I got this error in one of my Rails apps that I migrated to 2.2. It occurs when you try and send mail with ActionMailer, which makes it especially annoying because the exception notifications I normally receive when there is a problem weren't being sent! I wasn't able to track down the root cause of the problem - apparently something about an SSL certificate not being there or not being right, but here's the change that causes ActionMailer to fool around with SSL mail: http://github.com/rails/rails/commit/732c724df61bc8b780dc42817625b25a321908e4 I was able to "correct" the problem (or at least get things working again) by commenting out this line of code:

smtp.enable_starttls_auto if smtp.respond_to?(:enable_starttls_auto)

Perhaps it should be a configuration option, or there should be better error detection with regards to the certificate. If anyone comes up with a nicer answer, leave a comment, but in the meantime, I thought I'd post my quick and dirty fix.

It’s close! In the township where we live, Barack Obama defeated John McCain by 15 votes! I guess I should mention that the victory margin was 166 to 151. So it’s not like it was 15 votes out of millions. In all, 333 people in our township cast ballots, or about a third of the total population of our township. Just to give you a sense of scale, there are an average of 29 people per square mile out here. And the nutty jail expansion was defeated 3:1. Our county commissioners will just have to figure out some other way to house the county’s prison population (around six inmates) for awhile longer.

I haven’t been blogging this election at all recently — there are enough folks out there saying just about everything that should be said (and lots that shouldn’t), but I couldn’t let this little tidbit slip by without mention.Via the TaxProf blog:

• Politico and Bloomberg report that the State of Ohio has a $1,182.92 tax lien against Joe the Plumber for back income taxes.
• The Associated Press reports that Joe the Plumber lacks a plumbing license.

Also, the Trademark Blog notes the flurry of related domain name registrations. Technorati Tags: Joe the Plumber, Obama, McCain, Politics, Election

Gathering
I spent this weekend at a Skolelinux/Debian-edu gathering in Oslo. 8.5 hours by bus each way. I got to meet some of the people shipping a customized Debian for schools. As it was a gathering related to educational software, looking at the KDE4 kdeedu packages seemed most appropriate. I’ve tested step packaging and hopefully it is going to end up on your local debian archive one day, along with some fixes to where kvtml files are packaged, much awaited by Annma and others. Apparantly, in Brazil, they have their own debian based kde distribution and 130 GB of free as in public domain free educational movies. Some people discussed an application to view, tag and search the movies. I quickly thought of a mixup of nepomuk and phonon in a nice userinterface. So if anyone feels like implementing that, you are more than welcome. Gnash
The gathering was together with a Gnash hackathon, and apart from gnash getting more and more usable, the gnash people are also thinking about integration with the desktop environments. For KDE 4 they have plans of a KPart easy embeddable anywhere, including in KHTML. (Maybe another use of the KPartLoader dfaure wrote recently). The gnash team are unfortunately quite short on KDE knowledge and they asked for help. I’m probably not myself the right one to help here, but maybe some of you out there feel like helping. There is already a patch set around that some people claims works, but others haven’t figured out to make it work. Feel free to comment here and I will forward to the Gnash people - or just contact them directly on the gnash-dev@gnu.org maillist. Trolls
I left the gathering a bit early to get to a Troll picnic in a Oslo park and got stuffed with p lse and lompar. (sausages and pancake like bread) I was by bus all night back home and then a shower and straight to work. After work, I slept for 14 hours or so.

Things:

• I'll be speaking at the UKUUG Linux conference in Manchester this November.
• The ACM have chosen my article on power management from Queue last year as a shining example of such things, and republished it in Communications where you may now peruse it at your leisure. Fanmail may be sent to the usual addresses.
• I'll be in Boston from the 7th to 11th of December, and New York from the 11th to 15th. I will be endeavouring not to break any bones in the process. Might actually ensure I have travel insurance this time.
• I'll be presenting at LCA next January. Current plans involve spending a week in Melbourne afterwards and a few days in San Francisco on the way back.

Things I want to do:

• Visit Iceland. It sounds like it might be relatively cheap soon.
• Make this I C code work.
• Get dynamic power state switching on ATOM-based Radeons working. This probably involves actually plugging the card in.

