I just added Andree Leidenfrost to the Planet Debian feed. H ctor and I have been sponsoring his packages for mondo and mindi for a long time now, his New Maintainer proccess is currently in DAMnation and I think he will be a great maintainer one day (hopefully very soon). Andree is from Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, has a cat, and is a pleasure to work with.

Everybody say hi!

Following my recent posts about SPAM in our wonderful project, Rapha l Hertzog asked me to improve alioth mail configuration to use my suggestions. Thanks to him, the improvements I've suggested are now all in place, since roughly 12 hours. Alioth Exim's configuration had a couple of problems, and was in a not very satisfying shape. Here is the list of the improvements I've suggested, and that now are in place (hopefuly for our best comfort) :

• no check was done on the HELO/EHLO, we now at least verify one was given^[1];
• greylisting has now been made conditionnal: on bad HELO, or blacklisted hosts, we apply greylisting (the method I was talking about previously) ;
• greylisting was applied after the mail was sent (in reply of the DATA command) which is a pure nonsense, because it loads us for nothing. We now check it at RCPT TO time, sparing time, bandwidth and load.

Moreover greylisting has been made more efficient: before, we only greylisted on the pair (sender_ip, sender_domain) which is suboptimal: spammers always forge sender addresses from the same domains (aol, hotmail, ). So in half an hour, aol.com, hotmail.com, were whitelisted, and spammers could just get through, unannoyed. Whereas occasionnal senders on not very widespread domains were always caught. Now, greylisting uses the full sender_address, which is the mildest way to do greylisting. The hard way would be to use the usual triplet (sender-ip, sender-address, recipient-address), but given the fact that alioth does not delivers to that many recipients, not taking it into consideration is a good compromise to avoid a too huge database, with almost the same results. I hope to be able to deliver some nice curves based on alioth's traffic in about 10 days, to see if that worked as expected. Thanks again to Rapha l that made it possible.

---

for those who are interested, the exim4.conf snipplet to do conditionnal greylisting is :

• create a new ACL, defining what you do want to greylist:

    # acl that tell if we will greylist or not
    acl_greylist:
        # Check if EHLO greeting is resolvable
        deny
            !verify = helo
        # Deny if the host is blacklisted
        deny
            log_message = match $dnslist_domain
            dnslists = cbl.abuseat.org : dul.dnsbl.sorbs.net : dynablock.njabl.org
        # Deny if the sender address can't be verified
        deny
            !verify = sender/callout=30s,connect=5s,defer_ok
        accept

• just add that snipplet just before your greylisting rule:

        accept
            acl = acl_greylist

So, today, I've just arrived back from Sydney with a few of my fellow LCA 2006 organisers where we'd been attending the annual LCA Ghosts meeting. Next year, as you all know, LCA will be held at UNSW in Sydney, Australia. The venue looks great, and a lot of the ideas the Seven team have in the pipeline sound fantastic. If they pull a couple of them off, then this is going to be a fairly significant turning point in LCA growth. All things considered, this will make LCA 2007 even better than LCA 2006.. if that's even possible :). Raewyn also came along on this little trip, so that she could have a little holiday, and go shopping - also to add some stamps to her passport, she'd never been outside of New Zealand before.. One of her memorable comments was something like "That's really the Sydney Opera House, not just a postcard". She spent some of her time with the wife of one of the other 2006 organisers, who was there just for the shopping. This may not have been a good thing. We didn't get to do a whole lot together, since I was tied up for most of the weekend at Jeff and Pia's place. We did however manage to slip in a visit to see a good friend (bod, for those that know him), a BridgeClimb, a diamond ring, and a wander around the city on Sunday evening. I'd highly recommend the bridge climb, if you can manage to go around dusk, it's fantastic to watch the sunset in the west over the Blue Mountains. We also had a lovely dinner after the climb on Saturday with everyone else at James Squire Brewery down on the King St Wharf. I had the kangaroo - there's something pleasing about eating a national icon :) Yeah, for those of you that read that last paragraph and went "diamond ring?!? Wha?!".. I finally gave in, and proposed to Raewyn on the top of the Sydney harbour bridge. I'm still coming to terms with having a fianc , rather than just a girlfriend :). For those that are wondering, how do you take the ring up on the bridge, when you can't carry loose items? Well, it turns out it's not uncommon for guys to propose on the bridge.. So the BridgeClimb folk have this thing called an ERD - an Engagement Ring Device. Basically an elastic armband with a ribbon attached. The ring is placed over one side of the ribbon, and the two ends are placed through a small plastic toggle - like the one you have on your sleeping bag cover. When you are up on the bridge, you loosen the toggle, and place the ring on the appropriate finger, hold hands together, and slide the elastic from you to your (now) fianc . It's a bit hard to describe, but it works quite well. Anyway, This happened underneath what the Aussies call 'Blinky Bill' - the flashing red light on the top of the bridge used as a bit of a warning/navigation aid to aircraft. Our climb group were on the western arch of the bridge awaiting the descent, and the group behind were on the eastern arch after just arriving. Both erupted into applause, and cheering when I went down on one knee... quite an experience! The amusing anecdote of the whole thing was about 3-4 minutes later, as we were descending, Raewyn said "Oh my god, I'm engaged" - it had just sunk in.. At that dinner afterwards? We walked up to join the others, and they erupted into more applause and cheering, in front of the all the other diners.. Bastards. Right, now back to the real topic... The Seven crew really do have this LCA job all sorted out, and Sydney in January 2007 is the place to be.. Hell, even I'm tempted to put in a paper submission this time around - normally I'd try and avoid it! (I need to get back into this blogging thing again, it's so easy to just fall out of the habit when you get busy with other things.. I promise to try harder from now on!)

