Search Results: "will"

17 April 2008

Gunnar Wolf: Dear lazyweb: Large volumes strategy?

Wouter, you seem to enjoy using huge filesystem volumes. So, dear lazyweb...
I have a 500GB disk for my users' home partitions - they mainly use it to back up their desktop data, but I do expect them to give it more usage. Anyway - I am currently using around 350GB of it, leaving the rest still unpartitioned. I have switched over to ReiserFS, as online resizing it is way faster than online resizing ext3 - it's basically instantaneous.
It seems I do belong to the old sysadmin school, and I value highly the reliability that comes from not having filesystems too large for their own good - After all, recovering from failure in 10GB is way more probable than doing the same in 100 or 1000, isn't it? But then again, it's just impractical to create /home/samba/ 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9 / and randomly split users' directories inside them. Most users won't use more than a couple MB, but some users (legitimately!) back up tens of GB... It's hard for me to anticipate their needs.
Does any of you have scary stories regarding huge volumes? Or any data supporting the idea that I'm just too old fashioned and that half a TB is a good partition size?
Note that I _am_ holding full backups :)
[update]: So I'm undoubtley an old fart? Everybody seems to have partitions larger than me. Ok, I will stop crying...

Joerg Jaspert: debadmin delegation - should I accept or deny it?

As you might have read on debian-devel-announce lately, Sam delegated the ftpmaster rights to me. Steve, our new DPL, did state his full support in an IRC query minutes later. Now I got a query from someone who is, pretty strongly, argumenting that I should decline this delegation. Mostly on the grounds that it is not nice to force new team members into an existing team, and that it is not a good environment to work in, if a DPL can do that if he feels like proving a point. Leaving alone the fact that delegations are one (central) part of the DPL job, and that the constitution leaves a way if you do not like those delegations (GR), I’m now unsure what to do. (Just for the record - i once was bitten by a DPL using his powers in a way I absolutely did hate (and still do). Some of you might remember the fun around the DebConf7 venue decision). I could do
  1. decline the delegation, stay ftp assistant only. Which I am for a long time now. Possibly see some flame on the lists when I do this.
  2. do nothing, ie. accept the delegation. That will get at least one of the long time ftpmasters upset, possibly more of them. Maybe with a resign from that job. Or Debian. But it would enable me to do the work only ftpmasters can do, like changes to the code, changes to the archive directly, etc. Without delays while waiting for a master to comment on something I prepared. Good example here is the current situation with the release teams transitions: They are 90% done and merged, just one little more merge is waiting to happen before they are ready to use… And whenever I tried to get a master (mostly Aj, as he was working with me on this) to do the final steps I got nothing but silence back, even when he was otherwise active…
Bah. I hate this. The thing is - I really do want to have debadmin rights, and am working in that direction for a long time now. Not publically, but by talking with James in the past months, … As Sams mail showed - that did go nowhere, unfortunately. Now, could readers of my blog (and I know there are people reading this, my traffic stats tell me so :) ) please comment on this and give me advice? I just want some opinions about this. (Yes, my blog does understand comments since some time :) ) UPDATE: Thanks to everyone who commented on this, either by using the comment form here, by mail or via IRC. I really appreciate your input. I’ve decided to not decline the delegation and one DSA member already added my account to the debadmin group. (Thanks).

Biella Coleman: Chiki-Chiki Precario,Euromayday 08

It is not the case that “copyleft” is paired with issues such as sexual freedom and immigrant rights all that often. But there are times when they are bundled together as in this video, which is advertising a Pan-Europe set of May 1st events. And even if you don’t know Spanish, you will get something out of the video given its zany aesthetics (and note that “El Copyleft” is number 1 on their list :-) )

16 April 2008

Kartik Mistry: Tips and Tricks: How to deal with auto rickshaw in BLR


* Bubulle and Sam has already seen it. But, if you ever likely to coming down to BLR this tips and tricks can be useful. So, print it out! - Do not catch rickshaw on one-way. Even if your offer 1000 INR, they will not come to place where traffic is terrible. - Do not ask them where cop/policeman is not near. - Do not catch auto near biggie place like MG Road. They are smart and they will tell you tripple amount of fare because they know that people near these places are rich and can pay whatever they tell. - Keep your half of your budget for traveling inside BLR, half for rest of the things (like airfare, shoppings etc). - Learn Kanndda properly, if not, do not speak in Hindi. - Keep asking to auto drivers, probably after 45 or 50 tries you will get auto which will come with proper meter based fare. - The last advice: Hire a bicycle. Good for health, Good for brain. PS: This post is due to our (/me and Kushal’s) frustration of tomorrow’s attempt to get auto from Residency road to Ulsoor. kthnx.

