According to
https://passlib.readthedocs.io/en/stable/lib/passlib.hash.sha512_crypt.html:
> salt (str) – Optional salt string. If not specified, one will be autogenerated (this is recommended).
> If specified, it must be 0-16 characters, drawn from the regexp range [./0-9A-Za-z].
Until now, we were using invalid characters (like `-`). We were also
going over the requested length limit of 16 characters.
This is most likely what was causing `ValueError` exceptions for some people,
as reported in #209 (Github Issue).
Ansible's source code (`lib/ansible/utils/encrypt.py`) shows that Ansible tries
to use passlib if available and falls back to Python's `crypt` module if not.
For Mac, `crypt.crypt` doesn't seem to work, so Ansible always requires passlib.
Looks like crypt is forgiving when length or character requirements are
not obeyed. It would auto-trim a salt string to make it work, which means
that we could end up with the same hash if we call it with salts which aer only
different after their 16th character.
For these reasons (crypt autotriming and passlib downright complaining),
we're now using shorter and more diverse salts.
Related to #193, but for the Facebook bridge.
(other bridges can be changed to do the same later).
This patch makes the bridge configuration entirely managed by the
Ansible playbook. The bridge's `config.yaml` and `registration.yaml`
configuration files are regenerated every time the playbook runs.
This allows us to apply updates to those files and to avoid
people having to manage the configuration files manually on the server.
-------------------------------------------------------------
A deficiency of the current approach to dumping YAML configuration in
`config.yaml` is that we strip all comments from it.
Later on, when the bridge actually starts, it will load and redump
(this time with comments), which will make the `config.yaml` file
change.
Subsequent playbook runs will report "changed" for the
"Ensure mautrix-facebook config.yaml installed" task, which is a little
strange.
We might wish to improve this in the future, if possible.
Still, it's better to have a (usually) somewhat meaningless "changed"
task than to what we had -- never rebuilding the configuration.
Slavi Pantaleev
Thomas Kuehne
Dan Arnfield