Search Results: "ag"

6 August 2012

Richard Hartmann: The problem with copyright maximalism

The gradual descent into a [permission culture](http://www.ibiblio.org/ebooks/Lessig/Free_Culture/Free Culture.htm#pxiii) has many ugly heads. Be they copyright maximalism, patent wars, cementing antiquated business models by suing, or a myriad of other things. One of said ugly heads is that people pretend to have a copyright just to milk others. The name Righthaven will be known to most people as a prime example of this going badly for the offenders. From how it looks, the people behind Righthaven, a company founded just to sue others, are being pursued through that shell. Many of you will know the infamous "You have to watch this on YouTube as Rightster filed a copyright claim" notice. What this means is that YouTube will (try to) display ads and Rightster will get a share of any revenue. I can't comment on the validity of those claims, but some of them struck me as dubious in the past. We reached a new low, though. Scripps Local News, which publishes world-renowned papers such as Ventura County Star and Corpus Christi Caller-Times, temporarily blocked NASA's video of Mission Control during MSL's seven minutes of radio silence with their copyright claim. As NASA-produced video featuring NASA, published on NASA's YouTube account. Blocked: Turns out something is borked here and I don't have time to fix it right now. I uploaded it to imgur as a quick fix. The video has been made accessible again in the meantime, but this is, yet again, proof that we are sliding into a society where content and knowledge is locked down by default. Don't let that happen. Pester your politicians, inform your friends, participate in demonstrations, and don't give up. It's our culture, not theirs.

Michal Čihař: Ukolovnik 1.4

Great effort of new translators finally forced me to release Ukolovnik 1.4. There are only minor bug fixes besides translations updates. Full list of changes: PS: I don't plan any further development of this tool, in fact I have not touched it in last year and I don't expect this to change.

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Vasudev Kamath: Logging issue with Flask

While enabling logging for release of rewritten version of SILPA described in my previous post I faced a weird problem. I enabled Logging as described in the Flask documentation but SILPA won't log anything to the log even though log file is created in whatever location I gave while configuring the logging. Flask documentation suggests following way to use logging 
import logging
from logging.handlers import RequiredHandler
file_handler = RequiredHandler(...)
file_handler.setLevel(logging.WARNING)
app.logger.addHandler(file_handler)
After banging my head for some time I again wanted to look at Python's logging tutorials see if I'm doing something wrong and I found this example 
import logging
# create logger
logger = logging.getLogger('simple_example')
logger.setLevel(logging.DEBUG)
# create console handler and set level to debug
ch = logging.StreamHandler()
ch.setLevel(logging.DEBUG)
# create formatter
formatter = logging.Formatter('%(asctime)s - %(name)s - %(levelname)s - %(message)s')
# add formatter to ch
ch.setFormatter(formatter)
# add ch to logger
logger.addHandler(ch)
# 'application' code
logger.debug('debug message')
logger.info('info message')
logger.warn('warn message')
logger.error('error message')
logger.critical('critical message')
So there it is I need to set the logging level even on logger to same level as what I set on my handler. Now I didn't take time to read the documentation because I wanted to see if my findings really does the trick so I modified function configuring logging to look something like below (I'm taking the example given in Flask documentation itself real code can be seen in SILPA code on Github) 
import logging
from logging.handlers import RequiredHandler
file_handler = RequiredHandler(...)
file_handler.setLevel(logging.WARNING)
app.logger.setLevel(logging.WARNING)
app.logger.addHandler(file_handler)
This actually did the trick and now Flask is happily logging whatever I give to app.logger.levelname So I don't know this was my stupidity or fault in Flask's documentation by forgetting to mention this crucial point. But in the end all is well :-) Do comment your thoughts.

