DaCHS 2.3 on the way to Debian main

2021-01-12 Markus Demleitner

DaCHS 2.3 will be the first DaCHS officially in Debian.

DaCHS releases usually come around the Interops in (roughly) May and November. Not this one, though, for one pleasant, one unpleasant, and several other reasons.

The unpleasant reason first: The 2.2 release has a fairly severe memory leak in it (resulting, in roundabout ways, from python 3 preserving tracebacks of nested exceptions), which of course really became virulent on my server right over the holidays. If you run a site with just a few gigs of RAM that might be hit by second-rate async clients, this will bite you and you ought to upgrade now (well, you ought to upgrade anyway).

The pleasant reason is that DaCHS has made it into Debian main and thus, unless something disastrous happens, it will be part of the Debian version 11 (“bullseye”). This means that people who do not need to be on the bleeding edge, will not need to monkey around with our repository (and its signing key) any more starting some time in 2021 (or just about now, if they're running testing). I can't tell you how gratifying that feels to me. And well, I wanted relatively recent code corresponding to a something on our release branch in bullseye.

One of the other reasons is that stilts' author Mark Taylor is trying to stomp out TAP services failing his taplint's validation, and many DaCHS 2.2 services (those that don't define TAP examples, which of course is a shame anyway) fail with only the (really minor) error E-EXDH-1 (see below).

DaCHS 2.3 has some other noteworthy changes; as usual in minor version steps, my expectation is that none of this will break existing services. Still, you may want to glance over the following list, as there are some behavioural changes nevertheless. In approximate order of the wizardry involved:

I've long had a bad consciousness because DaCHS has stored cleartext passwords so far. That's probably not a problem for DaCHS itself (as it does not protect great riches), but people tend to re-use passwords, and I'd have hated to leak passwords that might work elsewhere. Well, no longer: the dc.users table now contains hashed passwords, and the upgrade will hash them. This, in particular, means that you cannot recover them once you have updated (which, of course, is as it should be).
The javascript delivered with DaCHS was no longer quite up to date with Debian's jquery. I have updated it in several ways, and I have restored the functionality of the WebSAMP button in the default response. If you have custom HTML templates containing javascript, you may need to update them to newer jquery, too, specifically,
- change .unload( to .on("unload", (this happens in the SAMP code in defaultresponse.html, for instance).
- also in the SAMP code in overridden defaultresponses, change the icon URL to completeURL("/logo_tiny.png") (or whatever) to avoid trouble with https installations.
- if you compare jquery element names: these are now returned in lower case.
And yes, WebSAMP now mostly works with HTTPS (which is unrelated to this update, except that DaCHS until 2.2 suppresses the WebSAMP button when it thinks it is delivering through HTTPS).
DaCHS now honours upgrade-insecure-requests headers that common web browsers issue and will then redirect them to https when appropriate. So, please don't forcibly do these redirects any more from reverse proxies – they break, among other things, TAP, and they're generally just a bad idea.
DaCHS now instructs the database to return all bits of floating point numbers. This may break your regression tests, but it's the right thing to do (blog post on this).
Another thing that may break regression tests: TAP results now have column names in the case given in the RD (where previously they were lowercased unless quoted). Let me cite rule 1 of SQL table design: Don't use mixed-case column names.
Wildcards in the directory parts of sources patterns are now expanded, which means that you can write things like <sources pattern="data/202?/*.fits"/>, which previously wouldn't have done what you might reasonably expect; however, this might in rare cases match additional sources when you re-import data.
The examples endpoint now returns a 404 if no examples are defined on a service; this fixes the stilts taplint E-EXA-EXDH-1 error I mentioned above.
DaCHS will now refuse to use x-unregistred as an authority when publishing resources or creating publisher DIDs. This is to protect to people who do a lot of imports before settling on their authority; sometimes DaCHS' fallback null authority got into their databases, which then caused quite a bit of cleanup effort.
Because of licensing problems, the Debian package no longer contains the CC logos for the time being. If you want them back, drop appropriate files cc0.png, ccby.png, and ccybysa.png into /var/gavo/web/nv_static/img
You can now list modules you want in a procedure application in its setup/@imports attribute. I've done this after I had to add code to a proc's setup just to run an import once too often.
simbadinterface's Sesame now uses the dc.metastore table to cache results rather than files as before. Previous saveNew, id, and debug parameters are no longer supported (the base.caches.getSesame interface is unchanged, so it's unlikely you'd notice this).
table.query() or querier.query() are now seriously deprecated (you may have used them in code embedded in RDs). See Database Queries in the reference documentation for what the recommended query patterns are (and have been for a while). Just one word of warning: table.query would macro-expand its argument, which the connection method obviously cannot. If you depend on that, call table.expand(query) manually first.

