One consequence of the server outage was that I could finally justify the time to solve an irritating Apache authentication problem. In fact, I had to solve the problem, because I needed to log in to our control panels. (I really love our new control panels, but I wrote them, so I should. I’ll release a new version Real Soon Now. Don’t bother looking for the old version - it’s horribly out-of-date.) The solution had two parts, both related to changes in the Authentication and Access Control of Apache httpd 2.2. In summary, it seems that there are now mod_auth modules which direct authentication (authn) modules and authorisation (authz) or access control modules, and there are some authnz modules which can do both parts. So, the solution: Firstly, mod_authnz_external has become an easier way to do PAM authentication than getting mod_auth_pam to work with the new system. (As an alternative, I could have authenticated directly against the SQL database used by the control panel, but it seems neater to do all authentication through PAM.) So, the modules enabled were auth_basic, authn_file, authz_groupfile, authz_host and authnz_external, but it still gave an error message. Secondly, I found a blog post about the no groups file? error I got then, which suggested re-enabling mod_authz_user. That cured the error, although I don’t yet understand why. The error and the solution don’t seem particularly related. But it works! The above took me about 3 hours of researching, installing, configuring and testing to get working. My guess that it was an awkward job was right. I think TTLLP control panel customers will be glad they’re not paying all of that!

One consequence of the server outage was that I could finally justify the time to solve an irritating Apache authentication problem. In fact, I had to solve the problem, because I needed to log in to our control panels. (I really love our new control panels, but I wrote them, so I should. I’ll release a new version Real Soon Now. Don’t bother looking for the old version - it’s horribly out-of-date.) The solution had two parts, both related to changes in the Authentication and Access Control of Apache httpd 2.2. In summary, it seems that there are now mod_auth modules which direct authentication (authn) modules and authorisation (authz) or access control modules, and there are some authnz modules which can do both parts. So, the solution: Firstly, mod_authnz_external has become an easier way to do PAM authentication than getting mod_auth_pam to work with the new system. (As an alternative, I could have authenticated directly against the SQL database used by the control panel, but it seems neater to do all authentication through PAM.) So, the modules enabled were auth_basic, authn_file, authz_groupfile, authz_host and authnz_external, but it still gave an error message. Secondly, I found a blog post about the no groups file? error I got then, which suggested re-enabling mod_authz_user. That cured the error, although I don’t yet understand why. The error and the solution don’t seem particularly related. But it works! The above took me about 3 hours of researching, installing, configuring and testing to get working. My guess that it was an awkward job was right. I think TTLLP control panel customers will be glad they’re not paying all of that!

A recent project was to install a Wordpress plugin that will announce new articles to Twitter. As you might guess, I’m not a big fan of Twitter, or any other closed-source Web 2.0 thing. I use a few social network things, but not Twitter at present because I don’t really want yet another login. So, I decided to solve a more general problem of status updates by using ping.fm and updating a wordpress plugin to work on PHP 4, as well as 5. I know PHP 4’s end-of-life is nigh but the target server still runs it for the forseeable future. While waiting for API key approval, on the same day as our server hiccough, GoDaddy broke ping.fm which broke the communication. Now, while I could set up two ping.fm-like update services to avoid the single point of failure at a closed service, but that would mean that any updates would appear twice. Alternatively, some of the Twitter-like services can be told to watch the Wordpress blogs for updates, but each one would need to be configured in a different way. Finally, there’s already a problem of redundancy and context with ping.fm which makes Adam Darowski and others hate it. Can we solve this? Can we get support for the NoseRub protocol into everything and make a social network network? Will good things come out of the W3C Workshop on the Future of Social Networking, 15-16 January 2009 in Barcelona? Is the ultimate solution to junk all the closed social networks? I wish I knew. In the meantime, at least it keeps me in work, hacking plugins, connecting stuff together. It’s bloody annoying sometimes, though. It seems like a Web 2.0 version of having a carpet that’s too small for the room, so you never get the whole floor covered at once.