Following my last blog post, Moritz Muehlenhoff sent me another statistical list in a desperate attempt to prove that there is no german cabal. As usual, when counting antyhing per inhabitant in IT, Finland wins:

   241890 Finland
   361500 Switzerland
   398766 Norway
   401033 Sweden
   426800 New Zealand
   489205 Austria
   492322 Germany
   612857 Australia
   713415 Netherlands
   795965 France
   814194 Belgium
   834800 Canada
   871071 United Kingdom
   912631 Denmark
  1102457 Spain
  1196289 Ireland
  1255125 Hungary
  1369233 United States
  1456400 Israel
  1484500 Croatia
  1737487 Czech Republic
  1738889 Uruguay
  1806645 Italy
  1910059 Bulgaria
  2270700 Latvia
  3369600 Lithuania
  3539191 Portugal
  3640956 Japan
  3811600 Poland
  4133884 Costa Rica
  5379455 Slovakia
  5608354 Greece
  6779558 Argentina
 10410773 Brazil
 11975000 South Africa
 14695666 Colombia
 12261197 Korea, Republic of
 16598074 Chile
 20042551 Madagascar
 20286976 Russian Federation
 22246862 Romania
 28199822 Venezuela
 28220764 Peru
 35293128 Turkey
 53341250 Mexico
 75360000 Egypt
226489200 India
330462972 China

Indeed, the best proof that there is no german cabal is that, IIRC, "they" never succeeded in having one of "theirs" elected a DPL. This is probably the best proof that there isn't ONE german cabal, but probably more... Beware of "them", "they" are everywhere.

A small discussion on IRC triggerred this (from Debian LDAP): Number of DDs per country:

United States : 348
Germany : 197
United Kingdom : 97
France : 96
Canada : 56
Australia : 56
Spain : 49
Japan : 41
Italy : 40
Netherlands : 38
Sweden : 34
Finland : 27
Austria : 22
Switzerland : 21
Brazil : 19
New Zealand : 14
Poland : 13
Norway : 13
Belgium : 13
Hungary : 12
South Africa : 8
Denmark : 8
China : 8
Russian Federation : 7
Ireland : 7
Argentina : 7
Korea, Republic of : 6
Israel : 6
Czech Republic : 6
India : 5
Portugal : 4
Bulgaria : 4
Croatia : 3
Greece : 3
Colombia : 3
Uruguay : 2
Turkey : 2
Romania : 2
Mexico : 2
Egypt : 2
Venezuela : 1
Thailand : 1
Slovakia : 1
Peru : 1
Madagascar : 1
Latvia : 1
Lithuania : 1
Costa Rica : 1
Chile : 1

Number of active DDs per country:

United States : 223
Germany : 167
France : 81
United Kingdom : 70
Spain : 41
Canada : 40
Japan : 35
Australia : 35
Italy : 33
Sweden : 23
Netherlands : 23
Finland : 22
Switzerland : 21
Brazil : 18
Austria : 17
Belgium : 13
Norway : 12
Poland : 10
New Zealand : 10
Hungary : 8
Russian Federation : 7
Denmark : 6
Czech Republic : 6
Argentina : 6
India : 5
Israel : 5
Ireland : 5
South Africa : 4
Korea, Republic of : 4
China : 4
Bulgaria : 4
Portugal : 3
Croatia : 3
Colombia : 3
Uruguay : 2
Turkey : 2
Mexico : 2
Greece : 2
Venezuela : 1
Slovakia : 1
Romania : 1
Peru : 1
Madagascar : 1
Latvia : 1
Lithuania : 1
Egypt : 1
Costa Rica : 1
Chile : 1

Last Sunday's Berlin Marathon was my fifth and final piece in completing the World Marathon Majors during 2007/2008: after running Boston, Chicago and New York in 2007, and then London and now Berlin in 2008, the set is complete. The idea was born after having run Chicago a few times, qualifying for Boston and winning a New York lottery entry. With friends to visit in New York, London and Berlin, it became feasible. It's been a great experience to run these famous courses in front of large crowds. Conditions ranged from cold, windy and rainy in Boston to way too hot in Chicago, had mixed conditions including a solid rain shower in London and were just perfect in both New York and Berlin. The crowds were awesome in all five places. All in all, these races were a blast -- if you're into long-distance running, give each or all of them a shot.

I'm lazy this morning, so I'll write a quick changelog about what's coming next in awesome 3.1, as of now.

