Search Results: "ana"

15 August 2006

Gunnar Wolf: FUSE vs. GnomeVFS?

Aigars: I agree with Womble's comment in your blog. Maybe GnomeVFS is just way too much? Maybe it could be substituted by an on-demand FUSE-based mounter and unmounter? It seems to me it'd be saner to get all the relevant file manager GUIs (or plainly UIs, maybe even some overpowered shells) to be able to interpret an URL request as just a call to said script and a local filesystem operation? Mounting via FUSE in a protected, per-user area, and then just unmounting after a given inactivity timeout.
Yes, I know GnomeVFS is able to do all that and more. But as it's always the case with Gnome and me: I doubt most of the times you need all the "all that". And probably there are saner ways to implement it than via yet-another-layer-for-yet-another-already-solved-thing.

Bdale Garbee: It Moved!

There's a particular analogy I've used from time to time to explain what it feels like to be someone like me, working in a very large corporation. I tell people that it's as if I'm standing next to a large rock with an eye dropper, carefully placing individual drops of water in hopes of eventually seeing the rock move. Today, the rock moved! Of course, it helps a lot that a growing number of HP customers have been pushing on this particular rock, including a few burly types who've really put their shoulders into the effort... ;-) But I guess I'd like to think all those little drops over several years helped soften the soil up a bit, making the rock a little easier to move today.

Aigars Mahinovs: Why? Oh Gods! Why?


$ mv .ssh/ .ssh.old/
$ python
>>>import gnomevfs
>>> gnomevfs.get_file_info( "ssh://aigarius:password@aigarius.com/home/aigarius" )
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
gnomevfs.AccessDeniedError: Access denied
>>>
$ ssh aigarius.com
The authenticity of host 'aigarius.com (85.254.216.40)' can't be established.
RSA key fingerprint is 6d:29:c0:f3:d0:84:c9:a9:d9:4c:7e:e3:1a:18:a2:e2.
Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no)? yes
Warning: Permanently added 'aigarius.com,85.254.216.40' (RSA) to the list of known hosts.
aigarius@aigarius.com's password: *******
[...]
aigarius.com$ exit
$ python
>>>import gnomevfs
>>> gnomevfs.get_file_info( "ssh://aigarius:password@aigarius.com/home/aigarius" )
<gnomevfs .FileInfo 'aigarius'>
>>>
 Of course, this is mentioned nowhere in the sparse documentation. Please keep me away from the person who wrote GnomeVFS and its Python bindings. Bloodshed might ensue. Bug reported Why can’t someone write a nice, light, working network file transfer protocol abstraction library that would be independent of any desktop environment (bonus) and a working X server (I am looking at you, GnomeVFS). Something that would simply provided all file and folder manipulation operations in sync and async ways in such way that those operations work completely uniformly across all supported protocols. Support for at least ssh and ftp is essential, webdav, nfs, rsync and other protocols that allow writing files to remote locations and http, https and other protocols that only allow read only access to remote files would be very welcome. The library should be in C with bindings in C++, Python, Perl, Ruby, PHP and also a command line processor that would allow all commands to be used in a shell script.
Why something like this can not be written and obsolete the GnomeVFS and those KIOslaves. Freedesktop.org, I am looking at you, please! Update: Apparently I only need to “import gnome.ui” and execute “gnome.ui.authentication_manager_init()” and my application will automagically get a proper authentication dialog in this case. Unfortunately it is not documented anywhere that I could find. :P

14 August 2006

Erich Schubert: SELinux for sarge updated

My experimental SELinux for Debian sarge backports have been updated. The core libraries and utilities are updated to the versions just uploaded to unstable. Therefore, they may of course contain the same bugs as the unstable versions and since I redid the packaging of libselinux and libsemanage - I didn't understand Manojs packaging system, and these packages needed larger modifications for sarge python support - they may also contain extra bugs. But even users of unstable might be interested in grabbing the "refpolicy" packages from this repository. These packages are now a modular policy. This is possible since the just uploaded toolchain finally has working policy module linking and results in a significantly smaller policy, since you don't have to add rules for software not installed. To support this, I've written a tool to resolve inter-module dependencies and to automatically install modules matching the software packages you have installed. Expect to see this in the unstable refpolicy packages sometime, too. Maybe someone else will contribute a ncurses frontend to select policy modules. Please note that bug reports should be directed to the Debian SELinux Mailing Lists. Please use the mailing lists, instead of just contacting me directly. On a side note, I don't know if I'll be continuing these efforts.

Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho: Fire

There was a fire on a nearby apartment house on Friday and again on Saturday. I went to see the house Saturday afternoon, just to see the last fire truck leave the scene. They still had a hose connected to the underground water pipe. To my knowledge, nobody was hurt, and everybody who lived in the building has found new logdings.

