "echo hello > /mnt/red/hello.txt"
Password:
$ ls -l /mnt/red
total 20
-rw-rw-r--. 1 root root     6 Jul 17 10:26 hello.txt
drwx------. 2 root root 16384 Jul 17 10:21 lost+found
$ sudo umount /mnt/red
$ sudo cryptsetup luksClose reddrive

When I attach the drive to my system, the file browser asks me to unlock it using the following dialog. Remember to choose forget immediately so that the file browser forgets the password.

On passphrases

The FAQ entry on cryptsetup page, give us hints and suggestions about passphrase creation.

If paranoid, add at least 20 bit. That is roughly four additional characters for random passphrases and roughly 32 characters for a random English sentence.

Key slots aka different passphrases

In LUKS, we get 8 different key slots (for passphrases) for each device(partition). You can see them using luksDump sub-command.

$ sudo cryptsetup luksDump /dev/sdb1 | grep Slot
Key Slot 0: ENABLED
Key Slot 1: DISABLED
Key Slot 2: DISABLED
Key Slot 3: DISABLED
Key Slot 4: DISABLED
Key Slot 5: DISABLED
Key Slot 6: DISABLED
Key Slot 7: DISABLED

Adding a new key

The following command adds a new key to the drive.

$ sudo cryptsetup luksAddKey /dev/sdb1 -S 5
Enter any existing passphrase: 
Enter new passphrase for key slot: 
Verify passphrase:

You will have to use any of the existing passphrases to add a new key.

$  sudo cryptsetup luksDump /dev/sdb1 | grep Slot
Key Slot 0: ENABLED
Key Slot 1: DISABLED
Key Slot 2: DISABLED
Key Slot 3: DISABLED
Key Slot 4: DISABLED
Key Slot 5: ENABLED
Key Slot 6: DISABLED
Key Slot 7: DISABLED

Removing a passphrase

Remember that removing a passphrase is based on the passphrase itself, not by the key slot number.

$ sudo cryptsetup luksRemoveKey /dev/sdb1
Enter passphrase to be deleted: 
$ sudo cryptsetup luksDump /dev/sdb1 | grep Slot
Key Slot 0: ENABLED
Key Slot 1: DISABLED
Key Slot 2: DISABLED
Key Slot 3: DISABLED
Key Slot 4: DISABLED
Key Slot 5: DISABLED
Key Slot 6: DISABLED
Key Slot 7: DISABLED

Now in case you don't know the passphrase, then you can use luksKillSlot.

$ sudo cryptsetup luksKillSlot /dev/sdb1 3
Enter any remaining passphrase:

Overview of the disk layout

The disk layout looks like the following. The header or phdr contains various details like magic value, version, cipher name, following the 8 keyblocks (marked as kb1, kb2.. in the drawing), and then the encrypted bulk data block. We can see all of those details in the C structure.

struct luks_phdr {
        char            magic[LUKS_MAGIC_L];
        uint16_t        version;
        char            cipherName[LUKS_CIPHERNAME_L];
        char            cipherMode[LUKS_CIPHERMODE_L];
        char            hashSpec[LUKS_HASHSPEC_L];
        uint32_t        payloadOffset;
        uint32_t        keyBytes;
        char            mkDigest[LUKS_DIGESTSIZE];
        char            mkDigestSalt[LUKS_SALTSIZE];
        uint32_t        mkDigestIterations;
        char            uuid[UUID_STRING_L];

        struct {
                uint32_t active;

                /* parameters used for password processing */
                uint32_t passwordIterations;
                char     passwordSalt[LUKS_SALTSIZE];

                /* parameters used for AF store/load */
                uint32_t keyMaterialOffset;
                uint32_t stripes;
        } keyblock[LUKS_NUMKEYS];

        /* Align it to 512 sector size */
        char                _padding[432];
};

Each (active) keyblock contains an encrypted copy of the master key. When we enter the passphrase, it unlocks the master key, that in turn unlocks the encrypted data.

But, remember, all of this is of no use if you have a very simple passphrase. We have another XKCD to explain this.

I hope this post encourages you to use encrypted drives more. All of my computers have their drives encrypted; (I do that while installing the Operating System.) This means, without decrypting the drive you can not boot the system properly. On a related note, remember to turn off your computer completely, (not hibernation or suspend mode) when you’re traveling.

As I have mentioned in the dgplug summer training page, focusing on the Free Software movement is a big part of this year's training program. A few weeks back there was a tweet from @gnome about travel ban, and many could not figure out why Gnome was writing about this topic. Amongst the many proper replies, Miguel de Icaza’s reply was to the point. This incident made Anwesha and me stop and think; and then made us rethink, about how we wanted to conduct the sessions on the Free Software movement and Software Licensing.

I was born in the beginning of the 80s and Anwesha even later. Our introduction to the movement was from the stories we heard (from many people); from Levy’s famous book, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution and the seminal Free as in Freedom.

My introduction to the FSF came through ilug-calcutta, and from Sayamindu. Later, at foss.in 2005, I made another friend (for life), Praveen A (he is from the same batch). And even later through out various conferences, I was introduced to other members of FSF India. In 2007, I was part of the 4th GPLv3 meet organizing team in Bangalore. That was my introduction to RMS, and his personality (I will write a blog post later about various incidents from that conference). That had a big impact on me.

Coming back to the story of the tweet, we also saw similar ignorance from newcomers, as they never got a chance to learn about the past, nor did get to meet the various people involved (distance and time). So, Anwesha and I, tried to write a brief history, including the hacker ethic, and beginning of the Free Software movement. A lot of stories mentioned in the article are from the books mentioned above. At the very end, I have written about how the different software we use everyday came about initially. I took the help of various FSF bulletins for the same.

This Monday I took a session on the same topic in the #dgplug IRC channel. When I made mention of the GNU C Library and the time Ronald McGrath started it, Siddhesh called attention to an announcement he (Ronald) made a few days ago (about stepping down from maintainership of that same GNU Library). I also pointed that Siddhesh is now one of the maintainer of Glibc. That gave the students a sense of impact and immediacy; a feeling of involvement and ownership.

Today evening from 13:30 UTC, Anwesha took a session on Software Licenses 101 in the #dgplug channel on Freenode. There will be more follow up sessions in the coming days.

Link to the article once again