As you may know, the future of the US world is again at stake in two weeks. Elections for the United States Senate and the United States House of Representatives will be held on November 7. Most general indicators are favorable to the Democrats (only 40% approve Bush administration, 46% vs. 34% think that Democrats would handle Iraq better than the GOP, 55% think US shouldn’t have invaded Iraq), and it seems they will likely get a majority in the House (latest polls show a 13-18 seats Democratic lead). Democratic Senate majority sounds far-fetched though. First of all, the members of the US Senate (which has 100 members, two per state, regardless of population) are elected by classes. The Senate is formed by three classes, so in this election only a third of the senators are challenged, which makes a turnover more difficult. Right now the Senate is composed by 55 Republicans, 44 Democrats and 1 Independent (who usually caucuses with the Democrats). Only 15 out of the 33 contested seats are held by Republicans, so Democrats would have to gain 7 of those 15 to get a majority (as a tie is broken by the Senate President, who happens to be the Vicepresident of the US, Dick Cheney). There are four close races that should be taken into account (Tennessee, Missouri, Virginia and New Jersey). Democrats would need to win three out of these to achieve majority. The amazing fact is that according to the latest polls they can make it. I’m not really fond of Democrats either (IMHO they are as right-winged as usual European right-winged parties), but lots of Dem Senate candidates are taking solid anti-war positions, which is quite good. In addition, I would say that anything that can take some power out of Bush hands it’s good news for the world. I just hope the anti-GOP wave is big enough. So, please, fellow American reader, on November 7th, vote the GOP out of the Senate and the House

As you may know, the future of the US world is again at stake in two weeks. Elections for the United States Senate and the United States House of Representatives will be held on November 7. Most general indicators are favorable to the Democrats (only 40% approve Bush administration, 46% vs. 34% think that Democrats would handle Iraq better than the GOP, 55% think US shouldn’t have invaded Iraq), and it seems they will likely get a majority in the House (latest polls show a 13-18 seats Democratic lead). Democratic Senate majority sounds far-fetched though. First of all, the members of the US Senate (which has 100 members, two per state, regardless of population) are elected by classes. The Senate is formed by three classes, so in this election only a third of the senators are challenged, which makes a turnover more difficult. Right now the Senate is composed by 55 Republicans, 44 Democrats and 1 Independent (who usually caucuses with the Democrats). Only 15 out of the 33 contested seats are held by Republicans, so Democrats would have to gain 7 of those 15 to get a majority (as a tie is broken by the Senate President, who happens to be the Vicepresident of the US, Dick Cheney). There are four close races that should be taken into account (Tennessee, Missouri, Virginia and New Jersey). Democrats would need to win three out of these to achieve majority. The amazing fact is that according to the latest polls they can make it. I’m not really fond of Democrats either (IMHO they are as right-winged as usual European right-winged parties), but lots of Dem Senate candidates are taking solid anti-war positions, which is quite good. In addition, I would say that anything that can take some power out of Bush hands it’s good news for the world. I just hope the anti-GOP wave is big enough. So, please, fellow American reader, on November 7th, vote the GOP out of the Senate and the House

We created the “Debian Webapps” alioth project a couple of months ago in order to write a Webapps Policy. Today, that team takes more responsability: it now maintains a couple of packages like, for instance, bugzilla which I find complex, rich and volatile enough to warrant a collaborative maintenance (long life to Subversion). TinyMCE - which can dynamically transform any textarea element into a rich-text area - will also be maintained by the team and is currently in the NEW queue (uploaded this morning).