13 August 2006

Edd Dumbill: Ten things you need to know about me

To keep you reading all the way through, the best one's at the end.
1. I'm striking back out on my own againAfter a couple of years working full time in an office, I've decided it's the right time to take my own business, the Useful Information Company, further on. As the rest of this post illustrates, we'll be involved in web technology conferences, our own products, and Rails-based software development. I'm always looking for collaborators, comment and customers, so get in touch if any of this lot grabs you.
2. I'm organising an amazing web developer event in London, late OctoberUseful's first venture is XTech WebDev London. This is the first of a new type of event for XTech: a focused one-day training event for web developers. The idea is to focus on the best practice in web development that emerges from the cutting-edge work demonstrated in the regular XTech conference.This year, that means: Ajax, web standards, open data, REST and Ruby on Rails. Any web developer wanting inspiration and a view of the future should come along. London, UK. October 31, 2006. You can reserve your place now. (We're right-priced for your training budget, and start late enough that folks could make it from all over the UK and beyond without staying a night.)
3. The pace is hotting up for XTech 2007 in ParisMeanwhile, I'm busy putting together the call for participation and programme committee for XTech 2007, in Paris, France. Our theme is "The Ubiquitous Web." As keynotes, I'm pleased to welcome Adam Greenfield, Matt Webb and Jack Schulze.
4. I'll be off travelling shortly and reconnect with old and new friends Though a little daunted by the new face of air travel, I'm heading out to O'Reilly in Sebastopol at the end of this month to take part in FooCamp. One of my main aims is to seek out the ingredients required for a successful professional online community. In September I'll be putting in some time at EuroOSCON. Both visits will let me hook up with friends, many of whom I've not seen for a couple of years.
5. I'm on the programme committee for O'Reilly's Emerging Technologies 2007 conferenceThis one has me interested and engaged. Rael Dornfest is due to unveil the call for participation in a couple of weeks' time, and I'll give my take on the conference then. The show itself is March 26-29, 2007.
6. I have an exciting startup under the covers, in the area of conference and event managementOne of the things I've done a lot of over the last half-decade is organise, coax and bully people into presenting at conferences. I'm pouring what I've learned, and more besides, into a great product. You'll soon be bored of me talking about it.
7. I'm involved in taking Pharmalicensing into an exciting new phasePharmalicensing is an online exchange for intellectual property in the biotech and pharmaceutical world. I was part of its foundation in 1998, and am still involved. I will be part of a newly energized team of people pushing it forward into 2007. 8. I'm having a bit of a clean-out of projectsAlas, with so much going on, I need to cut out a few existing commitments. One of these things will be Monopod, my Mono-based podcast client for Linux. If I can't find anybody interested in its maintenance, I'll just hang the source code out there for anyone to pick up.
9. I want to get more energy put into DOAPOne of my long term projects I definitely don't want to cut out is DOAP, my project to describe software projects in RDF. It's had a slow but sure take-up over the last few years, and is finding its way into some significant projects. However, I do need a bit more energy for it, and one or two collaborators would certainly help. 10. Around Christmas-time, I'm going to become a father to twinsI've still not recovered from the shock. Rachael and I are going to be the proud, stunned, parents of a couple of bright shiny bundles of Human 2.0. Completely awesome, and I've absolutely no idea what to do! For now, we're just concentrating on throwing enough junk out to make room for them.

Clint Adams: Waiting for something to break

Looking out over Toronto from the top of the CN Tower, and still running for public office, I realize that I have taken several actions in my life for which I owe public apologies. Once, I blamed the entire history of Middle East politics on a hapless middle-aged retard just because he said that he liked malls. He is currently awaiting trial at the International Criminal Court in rainy The Hague. I would like to apologize to the people of the Netherlands for my part in inflicting an American on them. When I was 55, I strapped a large snowboard to each foot and sat in the middle of a narrow trail in Vermont, just to be a dick. I would like to apologize to all the skiers who injured themselves fatally in attempts to avoid me. Four hours later, I tried the same on a mountain in Utah. I would like to apologize to the American people for failing to injure any Mormons in that endeavor. In order to console myself, I broke into a beer brewery and upped the alcohol content to 4% by weight, in contravention of state law. I would like to apologize for wasting alcohol on the people of Utah. When I was three, my cousin hung up on an imaginary phone call with Mr. President and proceeded to place an imaginary phone call to Mr. Government. I became so overcome by stress from her antics that I cast away her mock aloe, peddled my tricycle to Boston, and pissed all over the First Church of Christ, Scientist. I would like to apologize for not having waited several years in order to piss on some Scientologists instead. I would like to apologize to Uncle Bill for having dragged his name into this blog entry, especially in such close proximity to the Scientologists, who hate him with aplomb. I would like to apologize for having re-enacted this episode every month since then, despite the protests of Mr. "I-am-not-a-Jew" Schwartz et al. Several years later, I defecated on the streets of Hoboken, Jersey City, Atlantic City, and Camden during rush-hour traffic. I would like to apologize for not doing this in every city in New Jersey (Newark in particular). Last month on a flight to Dar-us-Salaam, I noticed that Steve Martin was sitting across the aisle from me. While he was sleepily drooling into his pillow, I swiped his notebook. I would like to apologize to Steve Martin for plagiarizing this blog entry verbatim. I would also like to apologize for having sex with his wife Karen seventeen times. I would like to apologize to Karen for having sex with her three times without her consent, and I would like to apologize to both Steve and Karen for having sex with their children while pretending they were members of the Plimpton family. I would also like to apologize for having sex with their elderly Hawaiian turtle, whom I mistakenly believed was dead. In 1981, I dined at Sammy's Roumanian Steakhouse while wearing a purple zoot suit with a silver see-through mesh tank top. I would like to apologize to the Romanian people, the denizens of Chrystie Street, the City of New Orleans, the poblano farmers, the shiksa that gave me a lapdance, and the marmot named Stu who saw the pictures on the website of a Jewish dog rapist and promptly choked to death on his own vomit. In 1987, I dined at a Benihana with a girl who would later get tattoos and piercings. We sat at a hibachi with a truckload of Italian tourists who spoke no English at all. I would like to apologize for laughing hysterically at them when one asked, Du sprichst Deutsch? , and for getting blood all over the teppanyaki when I slit their throats after another asked, Quel pays ? On New Year's Eve in 1989, I dined at the same Benihana with a different girl whose command of Japanese was incomplete. When a middle-aged drunken British woman jammed her tongue into my mouth, a Brooklyn school bus driver laughed at me. After leaving the restaurant, he offered me a Werther's Original candy to get the taste of old woman out of my mouth. I would like to apologize for following him home and forcing him to watch the same episode of Full House over and over again for 37 hours. I would also like to apologize to Girl Scout Troop 5166 for calling them a bunch of stupid whores. While they still are a bunch of stupid whores, there was no way I could have known that at the time. Furthermore, when I was growing up, the term stupid whore approximated the use of Khidir beneath Momouteh and Shaka, when the walls fell. Finally, I would like to apologize for making a Star Trek reference when I could have said that thing about porchmonkeys instead. Now on with the campaign!