A recent project was to install a Wordpress plugin that will announce new articles to Twitter. As you might guess, I’m not a big fan of Twitter, or any other closed-source Web 2.0 thing. I use a few social network things, but not Twitter at present because I don’t really want yet another login. So, I decided to solve a more general problem of status updates by using ping.fm and updating a wordpress plugin to work on PHP 4, as well as 5. I know PHP 4’s end-of-life is nigh but the target server still runs it for the forseeable future. While waiting for API key approval, on the same day as our server hiccough, GoDaddy broke ping.fm which broke the communication. Now, while I could set up two ping.fm-like update services to avoid the single point of failure at a closed service, but that would mean that any updates would appear twice. Alternatively, some of the Twitter-like services can be told to watch the Wordpress blogs for updates, but each one would need to be configured in a different way. Finally, there’s already a problem of redundancy and context with ping.fm which makes Adam Darowski and others hate it. Can we solve this? Can we get support for the NoseRub protocol into everything and make a social network network? Will good things come out of the W3C Workshop on the Future of Social Networking, 15-16 January 2009 in Barcelona? Is the ultimate solution to junk all the closed social networks? I wish I knew. In the meantime, at least it keeps me in work, hacking plugins, connecting stuff together. It’s bloody annoying sometimes, though. It seems like a Web 2.0 version of having a carpet that’s too small for the room, so you never get the whole floor covered at once.

Cooperatives South West is working in partnership with the Regional Infrastructure for Social Enterprise (RISE) to hold a Trade Fair with support from CDA (BRAVE Ltd.), Social Enterprise Works, Co-opportunity and Watershed Media Centre. It will be held on Monday 1 December at the Watershed in Bristol. Due to the size of the venue, the number of exhibitors and delegates is limited, so complete the booking form as soon as possible. There is no charge for cooperatives to attend or to exhibit (but there will be a charge to cover catering and venue costs if you book but don’t attend or cancel). The Social Enterprise Photography Competition is now launched across England. Regional winning photographs of the competition will be featured at the Trade Fair and the winners will be presented with their awards by a special guest. Please encourage all your friends and colleagues to submit photos of social enterprises. (Thanks to Viv at Cooperatives-SW for the above information.)

Lenny is the codename for the next release of debian, which will be debian 5.0 formally. For the first time that I can remember, debian will fit on one disk. OK, so it’s a blu-ray disk (BD), but I’m sure it will be a selling point to some people. The announcement goes into some more detail about the implications for data transfer and mirror sizes, as well as noting that it stresses genisoimage beyond breaking point. Before the release, there’s the small matter of about 200 bugs which we need to fix. If you can help, please do. One prickly problem in some of the bugs is that a second debian release in a row is looking like it will allow violations of the Debian Free Software Guidelines into the release. (I don’t think all of the listed example bugs are violations, but some are). My main question about the firmware ones remains the same as two years ago:-

“I think the idea that refusing to ship non-free firmware in main will strengthen demand for free firmware is worthy of consideration. Debian helps users to take control of their operating system. Increasing the demand for free firmware might also help users to take control of their hardware, or at least highlight that there’s this crap which their operating system uses to support their hardware but doesn’t have its normal freedoms.” “However, I’m undecided whether it’s a good idea to exclude them from the distribution CDs and so on. How big is the problem of vital hardware which won’t work without firmware being copied to it? Should we split non-free into non-free-hardware and non-free, allowing non-free-hardware packages onto the CDs?”

Ben’s technical blog: For those who care about firmware is tracking some of the hardware, but I don’t own any of the untested ones. That’s not surprising: I’ve been trying to avoid closed firmware for a few years now. Debian bug #502959 discusses how one of the key debian project machines is affected. There’s a nice suggestion of using some of the project’s $64,000 to buy some hardware that’s fully supported by free software, but the bug has been closed by Peter Palfrader with the message “go screw yourselves and do something useful, like find a bridge”. Yikes. Is there less vital hardware now than two years ago? Can the patches provided really not be included?

ThePhoneCoop Congratulations to all our friends at The Phone Coop for winning the Best Social Enterprise Award at the Enterprising Solutions Awards 2008 yesterday. (TTLLP is an agent and I’m a member personally too.) Longer report at Cooperatives-UK. Comiserations to Barnsley Building Society, who are merging into Yorkshire Building Society after having 10m with collapsed Icelandic banks. Still, it survived further into the banking crisis than even the biggest of the demutualised building societies.

I’m not sure which is the second-largest of the projects supported by Software in the Public Interest, but I thought that OpenOffice.org was up there with them. It’s been a bit of a surprise to me that SPI hasn’t done more for them since they joined back in March: only about $1,000 has been donated that way, none spent and I’ve not noticed their liaison being very active yet. Following the release of OpenOffice.org 3.0, I took a bit of a closer look. Stuff Michael Meeks is doing: Measuring the true success of OpenOffice.org suggests that the project is much smaller than I thought:

“In a healthy project we would expect to see a large number of volunteer developers involved, in addition - we would expect to see a large number of peer companies contributing to the common code pool; we do not see this in OpenOffice.org. Indeed, quite the opposite we appear to have the lowest number of active developers on OO.o since records began: 24, this contrasts negatively with Linux’s recent low of 160+. Even spun in the most positive way, OO.o is at best stagnating from a development perspective. “

OpenOffice.org is a project that produces something I don’t use much, but I recognise the significance of it. I’ve looked at contributing a couple of times in the past (nothing major, just bug reports and offers of help), but got utterly lost in the maze of websites and copious verbose descriptions written in management buzzspeak. (I spotted a “Report a Bug” link taking me to a page titled “Submit an Issue” for example.) Looking again now, OOo doesn’t seem much easier to navigate. I did find that SPI doesn’t appear to be listed on their donation page yet, which probably explains the low donation amount. Another confusing thing: they don’t use bugzilla, but a less accessible fork called Issue Tracker. Even simple contributions seemed to want multiple registrations to websites, mailing lists and whatnot - that seemed to contradict a claim that “Joining OpenOffice.org is purely optional” - and a confused email question to an address listed on the website got a rejection/error in reply. I’m sorry to say that I got confused, discouraged and moved onto other, easier things that I’d use more. Anyone else looked at contributing? How did it go for you? Anyone understand how this associated project works?

Bonfire Onlooker by dominicspics (cc-by) Of all the things I wanted to do yesterday, testing TTLLP’s disaster recovery plan was not one of them. I often suggest customers make disaster recovery plans, but I don’t like having to use them. One of our server farms suffered a serious hardware failure and slowly died during the day. (It didn’t catch fire - the title is a silly reference to lp0 on fire.) The current stinging electricity bills means that there’s an emphasis on power-saving now that wasn’t there 4 or so years ago, when we still built servers ourselves, before WEEE and cheap big-brand systems. Today’s servers aren’t quite as resilient, because each extra piece of hardware in use takes extra power. There are some much cleverer tactics now, but they don’t catch everything before it goes “bang” and we can’t just bring the “spare” hardware into action if it’s not installed yet. Replacement hardware will be installed as soon as possible, as well as some extra hardware that will help protect against a similar failure in future. The slow failure of the server also means that we lost some emails, voicemails and instant messages from 10am to 2pm yesterday. If one was yours, please resend. Most services have been rerouted or temporarily replaced with help from friendly associates. Three important services that haven’t yet are: 1. our financial system (which gets updated in batches anyway), 2. our task tracking (which is newer than our recovery plan and I need reminding about its backups, but at worst all the current data exists in other places) and 3. our newsletter server. I’ve copied the customer newsletter subscriptions to an older listserver, to send out news of our recovery, but the member newsletters (with GPG integration and so on) will wait for the replacement hardware. I’m hoping we can recover some things from the old server filesystem, else I’ll recreate it from the last release (that’ll teach me to hack it on the live server!). In the meantime, I’ve still most of yesterday’s work to do…

Just received this comment from Jimmy Kaplowitz over in the US: “yuck, your country continues to turn into Big Brother: BBC News: Giant database plan ‘Orwellian’” Hell, yeah. That’s a reason why my support for the party is so weak at the moment. I’ve been working and writing against this since ST@ND and the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, which we were told was essential for crime-fighting, but actually helps gov.uk spy on parents making school place applications. Currently, I’m telling people Gov.UK Consults on Forced ISP Snooping: Please Say NO. If anyone has any doubt that the database state will be abused, look at some examples of Labour’s “terrorists” (at least, they had supposedly anti-terror measures used against them) since 2001:-

1. Wolfie, an 82-year-old peace-campaigning heckler at a Labour conference
2. Indymedia
3. a Frenchman in Suffolk who downloaded the Anarchists’ Cookbook
4. an Algerian pilot
5. the country of Iceland

and that’s ignoring gov.uk’s frequent data leaks. Noodles replied: “There’s a quote somewhere that goes along the lines of “If the Tory policy is looking sane compared to what you’re doing, you’re doing it wrong” that’s been applied to the Labour fascist state stuff.” Our terrorism measures are a joke, with loopholes that gov.uk can drive a truck through. They should be repealed and clearly-limited ones enacted, shouldn’t they?

As well as my little What topics do you want to read here? survey, there’s a more serious Free/Open Source Participant Satisfaction Survey by Brenda Chawner for the Victoria University of Wellington New Zealand which you might like to answer. It seems that the results will be published under CC-NC, which is less than great, but better than not sharing them at all. Shame I don’t know of a third survey. The joke doesn’t quite work without it.

