I'm typing this blog entry on the train. Opposite of me is a gentleman of approximately 35 years old, who's got a paper lying on the table between us. That paper would seem to be approximately 20 pages thick, and is entitled...

Technical Specification

Sandbag With a header above that which tells me that it's from some government body to do with the "Civiele Bescherming", an agency which is mainly used when something happens in the country that could threaten the citizenship at large (natural disasters such as storms or flooding, large-scale electrical failure, water poisoning, etc). It's obvious why the civiele bescherming needs to have sandbags. It's quite funny to see how they need to write twenty-something pages on what a sandbag should look like. After all, it's just a bag filled with sand...

Over one month ago, I truly hoped an evasive network misbehavior issue was solved. In the institute, we had a strange situation which caused a (seemingly random) stack of switches to go out to lunch and leave one of the floors without network access until it decided to restore itself (usually power-cycling it was not enough). The equipment, ten 4200 SuperStack switches, is new, we got it ~September, so I expected 3Com to give me at least some support on the issue. The behavior was apparently random, and I could not track it down, only (thanks to the very nice Cacti) prove it existed.
December 5 was terrible. The whole building's network refused to work. Switches were able to reply to my pings for no more than a minute after booting before they got flooded with "Spanning Tree CTRL MAC PAUSE: Quanta 65535" (according to another great tool, the Ethereal protocol analyzer).
I had been bugging the support people at 3Com for at least three weeks before this incident, they kept promising they would come soon to help us track the cause of the ellusive problem - We threatened to send the switches back and pursue reimbursement through whatever means we could (we had much better stability and performance with our old 10Mbps hubs, so my boss insisted on replacing them), so we got them to come. The answer they gave me? Upgrade your firmware to version 2.50 (not available at their website, of course) and disable spanning tree functionality at the switches.
I have to admit the big problem immediately ceased. This is not to say I was pleased with the response time or with the switches' software quality, but at least we could work.
Happily, ~7 weeks passed by with no major outages (although with a few small ones).
Yesterday, we got back the complete chaotic conditions. This time, though, I was able to get a good and useful tcpdump snapshot, passed it through Ethereal, and actually got something interesting (available to whoever requests it to me if it sounds interesting). In short: Something happens that confuses a switch (I guess it's a faulty NIC), and makes it request to all of the neighbouring switches (via spanning tree protocol - Yes, it's disabled, but still) for their complete ARP tables. But somehow, this noise or whatever keeps confusing it, so the spanning tree requests start repeating every two seconds for slightly over one minute. Then, the same switch which requested this information gets tired of too many ARP tables being thrown at it, and sends out a storm of packets (one each 0.04 seconds) asking every other switch _not_ to send updates anymore. This is broadcasted to all of each of the switches' ports, and the network dies.
My grudge against 3Com is: How come this frigging noise (at least that's what I assume it to be) on one of the ports kill all of the network? If a switch is supposed to be smart, would it be too much for it just to disable the misbehaving port?
Anyway... One and a half days went down the drain trying to find the cause for the problem, sending the report to the 3Com guy (who is very nice in person, yes, but that's by far not enough!), running up and down the stairs to reset different switches, lock down on the source of distress... And as my 3Com contact was busy with another client (who presumably had not yet given them money), I never got a call back from them.
All my good intentions to spend a nice quiet time coding for three projects we currently need to have ready soon (one of them is in production and many of you have used, my dear Comas conference management system, but requires heavy tinkering to be able to extend it) were stuck at that: Good intentions.
I seem to have locked down the problem in one of three computers (that is, network seems stable again once I disconnected them). I insist it must be a faulty NIC. My boss bets it's an ber-contaminated Windows machine. My boss' boss insists we should get the switches double-grounded just to be sure that's not the reason for failure. I am tired, bad mooded, and -again- bored you to death with a too-long blog entry.
Blame it all on 3Com.

