Search Results: "spa"

8 January 2006

Michael Janssen: It doesn't mean they aren't out to get me.

Your Social Dysfunction:
Paranoid

You show pervasive and unwarranted suspiciousness, and mistrust of others. You are overly sensitive and prone to jealousy.

Take this quiz at QuizGalaxy.com

Please note that we aren't, nor do we claim to be, psychologists. This quiz is for fun and entertainment only. Try not to freak out about your results.

I honestly don't see how some of the questions are relevant. Meh.

Martin F. Krafft: Gmail sucks stinky goblin toes

I have used up my Gmail space. What now? I decide to delete the oldest few thousand mails. But how? The UI clearly sucks for this purpose (who needs to delete with 2 Gb of space?), but Gmail fortunately allows POP3 access. So I put together this script as a quick hack (thanks Clint for the tip about coproc -- bash does not seem to be able to do this...):

#!/bin/zsh -e
send()
 
  echo $@ >&p
  echo "sending: $@" >&2
 
recv()
 
  read line <&p
  echo "received: $line" >&2
  echo $line
 
coproc openssl s_client -connect pop.googlemail.com:995
while ! recv   grep -q '^\+OK'; do sleep 0.001; done
send user $1
recv > /dev/null
send pass $2
recv > /dev/null
send stat
set --  recv 
for i in  1..$2 ; do
  send dele $i
  recv > /dev/null
done
send quit
recv > /dev/null
exit 0

and off I go. The POP3 server only ever gives you access to a few hundreds of your mails, so I figured I'd just call this script a couple of times, until my inbox would be a little less full. (I should have used python and a POP3 module for this. :)) Yeah, but forget it. Deleting messages from the POP server doesn't delete the messages from the inbox. Not even If I set it in my preferences. Great. New Gmail account created, my mission: fill their servers to the brim. Update: apparently the bug has been fixed. Now messages deleted via POP3 are moved to the trash, where they remain for 30 days, or until I manually delete them. Magnificent, back to the old problem. Will you please give me 5Gb additional space, Google?

Julien Danjou: I am happy !!!

Your Social Dysfunction:
Happy

You're a happy person - you have a good amount of self-esteem, and are socially healthy. While this isn't a social dysfunction per se, you're definitely not normal. Consider yourself lucky: you walk that fine line between 'normal' and being outright narcissistic. You're rare - which is something else to be happy about.

Take this quiz at QuizGalaxy.com

Please note that we aren't, nor do we claim to be, psychologists. This quiz is for fun and entertainment only. Try not to freak out about your results.

This test is crap.

Eric Dorland: I knew this quiz was out to get me...

Your Social Dysfunction:
Paranoid

You show pervasive and unwarranted suspiciousness, and mistrust of others. You are overly sensitive and prone to jealousy.

Take this quiz at QuizGalaxy.com

Please note that we aren't, nor do we claim to be, psychologists. This quiz is for fun and entertainment only. Try not to freak out about your results.

Tollef Fog Heen: Social dysfunction: happy

I have no idea how happy can be a social dysfunction, but here we go:

Take this quiz at QuizGalaxy.com

Please note that we aren't, nor do we claim to be, psychologists. This quiz is for fun and entertainment only. Try not to freak out about your results.

Andrew Pollock: [tech] Asterisk and Engin?

Early musings, but I wonder if it's possible to sign up with Engin, and score a local Australian phone number, which pops out in the US, terminated on an Asterisk box? It's all technically feasible. The big question is, will Engin allow me to sign up? Initially googling implies that Engin will support Asterisk, which is cool in and of itself. Watch this space. I suppose I need to get Asterisk working now.

Andrew Pollock: [life] 2005: The year in review

2005 is the first year I've blogged from start to finish, so it is interesting to go through and reflect on what has happened. It's certainly been an eventful year. Executive summary: got engaged, got married, got a job with Google, moved to the US. Did a whole lot of other mainly geeky things in between.