Matthew Palmer: When you think you're good...

It's stories like the following that make you realise just how puny your talents are... (Reposted from a place not to be named, by the legendary Al Viro) 
Give them what I got yesterday. As in, box that got
        a) Linux kernel running.
        b) init and bash running.
        c) serial and floppy - built as modules. And not loaded.
        d) no sash.
        e) no ethernet.
        f) bloody large number-crunching that Should Not Be Aborted(tm).
        g) libc and ld-linux.so - unlinked (self-LART by owner).
Now, I could tell the guy to piss off, but... WTF? He had decent beer and
was properly scared. Oh, well... So we have no exec() for anything
dynamically
linked. And we have no chance to access any external stuff - insmod is
linked
dynamically, so no insmod floppy for you. Shutting the system down was not
an
option due to (f) (aside of dealing with fsck later - umount(8) is
dynamically
linked too). Now, I knew that both /lib/libc.so-2.1.2 and
/lib/ld-linux.so-2.1.2 were still alive - mmaped by init, for one. And
/proc/1/maps would even contain their inumbers. So the plan of attack was
to create a file in root and then cannibalize the entry (change inumber in
the directory). Alas - not enough. In-core inode got zero i_nlink and
if I would just create a link by hands it would not become positive. I.e.
still remove-upon-close. But. But if we will manage to call link() on the
hand-made link we will get i_nlink raised to 1 - iget() will find the same
in-core inode, so we are OK. We'll have to revert the phony link to avoid
PO'd fsck, but that's not a problem...
        So there we go: assuming that we got static ln
echo >foo
ln foo bar
flip inumber in foo entry to point to libc
ln foo /lib/libc.so-2.1.2
flip inumber.......................... bar
repeat for ld-linux.so
rm foo bar
begin recovering other damage (self-LART was a bit larger).
        But... we don't have this flip stuff and we don't have (aaarrgh)
static
ln. Oh, shit... OK, but all we really need is a couple of syscalls, right?
There we go:
        eax=__NR_link;
        ebx=s1;
        ecx=s2;
        int 0x80;
        eax=__NR_exit;
        ebx=0;
        int 0x80;
s1:     "foo"
s2:     "bar"
The next step was getting the syscall numbers. grep? We don't need no
stinkin'
grep.
# while read i; do case $i in *__NR_link*) echo $i;; esac;
done </usr/include/asm/unistd.h
#define __NR_link 9
# while read i; do case $i in *__NR_exit*) echo $i;; esac;
done </usr/include/asm/unistd.h
#define __NR_exit 1
#define __NR__exit __NR_exit
Now, scratching the head and recalling intel code...
start:  b8 09 00 00 00
        bb (address of s1)
        b9 (address of s2)
        cd 80
        b8 01 00 00 00
        bb 00 00 00 00
        cd 80
s1:     66 6f 6f 00
s2:     62 61 72 00
Fine, but... a.out support is compiled... you guessed it, as module and not
currently loaded. So we are in for crufting up an ELF binary. OK, we don't
actually need 100%-correct ELF, just something that will pass for the
exec(). Now, we don't have shell scripts, but . will work. So the next
step was rolling more(1) in shell and reading through the relevant code
(surprisingly small - binfmt_elf.c and two headers). After much swearing
the following abortion was created:
7f 45 4c 46 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
02 00 03 00 01 00 00 00 start______ 34 00 00 00
00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 34 00 20 00 01 00 28 00
00 00 00 00 01 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 base_______
base_______ size_______ size_______ 05 00 00 00
00 10 00 00
start:
b8 09 00 00 00 bb start+1d___ b9 start+21___ cd
80 b8 01 00 00 00 bb 00 00 00 00 cd 80 66 6f 6f
00 62 61 72 00
OK, set base to something page-aligned, start=base+54, size=79. There we go:
7f 45 4c 46 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
02 00 03 00 01 00 00 00 54 00 00 80 34 00 00 00
00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 34 00 20 00 01 00 28 00
00 00 00 00 01 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 80
00 00 00 80 79 00 00 00 79 00 00 00 05 00 00 00
00 10 00 00 b8 09 00 00 00 bb 71 00 00 80 b9 75
00 00 80 cd 80 b8 01 00 00 00 bb 00 00 00 00 cd
80 66 6f 6f 00 62 61 72 00
well, while read l; do for i in  echo $l ; do echo -ne "\\$i"; done; done
made for oct2bin, overwriting /usr/bin/emacs with the output of that gave
us static equivalent of ln foo bar. And it worked. The rest was essentially
the same - the only tricky part was to find the location of directory entry.
Which was done with (lseek, read byte, exit(said_byte)) and shell wrapper
around that. So we had a way to read a block and dump it on the console.
The rest was obvious - start from relevant block in inode table and walk
through the references... Once we got that, it was an easy ride - trick
with inumber flipping brought libc and dynamic linker back and after that
we had 99% of system back into the working state. Amazing how little you
actually need to bring the system back to life...
Hot damn that's some deep hackery...