12 August 2006

Daniel Burrows: Explaining Network Neutrality

One of the problems with network neutrality is that people outside the technology industry often can't follow the arguments back and forth because of the complexity of the terms involved. On my vacation last week, I found myself discussing this topic with my ~80-year-old grandparents. Now, Grandpa and Grandma have no clue about technology, but they aren't dumb; they are both retired educators and follow current events (especially politics) with a strong interest. In my effort to explain just what the fuss is about, I had a sudden brainstorm and came up with the following analogy, which I post here for anyone who cares to use it:


Imagine that your power company decides that it wanted to open a line of supermarkets. At the same time, it sends out an announcement that supermarkets (due to their refrigeration requirements) are particularly heavy users of the electrical system, and as a result, the power company will add a 15% surcharge to the power bills of any building that it deems to be a supermarket. Of course, the power company's own supermarkets are exempt from this fee. When the existing supermarkets complain, the power company says that they're asking for special treatment and trying to get electricity "for free" and that if they don't like its terms, they should buy their power from someone else.


Obviously this greatly simplifies the technical issues involved, but it's the best illustration of at least one aspect of the problem that I've been able to come up with. I've enabled comments for this post, so feel free to add your own suggestions.

Daniel Burrows: We aren't ATI's market.

Erich Schubert noted that ATI is holding onto their closed drivers. While it's unfortunate, I don't think this should be surprising to anyone. NVIDIA and ATI make their money by selling cards for gamer types, who make an art out of trying to get the latest super hardware to play the newest snazzy games on. They don't give a hoot about source code access -- after all, they're probably running proprietary games on a proprietary operating system anyway.

Free software enthusiasts, on the other hand, spend their free time hacking code and so don't have time to play the massive productions the game industry puts out nowadays; frozen-bubble or Wesnoth are about as much gaming as we have time for. As a result, we can do just fine with a video card capable of displaying Emacs, a couple xterms, and maybe a graphical Web browser -- and the built-in graphics card (usually Intel) on the motherboard is just fine for that. We also tend not to run Windows or OSX, where 99% or so of graphically intensive games come out, so even if we HAD free time for gaming we wouldn't be able to do it on a free system.

As a result, while I'd certainly like to have free ATI drivers, I think it's unrealistic to expect them anytime soon. ATI is a company, not a charity, and they will not provide source code or specs until it will clearly benefit them more than it hurts. If you don't believe me, try walking into your manager's office and saying "hey, I have a great idea! Let's give away all our secrets without any clear way to make money off it!" and see how he reacts. (note that this experiment may not apply to the 1-5% [0] of readers lucky enough to work in academia)

[0] this statistic determined by the HIGHLY SCIENTIFIC method of picking a small number at random.

