Search Results: "spa"

6 April 2014

Russell Coker: Finding Corrupt Files that cause a Kernel Error

There is a BTRFS bug in kernel 3.13 which is triggered by Kmail and causes Kmail index files to become seriously corrupt. Another bug in BTRFS causes a kernel GPF when an application tries to read such a file, that results in a SEGV being sent to the application. After that the kernel ceases to operate correctly for any files on that filesystem and no command other than reboot -nf (hard reset without flushing write-back caches) can be relied on to work correctly. The second bug should be fixed in Linux 3.14, I m not sure about the first one. In the mean time I have several systems running Kmail on BTRFS which have this problem. (strace tar cf . cat > /dev/null) 2>&1 tail To discover which file is corrupt I run the above command after a reboot. Below is a sample of the typical output of that command which shows that the file named .trash.index is corrupt. After discovering the file name I run reboot -nf and then delete the file (the file can be deleted on a clean system but not after a kernel GPF). Of recent times I ve been doing this about once every 5 days, so on average each Kmail/BTRFS system has been getting disk corruption every two weeks. Fortunately every time the corruption has been on an index file so I don t need to restore from backups. newfstatat(4, ".trash.index", st_mode=S_IFREG 0600, st_size=33, , AT_SYMLINK_NOFOLLOW) = 0
openat(4, ".trash.index", O_RDONLY O_NOCTTY O_NONBLOCK O_NOFOLLOW O_CLOEXEC) = 5
fstat(5, st_mode=S_IFREG 0600, st_size=33, ) = 0
read(5, <unfinished >
+++ killed by SIGSEGV +++

Keith Packard: Java-Sound-on-Linux

Java Sound on Linux I m often in the position of having my favorite Java program (AltosUI) unable to make any sounds. Here s a history of the various adventures I ve had. Java and PulseAudio ALSA support When we started playing with Java a few years ago, we discovered that if PulseAudio were enabled, Java wouldn t make any sound. Presumably, that was because the ALSA emulation layer offered by PulseAudio wasn t capable of supporting Java. The fix for that was to make sure pulseaudio would never run. That s harder than it seems; pulseaudio is like the living dead; rising from the grave every time you kill it. As it s nearly impossible to install any desktop applications without gaining a bogus dependency on pulseaudio, the solution that works best is to make sure dpkg never manages to actually install the program with dpkg-divert:

# dpkg-divert --rename /usr/bin/pulseaudio

With this in place, Java was a happy camper for a long time. Java and PulseAudio Native support More recently, Java has apparently gained some native PulseAudio support in some fashion. Of course, I couldn t actually get it to work, even after running the PulseAudio daemon but some kind Debian developer decided that sound should be broken by default for all Java applications and selected the PulseAudio back-end in the Java audio configuration file. Fixing that involved learning about said Java audio configuration file and then applying patch to revert the Debian packaging damage.

$ cat /usr/lib/jvm/java-7-openjdk-amd64/jre/lib/sound.properties
...
#javax.sound.sampled.Clip=org.classpath.icedtea.pulseaudio.PulseAudioMixerProvider
#javax.sound.sampled.Port=org.classpath.icedtea.pulseaudio.PulseAudioMixerProvider
#javax.sound.sampled.SourceDataLine=org.classpath.icedtea.pulseaudio.PulseAudioMixerProvider
#javax.sound.sampled.TargetDataLine=org.classpath.icedtea.pulseaudio.PulseAudioMixerProvider
javax.sound.sampled.Clip=com.sun.media.sound.DirectAudioDeviceProvider
javax.sound.sampled.Port=com.sun.media.sound.PortMixerProvider
javax.sound.sampled.SourceDataLine=com.sun.media.sound.DirectAudioDeviceProvider
javax.sound.sampled.TargetDataLine=com.sun.media.sound.DirectAudioDeviceProvider

You can see the PulseAudio mistakes at the top of that listing, with the corrected native interface settings at the bottom. Java and single-open ALSA drivers It used to be that ALSA drivers could support multiple applications having the device open at the same time. Those with hardware mixing would use that to merge the streams together; those without hardware mixing might do that in the kernel itself. While the latter is probably not a great plan, it did make ALSA a lot more friendly to users. My new laptop is not friendly, and returns EBUSY when you try to open the PCM device more than once. After downloading the jdk and alsa library sources, I figured out that Java was trying to open the PCM device multiple times when using the standard Java sound API in the simplest possible way. I thought I was going to have to fix Java, when I figured out that ALSA provides user-space mixing with the dmix plugin. I enabled that on my machine and now all was well.

$ cat /etc/asound.conf
pcm.!default  
    type plug
    slave.pcm "dmixer"
 
pcm.dmixer   
    type dmix
    ipc_key 1024
    slave  
        pcm "hw:1,0"
        period_time 0
        period_size 1024
        buffer_size 4096
        rate 44100
     
    bindings  
        0 0
        1 1
     
 
ctl.dmixer  
    type hw
    card 1
 
ctl.!default  
    type hw
    card 1

As you can see, my sound card is not number 0, it s number 1, so if your card is a different number, you ll have to adapt as necessary.

3 April 2014

Gunnar Wolf: DrupalCamp Mexico City: April 23-25

We are organizing a DrupalCamp in Mexico City! DrupalCamp Mexico City logo

As a Drupal user, I have so far attended two DrupalCamps (one in Guadalajara, Mexico, and one in Guatemala, Guatemala). They are as Free Software conferences usually are great, informal settings where many like-minded users and developers meet and exchange all kinds of contacts, information, and have a good time. Torre de Ingenier a

This year, I am a (minor) part of the organizing team. DrupalCamp will be held in Torre de Ingenier a, UNAM Just by Facultad de Ingenier a, where I teach. A modern, beautiful building in Ciudad Universitaria. Talks, tracks So, who is this for? You can go look at the accepted sessions, you will find there is a lot of ground. Starting from the very introduction to how Drupal is structured and some tips on how to work with it (delivered by yours truly), through workflows for specific needs, to strong development-oriented talks. The talks are structured along four tracks: "Training", "Theming", "Development", "Business" and "SymfonyDay". "SymfonyDay"? Yes. Drupal is a fast-evolving Free Software project. Most users are currently using versions 6 and 7, which are as different between each other as day and night... But the upcoming Drupal 8 brings even greater changes. One of the most interesting changes I can see is that Drupal will now be based on a full MVC framework, Symfony. One of the days of our DrupalCamp will be devoted to Symfony (dubbed the Symfony Day). ...And... Again, just look at the list of talks. You will find a great amount of speakers interested in coming here. Not just from Mexico City. Not just from Mexico. Not just from Latin America. I must say I am personally impressed. Sponsors! Of course, as with any volunteer-run conferences: We are still looking for sponsors. We believe being a DrupalCamp sponsor will greatly increase your brand visibility in the community you want to work with. There are still a lot of expenses to cover to make this into all that we want. And surely, you want to be a part of this great project. There are many sponsor levels Surely you can be part of it!

