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Sealed tinderbox

I’ve been pushing the tinderbox one notch stricter from time to time; a few weeks ago I set up the tinderbox so that any network access beside for the basic protocols (HTTP, HTTPS, FTP and RSYNC) was denied; the idea is that if the ebuilds try to access network by themselves, something is wrong: once the files are fetched, that should be enough. Incidentally, this is why live ebuilds should not be in the tree.

Now, since I’ve received a request regarding the actual network traffic issued by the tinderbox, I decided to go one step further still, and make sure that beside for the tasks that do require network access the tinderbox does not connect to anything outside of the local network. To do so, I set up a local RSync mirror, then added a squid passthrough proxy, that does not cache anything; at that point, rather than allowing some protocols on the router for the tinderbox, I simply reject anything originating from the tinderbox to access Internet; all the outgoing connections originating from the tinderbox are done through Yamato, so I have something like this in my make.conf:

FETCHCOMMAND="/usr/bin/curl --location --proxy yamato.local:3128 --output ${DISTDIR}/${FILE} ${URI}" 
RESUMECOMMAND="/usr/bin/curl --location --proxy yamato.local:3128 --continue-at - --output ${DISTDIR}/${FILE} ${URI}"

Note: googling on how to set up those two variables in Gentoo to use curl I did find some descriptions on the Gentoo Forums that provide most of them; unfortunately all I found ignore the --location option, which makes it fail to fetch stuff from the SourceForge mirrors and any other mirroring system that uses 302 Moved responses.

I also modified the bti-calling script so that the identi.ca dents are sent properly through the proxy. I didn’t set the http_proxy variable, because that would have made moot the sealing. Instead, by setting it up this way, explicitly for the fetch and dent, if any testsuite tries to fetch something, even via HTTP, will be denied.

But… why should it be a problem if testsuites were to access services on the network? Well, the answer is actually easy once you understand two rules of Gentoo: what is not in package.mask is supposed to work, and any bug found needs to be fixable, and testsuites results need to be reproducible, to make sure that the package works. When you rely on external infrastructure like GIT repositories, you have no way to make sure that if there is a problem it can be fixed; and when your testsuite relies on remote network services, it might fail because of connection problems, and it will fail if the remote service is closed entirely.

I’ve also been tempted to remove IPv4 connectivity from the tinderbox at all; IPv6 should well be enough given that it only needs to connect to Yamato, and it would be under NAT anyway..

Comments 5
  1. Not sure it is related …the links to ‘Altercut Productions’ and ‘Ritual: The Game’ are brokenon the right of your page.

  2. It’s definitely unrelated but they both work fine here; if you try to visit Altercut with IE6 it’s likely going to send you to a “too old browser” page…

  3. It’s nearly impossible to find educated people in this particular subject, but you seem like you know what you’re talking about!Thanks

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