I was hosting my projects on several Trac instances on a dedicated server. However, since several months, spam was pourring.

Trac & spam

How to fight spam with Trac There is not built-in mechanism in Trac to fight spam. However, plugins enable to setup several ways to stop spam (or at least, reduce it). One of them is Akismet, a web service who can tell you if some message is a spam or not. It is able to catch most of the spam. A bayesian filter complement this service. A learning step is mandatory and can become cumbersome when the vast majority of the tickets you receive is just spam. I used those two mechanisms on my Trac instances. Another path is to require an account to post a ticket. Creating an account each time you want to create a ticket for some software is burdensome. I did not want to do this to the poor souls that have found a bug in one of my projects. An alternative is to setup a public account and adding somewhere in the page some instructions on how to use it when you want to open a ticket but don t want to open an account.

Removing spam Despite Akismet and the bayesian filter, I still got two or three spams a day. I catched them in my RSS flow or in my email if they were not classified as spam. There are two steps to remove the spam:

• tell the bayesian filter by using the administration panel in the web interface,
• remove the spam from the database using some SQLite commands directly on the server hosting the Trac instance.

Indeed, Trac does not propose the possibility to remove a ticket. Of course, there are plugins, but you must find them, install them, find how to configure them, etc. Cumbersome.

GitHub GitHub is a popular source code hosting service which uses Git as a backend. This is a proprietary platform but a lot of open source projects have migrated to it, thanks to its features and the good performances. Everybody is on GitHub. This was the ideal opportunity.

Features First, GitHub allows to host Git repository. You push your Git repositories. There is a nice and fast web interface to browse them. However, I still keep an instance of cgit. Then, GitHub is very popular because they drive people to fork projects. With one single click, you can fork your favorite project. You get a copy which is synchronised with the forked project. There is also a wiki (accepting many markup syntaxes). This wiki is also available through Git. At last, GitHub offers a minimalistic ticket system. You open a ticket, you make some comments, you can add a tag or two and you can close it. That s all. Quite light. But enough for small projects like mine. However, there is more! Do not open a ticket to send a patch. There is no way to attach files to tickets. You need to fork the project, create a branch with your patch and request a pull for your branch. This will appear as a ticket but your commits will be linked to it. The author can then review and comment your branch, ask for some changes and if he wants to integrate it, a simple merge is sufficient. He can even do it using the web interface. Convenient. Socially, you can comment commits, tickets, projects and subscribe to a lot of events. You can receive and answers tickets by mail. However, an accound is mandatory to open a ticket. Since there is a lot of projects on GitHub, this account should be useful for a lot of software. To cut a long story short, even if GitHub is a proprietary platform, it offers nice and interesting features. More and more projects migrate from Google Code to GitHub even if there is less features on the latter.

Migration I have searched for tools to migrate automatically tickets from Trac to GitHub. For example, there is SD. At last, I have done it manually. GitHub API is well documented and there exists bindings in various languages including Python but it is a very limited API. You can t choose the number of the ticket nor its date. I have also rewritten README files to use the markdown markup and avoid the use of wiki pages when possible. I have also put some URL redirections with the help of nginx. In conclusion, even if maintaining Trac instances was not a lot of work, one thing that I do not have to do anymore. And no spam on GitHub, I assume.

Images Moved

So I've retired my old picture hosting sub-domain, and moved all the files which were hosted by the dynamic system into a large web-root. This means no more uploads are possible, but each link continues to work. For example:

• http://picshare.steve.org.uk/2OrKrfem9XQWz.jpg

Happily the system generated "random" links, and it was just a matter of moving each uploaded file into that static location, then removing the CGI application. The code for the new site has now been made public, although I suspect there will need to be some email-pong if anybody wishes to use it. Comments welcome.

MySQL replacements?

Lets pretend I work for a company which has dealings with many MySQL users. Lets pretend that, even though it is true, such that I don't have to get into specifics. Let us pretend that we have many many hundreds of users who are very happy with MySQL, but that we have a few users who have "issues". That might be:

• mysqld segfaulting every few months, with no real idea why.
  • Transactions are involved. So are stored proceedures.
  • MySQL paid support might have been perfect, or it might have lead to "yup, its a bug. good luck rebuilding with this patch. let us know how it turns out kthxbai."
  • Alternatively it might not have been re-producable.
• Master-Master and Master-Slave setups being "unreliable" such that data inconsistencies arise despite MySQL regarding them as being in sync.
  • Good luck resolving that when you have two almost-identical "mysqldump" outputs which are 6Gb each and which cause "diff" to exit with "out of memory" even on a 64Gb host.
  • Is it possible to view differences in table-data, via the binary records? That'd be a fun project .. for a masochist.
• Poor usage of resources.
• Heavy concurrancy caused by poorly developed applications in a load-balanced environment, leading to stalling queries. (Wordpress + Poor wordpress plugins I'm looking at you; you're next on my killfile).

To compound this problem some of these installations may or may not be running Etch. let us pretend they are not, just to simplify things. (They mostly arent' these days, but I'm sure I could think of one or two if I tried) So, in this hypothetical situation what would you recommend? I know there are new forks aplenty of MySQL. Drizzle et al. I suspect most of the forks will be short-lived - lots of this stuff is hard and non-sexy. I suspect the long-lived forks are probably concentrating on edge-cases we've not hit (yet), or on sexy exciting things like new storage engines and going nosql like all the cool kids. Realistically going down the postgresql road is liable to lead to wholly different sets of problems, and a significant re-engineering of several sites, applications and tools with no proof of stability. Without wanting to jump ship entirely, what, if any, are our options?

PS. MySQL I still mostly love you, but my two most recent applications were written to use redis instead. Just a coincidence... I swear. No, put down that axe. Please can't we just talk about it?/p> ObQoote: "I've calculated your chance of survival, but I don't think you'll like it. " - Hitchhikers Film.

Like last years initiative from Joey we have another opening for DebConf Newbies . Turns out this year it is me doing the main work for it, so here we are: If

• you never have been to a DebConf, or
• you last saw the conference in 2007 (Scotland)
• you can schedule a week off in July
• fear you might not make it with the normal sponsorship process ( they will never ever pick ME, im too small an ant in this project )

then this is for you. To apply for this funding, email newbies@debconf.org before 18th of June. The earlier you mail, the better, as funding will be given out in a first-come/first-serve way. In your email include an estimate of your travel costs, from where you travel from and the amount you are unable to fund yourself. I also need to know the dates you plan to arrive and leave. Please indicate if you will also need sponsored food and accommodation. (At the time of this writing you can still get sponsored food and accommodation by simply registering with the conference, so if you read this before May 19th please ensure to register NOW). Please also ensure you register with the conference now (see DebConf11 registration, even if your plans are not fully secure at this time. There is no punishment if you can not attend later - simply do not follow the reconfirmation process shortly before the conference.

