Search Results: "will"

16 May 2006

Wouter Verhelst: On huge ISPs and multi-level support requests.

Adam They just told you how to get past their front lines: Call their business support on the toll-free phone number she gave you. Here's my take at what happened:

You entered a question on a web form which is intended for user support questions.
A first-line technical support person called Irene (who, most likely, is not trained as a computer person; since 90% of all calls can be fixed by going with the customer through their connection and email settings, you can train anyone to be a first-line technical support person in one day, with most of the time spent in How do I handle the phone and How do I handle the ticket tracking system) had a look at your request, saw that you had problems with sending email from remote systems, and copied a standard text about mail bounces in her reply to you. Remember that there are many people out there who think they know a lot about computers because they know how to start regedit and know a few buzzwords; the presence os such words in a support request is not necessarily a sign that there's some clue at the other end of the line.
You replied that no, this does not apply, and that yes, it's really a problem at your end, because lots of words Irene does not understand. She then decided you're totally out of her league, and redirected you to their second-line support; second-line supportlines do consist of people knowledgeable about computers, because at that point it's no longer a trivial problem. Since you happen to be an ISP, which is a company in her book, she referred you to the Business support line; such a Business support line usually consists of people even more knowledgeable about computers in general and the Internet specifically, because companies usually have rather specific needs that go a bit further than I have an ADSL modem and a Windows box.

Really. Call them. You'll find that you will be talking to someone knowledgeable about what SMTP is, and who is able to put a request with SMTP administrators to fix this issue if that is required. Take it from someone who used to work at one of Belgium's largest ISP's (at least, it was that when I used to work there—they've lost some market share since).

Kai Hendry: So close yet so far

So I need to write a report. I can’t write it in HTML because it will print badly from a browser. And editing HTML can be a pain. There is princexml but that costs a couple of hundred dollars. I don’t want to edit in ODF because then I would have to use a hunk-of-crap WYSIWYG editor like Openoffice. Hell no. Also I have no experience of how ODF maps to the Web. Pretty badly I’ll assume. There is stuff like textile, markdown and reStructuredText, but what’s the point? They only seem to generate good HTML. So we are still left with the printing beautifully to A4 problem. Ok there is good old “tex”. But really I don’t want to go back there! Do I really have to use latex? It’s just so heavy and you can’t publish to HTML easily. Argh! Docbook. Hell no. It’s a dark art to control how the formats finally look. Trust me, I have experience. I had this thought that there must be some good mediawiki/wikipedia article printer tool. Maybe I can write this in mediawiki with the help of mozex and vim. Oh no. The Debian package is still b0rked on 1.4. Argh… I just wish there was a better mapping between the web and office formats like odf.

Ted Walther: Report from Debconf, Day Two

Photography. My roommate Aigars is quite a photographer, he came with his digital SLR and several lenses, an item I've lusted after for some time. Large apertures and manual controls are what every real photographer demands, and digital SLR's deliver. I told him my idea for a small sky recording station so that people could make movies of the paths that the stars take, and how it changes over the year. Ultimately I want a network of these stations, all uploading their pictures so I can examine them for anamolies. This is a hard problem, because stars are so faint. Aigars said to take a picture of the whole sky, a 1000 millimeter lense and a $50 computer scanner with some modifications should be able to do the job.

