The flight to Mexico last Saturday went pretty much all ok, except that the
plane had to start through at MEX because of some unexpected wind and the
generally low air pressure at high altitudes. While this delayed the landing
for about 20 minutes, I had the opportunity for a second look at this
incredibly large city. After getting through customs, we (with Herman, Tore,
and Annabelle) met Neil McGovern in the airport lounge, and after Marcella and
Luciano had arrived, we had a rather bumpy ride to Oaxtepec, amounting to a 20h
journey for me.
The site here is really beautiful, with lots of green, palms, other plants,
and of the swimming pool. However, so far Debcamp has been rather unproductive,
we haven't had net access until Monday evening, and even yesterday round trip
times and packet loss were so high that neither ssh (IRC!) nor scp/ftp/http
were really usable. Using irssi's proxy module allowed me to get rid of the lag
locally for IRC, but the connection was still unstable. I wrote some patches
which I have yet to submit and replied to most of my NM mail, but the next
projects will all require access to the BTS and debian.org machines to be
worked on. At the moment, network is down again because the antenna connecting
us from the village fell down. The main activity for me so far has ben to play
Mao with Jesus, Adeodato, Marga, Graham, Gerfried, and others :-)
Todo: get some real work done; upload pictures; go to the pool.
Ah... network just went up again, yet still slow... mail queue flushed...
network down again...
Upon popular request (my post was even featured on
Debian Weekly News), I re-ran
my previous query on the changelog files in Debian packages. This time, however, I didn't only retrieve 40 random package release names, but "all" of them, for unknown values of "all". I didn't analyze some of the files (missing permissions), and maybe I missed one or two because my query sucked, but I think I've got most of them.
I ran a slightly more complicated query than last time, using the data from
gluck:/org/lintian.debian.org/laboratory/. I have not the slightest idea how old the files in that archive are, but there's ca. 10.000 packages in there — more than enough, if you ask me.
The
results (78 KB) this time are in alphabetical order, and include the package names where the strings were found. There's a total of 1408 strings.
Here are 20 randomly chosen strings, for some more fun:
gdb: * The "Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!" Release.
glibc: * The "Fuck Me Harder" release.
abiword: * The "Foolin' Myself" release.
opensc: * The "RTFM" release.
directory-administrator: * The "On Train" release
xchat: * The "Merry Christmas, mine beloved Xchat users!" release.
apache: * The "Yes, we know there is a new upstream release" upload.
mmm-mode: * The "But I'm Not Dead Yet!" Release
mozilla-firefox: * The "becoming more and more an iceweasel" release.
nano: * The "Marbella, ciudad hermanada con Benidorm" release.
thy: * The Empty Spaces' release.
glibc: * The "Chainsaw Psycho" release.
sam: * The Minime' release.
xchat: * The "Binary only" release.
tellico: * The "pbuider and buildds are not the same" package release
pingus: * The "All you pingus are belong to blendi" release
xchat: * The "Ok, wrong patch, excuse me guys :)" release.
cappuccino: * The "It's time for the upload" release
abiword: * The "Got A Good Thing Goin'" release.
firefox: * The "what he taketh, he giveth back" release.
I also created a small statistic this time. Here's the Top-20 packages (the ones with the most release names):
64 abiword
62 thy
41 xchat
35 glibc
31 shadow
31 abcde
28 menu
18 reportbug
18 firefox
17 fetchmail
15 ccze
14 tama
14 mozilla-firefox
12 nano
12 apache2
11 gaim
10 debconf
9 mailutils
9 lirc
9 geneweb
Feel free to grab the whole
results file for more reading fun during boring hours of the day.
If you do any further processing or analysis of any kind with the data, please
post a comment and let us all know ;-)
Jeff Waugh: former GNOME release manager, LCA7 organiser, Ubuntu
evangelist extraodinaire ... rock star?
Do you remember the time that Kenneth Branagh was supposed to serve me tea and scones?
No? Well, I do. What I remember most about that is that he never did. Seeing Roger
Moore in a dress made up for having to pay $1 to see Roger Moore in a dress, but did
it make up for the lack of scones? I don't know.
On friday the 5th I started my trip to MX. I am assisting to Debconf 6 from the very first day, so that I can help the local team (at least with translations and such).
I arrived to the airport early, so that I didnt have to suffer last minute stress if I see that the line is way too long and I have too little time to catch the plane.