Ideal mobile text editing device redux As I read the responses¹ to my search for the ideal mobile text editing device, reality began to set in. The heating season is now upon us, and even used technology meeting my criteria would likely exceed my stated budget. Furthermore, I’d risk replacing my current issues with a whole new set of issues and end up with a less-than-ideal mobile text editing device. So I have rethought the problem and have decided it would be best to work on with what I have now while I wait for this ideal device to arrive on the market. Keyboard While I can’t change the keyboard of the ZR-5000, with a practiced lighter touch on the keys I can, in fact, touch-type passably well. It has served me well enough to draft several blog articles so far. Software Although not up to the high standard set by Vim, for quick note-taking, I don’t really need a fancy editor. My thoughts flow directly through my fingers into the device with only light editing. Cut-and-paste, motion keys and delete are the bare essentials. Anything more is a frill. Synchronization I do have an ACTiSYS IR-200L infrared dongle for my PC. The trouble is, although this is supported in Linux using IrDA, the ZR-5000 insists on speaking ASK-IR which is not supported. There is a Windows-only program, ZRLink, which might work. I’ll try it either on an XP system at work, (... mixed reviews out there as to whether it will work on recent Windows,) or under Wine. I can get the dialogs to display properly on Wine, but I have my doubts about whether serial emulation works. My initial tests at home under Wine indicate it doesn’t. (Could #277618 have something to do with this?) There is a 15-pin serial connector on the device, but I have no cable for it. And there’s a PCMCIA slot, but compatible devices are likely limited to older, harder-to-find components: either a 2M CF card or a modem card. While I have the latter, it exceeds the power available from batteries and I have no DC adaptor for the unit. Perhaps I overrate synchronization anyway. My best articles are rewritten from scratch more than once. Summary Living in an embarrassingly technology-rich country, it is too easy for a geek like me to convince himself that his gadget cravings are needs whereas, in fact, there is still plenty of life left in the devices he already has. After all, my venerable ZR-5000 was given to me by a fellow who figured if any one of his friends would still be able to use it for something, it would be me. Well, I won’t let him down. I’ll stick with it and make it work. There is one virtue of this device I doubt if any modern device of the same form factor can match. After a week of daily use, I still haven’t had to change the 2 ordinary AA NiMH batteries. Top that.

¹ Thanks, everyone, for your responses. Although there were the inevitable few that mentioned modern devices way over my budget, and I’ve decided now to stick with the ZR-5000, your suggestions did help me bring the real issues into focus.

New town, so new cycle forum. I'll be going along to the Weston-super-Mare cycling forum in the evening of Wed 25 October, which apparently will be seeing proposals for cycle route signing. I'm a big fan of "Cambridge-style" rectangular destination+arrows route signing on the approach to junctions. "Finger" post signs are not much good: they encourage cyclists to be looking up and away from the junction right at a critical moment. If you know of any good cycle route signs and general design principles, please leave a comment today and I'll pass it on.

Thanks to Don Armstrong's improvements to the performance of version-tracking in the BTS and Anthony Towns's tweaks to dak, as of the middle of last week, all NMUs uploaded to Debian unstable will cause the bugs mentioned in their changelogs to be marked as closed in that version, instead of just being marked as fixed. This is a great benefit to the release process, since previously, bugfixes in NMUs were still falling off the radar as soon as they were uploaded, with no automatable way to check whether a given update stuck in unstable fixed release-critical bugs that we needed to have in testing for the release. So these guys get a big thank you from me for helping to ensure etch only ships with the bugs we want it to ship with. ;) The new setup also has the advantage that bug submitters finally get the same, real email for bugs closed in NMU as they do for bugs closed in MU, instead of being left in the dark as they were before. But that only takes care of bugs closed in NMUs that happen between now and the release -- it does nothing for the roughly 1200 RC bugs that were already fixed in prior NMUs that haven't been acknowledged by the maintainer. Who knows if any (or how many) of those are still open in etch right now? Rather hard to tell when we don't know what version closed them, isn't it? So with a lot of help from Adam Barratt this weekend, we've marked about 800 (egads) of these RC bugs as closed in the corresponding NMU versions, with a brief note to the submitters. In the next couple of days, we should find our way to the end of the list, at which point we can think about ignoring the 'fixed' tag over on turmzimmer.net. Also fixed now is bug #388431, so people should be able to stop worrying now about their users chewing up the CPU with real-time scheduling. Nothing like a maintainer upload of a base package one year in the making, being uploaded after it's been frozen. So make that... 801 bugs closed?