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2 April 2014

Joey Hess: propellor type-safe reversions

Propellor ensures that a list of properties about a system are satisfied. But requirements change, and so you might want to revert a property that had been set up before. For example, I had a system with a webserver container:

Docker.docked container hostname "webserver"

I don't want a web server there any more. Rather than having a separate property to stop it, wouldn't it be nice to be able to say:

revert (Docker.docked container hostname "webserver")

I've now gotten this working. The really fun part is, some properies support reversion, but other properties certianly do not. Maybe the code to revert them is not worth writing, or maybe the property does something that cannot be reverted. For example, Docker.garbageCollected is a property that makes sure there are no unused docker images wasting disk space. It can't be reverted. Nor can my personal standardSystem Unstable property, which amoung other things upgrades the system to unstable and sets up my home directory.. I found a way to make Propellor statically check if a property can be reverted at compile time. So revert Docker.garbageCollected will fail to type check! The tricky part about implementing this is that the user configures Propellor with a list of properties. But now there are two distinct types of properties, revertable ones and non-revertable ones. And Haskell does not support heterogeneous lists.. My solution to this is a typeclass and some syntactic sugar operators. To build a list of properties, with individual elements that might be revertable, and others not:

 props
        & standardSystem Unstable
        & revert (Docker.docked container hostname "webserver")
        & Docker.docked container hostname "amd64-git-annex-builder"
        & Docker.garbageCollected

1 April 2014

Marco d'Itri: Real out of band connectivity with network namespaces

This post explains how to configure on a Linux server a second and totally independent network interface with its own connectivity. It can be useful to access the server when the regular connectivity is broken. This can happen thanks to network namespaces, a virtualization feature available in recent kernels. We need to create a simple script to be run at boot time which will create and configure the namespace. First, move in the new namespace the network interface which will be dedicated to it:

ip netns add oob
ip link set eth2 netns oob

And then configure it as usual with iproute, by executing it in the new namespace with ip netns exec:

ip netns exec oob ip link set lo up
ip netns exec oob ip link set eth2 up
ip netns exec oob ip addr add 192.168.1.2/24 dev eth2
ip netns exec oob ip route add default via 192.168.1.1

The interface must be configured manually because ifupdown does not support namespaces yet, and it would use the same /run/network/ifstate file which tracks the interfaces of the main namespace (this is also a good argument in favour of something persistent like Network Manager...). Now we can start any daemon in the namespace, just make sure that they will not interfere with the on-disk state of other instances:

ip netns exec oob /usr/sbin/sshd -o PidFile=/run/sshd-oob.pid

Netfilter is virtualized as well, so we can load a firewall configuration which will be applied only to the new namespace:

ip netns exec oob iptables-restore < /etc/network/firewall-oob-v4

As documented in ip-netns(8), iproute netns add will also create a mount namespace and bind mount in it the files in /etc/netns/$NAMESPACE/: this is very useful since some details of the configuration, like the name server IP, will be different in the new namespace:

mkdir -p /etc/netns/oob/
echo 'nameserver 8.8.8.8' > /etc/netns/oob/resolv.conf

If we connect to the second SSH daemon, it will create a shell in the second namespace. To enter the main one, i.e. the one used by PID 1, we can use a simple script like:

#!/bin/sh -e
exec nsenter --net --mount --target 1 "$@"

To reach the out of band namespace from the main one we can use instead:

#!/bin/sh -e
exec nsenter --net --mount --target $(cat /var/run/sshd-oob.pid) "$@"

Scripts like these can also be used in fun ssh configurations like:

Host 10.2.1.*
 ProxyCommand ssh -q -a -x -N -T server-oob.example.net 'nsenter-main nc %h %p'

Joey Hess: adding docker support to propellor

Propellor development is churning away! (And leaving no few puns in its wake..) Now it supports secure handling of private data like passwords (only the host that owns it can see it), and fully end-to-end secured deployment via gpg signed and verified commits. And, I've just gotten support for Docker to build. Probably not quite work, but it should only be a few bugs away at this point. Here's how to deploy a dockerized webserver with propellor:

host hostname@"clam.kitenet.net" = Just
    [ Docker.configured
    , File.dirExists "/var/www"
    , Docker.hasContainer hostname "webserver" container
    ]
container _ "webserver" = Just $ Docker.containerFromImage "joeyh/debian-unstable"
        [ Docker.publish "80:80"
        , Docker.volume "/var/www:/var/www"
        , Docker.inside
            [ serviceRunning "apache2"
                 requires  Apt.installed ["apache2"]
            ]
        ]

Docker containers are set up using Properties too, just like regular hosts, but their Properties are run inside the container. That means that, if I change the web server port above, Propellor will notice the container config is out of date, and stop the container, commit an image based on it, and quickly use that to bring up a new container with the new configuration. If I change the web server to say, lighttpd, Propellor will run inside the container, and notice that it needs to install lighttpd to satisfy the new property, and so will update the container without needing to take it down. Adding all this behavior took only 253 lines of code, and none of it impacts the core of Propellor at all; it's all in Propellor.Property.Docker. (Well, I did need another hundred lines to write a daemon that runs inside the container and reads commands to run over a named pipe... Docker makes running ad-hoc commands inside a container a PITA.) So, I think that this vindicates the approach of making the configuration of Propellor be a list of Properties, which can be constructed by abitrarily interesting Haskell code. I didn't design Propellor to support containers, but it was easy to find a way to express them as shown above. Compare that with how Puppet supports Docker: http://docs.docker.io/en/latest/use/puppet/

docker::run   'helloworld':
  image        => 'ubuntu',
  command      => '/bin/sh -c "while true; do echo hello world; sleep 1; done"',
  ports        => ['4444', '4555'],
...