January

Moved from living in an old rundown share house in Ainslie to a townhouse in Watson, without the flat mate
Started getting my teeth into work at my new job
Took Sarah to the ER with chest pains, after having had them on and off over Christmas

February

Proposed to Sarah
My blog got syndicated on Planet Linux Australia
Wrote my blog post about mitigating SSH brute force attacks using Netfilter's recent module. Still get a lot of search traffic from that today
Went camping at Jervis Bay, managed to hit a kangaroo on the way, had a rather traumatic time trying to euthanize it
Decided to continue studying at Uni part-time in conjunction with full-time work (masochistic, huh?)

March

Made changelogs.debian.net a whole lot spankier
Had a moderately unsuccessful time turning an old laptop with a dead hard drive into a diskless server with an NFS root filesystem. (I really must get around to trying again doing ATA over Ethernet)
Bought a QFE card, after much vying on EBay, which is still sitting in a drawer unused
Discovered how to make my laptop suspend
Completed a Saint John Ambulance Senior First Aid course

April

linux.conf.au happened, and I helped make it happen
Interesting side-effect of the above was that I got asked to apply for a job at Google
I had fun with a cylinder of surplus helium
Sarah is advised to discontinue triathlons because of a possible heart condition

May

My oldest friends separate, and it looks like they're going to get divorced
Sarah had her car broken into in the driveway and her purse was stolen
I get into a panic about passing Uni and really knuckle down
I discover a little too late that I've missed marking my ten thousandth day since birth
I organised a dinner meeting of Canberra Perl Mongers, which is a largely dormant group
We got a new cat
I hit two years as a Debian developer
I joined the Linux Australia sysadmin team

June

We decide to bring forward our wedding from April 2006 to July 2005, "just in case" the Google thing comes off
caesar, the box I use as my gateway blew up and got replaced with something gruntier
I got into discussions with University House about doing a wireless LAN setup for them for their guests
Started work on a box for Linux Australia that would host a few User Mode Linux instances for various things

July

My old Rover crew turned 20
We discovered the Tea Centre, and the wonders of different varieties of leaf tea
I scraped through first semester at Uni
I decided to upgrade daedalus and ordered a new box
Michael and I went to the US for face to face interviews with Google
Started semester 2 at Uni
Started migrating services to the new daedalus
Sarah and I were married

August

Google makes me a job offer
I ordered myself a new laptop
My car tyres got slashed while I was at Uni
Uni all got a bit much, and I decided to drop out
I got a 1 gig USB key
I had some fun with LVM snapshotting

September

Video card in my desktop blew up
I return to working in the office, and have a crack at catching the bus because of heinous petrol prices
I built Linux Australia's content mirroring box
The cat vomits one time too many and gets a new diet
We went and saw the Warehouse Circus' most excellent BAM! production

October

I ascended Mount Tennant with Rick
Sarah and I went and checked out the Tumut 3 power station
Sarah got her wisdom teeth out
I had some more fun with LVM and data migration
I had even more fun with LVM snapshots
We finally got our visas for the US
I quit my job
We bought a new dining table
We bought an iPaq and a bluetooth GPS and some navigation software
We bought a new digital camera
Canberra Perl Mongers had another dinner meeting

November

I finished up at Cybertrust
I went to the US
Sarah went to Singapore for a holiday with some of her relatives
I started at Google

December

Sarah arrived in the US from Singapore
We found somewhere more permanent to live
We bought new mountain bikes
All our stuff arrived from Australia

Andrew Pollock: [life] Back online

Our DSL modem finally arrived today. Well, it kind of involved accosting the UPS guy in an adjacent street whilst walking back home from 7-Eleven acquiring ice cream, but hey, we got the thing in the end. I went with Sonic on advice from guys from work, and I have to say I've been totally impressed with their customer service to date. Today I got an email from them because I'd reached my activation date, but they hadn't seen any ADSL traffic from me yet, and they just wanted to check that everything was okay. We had a free dialup account for use while we waited for the ADSL to be provisioned (and the delay was with receiving the modem over the holiday season, not the ADSL provisioning itself). Also, their account management website allows an impressive amount of self-control over aspects such as spam filtering and firewalling. I'm a very satisfied customer so far.