5 August 2012

Dirk Eddelbuettel: Counting CRAN Package Depends, Imports and LinkingTo

The recent update by S ren H jsgaard's to his gRbase package for graphical models made it the 75th package to depend on our Rcpp package for R and C++ integration. So in a lighthearted weekend moment, I tweeted about gRbase being number 75 for Rcpp to which Hadley replied, asking if Rcpp was in fact number one among R package Depends. Far from it, and I immediately replied listing lattice and Matrix as packages with way more other packages depending upon them. But as the question seemed deserving of a bit more analysis, I spent a few minutes on this and prepared three charts listing package in order of reverse Depends, reverse Imports and reverse LinkingTo. First off, the reverse Depends:. This is the standard means of declaring a dependence of one package upon another. CRAN package chart of Reverse Depends relations Unsurprisingly, the MASS package from the classic Venables and Ripley book comes first, with Deepayan Sarkar's powerful lattice package (also covered in a book) coming second. These are both recommended packages which are commonly distributed with R itself. Next are mvtnorm and survival. Our Rcpp is up there in the top-ten, but not a frontrunner. With the advent of namespaces a few R releases ago, it became possible to import functions from other packages. So the Imports: statement now provides an alternative to the (older) Depends:. The next chart displays the same relationship for Imports:: CRAN package chart of Reverse Imports relations Now lattice still leads, but Hadleys's plyr package grabbed the second spot just before MASS and Matrix. It is interesting to see that the sheer number of Imports: is still not where the Depends: are. On the other hand, we see a number of more recent packages popping up in the second chart. This may reflect more recent coding practices. It will be interesting to see how this stacks up over time when we revisit this chart. Lastly, we can also look at LinkingTo:, a declaration used to provide a C/C++-level dependency at the source code level. We use this in the Rcpp family to provide automatic resolution of the header files needed to compile against our packages. And unsurprisingly, because packages using Rcpp actually use its API (rather than R functions), the package is a little ahead of others. In the package we find three more packages of the Rcpp family, but only a limited number of other packages as C/C++-level dependencies are still somewhat rare in the R universe. There are also fewer packages overall making use of this mechanism. CRAN package chart of Reverse LinkingTo relations One could of course take this one level further and sum up dependencies in a recursive manner, or visualize the relationship differently. But these dotchart graphs provide a first visual description of the magnitude of Depends, Imports and LinkingTo among CRAN packages for R.

Stefano Zacchiroli: bits from the DPL for July 2012

Monthly DPL bits, fresh from the oven.
Tip to feel good about the release #476: before reading this, grab and fix one of the RC bugs affecting Wheezy. Done? Now you're ready for a slightly less exciting report of DPL activities. Highlights Assets Logo & trademark Note that the actual logo relicensing should be done by SPI, via their board, upon request of mine (as Debian Project liaison). We won't make it for the next SPI board meeting, as it is on 4 days away. But we can aim for the subsequent meeting, on September 13th. If all goes well (big "if"), we will enjoy a DFSG-free logo after that date. Internal organization Recent flurry of re-organization in the tech-ctte --- which I somewhat triggered pushing for periodic meetings --- seems to be proceeding well. I'm very happy about it, as we all need to trust that tech-ctte decisions will be not only sound, but also prompt. If you're interested into this topic, some recent evidence of the ongoing reorganization and its result can be found in their DebConf12 BoF, minutes of the last meeting, a set of forthcoming GRs, and the recent great decision of posting decisions results to d-d-a (as it happened for node/nodejs). Kudos to tech-ctte members for the recent activism! I haven't worked on it myself directly, but I highlight Enrico's work on server side archival of NM conversations. It has the potential of enabling automatic detection of stuck NM processes. I'm a bit rusty as AM now, but I think missing that ability is one of the main remaining causes of frustration when joining Debian. So, if you are an AM, please opt-in and use this feature with your appicants. If you are not an AM why not? :-) Miscellanea Some misc legal stuff: and some misc "political" stuff: Happy RC bug squashing,
Cheers.
PS the boring day-to-day activity log for July 2012 is available at master:/srv/leader/news/bits-from-the-DPL.txt.201207

Steve Kemp: minidlna is now packaged

So in my previous entry I talked about streaming audio media to my new tablet. Despite it working for others I couldn't get MPDroid to stream to my tablet from my MPD server successfully. After looking around for alternatives I used MediaTomb to stream my content to the Android "2player" application. After a while I switched from MediaTomb to minidlna instead - that application being built from source. To save myself effort, and be useful, I've packaged that for Squeeze here : There's a configuration file in /etc/minidlna and a trivial init-script. Works for me. In more fun news yesterday I endured and epic 8 hour bus trip and travelled from Edinburgh to Loch Ness. Why go to Loch Ness? Well I fancied a swim, and wanted to capture shots of hairy cows. In addition to that I saw several interesting birds and a lot of Scottish Scenery. All in all a good day out. ObQuote: "It's not you. It's me... I'm completely fucked up."- Cruel Intentions