So, I've arrived at LCA (linux.conf.au) 2006, in Dunedin, New Zealand. You're going to be getting a lot of these blog posts over the next few days, from me and other people, but it's only a week-long conference, so weather the storm. Plane trip over was... well, it was a plane trip. I can be thankful that I didn't lose my luggage (as one bloke has already had done to him). Beyond that, all aircraft interiors are identical, so no need to discuss that. At the stopover in Christchurch, we all headed for the bar (as geeks tend to do). I handed over a brightly coloured note in the local currency in exchange for my beer, and I get my change. What is part of my change? An Australian 10c piece. <sigh> Mad props to the conference organisers so far -- one of the organisers was at the gate (the only gate) at Dunedin airport to pick up speakers, but he gladly took us ruffian attendees into town, saving us all a few bucks in shuttle bus fairs. It was a nice guided tour in, as well, showing us all of the useful sights (like the pubs, 24 hour minimart, and eateries). He also dropped us off at the registration desk, so I got my conference schwag already (see my separate review of the schwag). Dinner involved walking into the octagon (a loop street with, unsurprisingly, 8 sides) and finding a place that serves you raw steak and a hot rock. It's like a portable BBQ construction kit. Amazingly tasty. We're going back tomorrow night for more of the same, as it's so tasty and fun -- you are legitimately allowed, even encouraged to play with your food. I also got a "barmate" (don't mispronounce that in front of your significant other) -- a yard-high glass cylinder with a tap at the bottom, filled with your choice of beer. Much merriment ensued amongst the assembled geeks, as we all plied ourselves with Speight's Gold Ale. I think it's about 8-10 pints worth of beer all up. Value. No Internet access yet, as they're still working out the kinks with the special conference network. I hope it's all up and running by tomorrow morning -- my mail queue is starting to seriously bulge with all of this outgoing mail.

So, I've arrived at LCA (linux.conf.au) 2006, in Dunedin, New Zealand. You're going to be getting a lot of these blog posts over the next few days, from me and other people, but it's only a week-long conference, so weather the storm. Plane trip over was... well, it was a plane trip. I can be thankful that I didn't lose my luggage (as one bloke has already had done to him). Beyond that, all aircraft interiors are identical, so no need to discuss that. At the stopover in Christchurch, we all headed for the bar (as geeks tend to do). I handed over a brightly coloured note in the local currency in exchange for my beer, and I get my change. What is part of my change? An Australian 10c piece. <sigh> Mad props to the conference organisers so far -- one of the organisers was at the gate (the only gate) at Dunedin airport to pick up speakers, but he gladly took us ruffian attendees into town, saving us all a few bucks in shuttle bus fairs. It was a nice guided tour in, as well, showing us all of the useful sights (like the pubs, 24 hour minimart, and eateries). He also dropped us off at the registration desk, so I got my conference schwag already (see my separate review of the schwag). Dinner involved walking into the octagon (a loop street with, unsurprisingly, 8 sides) and finding a place that serves you raw steak and a hot rock. It's like a portable BBQ construction kit. Amazingly tasty. We're going back tomorrow night for more of the same, as it's so tasty and fun -- you are legitimately allowed, even encouraged to play with your food. I also got a "barmate" (don't mispronounce that in front of your significant other) -- a yard-high glass cylinder with a tap at the bottom, filled with your choice of beer. Much merriment ensued amongst the assembled geeks, as we all plied ourselves with Speight's Gold Ale. I think it's about 8-10 pints worth of beer all up. Value. No Internet access yet, as they're still working out the kinks with the special conference network. I hope it's all up and running by tomorrow morning -- my mail queue is starting to seriously bulge with all of this outgoing mail.

This week I gave in and bought a cheap webcam (a Logitech QuickCam for Notebooks Deluxe or something), primarily for the upcoming OpenedHand VOIP service (update: this is not a public service, just SIP addresses for OH employees!), but also to record what Henry is up to when we leave (we want to know how long he cries for when we go out). Happily it worked straight out of the box with Ubuntu Dapper (using the spca5xx module): It works well in GnomeMeeting too, so all I need now is a good simple tool to record from the webcam to disk, ideally in Ogg Theora. Any suggestions? A GStreamer pipeline would probably do the job for now, as I can wrap that up in a nice Python UI if I need to. NP: Storm, Heather Nova

(I love the term "abroad". It sounds so English.) Well that happened. We had Michael and another Andrew from work who started two weeks before us and his wife come over for what Michael was calling "linner" (the inverse of "brunch"). Sarah cooked up an absolute storm. We had roast turkey, roast potato, pumpkin and sweet potato, steamed broccoli, cauliflower and asparagus, and Yorkshire puddings. We had so many types of gravy we completely forgot about the cranberry sauce. Michael managed to track down a plum pudding (this country seems obsessed with pumpkin pie) and we had something approximating custard (something else this country doesn't seem to do) with it. A very good feast was had by all, and six hours later we were done. Back to unpacking boxes. Brought to you by some kind neighbour's open access point.