It all started fine (well, I forgot my keys at home when taking the dog for a walk, but I managed to reach my girlfriend and she came back to open the door for me).
I must be the worst traveler in the world, since I seem to be causing only problems. Or maybe is that I question too many things that are the status quo and seem reasonable for other people.
From the begining. It was check-in time, and the lady ask me about my hand luggage. I mentioned that since my friends were going to be waiting for me at the airport for almost 2 hours, I had prepared all my stuff so that I was not carrying anything dangerous in my two backpacks. Heck, I even left behind the regular tools that I carry with me, including the nail scissors,...
The lady said it was not possible. "Sir, you can only carry 8 kilos of hand luggage". I looked around and saw people with lighter bags, but bulkier than mine. "Sorry, but, what is the reason? My luggage is smaller that the regular luggage, and I just need to get out asap". "Security reasons, sir". "Could you describe those reasons?". "... ... (surprise face) Security, sir. I would like to travel with my 20 kilos os luggage with me, sir". Yeah, sure. I am happy about that. I dont recall going away for such an extended period with such an small amount of things.
When did all this madness start?
Well, she did not manage to give me any reason why I could not take my things with me, but she got her sweet revenge. She put me on the back of the plane, with a guy who had at least 50k more on than I, although we both paid the same price for the ticket. I wonder where the security reasons are then, for those 50k...
(Mental note: add to the travel checklist not to EVER forget deodorant and to take a shower before leaving home. Two showers. I had enough torture with the guy beside me...)
The nice part of the flight was that for the first time i traveled on a Jet. Boy, is nice.
Landed in Germany. The plane went to park on the backyard of the airport. We had a long 10min trip back to the terminal.
The check-in for the plane to MX was a full hour set in advance, so that the HUGE amount of people that fits on one of those 747 had the time to show (for the 10th time) the passport. But looking aroung one wonders again where those security reasons not to let me carry my 8 kilos of luggage are: people around me had bought nearly their year salary on duty free stuff that wights more than 15k.
Oh, boy, now I am confused. Is it so that someone has decided to add a rule in the name of security at some point after 11/9 and they forgot why? What difference does it make to get the luggage with 8 kilos from outside the terminal than from inside?
As a side note, one can see that mexicans still keep much of the Spanish attitude. The speaker goes on, a man speaks in German and explains that people with children will board before anyone else. Nobody has understood anything, but they are already piling before the boarding gate. Once the man speaks in English, only the ones who dont understand English still await impatientily at the gate, mostly disturbing the check-in procedure for the flight, which will probably be delayed because of that.
The second part of the trip was a bit more relaxed... I will skip the story about the looks-like-it-is-not-her-day flight attendant who could not understand a shit, and will only mention that when she served me a light coke and I handed her the empty can for dispossal, she gave me another full can with a face of "take-this-and-shut-up,dont-you-see-i-am-not-having-a-good-day?".
I did not know Mexico was in the south hemisphere. At least that was the reason given for the satellite-linked internet only working the first three hours, although we were flying through Greenland, Canada, USA and Mexico's gulf for the 12h of flight, and Mexico IS on the (using the lonstanding critizised convention of not putting the map upside-down and say that is the right possition) north side.
After landing it was a bit of rush, until I had to wait for my luggage, which of course came after waiting for almost 40min (Revenge of the Check-in Lady, take three... hi, if you read me). The people who create those inmigration forms MUST have short names. They have a big horizontal box with small vertical lines on the boxes to put your data trying to force you to put every character of your name in one small designated area. So there you go: "J E S U S _ D A N I E L _ C L I M E" That's right. Not even my first surname fits. Forget the second. This are the times that a friend of mine comes to mind: Enrique Garcia-Villarubia Gomez-Limon (Hi, if you read me).
After all this I went out to find Amaya and h01ger waiting for me. We met Ganneff, Stockholm, Sam and Jeroen, and Damog, along with Agi, were coming right after picking up the van.
We put Ganneff and Stockholm on a taxi and sent them to Oaxtepec, and left the airport for some dinner.
Mexico is BIG, BIG, BIG. After driving for more than half an hour we got to a bridge from where you could see the city lights. And still, they were covering the horizon. HUGE. That realization is something I have not digested yet. Some local beers and tacos made the end of the night and we headed to Hector's place, where we were going to spend the night.
