January

The buildd admin job is a rather dumb one. You get between 20 and 60 mails per day; most of them build logs. This logs, which are mostly sent unsecured through the public internet, have to be signed and the only available key is the personal key of the admin. So on one hand you have to make sure that the key is secure, on the other hand you have to find a way to sign a rather large amount of stuff.

For the debian-kernel archive, which I operate, and the pkg-voip/pkg-gnome/pkg-kde-extras archive, which is operated by Kilian, we decided to sign the uploads automaticaly. Each buildd get its own key and the used DAK includes a patch which restricts this keys to do uploads of only binaries of the correct arches.

This drasticaly reduces the time until a new package is uploaded; this means much less failed builds because a build dep is not yet built. Also it reduces the places where it is possible to do harm; you have to attack the buildd machine itself instead of the complete mail setup between buildd and admin.

For etch, we will have apt security in place, so we can be sure that the stuff comes from the correct archive. But it is not possible to disable that checks only for one source, just for anything.

Buildds uses at least one mirror: incoming.debian.org aka ftp-master.debian.org. There are two queues, the accepted autobuild queue and the main archive. The accepted autobuild queue is not signed at all, it does not provide a Release file. The archive needs some time to generate the Packages files each dinstall run and have broken sigs during this time.

This means: buildds can't use APT security at all. And no, there is no other mechanism to ensure data integrity.

The upcomming linux-2.6 release will introduce some changes in the Xen support.

kernel: xen_net: Memory squeeze in netback driver.

Why is there no automatic or at least semi automatic infrastructure for LSB tests? The last published result is from the beginning of the last year and only for sarge.