The last few weeks have been rather busy, but here's a short overview:

• The Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit - nice to meet many other FLOSS developers, some interesting talks and discussions, but on overall I'm not satisfied with the results and my contributions
• Learned Turbogears. The following days I started a new project with a friend using Turbogears. It's not yet started; we're keeping it somewhat under the hood, but beta test will begin soon.
• Bought a new (used) laptop, I'm reinstalling it right now with encrypted disks using the latest Debian installer. Report will follow.
• Went to my first football match, the Berkeley vs. Washington game. This was a thriller: Washington miraculously was able to draw even in the last second, so the game went into overtime, where Berkeley had an interception and won. I still don't like football however, the game is suspended most of the time, and all you see is some people running into each other.
• Sick - I got a serious cold or flu at the game, and I'm still recovering from it.
• Flight back from SFO to Munich, in addition to the cold I'm also fighting Jetlag.

When I've somewhat recovered from the cold I'll start working on my diploma thesis. P.S. if you have some turbogears experience and don't charge overly high charges for small contract works - please contact me at erich@debian.org

Are blogs and conference speeches inherently about self promotion? If so is that a bad thing?

Recently I mentioned my Planet configuration on a mailing list where most people don't track new technology. Some people viewed blog entries for the first time as a result of this and then claimed that blogs appeared to be mostly about self-promotion.

It seems to me that people offer conference speeches to promote technology that they believe in (which often equates to self-promotion as such people are well known to be associated with the technology in question), for promoting themself or their own business, or to promote the company that employes them. Of these categories of talk the worst ones are those which are given to promote a company, it's especially bad when a talk starts with "the guy who was supposed to give this talk was called to a client so I'm doing it instead" - this indicates how much the company cares for the quality of the talk. Someone who is promoting themself will care about doing a reasonable job. Someone who promotes their favourite technology will usually give a great talk! But corporations rarely get the idea that a good quality talk which makes little mention of their products is the most effective advertisement. Of recent times Google seems to be the best example of a company which gets this idea, at many conferences there are Google employees giving talks about various technologies not directly related to Google operations without any direct sales pitch. Everyone who attends such talks gets the message - Google has hired many smart people and has them working on cool things.

It seems that blogs are often written with similar motivations to conference presentations but with no control over the topic and less quality control. The difference of course is that a blog doesn't get a forum the way a talk which is accepted by a conference will. So a corporate blog has to be really good to get readers.

PS I've added the day15 beard picture to this entry, it was taken on the 22nd of October, but I had only just got around to GIMPing it and uploading it.

A while ago I read Steve Yegge’s rant about Agile development, though I’ve forgotten who linked to it. The thing that struck me as interesting was the bit about “work queues”:

With a priority queue, you have a dumping-ground for any and all ideas (and bugs) that people suggest as the project unfolds. No engineer is ever idle, unless the queue is empty, which by definition means the project has launched. Tasks can be suspended and resumed simply by putting them back in the queue with appropriate notes or documentation. You always know how much work is left, and if you like, you can make time estimates based on the remaining tasks. You can examine closed work items to infer anything from bug regression rates to (if you like) individual productivity. You can see which tasks are often passed over, which can help you discover root causes of pain in the organization. A work queue is completely transparent, so there is minimal risk of accidental duplication of work.

Sadly, googling for “work queue” doesn’t come up with any sort of todo list stuff, but rather a multiprocessing scheduling tool which is cool, but not immediately relevant for me. As far as I can see, whatever was actually being talked about either isn’t public, or is more of a concept than an actual tool. The only Google Todo thing I could find was an applet thing for the personalised google homepage, which just lets you make todo items and set them as high/medium/low priority. And while that might be all that Steve Yegge was talking about, it doesn’t really feel terribly inspiring to me. I guess what I’d really like is to have todo items get assigned to a project (so that I can ignore all the todos for projects I don’t want to worry about atm), and also to be able to give them a deadline (so I can treat them with a bit more urgency when necessary) and a priority (so that I can easily spot things I’m willing to defer or ignore completely when I find I don’t have time to do everything I’d like). I suspect I’ll probably just stick with writing notes in vi to keep track of things, though, same as I have been for years.