Me and Andreas Schuldei

Programming. Finally made progress in programming, now that I know where everything is in Oaxtepec. My IRC bot didn't handle things gracefully when the server refused to let it log in, but that is fixed now. Tomorrow I hope to add multi-channel support. Reading through the new IRC RFC, I have the information I need to make a proper configuration file for the software. The design is sketched out and feels right, finally. Weekend vs. Weekday. Oaxtepec is much quieter today. Saturday and Sunday there were far more vendors on the street, and they stayed open much later. Today everything closed down around 6pm when the church bell tolled the summons to mass. I couldn't find the coconut man; maybe he only comes on weekends. Half the stalls at the mercado were empty. During the weekend, the resort was full of vacationers swimming, barbecuing, picnicing, playing soccer, or just sunbathing while the kids ran around. Everyone, young and old, but mostly young adult men and women, were running around in bathing trunks and bikinis. The happy noises were great to wake up to. This morning the sounds were quieter, but still present. The swimming pools here get a lot of use. During the weekend, there was a large tent where some ladies were giving body massages for $10. I didn't see them today. Probably they will be here again next weekend. Food. Tried a dish called "pancita" today. I saw people eating noodles and assumed pancita was a noodle dish, like the Filipino pancit. But no. It is a type of tomato soup filled with chopped up beef rind and chunks of fat. For only P31, I bought a small chicken. It was perfectly marinated and roasted, better than Kentucky Fried Chicken. I paid the money, and the shopkeeper brought out a pair of scissors and cut the chicken into all the appropriate pieces for easy eating, just like they do in Korea (viz the use of scissors) Church. Attended mass tonight, since the church was so close. The church is magnificent. It really is a cathedral inside; to see the ceiling you have to crane your neck. And when you do, you see paintings of angels playing instruments. I went into the nave to pray, and saw a giant depiction of the ark of the covenant. It was very realistic, with the cherubim covering it with their wings. And above it, was a painting of the wine and bread offering, which were offered on the altar daily. The priest was a black man from Illinois; after a bit of attempting to speak to each other in Spanish, we realized we both spoke English, and got on famously from then on. The cathedral opens at 10am, closes for lunch from 2pm-4pm, and then is open until mass is finished. This must be what the church was like in the beginning; a place where believers could drop in any time to be with others of their kind, to meet, eat, drink, discuss, and elevate each other to a higher plane. I am sad that we don't have this in Canada. Debian. There were some Debian talks and presentations, but nothing too interesting. Finally met Mark Shuttleworth, Anthony Towns, Manoj Srivastava, and Roblimo Miller. Clifford Beshers of Linspire almost convinced me to look into the Haskell computer language. I couldn't quite tell what Haskell has that LISP doesn't, apart from forcing strong types on you and being very fast and efficient in benchmarks tests. Marga didn't give me meal tickets before, so Graham printed some up for me today. By pure serendipity, I sat at dinner with the only other Canadian developers at the conference; Simon Law and Eric Dorland from Montreal. The drinking started at 11pm and is still going strong; the atmosphere is very convivial right now, but half of us are still tapping away at our keyboards.

Aigars Mahinovs: Debconf6 day 2: Java is non-free, at last!