Jeff Bailey: Physio, T-shirts, and the end of the contest!

Updates of the moment:

* I can put a t-shirt on now! About 3 days ago, I got brave and decided to give it a try. So, yay, no more zip up sweaters!

* Had my 6-week checkup yesterday, and everything is looking good. The incision is still a bit red and since my skin is so sensitive, the surgeon doesn't want me in the hottub for another 2 weeks. *pout*

* I started physiotherapy today. I can only give it a mixed review. The therapist was absolutely wonderful, it turns out that I got the clinic director. However, she doesn't actually have time to see me 3 days a week. Her schedule is so booked up that I'd be lucky to see her once a week. On top of that, the receptionists and assistants were not terribly professional (tending not to articulate, getting flustered, sort of tossing sheets of paper at me expecting me to know what to do with them), and the place was not clean. It was also in one big room, so the therapy is done in front of everyone else. Blech. So I have an appointment with a different clinic on Friday. Hopefully this one will go better.

* I don't think I've mentioned Leif recently. He's walking, can open the doors in the house now, and can clearly say "All Done". He also climbed onto my lap the other day and cuddled with me. So cute!

* Lastly, this is the end of the contest of "Guess the cost!" And the final total for the bill was.... $199,849.24. Our running total is of all things combined at UCSF is now somewhere around $280k, so I'm guessing the final total for everything will be around $300k when we're all said and done. Crazy. The closest guess was by [info]runasand at $192,000, whoever you are. Linked-in says the winner is in Norway. So finding that vegan restaurant might be interesting. I still remember Debconf 3 in Norway when the caterer told me "In Norway, we have a special way of preparing vegetables... We feed them to the animals." And the meat-eaters begging the vegetarians who were going elsewhere for food for their meals so that they had something other than slabs of meat to eat.

I think because of this, I'm going to have to award the prize to [info]mmmmtino in the meantime, who came in second place at $185k. That way I can pay it out hopefully within the next year. I'll still keep the other as a raincheque in case I happen to wind up in Norway sometime again. =)

Further on the OMG-This-medical-system-is-barbaric, It looks like the insurance company negotiates the hospital down in price, because they're in network. I've only seen the payout information for that one day overnight stay, but the insurance company will only be paying 10% of the cost. So if I didn't have insurance, I'd have to pay $67k. But the insurance company gets to pay around $7k. Do they charge so much because they don't make enough money when someone is insured? How does that all work?

Wouter Verhelst: Playing with git

A few years, ago, I decided that there were way too many SCM systems out there, and that I'd give the war of the SCMs some time before deciding on which one I'd use. Mean time, I did spend some time with subversion, since, well, CVS sucks my pants off, subversion is quite a bit better, and easy enough to understand for those of us who are already familiar with CVS. But it still sucks. I often find myself on the train, wanting to do an svn commit, and not being able to. svk helps, but not by much. I didn't spend much time during the past years in trying to wrap my head around one of the distributed SCMs; partially because I was somewhat coping, and partially because the above-linked blog post was written in response to me running away scared aftery trying to understand arch. I should have shoved arch up Tom Lord's <censored> years ago. So, anyway, I don't think "The World" has made a choice yet, and I don't think it ever will. However, it seems clear that git is a pretty popular choice these days; and, well, if a project the size of the Linux kernel is using it, then it must be good, right? Right. So I gave it a shot. After reading the tutorial, I can already honestly say I like it. The tutorial links to a number of different pages, most of which give a set of standard workflows for different ways of interacting with git. Exactly what I needed! I should've done this years ago. Anyway. I'm now considering switching the NBD repository over from svn to git, which should help ensure that patches which are important for several branches are applied to all of them (this requires much more manual work in subversion). Before taking that step, however, I'll have to make sure I fully understand the thing; after digging through docs for "only" an hour or so, I can't say I do.