This is just a diary of a random day sort of post. Nothing all that particularly unusual, but then perhaps if I only blog about the unusual, the typical gets lost. This week started out with temperatures as high at 99F. Today we didn t even reach 60, and tonight will be cold almost to freezing. It s Kansas, so while we remark on the strange weather, we re not particularly surprised by it. This morning, Jacob and Oliver went over to play across the street. Jacob then went with Terah to a birthday party for one of his classmates, while Oliver helped plant some trees with his grandparents. I was at home this morning, which gave me a small but welcome break from the past week: we had something going on 6 out of the last 7 evenings, and little time to do anything else. So I got out the Kindle and read from War and Peace. I started at the kitchen table while eating some granola, and then sat on the couch. The day was cold, windy, and overcast, and I like to use natural light, so there were only a few places to sit with enough light. I sat there reading the account of Napoleon s capture of Moscow in 1812, the characters lives uprooted by those events, and stories of violent mobs forming. And, of course, Tolstoy s essays on the mistake of overstating the importance of famous figures in history were common. I am now about 3/4 through War and Peace, which means I ve read 1,044 pages and have (only) 348 to go. As I got up to try to find slippers or a blanket for my cold feet at one point, I remembered a conversation I had while eating lunch this week. I was reading on the Kindle while reading, and a person I knew happened to walk past. She asked what I was reading. I said simply, War and Peace. There was this stunned silence, so I added, for fun. It s great! Which is true. She said, Oooookay, John, you just enjoy that then and went on her way. This isn t the first time I ve had a conversation like that about this book. It seems to be held up as some example of long, dry, literature that people are made to read but don t want to. I think that only long is accurate here. Anyhow, pretty soon Oliver arrived and, much to my surprise, said Doh! (meaning no ) when I asked him if he was ready for lunch. Instead he stood there looking at me sweetly. Taking a guess, I said, Oliver, would you like to watch train videos? Yeah yeah yeah yeah! So we did. He particularly enjoyed the steam engines today, and eventually was ready for lunch at 12:30. Jacob and Terah got home just as he was finishing. Oliver got his nap, and I played with Jacob for a bit. Ever since he had heard of the British wedding in preschool, he s been interested in weddings, so I showed him pictures from Terah and me at our wedding. This was a big hit. Then he went with Terah to decorate a Sunday School room at church, so I read a bit more Tolstoy. Tolstoy s characters sometimes are prone to not just changes in mood but changes in outlook and worldview changing from cold, logical, and uncaring to warm and loving, or from despair at the vanity and shallowness of humanity to elation at the simple honesty of a peasant and renewed trust in the human spirit. At first I marveled at this tendency in certain characters, but on reflection, and in consideration of the timeline of the novel, which spans several years, it didn t seem quite so strange. Things can happen to change the mood of individuals, or even a country; I can remember the national mood changing after 9/11, and again after Obama s election, for instance. I also felt a contrast with some of the characters who, due to their decisions or circumstances, lost things that mattered while chasing things that weren t as important. I felt fortunate to be at this place, with Jacob, Oliver, and Terah, and decided that we all ought to do something fun in the evening, but hadn t quite figured out what. And about that, the clouds started to break and Oliver woke up from his nap. I went up to his room, and much to his delight, played peekaboo with him for quite awhile. Eventually he was done with that game, but spotted my phone, so I helped guide his finger to launch Youtube and watch a train video over the wifi. This was certainly a Big Deal to him. After Terah and Jacob got back, I figured it was time figure out something fun to do. And what could be more fun, I decided on the spur of the moment, than a drive into town to pick up some cans of Silly String for the boys, neither of which had ever used it before. So we went to a restaurant, then bought the surprise toy (I hadn t told them what it would be beforehand), then went to an ice cream place, and finally back home. Oliver loved it. He needed my help to press the nozzle to make it come out, but still had a great time and shrieked with delight. Jacob then tried out his can, and stood in one place spraying his bright green strings all over the place. Then he took to running around the yard spraying string randomly in every direction until he finally completely emptied out the can. And after that, he gathered up some of the different colors of string and rolled them up into a ball which he was very proud of. A nice day.

From the java point of view Recently I had to get some Scala Tool working correctly. Unfortunately there are basically no packages in the Debian Archive at all so I had to use maven to install these (or download + install manually). Being a highly paranoid person downloading and executing code from the internet without any cryptographic verification at all one after the other practically drove me nuts. Looking a bit deeper I noticed that some of the software in maven's repository have some signatures next to them -- signed by the author or release manager of this specific project. Why secure sources matters With my experience in mind I got some Input from other people. One of the things I was told is that some scala tools just aren't security critical -- they're only installed and used as the current user. In my opinion this is, for my desktop system, totally wrong. The important things on my private Computers are my GPG and SSH keys as well as my private data. For messing with these no super user access is needed at all. Comparing to the Common Lisp situation Being a Common Lisp fan of course I noticed basically the same problem for installing Common Lisp libraries. Here the situation in Debian is quite a bit better -- and I'm working in the pkg-common-lisp Team to improve this even more. Common Lisp has some maven-alike tool for downloading and installing dependency trees called quicklisp -- without any cryptographic verification as well. However there's light at the end of this tunnel: There are plans to add GPG verification of the package lists really soon. Comparing the maven and the quicklisp model So there are basically two different approaches to be seen here. In maven the software author confirms with his signature the integrity of his software while in quicklisp the distributor confirms all users get the same software that he downloaded. Now the quicklisp author can't and won't check all the software that is downloadable using quicklisp. This won't be doable anyway as there's way to much software or a single person to check. Now in some kind of perfect World the maven way would be vastly superior as there's a End-To-End verification and verification of the full way the software takes. However there's a big problem: I don't know any of these Authors personally and there's no reason I should just trust any of them. Now comparing this to the Distribution / quicklisp model. Here I would just have to trust one person or group -- here the quicklisp team -- to benefit from the crypto which might be possible based on karma inside the using community. However here I don't gain the possibility that the software is integer. However idealized if some of these pieces of software was forged between upstream and the quicklisp team and attacker would also intercept me downloading the software from the same address so I get the source from upstream matching the checksum from quicklisp -- assuming the quicklisp team does indeed know the correct website. Additionally I get the confirmation that all other quicklisp users get the same source (if the quicklisp guys are fine of course) so no-one inside the community complaining is a good indication the software is fine. For this to work there's of course a relevant user-base of the distributor (quicklisp) necessary. Relevance for Debian So how do conventional Linux Distributions like Debian fit in here. Ideally we would have maintainers understanding and checking the software and confirming the integrity using their private key or at least know their upstreams and having at least a secured way getting the software from upstream and a trust relationship with them. Of course that's just illusionary thinking of complex and important software (think libreoffice, gcc or firefox for example). Maintainers won't fully understand a lot simpler pieces of software. And loads of upstream projects don't provide a verified way of getting the correct source code though that's a bit better on the real high-impact projects where checksums signed by the Release Manager are more common than in small projects. A misguided thought at the end As I'm a heavy emacs user I like to have snapshots from current emacs development available. Fortunately binary packages with this are available from a Debian guy I tend to trust who is also involved upstream so adding the key from his repository to the keyring apt trusts. Now my first thoughts were along the lines "It would be really nice if I could pin that key to only the emacs snapshot packages" so this guy can't just put libc packages in his repository and my apt would trust them. Now thinking of it again a bogus upload of the emacs snapshot package could just as well put some binary or library on the system at some place in front of the real on in the system path which would be rather similar bad. b