• awesome-client is now a true REPL: so it now returns things like errors;
• mouse events now support button release;
• awful has been splited in several modules;
• the window stacking has been reworked and handled special windows (dock, desktop) much better;
• window type is now exported and correctly handled;
• any window can go fullscreen;
• widget can get an event when the mouse enters in it;
• placement (smart, under_mouse, etc) has been move into awful;
• statusbars and titlebars has been merged in a common type: wibox;
• wibox can be floating (i.e. you can now write your own conky-like with wiboxes);
• _NET_WM_STRUT_PARTIAL is now supported so panel and dock automagically puts padding around the screen;
• sticky windows are handled like sticky windows and are not tagged anymore;
• windows that get reparented are now unmanaged (that fixes view of PDF etc in your browser);
• a new image type has been introduced so you can manipulate image directly in awesome and use them;
• a new imagebox widget has been (re)introduced to use image objects;
• a real minimize/iconify state is now available;
• awesome gets a --check to check Lua syntax file; restart is now also checked for syntax file by default.

And of course some bug fixes.

Being an American guy married to an Italian woman and living in Austria, I don't really have a problem with "globalization". Actually, I'm something of a fan, which is one reason I'm disappointed in the globalization of Amazon's services. If you order a book from Amazon.com in the US, it will be shipped to you from the nearest shipment center. If you go to a large site like Google, Microsoft, or Yahoo, it's quite likely that they provide services in your language. Amazon, however, appears to be completely split up along country lines. Your amazon.com account is completely seperate from your amazon.co.uk account, and amazon.de isn't even available in English! This completely violates the sensible reasoning behind the two features outlined above. If you're somewhere like Italy or Denmark or Eastern Europe, you should be able to log in to amazon.com, in your language, order a book, and have it shipped from the nearest shipping center. Instead, you have to log in to each site (they don't share account info), which is only available in one language. So, for instance, an English speaking guy in Austria wanting to order books from the nearest country with an Amazon site goes to amazon.de and finds that there is no option to get the site in English. If I want to order from amazon.co.uk I have to enter all my login information from amazon.com again, and don't get the same recommendations and other features that come from Amazon knowing about my purchasing history.

The Linux kernel source relies on a case sensitive filesystem. If you attempt to get the sources via git this will manifest as an error along the lines of:

fatal: Entry 'include/linux/netfilter/xt_CONNMARK.h

There are several header files like this the names of which differ only in case and just can’t be represented on a filesystem that doesn’t distinguish between cases. This is most commonly seen by people attempting to build embedded Linux from Windows.

While some people think that Googles new open source webbrowser Chrome is a great example of code reuse I think the opposite is true. He found at least 25 open source libraries used by the browser. So far this is not a problem but what is a problem is that it embeds all of them in the upstream source tarball instead of depending on the system-wide copies. I know that it might be problematic if people have to install 25 libraries on their own (they could provide static builds though) but for distributors this is just a nightmare if security issues pop-up in one of the used libraries (famous libraries who had issues in the past: webkit, libpng, libjpeg, libxml, ...).

In this case the distributors can't just fix the security issue in the shared library and all applications using it are fixed, no they also have to fix all the copies in software like Chrome. Same if you installed Chrome from source, if a security issue pops out in one of the embedded libs you have to go and install a new Chrome version. Google also needs to additionally maintain upstream and security fixes in their embedded code copies but I guess they have enough manpower to do so.

I didn't yet look at the Chrome source code but I hope it has at least a way to link against the system-wide copies without patching the makefiles.

I attended the Open Nordic Conference in Norway in June, a conference that brought together people from Norway, Sweden, Finland and Denmark. Attending the conference allowed me to find out what's going on with FOSS in Northern Europe. What I found interesting is that there was a lot of talk about using FOSS in the public sector. A number of countries are working on repositories to exchange software, in particular for public administration. One example is the Software Exchange (softwareborsen.dk), a project by the Danish National Software Knowledge Centre to promote the use of FOSS in Danish public administration. The Norwegian software exchange (delingsbazaren.no) plays a similar role in Norway. It seems as if every country is working on their own software repository to share FOSS. As such, it's great to see that the European Commission is taking a step towards bringing everyone together by introducing the Open Source Observatory and Repository (OSOR) for European public administrations. The goal of OSOR is to provide a platform for the exchange of information, experiences and FOSS code for the use in public administrations. OSOR will officially launch at the Open Source World Conference in Malaga in October. I've always thought that there is not enough cooperation and communication between European countries, so I have high hopes for OSOR. (Originally published on FOSSBazaar)