A few weeks ago I published a small HOWTO for using loop-aes to encrypt your hard drive, usb thumb drive etc. As I have bought a new 300 GB external USB disk drive on Friday, I have tried something new this time: disk encryption using dm-crypt / LUKS. It has been suggested to me multiple times that dm-crypt is superior to loop-aes, however I didn't get a real reason. Yes, it doesn't require any kernel patches and is easier to setup. But has any serious cryptographer looked at it sharply, yet? Did it withhold his eye contact? Anyways, here's how I encrypted my 300 GB drive. I largely followed the guide at the EncryptedDeviceUsingLUKS wiki page...

1. Make sure you run Linux 2.6.16 or better. Previous versions suffer from an implementation problem which affects the security of dm-crypt, see Linux Kernel dm-crypt Local Cryptographic Key Disclosure.
2. Enable the following options in your kernel:
   • Code maturity level options
     • Prompt for development and/or incomplete code/drivers
   • Device Drivers -> Multi-device support (RAID and LVM)
     • Device mapper support
     • Crypt target support
   • Cryptographic options
     • AES cipher algorithms
3. Overwrite the whole drive with random data in order to slow down attacks on the encryption. At the same time perform a bad blocks scan to make sure the hard drive is not going to die too soon:
   badblocks -c 10240 -s -w -t random -v /dev/sdb
   Replace /dev/sdb with whatever is correct on your system. If you're really paranoid, and are willing to wait one or two days, do this:
   dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sdb
4. Install the required packages:
   apt-get install cryptsetup hashalot
   The current cryptsetup in Debian already supports LUKS, which was not the case a while ago, if I'm not mistaken.
5. Create one or more partitions on the drive:
   cfdisk /dev/sdb
   I created one big 300 GB partition, /dev/sdb1.
6. Setup LUKS:
   cryptsetup --verbose --verify-passphrase luksFormat /dev/sdb1
   Enter a good passphrase here. Don't spoil the whole endeavour by chosing a stupid or short passphrase.
7. Open the encrypted device and assign it to a virtual /dev/mapper/samsung300gb device:
   cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sdb1 samsung300gb
8. Create a filesystem on the encrypted device:
   mkfs.ext3 -j -m 1 -O dir_index,filetype,sparse_super /dev/mapper/samsung300gb
   I used ext3 with some optimizations, see mke2fs(8).
9. Mount the encrypted partition:
   mkdir /mnt/samsung300gb
mount /dev/mapper/samsung300gb /mnt/samsung300gb
   That's it. Everything you write to /mnt/samsung300gb will be encrypted transparently.
10. For unmounting use:
    umount /mnt/samsung300gb
cryptsetup luksClose /dev/mapper/samsung300gb

After unmounting, nobody will be able to see your data without knowing the correct passphrase. Drive is stolen? No problem. Drive is broken, and you want to send it in for repair without the guys there poking in your data? No problem. You leave the USB drive at home and some jerk breaks into your house, steals your drive, rapes your wife, and kills your kids? No problem. Well, sort of, but you get the idea ;-) There's more things you can do, thanks to LUKS: have multiple passphrases which unlock your data, change/add/remove passphrases as you see fit, etc. Comments?