With this: Merry upgrading and a happy new year!

HTTPS in DaCHS

2018-09-24 Markus Demleitner

Another little aspect of HTTPS support in DaCHS: In the web interface, the webSAMP button must disappear in pages served through HTTPS: it simply wouldn't work.

(Warning: No astronomy-relevant content at all this time).

I can't say I'm a big fan of the mighty push towards HTTPS that's going on right now – as I'm arguing in the updated operator's guide it doesn't do people's privacy a lot of good (compared to, say, pushing for browsers to not execute Javascript by default or have DNSSEC widely deployed), but it's a fairly substantial operational liability. With HTTPS, operators have to deal with cryptographic material, regularly update their certificates, restart their services in time and assemble the whole thing correctly (don't get me started about proxying, SNI, and all those horrors). Users, on the other hand, have to keep their CA certificates in order, in particular when they do programmatic VO access, where the browser vendors, their employers and who knows who else doesn't do it for them. Pop quiz: How would you install a new CA certificate on your box? And will your default browser see it?

But on the other hand, there are some scenarios in which HTTPS makes sense, and I can remotely fantasise that some of those may even be relevant to the VO. And people have been asking for HTTPS in DaCHS a number of times, at times even because their administrations urged them to switch. So, here it is, hopefully. Turning it on is reasonably easy when you use Letsencrypt (which in particular entails having ports 80 and 443); the section on Letencrypt in the operator's guide tells what to do. In particular don't forget the cron job, because without it, things would break after three months (when the initial certificate expires).

Things get difficult after that. For one, if your box is known under several names (our data center, for instance, can be reached as any of dc.g-vo.org, vo.uni-hd.de, and dc.zah.uni-heidelberg.de; this of course also includes things like www.example.org and example.org), you'll now have to tell DaCHS about it in the new [web]alternateHostnames configuration item; for instance, we have:

[web]
serverURL: http://dc.zah.uni-heidelberg.de
alternateHostnames:dc.g-vo.org, vo.uni-hd.de

in our /etc/gavo.rc.

And then the Registry has to know you have https. There's actually no convention for that in the VO yet. But since I'd really like to have at least fallback interfaces with plain HTTP, we'll have to come up with something. For now, my plan is to have the alternative protocol (i.e., HTTPS for sites that have an HTTP-serverURL and vice versa) using the brand-new VOResource 1.1 mirrorURLs (in RegTAP 1.1, they are in the mirror_url column rr.interface). To make DaCHS declare the alternate URLs, set [web]registerAlternative to True.

Another change I've introduced for HTTPS is that the default HTML template for the form renderer (i.e., the one people use who come with a browser) now suppresses the SAMP button if the request came in through HTTPS; that's because WebSAMP doesn't work with HTTPS and probably never will – at least I can't see a way to make it happen without totally wrecking what security guarantees HTTPS gives.

All this doesn't yet cater for the case when you use a reverse proxy to terminate HTTPS. If you are in that situation, please talk to me so we can figure out a sane way for you explain to DaCHS what to tell the Registry.

Anyway, if you want to try things out, just switch to the beta repostitory and upgrade. Feedback is highly welcome.

Oh, and if you're a client developer: Our data center is now reachable through HTTPS (at https://dc.g-vo.org), and we already have pushed the records with mirrorURLs declaring HTTPS support to the RegTAP service at dc.g-vo.org (the others will have to wait a bit longer, as we haven't re-published our registry records yet (it's all experimental, after all).

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