Two kids, their really busy mother and my paid job leave me without much time
to blog or do Debian related work lately (well, at least on my free time,
I do Debian related things at work, but mostly as a user, not as a developer).
Anyway, a couple of weeks ago I decided it was time to upgrade my home servers
to Squeeze and I did it, but it was harder than expected.
At home I'm using two old laptops as servers, an old Aluminium PowerBook and
an Asus EeePC; the Asus was installed to replace an older PowerBook (a really
old one, BTW) that I was using as home server since my father gave it to me.
The plan was to use
OpenVZ on the Asus to move all
the PowerPC services to a couple of
Virtual Environments, but as I wanted to
migrate and change almost all the services I never got enough free time to
finish the job and when the old PowerBook hardware failed I replaced it with
another PowerBook that I wasn't using anymore, but instead of reinstalling the
machine I did a clean Lenny install using a kernel with support for
linux-vserver (
OpenVZ does not work on PowerPC)
and transformed the old machine installation (it was an Etch installation at
the time) into a
Virtual Private Server that run on the new hardware.
Having both systems running I upgraded the VPS to
Lenny and, as usually
happens, left the things as they were without consolidating the services into
only one machine, as I initially planned.
With this state of affairs I upgraded the
Asus to Squeeze without much
trouble (in fact I installed a kernel without
OpenVZ support, as the
services I use from this laptop were running on the host and not on a VE) and
did the same with the PowerPC host, but to my surprise the
linux-vserver VPS
failed to start with a message that seemed to imply that the
VServer support
was not enabled.
I should have filled a bug on the BTS then, but as I looked into how to solve
the issue I found bugs saying that the meaning of the message was that I had
no support for
linux-vserver and I needed to start the VPS ASAP, as it was
the machine that runs my SMTP server.
Before doing a restore of my last backup I did some digging and found a lot of
messages recommending to move
OpenVZ and
Linux-VServer virtual machines to
LXC and decided to give it a try.
First I built a container on the
Asus and it worked OK, after that I did the
same on the PowerPC, but the script failed; luckily the patch was trivial, the
problem was on the
/usr/lib/lxc/templates/lxc-debian script; it uses
arch
to get the
Debian architecture, but for
powerpc it gives
ppc instead of
powerpc, so it needs to be fixed on the script (Note to self: I have to
submit bug + patch to the lxc package to fix it).
After creating this container and trying it I tried to boot my old VPS with a
LXC configuration:
- For the network I used a
veth device attached to a bridge (I was already
using a local bridge and the /etc/network/interfaces file on the container
was right, as it was the one that I copied from the old real machine).
- I also reviewed the containers'
/etc/rc*.d contents, disabling the
hardware related services (to do that I just followed the template script
actions).
After a couple of tries I noticed that the system was not booting because it
was missing the devices files needed; to fix it I copied the
/dev directory
of my first LXC test and using a
chroot I also removed the
udev packages
from the container.
After that last changes the machine booted as expected and all services were
running OK.
To summarize, I decided to do the move to LXC and fixed the configuration to
boot the virtual machines on each restart:
- First I moved the machines to
/var/lib/lxc/, putting each container in a
sub directory that includes the machine's config file and its rootfs.
- Once I had that I linked the
/var/lib/lxc/$CONTAINER/config files of the
machines I want to boot on each host restart with names of the form
/etc/lxc/$CONTAINER.conf and adjusted the /etc/default/lxc file
accordingly:
- To try everything I rebooted the machine and all worked fine.
I know that LXC is still missing some functionality (I hate the way the
container stop function kills everything instead of doing a run-level change, I
guess I'll be using
hacks until I move to a newer kernel with the proper
support enters into Debian), but having the code on the mainline kernel is
a great bonus and the user level utilities are good enough for my home
needs... and I hope they'll arrive to a point where we'll be able to migrate
the
OpenVZ containers at work (we are using Proxmox and the support of
the
OpenVZ patchset is starting to worry us).
On my next post:
The Freak Firewall or
The Story of a HA Firewall based on OpenBSD's pf
running on Debian GNU/kFreeBSD hosts.
Three thousand lines of code is not a huge program, but it is enough
to get a pretty good feel for a language. Now that I've completed my
first real Haskell program I feel that I've gotten over several
of the humps in the learning curve and am starting to get a good feel
for it.
Actually, I've written closer to five thousand lines, since there were
several big refactorings. One was when I stopped manually threading my
program state around and added a 
A couple of month ago, my step-father-in-law encountered quite some
problems with the Windows installation on his Notebook and therefore
showed a great interest in 
After having 
Like you most likely know, I've been at the 
In the past, I ve helped customers run native Windows applications using emulation (wine) and/or virtualization, and in few cases, native support for C# by open source projects such as Mono. But, as it s been said, there are great benefits of having source code, and I recently worked around an issue in Mono by recompiling a whole .NET project in Debian.
So here s a brief guide reviewing the issues that I found and how I solved each one of them leading to a natively-compiled C# application that runs seamlessly in Debian and Windows, and please remember I m not a C#/.NET/Mono developer:
OK, I still have to load my photos of Debconf10 somewhere. Shame on
me. My gallery is broken (no longer allows uploads, even local ones!).
Still, do you remember that we somehow mentioned that a small bunch of
geeks did run together a local race at Debconf10?
Indeed, a dozen of Debconf10 attendees did participate to the Van
Cortland Track Club Summer Series run of Thursday August 5th. And all
of us completed this 5km cross-country run in Van Cortland Park, in
Bronx, turning it into the most international attendance of this local
race.
I use 
As requested by our beloved leader, here s my report on this year s Google Summer of Code 2010 Mentor Summit. The summit took place in Google s HQ in Mountain View, California and was what they call an unconference . In the beginning of the unconference the attendees had 10 minutes to write down proposals for a session and put them on a huge white board. After that, every attendee voted for the sessions in which he was interested by putting a small sticker on the proposal. This way we could evaluate the interest on a specific topic and schedule the sessions to the differently sized rooms according to their interest. Neat trick!
The the rest of the summit was basically like a conference: we had 11 tracks filled with 5-6 sessions per day, which ran from 10:00 to 17:30. Google provided shuttle buses from our wonderful hotel to the googleplex in the morning and back to the hotel in the evening. The hotel was very nice, it was equipped a swimming pool and a hot tub (both outside), which was extensively used in the morning and of course during the night. Speaking of the night, Google sponsored Thai food in the first night and ye olde Pizza and Beer in the second. Some of the attendees brought their keyboard, guitar, bass and electric clarinet, and where playing some sweet ass Jazz and Pop (on special request ).
The sessions itself where not quite what I expected. I expected some proper talks about specific topics, but it was more like and open discussion round where everyone was invited to participate. For some topics it worked pretty well, for others not. It was still totally worth coming, since you meet a lot of like minded people and there is plenty stuff to talk about.
Of course I was very exited to see the googleplex. And the rumors are true: the googleplex seems to be a very nice place to work. They provide free breakfast, lunch and dinner for their employees. They have micro kitchens everywhere where you can grab free snacks and beverages. There are lot s of toys lying around, they have bicycles everywhere on the campus which you can just grab to move from one building to another. There is a dinosaur on the yard, a spaceship over the stairwell and lots of other things (testing on the toilet, anyone?), and we have probably only seen a small fraction, since we were not allowed to leave the restricted areas for the unconference.
Despite the horrible yet lag (leaving Germany on Friday morning and leaving San Francisco on Sunday night), I m glad I was able to attend to the summit and can only recommend aspiring mentors and students to participate to the next summer of code!