You can run MSIE 6 on Linux quite well by now. Not that there is any reason to do so. (Okay, maybe if you are a webdesign professional you'll want to make sure your layout works fine with MIES, too.) So for me, this is more a demo on how far wine is. Here's how:

• Get a recent wine, e.g. 0.9.9 or 0.9.10
• Add a new user named "windows" to your system, because you don't want to risk running windows software like IE with your regular user account, will you? It could read your email!
• Add the freshly created windows user to the video and audio groups (adduser windows audio) if you want 3D or sound
• Use gksu -u windows xterm to open a shell as the windows user
• From Microsoft, download dcom98.exe and ie6setup.exe and save them to /tmp
• Type the following:

  cd
  wget http://www.kievinfo.com/2/ie6_overrides.reg
  wine regedit ie6_overrides.reg
  wine /tmp/dcom98.exe
  wine /tmp/ie6setup.exe
  exit
  

• You can now surprise your favourite linux-critics ("but linux won't run my $favourite_program, will it?") with a working Internet Exploder by running gksu -u windows wine C:\\Program\ Files\\Internet\ Explorer\\IEXPLORE.EXE - and it should not be able to read your email, much more secure than if you were running Windows.

Or, you could just be happy with not using Windows software. There is so much good FL/OSS software around, that I'm always seriously disappointed when I have to fight some windows software. I don't need it, do you?

Skype (that shady VoIP application which may eventually turn your computer into a "supernode" and use it for forwarding dozens of calls, that is packed with tons of anti-debugging techiques and tries to be very very shifty) seems to be incompatible with my Gnome. With the gnome session-manager, to be precise. Because I can run skype, if I launch it using

SESSION_MANAGER= /usr/bin/skype

Anyway, if you want to use VoIP, please use a standard protocol such as SIP. German DSL providers will currently give you DSL modems for free when you sign up with them that have SIP built-in, and where you can attach your regular phone (even ISDN) and do least-cost-routing. Some even give you a flatrate to landlines with their DSL service. And Freemail providers such as Web.de, Freenet.de and SIP specialists such as SipGate offer you a true phone number for use with SIP for free. There is tons of SIP software available. Linux users might want to try kphone (for KDE), linphone (GTK) or ekiga (former GnomeMeeting, Gnome). All of which should be included in your favourite Linux distribution (okay, maybe except for ekiga which has licensing issues with the OPAL library) Windows users might want to check out (I havn't tried it myself) Gizmo. I bet there is OSX software, too. Tons.

(Hmm, it's time for my bi-yearly DST rant. Here goes.) One of the many lame excuses given for daylight savings time is that it cuts down on crime, since more crime occurs after dark. This might be true of violent crime, since fewer people will be out after dark, but what about other crimes? It's interesting to think about ways that criminals could exploit possible confusion, broken data-keeping, etc around the discontinuity caused by daylight saving time changes. Q: Where were you on the night of October 30th 2005 between 1 and 2 am?
A: Well, I was at this bar with my friends that whole hour, I have an alibi. Ok, that's a bit easy to catch (although there's a real life story of a similar trick being used to avoid manslaughter charges), but what about more subtle cheats? All-night workers last night could pretty easily cheat their employer out of an hour's pay, for 2 am to 3 am. Conversely, if they're not careful, their employer might cheat them next fall. The only people I've ever heard discuss this are all-night radio jockies, but those guys love to hear themselves talk enough that an extra hour to do it in is not a problem to them. I'll bet that a fry cook would rather get some extra sleep. But this is still small, er, potatoes. For really nice exploits you have to take advantage of explicit failures of technology. One such failure is in the way Windows manages daylight savings changes. Unlike Unix, which elegantly flips between two time zones, such as EST and EDT, but still keeps counting each second from Jan 1st 1970, Windows actually changes the clock. Despite a brainwashed nation that has been taught that moving the hands back or forward is the right thing to do, in the world of computers, it's bloody stupid. A google for "daylight savings windows bug" turns up a million or so hits caused by this behavior, describing problems like this:

Windows reports erroneous file modification times, which change according to daylight savings.

And this:

When Windows NT automatically adjusts for daylight savings time, the times on files on Windows NT file system (NTFS) partitions and the events in the event logs are retroactively shifted by one hour, even though the files and event records were created before the daylight savings time change.