Wouter Verhelst: Actually, you can

Uwe Hermann and Russell Coker talked about resizing ext3 volumes in several scenarios. While they point out interesting things (i.e., the fact that you can resize stuff without losing data), they both get the important bits wrong. Uwe, you can do online resizing. Just use 
resize2fs <device-node>
. The kernel will notice that the device is mounted, and perform an online resize. This takes slightly longer than an offline resize, but (a) you don't need to do the fsck, and (b) you can still write and otherwise use the file system while the resize is in progress, so the net result is that you win time, especially if the file system in question is huge (I've done things like resize a 700+G LVM volume by 50-100G, which takes half a minute or so; an fsck will take seriously longer). Russell, resizing the LVM volume on which the root filesystem lives used to deadlock the kernel in the old days, but that bug has been fixed since around Linux 2.6.13. I've done online resizes of the LVM volume (and ext3 filesystem) of my root filesystem many times since then, both on some of my home systems and on huge customer boxes, and never encountered any problems. I really love LVM, especially on servers. /home is full? lvresize -L +5G /dev/<hostname>/home && resize2fs /dev/<hostname>/home, and we can work again.

Simon McVittie: Implementing D-Bus services with telepathy-glib

16:46 < epmf> tp-glib is made of magic

—#telepathy, 2008-04-15

Rob pointed out today that I'd been promising to blog about telepathy-glib for several months and still haven't done so. I think there's too much to cover in one blog post, so I'll start with the oldest part - implementing a service (typically a Telepathy connection manager).

While telepathy-glib is (obviously) intended for Telepathy implementors, I think the ideas we've been implementing are likely to be useful for any D-Bus API, particularly flexible/complex APIs where an object implements many interfaces.

Introduction to telepathy-glib telepathy-glib started out as a collection of code extracted from our XMPP connection manager, telepathy-gabble, but at some point it grew beyond that into a wrapper around/partial replacement for dbus-glib. We've been quite pleased with it, really :-) My first major round of work on telepathy-glib, during the first half of 2007, was to split it out from telepathy-gabble (versions up to 0.5.9 were released as part of Gabble 0.5.x tarballs, in fact), leading to the release of the 0.6.x stable branch in late September. This was very helpful for implementing connection managers - Salut, Idle and telepathy-sofiasip (our connection managers for link-local XMPP, IRC and SIP) all started off by forking/cargo-culting from Gabble, and achieved huge code reductions by porting to telepathy-glib. Also, Will Thompson used it in his Summer of Code project, telepathy-haze, to go from nothing to a working and useful Telepathy implementation based on libpurple in a matter of a few months. The second major round of work, which I'll discuss in a later article, added client code to telepathy-glib, obsoleting the older/worse libtelepathy and allowing client programs like Empathy and telepathy-stream-engine to be written using telepathy-glib. In the process, I accidentally reinvented DBusGProxy :-) More details to come later!
Some background: service-side code generation
The secret Collabora code-generation process

(credit: daf)

Supporting D-Bus in the GObject world has always involved quite a lot of code generation. The core API of dbus-glib is heavily reliant on varargs functions, which aren't type-safe and are easy to get wrong. dbus-glib contains a program called dbus-binding-tool, which is meant to generate reasonably sane GObject APIs for D-Bus objects. Unfortunately, it seems to be intended to generate a whole GObject at a time. Early versions of telepathy-gabble used dbus-binding-tool plus a script called gengobject.py to generate API stubs for the exported objects; developers then filled in the blanks, and hey presto, we had a GObject on D-Bus. This was fine up to a point, but had a couple of major drawbacks. Whenever we changed the D-Bus API (quite common during the early development of Telepathy), there was a very laborious and error-prone merging process. We ended up with the following process:
  • copy the D-Bus introspection XML from the telepathy-spec repository into a directory xml/pristine (actually, the canonical form for the spec was Python for a while, and we had a script that exported a contrived object onto D-Bus and introspected itself to get the XML - but that's another story!)
  • preprocess the introspection XML to add the dbus-glib CFunctionName annotation, resulting in a directory xml/modified
  • run dbus-binding-tool and a Python script gengobject.py to generate C source in xml/src
  • three-way-diff the old version of xml/src, the new version of xml/src, and the real C code in src to create a new version of src
  • pray that the diff process hadn't randomly exchanged functions' implementations
  • update the resulting code in src so it worked
  • check the whole mess back into darcs
  • hope that nobody else had made changes that would result in darcs conflicts
If you haven't yet gathered, this was a bit of a nightmare. Also, it was very easy to return the wrong thing from a method without noticing - because all the APIs were varargs, the compiler didn't notice, and the first we'd know about it was a mysterious segfault under certain circumstances.
How telepathy-glib fixes code generation telepathy-glib improves on this by taking advantage of this innocuous-looking feature in dbus-glib: 
commit 355ef78d98d6fc65715845d56232199162cab12a
Author: Steve Frécinaux <steve istique net>
Date:   Thu Aug 17 11:48:20 2006 +0200
    Interface support for bindings.
Instead of running dbus-binding-tool or creating GObjects with D-Bus interfaces, we put the entire Telepathy spec through glib-ginterface-gen.py, a distant descendant of Gabble's gengobject.py. For each interface in the spec, we generate a GInterface that mirrors the D-Bus interface. Any GObject that implements the GInterface automatically gets the D-Bus interface if it's exported onto D-Bus. There are a few non-obvious refinements, though:

  • The signature of the method implementation is always in the mode that dbus-glib calls "asynchronous", where the method implementation can either send a reply message before or after it returns. For "slow" methods, this is the only thing you can do. For instance, many Telepathy D-Bus methods can't return anything until some TCP round-trips to the server have happened. This is also the only thing you can do if you want to extract extra information, like the sender's unique name, from the method-call message (dbus-glib's "synchronous" API doesn't allow this to be done). For "fast" methods, sending a reply message before returning is just as easy as using the "synchronous" API (it's just a difference of syntax), and has an API consistent with that of the "slow" methods, making it easier for service authors.

  • The layout of the GInterface vtable is private, and (auto-generated) accessor functions are used to fill in implementations. This means our ABI doesn't change just because we re-ordered functions in the spec.

  • If no implementation is provided for a method, we just raise an appropriate error (org.freedesktop.Telepathy.Errors.NotImplemented), rather than suffering an assertion failure. This means we can safely add methods to an interface.

  • While we're generating code anyway, we generate some static inline wrapper functions which wrap dbus_g_method_return(), to have type-safe method returns. You can easily check that a method replies with correct types, by checking that the implementation of Foo() replies by calling tp_svc_some_interface_return_from_foo().

  • Similarly, we generate wrapper functions to emit signals, to get type-safe signal emission.

Not all interfaces are stable enough to be included in telepathy-glib's stable API and ABI, so some of our other projects include a copy of the telepathy-glib code-generation tools, and generate their own "mini-telepathy-glib" (traditionally in a /extensions/ directory) for their implementation-specific (drafts of) interfaces. This isn't yet as polished as it ought to be (mainly because we don't want to freeze the augmented-introspection-XML format that we write the Telepathy spec in, because it's rather ad-hoc and hackish in places) but it works quite well in practice. To see what this looks like in practice, have a look at the examples in telepathy-glib, or at a Telepathy connection manager like telepathy-gabble.
Mixins and base classes Another feature of telepathy-glib which makes life easier for connection manager authors is that it provides "mixins" and base classes which implement some of the GInterfaces. There's absolutely nothing magic about the base classes - they don't have any access to private implementation details of the GInterfaces, they just implement them like everyone else does. The "mixins" are only slightly more magical - they store some extra state inside the structures representing GObjects and their classes, and use it to provide default implementations of some or all of the methods on a particular interface (or two interfaces, in the case of the new TpMessageMixin). I'll leave it up to Rob to explain those in greater detail, since I seem to remember that he invented them :-P The examples and regression tests in telepathy-glib are quite good examples of how these work in practice.

Clint Adams: Saciar esta locura

I shall sleep the sleep of the damned, swathed in sateen and the silken locks of angels. I will dream of Faberg eggs resting atop a plateau of gabardine. Blessed are those who walk the path betwixt linen and twill, watching the chain links cross the sky, breathlessly seeking Heaven. I hope that J.K. Rowling does not sue me for mentioning MayoKetchup .

Kartik Mistry: Fresh blood, Debian and India


* We need fresh blood! Yes. Like Lucas mentioned in his last post, along with Debian itself, many small teams and big teams are highly out-numbered and probably dying slowly. Currently, debian-in team has only two active members (jaldhar and if I count myself). We live on #indlinux at moment, which also leads to confusion about actual focus area of team. So, here are some clear text messages: - Debian-IN is team to work for ‘Indic’ packages as well as bringing new and fresh blood to Debian from India. - Its not true that we only work for fonts, we have many other packages: aspell dictionaries and festival-* packages and so on. Update: QA Page for Debian-In-Workers. Thanks Runa. - We aim to provide platform for upcoming DDs from India. Sadly, all DDs in India are highly isolated at moment. - Hopefully, we will get #debian-in at oftc. Update: Recovered ‘dead’ channel now. Thanks to Ganneff and h0lger for help. Come and join us!! Please note that we are considering developers only right now. We have already good numbers of users of Debian in India. kthnx.

