I have been maintaining the autoconfigury of PostgreSQL for many years now, and every once in a while I go to ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/autoconf/ to check out a new version of Autoconf. That FTP listing is actually an interesting tale of how tarball creation practices have evolved over the years.

Obviously, .tar.gz has been the standard all along. Some projects have now completely abandoned .tar.gz in favor of .tar.bz2, but those are rare. I think most ship both now. The FTP listing goes back to 1996; the first .tar.bz2 was shipped in 2001.

RPM-based distributions have switched to supporting and then requiring bzip2-compressed tarballs many years ago. Debian might start supporting that with the next release. So if you want to be able to trace your pristine tarballs throughout the popular Linux distributions, shipping both is best.

One thing that was really popular back then but is almost forgotten now is providing patches between versions, like autoconf-2.12-2.13.diff.gz. The Linux kernel still does that. Autoconf stopped doing that in 1999, when it was replaced by xdelta. Anyone remember that? This lasted until 2002 and was briefly revived in 2008. I think shipping xdeltas is also obsolete now except possibly for huge projects.

In 2003, they started signing releases. First with ASCII-armored signatures (.asc), now with binary signatures (.sig). The Linux kernel also does this, except they call the ASCII-armored signatures .sign.

In 2008, we saw the latest invention, LZMA-compressed tarballs (.tar.lzma). They appear to compress better than bzip2 by about as much as bzip2 wins over gzip. But, this one's already obsolete because it was replaced in 2009 by LZMA2, which goes by the file extension .tar.xz. Some "early adopters" such as Debian's packaging tool dpkg are in the process of adding xz support in addition to the short-lived lzma support.

Throughout all this, interestingly, tar hasn't changed a bit. Well, there are various incompatible extended tar formats around, but when this becomes a problem, people tend to revert to GNU tar.

GNU tar, by the way, supports all the above compression formats internally. gzip is -z, bzip2 is -j, lzma is, well, --lzma, and xz is -J. And Automake supports creating all these different formats for source code distributions.

Thanks everyone for the helpful comments yesterday on Apache vs. lighttpd. I ve taken the first few steps towards improving things. I ve eliminated mod_php5, switched all PHP to FastCGI, and switched from the prefork to the event MPM. The event MPM docs say that it s incompatible with mod_ssl, but it worked, and googling for that turned up mailing list posts from 2006 saying it was fixed. The only real glitch was that egroupware inexplicably depends on libapache2-mod-php5. It works fine without it, but I had to create a fakelibapache2-mod-php5 that provides libapache2-mod-php5 to convince the system not to remove egroupware when I switched to the event MPM. I went from 28 Apache processes to 4 Apache processes plus an average of around 2 php5-cgi processes which, despite the name, actually do grok FastCGI. Three of my Apache processes now have an RSS of about 20M, and the other of about 30M. The php5-cgi processes are at around 40M. My old Apache processes ranged from 18M to over 40M. So there is some memory savings here, though not drastic. My Redmine processes, two of them, each use over 50M. Ruby on Rails still is leaving me with a bad taste. At least it s not a Java app; it seems a lot of those allocate 2GB before they ever start accepting connections. I ll see how this goes for awhile, but for now I doubt that moving to lighttpd (or similar) will yield enough benefit to make it worth the effort. But there may be some benefit in inserting a caching proxy in front of Apache, so I may yet do that.

