A couple of months ago, I switched over to ThePhoneCoop s LLU package. The new service is good so far. The ADSL is blazingly fast (I wonder if it will remain so good) and the main drawbacks so far are a lack of reverse DNS (currently escalating that one up through tech support) and a slightly noisy dialling tone on the phone. I was initially switched to a dynamic IP address (which was a change I wasn t told about in advance), but got a static on request so we could restrict the VPNs a bit more. As usual, LUGgers were a source of help when it looked like going a bit wrong. Thanks to oddbloke for positive feedback about Buffalo routers (they work fine with OpenWRT, but not tried ADSL). Big thanks to Noodles for pointing out that the Buffalo router I linked wasn t an ADSL router, despite being listed as such, that the only ADSL chipset to have full open source support is the AR7 (but the wifi is dodgy) and that the Broadcom chipsets have 2.6 support but maybe with a binary blob. I m still not sure if a new router is necessary. The infernal Belkin seems to be working, but it s disconnecting and rebooting a lot more often. I seem to be on the TalkTalk/CPW network - anyone know of problems with Belkin routers? I ve not seen anything yet. Also, who else has unbundled and how was it for you?

The workshop I went to recently and the ICT Champions in general ( Website Under Development - release early, anyone?) seem to be funded by public and charity money. As I mentioned, the worst thing was all the needless promotion of certain companies products, so why are they promoting private products instead of being neutral and open? That s bad for Britain, bad for the competing products that are co-produced by the Voluntary and Community Sector and bad for the VCS workers because it trains them in single-tool methods instead of transferable skills. Let the private sector pay for their own adverts! Why can t we stop making this mistake? Which brings me to the other problem with that ICT advice: well-meaning common-sector businesses like ours can t update it autonomously, for two reasons:

1. All the texts I saw were under various Non-Commercial and No Derivative licences which make them hazardous or unusable to IT support businesses.
2. Particularly on Free and Open Source Software, the advice is at best misleading and unhelpful. This is very frustrating: based on our private work and success in explaining things, I m sure we could do better, but for various reasons, no-one is paying for us to publish that. Instead, someone s paying to publish statements like There s no such thing as open source written by someone from an association that includes Microsoft and Oracle.

Again, why is public and charity money paying for the private sector s marketing? Why is it published under blocking copyright terms, scattering broken glass across the path just built? Where can we get funding to publish our explanations?

NCBA invites you to pick the Monday, April 6th edition of the New York Times to check out the front section for a very special advertorial on cooperative business. NCBA will receive a copy of the Advertorial to place on its Web Site on Monday and we will distribute a link so you can post it on yours in the next edition of the eNews. However, we hope that you ll let everyone at your cooperative know to pick up the Monday New York Times as everyone in the cooperative community should be proud to be part of this national effort to promote cooperative awareness.

These are challenging times for all businesses, but cooperatives are well-placed to weather the storm. I ll report back from our Bristol co-ops event later or tomorrow.

I m not a big fan of virus-scanning on the mailservers (I think you should bolt your email-sending computers right down so that viruses and spambots can t send email), but it seems to be a necessity these days. So, I was a bit late starting on mailserver-antivirus and mainly pay attention to it when it goes badly wrong. I ve got clamav installed where needed, but recently I m seeing clamav hang, eat CPU and cause postfix to defer all emails while logging nothing useful. Often this seems to be soon after freshclam kicks in. Anyone else seen this problem? Moreover, anyone managed to narrow it down and fix it? On some systems, instead of having freshclam, we have clamav-data from volatile which seems to work better, but are they missing out on anything by doing that? Does it lag a bit behind and download a bit more? Is there a third option, either another way of feeding clamav, or an alternative debian package, which you think people should consider?

With our AGM in Plymouth rescheduled until June or July, the Cooperatives-SW board will meet in Bristol on Monday. Cooperatives-SW aims to represent co-operative and mutual enterprises in the region. As with previous meetings, if you d like to meet up beforehand, let me know through this blog, identi.ca or email. Bristol is near HQ, so I expect I ve met most people there who want to talk to me. The meeting is just before a co-operative and mutual housing hearing. Places will be limited so please contact CDA (Brave Ltd) on 0117 989 2536 if you would like to reserve one.