From a not so negative point of view, the whole experience has been positive, and enlightening, to say it mildly. The food is mostly spicy. It could burn hell. Amaya is trying to get use to it by eating an insane amount of hot stuff but I refuse to do so.
For the scared (hi, helix) I have not managed to get anything from the tap water. So nobody is dead, yet, although rumor has it that some are in comas.
The net is here, although the roundtrip values are not very exciting.
Mao has visited already the place, and said it is here to stay.
Summary for the ones to come: this is HOT. I mean, really HOT. Forget your long jeans and bring shorts, even if you dont like to show your legs, sun screen cream, t-shirts, deodorant, swimming suit, and keep a bottle of water all the time with you.
Food is served at a more sensible time than in Finland: 02:00h and 20:00h.
See you in MX.
Looks like my plans for installing
cfengine are hitting problems before I’ve even started getting very far.
By default
cfengine will not copy files from the master host to the client nodes if their clocks are “too far” out of sync.
Unfortunately I cannot sync the clocks on all my nodes, much as I would like to, since UML doesn’t play nice with clocks going backwards ..
On the plus side I’ve got a nifty script which will push updates to remote systems via a combination of rsync + dpkg - that allowed me to update 50ish machines and cause them all to start logging remotely with
syslog-ng in the space of around an hour.
If I could generalise this system it might be sufficient to copy files, do minor edits, and essentially do the
tasks I wanted to automate with cfengine in the first place!
In related news the more I learn of ruby the more I’m coming to dislike it…. It is just so .. un-perl!
Still ruby is nicer than daemontools
Yesterday, I went to the Munich Bladenight... 20000 people (excellent weather)
on a 20km track through the city filling major roads.
(
picture gallery, though mostly of the gettogether before the start)
I didn't blade much recently - I went to only one Bladenight last year, and
that probably was only a 15km track, since I was in the US and Canada until
mid August. So it probably was a bad idea to start with this 20km long track...
at least my feet think so - they're still aching. Interestingly, it was worst
when walking after the bladenight. Everything was okay while blading...
And biking was much better than walking afterwards - you don't have your full
weight on you feet when biking.
Anyway, if the weather is good next week, I'll be going again. The north
route due next week is just 15km.
Currently me mostly concentrate on the following topics:
- Portland Project (xdg-utils)
- Sound / Multimedia
- Desktop Standards (LSB)
- SODA arch (just showed by Tom Schwaller, some kind of
back to the roots
componized application idea)
- build once / installation / sytem management / etc. (independent Software vendors want something like autopackage, but it should work...)
- printing
PS: I would like to add, that I'm not flooding planet again; but the
wireless lan broke down, so you'll get severall of my blogs at the same time;
I'm taking notes through this and thought they might be interesting for
someone.
The Council has replaced the three-quarter width gate at the southern
entrance to the Walks with a full-width one.
I was told that this wouldn't happen and now it has. As well
as cycles and wheelchairs, it may also block pushchairs and prams on
the diversion route to Greyfriars School while their bridge is closed.
I called the Walks project manager Richard Hales ... [cont.]
After the start of the DebCamp I’m just pissed off about just everything. I don’t know if that’s because people could expect you to do something you aren’t supposed to do; or because people are just trying to do children pranks and only look like adult morons; or because I’m just exhausted of children urinating in the pool; or because of the heat; or because I’m supposed to handle all the jokes about Mexican food; or because of having to go to school everyday; or because of having to skip my classes; or because of missing Ana, missing Venezuela; or because of the fact that I won’t be able to get the money I’m spending on DebConf back; or just because every fucking thing around me.
On the other hand, just as I heard Holger saying: “I will try to relax and have fun”, and won’t give a shit at anything not worthwhile.
Amaya,
H0lger and many other people are leaving to Mexico. Those news, the impatience,
the gimp and the tickets in my hand mixed each other and this image resulted.
You are invited to become a
Marichi too.
Here is the
Gimp file, or you can use you own imagination.
I'm leaving this night, and tomorrow I will be in Mexico. I want to be there now! :)
I'd just like to point out that
using Debian is not sufficient for
sending us your application. Apparently some projects were submitted with
minimal wording changes to Debian, Python, Postgres, Gentoo and Apache.
If you send us your project, it should have some extra relationship to our
project... it should be something our users or our community needs and that
is somehow related to Debian. There is nothing wrong with being useable by
other projects as well, but the relationship to Debian needs to be a bit
more than just "Debian is my favourite distro."