Martin F. Krafft: Summer in Limerick

As some of you may know, I am currently in Ireland, spending most of the summer at the Irish Software Engineering Research Centre to get a start on my Ph.D. research. This is the story of how I got here and how it's been so far. In the middle of July, I left my beloved city of Zurich and headed for Dublin. I commenced my stay in "the green country" with a three-day Debian workshop for the Google Europe sysops, which was intensive and yet enjoyable. I had between 4 and 10 participants, and the syllabus was to cover most everything, from APT basics to advanced concepts. That's a lot for three days, and I usually advise clients to consider a five-day or even two-week course instead, but after convincing the organiser to plan for three days rather than just two, I figured I'd be dealing with pretty good people anyway, given Google's hiring standards. I was not to be disappointed. We started the course with installation problems, because the 2.6 kernel install which I suggested could not deal with the SATA driver in the new IBM T43p notebooks which the participants were using. While one guy decided to try a 2.4 install with the IDE-sata driver, I opted to go down the debootstrap route instead, and was especially delighted -- at first -- to learn about a working netboot setup in the Google LAN. My joy vanished when I found the Ubuntu rescue image not to contain debootstrap, so I didn't have much choice but to prepare a root tarball and offer it for wget download. This worked, and after manual tweaking and making the system bootable, running into some issues after inadvertedly upgrading the entire system to the backports.org archive (which still does not offer a proper default pin), we decided to just go with testing and be done with it. I have to say that I really like courses where stuff does not work, as I believe those to be far more valuable to the participants. This time around, it was also the first time (after having taught maybe 60 or 70 courses in total) that I did not let myself get stressed out. Realising this put me in a great mood and made those days even more enjoyable. The rest of the workshop went without further complications, but judging from feedback over cigarettes, lunch, or the evening beer(s), the guys and girls still appreciated it. I have to thank Google and all participants for a great three days of hospitality and challenges, interesting discussions and fun. I really ought to reconsider my decision not to accept their offer for a sysop position... The last day saw me getting sick though, it must have been the air-conditioning. When I reached the hotel after the course, I definitely knew I had high fever and was developing a bad headache and cough, so I didn't get to enjoy a Friday night out in Dublin. Instead, I slept from 18:00 hours until the late morning, when I had to drag myself to the train station to catch the train to Limerick... which was painful, but I managed. Some time in between, I tried out nstx and managed to get a decent SSH connection to the outside world from the hotel room (just don't forget the -a -x flags!). Arriving in Limerick, I registered for the student apartment I had rented and found myself in a small room with a bed and desk, my own bathroom, a common room and kitchen I share with my room mate (whom I barely saw), including a TV, fridge, oven, microwave, and enough "little stuff" to make me conclude that this place was livable -- for 60 /week not a bad deal. I spent most of the weekend sleeping, but it was not until Tuesday that my state had returned to normal. The place also has an Ethernet jack, but that turned out to be unusable as it was (a) behind a fascist firewall, and (b) on the same network as about 40 other users, 17 of which seemed to be running peer-to-peer filesharing clients all hours of the day. In my office at the university, I found myself in the same situation as (a), but at least I managed to install OpenVPN, and dsniff and was thus ready to take back the net in my apartment. I wrote a little script which would (a) spoof ARP replies from the router for all hosts for a few minutes, (b) analyse the traffic it got to identify obvious P2P machines, and (c) proceed to poison their ARP cache every few seconds, effectively shaping their connection. I had to go this way, because tools like tcpnice (part of dsniff) do not work in a switched network very well, and neither did macof. Unfortunately, I lost the script in the recent XFS fiasco, but the major P2P offenders seem to have left anyway. Thanks to OpenVPN, I also got VoIP working and am happily tunneling through the university's proxy (which otherwise would require me to use the SOCKS4 proxy protocol with proxychains, which would be a nuisance). I really don't understand why a university blocks outgoing traffic. Oh well... It's been three weeks since I've come to Limerick, and my feelings are mixed. I've been spending most time in my (temporary) office (pretending to be) doing work, I have not really acquainted myself with the food here, the university campus is filled with hundreds of 14 year old summer school students but nobody of my age, and, well, research is coming along slower than I had hoped. I guess that's normal in a sense, but I also know for sure that I have a lot of work left to do on my discipline. I am a master of procrastination, you see, and Debian is a dangerous drug, a black hole that sucks in your time while it excites your synapses and splashes endorphines all around. But I've not lost my hope at the very least... Thanks for caring.

Steve Kemp: Same old me again today

If you can see this I’ve not screwed up DNS too badly. Tomorrow I have to move SMTP. Joy. On the plus side moving SMTP should be trivial since all DNS hosts I manage use the same STMP server and there is just a single alias mail.steve.org.uk. I should be able to just setup the mailserver, update that record, then use rinetd, or similar, to proxy connections from the old IP to the new one until the DNS switch propogates. Complications include hosting mailing lists, and having mailing list archives be written to a new machine… Bed now. Beer first.
PS for those people that like to argue with Joerg Schilling please stop. It is beyond obvious now that arguing semantics is getting nobody anywhere, for the Nth time. I’ve come to the conclusion that when arguing discussing things with Joerg he will either wilfully ignore your point(s) or deliberately misintepret the evidence to support his stance. The chance of persuading him to change his mind? 0%. Give it up already. Think of the DVD-media children!! It really is time to either drop the cdrecord or fork it. Please. Somebody. Do it.

11 August 2006

Aigars Mahinovs: Security costs? You pay!

Apparently the government agencies in UK that are managing the current security craze have little to no idea how much their super-paranoid security policies acctualy cost. It appears that direct losses from one day of air traffic chaos costs airlines 175 million pounds. Everyone who has their flight delayed for more then an hour for whatever reason need simply to sue the airlines and further the UK government according the EU regulations. Each person delayed for just 4 hours can claim as much as 600 euros of compensations. I wonder what compensation must a person delayed 24+ hours get, considering missed meeting, needed hotel bookings and other expenses. Now if all passengers and all airlines united and sued the government for the compensations (those can be in billions, considering that no sane business person would fly without their mobile and notebook and no mother would want to fly without toys to keep their children happy, so that will cause huge decreese in flying), then the government will think twice before disturbing lives of tens of thousands of people even when all suspects have been arrested. And we do not even know if there was any terror plot. Last time there was a terror craze in the UK, a road was closed and isolated, a house was raided and then disassembled and a man was shot, but in the end nothing was found. Who will foot the bill this time? The news say that people will not receive any compensation even if they were insured, because “it was an extreme event”. WTF?! That is what regulations and insurance are for!!! And the minister is saying that they think that most restrictions will stay forever. No carry-on baggage? That is ridiculose. SUE THE UK GOVERNMENT!

