Search Results: "ana"

25 October 2013

Jan Wagner: PHP.net infected with Malware and Linux Malware Detect

As some of you might have noticed, the Site PHP.net was infected yesterday with Malware.
If you are running a shared hosting environment, you are also be faced with similar Malware problems. Beside XSS attacks and compromised server systems on OS-level, very widely used attack szenarios are stolen user credentials. A usefull mitigation strategy might be a web application firewall (WAF) like ModSecurity. Another way might be the Malware scanner Linux Malware Detect. The project describes itself: 
**Description**
Linux Malware Detect (LMD) is a malware scanner for Linux released under the
GNU GPLv2 license, that is designed around the threats faced in shared hosted
environments. It uses threat data from network edge intrusion detection systems
to extract malware that is actively being used in attacks and generates
signatures for detection. In addition, threat data is also derived from user
submissions with the LMD checkout feature and from malware community resources.
The signatures that LMD uses are MD5 file hashes and HEX pattern matches, they
are also easily exported to any number of detection tools such as ClamAV.
**Features**
- MD5 file hash detection for quick threat identification
- HEX based pattern matching for identifying threat variants
- statistical analysis component for detection of obfuscated threats (e.g: base64)
- integrated detection of ClamAV to use as scanner engine for improved performance
- integrated signature update feature with -u update
- integrated version update feature with -d update-ver
- scan-recent option to scan only files that have been added/changed in X days
- scan-all option for full path based scanning
- checkout option to upload suspected malware to rfxn.com for review / hashing
- full reporting system to view current and previous scan results
- quarantine queue that stores threats in a safe fashion with no permissions
- quarantine batching option to quarantine the results of a current or past scans
- quarantine restore option to restore files to original path, owner and perms
- quarantine suspend account option to Cpanel suspend or shell revoke users
- cleaner rules to attempt removal of malware injected strings
- cleaner batching option to attempt cleaning of previous scan reports
- cleaner rules to remove base64 and gzinflate(base64 injected malware
- daily cron based scanning of all changes in last 24h in user homedirs
- daily cron script compatible with stock RH style systems, Cpanel & Ensim
- kernel based inotify real time file scanning of created/modified/moved files
- kernel inotify monitor that can take path data from STDIN or FILE
- kernel inotify monitor convenience feature to monitor system users
- kernel inotify monitor can be restricted to a configurable user html root
- kernel inotify monitor with dynamic sysctl limits for optimal performance
- kernel inotify alerting through daily and/or optional weekly reports
- e-mail alert reporting after every scan execution (manual & daily)
- path, extension and signature based ignore options
- background scanner option for unattended scan operations
- verbose logging & output of all actions
The recent development can be found at Github and in the last days I worked on packaging this into a Debian package 'maldetect'. If you want to give it a try on Debian, you could install the packages from our restricted repository: 
    # wget "http://ftp.cyconet.org/debian/sources.list.d/restricted-cyconet.list" \
        -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/restricted-cyconet.list
    # aptitude update
    # aptitude -t restricted install maldetect
For adding our archive key, you can just install the package "debian-cyconet-archive-keyring"

Clint Adams: The Legend of Natalie Dormer

In the future there will be an episode of Elementary with Frankie Faison playing Judge O'Hare.