So Tuesday was another very productive day seeing lots of things done. And actually today also started (and will end) like this. I am now of the opinion that we need such a kind of meeting of our team every 6 months, if only we could manage to get the time off from our real lifes. Sitting together, discussing, working on the same thing, being able to just call over the table and get a different opinion just gains so much that we are missing otherwise As you already read, Monday was our day to change the database layer while Tuesday left us with adding the v3 source formats. Which was declared finished today, somewhere around noon. The first picture in this blogpost shows our still to fix up/todo list from Monday evening. Besides the v3 format we also worked on other things, like the already mentioned lintian autorejects. This patchset is also fully committed and tested working since today, so we could start on other issues. We had lots of general enhancements of our code committed, from improving our logging to fixing some issues with expiring old files from the pool all the way up to reducing code duplicates all over the place. I must confess that we did not start right away working on dak today. . We had to start by using hightech to fix a broken shoe first. (Some glue and a heavy laptop. NOT MINE). :) Back to reality - we are currently 6 persons all working on various parts of the dak code. We still have the archive mostly disabled (basically one large dinstall run in the evening always) and are happy with this, as this allows us immediate testing without the risk of accidently destroying someones package upload. And we do test a lot, haven t seen that many python backtraces before in one place :) The third picture shows our todo list status from today. We still have a good number of points open, but as we have 6 persons working it does seem manageable to at least get a very good start on each of them. What we currently work on is ACLs in the archive, which will soon allow us to fix another issue the old DM code has but even more important will allow automated signing of packages built by buildds soon. We basically are able to limit such keys to only be able to upload for the one architecture they are allowed to, as well as forbid them to upload any kind of source. (Together with various other considerations around the setup of the buildds (like, for example, only buildds administrated by DSA can have that, but other points too), the handling of the keys, etc, this will lead to much faster uploads of the build binary packages). And will take a tedious work away from buildd admins (who will still have enough to do to deal with the general administration of it, the build failures, such things). Another thing we work on is the handling of arch all packages, in a source that produces arch all as well as arch any binaries. Currently, as soon as a new source is uploaded for one architecture, every architecture will see the new arch all deb. Which can lead to uninstallability of other packages. Not very nice. And another one of us is also working on our contents generation. Something started long ago, but not yet finished. Recently we did take big steps in this, getting our SQL queries for it down from about 10 minutes to something around 10 seconds. That is for one suite, one architecture, the full contents file contents. While this is SQL only and we still need to write it out to disk, it is a nice improvement. And to my right we have someone working on getting the Packges/Sources files data stored within projectb too, so we can also use our own python scripts to write those files. This will finally enable us to completly ditch apt-ftparchive. And finally, to my left site sits someone who is working on a dak policy wrapper, with which we can allow other groups then ftpmaster to control suites. The initial usage will be to restore the (oldstable-)proposed-updates handling with their own queues in front, as that is no longer part of our NEW handling script. In the future it will also allow easy handling of other situations, like suites for volatile or backports.org. Basically everything where the people running the archive software are different to those people actually setting the policy for the suite. Another nice detail is the ability to throw away uploaded binaries and only ever take buildd built binaries into the archive. We will not go to source-only uploads, as that will only lead to lots of untested uploads (sorry people, we are all humans, it WILL happen), but we can have them uploaded, do regular checks (including the lintian ones), then take the files from the buildds. (Of course there is a way to get things bootstrapped, the system behind this is flexible to allow for a bootstrap mode for a new architecture). (I have multiple pictures, will probably put some more up when I am back home).

I ve had a somewhat recurring problem that Apache on my server is a memory hog. The machine has a full GB of RAM now, but even so, heavy activity from spidering bots or reddit can bring it to its knees. I ve been trying to figure out what to do about it. I run Apache on there, and here s an idea of what it hosts:

• This blog, and two others like it, using Wordpress
• Several sites that are nothing but static files
• gitweb
• A redmine (ruby on rails) site
• Several sites running MoinMoin
• A set of tens of thousands of redirects from mailing list archives I used to host over to gmane (this had negligible impact on resource use when I added it)
• A few other smaller PHP apps

Due to PHP limitations, it will only work with the Apache prefork or itk MPMs. That constrains the entire rest of the system to those particular MPMs. Other than PHP, most of the rest of these sites are running using FastCGI that includes redmine and MoinMoin, although gitweb is a plain cgi. Many of these sites, such as this blog, have changed underlying software over the years, and I use mod_rewrite to issue permanent redirects from old URLs to their corresponding new ones as much as possible. I do have two IPs allocated to the server, and so I can run multiple webservers if desired. lighttpd is a lightweight webserver. I ve browsed their documentation some, and I m having a lot of trouble figuring out whether it would help me any. The way I see it, I have four options:

1. Keep everything as it is now
2. Stick with Apache, discard mod_php and use FastCGI for PHP, and pick some better MPM (whatever that might be)
3. Keep Apache for PHP and move the rest to lighttpd
4. Move everything to lighttpd, with FastCGI for PHP

I know Apache pretty well, and lighttpd not at all, so if all else is equal, I d want to stick with Apache. But I m certainly not above trying something else. One other wrinkle is that right now everything runs as www-data PHP, MoinMoin, static sites, everything. That makes me nervous, and I d like to run some sites under different users for security. I m not sure if Apache or lighttpd is better for that. If anybody has thoughts, I m all ears.