Now, I think there's all kinds of potential for criminal fun in file modification timestamps being wrong, and log files having innaccurate times. Throw in the odd backup that fails to run due to being scheduled to run at a time that never exists, and the time slip begins to seem like an ideal time for shady activities. (And a very poor time to be in a hospital hooked up to windows-controlled life-support equipment. Double-dose of morphine, anyone?) True story: A year ago I was at a fancy hotel, which was burgalarised. This hotel had electronic locks on the doors, which logged when the doors were opened, and by whom. The techies whose possessions were stolen were able to use this information, plus what they knew about when the theft must to have occurred, to narrow down the suspects to one or two hotel employees who opened the door at the right time. If those logs went to a machine running windows and the theft occurred during England's change to DST, it's quite possible the logs would have been useless. It's not too far from this kind of scenario to something suitable as an entry in Schneier's movie-plot terrorist threats contest. Although it's worth noting that the airline industry deals with timezone changes all the time, so if they have any sense, the DST change is not an exceptional event for them. One of the interesting things about plane travel to me is the way a plane in flight between timezones is a space in which no defined time zone exists. But I digress.. I suspect that the real source of fetile bugs related to DST is in the interstices between operating systems where programs have to deal with the peculuarities of multiple OSes to behave correctly. Such as this unison/linux/windows bug. Put different systems together and they fail in myriad ways, and there's room in the cracks for criminal activity. Thing is, I don't have a very good criminal mind, at all, so if any of the slightly weak approaches I've detailed above is feasable, it seems to me there must be some terrific scams, techniques, etc, that people who are good at thinking that way, and have the right motivation can use.

Well, we have enough lightning talks now to fill the space without anyone having to speak for more than ten minutes. I know I said you have until the 15th to make proposals, but I sorta forgot that I have to come up with something resembling a paper for this, which will probably be a list of the talks that will be given. And it's due on the 6th. So if you have been thinking about proposing a lightning talk, I suggest at least emailing me soon even if you're not ready to add it to the wiki page yet, so that I can pencil it into the schedule. I've marked the talks that I am currently planning on accepting as "accepted" on the wiki, but this is still tenative until the 15th.

I have wonderded about amazon's stupidity before however I am still surprised about the uselessness of its automatic recommendations. If I bought book A by author X amazon will recommend books B, C, D, &c.; by the same author. - That is the whole algoritm afaict. Not very surprising the implemention of the algoritm is broken, amazon also recommends paperback edition of book A and German translation of book A. Aargh.

I am trying to get the word out as soon as possible. Forgive the image quality, but I only had the camera phone in my Sony Ericsson T610 with which to capture this. I was walking from the Dunwoody MARTA station to the W Hotel for the No Fluff, Just Stuff conference when I saw this alarming message: I don’t know who’s behind it, but these Breast Caners must be stopped. I, for one, am a staunch advocate of breasts, and I will not stand for the senseless caning of them. The last thing this heinous movement needs is funding to research their diabolical scheme to abuse breasts. Breast advocates, unite! Happy Friday.

I recently had my Debian menu in GNOME disappear for reasons I could not explain. Since this is where the launcher for many of the applications one installs are typically housed, it was quite the inconvenience. I posted to the debian-user mailing list, and asked around on IRC in #debian and #debian-devel, but the most I ever received was a suggestion to run 'update-menus' from a command line. Having done that within the first 30 minutes of the issue’s appearance to no avail, I resigned myself to making do without the menu for the time being. Uninstalling and reinstalling the menu package was of no help. Reinstalling the gnome package yielded no joy, either. I could examine the contents of /var/lib/gnome and see that the menu structure was being built, it just wasn’t making into the menu. Through some poking around and talking with some folks who emailed me off-list to admit that they, too, had experienced this and were at a loss, the mystery has been solved. Apparently during some upgrade to packages, the menu-xdg package had been removed. Reinstalling it restored the menu to its formerly visible and altogether handy state. I posted a follow-up reply to debian-user in hopes of it helping posterity. This issue must seem like such a stupid or neophyte question that some people refrain from replying to a mailing list post about it. For those who knew the answer (I assume someone did), the question must have somehow seemed unworthy of reply. However, looking at the menu package, I don’t even see a Suggests entry for menu-xdg. It would be a shame if there are other people facing this issue with no resolution, so I am openly admitting that I had this problem in the hopes that it helps someone else out. Perhaps I should file some sort of wishlist bug, but my knowledge of the menu system is still narrow; maybe I will. I find myself periodically expanding the Debian menu on my desktop just to look at it and enjoy that warm, cozy feeling I get from having it back. 8^)