10 August 2006

Martin F. Krafft: Through with XFS

I am through with XFS, once and for all. Well, at least for laptops. I still think it's a good filesystem when you can ensure that the power never goes, and your hardware is reliable, but it's just not adequate for laptops or even desktops. I ran into some serious problems a while ago, but managed to recover. Two nights ago, however, three XFS filesystems on my laptop decided to blow up and left my system thoroughly broken. I guess as the hibernate maintainer, I should really start doing my tests somewhere else than my main system... It all started out with a dist-upgrade and this output: 
dpkg: error processing /var/cache/apt/archives/dpkg_1.13.22_i386.deb
(--unpack): unable to make backup link of
'./usr/share/man/man1/dpkg-deb.1.gz' before installing new version: Unknown
error 990
Looking at /usr/share/man/man1, I started to anticipate the apocalypse: 
# ls -l /usr/share/man/man1
total 7956
?????????? ? ? ?    ? ? ? 7zr.1.gz
?????????? ? ? ?    ? ? ? 822-date.1.gz
?????????? ? ? ?    ? ? ? CA.pl.1ssl.gz
?????????? ? ? ?    ? ? ? Defoma::Common.1.gz
So I look at the log, and amidst kernel oops notices, there's this lovely cookie: 
Filesystem "hda6": Corruption of in-memory data detected.  Shutting down
filesystem: hda6
Filesystem hda6 is /usr, so at that time I figured "it could have been worse", booted to single user, and remade the filesystem with the intention to simply reinstall all packages... when I found /var/lib/dpkg/info to be in similar condition. The rest of /var seemed fine, but I resolved then that there was no hope in reviving this system. Fortunately I brought an external drive that had just enough free space to hold my /home and some other stuff, but since USB is really slow when it comes to shifting large amounts of data, I decided to do something productive in the mean time and to answer some outstanding mails. It wasn't difficult to get SSH back up, so I started to work on a remote machine and used the time efficiently. Some time later, though, I got confused in the mist of screen sessions and was browsing my home directory on the laptop, thinking I was elsewhere (my home directories are mostly synchronised), when I noticed a directory in similar condition as the above. Oh shit. Imagine my pain and fear as I first thought my remote machine was also dying, imagine the sigh when I found out I was on the local filesystem, and imagine the shock when I realised that /home was also affected by the XFS breakage... A glance around /var confirmed that the XFS breakage was actually spreading and had now affected three filesystems on this machine. Fortunately, by that time, I had copied everything to the external drive, and decided to put my laptop and myself to sleep. I woke the next morning to the task of reinstalling the thing and decided to be optimistic about it. After all, a reinstall would mean I could finally try partman-crypto and encrypt my laptop's data to protect against leaking sensitive stuff in the case of loss or theft of my laptop. The installation was not as painless as I had hoped, but that was mainly because I ran into a known problem with the graphical installer and partman-crypto, which does not allow to set up volumes with random encryption keys (e.g. swap; see the forthcoming announcement for the beta3 release of the installer), and a bunch of smaller bugs. I had to restart the installation with the traditional frontend to get what I wanted, but other than that, I was very impressed with what our installer development team has accomplished! And a special round of gratitude to Frans Pop for not losing his patience while helping me on several occasions throughout the process. Now, 24 hours after the incident, I am back to normal with a fresh laptop and no data lost (except for one directory which I pulled from a mirrored remote machine; it had no local modifications (so why did XFS screw it up anyway?)). The fonts are all jaggy, so there's something I have to figure out. All things considered, I am sad to have lost 24 hours, but I can also relax more now, without fear of further XFS breakage or loss of private data. Update: Oh, and despite this, I did choose ext3 for all my laptop's filesystems. JFS was really cumbersome and slow last time I tried it, and I surely would not touch RazorFS after experiencing serious data loss on numerous occasions. Update: Two responses so far. Full ack for Julien (except for him laughing at me), Ingo's post warrants a reply though. First, ext3 is also journaled, and if you're about to say "yeah, but it's a hack on top of ext2, well... ext2 is damn mature, and journaling isn't really rocket science, so that "hack" isn't going to be too complicated. In fact, I like the idea of journaling being an option rather than a built-in feature. Second, of course you're supposed to keep backups. But since you keep backups, my top requirement of a filesystem is not "how to get the data back", but "how to ensure it does not break. If it breaks, I can reinstall and restore from backup, but that's a certain amount of time lost. If it doesn't break, well, that's like stealing a little something back from death then, isn't it? Third, I do follow the linux-xfs mailing list, but so what? I did not have write cache enabled, and I was running the 2.6.17.7 kernel at the time of the mishap. Lastly, you point to "excellent tools" to recover the filesystem. I am not sure how excellent xfs_repair really is when it reports "bad magic number 0x0 on dir inode 4696727" during the run, claims to have fixed it, I mount the filesystem, unmount it, run xfs_repair again and get the same message. No filesystem is perfect, and as we know from Biella's problems (among many others, ext3 is no exception. But we did get her data off! So then it's really an open field again, crap filesystem against crap filesystem. I guess at this point it helps to know that ext3 actually follows VFS semantics, while on XFS, a completed sync() syscall does not actually mean it has written the data to disk (see e.g. #317479). And then there are bugs like #239111... ext3 it is for now. If that let's me down, I'll try JFS. If that fails and noone has actually implemented a proper filesystem, I might have a go myself. Haha. Update: Alceste Scalas adds:
Ingo is right when he says that every filesystem has bugs --- but bugs apart, the design of Ext3 (i.e. its physical-block journaling) makes it a far more reliable choice for desktop and laptop PCs, expecially for people without an UPS. An Ext3 filesystem could only crash because of a bug or an hardware failure, while an XFS filesystem can be trashed even without bugs or hardware failures, due to the unavoidable consequences of a power loss on PC-class hardware.
He also alerted me to this mailing list post, which compares data=ordered journaling of ext3 (which almost noone does for performance reasons) with XFS and RazorFS. Update: You may also be interested in this post. Update: Otavio Salvador points me to this FAQ entry, which SGI must have added very lately. It explains how to deal with the directory corruption that was part of my problem. I guess I would have liked to know earlier, but I consider the outcome with dm-crypt + ext3 a win anyhow.

Andrew Pollock: [opinion] An Inconvenient Truth gets bad press Down Under

Film at 11 My friend Andrew brought this article in the Sydney Morning Herald to my attention today. I was initially mildly incensed by it, then someone at work pointed out the author's Wikipedia entry, which led onto this Bulletin article on her. So it seems she's just a professional right-wing shit-stirrer. This other article she wrote managed to stir up some ire amongst the cycling community. Still, I am glad to see that An Inconvenient Truth is coming to Australia. Well worth the watch. Now I need to go find where Who Killed the Electric Car is screening...