Biella Coleman: My Special Topics Course on Hacking

So I am nearly done with teaching this year, which is a relief, not because I don’t like it but because after a full year of teaching, one naturally wants a break. But before it is even over, you have to start thinking about your fall courses, mostly so you can order books in time and because developing a syllabus also requires more than a few days or weeks of work. Next fall, I am re-teaching a first year course Introduction to Human Communication and Culture as well as a new course on computer hacking. While I have an old version of the syllabus, I am going to spend the next few weeks revising, reshuffling, and updating. If there is anything you think should be included in this type of course drop me a line. Below is the new description of the course.
The Culture and Politics of Computer Hacking. This course takes as its object computer hackers to interrogate not only the ethics and practices of hacking, but to examine more broadly how hackers and hacking have transformed the politics of computing and the Internet more generally. We will examine how hacker values are realized and constituted by different legal, technical, and ethical activities of computer hacking for example, free software production, cyberactivism and hactivism, cryptography, and the pranksih games of hacker underground. We will pay close attention to how ethical principles are variably represented and thought of by hackers, journalists, and academics and will use the example of hacking to address various topics on law, order, and politics on the Internet such as: free speech and censorship, computer gaming, privacy and security, and intellectual property. This will allow us to critically 1) problematize thinking on computer hackers as a socio-cultural group guided by a singular ethic and set of practices 2) examine the multiple ways hackers draw on and reconfigure dominant ideas of property, freedom, and privacy through their diverse moral codes and technical activities 3) broaden our understanding of politics of the Internet by evaluating the various political effects and ramifications of hacking.

Holger Levsen: 4 months and eleven days

I'm still ill with quite heavy fever, I feel like doing nothing, I'm even to weak to walk the dog properly... but he copes well and is great as usual :-)

Thinking about Debian doesn't make me feel better at all, reading through the comments of lucas post didnt help at all. Since 2000???! Gosh.

Unfortunatly the NM statistics miss two important data points: 1. people who made it thru NM and 2. people waiting for account creation. The second is only "good" to attribute blame, the first would be nice to have, so one could easily see, whether nowadays less people apply for NM or whether there are just less people in NM because the process is faster now.

I don't remember when exactly, but sometime in the past I resolved for myself to only blog positive things here, I'm seriously considering to drop this policy and poste a mean rant every day or so, either til Debian is really dead or those things are fixed or I am kicked.

Ironically it needs people to fix stuff, but yet most people in Debian are overworked. Maybe we should try to get more people in...

Besides fixing stuff and keeping up, there was also this thing called inno- what?

Also ironically I'm also and still very annoyed by whiners.

Guess I will look for a book or a movie now.

MJ Ray: Better Free Software Organisations?

Another zero-day announcement of a Software in the Public Interest online meeting has been posted. The announcement mentions "one motion has been raised" but the agenda doesn't include any motions, so I'm not sure what. Also, the agenda lists "Debian logo licence" as up for discussion but I thought last month's meeting resolved that. I watch SPI fairly closely and I'm confused. How about the rest of you? SPI isn't alone in this: many software organisations seem to suffer from similar problems. For example, I ranted in passing about Free Software Manchester yesterday, who just posted the notes from their own zero-day meeting and I've suggested possible ways of reforming debian's currently-stalled New Maintainer process more than once. Are free software users particularly bad at the basics of running an interest society (like welcoming and expiring members, calling meetings, publishing routine communications, and so on), have I been spoiled by cooperatives with their friendly Member Services departments or secretariats, or what? Is this why so many free software orgs seem to include self-perpetuating leadership groups? Is this a serious problem if, as reported, Software Development is a Team Sport [etbe]? Are there fully-working free software mass participation groups out there? I feel a lot of these problems are caused by attempting to order our inherently entropy-filled world completely and insisting everything follows petty rules, such as refusing to answer a question because the "wrong" member asked it. The world will not become less random just because hackers try to impose arbitrary rules. Sometimes it's good to put down minimum standards (because calling zero-day meetings is a mostly-avoidable way of excluding some members) but it will always be a poor alternative to trying to do the best you can for others. How do we get past this? My pro-cooperation-and-better-business platform for SPI board went pretty badly and I've had some anti-cooperative flames back from someone starting another free software group this month, so I don't think I can fix these existing organisations any time soon. About 1 in 6 people in the UK are members of a cooperative, so even if that is reflected among hackers (and I think it's lower), all of them would not be enough to reform much. One of the most common memes in free software is "show us the code" and the few other free software cooperatives I've seen have mostly failed, with a few surviving but hitting a size limit. As a result, I'm currently negotiating the start of a new free software cooperative. So far, I'm really happy with how that's going. Many cooperators learn at the feet of large consumer cooperatives like the Cooperative Group who run training courses for new members about putting cooperative values and principles into practice, which we smaller groups couldn't run ourselves. As a result, most cooperators already know how to work well together. Should large software societies like SPI try commissioning similar courses?