I’ve just set up a poll on my site asking: what topics do you want to read here? Since this July, when cycling and most local and political themes were split off into other blogs, this site has been mostly Web Development and GNU/Linux topics, with an SPI article appearing most weeks, and minor themes of Koha news and ideas and general internet/telecoms issues around ThePhoneCoop. Finally, Drupal, OSCommerce and general business topics appear less frequently. By traffic, the SPI series seems by far the most popular (but at least one of those is heavily spam-attacked now, so I’d discount it), followed by other political themes, then the technical posts. I suspect that politics is getting a temporary boost because of the US and Canadian elections, even though I’ve not written about them much. But is there some other theme that people want to read about? The poll box on the right column lets you tick as many or as few as you want. It requires javascript, but if you don’t have javascript, please leave a comment on my site. If you want to suggest a new topic which I should add, please leave that in a comment too.

or “how did we do Batting Against Three Strikes through the Back Door?” In the latest EDRI-gram, there’s a report on the telecoms package EuroParl vote which is mostly positive. Thankfully both the Harbour and Trautmann reports were amended in vital ways to protect user privacy. So, just to tie up my last loose end from my last report: Neil Parish MEP never did bring any replies from Malcolm Harbour back to me. Conservative MEPs, eh? At least they make the right noises on privacy and freedom now, even if the actions are still old-fashioned and confusingly unconvincing.

Back in Solved but Why? Belkin F5D7630 to Realtek 8139 Drop-outs, I thought I’d cured my random 20+-second network hang problem, but I celebrated too soon. While that seemed to work for a while, it didn’t last. Those options also stopped the printer (lp0) from working, which was a bit of a fatal flaw - I print TTLLP’s invoices and minutes. As far as I can tell, the drop-outs are all the 8139-using laptop’s fault. They may only happen after resuming from suspend-to-disk, but it’s difficult to be sure of anything with an intermittent fault. I thought it was related to having all PCI devices on IRQ 10, but adding acpi_irq_balance to boot options cured that without curing the hangs. Today, I’m trying the 8139too driver instead of the 8139cp one and I’ve built both as modules so I can try unloading, reloading and switching between them if it keeps happening. This problem is doing my nut. I hate intermittent faults and it plays havoc with my VoIP phone, ssh, IRC and jabber sometimes. Anyone seen this before? Anyone fixed it for sure?

Today is Blog Action Day about poverty. As a member of several cooperatives, I have a pretty strong hope that the responsible lending of credit unions can help people escape from poverty. The basic process of a credit union is that you save for a while, then when you’ve shown that you will put aside that amount of money regularly, you can borrow some multiple of it and repay at the same rate you were saving. In addition, you get a voice in controlling the credit union itself, although it is limited by financial services regulations and so on. At yesterday’s meeting of the Cooperatives-SW board in Taunton, some members expressed concern about a “social enterprise” called South-West Pound backed by a company called South West Community Banking Partnership. Although it’s called that, apparently it’s not a bank and also not a credit union: its members don’t manage it. It’s working with credit unions, but I’m very unclear on how it’s regulated. From the few details on their website, it looks to me like it could even be running a Farepak-style scheme which happens to hold deposits in credit unions instead of banks. Why is concealing member-controlled unions allowable as a “social enterprise”? Why would anyone go to a “community banking partnership” instead of direct to a credit union? (Coo, I’m getting a bit angry again, both at the lack of information and the hide-them-to-promote-them idea.) Tomorrow (Thu 16 Oct) is International Credit Union Day. If you’ve not already done so, please go open an account and help your local community to fund itself, then see if you can get involved in publicising them to communities who suffer financial exclusion.

The monthly IRC board meeting of Software in the Public Interest will take place later today, as announced by SPI’s secretary last week. While the announcement is back on time (yay!), the agenda isn’t (aww!). I’d be quite interested to learn how SPI is going to try to reduce the risk to its reserves, given the current slow decline of its primary bank which is not one of the first US banks getting bailed out. I think the best way for not-for-profits to avoid risking donations at the moment is to avoid having them in their bank accounts, in line with the Better Business Bureau standard that

“the charity’s unrestricted net assets available for use should not be more than three times the size of the past year’s expenses or three times the size of the current year’s budget, whichever is higher.”

Back in June 2005, SPI’s board of the time (Ian Jackson, John Goerzen, Jimmy Kaplowitz, David Graham, Bruce Perens, Benj. Mako Hill, Branden Robinson) decided to “remain noncompliant” with that standard and I fear that chicken could be coming home to roost now. I hope we don’t lose anything, but AIUI we’ve got nearly $150,000 in play. Update: Unlike its UK analogue, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation covers corporation accounts up to $250,000, so SPI is only risking temporary unavailability, not yet a risk of loss. Thanks to bd_ for pointing me to that.