The first session in the morning that I attended was the BOF about Python. After an introduction to the current state by the Python maintainer (Matthias Klose) and a few other people we run overtime and the BOF was extended into another time slot. Also the session was plagued by the room switch hanging which affected both the network and the recording. It really looks that that strange situation with a bunch of python-foo, python2.3-foo and python2.4-foo packages will be fixed. Later in the day guys from Intel gave a talk about some kind of data mining stuff they were doing with hardware database from Ubuntu. The tool was called Toppler (from Dilbert) and basically was a hardware database. They pondered about possibilities of getting some useful information from the huge pool of data, but the examples that they showed were just lame. For example they showed how you can get a list of 1234 reports relating to this wireless card, but that is not what I want to know - I want to know if it works and if it does not work, what can I do to fix it. The showed an example of an OEM entering his computers hardware configuration to see what distro works on that hardware - that is completely useless: as an OEM I at that point would already have chosen a distro and what I really would like to know is what will and what will not work from my hardware configuration in that distro, why it will not work and how to fix that. That would be approaching useful status - so far they only have a SQL DB with a simplistic web fronted. At the same time to give out that kind of information you would need much more datapoints to make a correlation - datapoints most of which can not be tested automatically and require user interaction on submitting. On the other hand the more user interaction they need, the less users will want to submit that data. They already have at least 10 times too many questions (there were 30 + options) if they really want this to be something that users will want to contribute to. Also there is no real direct motivation for users to contribute to that database - maybe OEM's have that kind of motivation, but they must decide to use Linux first. In short I only saw mountains of social and technical problems with this project and really little in terms of benefit. That's what you get when you have too much money to burn. After that there was a "yearly" Ubuntu report from Mark Shuttleworth. Most of what Mark said was already widely known if you followed Ubuntu's development a bit. Dapper will release on 1st of June and will be supported for 3 years on the desktop and 5 years on the servers. Edgy Eft will be a developer driven highly experimental release that will be done in 4 months and its planning will be done in Ubuntu conference in Paris (18th-23rd June). In Dapper KDE is given equal weight to Gnome and in Edgy the same will be done to XFCE. There is a graphical installer - Ubiquity and a graphical upgrader that works around strange things that APT has not been designed to handle. Mark can only guess what will be in Edgy as developers will decide this one, but most probably Xen and XGL will be integrated, startup will be reworked by adding paralel init scripts with dependencies and maybe even APT will be replaced by some kind of SMART tool. I have not heard anything about it before and Mark also gave no further detail. but in any case Edgy promises to be "the Ubuntu equivalent of a release of Debian experimental". Way to go not to stick into the enterprise stability. I am really looking forward to that. Another announcement came from Sun - thanks to hard work of many people the license of Sun Java was changed to allow it to be included in Debian non-free repository. FHS and Debian Policy compilant packages have been produced and are uploaded to Debian sid non-free. Congrats to all involved! Now we only to move it to main somehow. Unfortunately I missed two BOF that I wanted to see due to scheduling changes that I did not follow at the time: i18n BOF and Debian representation BOF. I have been doing quite a bit of both during last years, so I wanted to be there, but missed it. Doh. In the afternoon I was twice recruited by the organizers to do the group photo. Last year there was a huge collection of dSLR's around Debconf5, but this year either the dSLR owners did not come or did not want to lug their cameras across half the globe, so I with my Canon 350D and a few (cheap) lenses have become the de-fact photographer of the Debconf6. It was only natural that the group photo also had to be taken by the best camera around. I, naturally, am very honored by the opportunity even if that would mean that I myself am not on the group photo. I could just gimp myself into the corner of it after the fact :) In any case the place to take the picture had to be found. The amphitheater where the Debconf5 group photo was taken was a perfect place, but lacking that a trick all the way back from Debconf3 could be employed - standing at a high place and take the picture at a sharp angle down. The best place for this that I found around here is the 10m diving tower - there is a platform aprx. 8 meters from the ground where one can clearly see to the back area of the tower where a large grass area is located. I still need to confirm whether I can take the group photo from there with my best lens (Canon 50mm f/1.8 II) and what amount of light will we have on time point when we have the ability to actually take the picture (18:00). There will still be a bit of a chance with the weather, so an alternate group photo time should also be planned. There will be an announcement mail that will probably go public before this email will. Oh and later in the evening I found a guy (sorry, names escape me is seconds) who has a Canon 17-40mm f/4 L lens which I will borrow from him for the group photo. That will make the photo a lot sharper and make us much more flexible to the group size which is very helpful. Just before the dinner I want to see the saunas that i was told long ago. Basically it was a headed room 3x1 meter with a temperature control outside that was set to 0. Nobody uses the sauna here and that is no wonder - the whole place is like a large sauna. In the same club (just above the restaurant where we have all the meals now) there was a ping-pong table, two pool tables and a gym. In the gym I found a Mexican Gentoo spy who's mom was born in Riga, Latvia. The world is truly small. After the dinner I sent out the group photo announcement email and then took a look at the Joey Hess's BOF about debian-installer. I snook into the talk to take a few photos and watched the rest via the webcast. Unfortunately all the people spoke very quietly there, so it was hard to distinguish their voices from the background noise. Please, do not do that! Speak up, people! The tango practice took place between hacklabs tonight. Looked fun, but I would rather take a lot of pictures of it :) On a final note I witnessed a Mao game in Spanish. That was only a bit more disturbing then the same game in English. Even while I do not speak any Spanish. P.S. If you really like what I do with photos in this blog, it would be very nice if you would sponsor me a Pro account at Flickr. Otherwise my monthly traffic limit there (20 Mb) is nearly up with only select photos of two days of Debconf uploaded. I have now almost 2 Gb of photos stored on my laptop and the conference is only starting.

15 May 2006

Junichi Uekawa: My wlan is dying quite often.

It's a prism2 card.There seems to be some kind of error condition, and once it enters that condition, the number of error packets will just increase.

Christian Perrier: Debconf - day 1

So, day 1 started when I felt asleep in the plane, at some randome place over the ocean near Galicia. We actually had a good sleep as the other place people weren't noisy even though the plane was packed. Woke up at 03:00 (MEX time). After a few listening music, I found myself using the free time to read the huge Report of Findings about Gender in F/LOSS recently mentioned in the Debian-Women mailing list. This is a very deeply interesting document which is a quite complete picture about the "Women in F/LOSS" topic. The people interested in the Debian Women project should definitely have a look at it. We finally landed easily at 06:30 local time. No problem going thru the customs, even though 3 of us were carrying more cheese than needed to be considered a terrorist group trying to invade Mexico. Cab drive to Oaxteprc went fine. The scenery is quite impressive and the pass at 3100m on the highway is....a bit strange for all of us. When arriving the Oaxtepec center we soon met with Enrico who helped us to discover the place, which is good as is is BIG... Found my room, with Damog and Ana sleeping in it (sleeping drunk as I was told later...:-))). So, I gently left my luggage there and we moved to have some breakfast at the market. I ate some really good tasting stuff which names I've no idea of, but thanks to Magic Enrico and his incredible abilities to catch any language in the world, we managed to do it. Back to the Tower for the Introductory talk...it was hard to be there in time with all these people crossing my path and who I need to say "hi" and babble with again. Later in the afternoon, after lunch, I felt more and more tired, so I missed Enrico's talk (Enrico, apologies!) and just isolated self, listening to good old Hot Tuna stuff and working on my business mail (yeah, I know, it's Sunday). More energy retrieved helped to finish the afternoon by hanging around here and there, trying to set up two ad-hoc sessions aimed at gathering all people interested in i18n to have some brainstoriming about what we want for i18n infratructure and all similar topics. Finally, at the end of the day, I attended Meike's training session for speakers. Really interesting moment to share with Aigars Mahinovs, Neil Mc Govern (hope I got it right), Bruno (Barrera), Martin Krafft. OK, we all suck on some aspects of our presentation skills but we less suck now (I'm afraid I will still suck by talk unpreparation as you will all notice for the "State of the art of i18n" I share with Javier on Saturday). And, finally, yes, finally...bed at midnight. Not so bad to recover from jet lag. Now I'm ready for a full Debconf Day, full of energy. Be prepared to a lot of bubulle's babbling, dudes.