I am at the Debian FTPMaster meeting in the LinuxHotel Essen currently. We arrived Sunday evening and will stay until 1st November, giving us a nice week of time to work on outstanding archive issues. Currently we are 4 persons, Mark and me as FTPMasters and Frank and Chris as FTPTeam members. 2 more FTPTeam members join us Wednesday evening, so we only miss 2 members of our team in the end. Monday started out very well, with us merging a 7000 (plus something) lines patch, completly changing our database handling code. While we do have the archive disabled since we started working on it (and haven t reenabled it yet), we had a surprisingly small amount of errors to fix up. Though we do still have to test various codepaths, so it will still be a bit before normal service is back. But yay, we are now with a database layer that actually understands types (and has various other advantages). Today started with us getting to the next intrusive patch set waiting for our attention, the source v3 format. At the time of writing this blog post the patchset is merged (with changes to the way it originally looked) and we are now cleaning up and fixing the introduced bugs. Though I just heard live the first rejection of a sample v3 format package, so that looks pretty good too. And while that bugfixing is going on we are also working on the lintian autorejects and still have many other points on our agenda. I try to keep you updated, and we sure will send a report after the meeting, but I think it can already be said that every single cent spent here is worth it.

Today is Monday, October 26. Someone at Yahoo will go home tonight and, on the way out, turn off geocities.com. Update: Tue, 27 Oct 2009 15:17:50 -0400 Geocities is finally offline. Pages say:

Sorry, the GeoCities web site you were trying to reach is no longer available.

To commemorate it, I bought geociti.es. I intend to do what I can to keep the Geocities pages on the web. I am part of the Archive Team, an independent group of amateur archivists racing to rescue the web from destruction at its own hand. In late 1994, Geocities began offering free web hosting as Beverly Hills Internet. A decade ago, Yahoo bought Geocities. In December 1998, one-third of all web users visited the website. As recently as March 2009, 11.5 million unique visitors arrived there. Today, according to Alexa Site Info, Geocities ranks somewhere between the New York Times and the Washington Post in pageviews. And today, Geocities.com shouts:

GEOCITIES IS CLOSING ON OCTOBER 26, 2009.

Tomorrow, Geocities' website will be closed for good if Yahoo sticks to that promise. The amount the Archive Team has downloaded is around one terabyte. That's all we seem to be able to reach; many pages were deleted months ago when the archiving effort began. The archiving is continuing as I write this. Think of it. Fifteen years of history, memories for millions of people, the birth of a generation on the web. More personal embarrassment than all the POG games put together. It fits on an $80 piece of storage equipment -- at least, that's what we managed to find before Yahoo erases it all. Initially, when I met Jason Scott of the Archive Team, he told me he wanted to download Geocities and share it by mailing hard drives around. I told him I wanted to hoist it back on the Web. He came around, and we and the rest of the Archive Team have put Geocities back online. Geociti.es is not the greatest website in the world, no. This is just a tribute. P.S. Major thanks to John Joseph Bachir for the paperwork assist.

After one year of development, today I uploaded my first package to CPAN: version 4.0 of Bryar.pm, a modular and extensible blog engine powered (by default) by Template Toolkit and originally written by Simon Cozens. I am officially a Perl developer! This is the software which I use for my own blog. Among the many changes in this release: caching, support for FastCGI, improved support for HTTP validators and a sitemaps generator.

My employer uses the IBM Tivoli Storage Manager for backups and since we use Debian everywhere possible we needed packages of its client program, which is only distributed as RPMs. The initial conversion made with alien was unsatisfactory for many reasons, and the ugly original packaging did not help either. For this reason I spent a few hours to create an high quality Debian package for the Tivoli Storage Manager client. The client binaries cannot be redistributed, so when it is built from source it unpacks the RPMs and copies from there the files it needs to build the binary package. This work has been sponsored by Seeweb, a provider of web hosting, dedicated hosting and colocation services.