As usual, the TTLLP office will open noon til mid-evening on 1 April. I ve already noted one thing on identi.ca that might be an April Fool s joke (surely it s not real) and we ve enough to do without double-checking everything we re told. Further, timezones and international communications (we work with companies from +1100 to -0900 IIRC) makes April Fool s jokes really tedious. Unless it s done really carefully, the joker is probably the fool, either too early (31 March) or too late (afternoon) for some of the targets.

I m sure there must be lots written about group system administration, but it doesn t seem to be written in either the FAQ, the reference or even the venerable FDL d SAG, so I hope it s not a(nother) completely silly question. As I was reminded by the Paralysed Perl Package Problem, sometimes other system administrators can really mess you up by changing things without documenting what, how or why they made that change. My current solution on that system is to put the message please record any major system changes with the command dch -c /root/changelog --no-auto-nmu -i 'description of change' in the /etc/motd file. I ve also installed apt-listchanges with a suitable configuration. For TTLLP servers, there s not a problem because we all use the same task tracker to make notes. For shared/remote servers, I d like to have something better than fault-finding and the intrusion detection tools, but stop short of trying to require all system administrators to use a particular version control on the system configuration, or trying to require them to use a centralised bug tracker application. (The other sysadmins work for other people, so we can t require them to do it and pay us to manage a repository/bug tracker for your server is an awkward sell anyway.) What do you do?

Last Friday, I spent most of the day at this NAVCA ICT event in Taunton. (There s another similar one in York this Friday if you re interested.) The event was a sandwich, with a Steve Bridger social media session as the filling between workshop halves.

Conference I went to the workshop for support workers. I m not sure whether it was quite the right label, but the others were for managers/trustees and for accidental technical supporters, which definitely weren t. There seemed to be at least three other ICT specialists there, so I wasn t the only one. The best thing about the workshop was the mix of specialists and generalists. I was really interested in what the generalists had to say, but sadly the workshop was more of a lecture and I don t feel I got as much out as I could. I d be interested to know if that was the same for other participants. I m not sure what I thought of Steve Bridger s session. It was a difficult one: the strange mix of an audience was all together, the room felt pretty warm and it stood between us and lunch. I had trouble concentrating but posted a few updates to identi.ca about it. The worst thing was all the needless promotion of certain companies products. They didn t talk about blogging and syndication, they talked about Blogger and Google Reader; they didn t talk about photo-sharing, they talked about Flickr; they didn t talk about spreadsheets, they talked about Excel. Nevertheless, I left the event feeling really positive about other ICT specialists, with some hope that the generalists were getting it and quite impressed by the people I met from the other tracks. It was pretty good to help someone towards the autosuspend setting on their GNOME-based netbook within ten minutes of arriving, too. I ve just updated software.coop with Richard Stallman s explanation of why proprietary software is a social problem, to see if that helps put the community-based view across. I ll look again at some of the grant-funded resources mentioned and see if we can improve them, but I d welcome any comments from the voluntary and community sector about how best to do that.

The monthly board meeting of SPI will take place on irc.oftc.net #spi tonight (Wed 18 March) at 20:00 UTC. Members may have seen that the meeting announcement was posted, but a bit late and with a misleading subject line. This month, the record-keeping looks like it will catch up to present-day, with a small hole still from Neil McGovern s time as secretary. The current treasurer and secretary have also posted their reports before the meeting only the president is missing this month. There s some bank house-keeping and another new associated project under discussion: OpenWRT. There seemed to be a little confusion about whether it had been waiting for a legal opinion or not and some controversy about whether SPI recognises a liaison or a decision-maker. Once again, I may still be travelling and without a stable network connection during the meeting, or I might have made it home by then. Either way, watch the comments below this article for a link to the summary when posted.