Gregor Herrmann: RC bugs 2012/31

this was my first week at work after my vacations, & also the first week of "normal" RC bug work. here's my short report:

Vasudev Kamath: Rewriting SILPA with Flask microframework

As a introduction on what is SILPA you can read my previous post This application was written by Santhosh about 6-7 years ago in May 2010 2009 ( Correct me if I'm wrong Santhosh ;-) Thanks to Santhosh for correcting me ) in Python without using any web framework. He crafted whole system single handed and with very nice ideas. He wrote all the modules available in it for all possible Indian languages even though he is native Malayalam speaker. I joined him 3 years back and I was providing some or other improvements and he ultimately made me as the Co-Developer of SILPA. Recently I came across the Flask microframework and thought of rewriting SILPA to use Flask. You might ask me why Flask? So here are my reasonings 
 1. Why reinvent Python webframework when we can use existing? Besides maintaining a not so well known framework code which is not written by you will be difficult    and time consuming.
 2. All Python modules are useful even outside SILPA project why make them dependent on SILPA code?
 3. Templating system used is very old and can't be ported to new Python version lets use something which is new and portable
 4. If new contributor wanted to add a module he need to understand SILPA framework to write and integrate it. This might be discouraging new
    contributions so lets use pure python module and make integration with SILPA straight forward.
 5. I was overwhelmed by Flask :P
I had previously tried bottle microframework but for some reason I couldn't crack it so choosing of Flask is not because it was better among other available microframework or something like that. I choose it because I could easily understand it and it suited my needs better. So I proposed about this to Santhosh and he asked me for a POC code. I started working on April 8 2012 and today by August 5 I can say I've first stable version of SILPA rewritten using Flask deployable over WSGI on Apache2. It can also be deployed on other servers supporting WSGI interface. It took me quite a bit of time but to be frank in the middle I completely had stopped coding because of some other works. Here is the commit graph and code frequency graphs from Github.

Changes in New Version Here is some major changes in current version. 
1. Newly developed framework provides plug and play features for new modules.
2. You need to install the modules which you want to run on it separately using PIP and only minimal code change is required. Only configuration and webbridge.py 
   will be changed. Ofcourse you need to add html file to *templates* folder.
3. This version uses decent routing logic from Flask for page serving.
4. It also provides JSONRPC interface which is compatible with previous version but only with method name changed.
5. This version separates out run time module loading and routing the request to modules.
6. Dynamic module loading now happens only at the beginning of application, so if I want to implement caching for particular services it will be straight forward
   now.
7. Routing requests to proper module is adapted from old version with few modifications
8. All previous pages are now converted to use *Jinja2* template system.
Things Remaining TODO Below is some stuffs still pending before this version can completely replace http://silpa.org.in 
1. Separate all modules from original SILPA and get it uploaded to pypi
2. Provide RESTful interface
3. Provide proper LICENSE, AUTHORS file for all modules 
4. Prepare a Nice UI
5. Find a better name than *SILPA*
...
Update 
Forgot to provide the github link and demo link for the new version of SILPA. Thanks to Aravinda for pointing
it out. Here it goes
Github: http://github.com/copyninja/Silpa-Flask
Demo: http://flasksilpa-indic.rhcloud.com