All puppet manages is running the image and a simple static command inside it. All the complexities that puppet provides for configuring servers cannot easily be brought to bear inside the container, and a large reason for that is, I think, that its configuration file is just not expressive enough.

Russ Allbery: Review: Asimov's, September 2011

Review: Asimov's Science Fiction, September 2011

Editor:	Sheila Williams
Issue:	Volume 35, No. 9
ISSN:	1065-2698
Pages:	112

Due to various other life priorities, it's been quite a while since I read this magazine. Let's see if I can remember the contents well enough to review it properly. The editorial this issue was about the Readers' Awards. Vaguely interesting, but Williams didn't have much to add beyond announcing the winners. I'm very happy to see Rusch's "Becoming One with the Ghosts" win best novella, though. The Silverberg column was more interesting: some musings and pop history about the Japanese convention of a retired emperor and how that fit into national politics. Di Filippo's book review column is all about short story collections, continuing the trend of Di Filippo mostly being interested in things I don't care about. "The Observation Post" by Allen M. Steele: A bit of alternate history set during the Cuban Missile Crisis, but with airships. The protagonist was a radioman aboard a blimp that was patrolling the ocean for Russian vessels sailing to Cuba. A storm forces them down on an island, resulting in an encounter with some claimed tourists who may be Russian spies. The SFnal twist is unlikely to come as much surprise to an experienced reader, and the barb at the end of the story suffers from the same problem. I appreciate the ethical dilemma, but I've also seen it in lots of stories and have a hard time getting fully invested in another version of it. But the story is otherwise competently written. (6) "D.O.C.S." by Neal Barrett, Jr.: Everyone has an author or two that they just don't get. Barrett is one of mine, although this story is a bit less surreal than most of his. I'm fairly sure it's an odd twist on the "death panel" conspiracy theory given a fantastic twist, but it's not entirely forthright about what's going on. Possibly of more interest to those who like Barrett better. (5) "Danilo" by Carol Emshwiller: Emshwiller's stories are always distinctive and not quite like anyone else's, involving odd outsiders and their attempts to make sense of their world. This one involves, as is common, an out-of-the-way village. Lewella claims that she's going to be married to a stranger from the north. No one believes her, although they give her bridal gifts anyway, and then one day she takes her gifts and leaves. The protagonist follows her, to look after her. The rest of the story walks the boundary that Emshwiller often walks, leaving the reader unsure whether the characters are in touch with some deeper reality or insane and suffering, but the ending is even more ambiguous than normal and, at least for me, entirely unsatisfying. (4) "Shadow Angel" by Erick Melton: This is another retread of an old SF idea. This time, it's that piloting through hyperspace involves alternate modes of consciousness and has profound effects on the pilot. The risk of this sort of story is that it turns hallucinatory and a bit incoherent, and I think that happened here. I like the world-building; the glimmers of future politics and trade and the way he weaves alternate timelines into the story caught my interest. But the story wasn't quite coherent enough (although part of this may be reviewing it quite some time after I originally read it). Promising, but not clear, and without quite enough agency for the protagonist. (6) "The Odor of Sanctity" by Ian Creasey: I found this story more memorable. The conceit is that a future society has developed technology that allows the capture and replay of scents, which has created a huge market for special scent experiences and the triggering of memories. The story is set in the Philippines and revolves around a Catholic priest who takes the mission to the poor seriously. He's dying, and several people wonder if it is possible to capture the mythical odor of scantity: the sweet scent said to follow the death of a saint rather than the normal odor of human death. Creasey handles this idea well, blending postulated future technology, the practical and cynical world of the poor streets, and a balance between mystical belief and practical skepticism. Nothing in the story is that surprising, but I was happy with the eventual resolution. (7) "Grandma Said" by R. Neube: This story's protagonist is a cleanser on a frontier planet made extremely dangerous by a virulent alien fungus. It is almost always fatal and very difficult to eradicate. Vic's job is to completely sanitize anything that had been in contact with a victim and maintain the other rules of strict quarantine required to keep the fungal infection from spreading uncontrolled. Nuebe weaves world-building together with Vic's background and adds a twist in the form of deeply unhealthy responses to the constant stress of living near death. Well told, if a bit disturbing. (7) "Stalker" by Robert Reed: Reed has a knack for fascinating and disturbing stories, and this is an excellent example of the type. The protagonist is a manufactured companion who is completely devoted to its owner. Their commercial name is Adorers, but everyone calls them Stalkers. In this case, the protagonist's owner is a serial rapist and murderer; given that, and given how good Reed is at writing these sorts of stories, you can probably imagine how chilling it is. As usual, there is a sharp barb in the ending, and not the one I was expecting. Good if you can handle the graphic violence and disturbing subject material. (7) "Burning Bibles" by Alan Wall: This is an interesting twist on the spy thriller. A three-letter agency in charge of investigating possible terrorist plots becomes suspicious after a warehouse of Bibles burns in mysterious circumstances. The agent they send in is a deaf-mute with special powers of intuition. This prompted some eye-rolling, and there's a lot of magic disability powers here to annoy, but it's played mostly straight after that introduction. The rest is a fairly conventional spy story, despite special empathic powers, but it's one I enjoyed and thought was fairly well-written. (7) Rating: 6 out of 10

