And I almost forgot about the libsoup default behavior for SSL certificates checking. By default libsoup and therefore webkitgtk will not do any SSL certificate checks. You need to put something like the following snippet into your code (adjust for your language of choice):

from gi.repository import WebKit

session = WebKit.get_default_session()
session.set_property("ssl-use-system-ca-file", True)

If you don’t do this it will accept any certificate (including self-signed ones).

This is documented behavior in libsoup and they don’t want to change it for compatiblity reasons in libsoup. But for webkit its unexpected behavior (at least to me) and I hope the webkitgtk developers will consider changing this default in webkit. I filed a bug about it. So if you use webkitgtk and SSL, remember to set the above property.

h = hmac.new(master_pass, site_tag, hashlib.sha1)
print(b64encode(h.digest())[:hash_len])

I want a commandline utility that can output me PassHash compatible hashes when I use w3m (or if the extension stops working for some reason).

To my delight I discovered that the upstream git repNice and hard to brute-force.o of PassHash already has a python helper to generate passhash compatible password. I added some tweaks to add pythons argparse [1] and now I’m really happy with it:

$ ./tools/passhash.py --hash-size 14 slashdot.org
Please enter the master key: 
KPXveo7bq7j1%X

Hard to brute-force and matches what the extension generates.

Squid-deb-proxy uses the well known squid proxy with a custom configuration to cache deb package and Indexfiles (like Packages.gz) that will allow caching from the default archives and mirrors and reject anything else by default.

The basic philosophy is that “it just works”. You run on your server:

root@server# apt-get install squid-deb-proxy

and on your clients:

root@client# apt-get install squid-deb-proxy-client

and that’s it. It does not require any fiddling with configuration (unless you want to ). The default will let you connect to .debian.org and nothing else.

The server will announce itself via avahi as _apt_proxy._tcp and the
client will hook into apt to use Acquire::http::ProxyAutoDetect. The
client is useful for other servers that announce themself via avahi.

Packaging was a bit more work than anticipated because there is a bit of setup and teardown work in the initscript. For Debian as sysvinit script was needed, Ubuntu uses upstart so it took a bit of refactoring to extract the code into a common helper.

If you want to try it now, its available via:

$ bzr branch lp:squid-deb-proxy
$ cd squid-deb-proxy
$ bzr-buildpackage

and in unstable once it leaves the NEW queue.

$ gdebi debian/control

in a unpacked debian source package it will check for missing build-dependencies and offer to install them.

This is what it loks like (notice the “Test drive” button below the screenshot):

And here what happens when I press test-drive and its connected (connecting takes about a minute currently).