Sergio Talens-Oliag: ikiwiki

Since I first read that joeyh was going to write a wiki engine with a subversion back-end I thought it was a good idea and after the announce that it was going to be usable as a blogging system I was sure that it was going to be something worth looking at (and hopefully learn from). I have installed the Debian package, but I have not had the time to test it although I've put it on my TODO list, as I'd love to move my blog to use a system like the one ikiwiki uses; I have a lot of things under revision control and moving things like my blog seem a logical next step (probably moving all my home directory comes next, but I need some time to do it and I also need to decide if I will use a centralized or distributed control system or a mix of both). Anyway it has a couple of problems for me right now:

It uses MarkDown (looks like a good format, although it is too centred into HTML), but I usually use reStructuredText (all my blog entries are written on .rst files) as it is a good format for reusing text for different purposes and there are tools to generate output formats that cover all my current needs (HTML for web pages, LaTeX/PDF for printing and S5 for presentations).
It is written in perl. As a user that is not a problem, but I'm not a native speaker and to solve the previous problem I was thinking about adding an rst plug-in to the current code... I'll look at it and see how it can be done, maybe it is simpler than I imagine and it is just a matter of calling the rst2html script and I can do it while keeping my perl knowledge low... ;)

Well, I'll test the current system and to see if I have to fill a wishlist bug against ikiwiki asking for reStructuredText support.

Aigars Mahinovs: Debconf6 day 1: Intro

The day was started by a welcome speech from the organizers saying thanks to all (most) the helpers and sponsors. The tower room was almost full, I wonder how will it look like when the real talks start. The next talk is only planed after an hour and a half as no BOF claimed this time slot. Well - a bit more time for hacking, socializing and sunbathing. :) After an hour of working on a good tan I went to "Debian vs. Open Solaris" discussion. After a bit of time the discussion about CDDL broke out. Debian basically objects to choice of venue clause and there are also GPL-incompatibility problems that might go away with GPLv3. The core of the discussion was more of the explanation of why those clauses were placed there in the first place. The sense that I got for the discussion is that Sun would modify CDDL in a way that will most probably make it DFSG-free and compatible with at least GPLv3. Also it was told that in fact usually choice of venue only applies to court suites between multi-regional corporations with overlapping regions. The legal discussions went over my head more then once especially when GPLv2, GPLv3 and CDDL license interaction on one system and distribution of such where discussed. On the OpenSolaris front there is a move from indoor source control system to Subversion. So far there are only around 100 non-Sun commits to OpenSolaris, but a big jump is expected after the transition to SVN is complete. Joey Hess had a wiki talk in paralel, which I did not see. Off to lunch! At the lunch I got to sit at the one table with Paul Allen from Intel and Ted Walther. It was discovered that Ted is actually just coming out of fasting so he does not eat anything, but only drinks juices. Well, that's one way to avoid foreign food problems. On the way back from lunch I got a lead on my first mark. I will now start a separate article about the Assassins game that I will publish when the game is over. The second talk was from Enrico about waisting time. He waisted a lot of our time with that :). I loved vigor - a paper clip assistant for vi :D. xlaby - a labyrinth for your mouse pointer. Read the man page! On the later part of the day I was busy mourning my death, preparing and trying to print papers fr the travel reimbursement stuff, so I missed all BOFs between Enrico and dinner, but had a bit of time for some local tetrinet fun. While I was doing that Ted was at the marketplace and got me a few bags of fried grasshoppers - a great souvenirs, thanks! :) Some evening hacking in the hacklab after the dinner and I already wanted to go to bed when I saw in the IRC an announcement about Speaker training BOF. The event was very interesting - Meike Reichle showed and made us do us several nice things that will definitely improve our public speaking. After that I just could not go buy a group of people playing Mao and I immediately joined the game. Luckily they were not playing long so I got the rules in seconds. The game nearly imploded after one of the players was very inconsistent with his rules (he had to rethink them all the time), but then another winner just reset the game and it went on with a lot of fun from that point. The game had three newbies, so it was a lot of fun, but also a bit of waiting for people to catch up and pay attention. Well, off to bed now - tomorrow will be busy.