31 March 2014

Laura Arjona: MiniDebConf Barcelona 2014

Wow, I cannot believe it has already been 2 weeks from MiniDebConf Barcelona.
It has been the first Debian event (and free software conference) that I have attended in person, and I took the opportunity to get more involved, giving a talk about translations together with Francesca Ciceri, and two lightning talks about two free software projects that I use and love and I d like to see them packaged for Debian: Pump.io and GNU MediaGoblin (videos coming soon). I also somehow-promoted Keysigning during the conference (well, in fact, I just sent some two emails to the mailing list before, and printed stickers with May I sign your key? slogan so we could keysign easily in the freetime between talks). The people I ve met some people in person, who I was following in the Debian mailing lists and identi.ca for long time (years, in some cases \o/). It has been amazing to meet Francesca Ciceri and Enrico Zini, since their blogposts and vision about Debian diversity skills have influenced very much in my involvement in Debian. It has been very important to me to be able to say THANK YOU to Tiago from the Debian video team (sorry Holger, I couldn t manage to meet you face to face), because I have learned so many things watching videos from Debconfs! Videos helped me to feel that I m part of the community, even when I cannot attend to the events, by following the streaming and being able to recognize the faces of the people and the work they do in Debian. I ve met many Debian Women, of course. I m so fan of all of them! I m enjoying a welcoming and diverse community thanks to many of them that worked since many years ago to make Debian what it is now, and faced bitter moments too. I cannot say that I engaged in many deep conversations (well, maybe some 2 or 3, and me mostly listening), but the most important thing that I keep from them was simply being there , watching and listening, enjoying the voices of the experience like Ana and Miriam, and the freshness and joy of Tassia, Solveig and Elena, for example. I ve tried to be welcoming too, I m not a newbie anymore as new people come to the group :) New projects (and renewing forces for other) Debian contributors I wanted to get more involved in the Debian contributors project and it has been a perfect opportunity to understand better all what I had read and watched about it before going to Barcelona. My plan is, apart of doing promotion as with all the projects that I use and love, to try to get translator work credited via Debian Contributors. That means to hack the l10n bot that now gathers info from the mailing lists to build the coordination pages for translators. It shouldn t be difficult to make it send that info to contributors.debian.org site, but I ll try to understand how it works and propose an elegant patch. No idea about Perl, btw, but anyway, it s a good excuse to start learning. Mediagoblin and pump.io packaging I m not sure I can help on this, but I ll keep an eye in the evolution of the Debian packaging of GNU MediaGoblin and the Pumpiverse software. I ll give moral support, at least, to the people actually working on that :) Website and Publicity team After Solveig s talk about bug triaging I ve been thinking about some bugs that I reviewed in the Website and Publicity team, and I think I should make a new round on the pending bugs to close them if they don t apply anymore, or to try to push a bit more towards a solution, if I can. Tails website translation Tails is a Debian derivative preconfigured to work out-of-the-box with privacy and anonymity features, since uses the Tor network for all the outgoing and ingoing connections.
Solveig proposed me to join the Spanish translators team at Tails. I just joined the translators mailing list, in order to help translating the Tails website into Spanish (the software is already translated, under the Tor Project). This is a new challenge from the translation point of view, since they work with PO files. And now, what? Well, first, I ll try to clean a bit my TODO list, mainly about translations, and other things not related to Debian. From now on until summer, I ll keep an eye and a hand on all the projects in which I am involved, and also I ll try to keep on engaging with the community via pump.io, the mailing lists, and IRC channels. Next summer, if I can put in order my GPG keys (long story), I ll try to join the Debian New Member process. If not, I ll try to get new keys and some signs, and then I ll apply. OTOH, thanks to the end of Windows XP support, it seems that some people are willing to migrate to any GNU/Linux distribution, and of course I m recommending Debian. Expect some blog posts about these migrations (wow, I should migrate some servers that still run Squeeze too ) and my new role of Debian help desk at job, if finally some people decide to migrate. I have gathered Debian stickers to proudly give to anyone that installs Debian in their computer!
Filed under: Events, My experiences and opinion, Videos Tagged: Communities, Contributing to libre software, Debian, English, Free Software, libre software, MediaGoblin, Moving into free software, pump.io, translations

Russell Coker: Links March 2014

Typing Animal wrote an interesting article about the dangers of stainless steel in a medical environment [1]. Apparently silver and copper are best due to the oligodynamic effect. Instead of stainless steel drinking bottles they should sell silver plated drinking bottles for kids, I m sure that lots of parents would pay extra for that. Mark Kendall gave an interesting TED talk about a replacement for the hypodermic syringe in vaccinations [2]. His invention can reduce the cost of immunisation while increasing the effectiveness and avoiding problems with people who have a needle phobia. The TED blog has an interesting interview with Will Potter about the use of the war on terror to silence journalists and the invention of the term eco terrorism for non-violent people who are politically active [3]. The TED blog has an interesting article by Kate Torgovnick May about designing products for sustainability [4]. It links to an insightful TED talk by Leyla Acaroglu about some of the complex issues related to sustainability [5]. Manoush Zomorodi wrote an informative article about How one college went from 10% female computer-science majors to 40% [6]. Slate has an interesting article by Jamelle Bouie showing the way that support for capital punishment in the US is linked to racism [7]. The Southern California Public Radio blog has an interesting article by Josie Huang about Suey Park and her success in using twitter to oppose racism [8]. Andrew Solomon wrote an insightful interview with the father of Adam Lanza for the New Yorker [9]. Waleed Aly wrote an insightful article about George Brandis attempt to change the Racial Discrimination Act specifically to allow Andrew Bolt to be racist [10]. He describes it as the whitest piece of proposed legislation I ve encountered which is significant in a country with as much racism as Australia. Really we need stronger laws against racism, there should be no right to be bigoted. A German Court has ruled that non commercial licenses don t permit non-commercial organisations to re-publish material [11]. This seems bogus to me, I d be happy to have my non-commercial licensed work published by a non-commercial publishing organisation just as long as they don t run adverts on the page. Professors Woolley and Malone wrote an interesting article about their research into group performance, apparently having more women in a group improves the collective intelligence of a group, but having smarter men in the group doesn t [12]. Susie Hill wrote an article about the SPARX computer game that is designed to treat adolescent depression [13]. They are working on a rainbow edition for GLBT kids and a version for Maoris. Unfortunately their web site is down right now and the version at archive.org says that it s currently only available to participants in a clinical trial. Tim Chevalier wrote an insightful article explaining why people who campaign against equality shouldn t be given senior positions in corporations [14]. Zeynep Tufekci wrote an insightful article about how French High Theory and Dr. Seuss can help explain gender problems in geek communities [15]. Hannah Levintova wrote an informative article for Mother Jones about how the US based hate group the World Congress of Families incites homophobic violence in Russia [16]. Josh Sanburn wrote an article for Time about people in the Deep South who claim to be Christian giving away guns to encourage people to attend church [17]. This is the same part of the world where people who claimed to be Christian used their religion as an excuse for supporting slavery. I m quitting bourbon, too much evil comes from that part of the world and I m not buying anything that comes from there.