9 August 2006

Steve Kemp: maybe of a brain hemorrhage, I haven t decided yet.

The past two days have been fairly busy and now I just want to avoid all computery things for the next week or so. This will almost certainly fail to happen, but I have a low-tech weekend planned which will involve shopping for outdoor gear and loitering outdoors drinking ale. Briefly I’ve: Still todo: I’m almost tempted to use one of those fancy “control panels” for managing a bunch of domains when I move over to the Xen instance. However many of them appear fragile, and contain numerous obvious XSS attacks - these do not fill me with confidence. Perhaps I will investigate more hosting setups soon. At the very least I wish to move towards an SQL-backed virtual hosting setup for email. Ideally exim4, but I’d settle for postfix at a push. So .. lots of research happening, and more to follow. Expect quiet from me for a while.

Evan Prodromou: 21 Thermidor CCXIV

We had a great trip up from wt:Boston yesterday and today. Monday morning, after Wikimania had ended, I went to visit the Cambridge offices of Let's Go publications. Let's Go is a travel guide series researched, written, edited and published exclusively by Harvard students. It's an amazing feat, and I've always liked the quality of the guides and the depth of coverage. Let's Go is far from the most prolific of travel publishers, but they have good writing and high-quality listings. I spent about an hour talking with the publicity manager, editor-in-chief, and publisher, mostly about Let's Go but also about Wikitravel a bit. It was a good time. Catching back up with Maj and Amita June, we had lunch at the Barking Crab, a clam shack on the harbor in Boston. Amita June loved the clam chowder; Maj ordered crab legs, and cracked them open with a big rock. Sated, we headed out of Boston on Massachusetts highway 2, through wt:Concord (Massachusetts) and a few other towns to the Connecticut River. It took a while to get out of Greater Boston, but once we were out it was beautiful country, still very wild after almost 400 years of Europeans. We drove up through wt:Brattleboro to wt:White River Junction and then called it a night -- the baby was wailing something fierce. We got a calzone and a Greek salad delivered by Ramunto's Pizza in wt:West Lebanon (New Hampshire), right across the border. It was a great addition to the otherwise so-so wp:X-Men: The Last Stand that we watched on the hotel movie channel. tags: ramunto's pizza

Today This afternoon was even better. We got up this morning early and were on the road before 9AM. That's always the best time to drive with the baby -- before she gets too crazy. We whizzed past wt:Burlington (Vermont) and up into the Lake Champlain Islands -- a really nice string of communities that reminds me of wt:Prince Edward Island. The baby started wailing around noon, so we stopped at North Hero State Park and waded in the lake a bit. Lake Champlain has a lake serpent like Loch Ness, but this one is named "Champ". I held Amita June carefully to make sure she wasn't swept away by this fossil reptile. After a two-hour nap on the grass (!), we had some delicious sandwiches in wt:Alburg then crossed the border. Maj had to renew her work permit -- she sent in a renewal by mail a couple of months ago, but she hadn't received the permit by the time we left, so she had to re-apply at the border. Once we got through with that, it wasn't long before we were back in Montreal. Home again, home again, though. I guess there was some pretty nasty weather last week in Quebec -- there are huge tree limbs, 3-4 feet in diameter, on the ground across the street in Parc La Fontaine. My lawn out front is positively glowing green, though. tags:

8 August 2006

Joey Hess: moving kite

(This is a long ramble with a concluding announcement that kitenet.net users should read even if they skip the rest.)
Back in spring of '03 I bought a used VA Linux 2u on ebay for $300 and dropped it a cabinet in the blue spaceship halls of the Hurricane Electic co-lo in Fremont, CA. I've never seen it again; I use it every day. Weird world.
Digression: The reason I needed to have a hunk of silicon and spinning metal hooked up to a power and an ethernet cable somewhere is this: On the internet you can either be a soverign entity, controlling your own computation, choosing your own software, making your own mistakes, and doing things your way -- or you can be a sheep. Or at least that's what I believe; reasonable people think otherwise. Here's a story illistrating this concept. Not only do I want to be a sovereign entity on the internet, but I want to empower others to be the same, to the small extent that I can: making software that supports it easier to install; contributing to co-ops like the one that hosts my computer; working on software that empowers users to become programmers; fiddling with making special-purpose embedded hardware useful for general purpose use; and letting a few users run code and such on my server and use it much the same as I do. It's a theme through a lot of my activities.
Anyway, it seems like my computer has been there longer than three years, and it's had a good run, despite little incidents like: Mostly though it has kept on running without problems for years, being my personal server and performing a few other roles. This seems to prove something I've long suspected; that computer hardware runs much better when I'm not near it. But that can't last. Eventually a hard drive will die, eventually whatever fans have (probably) already died will overheat it. Eventually I'll screw up a kernel update (which still have to be done blind, since I never did get grub talking to that serial port.) One option was to go back out there and do enough maintenance for it to last another three years. The other option was to move away from running my server on that nasty computer hardware stuff. Happily, in the intervening three years, that has become, in a way, possible. Xen and the like are big news, letting a single standard server appear as multiple separate machines. Not a new idea, but an idea newly within easy reach. So when I heard that Steve Kemp was puttng together a Xen co-op to buy a machine and split it up 6 ways, into 6 virtual machines, I jumped at the opportunity. Not only does Steve know a lot more about administering Xen than I do, but he got a good deal for on hardware that should be fully managed in case of breakage. Plus, he's providing a template for doing this on a grassroots level that I hope many other people follow. (Only partly because I want to have more than one little virtual server other there, rather than one big physical one..)
I'm still a bit unsure about Xen from the point of view of wanting to fully control my machine, since it does a) let the admin of the underlying hardware get at any data they want to if it's not encrypted and, b) it doesn't make it easy to run your own kernel. Luckily I a) basically trust Steve, and b) he seems to want me to run the exact same kernel (latest Debian unstable stock kernel) that I want to run.
So, the conclusion to this ramble is that kitenet.net will be moving, over the next few weeks, to wren.kitenet.net, which is theoretically located in London, but which is not a "real" computer as you might be accustomed to thinking of them. I decided against moving it all at once, and will be trying to keep all the various services working while shifting them around. The utterly gory details of the transitions are being kept on kite's page in my wiki, and announcements for kite users will be posted to kite's blog.

