Telegram is great, especially because it helps one stay away from the distractions that WhatsApp brings with it. Its unfortunately blocked in Pakistan, due to unknown reason but likely not related to censorship, given WhatsApp, Signal and every other messaging app works just fine.

The good news is Telegram upstream have their own proxy protocol and an implementation (https://github.com/TelegramMessenger/MTProxy), which seems to work well. I published MTProxy as a snap (https://snapcraft.io/mtproxy) yesterday, so thought it would make sense to share how others could setup their own proxy. This guide, will of course help me as a future reference as well.

So lets get started by installing MTProxy

snap install mtproxy

Due to security reasons, mtproxy drops privileges (if run as root) by calling setuid(), something a strictly confined snap does not allow due to security reasons, so my workaround was to create a new user on the server, so that mtproxy does not try to drop privileges.

So lets setup a new user and download proxy configurations from Telegram servers, more details: https://github.com/TelegramMessenger/MTProxy#running

useradd mtproxy -m
su - mtproxy
mkdir proxyconfig
curl -s https://core.telegram.org/getProxySecret -o proxyconfig/proxy-secret
curl -s https://core.telegram.org/getProxyConfig -o proxyconfig/proxy-multi.conf

Now lets exit the mtproxy user shell and create a secret to be used later by Telegram client apps

exit
head -c 16 /dev/urandom | xxd -ps

Now we create a systemd service so that our proxy runs in the background and starts automatically whenever the server is restarted. Open the below file for editing using nano (or the editor of your choice) and paste the below configuration.
Note: you must replace the random string that was generated in previous step with “my_secret” in below config.

sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/mtproxy.sevice

 [Unit]  
 Description=MTProxy  
 After=network.target  
 [Service]  
 Type=simple  
 User=mtproxy  
 WorkingDirectory=/home/mtproxy/proxyconfig  
 ExecStart=/snap/bin/mtproxy -u mtproxy -p 8888 -H 8000 -S my_secret --aes-pwd proxy-secret proxy-multi.conf -M 1  
 Restart=on-failure  
 [Install]  
 WantedBy=multi-user.target

Lets now start the service

systemctl enable mtproxy
systemctl start mtproxy

That’s it, we are done, you now have the Telegram proxy setup and (hopefully) working.

NOTE: This was only tested on DigitalOcean droplet, so your mileage may vary.

Lately at Crossbar.io, we have been PySide2 for an internal project. Last week it reached a milestone and I am now in the process of code cleanup and refactoring as we had to rush quite a few things for that deadline. We also create a snap package for the project, our previous approach was to ship the whole PySide2 runtime (170mb+) with the Snap, it worked but was a slow process, because each new snap build involved downloading PySide2 from PyPI and installing some deb dependencies.

So I decided to play with the content interface and cooked up a new snap that is now published to snap store. This definitely resulted in overall size reduction of the snap but at the same time opens a lot of different opportunities for app development on the Linux desktop.

I created a ‘Hello World’ snap that is just 8Kb in size since it doesn’t include any dependencies with it as they are provided by the pyside2 snap. I am currently working on a very simple “sound recorder” app using PySide and will publish to the Snap store.

With pyside2 snap installed, we can probably export a few environment variables to make the runtime available outside of snap environment, for someone who is developing an app on their computer.

Recently I got inspired (paranoid ?) by my boss who cares a lot about software security. Previously, I had almost the same password on all the websites I used, I had them synced to google servers (Chrome user previously), but once I started taking software security seriously, I knew the biggest mistake I was making was to have a single password everywhere, so I went one step forward and set randomly generated passwords on all online accounts and stored them in a keystore.

I then enabled 2FA authentication on some important services (GMail, GitHub, Twitter, DO) and adopted the policy to never login to my browser’s sync features. Doing that, I realize that the browser is just a commodity, it doesn’t matter which browser I use as long as I can log into my online accounts and of course a browser that actually works.

I am pretty sure there are many things that I could still improve around my computing patterns, which I will over time.

Motto: software security over convenience.

In a terminal run:

sudo snap install android-studio --classic

I am a long-time Ubuntu user and community contributor. I love how open-source communities generally work, sure there are hiccups, like companies mandating decisions that aren’t popular amongst the community. The idea of I being able to fix an issue and getting that released to hundreds of thousands of people is just priceless for me.

For the long time, I have distinguished some issues in Linux on the desktop that I want fixed. Biggest is always having the latest version of the software I use. Think of Android for example, you always get the latest version of the app, directly from the developers with no package maintainer in between. That’s the ideal scenario but for us currently on Linux it may not be possible in all cases because of the fragmentation we have.

Snaps, I believe tries to solve that.

Whenever I find a new software that I want to install these days, the first thing I do is search the snap store (snap find my_query). I have found some unexpected snaps while doing that but other times I faced disappointment. On a personal level I have slowly started to fix that. I published Android Studio as a snap, Sublime Text is work-in-progress and I am looking into snapping Keybase.

The other apps that are absolutely important for me are already available, like PyCharm and Slack.

I have also discovered that MySQL and Firefox to some extent have their snaps there, which is super awesome.

The great thing today is that most new open-source projects are doing development on GitHub, so we can just go and contribute snap support for a project and quickly get automatic builds on build.snapcraft.io. I hope more people who care about Ubuntu, and Linux in general get behind this effort and make application delivery on Linux the best amongst all Desktop OSes.

Its time to put our egos aside and work for a larger cause.

Yesterday I was laid off by Canonical after working 6 years with them as a QA Engineer. I really loved my job and learned quite a lot, but now I must find a new job to survive. I have been involved with Ubuntu for close to 8 years, started as a contributor to the Ubuntu community, later I was offered a role at Canonical to work on Ubuntu.

I am very passionate about software. When I am not working, I write code and when I am working I write code. I never stopped learning technologies of different domains during last few years, so apart from my full-time job, I taught myself Android app development, Django to write RESTful APIs (not a full-stack developer yet) and to some extent I am also a DevOp and have been managing a lot of my deployments.

As a QA Engineer, I can help you setup test plans, find coverage gaps, automate your tests and enable them to run as part of CI in Jenkins. Apart from automation, I do have extensive experience with manual testing as well, so I can really break your product(for good).

My Linux skills are quite competitive, having used Ubuntu exclusively for 8 years I am very comfortable with command-line, with remote debugging over ssh. I am experienced with both git and bzr. I am also very passionate about embedded devices, have experimented very cool things on the RaspberryPi.

I live in Pakistan (GMT+5) but I am pretty flexible with work hours, so if an opportunity arrives I can really work in a different timezone. I don’t have any specific preference over the size of the company, so I am very willing to work for companies of all size. I am also up for any freelance opportunities, so if you don’t have a full-time role, I can be a freelancer/consultant.

my linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/omer-akram-44830248/
my github: https://www.github.com/om26er
my launchpad: https://www.launchpad.net/~om26er
email: om26er@gmail.com

Exciting times ahead.