Last week, the Free Standards Group launched the LSB Developer Network, a community resource for developers building portable Linux applications via the LSB (read the press release and the introduction from LDN editor Martin Streicher). The LSB Developer Network (or LDN for short) aims to provide a well known starting point for developers looking to target the variety of Linux distributions available today without requiring a separate version for each distribution. It is the perfect complement to the LSB, which already provides a “highest common denominator” across the major distributions; and LSB Certification, which allows ISVs to indicate that their products will work with LSB Certified distributions. The big themes of LDN are “decentralized” and “bottom up”—to paraphrase Darrin Thompson, it’s a developer network that’s actually a network. In other words, we’re not taking the usual path of hiring a bunch of people to construct a centralized “network” from the top down—after all, Linux is a fundamentally decentralized phenomenon so shouldn’t a developer network for Linux be decentralized as well? Like the LSB, we see LDN as essential to the ultimate success of the Linux platform, an answer to similar programs for the centralized, proprietary platforms Linux competes with but built using the very techniques that make Linux what it is. Our fundamental belief is that “decentralized” doesn’t have to mean “fragmented”, and LSB and LDN are both key steps toward that end goal. We’re off to a good start too: LDN has the backing of a broad range of Linux platform stakeholders ranging from distribution vendors (Novell, Red Hat, Ubuntu) to OEMs (HP, IBM) and ISVs (MySQL, RealNetworks) to tools and content providers (O’Reilly, SlickEdit). One upcoming feature I’m particularly excited about is the integration of Safari Books Online. Soon, you’ll be able to type, for example, a function name into the LDN search box and get not just results from the link directory but also results from O’Reilly titles and others you know and love. We’re moving rapidly to add community content as well, including man pages and canonical reference documentation; and we’ll be hooking LDN into the LSB database, so you’ll be able to query the status of interfaces too, including whether or not those interfaces are in the LSB and what their status is in each of the major Linux distributions, to help make your applications as portable as possible. If you’re a Linux developer, and particularly if you use del.icio.us to bookmark resources on the web related to software development on Linux, I urge you to contribute to the LSB Developer Network. It’s easy: Simply create an account and link your account to your del.icio.us account (you don’t need to provide your del.icio.us password, just your username), and as you bookmark, tag, and annotate pages, your bookmarks, tags, and annotations will be pulled into the LDN directory. Help us build a developer network for Linux, bottom-up style!

Tony tagged 2.6.18-omap1 yesterday. This has nearly got to the point where all the "easy" devices on the E3 are supported out of the box. I need to clean up the modem bits for inclusion - currently it's done with early_serial_setup which I'm sure is wrong but my attempts to do it with a platform_device haven't met with much success. I'm sure half an hour with a hammer will do the trick. That basically leaves the more intrusive or non fully functional drivers; Matt Callow's mailboard and camera work and Mark Underwood's sound driver (unfortunately still not complete :( ). All of these are currently against 2.6.16. I tried to get the sound working under 2.6.17 but didn't get anywhere with it. If I can manage to find some time I'll try again with 2.6.18. Not that I have a lot of time at present it seems. Spent last week in Northern Ireland, Cambridge, London and Reading and this week I've got LinuxWorld (I'll be on the Debian stand, of course). I've had a bunch of things to try in terms of getting SA1110 UDC working for the Balloon which should probably take priority over the E3 sound. Meh. Can I have more hours in the day? Or a teleport would probably be better.

As a little side project I got interested in adding a MicroID extension for MediaWiki. MicroID is a teensy little format for asserting that the owner of a particular Web user account is also the owner of another account (like an email account or an OpenID). Adding support to MediaWiki means that Wikitravel users can verify their accounts with claimID or other similar services. Fun stuff, relatively easy, and useful for everyone -- the best kind of hacks. tags: microid mediawiki wikitravel identity openid

Confidential to Mako So, one thing that makes a Web site WebSoftwareFriendly is making sure (as best as possible) that each page has one and only one URL. It makes it easier when doing summaries and statistics and such for Web software to know that one page has One True Identity. Otherwise, it divides that page&aposs count of hits, incoming links, citations, etc. etc. between the two (or more) different URLs. The Web software then has an incorrect view of the world and is less useful for human beings. Planet Debian is a site like that. You can get to the same front page either through http://planet.debian.org/ or http://planet.debian.net/ . It may be a good idea to use a 301 redirect (moved permanently) to tell browsers and other Web software that one or the other URL is the definitive one. (I&aposm partial to the .net one, but not for any good reason). The following code somewhere in the Apache configuration for Planet Debian should do the trick:

RewriteCond % HTTP_HOST    !^planet\.debian\.net [NC]
RewriteCond % HTTP_HOST    !^$
RewriteRule ^/(.*)         http://planet.debian.net/$1 [L,R=301]

It just says, "If the client requests an URL that doesn&apost use our preferred hostname, redirect them with a 301 HTTP code to the same URL at the right hostname." Web software like blog aggregators, Firefox (or Iceweasel) extensions, or any other software that does HTTP stuff at a low level will benefit. tags: mako planet debian websoftwarefriendly nosey

Geograph Quick link here: the Geograph British Isles project is totally cool. Creative Commons-licensed photos for every map square in the wt:United Kingdom and wt:Ireland. Their coverage is already quite good. tags: geo geograph photos cc

Recently I mentioned that I hate releasing software. It's true, and I've decided that the first part of fixing it is to tackle the presentation of software to the world.

My current scheme of darcs.complete.org for repositories plus bare directories on my gopher (yes, that gopher) site leaves a lot to be desired. There is no bug tracker, there are few screenshots, there is no consistency. It is also not easy to empower others to work on them directly.

At the same time, I am the sole or primary contributor to most of them. These are not huge kernel-sized projects. These are smaller, bite-size projects. So I don't want or need a lot of overhead. I've been thinking about my options.

• I could just use sourceforge.net. I poked around there today, and all the advertising there is a real eyesore. Plus I figure that if anyone is getting paid for all my hard work, why should it be some random people that no longer write free software? On the other hand, it would be an easy way for my projects to gain visibility. Or I could use alioth, and give up both the advertisements and the larger visibility. But I don't like giving up control over my site's appearance, or behing beholden to others for backups, uptime, etc.


• I could use trac. It's nice, and is the only option that supports darcs, and has a very cool wiki integrated into everything (even parsing out keywords from changelogs). On the other hand, downloads are -- at best -- attachments to wiki pages. There is no download manager. And you have to set up a separate trac instance for each project. That is a non-starter for me. If I can't see all my bug reports at one place, the bug tracker will be too annoying to use.


• I could use gforge or savane. These are the sourceforge forks. Neither seems to be as resource-hungry as I expected, and debs are available for both. I could just install them locally and use them for my projects, though that seems like overkill. Plus, like SourceForge and Alioth, they have a crappy web-only bug tracker. I'd rather use something like RT that works by email. (Though RT is too resource-intensive to run on my server). However, web-only is better than nothing so I could hold my nose and use it.


• I could write my own. But I'd rather not, if there's already something workable out there.

Is anyone else thinking about this? What are your thoughts?

Found at the Mexico City House Hash Harriers mailing list A man and a woman who had never met before, but were both married to other people, found themselves assigned to the same sleeping room on a transcontinental train. Though initially embarrassed and uneasy over sharing a room, they were both very tired and fell asleep quickly… he in the upper bunk and she in the lower. At 1:00 AM, the man leaned over and gently woke the woman saying, “Ma’am, I’m sorry to bother you, but would you be willing to reach into the closet to get me a second blanket? I’m awfully cold.” “I have a better idea,” she replied. “Just for tonight, let’s pretend that we’re married.” “Wow! That’s a great idea!” he exclaimed. “Good,” she replied. “Get your own fucking blanket.” After a moment of silence, he farted.

With the elections for the parliament upcoming I've been considering who to vote for this time. For a longer time now I'm considering voting for the PvdA (Labour Party) lead by Wouter Bos. Bos has really refreshed the party and got rid of many of the old (and stale) socialist ideals, replacing them with more modern, still social views of society. He's also from a business background which is a welcome alternative to all the career politicians. My choice had been made. Until today. I discovered wiekiesjij.nl, "whogetsyourvote.nl", a great website aiming to better inform voters about the people on the (long) lists of candidate. Over 80% of votes on a party go to the party leader, while most lists can have over 50 candidates. The website allows you to search on personal aspects of the candidates. After some fiddling I tried the combination vegetarian, < 30 y.o., atheist and reached exactly one candidate: Kirsten Verdel, number 58 for the PvdA. From her blog she seems very sensible, and an extra qualification is that she's worked at my (everyone's?) favourite ISP XS4ALL. So my vote will go to Kirsten. It will end up at the PvdA, and Wouter will get in anyway, but I also support someone whose interests are quite similar to mine. An excellent combination. Thank you, wiekiesjij.nl for providing this insight.