Andrew Pollock: [life] First Christmas abroad

(I love the term "abroad". It sounds so English.) Well that happened. We had Michael and another Andrew from work who started two weeks before us and his wife come over for what Michael was calling "linner" (the inverse of "brunch"). Sarah cooked up an absolute storm. We had roast turkey, roast potato, pumpkin and sweet potato, steamed broccoli, cauliflower and asparagus, and Yorkshire puddings. We had so many types of gravy we completely forgot about the cranberry sauce. Michael managed to track down a plum pudding (this country seems obsessed with pumpkin pie) and we had something approximating custard (something else this country doesn't seem to do) with it. A very good feast was had by all, and six hours later we were done. Back to unpacking boxes. Brought to you by some kind neighbour's open access point.

Andrew Pollock: [meme] Priceless

My blog is worth $11,855.34.
How much is your blog worth?

Andrew Pollock: [life] Hello America!

Where do I start? It's been an eventful couple of days... The flight to LA was uneventful. Qantas is certainly orders of magnitude more pleasant to fly with than United, even though we were seated in a bulkhead area. I had a 13-month old baby seated next to me (no, Mikal was on the other side), and he was about as well behaved as you could possibly ask a 13-month old baby to behave. Mikal also behaved himself. I had the intention of trying to get something approximating 8 hours sleep, as we arrived at LAX at 7am local time, but I only managed about 4 hours. I did spend about 8 hours with a mask on and my brain in idle, so I arrived at LAX being mostly coherent. Entering the US via LAX was a much less traumatic experience than I was expecting. The E-3 visa was accepted fine, and I now have an I-94 stapled into my passport. Quarantine involved getting looked up and down by a guy in a booth, who waved me through. We had 3 hours to spare (or about 2 by the time we cleared all the immigration/customs queues) and then hopped on a 50 minute American Airlines flight to San Francisco, hired a car and drove to Santa Clara. The accommodation we're staying in for a month is very spiffy indeed. It's a largish gated community of units. Mine's got a ground floor entry, but everything else (except the garage) is upstairs. When Sarah gets here, we'll put up some photos. The weather is lovely as well. Our first outing was to the Social Security office to attempt to get social security numbers. This wasn't as successful as I'd hoped, as we were too freshly in the country to show up on their systems, so we left with letters saying we'd get one within four weeks, when our details had been verified. Yesterday evening, we went for a general recce of the surrounding area, and checked out a supermarket. That was less disconcerting than I expected, although I don't think it was a terribly huge supermarket. Having a GPS certainly raises one's confidence when navigating significantly. Last night I discovered that all the keys in my apartment were not created equal, and that the two loose in the lock box on the front door were the only two that opened the unit, and the two sets on key rings on the coffee table only opened the amenities and my mailbox. So I got to spend a bit of time sitting on my front doorstep until the nice man from Synergy Relocations came out to let me in (except his key didn't work either, so he got to make conversation with a legal alien while we waited for someone else to come out with a key). Today, we drove around to see a shopping mall, and the first set of shops we found happened to be around the corner from an enormous (by my standards) apartment complex, which had some signage implying that it had vacancies, so we decided to get the low down on how renting worked before we did our rental tours. Casey drove us around in a golf buggy and gave a tour of what two different floor plans looked liked. It seems that in this part, it's standard for an apartment to include the refrigerator, dishwasher, microwave, washing machine and clothes dryer, which is good to know. Let me just say that if this is what living in an apartment complex is like, it's more like living in a resort. The place had pools everywhere, tennis courts, two gyms, a community centre, it was just unreal. It was also cheaper than I was expecting. We then went to a massive shopping mall to do some window shopping. Discovered Wetzel's Pretzels. Hope they're not too fattening... Tomorrow, I'm going to avail myself to the complex's gym, and generally get ready for the week ahead. Future posts will be in a new category, which I won't be feeding to Planet Debian as not to bore people. I will inflict Planet Linux Australia readers with them until someone asks me to stop. If you'd like a custom feed that excludes my American adventures, please let me know. I wonder if adjusting Blosxom's idea of timezone buggers up existing posts and aggregators like Planet in general?