Brands are most often associated with the world of crass consumerism but they can play a key role in fomenting political change. Or so claim some pretty clever thinkers and activists and they will be giving talk about the importance of branding for democratic politics, this Monday at 7 PM, at the Change You Want to See

Please join us this Monday, October 26th as we continue our series on Symbols, Branding and Persuasion with an exploration of branding in the context of electoral and legislative politics. We ll start with a presentation by media theorist Stephen Duncombe, author of Dream: Reimagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy and the forthcoming Branding the New Deal. Afterward Jessica Teal, design manager for the Obama 2008 presidential campaign will join Duncombe for a conversation via video skype. Like it or not, propaganda and mass persuasion are part of modern democratic politics. Many progressives today have an adverse reaction to propaganda: ours is a politics based in reason and rationality, not symbols and fantasy. Given our last administration s fondness for selling fantasies as reality, this aversion to branding, marketing and propaganda is understandable. But it is also na ve. Mass persuasion is a necessary part of democratic politics, the real issue is what ethics it embodies and which values it expresses. Looking critically at how the Roosevelt Administration tried to brand the New Deal and how the Obama campaign leveraged principles of marketing and advertising gives us an opportunity to think about different models of political persuasion.

Brands are most often associated with the world of crass consumerism but they can play a key role in fomenting political change. Or so claim some pretty clever thinkers and activists and they will be giving talk about the importance of branding for democratic politics, this Monday at 7 PM, at the Change You Want to See

Please join us this Monday, October 26th as we continue our series on Symbols, Branding and Persuasion with an exploration of branding in the context of electoral and legislative politics. We ll start with a presentation by media theorist Stephen Duncombe, author of Dream: Reimagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy and the forthcoming Branding the New Deal. Afterward Jessica Teal, design manager for the Obama 2008 presidential campaign will join Duncombe for a conversation via video skype. Like it or not, propaganda and mass persuasion are part of modern democratic politics. Many progressives today have an adverse reaction to propaganda: ours is a politics based in reason and rationality, not symbols and fantasy. Given our last administration s fondness for selling fantasies as reality, this aversion to branding, marketing and propaganda is understandable. But it is also na ve. Mass persuasion is a necessary part of democratic politics, the real issue is what ethics it embodies and which values it expresses. Looking critically at how the Roosevelt Administration tried to brand the New Deal and how the Obama campaign leveraged principles of marketing and advertising gives us an opportunity to think about different models of political persuasion.

I was reminded about some TPM coding I d done to get random bytes from the pRNG on my TPM-enabled system from Matt Domsch s recent post. I m not fully convinced that the pRNG of the TPM is an appropriate source of entropy, but it does pass my simple FIPS-140-2 test. I had to find the Intel TPM docs to figure out how to enable TPM on my system. It was under Advanced / Peripherals . I was expecting it under Security , like every other BIOS I d seen. After that:

$ sudo apt-get install trousers tpm-tools
...
$ sudo modprobe tpm_tis
$ dmesg grep -i tpm
[676618.167313] tpm_tis 00:07: 1.2 TPM (device-id 0xFE, rev-id 70)
$ sudo service trousers start
...
$ tpm_version
TPM 1.2 Version Info:
Chip Version: 1.2.2.16
Spec Level: 2
Errata Revision: 1
TPM Vendor ID: WEC
TPM Version: 01010000
Manufacturer Info: 57454300
$ ./tpm-getrand hexdump -C
00000000 61 07 23 ff 71 3e 25 e8 f0 d5 de a7 a3 07 21 dc a.#.q>%.......!.

I could run rngd with a named pipe, but it d be nice to have a new driver that could run a command instead to get the next 20000 bits. UPDATE: I ve implemented this in rngd now.