Executive summary: Don t use btrfs on Debian Squeeze.
Longer summary: Don t use btrfs RAID with the kernel Debian Squeeze comes with. About six months ago, I set up a new server to handle this web site, mail, and various other things. The system and most services (including web and mail) was set to use an MD RAID 1 array across two small partitions on two separate disks, and the remaining space was setup in three different btrfs file systems:

• One btrfs RAID 0 for shared data I wouldn t mind having offline while fixing issues on one disk
• One btrfs RAID 1 for shared data I would mind having offline while fixing issues on one disk
• One last btrfs RAID 0 for entirely throwable things such as build chroots

Three days ago, this happened:

May 10 10:18:04 goemon kernel: [3545898.548311] ata4: hard resetting link
May 10 10:18:04 goemon kernel: [3545898.867556] ata4: SATA link up 1.5 Gbps (SStatus 113 SControl 310)
May 10 10:18:04 goemon kernel: [3545898.874973] ata4.00: configured for UDMA/33

followed by other ATA related messages, then, garbage such as:

May 10 10:18:07 goemon kernel: [3545901.28123] sd3000 d]SneKy:AotdCmad[urn][ecitr
May 10 10:18:07 goemon kernel: 4[550.821 ecio es aawt es ecitr i e)
May 10 10:18:07 goemon kernel: 6[550.824     20 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 <>3491225     16 44 <>3491216]s ::::[d]Ad es:N diinlsneifrain<>3491216]s ::::[d]C:Ra(0:2 00 03 80 06 0
3491217]edrqet / ro,dvsb etr2272
May 10 10:18:07 goemon kernel: 3[550.837 ad:sb:rshdln etr2252
May 10 10:18:07 goemon kernel: 6[551214]s ::::[d]Rsl:hsbt=I_Kdiebt=RVRSNE<>3491215]s ::::[d]SneKy:AotdCmad[urn][ecitr
May 10 10:18:07 goemon kernel: 4[550.833 ecitrsnedt ihsnedsrpos(nhx:<>3491216]    7 b0 00 00 c0 a8 00 00 0

Then later on:

May 10 12:01:18 goemon kernel: [3552089.226147] lost page write due to I/O error on sdb4
May 10 12:01:18 goemon kernel: [3552089.226312] lost page write due to I/O error on sdb4
May 10 12:10:14 goemon kernel: [3552624.625669] btrfs no csum found for inode 23642 start 0
May 10 12:10:14 goemon kernel: [3552624.625783] btrfs no csum found for inode 23642 start 4096
May 10 12:10:14 goemon kernel: [3552624.625884] btrfs no csum found for inode 23642 start 8192

etc. and more garbage. At that point, I wanted to shutdown the server, check the hardware, and reboot. Shutdown didn t want to proceed completely. Btrfs just froze on the sync happening during the shutdown phase, so I had to power off violently. Nothing seemed really problematic on the hardware end, and after a reboot, both disks were properly working. The MD RAID would resynchronize, and the btrfs filesystems would be automatically mounted. It would work for a while, until such things could be seen in the logs, with more garbage as above in between:

May 10 14:41:18 goemon kernel: [ 1253.455545] __ratelimit: 35363 callbacks suppressed
May 10 14:45:04 goemon kernel: [ 1478.717749] parent transid verify failed on 358190825472 wanted 42547 found 42525
May 10 14:45:04 goemon kernel: [ 1478.717936] parent transid verify failed on 358316642304 wanted 42547 found 42515
May 10 14:45:04 goemon kernel: [ 1478.717939] parent transid verify failed on 358190825472 wanted 42547 found 42525
May 10 14:45:04 goemon kernel: [ 1478.718128] parent transid verify failed on 358316642304 wanted 42547 found 42515
May 10 14:45:04 goemon kernel: [ 1478.718131] parent transid verify failed on 358190825472 wanted 42547 found 42525

Then there would be kernel btrfs processes going on and on sucking CPU and I/O, doing whatever it was doing. At such moment, most file reading off one of the btrfs volumes would either take very long or freeze, and un-mounting would only freeze. At that point, considering the advantages of btrfs (in my case, mostly, snapshots) were outweighed by such issues (this wasn t my first btrfs fuck up, but by large, the most dreadful) and the fact that btrfs is just so slow compared to other filesystems, I decided I didn t want to care trying to save these filesystems from their agonizing death, and that I d just go with ext4 on MD RAID instead. Also, I didn t want to just try (with the possibility of going through similar pain) again with a more recent kernel. Fortunately, I had backups of most of the data (only problem being the time required to restore that amount of data), but for the few remaining things which, by force of bad timing, I didn t have a backup of, I needed to somehow get them back from these btrfs volumes. So I created new file systems to replace the btrfs volumes I could directly throw away and started recovering data from backups. I also, at the same time, tried to copy a big disk image from the remaining btrfs volume. Somehow, this worked, with the system load varying between 20 and 60 (with a lot of garbage in the logs and other services deeply impacted as well) But when trying to copy the remaining files I wanted to recover, things got worse, so I had to initiate a shutdown, and power cycle again. Since apparently the kernel wasn t going to be very helpful, the next step was to just get other things working, and get the data back some other way. What I did was to use a virtual machine to get the data off the remaining btrfs volume. The kernel could become unusable all it wanted to, I could just hard reboot without impacting the other services. In the virtual machine, things got interesting . I did try various things I ve seen on the linux-btrfs list, but nothing really did anything at all except spew some more parent transid messages. I should mention that the remaining btrfs volume was a RAID 0. To mount those, you d mount one of the constituting disks like this:

$ mount /dev/sdb /mnt

Except that it would complain that it can t find a valid whatever (I don t remember the exact term, and I threw the VM away already) so it wouldn t mount the volume. But when mounting the other constituting disk, it would just work. Well, that s kind of understandable, but what is not is that on the next boot (I had to reboot a lot, see below), it would error out on the disk that worked previously, and work on the disk that was failing before. So, here is how things went:

• I would boot the VM and mount the volume,
• launch an rsync of the data to recover, which I d send onto the host system,
• observe, from the host system, what was going on I/O wise,
• at some point (usually after something like 10 to 50 files rsync ed), after throwing a bunch of parent transid error messages, the VM would just stop doing any kind of I/O (even if left alone for several minutes), at which point I d hard shutdown the VM and start over.

Ain t that fun? The good thing is that in the end, despite the pain, I recovered all that needed to be recovered. I m in the process of recreating my build chroots from scratch, but that s not exactly difficult. It would just have taken a lot more time to recover them the same way, 50 files at a time. Side note: yes, I did try newer versions of btrfsck ; yes I did try newer kernels. No, nothing worked to make these btrfs volumes viable. No, I don t have an image of these completely fucked up volumes.