Andrew Pollock: [tech/security] Is there a new BIND vulnerability lurking in the wings?

In recent times I've started seeing something in my logs that I haven't seen before. I'm yet to do any further investigation, but I suppose the next steps would be some packet captures and BIND source code poking...

Nov  8 02:13:16 daedalus named[6933]: errno2result.c:109: unexpected error:
Nov  8 02:13:16 daedalus named[6933]: unable to convert errno to isc_result: 14: Bad address
Nov  8 02:13:16 daedalus named[6933]: dispatch 0x80f6970: odd socket result in udp_recv(): unexpected error
Nov  9 01:08:33 daedalus named[6933]: errno2result.c:109: unexpected error:
Nov  9 01:08:33 daedalus named[6933]: unable to convert errno to isc_result: 14: Bad address
Nov  9 01:08:33 daedalus named[6933]: dispatch 0x80f6970: odd socket result in udp_recv(): unexpected error
Nov  9 10:01:13 daedalus named[6933]: unable to convert errno to isc_result: 14: Bad address
Nov  9 10:01:13 daedalus named[6933]: dispatch 0x80f6970: odd socket result in udp_recv(): unexpected error
Nov  9 10:01:13 daedalus named[6933]: errno2result.c:109: unexpected error:
Nov  9 10:01:13 daedalus named[6933]: unable to convert errno to isc_result: 14: Bad address
Nov  9 10:01:13 daedalus named[6933]: dispatch 0x80f6970: odd socket result in udp_recv(): unexpected error
Nov  9 10:01:13 daedalus named[6933]: errno2result.c:109: unexpected error:
Nov  9 10:01:13 daedalus named[6933]: unable to convert errno to isc_result: 14: Bad address
Nov  9 10:01:13 daedalus named[6933]: dispatch 0x80f6970: odd socket result in udp_recv(): unexpected error
Nov 11 00:02:35 daedalus named[6933]: errno2result.c:109: unexpected error:
Nov 11 00:02:35 daedalus named[6933]: unable to convert errno to isc_result: 14: Bad address
Nov 11 00:02:35 daedalus named[6933]: dispatch 0x80f6970: odd socket result in udp_recv(): unexpected error
Nov 11 00:02:35 daedalus named[6933]: errno2result.c:109: unexpected error:
Nov 11 00:02:35 daedalus named[6933]: unable to convert errno to isc_result: 14: Bad address
Nov 11 00:02:35 daedalus named[6933]: dispatch 0x80f6970: odd socket result in udp_recv(): unexpected error
Nov 13 02:05:47 daedalus named[6933]: errno2result.c:109: unexpected error:
Nov 13 02:05:47 daedalus named[6933]: unable to convert errno to isc_result: 14: Bad address
Nov 13 02:05:47 daedalus named[6933]: dispatch 0x80f6970: odd socket result in udp_recv(): unexpected error
Nov 13 02:05:48 daedalus named[6933]: errno2result.c:109: unexpected error:
Nov 13 02:05:48 daedalus named[6933]: unable to convert errno to isc_result: 14: Bad address
Nov 13 02:05:48 daedalus named[6933]: dispatch 0x80f6970: odd socket result in udp_recv(): unexpected error
Nov 13 23:03:05 daedalus named[6933]: errno2result.c:109: unexpected error:
Nov 13 23:03:05 daedalus named[6933]: unable to convert errno to isc_result: 14: Bad address
Nov 13 23:03:05 daedalus named[6933]: dispatch 0x80f6970: odd socket result in udp_recv(): unexpected error
Nov 15 02:37:32 daedalus named[6933]: errno2result.c:109: unexpected error:
Nov 15 02:37:32 daedalus named[6933]: unable to convert errno to isc_result: 14: Bad address
Nov 15 02:37:32 daedalus named[6933]: dispatch 0x80f6970: odd socket result in udp_recv(): unexpected error
Nov 15 02:37:34 daedalus named[6933]: errno2result.c:109: unexpected error:
Nov 15 02:37:34 daedalus named[6933]: unable to convert errno to isc_result: 14: Bad address
Nov 15 02:37:34 daedalus named[6933]: dispatch 0x80f6970: odd socket result in udp_recv(): unexpected error
Nov 15 02:37:34 daedalus named[6933]: errno2result.c:109: unexpected error:
Nov 15 02:37:34 daedalus named[6933]: unable to convert errno to isc_result: 14: Bad address
Nov 15 02:37:34 daedalus named[6933]: dispatch 0x80f6970: odd socket result in udp_recv(): unexpected error

Martin F. Krafft: Secure (!) APT updates

Andrew, your method leaves you and your system wide open to MITM attacks. All I need to do is poison your DNS cache at the right moment, and you'll trust my key (apologies to ari for misattribution in a previous edition of this post; thanks to dato for letting me know). I strongly suggest going via gnupg and verifying the fingerprint as well as the signatures on the key. You can use this page to help you verify these data (although the current lack of SSL doesn't really add a benefit, I am working on it). Here's what I usually do:

cirrus:~> GET http://ftp-master.debian.org/ziyi_key_2006.asc   gpg --import
gpg: key 2D230C5F: public key "Debian Archive Automatic Signing Key (2006)
  <ftpmaster<@t>debian.org>" imported
gpg: Total number processed: 1
gpg:               imported: 1
cirrus:~> gpg --check-sigs --fingerprint 2D230C5F
pub   1024D/2D230C5F 2006-01-03 [expires: 2007-02-07]
      Key fingerprint = 0847 50FC 01A6 D388 A643  D869 0109 0831 2D23 0C5F
uid   Debian Archive Automatic Signing Key (2006) <ftpmaster<@t>debian.org>
sig!3        2D230C5F 2006-01-03  Debian Archive Automatic Signing Key
                                  (2006) <ftpmaster<@t>debian.org>
sig!         2A4E3EAA 2006-01-03  Anthony Towns <aj<@t>azure.humbug.org.au>
sig!         4F368D5D 2006-01-03  Debian Archive Automatic Signing Key
                                  (2005) <ftpmaster<@t>debian.org>
sig!         29982E5A 2006-01-04  Steve Langasek <vorlon<@t>dodds.net>
sig!         FD6645AB 2006-01-04  Ryan Murray <rmurray<@t>cyberhqz.com>
sig!         AB2A91F5 2006-01-04  James Troup <james<@t>nocrew.org>

and then I check the trust path from my key to at least one of the keys used to sign the archive key. Only if I find an acceptable path will I then tell APT to trust the key:

cirrus:~> gpg --export -a 2D230C5F   sudo apt-key add -
Ok

Note that the key is signed with the previous archive key, so theoretically you can just build on your previous trust. Until Debian finally gets a proper PKI in place, this seems like the best way to do it.

MJ Ray: How boycotts work: one view

The problem of free software graphics hardware drivers was being discussed and it was suggested that we should only buy from friendly companies, which provoked a common sceptical claim that there's no point boycotting a product or company or country unless everyone else does. I think that may be assuming the aim is to bankrupt them rather than to change a bad decision. Since when has a boycott needed to be total in order to change a supplier's mind? You only need enough people to support it, not everyone. The value of "enough" changes for each thing: there are examples of relatively limited boycotts succeeding (Shell Brent Spar) and relatively long/large ones not yet succeeding (Nestl Baby Milk Action). Boycotts are consumers doing judo on corporations: Most corporations aim to maximise their profit. Boycotts are an overt way of linking lost sales to a particular issue. In theory, if it looks like it's costing more profit to suffer the boycott than to address the cause, the executives should fix it or the shareholders should replace them with some who will. So, it is helpful to boycott harmful companies noisily. (Full article continues on my site...)

7 January 2006

Martin F. Krafft: Unstable Linux

One thing I will never understand about this Linux hype are the operating system's miserable failures in the wake of hardware problems. Coming home from dinner, I find this all over my consoles:

Message from syslogd@piper at Sat Jan  7 22:53:35 2006 ...
piper kernel: Oops: 0002 [18] 
Message from syslogd@piper at Sat Jan  7 22:53:35 2006 ...
piper kernel: CR2: 0000004000000004

Since then, I cannot start new processes anymore (though apache2 and old processes work just fine), which means I cannot SSH into the box (which is far away from where I am right now), and thus it's become useless. The problem could be anything: corrupt memory, a broken CPU, a harddrive with bad blocks in the swap area, etc... since Linux obviously seems to be able to wall in response to a problem, I would only wish it wouldn't pout as a consequence but handle the event more gracefully. If only I had the time and energy to finally wave goodbye and choose NetBSD... Update: I managed to get a dmesg output:

<1>Unable to handle kernel paging request at 0000004000000004 RIP: 
<ffffffff80152c54> find_get_pages+36 
PGD 72cee067 PUD 0 
Oops: 0002 [18] 
CPU 0 
Modules linked in: rfcomm l2cap ipv6 af_packet ipt_REJECT ipt_state
iptable_filter iptable_nat ip_conntrack ip_tables deflate zlib_deflate
twofish serpent aes blowfish des sha256 sha1 md5 crypto_null af_key usbhid
hci_usb bluetooth raid5 xor dm_mod sbp2 ide_generic ide_cd eth1394
snd_seq_dummy snd_seq_oss snd_seq_midi snd_seq_midi_event snd_seq
snd_via82xx gameport snd_ac97_codec snd_pcm_oss snd_mixer_oss snd_pcm
snd_timer snd_page_alloc snd_mpu401_uart snd_rawmidi snd_seq_device snd
i2c_viapro soundcore i2c_core ehci_hcd via82cxxx ohci1394 shpchp pci_hotplug
sk98lin uhci_hcd ide_core ieee1394 rtc parport_pc parport floppy psmouse
pcspkr serio_raw evdev xfs exportfs sr_mod cdrom sd_mod sata_via
sata_promise libata sg scsi_mod raid1 md unix fbcon tileblit font bitblit
vesafb cfbcopyarea cfbimgblt cfbfillrect softcursor
Pid: 136, comm: kswapd0 Not tainted 2.6.12-1-amd64-k8
RIP: 0010:[<ffffffff80152c54>] <ffffffff80152c54> find_get_pages+36 
RSP: 0018:ffff81007f90dcc8  EFLAGS: 00010002
RAX: 0000004000000000 RBX: ffff81007f90dd08 RCX: ffff81007f90dd10
RDX: 0000000000000001 RSI: 0000000000000002 RDI: ffff81000289f678
RBP: 0000000000000000 R08: 0000000000000000 R09: ffff81007113f670
R10: 0000000000000040 R11: 0000000000000000 R12: ffff8100705e54e0
R13: 000000000000007a R14: ffffffffffffffff R15: ffff8100705e55f8
FS:  00002aaaab730d70(0000) GS:ffffffff8040f940(0000) knlGS:0000000000000000
CS:  0010 DS: 0018 ES: 0018 CR0: 000000008005003b
CR2: 0000004000000004 CR3: 0000000072925000 CR4: 00000000000006e0
Process kswapd0 (pid: 136, threadinfo ffff81007f90c000, task ffff81007f906760)
Stack: ffff81007f90dcf8 ffffffff8015bca7 ffff8100705e54f0 ffffffff8015c905 
       ffff810001172200 0000000000000000 0000000000000000 0000000000000000 
       ffff81000289f678 0000004000000000 
Call Trace:<ffffffff8015bca7> pagevec_lookup+23 
           <ffffffff8015c905> invalidate_mapping_pages+245 
           <ffffffff8018a403> shrink_icache_memory+259 
           <ffffffff8012d144> recalc_task_prio+324 
           <ffffffff8015ca01> shrink_slab+193 
           <ffffffff8015dcaf> balance_pgdat+623 
           <ffffffff8015df37> kswapd+295 
           <ffffffff80144e00> autoremove_wake_function+0 
           <ffffffff8010f0f7> child_rip+8  <ffffffff8015de10> kswapd+0 
           <ffffffff8010f0ef> child_rip+0  
Code: ff 40 04 ff c2 48 83 c1 08 39 d6 75 f0 fb 5b 89 f0 c3 66 66 
RIP <ffffffff80152c54> find_get_pages+36  RSP <ffff81007f90dcc8>
CR2: 0000004000000004