Russell Coker: Resizing the Root Filesystem

Uwe Hermann has described how to resize a root filesystem after booting from a live-cd or recovery disk [1]. He makes some good points about resizing an LVM PV (which I hadn’t even realised was possible). The following paragraph is outdated, see the update at the end:
Incidentally it should be noted that if your root filesystem is an LVM logical volume then it can’t be resized without booting from a different device because the way LVM appears to work is that the LV in question is locked, then files under /etc/lvm/ are written, and then the LV is unlocked. If the LV in question contains /etc/lvm then you deadlock your root filesystem and need to press reset. Of course if your root filesystem is on an LV which has been encrypted via cryptsetup (the LV is encrypted not the PV) then a live resize of the root filesystem can work as locking the LV merely means that write-backs from the encryption layer don’t get committed. I’m not sure if this means that data written to an encrypted device is less stable (testing this is on my todo list). If your root filesystem is on a partition of a hard drive (such as /dev/hda2) then it is possible to extend it without booting from different media. There is nothing stopping you from running fdisk and deleting the partition of your root filesystem and recreating it. When you exit fdisk it will call an ioctl() to re-read the partition table, the kernel code counts the number of open file handles related to the device and if the number is greater than 1 (fdisk has one open handle) then it refuses to re-read the table. So you can use fdisk to change the root partition and then reboot to have the change be noticed. After that ext2online can be used to take advantage of the extra space (if the filesystem has a recent enough version of the ext3 disk format). One thing he didn’t mention is that if you do need to boot from another device to manipulate your root filesystem (which should be quite rare if you are bold and know the tricks) then you can always use your swap space. To do this you simply run swapoff and then run mkfs on the device that had been used for swap (incidentally there is nothing really special about the swap space, but it does tend to often be used for such recovery operations simply because it has no data that persists across a reboot). The minimum set of files that need to be copied to a temporary filesystem is usually /bin, /sbin, /dev, /lib (excluding all directories under /lib/modules apart from the one related to the kernel you are using), and /etc. Also you should make directories /proc, /sys, and /selinux (if the machine in question runs SE Linux). The aim is not to copy enough files for the machine to run in a regular manner, merely enough to allow manipulating all filesystems and logical volumes. Often for such recovery I boot with init=/bin/bash as a kernel parameter to skip the regular init and just start with a shell. Note that when you use init=/bin/bash you end up with a shell that has no job control and ^C is not enabled, if you want to run a command that might not terminate of it’s own accord then the command “openvt /bin/bash” can be used to start another session with reasonable terminal settings. I recommend that anyone who wants to work as a sys-admin experiment with such procedures on a test machine. There are lots of interesting things that you can learn and interesting ways that you can break your system when performing such operations. Update: Wouter points out that the LVM bug of deadlocking the root filesystem has been fixed and that you can also use ext2online to resize the mounted filesystem [2].

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Miriam Ruiz: More on OOXML: ISO tries to recover lost credibility through press notes

After the unfortunate show that Microsoft and ISO provided us recently, ISO’s response is a FAQ note about ISO/IEC 29500 (OOXML, that’s it) in which they threaten Microsoft with the most severe of penalties if they’re tricking on as. Funny. In that statement, they try to answer all the issues that initially were concerns but that now has turned into proven facts about the OOXML standard and it’s approval, and to try to recover some of their lost credibility. It’s sad to be commenting on this, words don’t come easy, as if to say. Microsoft has already proven who’s the one in charge here, who owns the committees, who takes the decisions and in which terms, and nothing happens. It’s gonna take more than to publish a FAQ note saying how well you did it and to threaten Microsoft to behave or else. No one seriously believe you at the moment, you know? A funny thing is that ISO dismisses any responsibility about standardization, and relies on the market taking the decisions for them. Microsoft has said many times that they consider something positive and healthy to have multiple standards for the same, and let the market decide. Now ISO declares to think along the same lines: “After a period of co-existence, it is basically the market that decides which survives”. We don’t really need an organization for standardization for that, do we? We already have the market for that. Will ISO apply the same policy for every standard from now on? Like, say, having a couple of competing standards at least for every need, and let the market decide? ISO tries to recover from their credibility loss with this note (“the standards development process is credible, works well and is delivering the standards needed, and widely implemented, by the market“), without much success at least in what I’m concerned. If they keep trying to convince with press notes instead of with real acts, no one is gonna believe them ever again.