My previous website was generated (dynamically) with mod_autoindex, a module from Apache targeted at rendering an index page for the files contained in a directory. Pretty basic (but themable). Here is a new revamped web site using Hyde, a static web generator written in Python.

Static or dynamic ? It has been a long time since almost everybody is creating dynamic websites. Most often, they are powered by some blog engine written in PHP like DotClear or WordPress. Infrequently, they are crafted with bare hands using one s preferred language. Nowadays, hosting a dynamic website is pretty easy. There are a lot of cheap virtual servers solution that allow you to get a root access. However, dynamic websites have some drawbacks:

• Security need to be monitored tightly, especially security upgrades; some platforms are more often vulnerable than others.
• Dynamic websites may have some problem to handle increased load.

With a static website, security problems are easier: there are far less components to monitor and most of them (for example, the web server) are pretty solid and well audited. A site powered by nginx can handle several thousands of new connections per second without any special tuning. Getting this kind of performance with a dynamic website is far more difficult. Scaling is also easier. Just add more webservers and copy the content. No database, no synchronisation mechanism needed. Hosting can even be done on simple platforms like Amazon S3, even if there is now more appropriate platforms for this like Amazon CloudFront. Moreover, even a static website can receive comments using a system like Disqus which leverages the use of Javascript to add comment system to any static page.

Hyde Hyde is a static website generator written in Python. There exists a lot of those beasts. On StackOverflow, a question about this got some interesting answers. You will also find a fairly complete list on this blog. If you like Ruby, I assume that nanoc and Webgen are good candidates. Let s go back to Hyde. It was rewritten recently and the documentation is a bit incomplete. You will need to read the source code or look at examples (like the shipped one or this site) to understand how things are handled. Everything is handled by a plugin system. I hope it will not become a mess in one year (I play a large part in this). Hyde takes your files, apply a lot of filters on them and generate the final website. It uses Jinja as a template system, Markdown for markup syntax, Less to write CSS in a more efficient way (and to minify them), UglifyJS to minify Javascript, etc. It is also possible to add metadata to files (title, author, creation date, etc.). But since everything comes as a plugin, you can use any technology you like. In the end, you can tune all knobs but you need to do most of the work (HTML, CSS, Javascript), as well. Conveniently, there is a small web server that rebuild modified files on the fly. This comes handy but this is a common feature with this kind of generator.

New website Here is a new website crafted with Hyde. It is translated both in French and in English. This is done with the help of a small plugin plugin. I am quite happy about the result. Technically, there is one minified CSS file, one minified Javascript file and the dependencies (like jQuery) are loaded with the help of yepnope.js which will become part of Modernizr. I don t want to support Internet Explorer 6, but I plan to support Firefox 3, Internet Explorer 7 and recent versions of Chrome and Safari. For the design, I have always been undecided. I am pretty impressed by some raw website but also by some others more elaborate. Since I am not a talented graphic designer, I have tried to keep things plain and simple. If you are interested, sources are available on GitHub !

Today, Marc has released phpMyAdmin 3.4.0. This is huge step and introduces lot of new features. The most noteworthy are:

• User preferences
• Relation schema export to multiple formats
• ENUM/SET editor
• Simplified interface for export/import
• AJAXification of some parts
• Charts
• Visual query builder

As you can see, many of new features come from last GSoC, it took us almost half year to stabilize all new stuff and make it work nicely together. Thanks to last minute improvements in Japanese, it is fully translated to 15 languages, other translations are little behind, but you can still help improving them for future releases. The master branch is now open to development and we will start to merge patches accumulated in patch tracker for addition after feature freeze. PS: I forgot to mention that this release fixed largest number of feature requests and bugs ever - over 160 issues from sf.net tracker got closed. This can be nicely seen on tracker stats. PS2: Package with new version was just uploaded to Debian.

Filed under: English Phpmyadmin 8 comments Flattr this!

In the new version of Lintian there has been some more changes to overrides as well as a couple of new changes. First of, we fixed a false-positive with the embedded-library tag. Lintian would incorrectly use the source-field of a binary package, when figuring out if a package was the real library and not an offender embedding the library. However, this field is allowed to contain the version of the source package (if you remember Policy 5.6.1) and Lintian did not correctly cope with that. Speaking of embedded libraries, we have accepted a (series of) patch(es) from Marcelo Jorge Vieira to detect a number of embedded versions of the jQuery javascript library (libjs-query-*). Antonio Terceiro also gave a couple of patches two make Lintian more accurate with the recent changes for Ruby packages. Furthermore we also added a new experimental tag to catch duplicate files in /usr/share/doc. Lintian 2.5.0 also modifies the syntax and semantics of the overrides file. In 2.5.0 and newer all * after the tag name are wildcards; previously they only acted as wildcards in the beginning or the end of text after the tag. The Multi-Arch -aware reader might have noticed that this is not enough for packages marked Multi-Arch: same . Some packages might emit different tags on different architectures and all files in the package (incl. the override file) must be byte-for-byte identical if the path is the same on all architectures. Andreas Beckmann proposed a solution that we have accepted, namely architecture dependent overrides. With 2.5.0 and newer you can specify that a certain override is only for certain architecture. The parser is currently somewhat naive and forgiving, so it does not support architecture wildcards and it will not check that the architectures are valid. Now you get to do overrides like this:
# We like our code without pic on x86, thank you
[i386]: shlib-with-non-pic-code
If you had not guessed it, we use the same format as is used in the Build-Depends field (except for the lack of wildcard support). So you should be familiar with it. Note that the syntax of the overrides should be backwards compatible, so unlike the 2.5.0~rc1 upload, your overrides should still work! A little heads up for people going to DebConf11: We will do a Lintian BoF again this year, yay!

Almost a year ago I put together a simple picture sharing site, which was designed to accept uploaded images via OpenID logins and then share them. It was created because none of the existing image sharing sites allowed OpenID logins - and because frankly I rarely trust sites I don't control. (Especially when they're free sites, with no obvious revenue stream. We can reference recent compromises if we wish to be topical, but even without them it is all about trust.) I opened up the site to allow others to use it, but assumed it would remain Steve-only - After all why would somebody choose to use my site rather than imgur, or similar? Over the year I've spotted several minor problems with the site. The built-in support for comments was never used, primarily because I didn't have any other users, and some of the tagging aspects were hard to use. Since I've started using twitter I again found myself wanting a picture-hosting site, one with "short links". I started using twitpic.com, but wasn't happy with it. So the plan was formed; build another picture sharing site. But this time with short URLS. Sadly my first choice of http://picc.ie was denied to me - I couldn't register it as I don't live in Ireland. But my second choice http://linkti.me was free. As a challenge to myself this site uses Redis for storing all user-details, all image details, and all session data. It hasn't been difficult to implemenet a multi-user site, with logins, file uploads, and tagging. I guess I cheated as a lot of the code is borrowed from the previous site, but this time it looks prettier and there have been many cleanups due to my previous experience. This time round I was more focussed upon short links, so each image is allowed an incrementing number, which is then encoded using base 36 math - which is the alphabet you get if you use [0-9A-Z]. I designed three shareable links for each image to keep it simple:

• http://linkti.me/v/S - Show a HTML page with the image embedded.
• http://linkti.me/i/S - Show a raw image.
• http://linkti.me/r/S - Show a "thumbnail" of the image.