I was at my monthly Java ™ user group meeting tonight, and during the pre-meeting discussion our president Burr Sutter asked a question he usually asks: “So, anybody working on anything exciting?” This typically is taken as “does anyone have a really cool Java ™ project that they are working on right now that would be neat for us to hear about?” I usually sit there, not saying anything. But tonight, nobody had anything much, and I finally spoke up about free runtimes for Java ™. I told them that great progress is being made in the free runtimes for Java ™ arena, particularly in GNU Classpath and Kaffe. After my update, Burr asked a very good question: “Why would you work on a free, open runtime for Java ™ programming language?” My answer follows. You would work on it in order to have a free alternative to a platform governed by the SCSL. You work on a free runtime for Java ™ because a free alternative would be better than what we have now; a closely-guarded and largely ingrown platform. You work on improving a free alternative because you are free to participate without that project demanding (via a legally-binding license) that you can only work with them from here on out, and that nothing you learn while devoting your time and energy to them (without compensation) can be used elsewhere. If you do share it elsewhere, and that project finds out, their legal team will make an example out of your ass. You prefer a free alternative runtime for the same reason that you prefer the free alternatives to the non-free frameworks and platforms available for use on Java(TM). Why is Hibernate so popular? Why is Spring so popular? Why is EJB not? Because innovation by committee, while better than a ruthless, unaccountable corporate entity concerned solely with its own betterment, is still not as good as free, open cooperation and collaboration. Is this idea so new? Don’t we try to teach kids that sharing and honesty is the Right Thing ™ to do? I will probably flesh this out as an article at some point, but I wanted to get something written down tonight, while it’s still fresh in my mind.

I'm in Madrid now. On Friday afternoon, I returned to Cambridge from Vienna. Unfortunately, I couldn't start packing straight away because I had to work on a paper which was due Friday night. At about midnight my co-author noticed that the deadline had been extended until Wednesday so I went to sleep. The next day I finished packing and then started moving everything into my office at the university. Unfortunately, that took much longer than expected and I missed my bus to the airport. Turbo boost (aka taxi) to rescue and I was at the airport in time. I'm really slowly getting fed up with moving and need to settle down. It's just so much work, and that even though I don't own terribly much. I wonder how other people cope... in the last five years, I've lived in London, Innsbruck, Vienna, Melbourne, Cambridge and now Madrid. Hmm. Anyway, Madrid is fun. I'm sure I'm going to enjoy my time here. The people in the group I work with at the university are incredibly smart and friendly. Last night, Gregorio (my main contact at the university), Diego (the guy I'm staying with) and I went out for dinner... nice food and Sangria! What more do you want? The place I'm staying at is nice... Diego is friendly, we have wireless, a fairly big apartment and there's a balcony where I can see myself sitting with my laptop working on stuff and sipping Sangria... I don't know yet how I'll cope with the commute given that I've always lived very close to work (5 minutes per foot in Cambridge was about all I needed for everything) but I'm sure I'll find something to do. It will also be a really interesting experience to life in a country where you don't speak the language.

For those of you wondering about why Ekiga is not in unstable yet, the problem seems to be some discussion about MPL in debian-legal of which nobody has informed any of ekiga/opal mantainers (Thanks again for your communication folks!). The main problem is point 3.2, which reads

3.2. Availability of Source Code.
Any Modification which You create or to which You contribute must be made available in Source Code form under the terms of this License either on the same media as an Executable version or via an accepted Electronic Distribution Mechanism to anyone to whom you made an Executable version available; and if made available via Electronic Distribution Mechanism, must remain available for at least twelve (12) months after the date it initially became available, or at least six (6) months after a subsequent version of that particular Modification has been made available to such recipients. You are responsible for ensuring that the Source Code version remains available even if the Electronic Distribution Mechanism is mantained by a third party.

Also, as a comment in annotated MPL 1.1 you can read:

This provision is intended to ensure availability of code, while minimizing the burden on each Contributor. You do not need to ship Source Code to your Modifications with each Executable, as long as you make it available on-line and tell the recipient where it is. It does not require that you return Modifications to mozilla.org or any other named organization. However, you may do so if you choose, and we hope that you wish to participate in the development community that mozilla.org is chartered to foster.