24 October 2013

Daniel Pocock: Final report on GSoC 2013 projects

Google Summer of Code finished recently. This is the first year that I have participated as a mentor for the Debian Project. Its a big responsibility to be part of the Debian team and to be one of the Debian team members representing Debian at the GSoC Mentor Summit. Birthdays all round This has been a particularly important year for the Debian Project, as the project celebrated our 20th birthday recently, on 16 August 2013, one of the final days of DebConf13 in Switzerland. GSoC celebrates its 10th year in 2014, with a generous 10% boost in the student stipend to mark the occasion. Google: don't be evil Google's "Don't be evil" approach to business has always been an interesting point for discussion. In my view, there are few cases of absolute good or absolute evil that we can universally classify and agree on. At a more pragmatic level, various people have commented that GSoC is a recruiting program for Google: some have even cited this as a reason not to participate. This is a more interesting point for discussion. The results of the program are not exclusive to the headhunters at Google. Anybody can browse through the Debian GSoC weekly student reports from each student to find out exactly what the students were up to and try to recruit them. Mentors and the projects they belong to have not been forced to sign any wide-ranging non-disclosure agreements or non-compete agreements with Google. In one recent example, the xWiki open source project even went as far as setting up a new office in Romania and employing some former GSoC students on a permanent basis.
Assorted images from Iasi, Romania, where xWiki set up an office employing former GSoC students How does Google benefit then? Well, there appear to be several possibilities:
  • Generating a huge amount of goodwill and recognition for the value that they place on the development of the next generation of software engineers
  • Stimulating the expansion of high quality free software projects, many of which they use directly or indirectly for their internal projects
  • Access to private evaluations prepared by the mentors. These evaluations don't take more than an hour for the mentors to complete but they do serve to give Google's headhunters a slight headstart over anybody else who is scouring the web for the names of graduates who completed GSoC
Overall, it appears to fit the definition of a "win-win" scenario: yes, Google gets stuff out of it, but the benefit is not exclusive to Google and projects like Debian are winners too. My initial approach I started by reviewing some of these materials: One particular concept that I took note of was the need to give students some opportunity to be innovative and original in their project proposals. In other words, it has been suggested that students should not be given a precise specification: rather, they should be given some very general concepts or goals and asked to suggest some funky, innovative new idea. The wisdom of this approach varies. If your free software project has some very specific gap that you need to fill, you may only be interested in taking a student who can fill that gap and you may not want to waste the time of other applicants. On the other hand, if you do precisely document this gap you want filled, you may get a bunch of very similar proposals from students and it may be more difficult to distinguish which of them is the most desirable candidate. Furthermore, if your expectations are too rigid, you may not benefit from a top-gun coming in and contributing some really exciting piece of work that you hadn't even thought of. In the end, I opted for providing more generic project briefs and looking at how students responded. The briefs that I published are available here. Coding tasks during the selection process There is no doubt about it, coding tasks are an important part of ensuring students are capable of development work before they are selected. They are also very important for us as mentors. It is not uncommon for some of us to be completely out of touch with the capabilities of other developers. The coding tasks completed by the students during the selection phase allow us to get a feel for their capabilities and set reasonable expectations for how much they can achieve during the course of the project. To simplify the management of coding tasks and engage the students in the Debian community at large, I decided to create tasks as wishlist items in the Debian bug tracking system, such as this dynalogin bug report. The prospective GSoC students were asked to put their name in the bug tracker to take ownership of the task they would complete. Student project proposals For the real-time communications project, I felt all the students slightly underestimated the complexity of this field and would have to be extremely lucky to complete everything they hoped to. After all, this is a field that the free software movement has been wrestling with for years without gaining the upper hand. For somebody with good knowledge of the projects in this space, it is possible to guide the students towards meaningful and achievable subprojects. Nonetheless, the proposals were useful for me in understanding which part of the topics were most attractive to the students. For the other project areas, the student proposals were slightly more specific. Fabian's appeared to be the most specific and well considered proposal for the one-time-password project, in fact, it appeared very much like a project that he could work through from start to finish. Debian teamwork Anybody looking at the GSoC web site will notice that there is a certain amount of overhead in joining the program, promotion, payment administration and optional participation in the GSoC Mentor Summit. As a large organisation, Debian established a dedicated SoC administration team who looked after the GSoC and Outreach Program for Women administrivia. As a developer and mentor, I found this arrangement was highly effective and allowed me to focus over 99% of my efforts on the front-line work, selecting students and supporting them through their projects. Project results One of the more controversial issues during the Debian 7 (wheezy) release cycle was the inclusion of the Mumble voice conferencing software. Although the software has some serious issues, it was eventually escalated to the technical committee and allowed to remain in Debian, partly due to lack of any alternative. One of the first results from Catalin's project was the creation of an alternative, the new reConServer project, based on the librecon conversation manager API from the reSIProcate SIP stack. reConServer is a significantly more generic solution than Mumble, as it allows any SIP peer to participate in an audio conference. It supports TURN for NAT traversal too. Catalin then went on to make the first working implementation of a scheme for passing context information from a web site to SIP WebRTC call as described in the IETF draft. All work has been integrated into release tarballs and packaging. Fabian worked through the latest standards for one-time passwords, extending the oath-toolkit and dynalogin projects to implement mutual two-factor authentication with just about any arbitrary crypto suite using one-time passwords. This work is yet to be merged into an official release of dynalogin as it requires co-ordination with the oath-toolkit release and package updates. However, there is a compelling demonstration in his video from DebConf13 and the source is available under Fabian's github account. In the post-Snowden world, the work from both of these student projects will be hugely valuable to people wanting to tighten up their computer security and communication security practices. The development process Deciding to mentor more than one project turned out to be a worthwhile decision. At first, this might seem like a big risk but it is manageable with support from co-mentors. The upside is that different students work at different speeds, they have different code styles, they even work at different times of the day or week and mentoring more than one student/project allows the mentor to gain a better appreciation of how the students differ than if mentoring only a single project. For Catalin's project, it became obvious at an early stage that he would benefit from having a dedicated server to run the VoIP applications on public IP addresses and low-latency networks while testing them. I spun up a virtual machine with IPv4 and IPv6 in my Xen Cloud Platform and this was extremely helpful for both of us. Throughout the project, I took a hands-off approach and often left the students to their own devices. I gave some suggestions to Catalin about the object-oriented design and this was enough for him to fill in the gaps and write all the code by himself. Fabian's project had fewer ambiguities and he was able to use existing code as a model more frequently than Catalin. It is possible that the students may have produced more code if I had thought through the designs myself and given them definite blue-prints. However, I feel that this would have made it harder for me to appreciate their own abilities and test the limits of their design skills. DebConf13 participation One of the highlights for the students was their participation in DebConf13. Both students presented a session at the conference showcasing some of their work. The DebConf video team produces high quality videos of all sessions at the conference and this in turn provides some great evidence of the students' capabilities and what GSoC adds to Debian and the wider free software universe. I would encourage other mentors to actively contemplate ways to involve their students in conferences during or shortly after the completion of their project work. Looking ahead Google has recently confirmed that Google Summer of Code will be repeated in 2014. It is the 10th anniversary of the program and to celebrate, students will get 10% extra pay. Thank you There are many people to thank for the success of these projects and the wider success of the Debian GSoC team:
  • The Debian GSoC and OPW organisation admin team
  • Google and the Google Open Source Programs Office
  • All the co-mentors who assisted on these projects with me: Simon Josefsson, Luke Faraone, Sylvain Berfini, Eloy Coto and Jes s P rez Rubio
  • The students themselves, C t lin Constantin U urelu and Fabian Gr nbichler
  • All the other very capable and motivated students who applied, submitted code samples but were not selected to participate: many of these students could have also completed a successful project and turning them away is one of the most difficult tasks for mentors in a volunteer organisation like Debian