Why "/r" for the thumbnail? Well because it is a random thumbnail. To cope with difference sizes, and allow the recent image display to look regular, I wanted each thumbnail to be 150x150 pixels. My thumbnail generation simply picks a random X,Y co-ordinate from the image and then cuts out a 150x150 square block starting at that offset. The results of a random segment of an uploaded image are sometimes very cool, altough equally often they are misleading. If I upload naked people there is the possability that we'll just get a nipple or a cock - but I'm actually quite smug about the way it turned out. Simpler to code than to resize, scale, or similar and surprisingly random when you see 9x9 random images (as you do on the front page). Anyway that's all for now. I was tempted to talk about implementation or migration, but I've written too much for an early morning already. Some other time? ObQuote: "He's just trying to freak us out. " - 30 Days of Night.

As announced on my French blog, I m attending Solutions Linux this week (10-12 May). I ll be on the Debian booth with a few other members of Debian France. If you re in Paris during those days, make sure to come by. I ll be pleased to meet you, and we ll be a bunch of Debian contributors ready to answer your questions. And if you feel like it, feel free to stop for a few hours and give us some help at the booth. It tends to be crowded and we re never enough to answer the questions. As usual, I ll come with a copy of the book Cahier de l Admin Debian (the one that I want to translate into English) to show, and I ll be glad to dedicate the book to whoever brings his copy with him/her. While speaking of conferences, this summer I m going to Banja Luka for DebConf 2011. I ve bought my plane tickets and I ll be there the whole week (24-31 july). Joining a DebConf is a completely different experience. DebConf is made by Debian people for Debian people. It s an opportunity to meet many of the people that you mainly know over IRC/email. And you don t need to be a hardcore Debian contributor to join. In fact, it s a great experience for anyone who just started contributing to Debian. Read this email of Asheesh Laroia as a proof. Note that the sponsored registration period has been extended up to the 17th of May. Register now! I m looking forward to DebConf11. On request of Stefano, I registered a Debian Rolling Bof. It will be a good occasion to see how far we are and to discuss future plans.

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After numerous contributions from many of you, the DebConf team has finally released the DebConf10 Final Report. It s a 46-page document which gives the reader an idea about the conference as a whole. It includes descriptions of talks, DebCamp and Debian Day activities, personal impressions, attendee and budgeting numbers, the work of various teams, social events, funny pictures and so on. If you attended Debconf10, the report will refresh some of your remarkable memories and bring you closer to the organization team work. If not, it will certainly encourage you to be part of future Debian events :) The report is available in two PDF sizes and can be downloaded from Debconf media website. Enjoy! the DebConf team

This should probably be an official FAQ, but a) I wanted to rant a bit more than is probably acceptable for something "official" and b) the sort of person this information is directed at never bloody reads keyring.debian.org, which is the logical place for it. Who are keyring-maint? Currently Gunnar Wolf (good cop) and Jonathan McDowell (bad cop). Previous keyring maintainers include Igor Grobman & James Troup. I'd like to be a DM/DD. Do I send you my key? No. You go through the DebianMaintainer or NM processes. Then the DM team or DAM tell us to add your key to the appropriate keyring. I'd like to replace my DM/DD key in the Debian keyring. What should I do? Read the instructions at http://keyring.debian.org/replacing_keys.html I have a new key that isn't signed by anyone else, will you accept it? No. Did you read http://keyring.debian.org/replacing_keys.html ? I've got a single DD signature on my new key. That's enough, right? Not unless your old key has been lost and you're getting a different DD to request the replacement for you (and if they're prepared to ask for a key replacement we'll wonder why they're not prepared to sign the new key too). Did you read http://keyring.debian.org/replacing_keys.html ? I'm still really confused about how I should request a key replacement. Help? Try reading https://rt.debian.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=3141 (which just happens to be a recent decent example). Clear subject line (I'd have added a real name too, but it's still fairly clear), full fingerprint of the old and new keys, inline signed so RT doesn't mangle it. New key signed by old key and 3 other DDs. Request signed by old key. That RT link needs a login. I don't have one. Have you tried reading up on the Debian RT system? There's a generic read only login that'll get you access. That's too hard. Can't you just give me the details? Damnit. It appears the read-only login details are currently disabled due to misuse (one wonders how). Try reading http://wiki.debian.org/rt.debian.org Why are you using RT? Isn't bugs.debian.org more appropriate? We need the ability to for people to contact us is in a private fashion, for example if they need to us to remove a key because it's been lost or compromised. We could only use RT for that purpose and use bugs.d.o for things that can be public, but this way all the information is in one place and we get to make the call about when it becomes a publicly viewable ticket. What's with jetring? Should I send you a jetring changeset? jetring is a tool written by Joey Hess that used to be used to manage the Debian Maintainers keyring. keyring-maint borrowed a number of good ideas from jetring but don't use it at all. We ignore jetring changesets. So you just want key fingerprints, not attached keys? Yes. Of course you have to make sure your key is actually on a public keyserver so we can get it. the.earth.li is a good choice (because Jonathan runs it and thus pays more attention to it), but subkeys.pgp.net or pool.sks-keyservers.net are also commonly used. My key has expired and I want to update the key expiry date. I should email RT asking for this to be done, right? No, you should send the updated key via HKP to keyring.debian.org. You can do this with "gpg --keyserver keyring.debian.org --send-key <keyid>" Obviously replace <keyid> with your own key ID. I tried to send an entirely new key via HKP to keyring.debian.org, but I can't see it there. What gives? keyring.debian.org only accepts updates to keys it already knows about. That means you can send updated expiry dates, new uids and new signatures to your existing key, but not an entirely new key. I sent my updated key via HKP to keyring.debian.org and can see it's updated there, but the Debian archive processing tools (eg dak) don't seem to recognize the update. Why not? The updates sent via HKP are folded back into the HKP server automatically every 15 minutes or so. They are folded into the live Debian keyrings on a manual basis, at least once a month. This means if your key has an expiry date then you probably want to update your key at least a month before it expires. Where can I find these live Debian keyrings? They're what's available via rsync from keyring.debian.org::keyrings/keyrings/ This is canonical location for the current Debian Developers and Debian Maintainers keyrings. What about the debian-keyring package? This is a convenience package of the keyrings. It's usually the most out of date. We update it sporadically and try to ensure that the version shipped with a stable Debian release is current at the point of release. It is not used by any of the official Debian infrastructure. Why don't you automatically update my key in the live keyring when I send an update via HKP? We think that automatic updates of keys that allow uploads to Debian are a bad thing and that invoking a human eye at some step of the process is a useful sanity check. Paranoid much? Never enough. How are updates to the keyring tracked? We use bzr to maintain the keyring, with a separate file per key that can then be easily combined into the various keyrings. You can see the repository at: http://bzr.debian.org/scm/loggerhead/keyring/debian-keyring/changes Note that this is only updated when a keyring is pushed to live; the working tree may contain details of compromised keys and thus isn't public. What's with the whole replacement of 1024 bit keys? 2 things. Firstly 1024 bit keys tend to use SHA1 as a hash algorithm, which has been shown to be weaker than expected. While we're not aware of active exploits against this updating all of the keys Debian uses is not a trivial process and it's wiser to get it done /before/ there's a known issue. Secondly computing power has moved on and we feel that upgrading to larger key sizes is prudent. Elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) keys look like the future. Can I use one for Debian? No, not at present. When there are tools that are part of a Debian stable release that support them we'll look into it, after discussion with the major users of the keyring (DSA, ftpmaster, the secretary).