With any luck, someone has seen this problem before and can fix it easily. I don t seem to be able to find the fix by searching, but the search terms feel like they re either too general or too specific. I was trying to install some perl software on a debian lenny system that was upgraded from etch (and previously from sarge). After installing the dependencies, I started getting errors like this:-

$ perl -MYAML::Syck -e print
Can't locate YAML/Syck.pm in @INC (@INC contains:
/usr/local/lib/perl5/5.10.0/i686-linux /usr/local/lib/perl5/5.10.0
/usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.10.0/i686-linux
/usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.10.0 .).
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted.

Update: Well done to Raphael who spotted the local that I d overlooked. D oh! Now to see if I can discover where that came from. Update 2: Also thanks to Florian who emailed in at about the same time (I don t read my email as much as my website dashboard, usually).

Then I discovered that the debian mirror being used (which is in the same city, and in a nearby network) is marked as bad on the health check. I switched mirrors to a known-good one that I ve used for other systems recently, but no joy. I think a key symptom is this bit near the end of the output of perl -V:

Compiled at Aug 4 2008 09:48:59
@INC:
/usr/local/lib/perl5/5.10.0/i686-linux
/usr/local/lib/perl5/5.10.0
/usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.10.0/i686-linux
/usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.10.0

Our good systems show a December compiled at date and a much longer @INC list. I ve tried reinstalling pretty much every package I think might be connected, including libc6, libperl5.10, perl, perl-base and perl-modules (those last four are all version 5.10.0-19). I really don t want to reinstall the whole system because it s behind an irritating firewall that will make it a 10-hour round-trip site visit. I m currently hunting and removing obsolete packages to try to make sure they re not causing problems, because I m running out of straws to clutch at. How would you recover a debian system from this?

Conference This afternoon, I ll be at What s So Social About Social Enterprise? in Bristol. In general, I ll be trying to support the idea that TTLLP and cooperatives in general are necessarily social enterprise. I may ask a few questions about the Social Enterprise Mark which you may have seen me asking elsewhere already. I ll probably be sending a few updates during the event to identi.ca and other sites if I can get it working from the venue. What s your answer? What s social about social enterprise?

I was disappointed to read that ippimail announced the closure of the ippimail project [...] barring a miracle we will take the site down at noon on the 1st May 2009, UK time. I first covered the ippimail social enterprise back in 2006 as a way to do better than googlemail. There was a longer review on Cutting Free. So what now for free-to-use UK-based free-software-using webmails? Where do you think ippimail users should look now? Are there others giving to charity? Is a better world possible by emailing?

Earlier this week, Tom Watson, Cabinet Office Parliamentary Secretary, published the Open Source, Open Standards and Re Use: Government Action Plan. It s had a pretty mixed reaction, with mild scepticism (niq s soapbox: Is gov.uk going open-source?) being the average reaction from what I ve read. I particularly liked the kind offer by Bristol Wireless to debianise Tom Watson s laptop. I think commentators are bang-on that the procurement process needs to change and that this sounds positive. I ll love it if I m wrong, but this looks like the lip service as usual which I ve seen in the last 10 years working on FOSS in the UK. I want to see the action that comes from this plan! When government actually starts buying FOSS from typical FOSS service providers and not just the IBMs of this world, then I ll believe it. My suspicion is re-ignited by some of the activites around this action plan. For example, does anyone know why the Cabinet Office didn t select FOSS to run their special public FOSS Aggregation page? (Actually, what s the best FOSS tag aggregator web service out there? I know we can set them up in Wordpress widgets, but what hosted services are there?) I m also a bit bemused that their page requires users to accept cookies until they expire, yet its privacy policy explicitly says You may suppress cookies after your visit or configure your Internet browser to prevent them. Yes, I can prevent them, but then it does nothing useful! (Based on a comment I made at the OSS Watch team blog and discussions with a few user groups.)

This week and next week are Fairtrade Fortnight. As I ve mentioned in discussions at the Co-operative Group, there are some drawbacks to Fairtrade (most of which can be overcome by trading with co-operatives locally), but it is worth supporting fairtrade overall. The featured event this year is Go Bananas for Fairtrade, an attempt at world-record banana-eating on 6-7 March. I don t like bananas much, but I ll eat them cooked, so I ll be joining in. If you want to get involved and do something else, there is an events calendar on the FtFn site.