Just a few weeks ago, the world heard the news of the tragic school shooting at an Amish school in rural Pennsylvania. A deranged man entered the schoolhouse, bound and gagged female hostages, brought along torture equipment, and shot 10 of them. 5 died, and the remaining 5 are believed to still be hospitalized.

Back in 1990, a deranged man committed a series of murders near the University of Florida campus in Gainesville. The story mentions 5 people that were killed.

Both were tragic situations. Both men killed people that had their whole lives in front of them. Both shook an entire community.

But look at how the communities responded. The Amish responded like this:

CNN reported a grandfather of one of the murdered Amish girls said of the killer on the day of the murder: "We must not think evil of this man."

Jack Meyer, a member of the Brethren community living near the Amish in Lancaster County, explained: "I don't think there's anybody here that wants to do anything but forgive and not only reach out to those who have suffered a loss in that way but to reach out to the family of the man who committed these acts," he told CNN.

The Amish have reached out to Roberts' family. Dwight Lefever, a Roberts family spokesman said an Amish neighbor comforted the Roberts family hours after the shooting and extended forgiveness to them.

An article in a Canadian newspaper the National Post stated that the Amish have set up a charitable fund for the family of the shooter. (Wikipedia)

In addition, the Amish invited the Roberts family to attend the funerals for the Amish girls he killed.

Gainesville reacted this way:

Dianna Hoyt, Christa Hoyt's stepmother, said Rolling's execution has been eagerly awaited by the victims' families. Some will be inside the prison to witness it. . .

Sadie Darnell, who was the police department's media spokeswoman at the time and developed enduring friendships with the victims' families, said Rolling's execution still matters, even if it also provides him more of the notoriety he sought.

"Retribution . . . is important because it represents that our society is holding that person accountable," said Darnell, now a candidate for Alachua County sheriff. (CNN)

We've all heard of murders that have taken place lately. Usually they are accompanied by calls by politicians, victim's family, and sometimes even clergy to kill the perpetrator. In the days after 9/11, there were reports of anybody that looked Middle Eastern being attacked in several different places around the country.

I have never understood this great desire for revenge. How does that help anyone?

What the Amish did was right religiously and morally. They truly followed the New Testament call to love your enemies and forgive. It is not easy to follow all of Jesus' teachings, and nobody said it would be. But they are doing it, and they have already begun healing. Reports are that the Roberts family has become friends with several of the Amish in the area, and they are working to help each other out after this horrible tragedy.

Even putting religion aside for a moment, the Amish actions are quite simply the right thing to do. By spreading love instead of hate, and friendship instead of revenge, they have succeeded in making sure that no cycle of violence starts there.

In contrast, 16 years later, the families of the victims in Florida still aren't healing. They are still angry and bitter. They are still seeking revenge. They hope that their lives will get back to normal after the murderer is killed. But after 16 years of stewing about it, will they really? And what about the family of the murderer, whose lives certainly must have been a mess for the past 16 years? They will now lose a family member. Does anyone care about them, or will they now turn angry at society and possibly spread the pain more?

Imagine what would happen if so many more people around the world took the Amish perspective -- to forgive those that wronged us. How long must it be before we can forgive? How far back do we spread our hate? Do we still hate those that were involved in 9/11, or can we forgive them? Do we still hate the Germans for what their ancestors did in World War II, or can we forgive them? Do we hate politicians with whom we strongly disagree, or think are liars? Do we still hate all those that have wronged us personally -- someone that stole something from us or the sadistic boss?

Knives, electric chairs, and bombs do not buy reconciliation. They can not "win over" the hearts of others. They do not make our lives easier. Hate brings more hate, and more resentment.