Martin F. Krafft: e2fs fun

When Biella came to me today with a Grub error 2 (disk not found), I really thought that the problem would be solved within a little bit, even though we couldn't boot from USB (the verbose "Boot error") and had no CD drive available. Joey Hess fortunately had a netboot setup, so we ended up with a shell before too long. ... but that was only the beginning of the fun. To make a long story short, we're now sitting and watching e2fsck reporting "page after page after page" of error messages (quote Micah), consisting mainly of error messages listing thousands (literally) of block numbers claimed by multiple inodes on a single line. We have not figured out what actually happened, but it's somewhere between a motherboard problem and filesystem corruption accumulating over several weeks (Biella said the machine has been acting flakey lately). We'll consider sending the image to Theodore for analysis. Reading this and seeing her root partition go from working to something probably no longer resembling a filesystem really settle the issue for me. Never ever will I touch ext2 or ext3 again; XFS forever!

Ben Hutchings: Notes and slides from my talk at Debconf

Before I forget about it, here are the materials I prepared for my talk "Multithreading: why and how we should use it". I know I didn't present very well, but hopefully the links will give you a bit more explanation.

DebConf6 Blog: If you are one of those watching this years session via the video stream (Posted by Alexander Schmehl)

Update: Fixed a typo in the channel names. … and would to participate more interactivly, you’ll be pleased ot hear that we created two special irc channels for you on irc.debian.org. They are called #debconf-talks-tower and #dc6-talks-hacklab. Full schedule available updated as soon as we need to make a change is available at wiki.debian.org. Our Moderators, Nattie and Tolimar will try to keep an eye on those channels and proxy your questions. Please use those channels only to ask questions. No general discussion about the talks, no chatting, or we might loose track and ignore the channels ;) Thanks!

14 May 2006

Aigars Mahinovs: Deaths in Debconf

Debconf6 this year was also the venue of an Assasination game. The idea is that there are people playing the game who are ordered in a circle. Each of them only know the name of the person in front of them - the one they have to assassinate. The killing takes place by touching the marks upper body with a (clean) sock. The assassin must hold the sock in the moment of contact and nobody who is playing can see the event. If a player sees the assassination, it is void and must be repeated, but no sooner then on the next day. Before the death a killed assassin must utter the name of his mark, which then becomes the mark of the killer. My first mark was a guy that I did not know. I had to wait a day for him to arrive. I also had no idea how he looked because there is no available photo of him online. That made my job a bit harder. I tried to find him among people going from the lunch to the Enrico's speech, but missed him. And on the way back I was assassinated myself. Bugger. I think I can publish it now, because this information will not affect the game except maybe make people be a bit more careful when walking to the tower and back - it is a nice assassination spot. :P I guess being recognizable because of this blog is a big disadvantage in this game.

Pierre Habouzit: bugs['debian-qt-kde'] -= 200

Yeah, we did the past 10 days an extraordinary amazing job of triaging. almost 200 bugs that rot here since ages are now closed (hopefuly for good). Still a bit less than 1200 (non forwarded, non wontfix, non pending) bugs to triage, but still, it's a big step ! bts-link was of great help, to track bugs that were closed upstream since ages, and that we missed. Before, I rarely took the time to forward bugs upstream, because I though: what the heck, I won't have the courrage/time to follow its evolution upstream, and it will rot in the 1000 other bugs . bts-link put an end to that time.

Gunnar Wolf: Thanks!

Debcamp was really stressing - It seemed we would not be able to get things to work for Debconf. And it would suck. I was quite down when I last wrote a blog entry - Not in mine, but in Debconf's. Things looked quite hellish, and I was _very_ annoyed - Well, I must say: Thanks to you all for the support. Mooch's request has been honored extensively, and it does help. Really.
Yesterday we had the Debian Day. About 50 Mexicans showed up, after we had to jump through some hoops with the Oaxtepec management people (thank you, thank you, you are great! Real dedication to your job, to make us feel welcome and important). The talks were interesting and well presented, and the people left happy - and some of them, left quite late. We had presence from at least one national newspaper (La Jornada and a magazine, Software Guru. Good.
Then, during the night, we were flooded by arriving foreigners. Boy, the hacklab was packed! Good thing we now will have both hacklabs running.
I have to thank most than to anybody else to my wife, Gaby a.k.a. Nadezhda - She has done all the ugly paperwork... Without her, we would all not be here. And later, I would probably be sitting in jail or something ;-)
Seems that the bugs are ironed out. Now I'll try to attend the "Sun and Debian: can we be friends?" round table.