I ve added the lovely k s Helping Hand to Koha Community Blogs. I m particularly pleased to see a site combining both Koha and Drupal, two of my current favourites. A bit more about the background to the site is over at Korerorero: More great Koha news from India.

Websites I ve just updated the online banking compatibility list after a report from Italy that Monte dei Paschi di Siena is not currently working for GNU/Linux users. Can anyone confirm they broke it, or tell us how to get it working, please?

The Open Source Initiative and the Free Software Foundation are probably the two authorities on what is free and open source software that are better respected than the debian project. It s fairly easy to see that the famous licences (GNU GPL) appear on both lists, but how similar are their approvals? There was a comparison at Asheeshworld Notes you will like: OSI vs FSF in 2007, but I ve noticed more and more duplicates in that listing and the source code didn t work for me. I ve captured the current differences between their actual approvals in a pseudo-diff. The generating code and intermediate steps are splattered around the same folder. Many of the differences look like a result of process differences, but I m not sure because OSI doesn t make any comments and their licence review process archive seems awkward to search. As I understand it, a lawyer advocates a licence in the OSI process, so it requires the licensor to contribute (and many licensors couldn t care less about OSI); but FSF does an independent review, so FSF has to decide it s worth reviewing. In case it s not obvious, I think FSF s independent foundation-led review is much the better of those two. There are two licences that OSI approved but FSF lists as non-free: NASA Open Source Agreement and the Reciprocal Public License. Both of these are send-back-ware where changes have to be sent back or made available to the upstream developer. Many debian developers agree such payments-in-kind are non-free (OSI s OSDefinition is based on the Debian Free Software Guidelines), but I think an early OSI advisor thought they were a good idea, so those approvals look like an OSI bug to me. It s not obvious if there are licences that FSF approves but OSI rejects. OSI doesn t seem to list licences to avoid. Is it helpful to see the differences? Would a comparison with the debian archive be useful? Are there other curiousities captured in the differences? Are people interested in reconciling the differences?

Three things I really like have released recently:-

1. Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 ( Lenny ): I installed it on a laptop the weekend before going to a conference and I m really impressed. It installed fairly neatly and was good-looking (gtk installer from USB stick, default desktop task, in case anyone cares). I found one or two small glitches while travelling, which I ll reportbug soon, but they re very minor. Well done to everyone involved in stabilising this release!
2. The co-operative officially launched its new brand with a 2.5-minute whole-break advert using a Bob Dylan track, both of which are unusual. OK, so I feel it should have been available in a FOSS-friendly format and not done on the same day as announcing a sale of opticians or a big closure, but it s still good to see the co-operative getting big TV exposure.
3. Videos of Debian at FOSDEM and the Business of Open Source mini-conference at Linux.conf.au were released, which I ll watch soon. The current trend of recording key conferences isn t a substitute for being there in-person, but it s still invaluable and I thank all those involved.

The long-awaited, big and stable Debian GNU/Linux Lenny 5.0 has been released! Great job everyone and congratulations! In this release the Debian/Ruby Extra team has an ever greater presence. We were able to increase the number of mainted libraries and applications to over 95 packages. Also quite a lot of issues were resolved and I am proud that we obtained this quality level. For Squeeze we plan to deal with the transition to Ruby 1.9 and with possible multiple interpreter-support (still Ruby 1.8, JRuby?). We might also deal with the gems, who knows? :) P.S. Indeed, did I just started posting without explaining why I was away for over 7 months?

I was at this event back in November and they ve just emailed me this week to point out the speeches and some recordings are now available online. The appointed Regional Development Agency is getting more powerful as our indirectly-elected South West Regional Assembly is phased out, so if you re based in SW England, you may find their current views affect a lot of your daily life over the next few years. After the meeting, I passed on a few comments about how Business Link is failing to support cooperatives and I was asked for numbers, but I don t think I have them yet. I m still following this up and will post about it again later.