Maintainer's Notes: resurrection

In 2010, I became a ALT Linux maintainer : I went through all the steps of the Team acceptance process : I got candidate status, conducted a test assembly of the package under the guidance of the mentor damir @ (Damir Shaykhutdirov), received my nickname (lamp @), mail, generated and registered gpg keys for signing packages and ssh keys for accessing git.alt .

How did it happen? It all started with my first introduction to Debian Linux in 2005. Then there were experiments with Ubuntu , amusing Linux local LUGand Napoleonic plans for promoting Linux nationwide and in a single Rostov-on-Don. Meanwhile, in 2007, ALT Linux won the All-Russian open competition for the development and delivery of a free software package for schools . ALT Linux school distribution kit has been released . Pilot implementations of open source software have begun in schools in three Russian regions. And Rostov LUG decided to take an active part in all of this. We started working with ALT Linux, attending schools as official representatives and helping to implement the school distribution. They even organized a training seminar for teachers. You can read more about this in our blog . Of course, all this was done free of charge and in his spare time from work (usually on Saturdays).

I also thought about what students could offer as a tool for an initial study of programming. And found in ALT Linux the basic256 package . I contacted the author-developer James Reneau and became a co-developer for some time (interface translation, help, minor improvements in the code). Of course - became a maintainer. For almost a year (from April 2010 to January 2011) he carefully accompanied basic256 and released 7 assemblies. He also took part in the translation of James’s book “ Want to Learn to Program?” ".

Unfortunately, after a turbulent 2010th school project in Rostov-on-Don (and not only) actually came to naught. More urgent tasks came to the fore and I abandoned my responsibilities as a maintainer. However, the last couple of years I was thinking of returning. And finally, thoughts transformed into concrete steps. I contacted the guys from ALT, received the go-ahead, enlisted the support of the mentor glebfm @ (Gleb Fotengauer-Malinovsky) and got down to business.

1. My new old iron

Unfortunately, the old eMachines M6810 laptop, specially purchased for working with ALT Linux in March 2010 for 6 thousand rubles, has long since ended. Fortunately, a Samsung P28 (Celeron 1.5Ghz) laptop with 512Mb RAM, without a hard drive and a power supply unit, which was completely free of charge , was discovered in my household . I bought a BP for it and rearranged 60Gb hard from the deceased eMachines. Installed Simply Linux 7.0.5 - and the workhorse was ready. Yes, I also purchased USB WiFi TP-LINK TL-WN723N with a good discount (150 rubles), because there was no WiFi module in my Samsung.

2. The transition to the 8th branch

The first thing the mentor advised was to upgrade to the p8 branch. Which I did, with some adventures that are hardly worth much attention. He visited the page https://www.altlinux.org/Update and executed a series of commands:

$ sudo apt-repo rm all
$ sudo apt-repo add p8
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
$ sudo update-kernel

Rebooted and - voila, I have a fresh version:

$ cat / etc / altlinux-release
Simply Linux 7.95.0 (Dory)

As a bonus - earned USB WiFi TP-LINK. In general, by the way, Simply Linux makes a very good impression. The system is well balanced, accepts acceptable even on my weak hardware. Xfce is configured Window-like (personally, I don’t care, but for those who just came with Windows it’s convenient). The color scheme is pleasing to the eye. Plus a cool picture on the desktop.

3. Access recovery

The key question is, what about my keys? Understandably, they were on eMachines, but that hard was reformatted. However, even then, on the advice of my first mentor, I saved two folders (.gnupg and .ssh) on another laptop.

Let's start with gpg keys. These are two files (pubring.gpg and secring.gpg) from my old .gnupg folder. These keys are needed to sign srpm and tags in git. I copy them from the password-protected archive to the home folder and execute the command:

$ gpg —with-fingerprint secring.gpg

And then I show the result to the mentor (via telegram). It compares the fingerprint of my key with the one in the keyring of the keys of Team members. The fingerprint is the same. Yes, the keys are the same.

I import:

$ gpg --import pubring.gpg
$ gpg --import secring.gpg
$ rm * .gpg

It's time to remember the password. I create an empty file and try to sign it:

$ touch test_file
$ gpg -ab test_file

In response, gpg asks me for a passphrase. This is a serious problem. What password could I use back in 2010? I make several attempts, one result: Invalid passphrase; try again ... " Forgetting a password is like losing keys ," meanwhile, a mentor writes. And then it’s like it dawns on me! I try my guess - it works. The file is signed and I remembered my password!

It's time for ssh keys (from my old .ssh folder). They are needed to connect to build servers (gyle.altlinux.org) and synchronize the git repository (gitery.altlinux.org). Again I turn to my password-protected archive, extracting two files from there (id_dsa and id_dsa.pub). And then:

$ ssh-add id_dsa
$ cp id_dsa .ssh
$ cp id_dsa.pub .ssh
$ rm id_dsa *

In addition, I create a .ssh file ( vim ~ / .ssh / config ) with the following contents:

Host git.alt
    HostName gitery.altlinux.org
    Port 222
    User git_lamp
Host gyle.alt
    HostName gyle.altlinux.org
    Port 222
    User git_lamp

After several unsuccessful access attempts, I add to ~ / .ssh / config the first line:

PubkeyAcceptedKeyTypes + ssh-dss

This has to be done because modern openssh-clients consider (rightly) DSA a bad algorithm, its use must be explicitly allowed. And my keys are DSA (in the near future they need to be updated on RSA on the advice of a mentor). Checking access with the command:

$ ssh git.alt help
Enter passphrase for key '/home/lamp/.ssh/id_dsa':

I enter the password and get a list of available commands. Access restored, I'm back in the ALT Linux Team . The next step is to collect the package. But this will be a new story ...