You don't have to ask a lawyer to see that Debian does yet comply with this. As Alioth is now an official Debian system, and as OPAL is being mantained using Alioth and svn.debian.ORG, every patch we can make to OPAL source will be kept not only for those required 6 months, but forever. And nobody can comply about a SCM system not being an accepted Electronic Distribution Mechanism. For those wondering why OPAL is not relicensed using GPL/LGPL, you can ask yourself by performing a quick Google search. Basically the problem is that there were many conributors in the past and that some parts of the code were written sponsored under the condition of the code be kept under MPL. So, please, stop being so integrist and GPL centric. There are other licenses that have problems (as GPL have) but are as DFSG compliant like GPL and BSD are. We have to keep main clean, but we have a lot of problems to solve and we don't need to make up any more.

March has been a pretty busy month for me, with much less debian work than usual. As you can see in these photos it also has been exceptionally much snow in Hamburg...

Two weeks ago I started moving within the flat into my new quiet and sunny room yay! One day later I lost net access at home, also because of moving :( Luckily I only had to wait twelve days to get back online. I spent most of them renovating, moving and reorganzing stuff and then was too tired in the evenings, when I went online at friends, to do much useful stuff.



Right now it's 3.30am, the debian-edu ftpmaster meeting is almost over and in an hour we'll leave the house to go to the fish market which will start at 5am :) Update: it's 7.30 now, we're back, fish market was very much fun and there are some more fotos online now.

This week(end) has been pretty much fun and got me back into doing debian(-edu) work, although at the moment I'm too tired to properly write this blog entry. Good $timeoftheday!

Sarah's been helping someone at Google organise the Google Tour de Cure team, and so I've been roped in to ride. I don't know that I'm going to be able to raise a lot of money, as I don't really like asking people for money, and I don't know that many people here well enough to be soliciting donations anyway. I got this generic email to spam people with after registering:

Dear Friends and Family, I recently accepted the challenge of cycling in the American Diabetes Association's Tour de Cure fund-raising event. I am taking part in this event because I believe in and support the Association's mission: to prevent and cure diabetes and to improve the lives of all people affected by diabetes. You, too, can help by supporting my fund-raising efforts with a generous contribution. Your tax-deductible gift will make a difference to more than 20 million Americans who are affected by diabetes and another 40 million who are at risk for developing diabetes. It is faster and easier than ever to support this great cause - you can make your donation online by simply clicking the link at the bottom of this message. If you would prefer, you can also send your tax-deductible contribution to me at the address listed below. More information on the American Diabetes Association, its programs, and diabetes in general can be found at the Association's Web site, www.diabetes.org. To find out more information on our Tour de Cure, please visit http://tour.diabetes.org. Whatever you can give will help! I greatly appreciate your support and will keep you posted on my progress. Sincerely, Andrew Pollock To donate online, click http://tour.diabetes.org/site/TR?pg=personal&fr_id=3323&px=2791919. If this link does not send you directly to my personal fund-raising page, please cut and paste the entire link, from beginning to end, into your Web browser and hit return. To send a donation: Make all checks payable to: American Diabetes Association
Mail to: Andrew Pollock
Google, Inc.
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway,
Mountain View, CA 94043-4933

after 2 days working around this Trap 3e bug i got it fixed today
typing:
0 ok nvedit
0: probe-all install-console banner ?
1: " Probing Ultra SCSI controller to work around Trap 3e error" type cr
2: " /pci@1f,4000/scsi@3" " show-children" execute-device-method drop
3:
0 ok nvstore
from now bilbao.f.d is additional to maurice online.
mikado will come later as soon as i get the fibre channel array working(needs "to be developed kernel" modul)
The IBM RS6000 / 340 starts booting from net but didnt finish.
I will have a look in the next days about this.

And after a long and boring week and a half of ordered Development Platform uploads, today the first few Desktop packages have started to hit unstable. I expect that the entire 2.14 release will be ready for your apt-get'ing in just a few days more. Of course, that doesn't include Ekiga, as their dependencies seem to be in a debian-legal trap... The most exciting bit of this round of uploads is the participation of at least 3 new Debian GNOME maintainers, including... new people looking after the evolution packages!