Over the past months we've been working on a big change in the debian installer, removing base-config from the installation process. Doing this has required a great many changes, some of them user-visible. The installer now configures the timezone, users and passwords, and apt all in the first stage instead of after rebooting. Some preseed values have been removed or changed, including base-config/early_command and base-config/late_command. The biggest change of all, the the hardest to get working, has been moving of the selection of tasks and the installation of all packages into the first stage of the installer. Now tasksel pops up a debconf question that looks like any other question d-i asks, and the installation of packages is hidden behind a nice clean progress bar, and if any packages use debconf to ask questions, d-i will display those questions using its frontend too. I'd include a screenshot, but really, it's just another progress bar, how boring is that? By the way, if you maintain a debian package and it prompts without using debconf (when debconf is available), then your package will obviously break this, and it's well past time to fix it. I think that all the packages d-i installs do use debconf except for possibly a few like libc during upgrades. Upgrades are theoretically possible at this step for any packages debootstrap installs, so those will need to be fixed too. This has been a long, long time coming. Some milestones include:

• 1998: Wichert Akkerman and others do the design of debconf, and first draft of its specification. Without debconf, none of this would be possible.
• 1999: At linuxworld, I see Stormix's Debian-based install. I remember discussing with them about how debconf could be used to clean up the install process. I don't remember what kind of hack they used to avoid the long dpkg log interspersed with the occsional question that a Debian install involved back then.
• 1999: I begin writing the debconf program. And promoting its use.
• 2000: Randolph Chung begins writing cdebconf; d-i begins.
• 2000: Randolph writes the passthrough frontend for debconf. At the time this was expected to be used by tools like aptitude (deity?) to integrate debconf into their GUIs, but it mostly just rotted for a long time unused. Looking back this was a contribution of unexpected significance.
• 2001: I visit Progeny, they show me their implementation of a progress bar running over a Debian installation. It's a special-purpose hack, but it works.
• 2001: debconf enters Debian policy
• 2003: debconf becomes the policy-accepted standard way to do installation prompting
• 2003: Adam Heath adds --status-fd to dpkg.
• 2005 (Jan): Matt Zimmerman dusts of the passthrough frontend and makes it usable to pass debconf questions from debconf running in a chroot up to cdebconf running in d-i.
• 2005 (Jan): Michael Vogt makes apt support status fds too.
• 2005 (Fall): Ubuntu pulls most of the above peices together and fixes some bugs, gets a progress bar running over apt with debconf passthrough.
• 2005 (Dec): Colin Watson and I develop debconf-apt-progress, rest of the pieces fall into place for using this stuff in Debian.

So yeah, this has been in er, progress for 8 years, and at least three Debian derived distributions have come up with thier own approaches in between with only the last one being quite similar to the end result, and the other two being rather dead. I don't know whether this is a study in how Debian is slow, or a study in how we do eventually come up with infrastructure that is done right and ends up being used by everyone. Or both.

(I love the term "abroad". It sounds so English.) Well that happened. We had Michael and another Andrew from work who started two weeks before us and his wife come over for what Michael was calling "linner" (the inverse of "brunch"). Sarah cooked up an absolute storm. We had roast turkey, roast potato, pumpkin and sweet potato, steamed broccoli, cauliflower and asparagus, and Yorkshire puddings. We had so many types of gravy we completely forgot about the cranberry sauce. Michael managed to track down a plum pudding (this country seems obsessed with pumpkin pie) and we had something approximating custard (something else this country doesn't seem to do) with it. A very good feast was had by all, and six hours later we were done. Back to unpacking boxes. Brought to you by some kind neighbour's open access point.

I see that plans start getting ready. Bubulle is coming, Wouter is not, and people will soon start getting their plans ready. I am quite excited about it! Of course, I need to devote more time to it, which is hard to me - but I will do it. Oaxtepec rules, you will _love_ the place. I went there again to spend a weekend with Nadezhda - Took some more photos, added them to the album. Debconf guys: Yes, I owe you a full report... It will come. Soon. Promise.
Anyway... I'm excited. Debian friends, Mexican interested friends: What are you waiting for? Join us! Register!
[update] Well, I published this entry, but then realized I wanted to answer to Wouter's question: Why in May? ;-)
First of all, weather: The weather is plainly better in May. Somewhat warmer... The rainy season starts in May/June, but believe me, you don't want to have your laptop out during Morelos State's well known thunderstorms!
Second, I fear of political instability. Next July we will be having our federal elections. We don't anticipate instability such as what we had in 1994 (which, please you all be quiet, didn't even mean violence in the streets), but still... It's better not to have Debconf too near the elections.
Third, prices - Most places are noticeably more expensive during Summer.
And, yes, I know some people will not be able to attend... I am sorry to learn you are one of them. Still, I'm sure some other people would not be able to make it in July.

So. It's now officially the calm before the storm, which is no good on my nerves.
Rehearsals have finished, the artists will be back later, now all that needs to happen still is placing the chairs for the audience, some minor corrections on the lights and the throwing of the life-saving "program lock" DIP switch that noone who hasn't read the manual knows about.
---This post was made with a trial version of BlogPlanet, a photo blog client for mobile phones. For more information visit www.blogplanet.net.