Francesca Ciceri: Random notes from MiniDebconf Barcelona 2014

First of all, let me say this: Barcelona MiniDebconf was awesome. So the most important part of this post is a very big thank you to the organizers, volunteers, speakers, sponsors and attendees. Now, down to business. Day 0 Day 0 was a day of travelling, more or less: the Italian Cabal (me, Enrico, Elena and Diego) left in the early morning from Varese (where we had an epic Munchkin Apocalypse game the night before), and we travelled by car across Liguria and France and finally reached Barcelona in the evening. (Boring! Even more if you don't drive. I hate long trips by car) We reached Barcelona in time for the pre-registration event at Falstaff Bar, eat a great Falafel and hugged lots of people. Day 1 To me the highlight of Day 1 was to finally meet in person Laura Arjona, Spanish translator, publicity volunteer, pump.io and mediagoblin contributor. We had decided to have a workshop together about translations and we spent the morning more or less tweaking our presentation and chatting :). So, save for Elena's talk on 3d printing in Debian ("The Universal OS: now making tabletop games and cookie cutters!" -- which was great!) I missed all the talks in the morning. But thanks to the always amazing videoteam, I'll be able to watch them later, when the recordings will be published :). For me, the best talk of the day - well, no, actually of the conference! - was that afternoon: Ana Isabel Carvalho told us about the Libre Graphics Magazine project. Libre Graphics Magazine is a well written and designed magazine at the crossroad between Free Software tools and ideals and graphic arts and design. A crossroad not very much frequented, I'd say. But then, maybe I'm wrong: it's not that graphic artists don't use Free Software tools, it's more like the one who do are invisible.

This is one purpose of a Libre Graphics Magazine: to serve as a catalyst for discussion, to build a home for the users of Libre Graphics software, standards and methods. In such a magazine, we may unite all our previously disparate successes, all the successes which have, until now, stood alone as small examples, disjointed from the larger community. We have the opportunity to elevate the discourse around Libre Graphics as a professionally viable option, to raise previously unmentioned issues and to push forward the conception of just what Libre Graphics can produce.

If you are even only vagued interested in typefaces, fonts, design and graphic art take a look at the magazine: it's CC-BY-SA licensed and you can download it for free, or buy a paper copy (which is amazing, really!). And it's not just about graphic arts: if you skim over the titles of the issues, you can find that they've talked about things like "Localisation/Internationalization", "Use Cases and Affordances" and, my favourite, "Gendering F/LOSS". On a similar topic, Siri's talk about "Why aren't more designers using Debian or working for Debian?" tried to shed a light on the difficult relationship between Free Software tools and graphic artists. These are the voices we need to listen to if we want to bring more graphic artists to Debian, and $deity knows that Debian needs them a lot :). After Solveig's talk about bug triaging and Miriam's one on packaging, it was time for the l10n workshop. I think it went well: we tried to briefly explain the translation workflow in Debian, and to translate together with the audience a po-debconf message. It wasn't maybe enough to complete and submit a translation, but hopefully it gave the audience an idea about how to do it. The day ended with a party for Debian Women 10th anniversary. And the cake wasn't a lie, beside being very good. Day 2 This, I'll remember as "the day I exited my comfort zone". Ok, I'm making a bit of fuss about it, but it was my first talk in English all alone. I spoke about the non-uploading DD process and how to keep your (and others') sanity in a big community project (slides here). I think it's very important to remind people that not all DDs are coding persons. And you don't need to be a developer to love Debian, contribute to it and become an official member of the project. But writing this presentation was for me also the occasion to take stock of my experience in Debian so far: in that talk slipped many of my demons, as impostor syndrome or overcommitment. But all the things I said are more or less, common sense - nothing new! - and lesson learned on the road: it's been now 2 years as DD and 4 as contributor. I'm pretty sure it's thanks to the special conditions of this conference (only speakers identifying themselves as female, a safe and very friendly environment) that I had the courage to give a talk. So the conference was a complete success on that regard, too. In the afternoon I was able to do one of the things I love: videoteam duty. Though I convinced Riccio to switch roles and to give me the camera: my experience in directing during last DebConf left me a bit scarred. Special mention for Laura speaking of pump.io and MediaGoblin and Solveig of Tails during the "Lightning Talks" and the people from LelaCoders during the "Bits from Local Communities" session. The Day(s) after: a Debian Contributors hackathon In my experience a measure of a conference's success is the burst of activity in pet projects just afterwards. In this, also, Barcelona MiniConf was a success: during the weekend, Enrico, Laura and I had the chance to talk together about Debian Contributors and make some plans.
So, as soon as we got in Italy again, I took possession of Enrico's couch for a couple of days and we did a little bit of hacking on Contributors. For my part, I mostly worked in trying to add more data sources to the site: my (not so) secret agenda is to map most of the non-coding contributions. That basically means: translators, publicity editors, event organizers and volunteers, etc. Being in the same room as Enrico, gave me the chance to ask him how to add data sources and to test the existing code (we spot a little problem in the prototype for svn repository mining he made a while ago). At the end of the hackathon, I had managed to:

Please note that if you have contributed to one of the repo above and you are not listed there, it means that the automatic recognition of your email address didn't work. We still need to implement a manual interface for the recognition of email addresses: patches are very much welcome! Meanwhile Enrico:

Implemented showing the log of all changes involving a person in the personal page
Implemented visibility settings in the personal page
Redone data aggregation, so that it can be computed after each setting change and after each data submission
Implemented editing one's own display name
Autofill people's display names from Debian and Alioth user full name information
Read Debian and Alioth email forwarding fields to auto-associate more contributions to people
Show activity of teams, not only of people
Main contributors.debian.org page only shows the last year, with pagination for the previous ones
Added some statistics to the Site status page
New version of dc-tool, with fixed svn data source and quiet operation by default
Auto-associate OpenPGP key fingerprints using Debian's LDAP
Drafted about/privacy page

If you care about recognition of diverse contributions in Debian, help us: read the project todo list and subscribe to the low traffic mailing list or browse the project Git repository.

30 March 2014

Olivier Berger: Working on a TWiki to MediaWiki converter (targetting FusionForge wikis)

I m currently working on a wiki converter allowing me to transfer old TWiki wikis (hosted on picoforge) to MediaWikis hosted on FusionForge. Unlike existing tools that I ve found that more or less target the same needs, mine will address two peculiarities :

using MediaWiki s API to perform the import, where many tools seemed to use SQL requests: this should allow non-administrator users to do the job,
importing to wikis of projects hosted on FusionForge instances, even when the project is not public, which means that the API calls need to authenticate to FusionForge first.

The tool is written in Python, and will include my own crappy wiki syntax converter in Python, instead of spawning existing Perl scripts, as others did. It may happen to work for FosWiki too, but I don t intend to use it beyond our old TWiki installations, for a start. Stay tuned for more progress updates. Edit: I ve now released a first version.