Russ Allbery: Review: Applied Cryptography

Review: Applied Cryptography, by Bruce Schneier
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Copyright: 1996
ISBN: 0-471-11709-9
Format: Trade paperback
Pages: 621
This is the next entry in the series of Russ reading books that he bought years ago and never got around to reading. Thankfully, this time, the book has aged somewhat better. This review is for the second edition of Applied Cryptography, published in 1996. Given how important computer security has become, and how central cryptography is to computer security, one might think that the passage of 17 years would make a book effectively obsolete. This turns out not to be the case. Yes, Rijndael (the current AES standard and the most widely-used block cipher), Camellia (the up-and-comer in the block cipher world), and the SHA-2 hash postdate this book and aren't discussed. Yes, there have been some further developments in elliptic-curve public-key cryptography. And yes, much of the political information in this book, as well as the patent situation for public-key cryptosystems, is now mostly of historical interest. But a surprising amount of this book still applies directly. Partly that's because much of Applied Cryptography is focused on general principles, classes of algorithms, and cryptographic protocols, and those do not change quickly. A rather amazing number of techniques and protocols still in widespread use today originated in the 1970s. Block ciphers, stream ciphers, cipher modes, public-key systems, signature systems, hash functions, key exchange, secret splitting, key management, and other, similar topics have not changed substantially. And even in the area of specific algorithms, DES is still in use (unfortunately) and its analysis is valuable for understanding any block cipher. RC4, Triple DES, CAST, RSA, MD4, MD5, and SHA-1 are still part of the cryptography landscape, and Schneier was already warning against using MD5 in 1996. The source code included in this book has, thankfully, been made obsolete by widely-available, high-quality free implementations of all common ciphers, available for any modern operating system. But the math, the explanations, and much of the cryptanalysis is still quite relevant. While it contains a comprehensive introduction to cryptographic concepts, Applied Cryptography is structured more like a reference manual than a tutorial. The first two chapters provide some foundations. Then, a wide variety of protocols, from the common to the completely esoteric, are discussed across the subsequent four chapters. There are four chapters on the basics of ciphers, another chapter on the mathematics, and then the longest part of the book: twelve chapters that provide a tour of all major and several interesting minor protocols that existed in 1996. These are organized into block ciphers, stream ciphers (and pseudo-random number generators), hash functions, and public-key systems. An entire chapter is devoted to the history and analysis of DES, and I think that was my favorite chapter of the book. Not only is it worth understanding how DES works, but it also provides a comprehensive introduction to the complexities of block cipher design, the politics of interactions with the NSA, and a fascinating history of early computer cryptosystems. Finally, Applied Cryptography closes with chapters on real-world systems and on politics. The politics section is mostly a historical curiosity, as is much of the chapter on real-world systems. Schneier discusses some of the PKCS and X.509 protocols here but doesn't use SSL as one of his examples despite its specification predating this book (perhaps the most glaring omission of the book). But he does discuss Kerberos (which is of personal interest to me), and it was useful to see it analyzed in the broader context of this sort of book. Those who read Schneier's blog regularly, or who have read any of his other books, will know that he's concise, incisive, and very readable, even with difficult material. I think he does err on the side of compactness this is not a book that handholds the reader or explains something more than once but there's a lot of ground to cover, so I can't really blame him. Expect to have to read the more difficult parts several times, and (at least on a first read) expect to just skip past some of the most complex sections as probably not worth the effort. But I think Schneier does a great job structuring the book so that one comes away with a high-level impression and overview sufficient to make informed guesses about capabilities and relative difficulty even if one doesn't have the patience to work through the details. I suspect most readers will want to skim at least part of this book. Unless you're willing to do a lot of background reading to understand the math, or a lot of careful study to follow the detailed descriptions and flaws in often-obscure algorithms, the algorithm discussions start to blend together. I found myself skipping a lot of the math and focusing on the basic descriptions and the cryptanalysis, particularly for the obscure ciphers. Many of the algorithms are also highly opaque and of obscure benefit; I doubt I will ever care about blind signatures or oblivious transfer, and I struggled to wrap my mind around the details of bit commitment (although it's apparently important in zero knowledge proofs, which in turn are relevant to authentication). But this is not the sort of book where you have to read every word. It's very well-structured, provides clear resynchronization points for readers who have had enough of a particular topic, and marks the topics that are more obscure or of dubious general usefulness. The most useful parts of this book, in my opinion, are the basic conceptual introductions to each class of cryptographic algorithm or protocol, and those chapters are excellent. I've been working in applied computer security, at the application and deployment level, for years, and this is the first time that I've felt like I really understood the difference between a block cipher and a stream cipher, or the implications of block cipher mode selection. Applied Cryptography is also a fascinating exercise in adjusting one's intuition for where the complexity lies. It's a memorable experience to move from the chapters on block ciphers, full of S-boxes and complex mixing and magic numbers, into the far more straightforward mathematical analysis of stream ciphers. Or the mathematical simplicity of RSA (although quite a bit of complexity is lurking on the cryptanalysis side, much of which is only touched on here). Of more historical interest, but still quite impressive, is that Applied Cryptography doubles as a comprehensive literature review. Not only does it cover nearly every algorithm in use at the time, it discusses the cryptography literature on nearly every topic with brief summaries of results and lines of investigation. The references section is a stunning 66 pages of small print featuring 1,653 references, and those are mentioned and put in context throughout the book. I'm not personally interested in chasing those lines of research further, and of course 17 years means there are many new papers that are as important to read today, but it's obvious that this book would have been an amazing and invaluable map to the research territory when it was first published. There are now newer books on this topic that you should consider if you're purchasing a book today. Cryptography Engineering in particular is in my to-read pile, and I'm interested to see how much of this book it could replace, although I believe it's lighter on the mathematical analysis and details. But I think Applied Cryptography still has a place on the bookshelf of any computer security professional. Schneier is succinct, detailed, straightforward, and comprehensive, at least for 1996, and I know I'll be reaching for this book the next time I forget the details of CFB mode and then get hopelessly confused by the Wikipedia article on the topic. Rating: 8 out of 10

23 October 2013

Russ Allbery: Review: Lean In

Review: Lean In, by Sheryl Sandberg & Nell Scovell
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
Copyright: March 2013
ISBN: 0-385-34994-7
Format: Hardcover
Pages: 217
Lean In is normally listed as written only by Sheryl Sandberg, which is also what's on the dust jacket, but the inside cover says "with Nell Scovell." Given what that normally means for celebrity books, supported by comments in the acknowledgments, I'm listing it as co-written by Scovell. However, much of the book is written in the first person and is clearly meant to be Sandberg's voice, so I will mostly refer to Sandberg as the author for the rest of the review. I was unfair to this book. Lean In made quite a splash when it first came out, since the named author is the Chief Operating Officer of Facebook, a former vice president of Google, and one of the most prominent female executives in the business world. The subtitle is Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, and the normal Internet summary was that it focused on how women could change their behavior to be more effective and successful in the business world. Throw in some ridiculous review hyperbole (one New York Times writer compared it to The Feminine Mystique, which is a bit like the comparison of every extruded fantasy product with The Lord of the Rings) and I was ready to hate this book. It's work advice from someone in a very privileged position, and it seemed to have a distinct whiff of victim-blaming. It's obvious, however, from the first few pages that Sandberg was very aware of this trap and had no intent of falling into it. This is hard: giving practical advice to women on how to navigate a sexist culture runs a severe risk of victim-blaming even with the best of intentions, particularly since part of the sexism of the culture is a pervasive impression that women aren't doing enough. But I think Lean In handles that about as well as one could while still writing a book focused on practical advice rather than revolutionary change. Sandberg is clear that many things women can do to help their careers shouldn't be necessary, and she takes some time, in each section, to talk about the shape of any structural unfairness that she's seen. What advice she offers here is clearly in the spirit of how to navigate a system that is unfair and unequal, but which can be navigated and can be made more fair by more women participating. This is a very practical book, with more in common with business self-help books than with feminist critiques. It's also a narrowly targeted book, not that you'd guess this from the number of copies it's sold and the sort of publicity it got. Lean In is advice to female executives about how to navigate the top levels of US business culture, with a strong eye for issues of feminism, gender-based double standards, and potential traps of self-sabotage. It offers a blend of encouragement, practical tips, and some forthright analysis that tries to bring to the surface internalized sexism and perceived barriers and limitations for female executives so that they can be addressed and hopefully overcome. It's not in any way a revolutionary book, either with respect to business culture or with respect to gender roles; rather, it's an open acknowledgment of a whole bunch of problems combined with practical advice for how to work around those problems until they can be solved. For the most part, it doesn't attempt to address how to solve the problems. There is nothing wrong with that as a focus for a book. Lean In has attracted a fair bit of criticism in some circles, but, after reading the book, I think a lot of that criticism is predicated on assuming different goals than this book actually has. Contrary to various glowing reviews, Lean In is not a book that's going to change the world; rather, it's a book that might help a narrow band of the population in a specific job and career path navigate problems of sexism and gender expectations and be more effective. Read in that light, it struck me as honest, open, considered, and well aware of its own limitations. Sandberg says repeatedly that many of the options she discusses simply aren't available to most women, and that women may not be in a position to be able to make the decisions she made. She's quite forthright about the limitations of her own experience and the limitations of the advice that she offers, and I think deserves full points for honesty. Similarly, when it comes to business culture, Lean In is not about changing that culture for the better. It's about navigating that culture as it exists. Here, I think Sandberg is less aware of the limitations of this perspective; there is far less acknowledgment in Lean In that executive culture may be inherently toxic as there is of the limitations that women face in business. But while Sandberg has an obvious blind spot, this is not a paean to overwork. It has some excellent advice about work-life balance, including the need to put strict limits on the amount of time one spends in the office and the necessity for someone to pick up substantial burdens in the home if one of the members of a household is going to pursue a business executive job. I was worried, going in, that Lean In would excuse, justify, or idealize the culture of exploitation so common with salaried jobs in the United States, but it really doesn't. As with feminism, it doesn't pick any deep fights, and those with a "kill it with fire" gut reaction towards US executive culture (such as myself) will find the bland acceptance of it irritating, but this is more of an issue with reader expectations than with the book. One should not expect a highway map to point out that trains are more efficient. So, I'm willing to stand up for Lean In to a degree. This is not a bad book. It's very readable, parts are quite interesting, and some of Sandberg's observations about the intersection of gender expectations and executive culture were worth hearing. I learned some things from it. But I think one should read it in full awareness of its limitations. This is a book of practical advice that will only be of direct use to 10% of the population, and which could be generalized with some effort to maybe 25%. It has little to say to women who are not in white-collar, professional jobs, and its applicability to women who aren't aiming for executive careers is a bit hazy. It's the kind of book that's full of anecdotes about how Sandberg got parking spots reserved for pregnant women at Google by talking to the founders about it, or about how to negotiate salary when offered an executive position, which are vaguely interesting but of dubious practical benefit to people who aren't offered jobs where salary and benefit negotiation is available. This isn't the fault of the book, but at times it is rather stunning how different (and how much more tractable) the world looks to someone with the wealth and personal connections that Sandberg has. (To her credit, Sandberg does seem to be aware of this and does acknowledge it.) If you are a female executive, or a male executive interested in developing your empathy and understanding of how institutional sexism affects your colleagues, I suspect Lean In would be quite helpful. If you're not, I think it's mostly a curiosity. But it's also well-written, well-organized, probably available in most libraries in the United States, and provides anecdotal data to help build a more complete picture of the concerns and experiences of female executives. Unless you're in the specific target audience, I'm not sure I'd recommend going out of your way to find it, but it's probably worth reading if it falls into your lap. Rating: 7 out of 10