4 August 2012

Gerfried Fuchs: Mermaids Reloaded, Addendum

First things first: The issue with the feedback form is fixed. Sorry for the inconvenience. I'm not sure if you followed the schedule of this year's debconf closely, but there was an International Poetry Night happening. Given that Mermaids still is quite important for me, but also, that I like to write poetry every now and then, I had the idea spinning around in my head to present Mermaids there. The simple thought of that made me extremely nervous. Things happened as they liked to happen: the video streaming setup for debconf still was giving me a bit of headaches, and suddenly it was too late to print out the poem because I didn't even had CUPS installed on my new laptop. Also, having reread it recently I noticed that it wasn't flowing too well, so I was uncertain whether it would be possible to properly perform it. I attended nevertheless. It was rather cosy in El Panal, but still a fair amount of people there. And to my surprise, quite a lot of Debian people were presenting poetry. Some in Spanish, some in English, but also one in Japanese, one in German and even one Esperanto. I had the feeling that I really should present something too. I still was extremely nervous, but during the day I had opened some of my poems in the browser, so I started to write down The Girl and the Boy, and when Fito called me to the microphone, I think most people were able to tell how nervous I was about it. But it went well. It even went so well that I felt the need to perform another poem. I chose that's what friends are for, quickly scribbling it down in bad light. The choice was easy, given that it is one that means a lot to me and that an haiku already got presented. It was really a nice experience to not only write these poems and publishing them on deviantART and in my blog, but also to present them to a live audience. Then there was a break. Actually I thought it was over already, but they started a second round. And I somehow liked the way it worked out, so I started to dig for something else to present. I settled for Strange and Jonathan insisted on translating it into Spanish and present that version, too. His version wasn't in Haiku style, but I think it still was a very nice idea. It seem to have been received well, but given that I don't speak Spanish I can only hope he was able to catch the feelings that I did put into this short piece. I am confident he did well. :) As final piece I settled for another short piece, this time it was in German, Wahre Liebe. I think I was able to transport the feelings of it with adding pauses in certain spots, although I fear most people didn't get it because it was ... well, in German. Again, a fair amount of the people who presented poetry were from Debian, actually more than half of it I think. And I am wondering: When will the CfP for next year's debconf open so we can try to establish this event as regular debconf event? And who knows, maybe I'll find the courage then to perform Mermaids.

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Russell Coker: Love of Technology at First Sight

After seeing the Retina display I ve been thinking about the computer products that I ve immediately desired. Here is the list of the ones I can still remember:
  1. My first computer which was the TEC-1 [1], in 1982 or 1983.
  2. A computer with a full keyboard and a monitor (Microbee), in about 1984. A hex-only keypad is very limiting.
  3. Unix, initially SunOS 4.0 in 1991. Primarily the benefits of this were TCP/IP networking, fast email (no multi-day delay for Fidonet mail), IRC, and file transfer from anywhere in the world. Not inherent benefits to Unix, but at the time only Unix systems did TCP/IP at all well.
  4. OS/2 2.0 in 1992. At the time OS/2 had the best GUI of any system available (IMHO) and clearly the best multitasking of DOS and Windows programs.
  5. Linux in 1992. I started with the TAMU and MCC Interim distributions and then moved to SLS when it was released. The first kernel I compiled was about 0.52. At the time the main use of Linux for almost everyone was to learn about Unix and compile kernels. In 1993 I started running a public access Linux server.
  6. Trinitron monitors in 1996. I first saw an IBM Trinitron monitor when working on an IBM project and had to buy one for home use, at the time a 17 Trinitron monitor beat the hell out of any other display device that one could reasonably afford. A bigger screen allowed me to display more code at once which allowed easier debugging.
  7. Thinkpad laptops from 1998 until now. They just keep working well and seem to be better than other products every time I compare them. I also like the TrackPoint. 1998 was when a Thinkpad dropped to a mere $3,800 for a system that could run with 96M of RAM, enough compute power for the biggest compiles and it cost less than most cars!
  8. The KDE desktop environment in 1998. In 1998 I switched my primary workstation from a PC running OS/2 to a Thinkpad running Linux because of KDE. Prior to KDE nothing on Linux was user-friendly enough.
  9. The iPaQ hand-held PC. I got one in 2002 and ran the Familiar distribution of Linux on it. I had it running SE Linux and used it for writing an article for Linux Journal. Being able to get a computer out on public transport to do some work really saved some time. In some ways the iPaQ hardware and the Familiar OS beat modern Android systems.
  10. The EeePC 701 which I bought in 2008 [2]. In the last 4 years someone has probably released a system that s no larger or heavier and has the same amount of compute power (enough for web browsing, email, and ssh). But most Netbooks that I ve seen don t compete. The EeePC allowed me to take laptops to places where it previously wasn t convenient.
  11. Android, before using Android I never had a smart phone that I used for anything other than taking photos. The other smart phone OSs are either locked down or don t have the app support that Android has. I listed lots of problems with my first phone the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10, but I still really enjoyed using it a lot [3]. Since getting an Android phone I ve read a lot of email while on the go, this means I can respond faster when necessary and use time that might otherwise be wasted. The ssh client means that I don t need to carry a laptop with me when there s a risk that emergency sysadmin work may be required.
  12. Cheap rented servers, Amazon defined cloud computing with EC2, Linode offers great deals for small virtual servers, and Hetzner offers amazing deals on renting entire servers. Getting your own Internet connection or running your own physical server in someone s data-center is a lot of effort and expense. Being able to just rent servers is so much easier and allows so many new projects. I can t remember when I first started using such services, maybe 5 years ago.
  13. The Apple Retina Display [4] a few days ago.
For the period between 1998 and 2008 I can t think of anything that really excited me apart from the iPaQ. Computers became a lot smaller, faster, cheaper, etc. But it was never a big exciting change. The AMD64 architecture wasn t particularly exciting as most systems didn t need more than 4G of RAM and the ones that did could use PAE. What are the most exciting computer products you have seen? Related posts:
  1. Old PDA vs New Mobile Phone for PDA use Since about 2002 I have been using a iPaQ [1]...
  2. CyanogenMod and the Galaxy S Thanks to some advice from Philipp Kern I have now...
  3. Moving from a Laptop to a Cloud Lifestyle My Laptop History In 1998 I bought my first laptop,...