Patrick Winnertz: Demotivaton of new prospective Developers

I'm writing this blog entry as a reaction of Lucas Nussbaums one. More or less one year ago I also was a New Maintainer who completed the process after 3 months (Started in February and ended in May). My Intention was to become as fast as possible a Developer and I was very motivated. (I helped Lucas with filling the build twice in a row bugs in this time). The FD approves me quite fast... (I'll guess I was only waiting for two weeks?) but the next to steps (Approval of DAM and creation of the account) took very long. After waiting for 3 months I was quite demotivated and doing only necessary things in order to update my packages... it was very frustrating. But now I'm finally a DD, since 6 months. For those who doesn't want to calculate: I was waiting for DAM about 4 months. When I saw that I was again highly motivated and started again to work on Debian a bit more, because I thought that the account creation can't took long...this was an error: I was approved by DAM in the middle of October... and got my account in Dezember... again waiting for a simple action. I can really understand New Maintainer who are directly MIA after being a DD. Waiting a half year for account creation is much too long. In my eyes there is only one possible solution for this issue: Since DAM and the Account Manager have also many other tasks which consumes there time, I would suggest to give them assistants...every manager needs at least one assistant ;-). This would speed up the process and people who are doing actually a great job doesn't get frustrated by waiting, but can actively work on Debian. I hope that the new DPL will find a solution for this really big issue during his time.

15 April 2008

William Pitcock: How NOT to switch from x86 to amd64 Debian

The following script, or any script like it will not work. Do not waste your time and end up hosing your box like I did today: 
#!/bin/bash
echo "==> installing cdebootstrap"
apt-get install cdebootstrap
echo "==> reticulating splines"
dpkg -l   cut -f3 -d' ' >> /tmp/packages.installed
pkg= cat /tmp/packages.installed   xargs 
pkg= echo $pkg   sed -e 's#bunch of crap elided here##g' 
echo "==> installing libc6-amd64"
apt-get install libc6-amd64
echo "==> installing base system"
cdebootstrap -a amd64 lenny /
for pkg in $pkg; do
echo "==> reinstalling $pkg"
apt-get install --reinstall --force-yes $pkg
done
Don’t let this happen to you. I had the pleasure of discovering that Bacula was not properly backing up my MySQL databases. What an excellent way of finding out.

John Goerzen: datapacker

Every so often, I come across some utility that need. I think it must have been written before, but I can't find it.

Today I needed a tool to take a set of files and split them up into directories in a size that will fit on DVDs. I wanted a tool that could either produce the minimum number of DVDs, or keep the files in order. I couldn't find one. So I wrote datapacker.

datapacker is a tool to group files by size. It is perhaps most often used to fit a set of files onto the minimum number of CDs or DVDs.

datapacker is designed to group files such that they fill fixed-size containers (called "bins") using the minimum number of containers. This is useful, for instance, if you want to archive a number of files to CD or DVD, and want to organize them such that you use the minimum possible number of CDs or DVDs.

In many cases, datapacker executes almost instantaneously. Of particular note, the hardlink action can be used to effectively copy data into bins without having to actually copy the data at all.

datapacker is a tool in the traditional Unix style; it can be used in pipes and call other tools.

I have, of course, uploaded it to sid. But while it sits in NEW, you can download the source tarball (with debian/ directory) from the project homepage at http://software.complete.org/datapacker. I've also got an HTML version of the manpage online, so you can see all the cool features of datapacker. It works nicely with find, xargs, mkisofs, and any other Unixy pipe-friendly program.

Those of you that know me will not be surprised that I wrote datapacker in Haskell. For this project, I added a bin-packing module and support for parsing inputs like 1.5g to MissingH. So everyone else that needs to do that sort of thing can now use library functions for it.

Update... I should have mentioned the really cool thing about this. After datapacker compiled and ran, I had only one mistake that was not caught by the Haskell compiler: I said < where I should have said <= one place. This is one of the very nice things about Haskell: the language lends itself to compilers that can catch so much. It's not that I'm a perfect programmer, just that my compiler is pretty crafty.

Pablo Lorenzzoni: fisl9.0: T-48h

We are at T-48h of fisl9.0, and everything starts to take form. I spent the whole afternoon getting our icecast infrastructure online. We ve got 6 servers, all with different bandwidth and not all with the same architecture The debian boxes were prevalent (4 of them 1 amd64 and 3 i386), all of them etch. We ll be able to follow the statistics at tvstats website (not all the servers are enlisted yet). In this process I found an evil bug in debian s icecast package, I will have to debug to understand it better: when relaying from a master server (which is our set-up), if the source stops feeding the master, the relay segfaults. The strace shows it just segfaults while pooling I got no explanation for it and I ll have to dissect it if I want to build a proper bug report. In the meantime, I installed the sarge-backports version, and it worked so, the bug report will have to wait until after fisl :-) I took some pictures to show how s everything being put together. Take a look: And some of the infrastructure crew: See you all there!

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