Christian Perrier: Debconf - day 0

At least for my personal schedule, this is day 0 of Debconf. After being driven to Paris Orly airport by Elizabeth (my wife, dudes), I easily met with M. Adn ne Trojette and Nicolas Fran ois. A very quiet flight with about 30 people in a 200-seat plane lead us to Madrid Barajas (the flight was less quiet for Adn ne who has to suffer my constant babbling...."talks too much" as says my friend Konstantinos). This Barajas airport deserves a special mention, indeed. Its terminal 4 is incredibly H.U.G.E. More precisely it appears as huge because the two terminals are long straight buildings about 1.5 km long. As minutes were passing we easily met with Riku Voipio, Petr Rockai and Rapha l Hertzog. A few beers (for Riku, Nicolas and I) helped spending the couple hours of waiting time friendly and the French Mini-Cabal was even able to speak English (well, Frenglish...anyway). Nicolas and I then have been the local attraction but doing some hacking seated on the floor in the toilets (for caballeros, though) which is the only place with power sockets. Then we boarded in a huge A340 completely filled with people who, what a surprise, all speak Spanish. We finally met with Guido G nther whose flight had been delayed. So, finally, we will be 7 of us landng in that flight. That will make a really packed SUV cab. We're now seated, flying over Portugal and Galicia, the 4 of us French geeks hacking on our laptops (seems to me that other passengers are a bit staring at us...). Time to sleep and....see you in MEX for bubulle's blog of Debconf - day 1.

Adam Rosi-Kessel: Comcast: Human or Automaton?

I’m not the first person with a story about the sad state of Comcast. Since I’m certain I’m never actually going to get a True Human to read my email at Comcast, I’ll just post my brief exchange regarding Comcast’s SMTP servers here. Maybe some future archaeologist of the Internet will point to this exchange as early evidence of the End of Email: I posted the following to Comcast’s website feedback form — apparently there is no publicly advertised email address for communicating with Comcast:

Please forward this email to an engineer responsible for Comcast’s SMTP service. I run an ISP. Email to @comcast.net addresses often bounces with a “556 null byte in data” rejection connecting to gateway-s.comcast. I use postfix from Debian Sarge. This is not a problem on my end. There are numerous reports of this problem in newsgroups (just google ‘556 null byte in data’ ‘comcast’). The problem is independent of mail user agent and ISP. Note that this is *not* an issue of my users attempting to connect to the Comcast SMTP server themselves—I understand there is some issue where Comcast only accepts SMTP/SSL/TLS now for its users. This is a *delivery* problem. I have seen some speculation that Comcast’s SMTP servers are rejecting email with this error because of either large attachments or attachments with long filenames. I have seen the problem occur where the attachments are very small (on the order of 10K), but I haven’t ruled out the latter explanation. Please let me know if there is anything I can do to fix this problem. My users would like to be able to email Comcast customers.

Comcast’s response:

Dear Adam KESSEL, Thank you for taking the time to write us. Comcast is aggressive about protecting its’ subscribers from unwanted and unauthorized emails. In keeping with industry standards and best practices some recent changes to our filters have been made.If you are attempting to send emails to legitimate recipients in the Comcast.net domain, and receive an error message there are 3 likely reasons: 1. Your mail server has been identified as a source of Spam. Our mail filters have been updated to reject all mail from your server until the administrator of your mail server contacts us to request the server be removed. 2. The source of your message has a dynamic email address. Anyone attempting to email into the Comcast domain directly from a Dynamic IP address will receive the following error message: Comcast does not support the direct connection to its mail servers from residential IPs. Your mail should be sent to comcast.net users through your ISP. Please contact your ISP or mail administrator for more information. 3. Your mail server has an invalid rDNS value. What this means is that our mail filters authenticate each message by checking the rDNS value to ensure its’ a legitimate domain and yours wasnot. The error or “bounce” message you receive will indicate which reason the message was rejected. Youwill either be given the address to request Blacklist removal or you will be directed to our rDNS FAQpage. If a domain administrator feels that their IP range has been blocked in error or they would like information on required steps to be removed from our black list, they can contact us at: blacklist_comcastnet@cable.comcast.com If you need assistance setting up email through your ISP?s mail servers please visit their support pages or contact their support group. If you need information on the rDNS block, please visit: http://www.comcast.net/help/faq/index.jsp?faq=Email118405 Thank you for the opportunity to assist you. If you need further assistance with any of your Comcast services please reply to this email and we will be happy to assist you. Thank you again for choosing Comcast we appreciate your business. To visit our local support page including links to contact us via Live Chat, as well as many downloadable forms,and FAQ pages, please visit: http://www.comcast.com/nesupport/ Did you know that Comcast offers its customers a variety of free benefits? These include McAfee Antivirus, Firewall and Privacy software as well the Comcast tool bar that lets you take Comcast.net with you while you surf, and the Desktop Doctor to help you restore lost settings…plus much more, please visit http://www.comcast.net/downloads/ to see all of the extras that we provide. Sincerely,
Irene Comcast Electronic Customer Care - New England You can email us anytime by replying to this email or by clicking the “Contact Comcast” link found on the bottom of all www.Comcast.net and www.Comcast.com webpages. Our Electronic Customer Support teams are available to assist you 24 hours a day 7 days a week. **************************************************
The response contained in this message is intended for the addressee only and may vary from other ponses depending on geography, promotional campaigns or other factors. If you are not the intended recipient of this response, please delete this message. Any unauthorized use or dissemination of the information contained in this message is prohibited.
**************************************************

