It's been a couple of crazy weeks lately, but it seems like things are getting back on track.
After the last blog post, my next order of business was to get the client and server sides working properly on my machine (note this information should have been its own blog post a while ago), which wasn't too difficult. I did run into a problem in which xdg-email uses a grep command that is not compatible with the Thunderbird mail client and thus the attachment with the signed key information fails to be included in the email. Putting this aside, perhaps what was more challenging was to get a handle on the codebase. My plan of attack was to run both the client and server side and to use the logs to track the flow of information. It seemed a little overkill at the time, but I annotated the logs so that every time there was log entry I could see which function was called. I am so glad that I took the time to do this, it has been more helpful than I would have thought. Not only was it a great aid in understanding the source code, it has been a useful resource in my current task. The following is a link to the log when using the server side:
With the next link showing the log for the client side:
I know this might not be possible to do for other projects, but I would definitely do something similar such as a flow chart or anything to track where the program is running. Alas, onto the current week.
I began working on my first task, which is to add some functionality to the avahi services so that avahi only attempts to download keys from servers that have the correct information. Currently, the data with the public key is transferred between computers via the local network, with the use of the Avahi library with python bindings. Avahi is a system to allow users to publish and discover services on their local network. My first impression with Avahi is that it seems like it's rather obstinate and working with it may be challenging. Fortunately, the mysterious Andrei Macavei wrote code so that the fingerprint would be announced in text form. I thought the pragmatic approach would be to make sure that this piece of code functioned as it should. When I got it up and running on a new branch it appeared to interfere with rendering the fingerprint as a QRCode. However, it only took a few modifications so that the application functioned as before. That was nice. My next step was to test if the fingerprint was being published. The answer is, I think so. : / As it stands, there is a necessary bit of code in the AvahiPublisher file,
avahi.string_array_to_txt_array (self.service_txt), that is crucial for the program to function. However, that self.service_txt is my fingerprint information, which I can add by itself and it appears as text in the logs for the AvahiBrowser implementation. I think this is good and I'm planning to move onto working on the client side of things. Thus, the very basic summary of the solution is that I need to write code that will recognize the published fingerprint and then proceed to download the information only if it is a match with the relevant fingerprint. So simple, right? It's a bit of a daunting task, but my mentor (Tobi) has provided some great links to code that has what we need. Somewhere the solution is in there. So tomorrow begins the process of actually writing that solution so that it works!
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