22 October 2013

Wouter Verhelst: bind module for puppet

Yesterday, I released a module to manage bind zones using puppet on the puppet forge. It uses a custom type to manage DNS RRs (using dig and nsupdate), and there's also a class for ensuring that a zone is installed, both on masters and on slaves, in a manner that you only need to list the zones, with their master and slave name servers, in a hiera data file. The main reason why I did it this way is because all the other modules that I looked at would either expect you to write zone files (and then just copy them over), or generate the zone files and use "rndc reload" or similar. I don't like that way of doing things. BIND does support dynamic updates of zone entries, and it's perfectly possible to query a name server to verify whether a given record actually exists. Additionally, this gave me a good excuse to learn how to write a custom type for puppet. Today, I was astonished to learn that my module has already had six downloads. In 20 hours, that's fairly impressive, in my opinion.

21 October 2013

Julian Andres Klode: python-apt 0.9 released

I released python-apt 0.9. This completely removes support for the old API from the code base (it was disabled for the entirety of 0.8 in Debian, and in Ubuntu since saucy). Highlights:
Filed under: Debian

Aigars Mahinovs: Moved to Mezzanine

After my server that has hosted my blog for some years had given out its last breath (second motherboard failure), I decited it was time for a change. And not just server change, but also change in the blog engine itself. As I now focus on Python and Django almost exclusively at work, it felt logical to use some kind of Django-based blog or CMS. I tried django-cms and mezzanine and ... Mezzanine is so fast and simple, that I simply stopped looking. After simply following the tutorial and creating a skeleton project, I had a ready-to go site with all the CMS features, incuding a blog. I just had to change a few settings to have the blog module be the home page of the site, change site settings for the title and Google Analytics settings and such and tweak the theme a bit to my liking. This was my first real exposure to a Bootstrap design. I must say - it is very simple to understand and modify if your needs fit within its limits. For example, I wanted to remove the left sidebar and expand the main content block to fill that. All I had to do was to remove the div element with class "left-sidebar span-2" and change the class of the main content part from "span-7" to "span-9". To do that I simply copied the templates/base.html file from mezzanine default templates and modified it. The information from django-debug-toolbar showed me what files were used in rendering the page. But the feature that really got me hooked was the Wordpress import. Using a simple management command I was able to feed into Mezzanine instance the XML export file from Wordpress. It created blog posts, categories, comments, static pages and even redirects from Wordpress permalinks to Mezzanine permalinks. It was not flawless - there were a few issues: After that was done it was a relatively straightforward process of picking up the code and data and deploying it to a Django-friendly hosting service. There is a plenty of good competition out there, most now offer a simple one-click Django installation, so I just created a simple Django skeleton via their web interface and then replace what they generated with my app while keeping their settings as local_settings.py . I should probably write a bit more details about the process. After I create a custom fabric file for this. It is quite a strange feeling to have a Mezzanine blog that responds faster from a shared server half a continent away, compared to a Wordpress on dedicated server in the same room There are a few features that I am still missing - most notably draft post autosave. That has bitten me hard while writing this post :P Also a Twitter digest post feature. But on the bright side - that is a great motivation to write such features, preferably in a portable way that other people can use too :)