3 August 2012

Christian Perrier: Why the name?

Justin B. Rye, the by far most efficient and clever reviewer of the "Debian English Localization Team" (working in the debian-l10n-english mailing list) just created a great page : Why The Name. This page tries to give a clue about some cryptic packages and software names and is a great moment to read, both because you'll definitely learn something...and also benefit from tJustin's so british humor. Justin, when do you apply as non-uploading DD?

Bastian Venthur: Usability of git-http-backend with self signed SSL certificates

Why makes it git so hard to use a self signed SSL certificate in conjunction with the https protocol? At work we have a server for shared git repositories. For some reasons we can t use the ssh protocoll to acces the repositories so we looked into the git-http-backend. So far so good but we want it encrypted, of course. So we used SSL with our self signed certificate:
git clone https://git.example.com/public
Cloning into 'public'...
error: server certificate verification failed. CAfile: /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt CRLfile: none while accessing https://git.example.com/public/info/refs
fatal: HTTP request failed
 Huh? Looking deeper into the problem it turns out that git uses curl for the http(s) transport and curl refuses to work with SSL certificates it cannot verify. Ok, that s not a bad thing. To circumvent that you can either set an environment variable (GIT_SSL_NO_VERIFY=1) to make curl ignore the verification or install the certificate on your machine. The first option is not very attractive on the long term as you d have to do it on every operation with the remote server, the second one is not very attractive when dealing with multiple developers working on different operating systems. You ll have to explain to them how to install the certificate on their machine, and that has to be done every time a new developer joins the team, yada, yada. There is also an option in git (http.sslverify) you can set where you can tell git to ignore the verification of the SSL certificate for that repository. The thing is you still have to set the environment variable on the first clone and then you have to tell git to permanently ignore this issue for that repository with the configuration option a lot of stuff to remember. Heck, looking on the interwebs I see may of the people with that problem suggesting to shut of SSL cert verification permanently by setting it globally. I really wonder why git cannot simply tell the user that the SSL certificate cannot be verified and if you want to accept it permanently, temporarily or not. Every browser does that. Right now it just quits with an error and leaves the user with a cryptic error. On the other side, when using git with a server providing the repositories via ssh. Git simply asks if you want to accept the key when you access the server for the first time and never bothers you again.

Michal Čihař: Nuremberg month ago

About a month ago, I've spent some time in Nuremberg and took few night pictures there. As usual, downloading them from my camera took quite long, but nevertheless now there are online: Kettensteg, Nuremberg Maxbr cke, St. Lorenz, Nuremberg Weinstadel, Nuremberg Weinstadel, Nuremberg Heilig-Geist Spital, Nuremberg Kaiserburg, Nuremberg Kaiserburg, Nuremberg

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Paul Tagliamonte: monomoy (the next generation of qlight)

I ve been working on a replacement to qlight since I ve blogged about it something a bit more self-contained and clean. I ve settled on the name monomoy, since I had a lot of the ideas i ve been using come to me on the real monomoy. In particular, I d like for it to support having remote build-nodes, and non-archive upload patterns I d like to be able to upload pkg-foo/1.1.2-1 (UNRELEASED) 20 times without bumping the changelog. Now, my approach and local test-code has been unorthodox. I ve decided to throw caution to the wind, and store as much as I can in mongodb, including parsed debian control files. I ve recently (this afternoon) added support for build queues, which I hope to build out. More to come once it s sane, but it s working-ish!