6 August 2006

Ross Burton: Cornish Bliss (part 1)

Let's start this with a cliché: A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian: £8
Best Of by Nina Simone: £14
One week in a rather swish house just outside St. Ives: about £200
No email. No Jabber. No Subversion. No Bugzilla: priceless For the last week Vicky and myself were in Cornwall, staying in a house just outside St. Ives with her family. The house was much nicer than we expected, very tastefully decorated and well equipped, with a DVD player, hi-fi, coffee machine, and so on. Settling In The house was in Carbis Bay, about a twenty minute walk from St. Ives along the costal path that was directly off the bottom of the garden. The path towards St. Ives is also the nicest stretch of costal path I've been on: it is surfaced and wide enougth to drive on, unlike the paths we've been on previously which are often no more than a foot wide cutting in the earth, next to a sheer cliff. St. Ives The Sea Our first impression of Cornwall was one of chill: when the taxi dropped me off at the train station to start the journey down the thermometer said 38°C, but at the same time the next day it was only 23°C. Brrrr. The traditional Cornish summer proceeded to roll in a few days later, with heavy rain, gusty wind and general grimness for a day. Yay for DVD players! Typical Cornish Summer St. Ives is a lovely town. Unlike Newquay which was got far too popular for it's own good (the two-carriage train had both a Stag and Hen party on board en route to Newquay, trying not that subtly to pull each other), St. Ives is busy but not crammed. There is no demographic that dominates the tourists, a mix of families young and old, surfers, twenty-somethings and pensioners means it doesn't feel like a tourist hotspot, and it manages to cater for everyone. The habour front has lounge bars, traditional pubs, restaurants and cornish pasty shops, catering for everyone. The town has become quite a focal point for artists recently (since 1928, Wikipedia tells me), and there seems to be more independent art galleries than pasty shops (!), including the Cornwish outpost of the Tate. Tate St. Ives is pretty small for anyone who has been to Tate Modern, but it's damn good: due to the size it is very focused (there are just two galleries) and the building itself is a wonderful modern piece of art deco architecture. We went with the intention of getting some more pictures for the house and did quite well: a print of Horizontal Stripes by Patrick Heron, and a limited run print (427/600) by a local artist. I'm too lazy to remember the name of the picture or the artist, but I'll take a photo of it later. Our Grand Plan of having more individual art in the house is going well, we've an original oil-on-canvas abstract to collect from the framers that we bought in Paris too. To be continued...

Andrew Pollock: [tech] Initial bonnie++ results with the uber-disk

So I ran bonnie++ over my 1.5 terabyte, exported via ATA-over-Ethernet logical volume of extreme immensity. I don't really know what I'm looking at, but I'll record the results here before I lose them. From both the MythTV front-end, and from minotaur, the box that has the disks attached, I ran bonnie++ twice: 
bonnie++ -d /mnt -s 2G -n 1 -u nobody:nogroup
and 
bonnie++ -d /mnt -s 2G -n 1024 -u nobody:nogroup
Firstly, I guess the results where the disks are directly attached (via USB): 
Version  1.03       ------Sequential Output------ --Sequential Input- --Random-
                    -Per Chr- --Block-- -Rewrite- -Per Chr- --Block-- --Seeks--
Machine        Size K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP  /sec %CP
minotaur         2G 13595  95 20652  24 10204  12 13625  92 21362   6 295.5   1
                    ------Sequential Create------ --------Random Create--------
                    -Create-- --Read--- -Delete-- -Create-- --Read--- -Delete--
              files  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP
                  1 +++++ +++ +++++ +++ +++++ +++ +++++ +++ +++++ +++ +++++ +++
and 
Version  1.03       ------Sequential Output------ --Sequential Input- --Random-
                    -Per Chr- --Block-- -Rewrite- -Per Chr- --Block-- --Seeks--
Machine        Size K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP  /sec %CP
minotaur         2G 13646  95 20864  24 10195  12 13348  91 21377   6 288.8   2
                    ------Sequential Create------ --------Random Create--------
                    -Create-- --Read--- -Delete-- -Create-- --Read--- -Delete--
              files  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP
               1024  6173  37  6090  17  2215  22  1032  22   184   0    93   2
The +'s indicate that the result occurred in an impossible to accurately measure, sub-500ms time. From the MythTV front-end, so with the ATA-over-Ethernet overhead thrown in: 
Version  1.03       ------Sequential Output------ --Sequential Input- --Random-
                    -Per Chr- --Block-- -Rewrite- -Per Chr- --Block-- --Seeks--
Machine        Size K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP  /sec %CP
teevee           2G  3789   7  3761   0  3138   0 10742  23 11445   0 152.9   0
                    ------Sequential Create------ --------Random Create--------
                    -Create-- --Read--- -Delete-- -Create-- --Read--- -Delete--
              files  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP
                  1 +++++ +++ +++++ +++  1029   2  1372   1 +++++ +++ +++++ +++
and 
Version  1.03       ------Sequential Output------ --Sequential Input- --Random-
                    -Per Chr- --Block-- -Rewrite- -Per Chr- --Block-- --Seeks--
Machine        Size K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP  /sec %CP
teevee           2G  3848   8  3862   0  2876   0  9871  31 11440   1 147.9   0
                    ------Sequential Create------ --------Random Create--------
                    -Create-- --Read--- -Delete-- -Create-- --Read--- -Delete--
              files  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP
               1024  2488   7  4633   8  1752  15   752   8   444   1   159   1
Wow, I'm going to go away and analyse these numbers and update this post, but on the face of it, it looks like there's a significant performance impact (at least on my home network, I'm sure it's not optimal) in using ATA over Ethernet. Hmmm.