Petter Reinholdtsen: Debian Edu interview: Roger Marsal

Debian Edu / Skolelinux keep gaining new users. Some weeks ago, a person showed up on IRC, #debian-edu, with a wish to contribute, and I managed to get a interview with this great contributor Roger Marsal to learn more about his background. Who are you, and how do you spend your days? My name is Roger Marsal, I'm 27 years old (1986 generation) and I live in Barcelona, Spain. I've got a strong business background and I work as a patrimony manager and as a real estate agent. Additionally, I've co-founded a British based tech company that is nowadays on the last development phase of a new social networking concept. I'm a Linux enthusiast that started its journey with Ubuntu four years ago and have recently switched to Debian seeking rock solid stability and as a necessary step to gain expertise. In a nutshell, I spend my days working and learning as much as I can to face both my job, entrepreneur project and feed my Linux hunger. How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu project? I discovered the LTSP advantages with "Ubuntu 12.04 alternate install" and after a year of use I started looking for an alternative. Even though I highly value and respect the Ubuntu project, I thought it was necessary for me to change to a more robust and stable alternative. As far as I was using Debian on my personal laptop I thought it would be fine to install Debian and configure an LTSP server myself. Surprised, I discovered that the Debian project also supported a kind of Edubuntu equivalent, and after having some pain I obtained a Debian Edu network up and running. I just loved it. What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian Edu? I found a main advantage in that, once you know "the tips and tricks", a new installation just works out of the box. It's the most complete alternative I've found to create an LTSP network. All the other distributions seems to be made of plastic, Debian Edu seems to be made of steel. What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian Edu? I found two main disadvantages. I'm not an expert but I've got notions and I had to spent a considerable amount of time trying to bring up a standard network topology. I'm quite stubborn and I just worked until I did but I'm sure many people with few resources (not big schools, but academies for example) would have switched or dropped. It's amazing how such a complex system like Debian Edu has achieved this out-of-the-box state. Even though tweaking without breaking gets more difficult, as more factors have to be considered. This can discourage many people too. Which free software do you use daily? I use Debian, Firefox, Okular, Inkscape, LibreOffice and Virtualbox. Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to get schools to use free software? I don't think there is a need for a particular strategy. The free attribute in both "freedom" and "no price" meanings is what will really bring free software to schools. In my experience I can think of the "R" statistical language; a few years a ago was an extremely nerd tool for university people. Today it's being increasingly used to teach statistics at many different level of studies. I believe free and open software will increasingly gain popularity, but I'm sure schools will be one of the first scenarios where this will happen.

Joey Hess: propellor

Whups, I seem to have built a configuration management system this evening! Propellor has similar goals to chef or puppet or ansible, but with an approach much more like slaughter. Except it's configured by writing Haskell code. The name is because propellor ensures that a system is configured with the desired PROPerties, and also because it kind of pulls system configuration along after it. And you may not want to stand too close. Disclaimer: I'm not really a sysadmin, except for on the scale of "diffuse administration of every Debian machine on planet earth or nearby", and so I don't really understand configuration management. (Well, I did write debconf, which claims to be the "Debian Configuration Management system".. But I didn't understand configuration management back then either.) So, propellor makes some perhaps wacky choices. The least of these is that it's built from a git repository that any (theoretical) other users will fork and modify; a cron job can re-make it from time to time and pull down configuration changes, or something can be run to push changes. A really simple configuration for a Tor bridge server using propellor looks something like this:

main = ensureProperties
    [ Apt.stdSourcesList Apt.Stable  onChange  Apt.upgrade
    , Apt.removed ["exim4"]  onChange  Apt.autoRemove
    , Hostname.set "bridget"
    , Ssh.uniqueHostKeys
    , Tor.isBridge
    ]

Since it's just haskell code, it's "easy" to refactor out common configurations for classes of servers, etc. Or perhaps integrate reclass? I don't know. I'm happy with just pure functions and type-safe refactorings of my configs, I think. Properties are also written in Haskell of course. This one ensures that all the packages in a list are installed.

installed :: [Package] -> Property
installed ps = check (isInstallable ps) go
  where
        go = runApt $ [Param "-y", Param "install"] ++ map Param ps

Here's one that ensures the hostname is set to the desired value, which shows how to specify content for a file, and also how to run another action if a change needed to be made to satisfy a property.

set :: HostName -> Property
set hostname = "/etc/hostname"  File.hasContent  [hostname]
         onChange  cmdProperty "hostname" [Param hostname]

Here's part of a custom one that I use to check out a user's home directory from git. Shows how to make a property require that some other property is satisfied first, and how to test if a property has already been satisfied.

installedFor :: UserName -> Property
installedFor user = check (not <$> hasGitDir user) $
        Property ("githome " ++ user) (go =<< homedir user)
                     requires  Apt.installed ["git", "myrepos"]
  where
    go ... -- 12 lines elided

I'm about 37% happy with the overall approach to listing properties and combining properties into larger properties etc. I think that some unifying insight is missing -- perhaps there should be a Property monad? But as long as it yields a list of properties, any smarter thing should be able to be built on top of this. Propellor is 564 lines of code, including 25 or so built-in properties like the examples above. It took around 4 hours to build. I'm pretty sure it was easier to write it than it would have been to look into ansible and salt and slaughter (and also liw's human-readable configuration language whose name I've forgotten) in enough detail to pick one, and learn how its configuration worked, and warp it into something close to how I wanted this to work. I think that's interesting.. It's partly about NIH and I-want-everything-in-Haskell, but it's also about a complicated system that is a lot of things to a lot of people -- of the kind I see when I look at ansible -- vs the tools and experience to build just the thing you want without the cruft. Nice to have the latter!