I took a note of the various talks I attended at DebConf, with the aim of writing a few notes about each so that I could try to explain to my work mates exactly what I get out of going. However I think a lot of the benefit is about general face to face contact with fellow DDs and random conversations that happen. Having worked from home for over 3 years I'm finding it quite nice to be back in an office with people working on the same things as me; there are conversations that you will have over a quick cup of coffee or in the corridor that you wouldn't bother typing on IRC or email or picking up the phone for. Debian is a lot like a large organisation full of telecommuters and DebConf provides a vital opportunity for us to have those "minor" conversations that prove quite useful and to remind each other what we're actually like in person. I didn't end up writing a lot of notes during the talks so these are just snippets after the fact. If I'd been more organised I'd have done a write up on a daily basis rather than leaving it all until the week after. A lot of the below is fragmented thoughts, but the longer I leave it the less relevant it gets and the more chance I forget something. It'd have been up faster if I hadn't been fighting Movable Type to try and get some sort of headings. Sunday
Introduction, Marga The "Welcome to DebConf" bit. Marga got up and talked about how at DebConf4 (Brazil) she hadn't been a DD and now she was and how it had been a life changing event. She'd thought she was to blame for DebConf8 in Argentina, but trawling mail archives had shown it was originally Mart n's idea. She hadn't realised at the start quite how much work it would be. Steve's DPL talk, Steve McIntyre The DPL welcomes us to DebConf and talks about Debian's achievements, some of the results of his team survey (the teams largely say they need more manpower. Not really a huge surprise.). NM/User Survey BOF, Paul Wise Paul emailed debian-user, debian-newmaint and various other places (I think) asking about people's experiences as a Debian user or applicant to New Maint. His final results aren't yet published and I got the impression a disappointing number of our users had replied. The NM problems these days seem to be largely down to a lack of AMs, at least according to the stats on nm.debian.org. Meet SPI board - bdale, maulkin, jimmy, michael, others A chance to meet those of the SPI board who were present. The usual "If you're involved with Debian you should seriously consider joining SPI". Some discussion about the fact that although SPI was originally mostly Debian these days other projects are making more and more use of it - OFTC, PostgreSQL and Madwifi for example. Not a huge amount of new information for me. I've been an SPI member for some time and I think they perform a vital role for Debian. They've had issues in the past but it's really good to see them overcome and more projects on board. Monday
http://hp.com/go/debian, bdale Bdale talks about the history of Debian and HP. And makes the point that HP aren't doing any of this to be "nice"; their primary responsibility is to their shareholders. Not surprising, but it's good that even with that criteria at the fore front Debian ends up a good idea for a large multinational. Managing 666 packages, Mart n Ferrari Mostly centered around the pkg-perl experience and the tools/workflow they have to help manage things. Impressive web tool (DEHS) to help track packages with new upstreams, issues or pending uploads. Quality Assurance in Lenny + 1 I can't remember a lot of this, which is a bit bad. I remember a discussion about whether we should release with orphaned packages, or if they should be removed. The argument for not removing them seemed to revolve around a theory that if they weren't buggy then what was the harm, the argument for was that if they were unmaintained and not really used than how did we actually know they weren't buggy, and was it reasonable that they potentially held up library transitions etc? Bugs in large packages Don Armstrong and ways in which the BTS can help people with lots of bugs. This (thankfully) doesn't affect me, but it was interesting to hear Don talk about his work on the BTS and his various ideas. I was sorry I'd missed his talk on SOAP access to it; I shall have to find time to watch the video. Tuesday
Debian and Ubuntu, Mark Shuttleworth The usual interaction with Debian stuff, including how we interact with our upstreams. If a bug is raised with an Ubuntu package then it might well be appropriate to raise it with Debian and upstream as well, but each set of people should be able to use their own bug reporting systems rather than having to go to a foreign system. I don't think it was actually said, but I guess the idea is that launchpad is the thing that will do this gluing together. He also talked about Ubuntu as an "experiment" rather than a fork of Debian; something that has potentially different ideas about how to do things but that these ideas may lead to things that should be fed back into Debian. The point was made that even if you consider Ubuntu a fork they've forked 9 times now; it hasn't been a case of forking once and diverging wildly since thast point. I have a few thoughts on all the whole Debian/Ubuntu stuff which I should really try to form into something coherant and post. I think it's important to take Mark's talk in the context of bdale's "Shareholders come first" point. Derivatives round table Didn't stay for most of this. Ubuntu, Debian-EDU (which I hadn't realised was a derivative rather than a team within Debian, but apparently there are various things it was much easier for them just to patch now and try to work towards a generic solution later), someone from Extramadura and someone from the Munich government Linux stuff. I'm sure I've missed someone off. tdebs/i18n This was a useful BOF. It helped that we said no to the usual video team requirement that if you want to speak you had to wait for the microphone. This works fine for a normal talk, but really impedes the flow of conversation in something like a BOF. tdebs are something that have partly come from a need of Emdebian to reduce installed package size and partly from the desire of the i18n team to be able to update package translations without