For example the SELinux policy module dependency handling is obviously
something all distributions would like to have to ease installation. But
when integrated with some nice magic of autoselecting policy modules based
on the Debian packages installed: go for it.
I've been asked about details on the Debtags SoC ideas. Here are some mails
for you to read:
Lately we've been looking at backup solutions at work.
And I've got to say that
Bacula is looking downright awesome. It's GPL'd and it has just about every feature a person could ask for.
I am a complete Bacula newbie. Today, after using Bacula for a total of about 30-60 minutes, I added the first client machine to my Linux test box. The client machine was running the Windows bacula client. It took about 10 minutes to install and configure the client and the server. And both backup and restore worked perfectly the first time. Nice. Setting up a *nix client is even easier.
I've been using
Amanda for many years at home and at various workplaces. Looks like we're going to be switching.
We've also ordered an HP MSL4048, a 48-tape LTO3 library with barcode support. Each tape has a native storage capacity of 400GB. Should be nice when it arrives. With that library and Bacula, we should be able to back up all our servers using a single backup system. And both our Windows and Unix people can manage the system, including running restores to any machine, from any authorized console machine.
A new development version of backup-manager
has been published.
This release provides two new upload methods. The first one is called “ssh-gpg” and lets you upload your locally-built archives to untrusted remote places. During the upload (permormed with SSH), the archives are encrypted using GPG. The other one, called “s3″ is able to upload your archives to the Amazon S3 Storage service (if you have a valid account). This release also comes with a couple of bug fixes (filenames with spaces are now fully supported) and provides some other new options.
As requested on the users mailing-list, a Debian package will come very soon.
Last year
Black Cat decided they wanted
to be more organised about offering dedicated servers. We already had a
rackful but they were all in use. So we looked around for a suitable supplier.
Originally
Dell were the front runner; although they
have a bad reputation we already had a bunch of machines from them and they'd
been reasonable reliable, did serial BIOS properly and were competitively
priced.
Dom pointed out that having hotswap drive
bays would be a really good plan; we'd already specced the machines with
dual drives to enable RAID1, but if they were hotswap then we could easily
move drives into a spare chassis in the event something went wrong, meaning
the customer could be back up and running again quickly while we investigated
the old machine. Good plan. This started to push Dell into ridiculous pricing,
so we had a look around. We had some machines from
Xinit, which again we hadn't had issues with. They
were able to give us a price that wasn't that different to the non hotswap
Dells, so we decided to go ahead with them.
Bad move.
On September 6th I informed them we wanted to go ahead. They'd quoted us a
10-14 working day lead time. As we didn't have a credit account already
set up with them and it was likely to take a while to sort out we said we'd
pay up front in the interest of getting things moving as quickly as possible.
By September 22nd we still hadn't heard anything from them, like even
confirmation that payment had been received and an ETA for delivery. So I
contacted them, received confirmation they'd received full payment by September
13th and was told we should see systems by September 30th or October 3rd at
worst.
On September 26th they emailed to say there was a problem with their
shipment and we'd be receiving a part shipment with the rest to follow.
4 servers were delivered on October 12th. It turned out none of them had
been configured as requested (serial console, 9600 8n1, all set to auto
power on after power failure), so I ended up having to plug a monitor
and keyboard into each machine before connecting it up to the serial
console server and power cycler.
I chased Xinit again on 24th October. They'd claimed a 5th server was to
be delivered before that and still hadn't told me anything about the
remaining 15. I was not impressed. A new contact got back in touch and made
all manner of apologies and promises about keeping in better contact and
keeping me up to date with what was happening. Suffice to say this didn't
happen, and calls to the main Xinit number were of no use as no one could
help, and the mobile number I'd been given for this contact was unanswered
more often than not.
On 1st November we received another 11 machines. These were at least
configured as requested, but during our testing we discovered they had
been misassembled. 5 machines had CPU heatsinks put on incorrectly;
visually misaligned and such that any load caused a machine crash. Very
unimpressive from a company who supposedly does full burn in tests on
machines before shipping them (and indeed used this as an excuse for not
shipping us machines sooner on occasion).
Further chasing didn't have much effect, but we eventually received the
remaining servers on December 5th. Nearly 3 months after we initially
placed the order.