28 March 2014

Thomas Goirand: WordPress auto-updates stupidity

Out of laziness, like many, I use WordPress for this blog. I did try others, but was disappointed (after my blog got hacked a few times), so I just use that. WordPress has a long history of security issues. So upstream decided to preform automatic updates. This would have been a good thing if automatic update didn t completely mess my blog each and every single time. On my hosting system, PHP scripts have to be chmod +x to be executed. Otherwise, there s a error, and Apache wont execute the PHP script. The same way, an error will happen if a directory is world writable (eg: chmod 777). This is in order to prevent some of the most common hacks: a hacker finds a way to upload a PHP script (often via a feature of the hosted software), and then uses the uploaded script to do nasty things (like installing phishing sites, send spam, you name it ). Checking on these basic unix rights prevents uploaded scripts to be executed, and it s normally a way harder for hackers to find a way to chmod the PHP scripts than it is to just upload it. Unfortunately, WordPress, on each upgrade, is resetting these unix rights. Someone got to explain to me the reason why it absolutely needs to chmod 777 the hosted folders, and why it wouldn t keep the chmod +x on the php scripts. Direct result? My blog often gets completely broken by these automated updates. And I didn t find a way to disable them (if someone knows, please send me a quick email). I have reported the bug upstream: https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/27568

Andrew Pollock: [life] Day 59: Rain, BJJ, play cafe, bunk beds and a car wash

Today was another wet day. Sarah dropped Zoe around in the morning, and she watched a little bit of TV before we drove to Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu class. My cycling fitness is going to go completely to hell. Zoe's really taken to her teacher, Patrick. The classes have pretty much been just Zoe and I on Friday's, with the occasional other kids, and so she's formed a pretty close relationship with her teacher. The last few weeks, Zoe's really liked to help Patrick set up and tidy up the space before and after the classes. She loves to tell Patrick about what's been going on in her life. It's really sweet to watch. Today there was another 3 year old boy, but he was much less focused than Zoe. I will miss the classes, because I've seen real self-defense value in what they've been teaching. For proper comparison, I should see tae kwon do clases as well, but currently I'd be pretty happy with what I've seen taught in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. I can see the practical application of it. We're going to go watch Patrick compete in May, and I'm looking forward to seeing some adult-level stuff. Megan's Dad was looking for something to do with his kids, so I suggested we meet at Lollipops Playland & Cafe in Cannon Hill after BJJ class. We were a bit late in getting there, mostly because Zoe wanted to hang around after class for a bit, but we got there eventually, and Zoe and Megan had a great time. We stayed for lunch and the girls played a bit more. It's the first time I've used a play cafe since coming back to Australia, and I found it almost overwhelmingly loud and busy. These places must love it when it rains. It was nice that Zoe's at an age now where she can go off and play on her own. Having Megan there was a great help in that regard, but the girls did keep losing each other, although that wasn't a big problem for either of them. While we were at the play cafe, I received an email saying that the Kindergarten working bee for tomorrow had been canceled on account of the wet weather, so that's opened up our Saturday significantly. After that, we headed down to Bunkers to place the order for the bunk bed I want to get Zoe for her birthday. I'd expected with all the morning's activities, for her to pass out in the car immediately, but surprisingly she lasted the distance, and had a great time sampling all the different bunk beds at the store. Even on the way back home, it took her a little while to fall asleep, so I extended the car ride by driving around the Port of Brisbane to see how much there was to see that might be interesting for Zoe when she's awake. After that, we went to the car wash to get the car cleaned, because it's been a while. Zoe had a babyccino and we sorted through the DreamWorks cards we'd traded with Megan that morning. It was time for dinner after the car wash, so we headed home, and Zoe watched some TV while I prepared dinner. At bath time, I realised that we hadn't had time to do anything for Science Friday. Yesterday at Bunnings I bought a roll of clear tubing for the heck of it, so we made a siphon in the bath. Zoe thought the tube was great fun, and had a good time blowing bubbles in the bath with it. Tomorrow we'll have to use some bubble bath for added entertainment. Bedtime went smoothly enough.

27 March 2014

Wouter Verhelst: GSS-TSIG

While reading up on dnssec-keygen and other related stuff in order to update my puppet bind module to support DNSSEC transparently, I accidentally stumbled across something in the BIND Administrator's Reference Manual called GSS-TSIG. Intrigued, I set out to learn more, and found that this is terribly easy to set up with BIND:

create a DNS/<nameserver address> principal inside your realm. Note that the "nameserver address" really needs to be the name of the primary name server as specified in the SOA record of the zone; this is in contrast to pretty much every other use of Kerberos out there, where it has to be the name of the machine as specified by the PTR record of the IP address you're talking to.
Write that principal to a file which is readable by named. I used /etc/bind/bind.keytab for this purpose. Make sure this file is owned by the UID that named runs as.
Add a tsig-gssapi-keytab stanza to the options block in your named.conf file (or named.conf.local) on Debian. This stanza wants a string specifying the filename of your keytab file. In the above example, that becomes tkey-gssapi-keytab "/etc/bind/bind.keytab";
In the zone block of the relevant zones, add an update-policy statement for each of the users that you want to allow to make updates; e.g., update-policy grant exampleuser@EXAMPLE.COM zonesub any; ; will allow a user with principal exampleuser@EXAMPLE.COM to perform updates for this zone.
exampleuser@EXAMPLE.COM can now use nsupdate -g to perform any GSSAPI-authenticated updates of the zone file.

There are a few more interesting features; e.g., krb5-self can be used to allow the host/machine@REALM principal to update the A record for machine, and there are ways to specify ACLs by wildcard. For more information, see the BIND administrator's reference manual, chapter 6, in the section entitled "Dynamic Update Policies".

Gunnar Wolf: Getting rid of rodents

So a good friend of mine talked about something in the debian-private mailing list. And we should not disclose that something outside such a sensible space without his approval. But Jakub is right. Once the discussion goes over to only messages talking about non-private stuff, the discussion should be moved to a non-private area. After all, we will not hide problems yada yada, right? So, not knowing where in the Debian lists this should go to, it will land on my blog, reformatting mail to make sense in this media:

Luca Filipozzi dijo [Wed, Mar 26, 2014 at 03:36:49PM +0000]:
Or don't use a mouse. When I started getting shoulder strain from using a mouse too much, I switched to an Adesso touchpad keyboard and was very happy with the positive outcome. I'm a touch (that's punny) less efficient with the touchpad compared to a mouse, but the lack of permanent injury and ongoing pain is worth it.
Right. I also have this keyboard (same brand even, different model). The keyboard is not that good (keys are not as smooth as in my previous, stock-Dell keyboard), but not having to move my right hand just to feed the rodent has made my back way way happier. I even feel better using a trackpad than a mouse (mabye because I use too much my netbook?). Luca, just out of curiosity: Did you ever manage to recognize the keyboard under the Synaptics driver, or to get it running under ChordMiddle or Emulate3Buttons? I had to fall to a ugly hack, mapping the "XF86Search" key to the middle button by telling my window manager (i3) to "bindsym X86Search exec xdotool click 2".