having to do a full binary NMU of a package. We had some of the FTP team, the release team, the i18n team and Emdebian there and I think some progress has been made. There'd been various conversations had before this meeting which I think helped people think about the issues and objections so that we had answers by the time we all sat down together - an excellent example of the use of DebConf. DebConf9 C ceres Various bits of discussion about next year's DebConf in Extramadura. Temperature is likely to be an issue for me as they reckon it could easily get up to 40C! I'll melt! Venue sounds good; some queries regarding late night hacklabs and net connections to same, but I'm sure the networking team will sort it all out as usual. ;) DebConf10 bids Venezela and New York were both pitching. Lots of people don't want to travel to the US or think they'll have problems doing so (I hadn't realised there was such an issue for people from South America). I suspect various people will have issues with Venezela as well; I heard expressions of doubt over their political stability expressed. However I'd be happy to go to either (and preferably both! DebConf10 + 12 perhaps?) Speaking of which, what ever happened to the Sarajevo bid? If they're reading, have you considered DebConf11? Wednesday
A day trip to an Argentinian ranch and lunch was an asido. Fantastic food and a pleasant afternoon spent sitting in the sun chatting to people. That evening was the formal, but thanks to having stayed up until after 4 on Tuesday I had to wimp out and go to bed fairly early. Not until I'd seen the DPL dance though. :) Thursday
Internationalization in Debian I forget most of this other than pretty graphs from Christian regarding what's translated and what other languages we might have; e.g. you can consider South America to be covered largely by Spanish and Portuguese, or you can consider it to not be covered very much at all by the local indigenous languages. dh-make-webapp: yeah right! Mainly what I took away from this was "It'll never happen thanks to the fact that every web app author uses a different system" and that more work needs to be done on the web apps best practices document. I don't really do web apps, but having them easily installable on my systems is a good thing so I hope some standardisation within Debian comes from this. Best practises in team-maintaining packages Various team members got up to talk about work flow in their teams. Not unsurprisingly different things seem to work for different people. Predictable PRNG in the Vulnerable Debian OpenSSL Package Lucian giving his Black Hat talk about the OpenSSL issues we faced earlier this year. Some queries about automated testing and that it should have found this, which originally I agreed with until I thought about it - you'd have to have run > 65536 tests and compared all the data to find this; something like the FIPS tests against a single run wouldn't have shown any issues. Lucian wanted feedback on ensuring he was presenting the Debian side of things acceptably as well. Keysigning Run by Don Armstrong. Nothing to really remark except I think key signing attendance is dropping off after things like the Helsinki experience. Also I've now managed to get my new RSA key signed by keys other than my own (and I'll try to get sorted out to sign keys myself soon). Friday
LessWatts Intel's drive towards reducing power usage. Odd to hear such things from someone who wasn't Matthew Garrett and I think I'd heard most of it before. Debian technical policy update Sorry Manoj, I should have been paying more attention. Debian Policy is something I think is important, but I'm not enough of a nitpicker to really feel I can contribute a whole lot. Virtualisation in Debian - Present and future This was depressing. What I took away was "We had 2 forms of virtualisation in etch (Xen + vserver) and we're supporting neither for Lenny". As someone running a Xen machine this is problematic. The host does have the hardware support that would allow kvm, but I'm worried about smooth migration (it's a colo box). There was some mention of Xenner, which isn't packaged for Debian. I took a look at doing so but there are some worrying items in the TODO list (like, oh, locking to enable reliable SMP) and I've spectacularly failed to get it compiling so far. I should have another go. Emdebian update Neil Williams about where Emdebian is and waved his Balloon3 about. Some interest from the Openmoko guys and discussion about why it might be better than OpenEmbedded. And equally what it couldn't do that OpenEmbedded can manage (mainly very small installs; a minimal Emdebian install is 24MB+ and with X that goes up to 75MB+ I believe). netconf I'd never actually seen Martin talk about netconf before. Am impressive flow of control diagram. It all sounds quite complex for little benefit at present, but if he pulls it off then I can see it being a much more flexible replacement for the likes of Network Manager. Saturday
Lenny - The Road To Release Neil played with putting the heads of the release team on random images. And tried to tell us all how to behave during the release process in terms of what should and shouldn't be uploaded etc. Most of it is just common sense, but apparently everything he talked about he'd experienced. Also pointed out we were supposed to release in 3 weeks and didn't even have the appropriate kernel in testing yet so it's probably not going to happen. Colour me surprised. Sustainable Computing Low power consumption/affordable computing. Interesting points about the OLPC being used in the middle of nowhere with no chance of an Internet connection being close by compared to neighbours in large cities where people can't necessarily afford top of the line computers or individual connections - in this sort of scenario mesh networking is really viable in terms of getting people connected up. Multi winner voting Manoj needs pretty diagrams, probably drawn by Martin Krafft. ;) Semi-interesting discussion about multi-winner voting (e.g. SPI board elections) and how the current Debian voting system is completely tied to Debian's infrastructure eg the LDAP setup. Manoj would like to make it more generic so it could be used by other groups as well as for different sorts of votes in Debian.

