ATIX’s Debian/Ubuntu Erratum Service is now open source!

Improving Debian and Ubuntu support in orcharhino has long been one of the ATIX crew’s central concerns.

The introduction of Debian/Ubuntu Errata in orcharhino version 4.0.0 was an important milestone.

To use this feature, the Debian/Ubuntu Erratum Service provides regularly updated erratum lists.

The ATIX crew has now published the source code underlying this service on GitHub under the GPLv2 Open Source License (parser and server). The first inquiries about this were already received at the Open Source Automation Day 2018 when orcharhino 4.0.0 was officially presented – and for us as an open source company it is a matter of course to make such an innovation available in an open source manner.

The published erratum service technically consists of two parts:

An “errata parser” that generates errata lists from the Debian Security Announcements (DSA) and the Ubuntu Security Notices (USN), and an “errata server” that provides these via an HTTP interface.

These two parts each run in their own Docker container, which interact with each other using a Docker volume.

The parser is written in Ruby, the server in Python (with twisted and asyncio).

The graphic shows what addressing the erratum service looks like in orcharhino:

By publishing the source code, we want to generate added value for the entire open source community.