I joined the MirageOS retreat in March 2019. It's an 1 week event in Marrakech, Marocco. It's a real nice house in the old city of Marrakech, the medina. The event itself doesn't have much structure than a morning meeting and sometimes talks in the evening.

MirageOS is unikernel written in OCaml. MirageOS can run ontop of many backends, e.g. Unix process or xen, kvm, bhyve. This retreat I took care of the Internet uplink. We had a slow and leaky 4MBit ADSL line from Marocco Telecom which we used as backup, while using LTE as main uplink. We used first imwi as provider. But imwi changes the IPs quites often and the implementation in OpenWrt uqmi does not follow the IP changes, which resulted in a stale LTE connection. Imwi is also filtering all UDP DNS queries, except those going to their own servers. We then switched to Orange as provider, because someone had a card available. Orange was fast enough, pretty stable 5MBit up&down. We consumed roughly 20 GB a day. This brought us the nice daily ritual, a walk to a small and nice mobile shop in the medina. 1 GB cost 10 Dh (1 Euro). Our router, an APU2, runs OpenWrt, but we disabled DNS & DHCP and ran these services on a seperate APU using MirageOS.

Even I'm not such familiar with OCaml and functional languages, I tried to fix a bug in the DHCP Server implementation PR#97. It worked for me, however after deploying it, it turned out, it only worked for me, I broke it for everybody else ;). This motivated me to start looking on TTCN-3, a ETSI language to test network protocols. Later together with Hannes, we fixed the DHCP for real. Adding some TTCN-3 tests and create a simple base is still on my TODO. Another really nice OCaml service on side was a learn-ocaml instance. An interactive teaching web application for beginners and advances OCaml programmers including an annotate OCaml compiler. Sadly there is no instance in the internet yet, as the projects is not ready for release.

While there I also worked a lot on reproducible builds for OpenWrt. I fixed 2 packages. All OpenWrt base packages are 100 % reproducible. Thanks to Daniel Golle, OpenWrt images can be cryptographically signed. This signature must be removed before looking for differences, this is also done in the reproducible builds setup for OpenWrt. 100% of ar71xx images are reproducible and 98% of ramips. The remaining 2% are also signature problems, but these signatures are in the middle instead of the end of the image. I also found the time to integrate my package index parser into reproducible builds. It's much easier to just parse two packages list, than looking on the all package files to determine if they are reproducible or not. The package index files also contain metadata of the packages which it inserts into the reproducible builds database.

Some people from the QubesOS projects joined the retreat. For example there is a MirageOS firewall which replaces the QubesOS own one. There is also a Pong game, which can run as QubesOS-vm. Thanks to the QubesOS people for their help on my problems with disposable vms.

Furthermore I brought a beaglebone black with me to investigate bugs reported for that platform. While looking at it, I found out the last release of OpenWrt (18.06.2) doesn't work on this board (fs: squashfs), while master works. I also fixed builds issues with u-boot in OpenWrt for the beaglebone black when using a modern toolchain.

Since we used LTE as uplink, we wanted to know how much of our data volume was consumed. OpenWrt might have statistics, but those are stored only in memory and not saved anywhere. I didn't looked for any OpenWrt packages which fixes this problem, because the provider (Orange) is supporting a USSD code to retrieve the remaining volume.

What is USSD? USSD stands for Unstructured Supplementary Service Data. It's used on mobile phones to retrieve balance, your phone number, your IMEI, [..]. Most people have used them. Take your phone, open the phone application and call *#06#, it will return your phone unique identifier (IMEI). While SMS is a store-and-forward scheme, like email. USSD is real time message protocol, similiar to a TCP connection. The USSD codes are simple, do a request, get a response. Done. But Orange implemented a menu via USSD. So the USSD session will look like: Request, Response, Choose Your Menu, Response, Go Back, Choose different Point. I've started writing USSD support for libqmi. Simple USSD codes can be requested and decoded, but not menus with user input.

And the biggest problem is: OpenWrt doesn't support USSD at all. Not even the simple ones.