While Xinit have happily provided many platitudes they have failed to
address the numerous failings in their organisation. They are appalling
at responding to phone calls or email. They continuously fail to make
good on any of the promises they make. They can't provide realistic
delivery dates and don't have the decency to get in contact and let you
know when they're going to miss them. They have proved unable to
assembly machines to any level of competence; most of what they do is
buy in chassis and fit parts to them - this is not complicated and yet
they managed to get it wrong on several of the machines we ordered. We
were promised a machine or two in compensation, but of course these
never arrived. In addition, they're so badly organised that in the
middle of March we received a spam from one of their sales people who
was completely unaware we'd been customers of them!
I cannot stress how much you should never consider using this
company. I've spoken to others who've bought machines from them or had
dealings with them and I know I'm not alone in this. Really. Don't do
it. You'll regret it. I suspect it would have taken less of my time and
energy to buy all the parts and assemble the machines myself. I wish I'd
done so instead.
This does leave me lacking a hardware supplier however. We're in the
position of needing more machines, but given recent power pricing
increases Xeon LVs (the new Sossaman cores) look like the way forward.
Except no one appears to have any stock. And even if they do, how do I
know I won't get my fingers burned again?
Spring Seoul is looking much better than
earlier. I am happy to be back from
my travels in Beijing. The air is so much cleaner here in Seoul!
I’ve just corrected some spelling mistakes and added some links to some appropriate
pictures to my blog posts of
my 10 days in Beijing, China.
I’ve had my post-travel disaster, by washing a 2USD towel I had to buy because it’s cheaper to buy a new towel in China than actually wash it, with the rest of my clothes!
AARRGGGHHHH!
I’m not sure how to fix this. I am just washing the clothes again and taking up prayer. Argh, it hasn’t helped.
Since my last post I discovered Beef Noodles! They are so incredibly delicious. I had them in a pleasant artsy area just south of Tienanmen square by bike of course.
Last Tuesday I visited the
Sina offices and gave a
impromptu webpy presentation for the
Beijing Python User Group. It went well and they asked me also to talk about Debian, as they were unfamiliar with it (to my surprise). Nice bunch of guys. Afterwards we went out for Taiwanese cuisine where you cook fresh food in a hot broth. Very good. They were all impressed I could drink three large bottles of beer in such a short space of time. I’ve been
practicing and my throat was so dry from the air pollution in Beijing.
I’ve also uploaded
some videos of China I took with my
sister’s camera. This is my
favourite video with me riding along the top of Tiananmen.
In addition some people (including me) had to move from one hotel to
another hotel, where all the other Debconf people were staying. That
required finding places, packing things, moving things, giving away
keycards, getting new keycards, moving things again, unpacking
things, ... It basically took all morning and a good part of the
afternoon for those involved. (Note: we really want/need a key/keycard
for every person in the room)
The dinner was a three dish set. Learning from yesterdays experience
meals were preselected in two sets: normal and vegetarian. Those not
liking fish (which also includes me) had to settle for the vegetarian
main dish which was a tomato with sweet corn and some salad - not too
filling. The food in general is quite simple and very tasty.
One must remember to drink a lot of water, but not tap water.
In the afternoon some DD's (including me again) went to check out the
pool system which seems to be the center of this place. There is a lot
of people in and around the pool at all the time it is open (8:00 to
18:00). Swimming is quite tiring, but you can rest by holding to the
wall or by climbing out and sunbathing a bit. Trampolines look scary.
Strange discussions ensue among people clamping for the wall of the
pool.
Dinner was just as nice as lunch, but one more bit of knowledge emerged
there - if there is something on the table and you do not know what
exactly it is, be sure that it will be be hot. Very hot. Especially if
it is green.
There was an organizational meeting right after the dinner. It seems
that a lot of things can go late when setting up a network coverage for
a holiday resort on a hill some way out of a town: uplink is plagued by
line of sight problems, lots of wires to be put on roofs, hotspots, ...
It should be fixed tomorrow - "manyana" is the key word here. It was
even said that the key phrase of the conference should have been
"Debconf 6: manjana" instead of "Debconf 6: hot and spicy". The "wild
Debconfers vs. the security guards" issue got some coverage too. The
conclusion is not to swim in the pool in the night. Especially not
naked. I should go look at the local sauna tomorrow.
The place looks just wonderful - here are some more picture of the
surroundings:
