DPL August report, posted on d-d-a a while ago (yep, I forgot to blog it up to now!, sorry for the oldies).

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Dear project members, August has been a month with a good deal of vacations for many of us, including yours truly. Therefore the monthly report of DPL activities will be briefer than usual. Which is good, as it'll leave all my readers more time to do NMUs and fix RC bugs! Ongoing discussions

• Discussion about the new trademark policy has continued on -project. I've collected quite some feedback and summarized it in a request for change that I've passed on to SFLC. I'm waiting for a second draft from them, before reviving the thread.
• on the long-running issue of de-duplicating DebConf infrastructure wrt Debian's, I've been happy to support the proposal of moving DebConf's list to Debian's software and infrastructure. There seems to be interest and consensus, but the DebConf team could probably use a couple more helping hands to make it real
• starting from the practical need of dealing with minified JavaScript files, an interesting discussion sparkled on -devel. It quickly turned in both musing on the notion of archive-wide DFSG-freeness and some new devscript tooling by Andreas Tille. AFAIU some extra testing would be welcome

Assets

• The DFGS-free logo relicensing I've mentioned last month is now on its way. Following advice from SFLC, I've slightly patched the current trademark policy (mainly to clarify scope), just enough to decouple logo relicensing under LGPLv3/CC-BY-SA 3.0 from the finalization of a new trademark policy (see above). I've also verified that the license choice is fine with teams that regularly deal with the logos. Ball is now in SPI camp (as copyright holder). They should finalize the relicensing during the forthcoming board meeting, on September 13th.
• We heard back from the trademark office in Japan, who accepted our request to transfer it from local Debian contributors to SPI. That being mainly a bureaucratic acknowledgement, we'll now need to way for a while until they confirm the transfer has been finalized. My eternal thanks for help with this matter goes to Kenshi Muto.

Core teams

• Manoj Srivastava has stepped down as tech-ctte member. I hereby thank him for his long and valuable service in that capacity. The tech-ctte has now one vacant seat, and I've encouraged present tech-ctte members to propose to me a suitable candidate. In an attempt to promote diversity of views within the tech-ctte, they are now considering various ways to solicit candidatures. You'll hear from them about this soon, I suspect.
• In the meantime, monthly IRC meetings of the tech-ctte are continuing, as you might have noticed from tech-ctte decision reports posted on this list. As it seemed to be lingering, at the last meeting I've solicited progress on the Python maintenance issue.
• The auditors have noticed the unclear situation of the Policy Editor delegation, which seems to rely on a "base" delegation dating back to Antony Towns' office and various subsequent delegation "patches". After discussion with Russ Allbery I've then proceeded to a public "ping" to assess the interest of current editors in continuing their work in such capacity, and encourage new volunteers to apply as editors. Based on the feedback I've got, I'm now preparing a new Policy Editor delegation.

Legal and RC fun

• Solicited by Jonathan Nieder and Helge Kreutzmann, I've looked into #555168 and sought legal advice to answer various questions related to the non-copyrightability of locale data. Aaron Williamson of SFLC has been blazing fast in answering them (thanks!), and Jonathan and Helge has now all the needed information to help addressing that (RC) issue. Keep an eye on the bug log for more details.

Hardware

• I've approved buying 6 console servers to improve DSA ability to act on remote machines, without having to bother^Wrely on local admins when not strictly needed. ~550 USD well spent.

See? It's been quick(er)! Talk to you here next month, with a much lower count of Wheezy RC Bugs on the horizon, hopefully.
Cheers.

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PS the boring day-to-day activity log for August 2012 is available at master:/srv/leader/news/bits-from-the-DPL.txt.201208

I just uploaded Debian Policy 3.9.4.0, which includes the implementation of the Technical Committee decision to make build-arch and build-indep mandatory targets and which significantly reworks the section on shared libraries. Nothing here is release-critical for wheezy, and uploads targeted for wheezy should not attempt to update packaging for a new version of Policy. I went into some more detail on debian-devel-announce. The version number probably should have been 3.10.0.0 given the build-arch and build-indep changes and the work on symbols files. Ah well. Here's the upgrading checklist:

2.4

New tasks archive section.

4.9

build-arch and build-indep are now mandatory targets in debian/rules.

5.6.26

New section documenting the Vcs-* fields, which are already in widespread use. Note the mechanism for specifying the Git branch used for packaging in the Vcs-Git field.

7.1

The deprecated relations < and > now must not be used.

7.8

New Built-Using field, which must be used to document the source packages for any binaries that are incorporated into this package at build time. This is used to ensure that the archive meets license requirements for providing source for all binaries.

8.6

Policy for dependencies between shared libraries and other packages has been largely rewritten to document the symbols system and more clearly document handling of shared library ABI changes. symbols files are now recommended over shlibs files in most situations. All maintainers of shared library packages should review the entirety of this section.

9.1.1

Packages must not assume the /run directory exists or is usable without a dependency on initscripts (>= 2.88dsf-13.3) until the stable release of Debian supports /run.

9.7

Packages including MIME configuration can now rely on triggers and do not need to call update-mime.

9.11

New section documenting general requirements for alternate init systems and specific requirements for integrating with upstart.

12.5

All copyright files must be encoded in UTF-8.

I ve spent the last few hours working on a tool to take snapshots of all the html files in a .deb using phantomjs. It works great, but renders text all funny on my machine. I ve got two builds going with slight tweaks to check for the issue, but some advice before I file a bug would be helpful. (or see the full size image) This will hopefully be integrated into debuild.me, or debexpo.

As announced in the Debian Project News of September more mirrors have recently joined Debian's mirrors network. Two more have been added since that issue of DPN was released, and about four more might be added any day now. Many thanks to those sponsoring them!

The mirrors redirector has also received some improvements, and around 2.5 million requests a week.
Among the improvements, users of teredo and 6to4 tunnels are now handled as IPv4 users. Not only it gives them access to a wider range of mirrors, but it also avoids the tunnel overhead.

Another improvement is the prompt detection of mirrors that drop architectures without prior notification. This is thanks to a new version of ftpsync, the standard and recommended tool to create Debian mirrors suitable for Debian's mirrors network.
As more mirror administrators upgrade to the newer version, or switch to it, http.debian.net and other tools become more reliable: they no longer need to perform some checks and hope the results mean the mirrors actually include the architectures they say they include.

In this regard, http.debian.net is an improvement over debian-installer's mirrors selection menu: not only it chooses a mirror that is close to the user and up to date, it also ensures the mirror provides the files for an architecture even after the installer image has been built. debian-installer's mirrors list is static and hard-coded into the installation media.

There's more to come, stay tuned.

Conrad released the bug-fix release 3.4.1 of Armadillo earlier today, and the corresponding RcppArmadillo package 0.3.4.1 is already on CRAN. No R level or interface changes were, the upstream changes are summarized below.

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.3.4.1 (2012-09-18)

• Upgraded to Armadillo release 3.4.1
  • workaround for a bug in the Mac OS X accelerate framework
  • fixes for handling empty sparse matrices
  • added documentation for saving & loading matrices in HDF5 format
  • faster dot() and cdot() for complex numbers

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for 0.3.4.1 relative to 0.3.4.0 As always, more detailed information is on the RcppArmadillo page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page.

About two years ago, I wrote about moving to a Sandisk Sansa Fuze as my music player. I transitioned from a 40G, HDD-based iRiver to an 8G flash-based player, with an additional 32G supplied by a micro SD card, both running the rockbox open-source firmware. Of course, my music collection has grown over the last few years and so I needed to find another solution. That solution is another Sansa Fuze! This was actually my interim solution, this time with 4G internal capacity (didn't matter too much) with another 32G microsd and a rubber band. It turns out that managing four storage devices (two SDs and two embedded storages) is a complete nightmare. However, as luck would have it, I learned that the new, larger capacity SDXC cards can be made to work in some SD readers, including the Sansa Fuze. At around this time, my original player started to malfunction and so, another Sansa Fuze, again! It took three attempts to get a 64G microsd: the first was faulty or fake, the second never turned up. Third times a charm, and a third sansa fuze (to get 8G internal capacity) completes the story. For the sansa fuze, to get a 64G microsd to work, one needs to change the partition type to 0x0c (W95 FAT32 (LBA)) and reformat with FAT32. (Interestingly that's actually hard to do for Windows users, as Win 7 refuses to offer FAT32 for flash devices over 32G in capacity by default). I now have approximately 67.7G of storage on a single device and all my music in one place again (albeit two storage locations) which feels surprisingly good!

This especially goes to planet.debian.org: SORRY! My WordPress thought it is a great idea to deliver empty (no date, no link, no content) posts, randomly, and planet started to post everything as new as it took the feed. I still haven t reenabled all the plugins, but it runs stable for several hours now and I ll try not to break it again.

0 comment(s) this blog is flattr enabled

When Keith and I released a new version of AltOS, the open source firmware and software system associated with our Altus Metrum hobby rocket avionics systems last week, we forgot to mention one small but really neat new feature Keith spontaneously added a few months ago. When a rocket is on the rail waiting to launch, we now beep out the igniter continuity status over the radio link instead of just sending periodic audio beeps. This is particularly useful when flying TeleMini, which is just too small to include an on-board beeper. Previously, you had to check the ground station computer to see if the board powered up correctly and was ready to fly. Now all you need is an HT tuned to the right frequency, which is easy to have in your pocket or clipped on your belt while preparing a rocket for flight! Son Robert and I made heavy use of this last weekend flying at the Tripoli Colorado Fall Frenzy 2012 launch, where 4 of our 5 flights were in TeleMini-equipped rockets set up for apogee-only electronic recovery deployment with motor backup. I also found it really handy when setting up YikStik3 on the flight line at Airfest 18. It was hard to hear the altimeter beepers on the two TeleMetrum boards buried deep in the airframe, but they were loud and clear through the HT in my back pocket! Thanks, Keith! So much improvement in flight-line experience from so little code...

A few months ago, a collection of essays called Open Advice was released. It consists of the things that seasoned Free and Open Source developers wish they had known when they got started. The LWN book review is the best way to get a good feel for what it's about, but here are the notes I took while reading it:

• Write code first: a project doesn't exist before there is code for it.
• Listen to your initial users and prioritise their bugs / feature requests: they will tell you how to turn your pet project into something that others will want to use.
• Documentation is not a waste of time: at some point, someone will need to take over from you. You're not just coding for yourself.
• When you first come to a project, you can make valuable contributions to the project's on-ramping process and documentation (other developers can't see or have forgotten about this stuff).
• Many potential contributors think they're not good enough to contribute to your project: invite them to do a specific task personally.
• Validated backups give you the freedom to do what's needed.
• Writing a library is a good way to enable cross-project collaboration.
• For many newcomers, documentation is a gateway in the FOSS community.
• Real programmers virtues: laziness, patience and humility (politeness is critical).
• Documentation can occur in sprints.
• Professional writers should focus on teaching and mentoring, not writing documentation.
• Watching real users use your software is the best way to improve its usability.
• The best designs evolve slowly and get refactored over time using well-known patterns.
• Outsiders can inject different viewpoints into the discussion, particularly around prioritization.
• Community managers should be good listeners and learn from their peers.
• Have a willingness to accept that you can and will be wrong sometimes.
• Sometimes you need to walk away from a project or argument, allow a day for things to settle down and for you to get a chance to breathe.
• Do not ask people what they think, state that you will do something by a date pending any objections from others.
• Creating a community team should never assume that people will stay fully committed the whole time. They will be in for a while then disappear for longer periods and then come back.

If you want to add some rules to your Apache based on the clients country, mod_geoip is perfect for it. Installation On Squeeze following is enough: # apt-get install libapache2-mod-geoip geoip-database/squeeze-backports Note that you should use the geoip-database version from squeeze-backports to have got the most up to date database version, I am updating it every month. Configuration You can add the rules to your VirtualHost, Directory, Location directives and also to your apache2.conf ( serverwide ). So you are flexible with where to use it. Blocking countries On some servers I have got more than 90 percent of spam requests only from three countries, so I blocked them with: <DirectoryMatch ^/var/www/.*/html >
SetEnvIf GEOIP_COUNTRY_CODE RU BlockCountry
SetEnvIf GEOIP_COUNTRY_CODE CN BlockCountry
SetEnvIf GEOIP_COUNTRY_CODE UA BlockCountry
Deny from env=BlockCountry
</DirectoryMatch> Allow only specific countries In the other way you also can allow specific countries to have got access to your website, this also may be a good idea for extranets, where you know from where your customers are: <Directory /var/www/my.site.com/html/login >
SetEnvIf GEOIP_COUNTRY_CODE DE AllowCountry
SetEnvIf GEOIP_COUNTRY_CODE CH AllowCountry
Deny from all
Allow from env=AllowCountry
</Directory> Very easy! Rewrite Rules You can also use it for mod_rewrite. Within a project, customers from CN and TW should be redirected to the chinese page: RewriteCond % ENV:GEOIP_COUNTRY_CODE ^(CN TW)$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://some.example.cn/site.php [L] mod_geoip with proxy frontends Normaly mod_geoip works behinds load balancers and proxy servers, since it also take care of the HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR header. But with haproxy it looks problematic, since it does not add the HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR header to KeepAlive d requests :( Disabling KeepAlive is a bad idea on this cluster, so we decided to also use php5-geoip in our application, so everything is working nice now.. What mod_geoip is NOT is mod_geoip helps you to block/allow specific countries, but it does not protect you from them.
Also keep in mind that the database is only ~ 99,8% accurate, so you may have got false positives/negatives. If you only allow german users, a german IP could be listed as russian.
This is much more problematic with mobile/satellite connections and surely you can also not access your page, if you are on vacation in another country. ;)

When you start using Linux' logical volume manager, one of the first question you have to answer is: what name will you give to your volume group? The usual answer is: vg1, vg2, etc. Although it does not bear any specific meaning, this naming convention is simple and seems functional enough. In fact, this is a bad idea, which can have nasty consequences on the long term. Here is why: one day, your computer will eventually give out. To save your precious data, you will remove its drives and plug them into another computer. If you are using LVM with the same naming convention on that second computer, you will then get a name conflict, which will prevent you from seeing the volume group you want to recover. The solution is to name volume groups uniquely across all your computers, and if possible other people's. An elegant way to achieve this is to use your host names as a basis. For instance, on a machine called Pi acolada , you would name a single volume group pinacolada , or two volume groups pinacolada1 and pinacolada2 . Or perhaps vg-pinacolada0 or whatever, you get the idea.

Today I ll be telling you about an interesting way to build your Debian packages using Deb-o-Matic, a tool developed and maintained by Luca Falavigna. Some more details about this tool from the package s description:

Deb-o-Matic is an easy to use build machine for Debian source packages based on pbuilder, written in Python. It provides a simple tool to automate build of source packages with limited user interaction and a simple configuration. It has some useful features such as automatic update of pbuilder, automatic scan and selection of source packages to build and modules support.

The setup. 1. Download the package.

apt-get install debomatic

2. Modify the main configuration file as follows:

[default]
builder: pbuilder
packagedir: /home/john/debomatic # Take note of the following path since we'll need it for later use.
configdir: /etc/debomatic/distributions
pbuilderhooks: /usr/share/debomatic/pbuilderhooks
maxbuilds: 3 # The number of builds you can perform at the same time.
inotify: 1
sleep: 60 # The sleep time between one build and another.
logfile: /var/log/debomatic.log
[gpg]
gpg: 0 # Change to 1 if you want Deb-O-Matic to check the GPG signature of the uploaded packages.
keyring: /etc/debomatic/debomatic.gpg # Add the GPG Keys you want Deb-O-Matic to accept in this keyring.
[modules]
modules: 1 # A list of all the available modules will follow right after.
modulespath: /usr/share/debomatic/modules
[runtime]
alwaysupdate: unstable experimental precise
distblacklist:
modulesblacklist: Lintian Mailer
mapper:  'sid': 'unstable',
'wheezy': 'testing',
'squeeze': 'stable' 
[lintian]
lintopts: -i -I -E --pedantic # Run Lintian in Pedantic mode.
[mailer] # You need an SMTP server running on your machine for the mailer to work. You can have a look at the 'Ssmtp' daemon which is a one-minute-setup MTA, check an example over here.
fromaddr: debomatic@localhost
smtphost: localhost
smtpport: 25
authrequired: 0
smtpuser: user
smtppass: pass
success: /etc/debomatic/mailer/build_success.mail-template # Update the build success or failure mails as you wish by modifying the relevant files.
failure: /etc/debomatic/mailer/build_failure.mail-template
[internals]
configversion = 010a

The available modules are:

1. Contents , which acts as a dpkg -c over the built packages.
2. DateStamp , which displays build start and finish times into a file in the build directory.
3. Lintian , which stores Lintian output on top of the built package in the pool directory.
4. Mailer , which sends a reply to the uploader once the build has finished.
5. PrevBuildCleaner , which deletes all files generated by the previous build.
6. Repository , which generates a local repository of built packages.

2. Configure dput to upload package s sources to your local repository, edit the /etc/dput.cf file and add this entry:

[debomatic]
method = local
incoming = /home/john/debomatic

or the following if you are going to upload the files to a different machine through SSH:

[debomatic]
login = john
fqdn = debomatic.example.net
method = scp
incoming = /debomatic

3. Add a new Virtual Host on Apache and access the repository / built packages directly through your browser:

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerAdmin john@example.net
ServerName debomatic.example.net
DocumentRoot /home/john/debomatic
<Directory /home/john/debomatic>
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
AllowOverride None
Order allow,deny
allow from all
</Directory>
</VirtualHost>

4. Start the daemon:

sudo /etc/init.d/debomatic start

5. (Optional) Add your repository to APT s sources.list:

deb http://debomatic.example.net/ unstable main contrib non-free

6. (Optional) Start Deb-O-Matic at system s startup by modifying the /etc/init.d/debomatic file at line 21:

- [ -x "$DAEMON" ]   exit 0
- [ "$DEBOMATIC_AUTOSTART" = 0 ] && exit 0
+ [ -x "$DAEMON" ]   exit 0
+ [ "$DEBOMATIC_AUTOSTART" = 1 ] && exit 0

and finally add it to the desired runlevels:

update-rc.d debomatic defaults

Enjoy!

Quick question, what is the lowest Process ID you will find? Most people (myself included until recently) would be able to say that the lowest number is 1 for the init process. Plenty of programs including ps and pstree have this assumption. This assumption bit me this week with Debian Bug 687829 where pstree on a kFreeBSD would not return and used 100% CPU. What was happening? Well it seems that kFreeBSD has a process ID of 0 and pstree used 0 for a fake root to the tree. So with a real and fake process #0 hanging around in pstree there was a strange parent-child circle (I m my own grandad!) between init and process 0 meaning when the tree was walked things go around in circles. The fix is basically to assume the tree starts at 0 and not 1 and that keeps things into perspective. So if you are wondering how inconsistent this goes, here is the list.

• Linux has init with PID 1 and PPID 0. There is no process 0
• FreeBSD has init with PID 1 and PPID 0. Process 0 is kernel and exists and has PPID 0
• Hurd has init at 1 with PPID 1. Process 0 is proc and has PPID 1

So Linux the root is init PID 1, FreeBSD it is kernel PID 0 and Hurd its init PID 1 with a child with PID 0. Nothing like consistency! I do like the crazyness of Hurd where a child is created before a parent; nothing is normal in Hurd-land. I have some temporary code going proving the problem with psmisc and FreeBSD, the tree now looks like what you can see below. This fix will also show up processes hidden under init that were previously hiding.

?()-+-acpi_cooling0(16)
     -acpi_thermal(15)
     -audit(10)
     -bufdaemon(18)
     -flowcleaner(22)
     -g_down(4)
     -g_event(2)
     -g_up(3)
     -hald-runner(547)---hald-addon-storag(569)
     -hald(546)-+-hald(548)---hald(549)
                 -hald-runner(547)---hald-addon-storag(569)
     -hald(548)---hald(549)
     -idle(11)
     -init(1)-+-etc....

Related articles

• An overview of Linux processes (ibm.com)
• What s a process? (acertifiednut.typepad.com)
• Hide process information for other users (linux-dev.org)
• What can you do with a PID? (acertifiednut.typepad.com)

After a long break in my row of interviews with people in the Debian Edu and Skolelinux community, I finally found time to wrap up another. This time it is Giorgio Pioda, which showed up on the mailing list at the start of this year, asking questions and inspiring us to improve the first time administrators experience with Skolelinux. :) The interview was conduced in May, but I only found time to publish it now. Who are you, and how do you spend your days? I have a PhD in chemistry but since several years I work as teacher in secondary (15-18 year old students) and tertiary (a kind of "light" university) schools. Five years ago I started to manage a Learning Management Service server and slowly I got more and more involved with IT. 3 years ago the graduating schools moved completely to Linux and I got the head of the IT for this. The experience collected in chemistry labs computers (for example NMR analysis of protein folding) and in the IT-courses during university where sufficient to start. Self training is anyway very important I live in the Italian speaking part of Switzerland, and the SPSE school (secondary) is a very special sport school for young people who try to became sport pro (for all sports, we have dozens of disciplines represented) and we are recognised by the Olympic Swiss Organisation. How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu project? Looking for Linux / Primary Domain Controller (PDC) I found it already several years ago. But since the system was still not Kerberized and since our schools relies strongly on laptops I didn't use it. I plan to introduce it in the next future, probably for the next school year, since the squeeze release solved this security hole. What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian Edu? Many. First of all there is a strong and living community that is very generous for help and hints. Chat help is crucial, together with the mailing list. Second. With Skolelinux you get an already well engineered platform and you don't have to start to build up your PDC and your clients from GNU/scratch; I've already done this once and I can tell it, it is hard. Third, since Skolelinux is a standard platform, it is way easier to educate other IT people and even if the head IT is sick another one could pick up the task without too much hassle. What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian Edu? The only real problem I see is that it is a little too less flexible at client level. Debian stable is rocky and desirable, but there are many reasons that force for another choice. For example the need of new drivers for new PC, or the need for a specific OS for some devices that have specific software packages for another specific distribution (I have such a case for whiteboards that have only Ubuntu packages). Thus, I prepared compatibility packages educlient and eduroaming, hoping not to use them ;-) Which free software do you use daily? I have a Debian Stable PDC at school (Kerberos, NIS, NFS) with mixed Debian and Ubuntu clients. If you think that this triad combination is exotic... well I discovered right yesterday that Perceus has the same... For myself I run Debian wheezy/sid, but this combination is good only I you have enough competence to fix stuff for yourself, if something breaks. Daily I use texmacs, gnumeric, a little bit of R statistics, kmplot, and less frequently OpenOffice.org. Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to get schools to use free software? I think that the only real argument that school managers "hear" is cost reduction. They don't give too much weight on quality, stability, just because they are normally not open to change. Students adapts very quickly to GNU/Linux (and for them being able to switch between different OS is a plus value); teachers and managers don't. We decided to move to Linux because students at our school have own laptop and we have the responsibility to keep the laptop ready to use; we were really unsatisfied with Microsoft since every Monday we had 20 machine to fix for viral infections... With Linux this has been reduced to zero, since people installs almost only from official repositories. I think that our special needs brought us to Linux. Those who don't have such needs will hardly move to Linux.

Yesterday, Kirsten Flipkens, after having had a pretty bad year in which she couldn't even enter the Wimbledon qualifiers, reached and won her first-ever WTA finals, in Quebec City. Flipkens, who was a junior world number 1 when she won the junior US open and Wimbledon tournaments in 2003, has had a fairly troublesome career, with some injuries at some bad times, and some bad luck as well, culminating in a career-high ranking of 59. In that light, it's refreshing to see everything finally coming together for her, and having her finally clinch that well-deserved title. With today's win, she jumps from a 102nd position to a whopping 69 in a single week. So again: Congratulations, Kirsten!

I just had a conversation with someone who thinks that their office should have no servers. The office in question has four servers, an Internet gateway/firewall system, the old file server (and also Xen server), the new file server, and the VOIP server. The Internet gateway system could possibly be replaced by a suitably smart ADSL modem type device, but that would reduce the control over the network and wouldn t provide much of a benefit. The VOIP server has to be a separate system for low latency IMHO. In theory you could use a Xen DomU for running Asterisk or you could run Asterisk on the Dom0 of the file/Xen server. But that just makes things difficult. A VOIP server needs to be reliable and is something that you typically don t want to touch once it s working, in this case the Asterisk server has been a few more years without upgrades than the Xen server. An Asterisk system could be replaced by a dedicated telephony device which some people might consider to be removing a server, but really a dedicated VOIP server device is just as much of a server as a P4 running Asterisk but with greater expense. A major advantage of a P4 running Asterisk is that you can easily replace the system at no cost if there is a hardware problem. Having two file servers is excessive for a relatively small office. But running two servers is the common practice when one server is being replaced. The alternative is to just immediately cut things over which has the potential for a lot of people to arrive at work on Monday and find multiple things not working as desired. Having two file servers is a temporary problem. File Servers The first real problem when trying to remove servers from an office is the file server. ADSL links with Annex M can theoretically upload data at 3Mb/s which means almost 400KB/s. So if you have an office with a theoretically perfect ADSL2+ Annex M installation then you could save a 4MB file to a file server on the Internet in not much more than 10 seconds if no-one else is using the Internet connection. Note that 4MB isn t THAT big by today s standards, the organisation in question has many files which are considerably bigger than that. Large files include TIFF and RAW files used for high quality image processing, MS-Office documents, and data files for most accounting programs. Saving a 65MB quick-books file in 3 minutes (assuming that your Annex M connection is perfect and no-one else is using the Internet) would have to suck. Then there s the issue of reading files, video files (which are often used for training and promotion) are generally larger than 100MB which would be more than 30 seconds of download time at ADSL2+ speed but if someone sends an email to everyone in the office saying please watch this video then the average time to load it would be a lot more. Through quickly examining my collection of Youtube downloads I found a video which averaged 590KB/s, if an office using a theoretically perfect ADSL2+ connection giving 24Mb/s (3MB/s) download speed had such a file on a remote file server then a maximum of five people could view it at one time if no-one else in the office was using the Internet. Now when the NBN is connected (which won t happen in areas like the Melbourne CBD for at least another 3 years) it will be possible to get speeds like 100Mb/s download and 25Mb/s upload. That would allow up to 20 people to view videos at once and a 65MB quick-books file could be saved in a mere 22 seconds if everyone else was idle. Of course that relies on the size of data files remaining the same for another 3 years which seems unlikely, currently no Youtube videos use resolutions higher than 1920*1080 (so they don t take full advantage of a $400 Dell monitor) and there s always potential for storing more financial data. I expect that by the time we all have 100Mb/25Mb speeds on the NBN it will be as useful to us as 24Mb/3Mb ADSL2+ Annex M speeds are today (great for home use but limited for an office full of people). There are of course various ways of caching data, but all of them involve something which would be considered to be a server and I expect that all of them are more difficult to install and manage than just having a local file server. Of course instead of crunching the numbers for ADSL speeds etc you could just think for a moment about the way that 100baseT networking to the desktop has been replaced by Gigabit networking. When people expect each workstation to have 1000Mb/s send and receive speed it seems quite obvious that one ADSL connection shared by an entire office isn t going to work well if all the work that is done depends on it. Management could dictate that there is to be no server in the office, but if that was to happen then the users would create file shares on their workstations so you would end up with ad-hoc servers which aren t correctly managed or backed up. That wouldn t be an improvement and technically wouldn t achieve the goal of not having servers. Home Networking Without Servers It is becoming increasingly common to have various servers in a home network. Due to a lack of space and power and the low requirements a home file server will usually be a workstation with some big disks, but there are cheap NAS devices which some people are installing at home. I don t recommend the cheap NAS devices, I m merely noting that they are being used. Home entertainment is also something that can benefit from a server. A MythTV system for recording TV and playing music has more features than a dedicated PVR box. But even the most basic PVR ($169 for a 1TB device in Aldi now) is still a fairly complex computer which would probably conflict with any aim to have a house free of servers. The home network design of having a workstation run as a file and print server can work reasonably well as long as the desktop tasks aren t particularly demanding (IE no games) and the system doesn t change much (IE don t track Debian/Testing or otherwise have new versions of software). But this is really something that only works if you only have a few workstations. Running an office without servers seems rather silly as it seems that none of my friends are able to have a home without a server. Running Internet Services Hypothetically speaking if one was to run an office without servers then that would require running all the servers in question on the Internet somewhere. For some things this can work better than a local server, for example most of my clients who insist on running a mail server in their office would probably get a better result if they had a mail server running on Linode or Hetzner or one of the Hosted Exchange offerings if they want a Windows mail sever. But for a file server if you were to get around the issue of bandwidth required to access the files in normal use there s the issue of managing a server (which is going to take more effort and expense than for a server on the LAN). Then there s the issue of backups. In my previous post about Hard Drives for Backup [1] I considered some of the issues related to backing data up over the Internet. The big problem however is a complete restore, if you have even a few dozen gigs of data that you want to transfer to a remote server in a hurry it can be a difficult problem. If you have hundreds of gigs then it becomes a very difficult problem. I m sure that I could find a Melbourne based Data Center (DC) that gives the option of bringing a USB attached SATA disk for a restore but even that case would give a significant delay when compared to backing things up on a LAN. If a server on the office LAN breaks in the afternoon my client can make arrangements to let me work in their office in the evening to fix it, but sometimes DCs don t allow 24*7 access and sometimes when they do allow access there are organisational problems that make it impossible when you want it (EG the people at the client company who are authorised become unavailable). The Growth of Servers Generally it s a really bad idea to build a server that has exactly the hardware you need. The smart thing to do is to install more of every resource (disk, RAM, CPU, etc) than is needed and to allow expansion when possible (EG have some RAM slots and drive bays free). No matter how well you know your environment and it s users you can get surprised by the way that requirements change. Buying a slightly bigger server at the start costs hardly any money but upgrading a server will cost a lot. Once you have a server that s somewhat over-specced you will always find other things to run on it. Many things could be run elsewhere at some cost, but if you have unused hardware then you may as well use it. Xen and other virtualisation systems are really good in this regard as they allow you to add more services without making upgrades difficult. This means that it s quite common to have a server that is purchased for one task but which ends up being used for many tasks. Anyone who would aspire to an office without servers would probably regard adding extra features in such a manner to be a problem. But really if you want to allow the workers to do their jobs then it s best to be able to add new services as needed without going through a budget approval process for each one. Conclusion There probably are some offices where no-one does any serious file access and everyone s work is based around a web browser or some client software that is suited to storing data on the Internet. But for an office where the workers use traditional Office software such as MS-Office or Libre-Office a file server is necessary. Some sort of telephony server is necessary no matter how you do things. If you have a traditional telephone system then you might try not to call the PABX a server , but really that s what it is. Then when the traditional phone service becomes too expensive you have to consider whether to use Asterisk or a proprietary system, in either case it s really a server. In almost every case the issue isn t whether to have a server in the office, but how many servers to have and how to manage them.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2012/08/08/hard-drives-backup/