One massive annoyance with last week’s trip to the L2SE conference was the terrible state of WiFi access in London. I’d actually paid a little extra for first class on the home trip because it gives access to Paddington’s Victorian Lounge which says “It also has workstations with access to the Internet”. What it doesn’t say is that the workstations are desks not computers, there’s no wired ethernet and the wifi is Extortionate ISP The Cloud at the cost of 4.50 an hour. Alternatively, you can pay through Orange at 6/hour or more reasonably through O2 at 7.50/month. I was carrying two mobile phones, but not an O2. Why is Paddington so backwards? Bristol Temple Meads has U2com free wifi access through Dashi sushi bar (note it’s not National Rail or First Great Western) and fon which was about 3/day last time I used it. 4.50/hour seems a really terrible deal to me - I’ve used cheaper internet cafes than that and they have to maintain actual hardware. If that fee really reflects their costs, The Cloud must be a pretty wasteful operator. So I finally got GPRS working on my phone. Essentially, it was the same as described on Dave Stevens site and davesource, with the exception that the k608i already knows the connection settings, so the AT+CGDCONT line can be removed completely, as mentioned on Of Linux, GPRS Phones, Serial Cable, Irda, Bluetooth and USB, by Mikko Rapeli - otherwise the phone replies ERROR and the connection fails. It also needs the guest * guest line in the pap-secrets file and a matching user guest in the gprs options file. Another TTLLP member tells me that later phones offer NAP service and that pand is much simpler than pppd/gprs. I’ll find that out when I get a newer phone, I guess. Someone else suggested ip-over-dns to punish The Cloud for their silly fees, but is that legal?

Last Thursday, I was at a conference called Listening to the Social Entrepreneur. Here are some short notes about the plenary session, which were written at the time, along with thoughts on the workshops that I’ve just written up. HCT Group - credit crunch opportunity - business with ethics - transport - dislike 3rd sector term - difference between social enterprise and charity - optimism. Haley House - ex-soup kitchen staffed by ex-homeless, bakery, bank donated equipment, financial picture - catering grew 36% cafe grew 21% september, cooking classes; recipe for success: collaborate with experienced partner, secure enough capital or equivalent, align venture with mission; plan for sustainability; future… Roskilde university - relevance of academic research - why references for things I know - hard to have your feelings discussed. (meeting last Monday?) - don’t care what it’s called - too much jargon - several ways of learning, conceptual doesn’t seem useful but will later. CICs. Four flags of SEs - eship, er, e, econ. Bikeworks - practitioner and academic. Formation, setup, establishment, sustain. SE changes; viewpoint: academic, researchers, help us. Useless website. Then came three workshops of varying usefulness: Procurement Versus Marketplace was an interesting idea and reminded me why I avoided public-sector projects for years: I’m better at negotiated than at rules-based selling. I also was told (with a straight face) by a development trust worker that cooperatives are simply profit-sharing schemes, which was very disappointing. Social verses Business Goals seemed pretty ill-conceived. The reason why many people work in social enterprises is because we don’t believe we should choose between them. It’s an integrated, multi-faceted approach. Born or Made? was an interesting examination of the people powering social enterprises. Food for thought, but I’m not sure it really produced much. But I’m not that sure whether any of the workshops had much of a productive purpose. The final plenary session was confusing. I was sat further back, the sound system was intermittent and echoy and the talks seemed truncated and still, but maybe I was just tired. A lot of people had left by this point. I stayed on for the networking reception and met a few interesting people, but left earlyish to meet another TTLLP member on the light railway. The venue was OK (I think the main hall problems were more sound system and operation than the hall itself) and coffee, lunch and reception were well-catered. In conclusion, it was an interesting conference, but I don’t feel that we got much out of it, apart from some thoughts from a workshop session. I suspect it was more useful for the researchers than for the entrepreneurs. There weren’t many opportunities for professional development or sales or even putting things into consultations or . I’m not sure I’d spend best part of two days work (attending plus travel plus costs) on another similar event.

I'll be there.

Today, I shall be mostly at Listening to the Social Entrepreneur. If you’re in the area and have something to say, leave a comment here to contact me. (Comments won’t appear here until this evening, sorry.) I’ll write a review post after the event. Aside: Councils are worried about their Landsbanki deposits - thankfully, Kewstoke isn’t one of them, but ow! Yet another way that the banking problems will increase taxes.