2 August 2012

Russell Coker: Sam Harris on Lying

The Neuroscientist and atheism advocate Sam Harris has written a short blog post about a journalist named Jonah Lehrer who destroyed his career through false quotes and lies about them [1]. The main point of the article seems to be to promote his new eBook about Lying. The book is available for free until the end of the week (not sure if that is Friday, Saturday, or Sunday and in what time zone get it quick if you want it). The book is very short, 58 pages with a single column of large font text. If written a densely as a typical research paper it would probably be about 12 pages. But it has some good points to make. He makes a good moral case against most forms of lying, even answering questions such as do I look fat . It seems that anyone who was to follow his advice would be unusually honest even by Aspie standards. Related posts:
  1. Lies and Online Dating Separating Fact From Fiction: An Examination of Deceptive Self-Presentation in...
  2. Links January 2012 Cops in Tennessee routinely steal cash from citizens [1]. They...
  3. Desks Lindsay Holmwood has written about the benefits of a standing...

Sorina Sandu: Status update - D-I improve network config

Hello!

Here's a short status update:

[1] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=682737
[2] http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=d-i/netcfg.git;a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/people/sorina/write_config
[3] http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=d-i/netcfg.git;a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/people/sorina/coding_style
[4] https://github.com/sorinasandu/Debian_Netcfg/tree/local_testing

Sorina

Michal Čihař: Weblate in numbers

About month ago, I wrote that there were over 20000 translations done using Weblate in three months. It looks like I was too pessimistic with future as in slightly more than month l10n.cihar.com has reached 30000 translations. This is quite great achievement and shows big user base. Especially together with rising number of third-party installations of Weblate (still some of the big ones do not want to be mentioned). On the other side, there have already been around 100 issues open, out of which most were fixed (1.2 release already includes 30 fixed issues). Still I'm sure there is lot of place for improvements :-). Anyway if you are looking for more numbers, you can find them on Ohloh :-).

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1 August 2012

Bdale Garbee: Early Retirement

I am pleased to announce that HP accepted my application for participation in this year's Enhanced Early Retirement program. After 26.5 years, my last day at HP will be 31 August 2012. This isn't because I have a problem with HP, quite the contrary! I feel immensely privileged to have worked on so many interesting things with so many smart people for so long. And there are many exciting things happening right now, including high profile projects like Odyssey and Moonshot expanding both ends of the server scaling continuum with Linux, and the immense commitment to and investment in Open Source represented by the use of Open Stack and Ubuntu LTS in building HP Cloud. The temptation to stay and continue to help guide HP's Open Source engagement was strong. I'm certainly under no pressure to leave... in fact, I think I managed to shock my management with my decision to retire! But I'm very excited about "taking a break" from full-time employment for a while to focus more time on things that matter a lot to me. My son and I have a number of projects we'd like to work on together as he enters high school. The side business I started two years ago with Keith Packard to design, build, and sell avionics solutions for high power model rockets is growing and could use more attention. I'm in the midst of designing the processor board for another amateur radio satellite. And of course, I'm looking forward to putting more "quality time" towards Free Software projects like FreedomBox and Debian! Since they do not depend on my employment status, I do not expect any immediate changes in the various roles I play outside of HP. I will continue to serve on the board of the Linux Foundation representing individual affiliates, on the board of the FreedomBox Foundation, as Chairman of the Debian Technical Committee, and as President of Software in the Public Interest. And while I hope to travel less than I have in recent years, I look forward to continuing to speak and otherwise participate in key Free Software conferences around the world from time to time. After I retire, the primary point of contact with HP on Open Source matters will be the Director of HP's Open Source Program Office, Phil Robb. But if there are open issues regarding HP and Open Source that I can help with over the next month, feel free to contact me and I'll see what I can do to help.