One of my last blog suggested a way to systematically clean up versioned dependencies in packages. Given the comments posted thereafter, it s clear that the one-size-fits-all strategy is ill-advised. Sorry about that. So, should these versioned dependencies be cleaned up or not ? Well It depends. Cleaning up versioned dependencies will hurt people when the package you re working on may be back-ported to old version of Debian. In corporate world, upgrading a machine may cost a lot, so you can still find production machine running etch. I would not be surprised to hear about older systems still used in production. In consumer world (mostly desktop or multimedia), people will mostly run more recent versions of Debian. All in all, the following elements must be considered before removing old versioned dependencies:

• Is the package likely to be installed on server ? or is it more targeted to consumer world ?
• What is the policy of the maintenance group of this package ? For instance, Debian perl group policy is to clean up versioned dependencies older than old-stable.

Unfortunately, there s no universal strategy. In case you want to clean up old dependencies, the latest version of Dpkg::Control model for Config::Model will be helpful. The last version of this models provides a bunch of meta Dpkg parameters. These parameters are used to customize the behavior of the Dpkg editor tool to suit your needs (For more details, see Config::Model::models::Debian::Dpkg::Meta). The dependency meta parameters will enable you to tune the behavior of config-edit to your needs. There are 3 dependency parameters, from the most global to the most specific ones:

• dependency-filter: your personal general policy
• group-dependency-filter: the policy of the maintainer group of your package
• package-dependency-filter: filter policy specified per package

Before applying a cleanup, config-edit will check the policies in the above order. The most specific one will be applied. Ie. the group policy will supersede your personal policy and the package specific policy will override the group policy. Here s a screenshot of config-edit GUI invoked on a package: From the parameters set in the GUI above, you can see that a warning will be raised for :

• perl package with versioned dependencies older or equals than lenny
• any other package with versioned dependencies older or equals than etch

Last but not least, if you want to use config-edit without any dependency filtering, just make sure that all these filter parameters are empty. You will still benefits from other features, like warning if a package dependency is unknown, which is useful to catch typos. All the best

Date for end of sponsored registrations for this years DebConf11 in Banja Luka was set for May 8th, today that date has officially been extended to May 19th. Now to answer your question on why are you extending sponsored registrations 12 hours before it ends here s the answer. Registrations are going fine, we have more then 300 attendees who registered so far, it is due to change in our monetary resources as sponsorship level has changed from one to another, and we ve be granted to welcome more people. But it is also to give some possible attendees more time and information, as I ve got a feeling a lot of people from this region and elsewhere have been lacking some even general information, and thus I d like to bring everything closer to everybody. Before anything, heading to our website might be a good start as we have immense amount of information up there. Since government of Republika Srpska is our greatest and main financial sponsor, local team has made a document for them in which we tried to explain most basic and crucial things from what DebCamp and DebConf is over logistical/statistical data to what we have planned for Fun and Free time, so checking out that document might be a good idea as well DebConf11 Plan and Program. Since that might be too much for somebody as the documents stretches to some ~30 pages, I ll try to give answers to most common/asked questions. Registrations Who should register? In plain English, everybody. Only people that don t need to register are people who will attend Debian day, please see Plan and Program section 5.3 for more information on Debian Day. If you want to attend any of the DebConf lectures/presentations/whatever you should register. Registrations will play great deal in this years DebConf as if you register you ll get accreditation with your name on it and what you re allowed to do. Whether you have sponsored food/accommodation and thus allowed to eat for free or that you can sleep in certain hotel, or whether you re allowed to the pools for free; also as we re planning to have tight security in our Venue, in order for you to even enter Venue building you ll need to have accreditation on you. So, if you re planning to do anything with DebConf please do register. What is DebCamp/should I attend DebCamp? Please refer to Plan and Program document it s all said at the end of page 15. Sponsorship After registrations this is next thing that is brought up and that is most unclear to most of you. You re able to request travel, accommodation and food sponsorship, what each of those means is pretty self elaborate. But the real question here might be, who is eligible to request sponsorship? Again, everybody. What are is the criterion for getting sponsorship? There really isn t a written rule who gets the sponsorship and who doesn t but if you have ever been involved or contributed in any sort of way to Debian, or even have contributed or have been involved in any open source projects you re more then welcome to apply for sponsorship. Furthermore, due to the funds that we have been granted from Government of Republika Srpska, I even encourage you to ask sponsorship, don t be intimidated and just do it Professional/Corporate This is category for those who are sent by their companies, and whose participation/attendance is sponsored by the same. Professional covers the price of actual costs of their visit, while the corporate is double that price, which is for those who besides paying the actual costs also want to contribute money and help Debian. Organized transport and getting to Banja Luka Now, for those who are flying to Banja Luka I personally told you to come to via Zagreb. Why did I do this, if Banja Luka has its own airport? I told you this because Zagreb is much larger airport and thus has many budget companies, meaning cheaper flights. Once the registrations are closed, based on your arrival/departure dates we ll be able to statistically predict how many of you will be coming to Zagreb on each date and each time as we re planning to have organized transport. This means that we ll send buses/shuttles to pick people up in Zagreb. Of course to have this organized we ll need to set up arrival/departure pages with all the information that s need for us to have this organized. Now, for those who want to come directly to Banja Luka airport this might be bit pricer then going via Zagreb, but not by much. I personally value my time and I even fly from Zagreb to Sarajevo Phil for example booked his flight just this morning from London via Ljubljanja to Banja Luka and it wasn t that much more expensive then Zagreb. Also worth noting is that Banja Luka might be limited for some destinations, but I for a fact know that there are flights coming from Zurich, Ljubljanja, Belgrade and so on. Maybe someone from Banja Luka could follow up on this one with more information. Questions? With this post I hope I have brought some of these topics closer to you and that I made some things clearer. If you have any questions, please feel free to leave your comments or email whatever you re concerned about to our mailing list on: debconf11-localteam@lists.debconf.org Further reading:
Gunnar Wolf Posts explaining DebConf

This is just a quick note to say: Next week, I am going to be at: My goals for the conference:

• On Day 3, participate in a panel called How to keep and make productive libre graphics projects?
• Talk about the success of the recent Build It events.
• Learn more about the world of free software graphics app development.
• Enjoy the opportunity to speak French.
• Say 'hi' to old friends like Jon Phillips.
• Give chocolate to Michael Terry for staying positive on a recent gimp-deve thread.