[ this can be declassified at any time ]
my contributions to this thread too...
my contribution unclassified, also
My classifications remain contributed. Do as you will with my bits of this message.

Elena 'valhalla' Grandi: Copyright and Cooking Recipes

I've added a new page to my site to clarify that yes, you can do things with my cooking recipes, even if they are not yet under a free license:

Trueelena: Copyright and Cooking Recipes

The reason why I haven't felt the need to release my recipes under a different license is related to the way copyright works in relation with cooking recipes: copyright covers the creative expression of an idea, not the idea itself.

Diego Escalante Urrelo: Setting up Apache + PHP + MySQL on OSX with Homebrew

Recently I ve been doing some hacking for Chamilo LMS, a Free Software E-Learning system. For various reasons I had to do this on OSX, which meant setting up a web development environment. This lead me to MAMP, an OSX bundle with Apache + MySQL + PHP. However MAMP had many weird quirks that forced me to maintain a local set of patches just to get things working. I finally had the time to look into a saner option, take some notes in the process, and write a blog post.

Important life advice. This post enables it.

A popular alternative was using OSX s installed Apache with a newer PHP version from Homebrew. This sounded dangerous because you can t just apt-get install --reinstall apache if you break something. I preferred a pure Homebrew installation also because:

No need for root. Everything is user writable in /usr/local.
Vanilla versions for everything, and easy to keep up to date with upstream.
Easy to destroy and replicate.
Usable, non root, PEAR.
You would brew most of this for a hybrid setup anyway.

I couldn t find a simple and straightforward resource for this specific setup, so I present you with my tutorial/recipe to get Apache + MySQL + PHP, via Homebrew, running on OSX. I took these notes on OSX 10.7.5 while building Apache/2.2.26 (Unix) with PHP 5.5.10 and MySQL 5.6.16. #1- A healthy Homebrew install First of all you need to install Homebrew. Head over to Homebrew s homepage for instructions. Even if you already have it, I recommend a health check and an update+upgrade:

$ brew doctor

$ brew update && brew upgrade

Pay attention to whatever that says and follow the instructions if there s any. You also want to add Homebrew binary paths to your $PATH, even if the directories don t exist yet. Add this to .bash_profile or whatever your shell uses:
PATH=/usr/local/opt/php55/bin/:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:$PATH #2- PHP and all its additional recipes The PHP recipes are maintained in a different repo, but don t worry, this is not a duct taped chaos, it s properly maintained:

$ brew tap jgonzales/php

$ brew install php55 --with-intl

You might want to add --with-pgsql if you want to work with PostgreSQL. MySQL, Apache and CLI support is built by default. After the installation there are two quick things to do. First, timezone configuration:

(editing /usr/local/etc/php/5.5/php.ini)

date.timezone = America/Lima (or whatever works for you)

And second, PEAR permissions:
$ chmod -R ug+w /usr/local/Cellar/php55/5.5.10/lib/php #3- Setting up boring MySQL Now let s brew MySQL:
$ brew install mysql With that done, go ahead and start the server so we can initialize the basic tables, and secure the installation defaults:

$ unset TMPDIR

$ mysql_install_db --verbose --user= whoami  --basedir="$(brew --prefix mysql)" --datadir=/usr/local/var/mysql --tmpdir=/tmp

$ mysql.server start

$ mysql_secure_installation

Remember: You shouldn t use sudo, so be careful with your muscle memory!

Mr. Eastwood acknowledges the warning.

#4- Brewing Apache (httpd) And finally, it s time to brew Apache. You can do so with:
$ brew install httpd When that s done burning your lap, you can start configuring Apache. I chose to keep httpd.conf as pristine as possible and do everything in a VirtualHost. Remember you need to run this on something other than port 80 because you won t run httpd as root:

Note that I m enabling virtual hosts and using my own paths. If you want to configure Apache differently, you probably know what you are doing. So, get off my lawn you damn kid. #5- Brownie points: PHPMyAdmin In my virtual hosts configuration I included some lines for PHPMyAdmin. That s because I m old school and I love PHPMyAdmin. You can follow into my wrinkled foot steps with:
$ brew install phpmyadmin #6- Profit You can check everything is fine by creating an index.php with a call to phpinfo() inside your configured root from httpd-vhosts.conf. Make sure OSX s Apache is not running and start (or restart) the servers:

$ apachectl start/stop/graceful(restart)

$ mysql.server start/stop/restart

Now open go to http://localhost:8000/ and http://localhost:8000/phpmyadmin. Enjoy your success. Maybe do a victory dance:

This might seem like a lot of work, but it s fairly quick with this cheat sheet. It s also very safe and easy to keep updated with brew update && upgrade. A final note: All the suggestions and instructions that are printed after installing each package can be read again with brew info <recipe>. No need to write them down. Happy hacking!

26 March 2014

Steve Kemp: A diversion on off-site storage

Yesterday I took a diversion from thinking about my upcoming cache project, largely because I took some pictures inside my house, and realized my offsite backup was getting full. I have three levels of backups:

Home stuff on my desktop is replicated to my wifes desktop, and vice-versa.
A simple server running rsync (content-free http://rsync.io/).
A "peering" arrangement of a small group of friends. Each of us makes available a small amount of space and we copy to-from each others shares, via rsync / scp as appropriate.

Unfortunately my rsync-based personal server is getting a little too full, and will certainly be full by next year. S3 is pricy, and I don't trust the "unlimited" storage people (backblaze,etc) to be sustainable and reliable long-term. The pricing on Google-drive seems appealing, but I guess I'm loathe to share more data with Google. Perhaps I could dedicated a single "backup.account@gmail.com" login to that, separate from all-else. So the diversion came along when I looked for Amazon S3-comptible, self-hosted, servers. There are a few, most of them are PHP-based, or similarly icky. So far cloudfoundry's vlob looks the most interesting, but the main project seems stalled/dead. Sadly using s3cmd to upload files failed, but certainly the curl based API works as expected. I looked at Gluster, CEPH, and similar, but didn't yet come up with a decent plan for handling offsite storage, but I know I have only six months or so before the need becomes pressing. I imagine the plan has to be using N-small servers with local storage, rather than 1-Large server, purely because pricing is going to be better that way. Decisions decisions.

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