Aigars Mahinovs: Moved to Mezzanine

After my server that has hosted my blog for some years had given out its last breath (second motherboard failure), I decited it was time for a change. And not just server change, but also change in the blog engine itself. As I now focus on Python and Django almost exclusively at work, it felt logical to use some kind of Django-based blog or CMS. I tried django-cms and mezzanine and ... Mezzanine is so fast and simple, that I simply stopped looking. After simply following the tutorial and creating a skeleton project, I had a ready-to go site with all the CMS features, incuding a blog. I just had to change a few settings to have the blog module be the home page of the site, change site settings for the title and Google Analytics settings and such and tweak the theme a bit to my liking. This was my first real exposure to a Bootstrap design. I must say - it is very simple to understand and modify if your needs fit within its limits. For example, I wanted to remove the left sidebar and expand the main content block to fill that. All I had to do was to remove the div element with class "left-sidebar span-2" and change the class of the main content part from "span-7" to "span-9". To do that I simply copied the templates/base.html file from mezzanine default templates and modified it. The information from django-debug-toolbar showed me what files were used in rendering the page. But the feature that really got me hooked was the Wordpress import. Using a simple management command I was able to feed into Mezzanine instance the XML export file from Wordpress. It created blog posts, categories, comments, static pages and even redirects from Wordpress permalinks to Mezzanine permalinks. It was not flawless - there were a few issues: After that was done it was a relatively straightforward process of picking up the code and data and deploying it to a Django-friendly hosting service. There is a plenty of good competition out there, most now offer a simple one-click Django installation, so I just created a simple Django skeleton via their web interface and then replace what they generated with my app while keeping their settings as local_settings.py . I should probably write a bit more details about the process. After I create a custom fabric file for this. It is quite a strange feeling to have a Mezzanine blog that responds faster from a shared server half a continent away, compared to a Wordpress on dedicated server in the same room There are a few features that I am still missing - most notably draft post autosave. That has bitten me hard while writing this post :P Also a Twitter digest post feature. But on the bright side - that is a great motivation to write such features, preferably in a portable way that other people can use too :)

19 October 2013

Dirk Eddelbuettel: Yes another Herbie Hancock concert

Hadn't mentioned yet that I saw Herbie Hancock last Friday at the CSO / Symphony Center. That's about the fourth time I have him according to this blog (September 2007,March 2005, April 2004) and I think I saw him two more times when I lived in France, and maybe once while I was in Canada. This time, the format was a horn-free quintet with Lionel Loueke on guitar, James Genus on bass, Vinnie Colaiuta on drums and Zakir Hussain on tabla. Hancock himself played mostly keyboards / synthesizer, even when he used the full piano as input. Overall the concert was little uneven--Hancock himself alluded to the fact that the five hadn't really practised together. At times they were rolling: the opening was a very rhythmic version of his very old standard Watermelon Man; the encore was a very rocking version of his best-selling pop-fusion hit Rockit. In between, it was sometimes wanting. Still, all five are tremendous artists and I also had a fabulous seat as shown in this Google+ post with a picture of Hancock's setup, including multiple screens. But they did not really connect with audience as a whole, and by the time the encore rolled around, the house was pretty empty.

17 October 2013

Thomas Goirand: OpenStack Havana 2013.2 Debian packages available

OpenStack upstream was released today. Thanks to the release team and a big up to TTX for his work. By the time you read this, probably all of my uploads have reached your local Debian mirror. Please try Havana using either Sid from any Debian mirror, or using the Wheezy backports available here: deb http://havana.pkgs.enovance.com/debian havana main
deb http://archive.gplhost.com/debian havana-backports main Yes, you will need *both* repositories. This is unofficial, though these are the exact same packages as in Sid, just rebuilt for Wheezy. On the package side, here s what is new: - All packages who needs it can now be configured through debconf for the RabbitMQ settings. This is on top of what was already available for Grizzly, which is automated configuration for: keystone auth token, the database, the API endpoints and much more. (remember: this is fully optional, you can always use the non-interactive mode ) - All Quantum pluggin packages have been removed, and now everything is self-contained in the neutron-common package. The selection of which plugin to use is done directly using the core_plugin= directive in /etc/neutron/neutron.conf. This will also control the init.d script of neutron-server, so that it loads the corresponding ini file in /etc/neutron/plugins. The plugin selection is done through Debconf, so that users don t have to write the full path of the plugin class, which is (for most) very cryptic (am I the only one who thinks that writing neutron.plugins.openvswitch.ovs_neutron_plugin.OVSNeutronPluginV2 in a configuration file is user friendly?). - All of the package descriptions and Debconf templates have been reviewed by the Debian internationalization team, and most strings are translated in Czech, Danish, French, Italian, Japanese and Russian (sometimes even more) for almost all packages (thanks everyone!). I d like to publicly thanks eNovance for sponsoring my packaging work, and Mehdi Abaakouk for his work on our CI with the tempest tests. Happy Havana release testing,
Please report bugs through the Debian BTS.

16 October 2013

Matthew Garrett: Standing for the Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board

According to its charter, the Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board exists "to advise The Linux Foundation Board of Directors (Board) and the management of The Linux Foundation (Management) on matters related to supporting the technical agenda of The Linux Foundation". It consists of 10 members, with 5 seats up for election each year. Elections take place at an event at Kernel Summit, but are also open to attendees of whichever conference is colocated with the Kernel Summit that year. The election announcement is emailed to the Linux kernel list and tech-board-discuss, a mostly moribund list that springs into life once a year for election announcements.

This arrangement seemed odd to me even back in 2007. Back then the Linux Foundation was already sponsoring development of certain non-kernel components, and now that list is even larger. While nominally open to all, nominations for the TAB tend to end up being people actively involved in the kernel community. That's probably better than people limited to any other single technical community (kernel developers tend to end up dealing with bugs from a fairly wide range of projects, so they're not entirely unaware of what other people have to deal with), but it still seems suboptimal. The current membership is mostly limited to people who spend little to no time working with userspace developers, let alone anyone active in other Linux Foundation projects. I don't think this is a good thing

So, after several years of considering it, I'm finally standing for the TAB. I've been an active developer at most levels of the Linux stack, from the kernel through to desktop environments. I've worked closely with distributions. I've even worked closely with firmware developers. I'm not intimately involved in any of the other Linux Foundation projects, but I have experience that allows me to better understand their needs and motivations than I'd have from having spent my entire life living in the kernel. Being on the TAB would make it easier to ensure that these projects are represented in a meaningful way.

Of the other people who I know are standing (and this list may well grow longer), I'm inclined to vote for:
The election is currently scheduled to be National Museum in Edinburgh on the evening of the 23rd of October. If you're attending Linuxcon or one of the colocated events, please do come along and vote.