I'm going to arrive in Montreal at 6:30am on Tuesday on an overnight Greyhound bus from Boston. So another goal:

• Make it through Tuesday without embarrassingly falling asleep in public.

If you want to say hi to me during the conference, email me and make sure we meet up!

Steve Langasek has been contributing to Debian for more than a decade. He was a release manager for sarge and etch, and like many former release managers, he s still involved in the Debian release team although as a release wizard (i.e. more of an advisory role than a day-to-day contributor). Oh, and he did the same with Ubuntu: on the picture on the left, he just announced the release of Ubuntu 10.04 from his Debian-branded laptop. He has also been maintaining PAM in Debian for as long as can I remember and does a great job at that. He s very knowledgeable and fully deserves his place within the Debian Technical Committee. I m glad he still has the time to participate on several important Debian mailing lists because his contributions are always very useful. I m sure you ll notice this just by reading his answers below. My questions are in bold, the rest is by Steve. Who are you? I m 32 years old, have been running Linux since my first year in college back in 96, and have been a Debian developer now for ten years. Along the way I ve been involved in maintaining a variety of server packages, worked on the Alpha port for a while, did a stint as a release manager for a couple of years, and serve on the technical committee. This year I m also celebrating my ten year anniversary with my lovely wife Patty, who many know as an erstwhile front-desk volunteer at DebConf. God only knows why she puts up with my late-night hacking! These days in my day job I m a manager on the Ubuntu Platform team at Canonical, working to help make Ubuntu a daughter distribution that the Debian community can be proud of. What s your biggest achievement within Debian or Ubuntu? There s no doubt that my biggest achievement in Debian has been overseeing the release of two Debian releases as release manager. On the other hand, the scope of a release is so huge, and it represents the output of so many developers working together, that it would be arrogant to claim the release itself as an achievement of my own. Also, sarge and etch have long since been rotated off of the mirrors so no one cares about them anymore. For a more personal and lasting contribution in the distro itself, I m very proud of writing pam-auth-update. It s a small piece of code, but one that Debian was missing for a long time it s made a big difference to PAM module integration in packages! What are your plans for Debian Wheezy? My top priority for this cycle is to see multiarch through. We re still not far enough along in Debian for most developers to see any difference and once we are, the first thing people are going to see is a fair bit of breakage when we start breaking a lot of assumptions about paths that have been hard-coded upstream. But I m still excited by the progress that is being made here. We should be able to ship wheezy without any ia32-libs package. We might even be able to get rid of all the biarch library packages, including those used by the toolchain itself. 54 packages in testing build-depend on gcc-multilib right now, in order to build 32-bit code to ship in the amd64 package; a bunch of those should go away with absolutely no reduction in functionality, saving us a bit of space in the archive and saving the maintainers a lot of complexity in their packages, while at the same time giving us much better support for cross-compilation than we ve ever had before. It s a tall order, certainly, but the pieces are falling into place one by one. My second priority is to get a policy in Debian around packages integrating upstart jobs. It would of course benefit Ubuntu to have many packages back in sync with Debian, but if all we wanted was to sync with Debian, we could mostly just make debhelper ignore upstart jobs in Debian, prefer them in Ubuntu, and call it good. I m interested in making sure Debian also gets the benefits of being able to use upstart, because as Linux has become increasingly asynchronous (doing more in parallel at start up), the traditional sysvinit has not been able to keep up. There are all kinds of bugs now related to network startup, for instance, that we don t have a good answer for in a sysvinit model but that we can fix with an event-based system. Upstart has been around for a while now, but we ve been slow to integrate it into Debian because it only works on Linux. It would be a shame if right after the first Debian GNU/kFreeBSD technology preview, packages all stopped working on kFreeBSD because they started to assume the availability of upstart! Unfortunately, having been so cautious we now have systemd on the scene, which not only doesn t support non-Linux but seems to be in the process of trying to gobble up other, non-Linux-specific components of the desktop stack. So I have to wonder what the future holds for the free desktop on non-Linux kernels. If you could spend all your time on Debian, what would you work on? Well, based on my previous experiences when I did spend all my time on Debian, I think the answer here is QA / release work. Otherwise, I don t know. My hands are full enough now with multiarch that it s hard for me to see what the Next Thing would be. You re a member of the technical committee. In the interview of Bdale Garbee, I have argued that it s not working well. What s your point of view on this topic? Well, I feel a constant low level guilt about my own poor level of activity in the TC; but that doesn t translate into a belief that the system is broken. This is, after all, the decision making body of last resort for technical disputes in Debian, and as such it should really be used sparingly. And if a reputation for glacial deliberation means more developers work out their disputes on their own rather than asking the TC to step in, I think that s actually a healthy thing! I do still wish we were more effective at resolving those issues that do come our way, but there s no silver bullet for this. Though the funny thing is, I ve noticed that the majority of issues that get referred to the TC nowadays never even need us to make a decision; a short conversation with the disputants is often enough to get them to come to an agreement. What s the biggest problem of Debian? By and large, I think Debian is still doing a great job at what it s best at delivering a rock-solid distribution that users can rely on. If I would highlight one problem in Debian, though, it would be that I think we re becoming less innovative as time goes on. Part of that comes from being such a large project that we re bound to be more conservative as an institution; but even though the three pet Debian projects of mine that I mentioned above are fairly innovative (multiarch, pam-auth-update, upstart), each of these has landed first in Ubuntu rather than in Debian. Always with a clear intent of pushing back up into Debian, of course, but it just wasn t possible to do this work within Debian for the first cut without much longer delays. I worry that if Debian is no longer the place to try new things, that we re going to miss out on attracting contributions from the folks who are inspired to make Free Software better and not simply to make it stable. I m not sure how to address this, though. Maybe improved conversations with derivatives such as (but not limited to) Ubuntu, about what crack of the day is being tried where and how that can be integrated into Debian once it s proven to work? I don t think that team-based maintenance or low-threshold NMUs do anything to address this, though, as the kinds of innovation that matter most are ones that require discussion and consensus-finding not just routing around inactive maintainers. Do you have wishes for Debian Wheezy? Well, I d like to see the armhf port get on its feet and become an official port. Over the lifetime of the arm and armel ports, the state of the art on ARM has changed quite a bit; it would be great to see Debian taking advantage of this richer platform, to let people make better use of their hardware via Debian. As a former release manager, you re now a release wizard . I guess you have seen it on debian-devel, there are proposals to not freeze testing and to use another distribution starting as a snapshot of testing to finalize the new stable release. According to your experience, what needs to happen to make this possible? Frankly, I ve stayed out of that discussion because I don t think what s being asked for is possible. I think proponents of a freezeless release have seriously underestimated the amount of work required on the part of the release team to wrangle testing into a releasable product, and that anything that makes propagation of fixes into the pending release more time consuming will make Debian worse on the whole, not better. If people really want to avoid long freezes for the Debian release, the best way they can help this happen is by making Debian more releasable on an ongoing basis, by helping to hold our packages to our shared standards for quality (i.e., by fixing RC bugs!). The biggest factor in long freezes for Debian is the slow rate at which we bring the RC bug count down during the freeze. Back in the sarge, etch days we used to have really great bug squashing parties that would get people together on weekends to hack through RC bugs by the dozens. I don t see that happening as much anymore. I d really like us to get back to that, but my few attempts at this so far since retiring as release manager have led me to think I m really terrible at organizing parties of any kind. On the other side, as seen at http://bugs.debian.org/release-critical/, the RC bug count for testing at the beginning of the release cycle keeps getting higher and higher. I d love to know why that is so we can address it. I know we ve gotten better at detecting some classes of RC bugs; that s part of it, but I don t think it explains the whole trend. Is there someone in Debian that you admire for their contributions? Wow, what kind of arrogant jerk would I be if I didn t admire anyone in Debian for their contributions? Debian is and always has been an amazing community of top-notch developers; there are certainly too many I admire to list them all here. Joey Hess certainly makes the list, for his longstanding example of code speaking louder than words and for his ability to get to the heart of common problems and come up with elegant solutions. So does Russ Allbery, who by all accounts had his ability to feel anger in response to email burned out of him at a young age in a flame-related accident on Usenet. The list goes on, but here I think I have to follow Joey s example and cut the words short.