Now, how does a mere mortal diagnose this? This was the third in a series of oopses, the others occurred in a find process... the machine runs a software RAID5, so it really could be anything, right?

6 January 2006

Marco d'Itri: How the kernel firmware loader works

fEnIo learnt an important lesson about the kernel firmware loader: it (usually) does not work as expected for non-modular drivers. The reason is that the request_firmware() interface is synchronous. Since it's usually called in the initialisation section of drivers, the userspace firmware loader is not available yet if the calling driver is built-in in the kernel. The request_firmware_nowait() asynchronous interface was designed to replace it, but most drivers have not been ported yet. When a driver calls request_firmware(), a uevent is sent by the kernel to udev over a netlink(7) socket, requesting that a specific file is uploaded. udevd runs /lib/udev/firmware.agent, a simple shell script which will look for the $FIRMWARE file in a few directories and then copy it to the designated place in the driver $DEVPATH in sysfs. If the driver is initialised before userspace is started then the loader will not be available, and the request will fail. A possible solution is to run udev in the early userspace environment (initramfs), but just compiling the driver as a module is usually simpler.

Enrico Zini: Server crashes

My server has been crashing a lot, and now I'm home to do some more fixing on it. If you've been sending me mail and didn't get a reply, it's one more reason for pinging me again. Various things were crashing:

weird vm failures like Bad page state at free_hot_cold_page errors

pyblosxom going wild with memory allocation and getting OOMed

sata_nv driver starting to do nothing but dumping pointers on console, really fast

occasional kernel panics

This was on kernel 2.6.12. I did not find a way to upgrade to newer ones for sarge on amd64 and get the system to boot: seems to be because some partitions are in LVM. Yet another update of the mobo flash didn't help much. I left memtest86+ running for a night: memory seems to be perfect. I turned off swap and run badblocks on the swap partition, read and write tests: that's ok as well. I'm monitoring internal temperature, both motherboard and hard drives, and the system isn't overheating. So, it was time to upgrade to testing. Thanks to various cool people we have testing-security which makes the idea of running testing on my server a bit less scary. The upgrade brought udev, and (sigh) the random swap of the ethernet devices. I found something here. It works, I have even to say it's cool, although it doesn't work if I use 'eth0' and 'eth1' as device names: gotta rewrite a couple of scripts. Now I'm on testing, and some files are corrupted because of the various hard drive-related crashes. Ganneff and Yoe nicely pointed me at debsums, so let's have some fun:

debsums -a -c 2>&1  tee debsums-report.log

not so cool things come out. Among them, a list of packages that are not using dh_md5sums. Bad bad: people, please build packages with that: it's nice and comfy. Luckily debsums reports them and I can just apt-get install --reinstall them. Another cool thing of debsums, Ganneff pointed out, is that when it's installed and you install a package that doesn't have the md5sums inside, then debsums will compute and store the sums. So, if you don't have debsums installed, it seems to be a good idea to do it now. Ok, so now I'm on 2.6.15. As a side effect, the onboard gigabit ethernet card is now supported: cool! Now let's see if it holds up, and then, since now I'm on etch, I could as well enjoy it and start playing with Rails :) It could even be an opportunity to replace pyblosxom. Any good Rails blog around? I couldn't find any who is also available in Debian :(

Simon Law: Debian meetup

 ____       _     _               __  __           _               
   _ \  ___   __ (_) __ _ _ __      \/    ___  ___   _ _   _ _ __  
       / _ \ '_ \   / _    '_ \     \/   / _ \/ _ \ __        '_ \ 
   _     __/  _)     (_                    __/  __/  _   _     _)  
 ____/ \___ _.__/ _ \__,_ _   _   _    _ \___ \___ \__ \__,_  .__/ 
                                                             _

So what does a Debian beer stein have to do with this gathering?

Debian stein

Absolutely everything! We're getting together a bunch of Debian Developers in Montr al to drink and chat. There are rumours that you can even get your GnuPG key signed, if you buy enough rounds. What a great deal! Thusly, the beer goes down and the trust scores rise! The relevant details:

Who:: The Debian community.
Where:: Hurley's Irish Pub
Date:: Saturday, 7 January 2006.
Time:: 17:00 or 5 PM.

Eric Dorland: Montr al Debian soir e

Since

sfllaw hasn't blogged about it, we're having a little get together on Saturday at Hurley's at 5:00. In the spirit of "the more, the merrier" (hope that's ok with you Simon), if you're a wannabe Debian developer come buy us drinks. I promise to sign the key of anyone who buys me a pint (how's that for a web-of-trust?).

5 January 2006

Edd Dumbill: Are web services and e-business interesting?

A couple of people have commented to me on the lack of explicit reference to web services or e-business technologies in the XTech call for participation. It's worth explaining why this is so. On web services: I consider the low-level specs here (SOAP, REST, WSDL) now to fall under "core technologies" track, and the higher level stuff (WS-*) to be often vacuous spec-mongering. Also, over the years, the quality of web service proposals submitted to the conference has been notably poor compared to all the other topics. A lot of this was to do with the hype web services received. On e-business, some useful submissions have been forthcoming, but never more than a few. My suspicion is that the OASIS stream of events is more interesting for most people in this space--I'd love to hear otherwise. I do view e-business presentations as on-topic, but I would like to find those that genuinely present something worthwhile. While many people often say they'd like to see more case studies, turnout for these is always low at the conference itself, so I've shied away from them somewhat. The thing with case studies is that they're necessarily related to a domain, and it's easy to for attendees to assume there's not transferable experience to be heard. I guess I don't believe either that all the problems in the e-business space are unique to that area. Identity, federated service location, transactions are all topics that deserve a broad audience. However, I acknowledge that I do not work daily in the e-business sphere and I would dearly love to hear somebody who does do a presentation on why there's really some solid things going on there now. Exchange of best practices is more necessary than ever. More reason not to hive off e-business from the other matters in the conference. For a similar reason I've mixed semantic web topics throughout the tracks as well. If anyone working in e-business didn't get useful knowledge out of XTech, I'd be astounded. Likewise, those working in e-business have plenty useful to say to the rest of the conference.

only 4 days left to submit a proposal for XTech 2006 (Amsterdam, May 16-19) -- do it now

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