(Updated to correct a typo)

comment count unavailable comments

Carl Chenet: Brebis 0.7, the fully automated backup checker

Follow me on Identi.ca or Twitter The new version of Brebis Chevillette 0.7 was published two days ago. Brebis is a fully automated backup checker. Brebis does not create backups. It only performs controls on them. Brebis is able to detect a corrupted archive compressed with different formats, automatically checking the integrity of your archives and lots of parameters of the files inside these archives or inside a tree of files and provide detailed reports if unexpected states are detected. Check out the list of the supported features. What s new? The main features of this new version are: Complete example of installing, configuring and running Brebis How to install from your package manager Brebis is available in Debian, FreeBSD, Archlinux and Frugalware. Use your favorite package manager to install it. How to install from the sources 
# wget http://brebisproject.org/attachments/download/8/brebis-0.7.tar.gz
# tar zxvf brebis-0.7.tar.gz && cd brebis-0.7
# python3.3 setup.py install --install-scripts=/usr/bin
# mkdir /etc/brebis
What you need before running brebis Our goal is to check on a regular basis the archive /backups/monthly-backup.tar.gz. Brebis needs two files in order to correctly run: a configuration file with general parameters and the list of files with all their parameters. Don t be afraid, both of theses files will be generated by Brebis with the following command: 
# brebis -G /backups/monthly-backup.tar.gz
# ls /backups/
monthly-backup.tar.gz monthly-backup.conf monthly-backup.list
All the files inside your archives have been detected and their names and parameters (uid, gid, mode, md5, ) have been written in the file monthly-backup.list. More information about those files. How to configure Brebis Lets save /backups/monthly-backup.list in /etc/brebis: # mv /backups/monthly-backup.list /etc/brebis For /backups/monthly-backup.conf, we just modify the files_list parameters: 
[main]
name=monthly-backup
type=archive
path=/backups/monthly-backup.tar.gz
files_list=/etc/brebis/monthly-backup.list
We also save monthly-backup.conf in /etc/brebis: # mv /backups/monthly-backup.conf /etc/brebis Use Brebis Using Brebis is as simple as: # brebis -c /etc/brebis/ -l /var/log/brebis.log If there is not any difference between the current state of your backup and your list of file, the logfile /var/log/brebis.log will be empty. If any difference happens, they will be reported in /var/log/brebis.log. Show time. I m modifying the md5 hash sum of a file in /etc/brebis/monthly-backup.list, during the next run of brebis, I get the following content in brebis.log: 
WARNING:root:1 file with unexpected hash while checking
/backups/monthly-backup.tar.gz:
WARNING:root:toto/titi hash is ce4f8cacd8fc702bdd03531b9447818b.
Should have been ce4f8cacd8fc702bdd03531b94478184.
As you can read, Brebis reports a difference between what was expected and what it checks. Now it s easy to do the same for any backup you want to check on a regular basis. Just add something like the next line in /etc/crontab: 01 00 * * * root brebis -c /etc/brebis/ -l /var/log/brebis.log A brebis run will happen every day at midnight to check your backup. Every configuration files in the directory /etc/brebis/ will be inspected. Feedback about Brebis We at the Brebis Project welcome any feedback about Brebis. Feel free to subscribe to the Brebis-users mailing list, by Twitter or email me directly at carl.chenet@brebisproject.org 
Official website: http://www.brebisproject.org
Mailing-list: http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/brebis-users

15 October 2013

Francois Marier: The Perils of RAID and Full Disk Encryption on Ubuntu 12.04

I've been using disk encryption (via LUKS and cryptsetup) on Debian and Ubuntu for quite some time and it has worked well for me. However, while setting up full disk encryption for a new computer on a RAID1 partition, I discovered that there are a few major problems with RAID on Ubuntu.

My Setup: RAID and LUKS Since I was setting up a new machine on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin), I used the alternate CD (I burned ubuntu-12.04.3-alternate-amd64+mac.iso to a blank DVD) to get access to the full disk encryption options. First, I created a RAID1 array to mirror the data on the two hard disks. Then, I used the partition manager built into the installer to setup an unencrypted boot partition (/dev/md0 mounted as /boot) and an encrypted root partition (/dev/md1 mounted as /) on the RAID1 array. While I had done full disk encryption and mirrored drives before, I had never done them at the same time on Ubuntu or Debian.

The problem: cannot boot an encrypted degraded RAID After setting up the RAID, I decided to test it by booting from each drive with the other one unplugged. The first step was to ensure that the system is configured (via dpkg-reconfigure mdadm) to boot in "degraded mode". When I rebooted with a single disk though, I received a evms_activate is not available error message instead of the usual cryptsetup password prompt. The exact problem I ran into is best described in this comment (see this bug for context). It turns out that booting degraded RAID arrays has been plagued with several problems.

My solution: an extra initramfs boot script to start the RAID array The underlying problem is that the RAID1 array is not started automatically when it's missing a disk and so cryptsetup cannot find the UUID of the drive to decrypt (as configured in /etc/crypttab). My fix, based on a script I was lucky enough to stumble on, lives in /etc/initramfs-tools/scripts/local-top/cryptraid: 
#!/bin/sh
PREREQ="mdadm"
prereqs()
 
     echo "$PREREQ"
 
case $1 in
prereqs)
     prereqs
     exit 0
     ;;
esac
cat /proc/mdstat
mdadm --run /dev/md1
cat /proc/mdstat
After creating that file, remember to:
  1. make the script executable (using chmod a+x) and
  2. regenerate the initramfs (using dpkg-reconfigure linux-image-KERNELVERSION).
To make sure that the script is doing the right thing:
  1. press "Shift" while booting to bring up the Grub menu
  2. then press "e" to edit the default boot line
  3. remove the "quiet" and "splash" options from the kernel arguments
  4. press F10 to boot with maximum console output
You should see the RAID array stopped (look for the output of the first cat /proc/mdstat call) and then you should see output from a running degraded RAID array.

Backing up the old initramfs If you want to be extra safe while testing this new initramfs, make sure you only reconfigure one kernel at a time (no update-initramfs -u -k all) and make a copy of the initramfs before you reconfigure the kernel: 
cp /boot/initrd.img-KERNELVERSION-generic /boot/initrd.img-KERNELVERSION-generic.original
Then if you run into problems, you can go into the Grub menu, edit the default boot option and make it load the .original initramfs.

Daniel Pocock: Debian Outreach Program for Women 2013

Debian's Outreach Program for Women (OPW) is underway. This is a huge thing and not just something that female developers need to be concerned with. Untapped potential Many computer science schools see about twenty percent of places occupied by female students. In the Debian community, however, about one percent of developers are female. As there are about one thousand male developers, this suggests there are another one hundred potential female developers and contributors out there who are not aware of the fact that they could be part of Debian. Finding these people and helping them fulfil their potential makes the project better for everybody. Women are heavy lifters People should not assume that these women are going to need their hands held. When the Jitsi project recently moved to Github, the Github repository reports made the surprise revelation that Yana is the top contributor - by a fifty percent margin. Will women save the world this week? It is not just in software engineering that women have significant potential. As the men running the US bumble around with their high-stakes game of chicken, it is notable that last week the US Federal Reserve appointed their first female chairman, Janet Yellen. It is unlikely that her first meeting with female IMF boss Christine Lagarde would have satisfied stereotypes about casual gossip or shopping; more likely, they would be contemplating how to save the world economy if rogue congressmen push the US into default - a possibility that is no longer just an outlier. Integrating financial software in Debian With that in mind, one of the projects I've offered to mentor under OPW involves creating further integration between free software for finance and accounting on Debian. Several applicants have already contact me about this. Fundraising to support OPW 2013 Debian is currently raising funds to support this program. The project administrators are hopefully going to provide more details soon about how funding will be allocated and how many projects will proceed.