Daniel Jacobowitz: Look Ma, I can blog too!

I've been meaning to set up a blog to keep track of random things that I run into and feel like sharing. One of those happened today, so I finally figured out how to install blosxom. I haven't gotten around to making a pretty CSS for it yet (not sure if I ever will, but I can pretend...) so for now it's somewhat utilitarian and default-looking. Blosxom is pretty bare-bones without plugins, and while Blosxom itself seems well documented the plugins are much less so. I spent about ten hours mucking around with the minimal set of plugins I needed to get something acceptable (timezone, autoblock, feedback, entriescache, interpolate_conditional, permalink, cooluri2, lastmodified, and a bunch of modified templates to use feedback and permalink). I tried and then discarded followsymlinks and metadate (for not playing well with other plugins I was using) and entries_index (lastmodified wanted something which set %others, so I used entriescache instead). I needed to hack lastmodified to work with entriescache, since it cleverly gets the timestamps from the cache, which are now publication dates. So here's a slightly modified lastmodified plugin which stats files directly. I spent a while getting RSS to behave, too. I used lastmodified to set lastBuildDate, modified the story template to use permalinks which were acceptable to feedback (it wants .rss on the end or it decides they aren't story pages), and eventually figured out that I needed to set <guid> to prevent liferea from thinking each modified post was new by comparing descriptions. All in all it was far more work than I meant to do last night when I decided this was a good idea. Hopefully I haven't messed it up too badly. We'll see whether I upset Planet. Leave me a note if it makes your feed reader unhappy, or something. I was actually going to use ikiwiki, but chickened out at the last moment; blosxom had fewer dependencies and I didn't want to mess around with getting ikiwiki to install on sarge. And it still seems to be evolving - so while it's wicked cool, I think I'll let it have a little more time to settle first. I spent most of this morning messing around with OpenWRT. I bought a LinkSys WRT54G quite a while ago (to replace a flaky D-Link DI-614+), and put OpenWRT on it. It took a little work to get it to do what I wanted, including fixing a quoting bug in the WPA startup script and tracking down an updated dnsmasq, but eventually I got it set up. Mostly the stock things: NAT, firewalling, wireless with WPA2, DHCP, internal DNS. Except that it can do one thing that none of the stock firmwares could: provide static DHCP addresses to specific boards, including custom options. This was absolutely essential for me to retire my old DHCP server, since I keep an embedded board lab in my office. I need the DHCP server to be able to tell boards where to get kernels and root filesystems. Anyway, it works well. Except that I've been having too many dropped connections lately and I have no way to track down whether it's the laptop (Dell Latitude D400, ipw2200 - mostly in Windows lately, I haven't retested it in Ubuntu in a bit) or the AP. I updated the Windows drivers and now it periodically tries to rekey, fails, reports "duplicated RSN" whatever that means, and periodically reports authentication failures. About the same as before except that now it has better diagnostic tools to tell me in undocumented messages what went wrong, instead of just telling me that something went wrong. So I next went looking for an updated driver for the other end. Which was a mistake. Note to others: if most of your packages are on a cromfs, running "ipkg update" is going to tear through your available MTD space really fast. And ipkg is not graceful at updates the way dpkg is; it failed to upgrade base-files due to file conflicts, leaving the updated dnsmasq unable to start. These are the same sorts of conflicts that you see in apt-get upgrade periodically: files moving from one package to another without sufficient package relationships (or in ipkg's case, maybe sufficient package manager support) to do it seamlessly. Then when I retried the update it succeeded, but it wiped out my firewall config and password file without asking. I don't really blame OpenWRT for this. "ipkg update" just isn't a good idea with their tools. But I miss apt. And I really miss 2.6 kernels; the binary-only Broadcom drivers that power the WRT54G only work on 2.4.30. And it's tight on flash/RAM anyway. So I went looking at options. Obviously, I can't get something that does exactly what I want for the kind of mass-market price the WRT54G sells at. But a suggestion from a coworker sent me looking at Mini-ITX systems, like the nice-looking Mini-Box M200. And at smaller things, like the WRAP WiFi and Soekris boards. I haven't done a hardware project of any sort since last summer, so I'm thinking about building myself an access point with benefits. I haven't decided what the benefits will be yet - if I get something like one of the Soekris boards, probably just bigger compact flash and back to dnsmasq for internal DHCP. But if I get a Mini-ITX system, I can throw a hard drive in it, arrange over-the-network backups, and use it as an incoming mail hub. This would let me decomission one of the always-on computers in my office. A mighty attractive proposition, although a bit less so now that the heat wave has broken.

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