Via reddit (which kicks the crap out of slashdot and digg): What I've Learned From Failure.

The link above is a long, but fascinating piece. I've had to become a lot more interested in how to manage software projects since taking on Xorg maintainance, and the same lessons seem to scale up well to how Debian as a whole manages itself. This article talks about some of the major problems that I've seen myself deal with, and the experiences of this guy echo my own over the past year very strongly. Here's a few examples:

"Getting away from weak teams, another source of failure is the omnipresent threat of "chickens." A chicken is not necessarily a weak individual, but a sign of a weak management structure. A chicken is an individual who has significant authority over your project, but does not make a personal commitment to the success of the project. Significant authority includes the authority to impose constraints on the team."

I like this and I've noticed it in the XSF and in Debian as a whole. People are free to work on what they want how they want, and this tends to work out well for us. But we also have no structure in which people must actually commit to what they do. As such, there's no accountability. This frees Debian developers from the preassure of having to work on something they don't enjoy, but it also creates abandoned packages, ignored bugs, and frustrated release schedules. In the past I've described a need for a stick in addition to a carrot for Debian developers, and the sentiment here echoes that idea. I've spoken with Manoj about his conception of personal responsibility in Debian, and I think it may truly be the bedrock on which Debian needs to rest. I still don't have a good mechanism for this yet though.

"Another sign of a weak team is poor development hygiene. There are dozens of development practices that seem trivial to the inexperienced outsider or to the manager focusing on "big wins." Examples of development hygiene include source code versioning, maintenance of an accurate bug or issue database, significant use of automated testing, continuous integration, and specifications that are kept current (whether incredibly detailed or high-level overviews)."

This is a something I myself have had a problem with over the past year. Branden was extremely good about keeping the XSF svn repo and the BTS up to date and well managed. I've done just about the opposite over the past year, and it's bitten me a few times. This however, was a conscious decision on my part, knowing that I was so far behind upstream that it was going to be hard to effectively manage the BTS without a recent codebase deployed to our users. So I focused on packaging instead, and luckily that road is nearly finished. Also fortunately, everyone else in the XSF managed the BTS for me, most notably (in alphabetical order by last name) Julien Cristau, Michel D nzer, Eugene Konev, and David Martinez Moreno, and they've managed to keep it relatively tidy. I'm going to spend some serious effort over the coming months to clean out the BTS so it's more manageable both for users and developers again. Luckly our SVN repo is in good shape still, so for the most part we're doing pretty well here. Debian as a whole also seems to be doing better at this, with lots of public svn repos springing up on alioth.

"It's mandatory to fail early. You need to know you're in trouble right away. That's essential when taking over an existing project or starting something new. You have to find out how you're doing within weeks. Not quarters, not months. The longer you wait, the more inertia the failure will have."

We're getting better at this, and I've sort of made it my mantra for this release cycle. Get things in to experimental as fast as possible, and then when I've fixed the majority of the bugs that show up there, put it in unstable as fast as possible. It worked out well for all the releases I've done so far and I'm going to keep doing it. Michel is really pushing me to keep CVS (or git as of Real Soon Now) snapshots from upstream in experimental, and I really like this idea and plan to follow through with it for this reason. This also echoes some of aj's ideas about speeding up development pace. Hopefully he'll implement them whether or not he becomes DPL, because I think they're going to be important for Debian as a whole.

"Dates are sacred."

We learned this during the sarge release cycle.

"The net result is that I've tried to find the happy medium where I generate weekly management reports on projects. A management report is something that is used to actually make a decision. Everything else is garbage. I've learned that when I haven't had management reports for a project, failure has resulted."

This is an interesting idea. It sort of echoes how I try and provide status updates on my blog, as well as the "Bits from" emails, but perhaps something more like this would be useful. I may try and play with this idea in the near future.

There's a lot more in there, but this entry already got way too long. Hopefully there's some food for thought in there for everyone who's interested in how Debian is run. The Debian development model has carried us very far, but I can't shake the feeling that we need to make some critical changes for it to continue. This will require a certain degree of boldness, but in order to fix the problems with the project I think we just need to clench our teeth and go for it. With that, I'll leave you with one last line from the above: "And if you decide to make changes, have the courage to go 100% with your gut. I've failed more than once when I watered down my convictions in order to appease dissenters. The only thing worse than evangelizing change and failing is looking back and realized you might have succeeded if you'd held firm on your convictions."