14 October 2013

Bits from Debian: Ada Lovelace Day: meet some of the "women behind Debian"!

Today is Ada Lovelace Day:
"Ada Lovelace Day is about sharing stories of women - whether engineers, scientist, technologists or mathematicians - who have inspired you to become who you are today. The aim is to create new role models for girls and women in these male-dominated fields by raising the profile of other women in STEM". source
To celebrate, we asked to some of the "women behind Debian" to share their stories with us. Enjoy! Alt Ada Lovelace portrait Ana Guerrero Lopez (ana) Who are you? I'm a 30-something years old geek. I'm from Andalusia, Spain but live in France. What do you do in Debian? I work mostly on my packages, in sponsoring new people's packages and in this very blog you're reading now. I also maintain an unofficial Google+ page about Debian. At $PAID job, I work in an internal Debian distribution so from time to time, I get the opportunity to contribute back some of the stuff we do there. How and why did you start contributing to Debian? I started using Debian around 2003 switching from Mandrake. I was a happy Debian user when the Debian Women project started in the summer 2004. When I saw the project announced, I asked myself why I wasn't contributing to Debian and the rest is history... in a couple of weeks it'll be my 7 years DD-versary! If for some reason you want a longer reply to this question, read here. Beatrice Who are you? I am a PhD student with a degree in Biology. I am a computer fan since my first C64 and I am a self-taught computer geek wanna-be. And I am a bug fan - not software bugs, real bugs :) What do you do in Debian? I work on translations - doing the translation work itself, but also reviewing other translators' work and helping in coordinating the translation effort. How and why did you start contributing to Debian? I started using Linux because I liked the idea of an open source operative system based on collaboration and I began reviewing open source software translations. Since my first Linux system was Debian Potato and I sticked to Debian ever since, it only seemed natural to focus my translation work on Debian. Christine Caulfield Who are you? My name is Christine Caulfield. My day job is principal software engineer at Red Hat working on the cluster infrastructure components corosync & pacemaker. Outside computing I'm a musician and sound engineer. I play violin with lots of technology attached, and love avant garde music. What do you do in Debian? I'm not that active on Debian any more due to pressure of time, and maturity of the packages I work on. I currently maintain the, little-used, DECnet userspace packages and the, even less used I suspect, mopd bootloader. I used to maintain lvm2 for a while but dropped that a few years ago. How and why did you start contributing to Debian? My initial reasons for joining Debian were slightly selfish, to find a home for the DECnet project that I was heavily involved in at the time. I was a keep Debian user and people wanted a distribution where the software was easy to set up. DECnet is quite complicated for users to configure, being a totally independant networking stack to IP and so OS support is needed. Debian seemed like the logical place to make this happen. As mentioned above I got quite involved for a time and maintained other packages too. I picked up lvm2 because I was on the lvm2 dev team at work in Red Hat and as it was a new package at that time I seemed a logical choice. Elena Grandi (valhalla) Who are you? I'm a 30-something years old geek and Free Software enthusiast from Italy. What do you do in Debian? I'm currently maintaining a few packages (2 python modules and a python program) as a sponsored uploader; I'm also slowly looking around for other things to do (by preference technical, but not limited to packaging), with the aim to spend more time contributing to Debian. How and why did you start contributing to Debian? For a while I had being distro-hopping between "fun" distributions (the ones that break now and then) on the desktop while using Debian stable on the home server and in chroots. I was already doing marginal contributions to those distributions, where finding stuff that was missing was easy, but my perception as a stable user was that Debian was already working fine and probably didn't really need any help. Then I started to socialize on IRC with some DDs and DMs, and realized that my perception was superficial and that in reality there were dark holes in the depths of the archive where Evil festered and prospered and... ok, sorry, I got carried away :) Anyway, since I was actually using Debian more and more I decided to start contributing: I read documentation, I attended the useful IRC sessions on #debian-women and decided that it was probably best not to add new stuff, but look for things that I used and that needed help. Then nothing happened for a while, because finding stuff that doesn't work is hard (at least on my mostly textual systems). Then one day I was trying to write a python script that needed to verify gpg signed messages; it had to run on my Debian server, so I was trying to use python-pyme and its documentation was painful to use, while I remembered an earlier attempt using python-gnupg that was much more pythonic, but not available in Debian. In a fit of anger I decided to forgo all of my good intentions and actually add a new package: I checked the sources for problems, packaged, sent it to mentors@d-o, got reviews, fixed problems, resent and finally got sponsored and well, everything started. Francesca Ciceri (madamezou) Who are you? I'm Francesca, a 30-something Italian graduated in Social Sciences. What do you do in Debian? I'm a (non uploading) Debian Developer since 2011 and have been DPN editor, press officer, webmaster for www.debian.org and translator for the Italian l10n team. Recently, due to time constraints, I had to reduce my involvement and now only work on two things: writing/editing articles for bits.debian.org together with Ana Guerrero, and creating subtitles for the DebConf talks, in the DebConf Subs team. How and why did you start contributing to Debian? Basically thanks to the sudden abundance of free time - due to an health problem - and the desire to give something back to this wonderful operating system. After that, I found out that Debian is not only a great OS but also a very special community. Today, some of my dearest friends are people I met through Debian. :) Laura Arjona Who are you? I live in Madrid (Spain), and work as IT Assistant in the Technical University of Madrid (UPM). I'm married and I have a 4-years-old son. What do you do in Debian? In 2012 I started to clean spam and to translate Debian web pages into Spanish. I also follow the work of the web and publicity team, I hope I'll get more involved there too. And of course, I'm in Debian Women :) How and why did you start contributing to Debian? I'm using Debian at work since 2007 (servers), and in my desktops since 2010. I like very much that it is a community distro and I wanted to participate. I was already doing translations in other (small) free software projects, so I began here too. The Debian-Women list, the planet, and people in identi.ca helped me to learn a lot and feel part of the community even when I was not contributing yet. M nica Ram rez Arceda (monica) Who are you? My name is M nica Ram rez Arceda and I am an enthusiast of free software and sharing knowledge cultures: for me it's a kind of philosophy of life. I studied Maths a long time ago but ended up working as a developer for some years. Now I'm working as an IT teacher. What do you do in Debian? Debian is a huge project, so you can help in various scopes. Mainly, I work on packaging, fixing wnpp bug inconsistencies in BTS and helping in spam cleaning of the mailing lists. But I also enjoy doing some non-technical work from time to time: the project I am just now involved is organizing, with the rest of Debian Catalan community, a local team to propose Barcelona as the venue for a minidebconf where all the speakers will be women. How and why did you start contributing to Debian? In 2000 I discovered Free Software world and I fell deeply in love with its philosophy. Since then, I've been trying to do my best in different activities, like spreading the word, giving free courses, helping collectives and friends in technical stuff (from installing Debian to developing some helping apps for them)... but two years ago I was looking forward to join a free software project and I decided to try Debian, since it has been my first and only distro in my day-to-day life for about ten years. So, I wanted to give back Debian all what it had offered to me, but.... I thought I couldn't (hey, Debian is for real hackers, not for you little ant!), but I started to adopt some orphaned packages, do some QA uploads, fix some RC bugs, talk with some Debian Developers that helped me and encouraged me more than I expected, I traveled to my first Debconf... And one thing takes you to the other, and on March 2012 I became a DD. Now, I'm glad to see that everything that frightened me is not so scary :-)