Nice coreboot news the Free Software x86 firmware ("BIOS") is featured on the cover of issue 186 of the Linux Journal. Anton Borisov's article Coreboot at Your Service! explains the basic ideas behind coreboot, how to build an image for your board, which payloads are available and how they are used, e.g. GRUB2, SeaBIOS if you need legacy BIOS callbacks (e.g. for booting Windows), Etherboot/GPXE, or more fun stuff such as space invaders or tint (a tetris clone) in your flash ROM chip... If you read the article and think the build process is a bit complicated and ugly, do not despair! We're currently in the process of converting the whole coreboot code base to use kconfig (the widely-known configuration tool used by the Linux kernel, busybox, and other projects), so in the very near future the whole process for building a coreboot image will work like this:

  $ make menuconfig
  $ make

Flashing the image can then be done using an EEPROM programmer and/or via the user-space utility flashrom (available for Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, etc.)... It's nice to see that coreboot is getting more and more coverage in "mainstream" media and is growing both in number of deployments and in number of supported chipsets and boards. We are desperately in need of more developers though, there are just way too many chipsets, boards, and datasheets out there; we're happy about every patch and every new tester or developer who likes to mess with code that runs in the very first few (micro)seconds after power-on. If you think kernel hacking and related low-level development is nice, you might also be interested in writing code where there's no RAM yet (as coreboot has to initialize it), there's no serial port for debugging (coreboot has to initialize it), no PCI devices have been set up, most of your auxiliary hardware is not yet up (ethernet NIC, parallel port, audio, IDE, SATA, USB, you name it). It's a fun environment to work in and you'll learn a lot about PC hardware, even if you (so far) thought you knew everything there is to know. Feel free to join us on the mailing list or on IRC in #coreboot on Freenode.

Shortly before 9AM this morning I discovered that the IP address for my mail server was not being routed, according to my logs the problem started shortly after midnight. It s on a TPG ADSL connection, there is one IP address for the PPPOE link and 6 addresses in a /29 routed to it one of the addresses in the /29 is for my mail server. It wasn t until 3PM that I was able to visit the server to sort the problem out. It turned out that the main IP address was working but the /29 wasn t being routed to it. So TPG had somehow dropped the route from my routing table. I pinged all the addresses from a 3G broadband connection on my EeePC while running tcpdump on the server, and no packets for the /29 came through but the IP address for the PPP link worked fine. I was even able to ssh in to the server once I knew the IP address of the ppp0 device for future use I need to keep ALL IP addresses of all network gear on my EeePC not just the ones used for providing services. So I phoned the helpdesk, and naturally they asked me inane questions. My patience extended to telling them the broadcast address etc that was being used on the Ethernet device (actually a bridge for Xen but I wasn t going to confuse them). The system been power-cycled before I got there in the hope that it might fix the problem so I could honestly answer the question have you rebooted it (usually I lie rebooting systems to fix network problems is a Windows thing). But my patience started to run out when they asked me to check my DNS settings, I explained very clearly that my problem was that IP packets couldn t get through and that I wasn t using DNS and demanded that they fix it. I didn t get anyone technical to look at the problem until I firmly demanded that the help-desk operator test the routing by pinging my systems. The help-desk people don t have Internet access so that actually testing the connection required escalating the issue. It seems that the algorithm used for help-desk people is to just repeatedly tell people to check various things on their own system, and that continues until the customer s patience runs out. Either the customer goes away or makes requests firmly enough to get something done about it. So their technician did some tests and proclaimed that there was no problem. While said tests were being done things started working, so obviously their procedure is to fix problems and then blame it on the customer. It is not plausible to believe that a problem in their network which had persisted for more than 15 hours would accidentally disappear during the 5 minute window that the technician was investigating the problem. In the discussion that followed the help-desk operator tried to trick me into admitting that it was my fault. They claimed that because I had used multiple IP addresses I must have reconfigured my system and had therefore fixed a problem on my end, my response was I HAVE A HEAP OF MACHINES HERE RUNNING ALL THE TIME, I USE WHICHEVER ONE I FEEL LIKE, I CHANGED NOTHING . I didn t mention that the machines in question are DomUs on the same Xen server, someone who doesn t understand how ping works or what routing is wouldn t have been able to cope with that. I stated clearly several times that I don t like being lied to. Either the help-desk operator was lying to me or their technician was lying to them. In either case they were not going to trick me I know more about how the Internet works than they do. TPG was unable to give me any assurance that such problems won t happen again. The only thing I can be sure of is that when they lie they will stick to their story regardless of whether it works.