Forgiveness is not easy. We all hope that we will never be involved in such a tragedies as these. But let us follow the example the Amish have shown -- forgive for all things, big or small, important or not, painful or not.

Only then will we be at peace with ourselves, and only then will we have the chance to be at peace with our neighbors.

This weekend, I started modifying the way I use disk space on rock, my home desktop and server. rock used to be a PentiumIII running at 650Mhz, until I received an SMP box from Osamu Aoki when he moved back to Japan and couldn't take it with him. So rock is now a dual Celeron 433Mhz, and the machine that originally served as my desktop went on to replace pop, my parent's box. A little while later, rock's hard disk died, and I was left with a single 13G hard disk (or so I thought). At that point, I used the sarge installer to install rock on an LVM system, so that I could easily enlarge the volumes in the installation later on, without having to start copying files for no good reason. When I later on bought a second-hand 80G hard disk to add to the LVM system, I found that there were in fact two more hard disks inside rock, which simply hadn't been connected to the IDE controllers; one was 20G large, the other 40G. So I added them all, and enlarged all the volumes that could use some extra space. A while later, I started worrying. What if one of the disks would die? Reading the documentation, I found that I would lose all the LVM volumes that were on the dead disk, even if only partially. Obviously there's also an option to get LVM to mount partial volumes to get at the data that's still available, but it didn't sound too hopeful. In short, I became convinced that what I was doing wasn't all that sure for my data. Obviously I have backups of the important stuff, but avoiding failure is always preferable over having to use recovery procedures, even if they're good recovery procedures. So I decided that I would migrate to a setup that would use at least some redundancy; that way, I could stop worrying as much. And since I had four disks, there should've been a way to do that. I started partitioning, and found that I had overlooked a second 40G hard disk that rock was using; so rather than creating a RAID5 array on top of two 33G partitions (on the 40G and 80G disks) and one RAID0 array or something similar (combining the 13G and 20G disks), I decided to create a 40G RAID5 array composed of two 40G disks and one 40G partition on an 80G disk. All other disk space (the other 40G on the 80G disk, and the 20G and 13G disks) would be combined into an LVM volume group for less important data (such as the squid cache and other large parts of /var, swap space, and a bunch of digitized CD's of which I still have the originals). Also, the RAID5 array wouldn't just be one large volume or so; instead, I created another LVM volume group in the RAID array. Theoretically I could of course combine everything in one volume group and use pvmove and/or the right options on lvcreate to force important volumes on the RAID array, but then having separate volume groups for RAID/no RAID would force me to think carefully before managing volumes, which is never a bad idea. So on Friday I started moving data. This would involve running pvmove on a particular physical volume until all data would be removed from it; then run vgreduce -a <vgname> to remove the physical volume from it; use the just-freed drive to create new partitions on it to hold the live data; copy the live data over; and start doing pvmove again. Rinse, repeat, until all data is copied over and/or you've freed enough disks to create the RAID array. Luckily one can create a RAID array in degraded mode, or the procedure would've involved updating my backups, verifying them, wiping the hard disks, and reinstalling. As it is, I could get away with creating partitions that were just large enough to hold all data, and hoping people wouldn't try creating more data. I started working on this on Friday, and am just now, over 48 hours later, finishing up. It should've been possible to do all this in far less time; but rather than explaining what went wrong, let me just say, for the record, that I hate hardware. And that I should plan better. Anyway. The last stumbling block was the fact that the system simply wouldn't boot from the new root device. The reason was fairly obvious; the initrd was generated when mdadm was not installed yet, so had to be regenerated. But after calling yaird with the right options, it still wouldn't work. It took me a while to figure it out; but eventually, I found that yaird will read your /etc/fstab to find out about your root device; that it will see how it can get at that root device (where it's smart enough to know about md devices and LVM devices etc); and that it will then add the right software to the initrd based on that. Sure enough, my temporary root device that I had put outside of any LVM thing on /dev/hdb3 did have /dev/hdb3 as its root partition. So yaird didn't think mdadm was necessary. Heh. Quick edit fixed that. So now I have my important data on an LVM system on RAID5, and my less important data still on LVM. Me happy.