Clint Adams: The Windy City is full of meat

As you know, I am not big on reviews, so you should disregard the remainder of this entry. I recently found myself in what is called a theatre complex , watching an adaptation of Moli re's Les Femmes savantes by Freyda Thomas, who is apparently famous for playing Alenis Grem on Deep Space Nine. Called The Learned Ladies, this translation to English manages to approximate some of the rhyme of the original, thereby making it unquestionably better than DS9. Also noteworthy is the all-female cast, cobbled together from two all-female theater groups. Elizabeth Neptune plays Chrysale, occasionally channeling the spirit of Jackie Gleason or bringing adorable ardor to such epic lines as Tea! I won't say anything about her eyes, but I will say something about her slippers. Sara Montgomery, as B lise, is delightfully crazy in her singing, dancing, costume changes, and other antics, which serve to transform this otherwise-completely-serious play into a comedy. I definitely won't say anything about her shoes. Madeleine Maby begins playing Philaminte well before the show starts. Spoiler alert: she sits on the stage, pretending to look through a telescope and make notes from before the house opens until right before the start of the first scene. I still feel exhausted by the thought of having to do that myself. L' pine is portrayed by Alyssa Lott, who also plays three minor roles. Her mastery of physical comedy is not wasted on this production. Marta Kuersten plays Clitandre opposite Sarah Brill's Henriette. While Marta's performance was quite good, she looks much better as a woman. I will not be saying this about everyone. Katie Honaker delivers visceral smarm and sleaze as Trissotin. Even her hairstyle is somehow evocative of contempt. Susan Finch plays Vadius and Le notaire. Susan was definitely most convincing as a man. Despite mutterings to the contrary, some suspension of disbelief was necessary for the other male roles, but not for Vadius, oh no. Finishing out the list we have Janna Emig as Martine, Francesca Day as Armande, and Kathryn Alexander as Ariste, with good performances, particularly in the second half. Even though it didn't have Coppertop from Strangers With Candy and a boy-band song-and-dance cover of To Be with You by Mr. Big, I recommend this play.

Brett Parker: Just in case you missed it...

So, I've changed jobs, I now work for the incredibly awesome Mythic Beasts, So far it's been great, we've hit a few problems, we've made sane plans, and we're moving forwards and making things easier to manage long term. I've mostly been involved with debugging mac-mini boot problems, and getting them working with (as far as possible) stock kernels, rather than our previous set of custom compiled kernels, so that it's easier to upgrade later, and so that we're not having to maintain a whole set of patches that we shouldn't need to! We're also starting to package our own software that we use internally so that actually deploying new servers is becoming a lot easier, and configuration of our previous packages is now (mostly) handled by debconf, meaning that actually setting up backups is becoming much easier. We've also changed out main backup strategy from using a (slightly flaky) openvpn connection with loopback mounted ext3 filesystems to using rsync with the --fake-super option - the only thing that we've found slightly wrong with this so far is that --fake-super can't reconcile symlinks (it uses user level xattr to store the origional permissions, and with symlinks this doesn't work, because, apparently, symlinks should store user xattr attrbutes!). We also offer ipv6 for all our dedicated and vps customers, as per the mythic blog - and our 2 authoritative name servers are both v6 enabled. We're working towards making all of our core services available over both ipv4 and ipv6, and we should be there soon. It's fantastic to work for a company that has the technical knowledge and no-shit stance that Mythic Beasts has, we will hold our hands up if we do something wrong, and we'll tell you exactly what happened, why, and what we're doing to stop it from happening again. So, 1 month in, and I'm absolutely loving working for them, and I've been a customer of theirs since black cat networks sold their domain name side to them, and shortly afterwards bluelinux sold their virtual servers service to them. Our new VDS lite service is reasonably priced, and well spec'd. I thoroughly recommend our services, and obviously, we actually use our own vds service to provide some of our services - so it's as important to us that it keeps working as it is for our customers. Wow, so that was a very salesy post. Erm, next time, back to whinging about authors not having written the books I'm waiting for yet! :)

Eugene V. Lyubimkin: Cupt 2.6

Cupt 2.6 is released to Debian unstable. Some prominent changes, citing from NEWS-file:

Gunnar Wolf: C sar Y ez (@caesarcomptus) in the classroom: Process scheduling

I try to have some guests every now and then to my Operating Systems class. The class is not as practical/interactive as I'd like, and having some people show the students how the subjects I teach are reflected in the real world is, I feel, very useful for them to understand the topics' importance. The past semester (the first one for me) I had three guests: Chema Serralde, talking about process scheduling and in particular on the importance of real time, from his perspective as a musician, Rolando Cedillo, talking about the early stages of the boot process, and C sar Y ez, giving a review of file systems. This semester, there have been two guests so far: Felipe Esquivel, who spoke about parallelism, and used renders with Blender to illustrate the speed gains and limitations (i.e. Amdahl's law), and this last Thursday, I invited again C sar Y ez. C sar spoke about process scheduling, first giving a quite thorough review of what had taken me at least three sessions to go through, and second, giving some in-depth review based on his experience with Haiku OS. What else was different this time? I told our coordinator in the faculty, and she invited the other teachers of the subject (and attended herself). So, instead of the usual ~25 students, we have ~40 people in the classroom. And one of them, Adolfo, recorded most of C sar's explanation. Yay! Of course, I asked Adolfo for a copy of his recording, and recoded it in a format more suitable for Web viewing. Here it is (almost 300MB, Ogg Video, ~95 minutes). I still have the original video file given to me, in an Apple-generated badly-compressed .mov, but at over 1.5GB, it's too much for a Web download. I will try to record future sessions, as they will surely be useful!

Next.

Previous.