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Over the past few days, I decided to purge Gnash and LightSpark from my laptop to see whether my Internet experience would be affected in any dramatic way. Amazingly, a number of sites seem to offer video content encoded in Theora (VP3) or WebM (VP8). Sadly, a handful of popular sites such as Vimeo insist upon using the H.264 (MPEG-4) CODEC, which cannot be safely supported on Free Software because of unclear licensing issues that might impose an ulterior usage fee onto the end-users.

The good news is that the Mozilla Foundation has decided to avoid the issue together: starting with the most recent release of the mobile version of Firefox, content decoding is offloaded to the platform's native media CODEC library. On most Free Software platforms, this means that Gstreamer will handle the content and, in turn, use gstreamer-plugins-bad to perform the decoding. However, Gstreamer support is still rather sketchy, as attested by this Debian bug report and thus disabled by default. This leaves me wondering how little is missing for this to properly work. Would either Canonical or Red Hat perhaps be interested in funding this?

Ever wondered how you can update your website (in our case a static website with a bunch of HTML and PHP files) by committing to a Git repository hosted on a different server? if the answer to the previous question is yes, then you are in the right place. The scenario: - Website hosted on server A.
- Git repository hosted on server B. and a few details about why would you opt for maintaining your website through Git:

1. You need multiple people to access the static content of your website and you also want to maintain all the history of changes together with all the Git s magic.
2. You think using an FTP server is not secure enough.
3. You think giving out SSH access or more permissions on the server to multiple users it s not what you want. (also using scp will overwrite the files directly with all its consequences)

the setup, on server A: 1. Clone the Git repository over the directory that your Web server will serve.

cd /srv/www.domain.com/http && sudo git clone http://git.example.com/git/domain.git

2. Grab the needed package:

apt-get install fishpolld or yum install fishpolld

3. Set up a topic (called website_update) that will call a git pull each time the repository hosted on server B receives an update. (the file has to be placed into the /etc/fishpoll.d directory)

#!/bin/bash
PATH="/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin"
WEBSITEDIR="/srv/www.domain.com/http"
if [ -d "$ WEBSITEDIR " ]; then
cd "$ WEBSITEDIR "
else
echo "Unable to access theme directory. Failing."
exit 1
fi
git pull

4. Add a little configuration file that will enable the website_update s topic at daemon s startup. (you should name it website_update.conf)

[fishpoll]
on_start = True

5. Open the relevant port on Iptables so that server A and server B can communicate as expected, the daemon runs over port 27527.

-A INPUT -m state --state NEW -m tcp -p tcp -s server-B-IP --dport 27527 -j ACCEPT

6. Start the daemon. (by default, logs are sent to syslog but you can run the daemon in Debug mode by using the -D flag)

sudo /etc/init.d/fishpolld start or sudo systemctl start fishpolld.service or sudo /usr/sbin/fishpolld -D

and on server B: 1. Grab the needed package:

apt-get install fishpoke or yum install fishpoke

2. Configure the relevant Git hook (post-update, located into the hooks directory) and make it executable.

#!/bin/sh
echo "Triggering update of configuration on server A"
fishpoke server-A-IP-or-DNS website_update

Finally test the whole setup by committing to the repository hosted on server B and verify your changes being sent live on your website!

Right now, in many parts of the world, people are celebrating the Software Freedom Day 2012. The Debian project as well is participating to some of these events with talks, demos and partying. In particular, you can find our project members actively involved in different locations and activies, among which: Brazil Novo Hamburgo, RS

• BASH for sysadmins
• What is the Debian Project?
• ZFS: quick presentation for sysadmins.

Italy Quiliano, SV

• Introduction to the Debian Project

UK Rugby A series of hands-on live demonstrations, including:

• Linux-based machines running Debian or Debian-derived distributions
• FreedomBox for visitors to check out
• Raspberry Pi machines running Raspbian, used to help local children and parents learn Scratch

Personally, right now I m celebrating in Italy, attending a talk by the famous kernel hacker Alessandro Rubini (a really great speech about our freedom and how software impacts it). Cheers from the Italian Riviera!