Earlier today, I presented a 3 1/2 hour tutorial Introduction to high-performance R (here is a brief description of the talk) at the UseR! 2008 conference at the TU Dortmund. In a nutshell, the tutorial covered how to measure / profile R performance for speed and memory use, how to accelerate R using vectorised expression and tools like Ra / jit, how to add compiled code to R using either the .C or .Call interface and using the inline and RCpp packages, how to use R code in parallel (explicitly using NWS, Rmpi or snow as well as implicitly using pnmath / OpenMP), and how to script / automate R using littler, Rscript or RPy. The final version of the slides is now available via my presentations page, and the live cdrom with software support for all the software used is at Alioth. Update: Corrected link to presentations page thanks to heads-up by Charles. Thanks!

Earlier today, I presented a 3 1/2 hour tutorial Introduction to high-performance R (here is a brief description of the talk) at the UseR! 2008 conference at the TU Dortmund. In a nutshell, the tutorial covered how to measure / profile R performance for speed and memory use, how to accelerate R using vectorised expression and tools like Ra / jit, how to add compiled code to R using either the .C or .Call interface and using the inline and RCpp packages, how to use R code in parallel (explicitly using NWS, Rmpi or snow as well as implicitly using pnmath / OpenMP), and how to script / automate R using littler, Rscript or RPy. The final version of the slides is now available via my presentations page, and the live cdrom with software support for all the software used is at Alioth.

When I gave a Revealing Errors talk at Lug Radio Live USA, I had the misfortune of being up against Robert Love's talk on Android which many people at the conference wanted to see -- myself included! One person who showed up to my talk anyway was Allison Randall. She was apparently entertained enough to invite me to give a short version of the talk as one of the keynote presentations at OSCON 2008! In the talk, I covered the ideas behind my Revealing Errors project and quickly walked through a few examples that showcase what I'm trying to do. I'm happy with the result: a couple thousand people showed up for the talk despite the fact that it was at 8:45 AM after the biggest "party night" of the conference! For those that missed it for whatever reason, you can watch a video recording that O'Reilly made and that I've embedded below. A larger version of the Flash video as well as a QuickTime version is over on blip.tv and I've created an OGG Theora version for all my freedom loving readers.

Usually, files in /etc/pam.d/ are simple, linear descriptions of how a user should be authenticated, e.g. Try to authenticate him against ldap, and then against the local data base . But sometimes, you want something more advanced, for example If the user is called guest, please authenticate him with pam_dbus, otherwise use regular pam_unix. This is possible, and here I ll note down how to do that.There are actually two problems to solve: How to detect the username, and then how to do the flow control.For the first problem, I recently discovered the pam_succeed_if module, that allows for relatively advanced logic for checking uids, usernames, hostnames and group membership. For our case, the line would read

auth ? pam_succeed_if.so quiet user = guest

Now what next? If we just wanted to allow unrestricted access to guest, we could put sufficient for the questionmark. But we need something like if..then..else. Unfortunately (and I hope this will be fixed eventually), the only flow control available is skip the next n lines . So we can skip to pam_unix when this module fails (i.e. the user was someone else but guest), and if we did not skip, we can run the guest-specific module and then skip over pam_unix. So here is the complete snippet:

auth [default=2 success=ignore] pam_succeed_if.so quiet user = guest
auth [success=ok new_authtok_reqd=done ignore=ignore default=die] pam_dbus.so
auth [default=1] pam_permit.so
auth required pam_unix.so