The last bit about “unauthorized use” is a nice touch. My follow-up:

The 556 null byte SMTP error is *not* a spam or blocking related rejection. My mail server is (1) not a source of spam (2) does not have a dynamic IP address (I assume below whenyou wrote “dynamic email address” you meant “dynamic IP address”); it is not a residential IP but rather a commercial ISP that I run; and (3) the mail server has a valid reverse DNS lookup. To clarify: not every email is being rejected from the ISP’s IP address. In fact, the same sender can send from my ISP multiple times to a Comcast subscriber, and most messages will get through. There appears to be a bug in your SMTP delivery server whereby certain triggering events cause a 556 null byte error. There is at least some evidence that one such triggering event is an email with an attachment with a long filename. This is not a spam filter issue. This is a Comcast SMTP configuration issue. As you will see if you google “‘556 null byte in data’ comcast” this is awidespread problem that is entirely unrelated to Comcast’s zealous efforts to block unsolicited email. Please forward my email to an engineer or technician. Thanks,
Adam

Finally, Comcast’s witty retort:

Dear Adam Rosi-Kessel, Thank you for taking the time to write us. Commercial Email Accounts We have to apologize, but at this time you must contact our Commercial Business support team by calling one of the following toll free numbers 888-824-8105 or 888-824-8155, 1-888-737-8361 Thank you for the opportunity to assist you. If you need further assistance with any of your Comcastservices please reply to this email and we will be happy to assist you. Thank you again for choosingComcast we appreciate your business. To visit our local support page including links to contact us via Live Chat, as well as many downloadable forms,and FAQ pages, please visit: http://www.comcast.com/nesupport/ Did you know that Comcast offers its customers a variety of free benefits? These include McAfee Antivirus, Firewall and Privacy software as well the Comcast tool bar that lets you take Comcast.net with you while you surf, and the Desktop Doctor to help you restore lost settings…plus much more, please visit http://www.comcast.net/downloads/ to see all of the extras that we provide. Sincerely,
Ivonne Comcast Electronic Customer Care - New England You can email us anytime by replying to this email or by clicking the “Contact Comcast” link found onthe bottom of all www.Comcast.net and www.Comcast.com webpages. Our Electronic Customer Support teams are available to assist you 24 hours a day 7 days a week. **************************************************
The response contained in this message is intended for the addressee only and may vary from other responses depending on geography, promotional campaigns or other factors. If you are not the intended recipient of this response, please delete this message. Any unauthorized use or dissemination of the information contained in this message is prohibited.
**************************************************

If anyone has interesting ideas about how to get past Comcast’s front lines, I would like to know.

Andree Leidenfrost: Mondo Rescue RAID Support at Last

CeBIT Australia ate substantial amounts of my time for the last two weeks (and almost killed both my feet and my voice but was still interesting and fun), so things took a little longer in Mondo Rescue land. But at last, here it is: mindi-1.07-3 and mondo-2.07-2 are in incoming and add the much overdue RAID support for Debian!

What it does (from the shiny new NEWS.Debian file):

This is the first release supporting RAID via mdadm. It is supposed to work with all RAID levels/varieties supported by mdadm and the kernel.

The following limitations and oddities apply:

All information about existing RAID arrays is drawn from /proc/mdstat, the contents of an mdadm.conf file is ignored.

Using RAID for the boot device is currently untested. The system will likely be unbootable after a restore.