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Thank you to Steve for the time spent answering my questions. I hope you enjoyed reading his answers as I did. Subscribe to my newsletter to get my monthly summary of the Debian/Ubuntu news and to not miss further interviews. You can also follow along on Identi.ca, Twitter and Facebook.

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This June, soon after my seventh anniversary with Canonical, I will finish my job as Ubuntu CTO at Canonical. You can read my official announcement on the Canonical blog. It s sometimes hard to believe that it s been that long since we first envisioned a Linux desktop for human beings . When I look at how far we ve come, at the difference we ve made to so many people, it s easy to see how the time passed so quickly. It s been an incredible experience for me to play a part in building Ubuntu and Canonical. Whether building a decentralized company of hundreds of people, to a global community project of tens of thousands of members, I m grateful for all of the learning opportunities along the way. It has been a privilege to work with so many brilliant, passionate and thoughtful people under such auspicious circumstances. There is much I will miss, and I have many memories to enjoy, from all-night global hacking sessions driving toward a ship date, to casual singing and playing music at our many face-to-face events Nonetheless, it is time for me to seek out new challenges and stretch myself in new ways. I ll be moving back to the US, closer to old friends and family, and starting a new job with a different type of company. I am leaving behind a capable and dedicated team at Canonical, who I am confident will achieve even greater things in the years to come. I will remain active in the free software community as a volunteer. I intend to continue to participate in Ubuntu, and to serve on the Technical Board. I will also be continuing my work with Debian and the DEX project. This year, I ve accepted advisory positions with the Ada Initiative and the Freedom Box Foundation, and will continue to support those organizations and their missions. I ll be in Budapest at the Ubuntu Developer Summit for the next week, and look forward to seeing my friends in Canonical and the Ubuntu community. I ll have more to say soon about what I ll be doing next professionally. Watch this space for updates!

I ve been busy tonight spamming mailing lists and otherwise getting the word out: the LSB workgroup is preparing to update the FHS. This update has been a long time in coming; FHS 2.3 (the current version) was released back in 2004. Since then, a lot has happened, and it s starting to look like the FHS is holding things back due to the lack of updates. For the longest time, the FHS was cared for by its original editors: Dan Quinlan, Rusty Russell, and Chris Yeoh. We should all be grateful that they created a useful and well-written standard one that has been resilient enough to remain useful for six years without changes. Even though it s time to move on, we should not forget that we are building on a strong foundation they laid for us. So, you may be asking: how can I help? Glad you asked!

• First of all, get the word out! If you know people who might be interested (developers for Linux distributions, standards people, etc.), point them to this post or to the LSB announcement linked earlier.
• We have set up the usual open-source project infrastructure: a bug tracker, version control (using Bazaar), a mailing list, and a wiki (of sorts; it s actually a page on the LSB wiki). Come and join in! Subscribe to the mailing list, post comments on the wiki, check out the source and submit patches.
• The bug tracker deserves special mention. We hosted it for the old FHS project, and so we re continuing to use it. In particular, we ll be doing triage on the old bugs there, as well as any new bugs filed. So go ahead and file bugs, or add comments to old bugs; we ll be taking those into account for the new update. If you file new bugs, please file them against the FHS product.

We re tentatively shooting for a goal of releasing FHS 3.0 before July, though that s not written in stone. But we don t want to wait much longer than we ve already had to.

We re in that in-between place where there is plenty of IPv4 out there, but sometimes you either need or want to get to IPv6 addresses. With the IPv4 address allocations out of ARIN now empty there is going to be an increased need of NAT either between the address families or within it. This is a quick overview of the different sorts of systems that do this address translations. 6tunnel The best way to describe this is port forwarding across the address families. You can have a IPv4 port on your local device that when you connect to it forwards the connection via IPv6 to a remote device, perhaps on a different port. You can also do it the other way, so connecting to a local IPv6 port will connect to a remote IPv4 port. Of course remote could be another port on the same computer. Squid You could replace squid with any other sort of proxy server that can work as a reverse proxy and understands IPv6. From the deployments I ve heard of, this arrangement where the IPv4 only webservers are front-ended with a dual stack IPv4/IPv6 squid (or other) reverse proxy server or set of servers. It is a real simple way of getting your webserver onto IPv6, if you cannot do it in the webserver itself. The usual advantages and disadvantages of using a reverse proxy apply here. The better long-term solution is to have the servers just run IPv6 natively, but this is a reasonable stop-gap. That s a brief overview of the various packages out there that can help with address translation to either get your servers understanding IPv6 or a client to get to an IPv6 server. Ideally these are only temporary measures but as some methods people use to write programs (the latest I ve seen has weird hard-coded 4 byte offset tree-table with 256 long list inside good luck fixing that!) they may be temporary for some time. Tayga This program implements NAT64 which is a 1:1 address translation. It can work both ways so IPv6 clients can connect to IPv4 servers and vice-versa. You would normally use this for your own hosts, rather than for connecting to the internet as you need to specify prefixes. It works like the old style static nat ranges in IPv4 where 1.1.1.10-100 would map to 2.2.2.10-100 tnat64 Now this package is a little back-to-front to the others in that it takes an existing IPv4 only application and makes it able to connect, at least at the socket level, to a IPv6 server. It works by preloading a library which overloads the socket functions like socket() and connect() so it can attempt to find IPv6 servers. totd This is a small DNS proxy which can be used to translate IPv4 A records to IPv6 AAAA records. You often use it with translation technologies like Tayga.

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