You can read more about this advanced configuration in the PAM Administration guide. And here is the corresponding configuration for gdm, where guest can always login:

auth [default=2 success=ignore] pam_succeed_if.so quiet user = guest
auth required pam_permit.so
auth [default=1] pam_permit.so
auth required pam_unix.so

So I have a guest account with a locked password and I can allow ssh logins with a mouse click and use it directly with gdm. I probably should put the gdm configuration also in xscreensaver to not lock me out.

So, I should be at DebCamp, but I'm back home after driving 800km in one day.  
Why?   I still don't know.

The main reason for this post is the irrational and unilateral response I got 
from the DebConf Orga Team, with no right to replica of any kind, and with 
the violence and humiliation we were treated with. I've helped to make 
3 DebConf's possible, and have been involved in many ways for the past years 
in Debian, so this shocked me deeply.

The short story is that there was an extra bed in the room I was staying in, the 
person who was suppose to be in that bed is a close friend of mine, so I asked 
if someone else could use it while they weren't, since that meant I could take 
the necessary equipment that I managed to get for DebConf, and also introduce 
to Debian someone who is very active and well known in our local community 
(and also part of the umbrella foundation used for local finance issues). 
I was excited about getting there, like every year. Just to make this extra 
clear, this person had already booked the full week of DebConf, just not 
DebCamp, as he previously thought he couldn't attend. When he found out he 
could, he was thrilled to be able to go and help setup. So, I made the mistake 
of not notifying the Orga team about the switch. I did this because it truly 
was harmless action, where a bed which would otherwise be wasted would get 
used, and, I did not notify the Orga team because they've been very 
aggressive, inflexible and unhelpful throughout the planning of the 
conference. This doesn't justify it, just explains why someone who generally 
is helpful decides to take the wrong path to solve something.

Up to here, nothing very exciting. What made this special, is that when one 
of the organizers, Margarita Manterola, found out about the switch, instead 
of coming to talk to me, even though she's known me for *years*, she went 
and informed the hotel that somebody had committed a crime, and checked in 
under a different name, as if me or the person that came with me where 
some random stranger. All I can say is, WTF?

Let me stress this, the email that was sent out[1] twisted the facts, to the 
extent that some of them are a lie, like the problem arrived at check-in, 
when it actually happened while we where napping a few hours after we had 
arrived, and any effort made by the Orga team with the hotel where wasted, 
as it was one of them who had originally created the problem.

Instead of solving this among us as a group, and, again, "solve" is a 
bureaucratic thing, because no one was being harmed, Marga decided to 
actually *harm* me personally, the person who I had brought, and DebConf 
as a group. What got solved?  Nothing. I left, along with someone who 
would of otherwise been helping out build DebConf, while the Orga team 
demanded a ridiculous fee for me to stay in the hotel.
Rules are rules, I understand, but I also understand everybody listens to 
downloaded music, people in Germany install[2] nmap, and a very long list 
of rules that we tend not to follow because they're unreasonable or 
unnecessarily complicated.
Is this really what DebConf is turning into?

All I can say is I'm very sad and shocked that the people I've worked with 
for so many years decided to condemn me over such a meaningless issue, and 
especially that the local team, Martin Ferrari, Damian Viano, Maximiliano 
Curia and Margarita Manterola would do such thing to "one of there own", 
and that the international Orga team would mindlessly follow through with it.

I apologized to the hotel, I do want to apologize to the innocent people who 
had to deal with this, and, even though my intentions where good and unselfish, 
I regret what happened.

Despite all of this, I'm still deeply committed to Debian, have worked during 
the year and deserve to relax and enjoy it, so I will be there for DebConf 
as a regular attendee.

See you there!

[1] http://lists.debconf.org/lurker/message/20080802.231856.66c7d3fd.en.html
[2] http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/31/1629259&from=rss