Christian Perrier: Adios Nicaragua!

So, it's now over. After two weeks of DebCamp+DebConf, followed by two weeks touring over to the best places in Nicaragua with my beloved Elisabeth (our first long holidays as a couple without children since....1987!), my best holidays EVER are over. I visited a wonderful country. I met wonderful people. And I have to come back as I left un unachieved volcano climb (some could think I did that on purpose just to have an excuse for coming back)...:-) I'll probably try to blog about all this in a soon-to-come very long bubullish post (IOW: full of typos and Frenglish) for those of you who aren't tired of these. Now, doh, I have two gardens to clean out before resuming work in less than two weeks.

Russell Coker: Hetzner now Offers SSD

Hetzner is offering new servers with SSD, good news for people who want to run ZFS (for ZIL and/or L2ARC). See the EX server configuration list for more information [1]. Unfortunately they don t specify what brand of SSD, this is a concern for me as some of the reports about SSD haven t been that positive, getting whichever SSD is cheapest isn t appealing. A cheap SSD might be OK for L2ARC (read cache), but for ZIL (write cache) reliability is fairly important. If anyone has access to a Hetzner server with SSD then please paste the relevant output of lsscsi into a comment. The next issue is that they only officially offer it on the new EX 8S server. SSD will be of most interest to people who also want lots of RAM (the zfsonlinux.org code has given me kernel panics when running with a mere 4G of RAM even when I did the recommended tuning to reduce ARC size). Also people who want more capable storage options will tend to want more RAM if only for disk caching. But I m sure that there are plenty of people who would be happy to have SSD on a smaller and cheaper server. The biggest SSD offering of 240G is bigger than a lot of servers. I run a Hetzner server that has only 183G of disk space in use (and another 200G of backups). If the backups were on another site then the server in question could have just a RAID-1 of SSD for all it s storage. In this case it wouldn t be worth doing as the server doesn t have much disk IO load, but it would be nice to have the option the exact same server plus some more IO load would make SSD the ideal choice. The biggest problem is that the EX 8S server is really expensive. Hard drives which are included in the base price for cheaper options are now expensive additions. A server with 2*3TB disks and 2*240G SSD is E167 per month! That s more expensive than three smaller servers that have 2*3TB disks! The good news for someone who wants SSD is that the Hetzner server auction has some better deals [2]. As is always the case with auction sites the exact offers will change by the moment, but currently they offer a server with 2*120G SSD and 24G of RAM for E88 per month and a server with 2*120G SSD, 2*1.5T HDD, and 24G of RAM for E118. E88 is a great deal if your storage fits in 240G and E118 could be pretty good if you only have 1.5T of data that needs ZFS features. The main SSD offering is still a good option for some cases. A project that I did a couple of years ago would probably have worked really well on a E167/month server with 2*3TB and 2*240G SSD. It was designed around multiple database servers sharding the load which was largely writes, so SSD would have allowed a significant reduction in the number of servers. They also don t offer SSD on their storage servers which is a significant omission. I presume that they will fix that soon enough. 13 disks and 2 SSD will often be more useful than 15 disks. That s assuming the SSD doesn t suck of course. The reason this is newsworthy is that most hosted server offerings have very poor disk IO and no good options for expanding it. For servers that you host yourself it s not too difficult to buy extra trays of disks or even a single rack-mount server that has any number of internal disks in the range 2 to 24 and any choice as to how you populate them. But with rented servers it s typically 2 disks with no options to add SSD or other performance enhancements and no possibility of connecting a SAN. As an aside it would still be nice if someone ran a data center that supported NetApp devices and gave the option of connecting an arbitrary number of servers to a NetApp Filer (or a redundant pair of Filers). If anyone knows of a hosting company that provides options for good disk IO which are better than just providing SSD or cheaper than E167 per month then please provide the URL in a comment. Update: It seems that I can get SSD added to one of the cheaper servers. This is a good option as I have some servers that already have the flexi-pack due to a need for more IP addresses. Related posts:
  1. Servers vs Phones Hetzner have recently updated their offerings to include servers with...
  2. Hetzner Failover Konfiguration The Wiki documenting how to configure IP failover for Hetzner...
  3. Dedicated vs Virtual Servers A common question about hosting is whether to use a...

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