Using LVM in conjunction with RAID is currently untested. Restore will likely fail.

Building a RAID5 array may appear to hang the system because of extended screen inactivity. However, disk activity should be high and eventually the restore will continue.

The synchronisation progress bar and the formatting progress bar may overwrite each other leaving the screen somewhat garbled. Not nice but harmless.

I have intensely tested this with various RAID levels, chunk sizes, parity algorithms, with and without spare disks and so forth. In particular, I've done successful full archive and restore runs using NFS as storage media for the following:

amd64, RAID1, kernel 2.6.16-1-amd64-k8 (2.6.16-12)
amd64, RAID5, kernel 2.6.16-1-amd64-k8 (2.6.16-12)
amd64, RAID10, kernel 2.6.16-1-amd64-k8 (2.6.16-12)
i386, no RAID, kernel 2.6.16-1-k7-smp (2.6.16-10)

I'll post the patch to #325877 for reference purposes and will also commit to upstream SVN shortly. Bruno was kind enough to review that patch and likes it, so there shouldn't be a problem (other than some fiddling because I have worked off the Debian 2.07-1 package and not tracked upstream).

Apart from fixing issues with the above, I plan the next steps to be:

support for RAID boot partitions
getting LVM to work

However, I think I'll do a fresh install of Sid AMD64 before that, to ensure that d-i created systems work with Mondo Rescue.
.

Also, I am experiencing a strange behaviour with busybox on AMD64 in that I get the following message on virtual terminals (and no prompt):

./sh: Cannot set tty process group (Operation not permitted)

when I run:

./openvt 8 ./sh

(where ./openvt and ./sh are both links to ./busybox)

This happens with 1.00 as well but in either case only on amd64, i386 is fine. Also, it only happens if NFS support is enabled for busybox mount.

13 May 2006

Roland Mas: Traveling again

Currently sitting next to Josselin Mouette aboard flight AF 434, due to arrive in Mexico in about four hours (and Debconf 6 in Oaxtepec maybe two hours after that). The new battery I recently bought for my laptop means I can type this and not fear being interrupted after a few minutes, and so here I am, re-using the asynchronous blogging system I had set up last year for my world tour. Fond memories come to mind, except that this time I’m reasonably confident there will be network access. And I’m looking forward to hacking all day long for a week. Some of my packages could use some attention. Hm. The only games installed on this laptop are moon-buggy and bastet. I’ll have to get a few more in prevision for the return trip.

René van Bevern: Backports of initial set of Common Lisp packages

Now that SBCL has been accepted on Backports.org, an initial set of recent packages from the CL-Debian project is available for Sarge. Peter also hosts a repository with backports for quite some time, obviously lacking the advantage of being autobuilt for architectures other than i386 and being mirrored. So now Backports.org has the basic things of getting started: our infrastructure tools like a recent Common Lisp Controller and dh-lisp, as well as Clisp and SBCL – yes, finally I boostrapped an AMD64 package for SBCL on Sarge. Sarge-AMD64 lacked one initially, but SBCL is kind of useful to build SBCL. The development environment SLIME is also ready for usage. I'll continue with backporting most of Debian's Common Lisp libraries also and will probably get around to backport CMUCL, so that a fairly complete set of what a Common Lisp programmer needs can be used with Sarge on most architecutures.

Wouter Verhelst: Joining Debconf by remote

For those of you who don't read my blog through Planet Debian: at this very moment, people are gathering in Oaxtepec, Mexico, for DebConf6, the yearly Debian conference. While I joined it last year (when it was in Helsinki, Finland), for various reasons I was under the impression that I wouldn't be able to join this year (eventually it turned out that I would have been able to, but when I found that out it was too late to go ahead and organize things). This year they'll be doing something new for the first time: live Internet streaming of the talks that will be held. While it doesn't even remotely compare to actually being there—the talks are only part of the Debconf experience; far more important, at least IMHO, is the ability to meet people whom you otherwise only know as their IRC nick or email From: header— the ability to follow the talks as they are happening is something very nice indeed, and I'm sure going to try to attend some of them. However, there's one thing. Since Oaxtepec is in the -0500 timezone while I live in +0200, that means some of the talks will be very, very late at night. Since they'll undoubtedly all end up at the Meetings archive afterwards (and probably in much better quality at that), I don't really see any added value in following it live—unless I can actually join in while having a look at the live stream. So, I guess this is a question: is the network in Oaxtepec good enough to allow for IRC sessions in the rooms where the talks will be held? And if so, is there going to be a way for me to ask questions or provide feedback or anything through IRC? Because that would make it worthwile to stay up at night for me...

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