It is great to see that the collaboration between Debian and Ubuntu is improving; and I don't say that just because it probably can't be much better within the Debian/Ubuntu Games Team, we have people from both distributions working inside the team and most of the packages don't carry Ubuntu specific patches (anymore) because of that. Actually, seeing that things do go pretty well in that area made me consider signing up to become a MOTU. To do that one has to sign the Ubuntu Code of Conduct (CoC) which is a fairly good document, actually. I wish there would be something similar within Debian that is considered binding, it would be able to reduce quite some tough and rough times, actually. It is about and explains to be considerate, be respectful, be collaborative, what to do when you disagree, when you are unsure and wants you to step down considerately. If these principles would be carried out amongst all the free software communities (and I really mean carried out and not just be there and grow old) I expect it would be much more welcoming for new people. And it's not too hard to do your part for it (... says the person who just recently had to excuse for her behavior). Anyway, there is this one part with the CoC that itches me. It's not that one has to sign it with their GnuPG key, but related to it. Making it a requirement to sign it gives the document a much more official character, actually gives it the feeling and impression of a contract and I expect it is meant to carry that feeling. Though, there is this one part in it that I consider off for such a document:

Nobody knows everything, and nobody is expected to be perfect in the Ubuntu community (except of course the SABDFL).

Given that the acronym SABDFL refers to Mark Shuttleworth it means that one has to expect him to be impeccable which I am sorry but cannot sign. I don't expect that from anyone else but myself, even Mark is only human and can make mistakes. Even though it's obvious that this is a tongue-in-cheek kind of joke which might be meant to make it clear that the Ubuntu community isn't just sterile having this in a document that is expected to get signed by contributors is just an extremely bad idea. Sorry, Ubuntu, as long as this joke is part of the CoC I can't sign it with clean conscience, no matter how much I would sign the rest of it a thousands' time. It really makes me wonder how many others actually did read the "contract" carefully that they are signing but on the other hand simply didn't care. There is too many site signup stuff out there that noone reads neither.

I read this post by Steve Waddington of Exetel where he says that customers never seem to follow-up with him when he asks them about their poor customer experiences. I just had to laugh. I had actually just filled a complaint with the TIO about Exetel. I have emailed Steve Waddington a number of times, generally outlining problems, but I am yet to ever receive a response. Generally if you want to hear feedback from your customers, you have to take your fingers out of your ears. Here is my (most recent) Exetel story. To set the scene, I am synchronising a large backup of data. Think around 100Gb. In reality a small amount. Towards the end of September, we receive an email indicating that we had used a large amount of service. Furthermore that we had 72 hours to pay an interim fee of AUD$100. The email was sent in the early hours of a Friday morning. Which effectively turned it into a single business day. Heaven help you if you had decided to take a long weekend. At any rate, the fee was paid by that afternoon and a name and receipt were obtained. Everything should have be hunky-dorey. Come Monday morning - the Internet service had mysteriously failed. After some remote, expensive AU to UK phones calls and diagnostics I determined that the problem was that Exetel's system had disconnected the service anyway. I emailed them to see what the problem was, and contact was made from Australia. Around the middle of the day, service was restored. A complaint was filed with them (reference: #1691636), that day, which was summarily responded too. I left things for a while since I was busy. But on the 13th Oct night, I decided to file a complaint with the TIO (reference: 09/251856). Here is the full text:

Describe your complaint On 25 Sep, roughly 07:30am, an email was received from Exetel that they required an interim payment as our usage had exceeded AUD$100. The email indicated that if payment was not received within 72 hours - the service may be suspended. At roughly 3:15pm, on 25 Sep - i.e. the same day. A payment of AUD$100 was made and we were issued receipt number 346650646 by an employee who indicated that there name was Rukshani. On 28 Sep at roughly 8am, the Internet ceased to function. After some investigation we determined that Exetel's automated systems believed that the payment had not occurred. #1: I sent an email at 11am on 28 Sep to their billing department, along with their senior management, with payment and service details asking why this occurred. #2: A complaint was sent by the payee at 11:30am on 28 Sep indicating that we were unhappy with the service -- having been customers of long standing (over 4 years) -- being disconnected for over 4 hours despite paying is annoying. Particular when this was not through fault of our own. Nor a technical fault. How did the service provider respond to your complaint #1: On 30 Sep at 12:45 an email was received from James Lowe, who said "Your service is un block now [sic]". No explanation was provided for the outage and non-application of the payment made. #2: 2 responses were received to this email. #2a: At ~11:50am on 28 Sep we received an email from Larry Kaeto who said that the service was unavailable for 2hrs 31mins, not the 4hrs as we had claimed. Additionally he indicated that we had a residental service which is not to be relied upon for business/mission critical requirements and suggested we purchase a more expensive service which has "business grade type support". #2b: At ~09:40am on 29 Sep we received a further email from Larry Kaeto who claimed that no payment had been received by Exetel on 25 Sep. How would you like the service provider resolve your complaint Exetel appears to pride itself on its automated systems. (c.f. http://johnl.blogs.exetel.com.au/index.php?/archives/2783-Automating-Key-Systems-Is-A-Never-Ending-Task.html) However, in this case, the automated system issued a demand for money. The money was paid, but it suspended access to the service anyway. Service should not have been disrupted for 1 minute nor 150 minutes nor 240 minutes. I believe the charge of AUD$100 and the monthly charge should be credited back to us for the hassle.

I've put in the headings as they are on the TIO complaint form, and made the URL a link otherwise it is exactly as I submitted it which is also why the text is not very lengthy, as the TIO restrict how much you can submit. This morning, at 09:10 I received an email from Exetel acknowledging receipt of the TIO complaint and asking Please detail in a point by point manner your concerns. This email was from Larry Kaeto. It also contained a copy of the most recent LNS logs. I replied with a full copy of the complaint as I submitted it to the TIO (reference: #1770435) and also indicated I would speak with the TIO to confirm what they had sent to Exetel (Exetel reference: #1771491). By 12:56, Larry Kaeto was able to responsd, quoted here and edited to occlude privacy information:

Exetel acknowledge payment 25/9/09 was manually processed 25/9/09 but the record to remove the timer to suspend in 72 hrs was not removed. I did not see the manual payment of the 25/9/09. Sorry for my ''incompetence'' for saying payment was not made. The duration of suspension was 2 hours and 28 minutes (or thereabouts) as the facts show below (our session logs and your usage time logged in and out) and nto 4 hours as is claimed. As gesture of goodwill, Exetel will provide a refund of $100 Exetel has made a commercial decision to end the relationship with you. See e-mail sent separately titled ''Ticket #1771491: XXXXXXXX5X - Notice of Termination - XXXXX XXXXXX ''

So, as you can see from John Linton's post, if there is a problem with taking payment your service is summarily disconnected. And, as you can see here, even if they take payment, but their automated system fails, if you complain about it, your service is summarily disconnected. It is much easier to listen to your customers when you take your fingers out of your ears.

Sean Kenny emailed us to tell us about an event in Bristol: This week s Freeskilling is called Who needs Microsoft? and we are meeting at the Better Food Co. Cafe, St Werburghs @ 7pm Tues 13th Oct. Ben Smith will be giving a talk about how you can replace Microsoft Windows and all the very expensive and security flawed software that goes with it, with Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). This will save you lots of money and is more ethical into the bargain! For more info, go to http://thegurinet.doesntexist.com/ Only thing I m disappointed about is that it s centred on replacing Microsoft, but that s still the starting point for most people.

You can now use the Debian installer to install Debian on the Marvell SheevaPlug. This routine will install Debian testing (squeeze), which is currently under development. The installer itself is also under development, so there may be problems from time to time but it should generally work pretty well. The Debian installer doesn't support installations to flash, but you can use it to install to a USB stick or disk as well as to an SD card. Here are installation instructions.

Hey all! I m sorry I haven t been very active with my packages recently. I all-of-a-sudden started grad school and have been swamped with studying. I also started a contract and have been busy trying to learn a new codebase while contributing something other than snark. I promise I ll get back to packaging IronRuby and IronPython on Mono for Debian as soon as things start settling down. Getting an A in the class is higher priority, though, sorry Don t worry. I haven t forgotten about you ;) Cheers, C.J. PS, I am implementing a Perl library to exercise my understanding of the class. You can follow along at the search.cpan.org page for Lingua::HPSG or by cloning the git repo: $ git clone git://karma.colliertech.org/colliertech/langparser