DebCamp8, shakiness, planes, python-debian Well, not unexpected news, but since I've been rather quite lately it is worth reminding that I'm now at DebConf8, enjoying the DebCamp. I've arrived today after a quite long trip made of unexpected extra plane stops in Madrid (thanks Iberia for not declaring it and letting me ponder about how can it possibly take 16 hours from Barcelona to Buenos Aires, now I know the reason ...) and shaky bus hours. First tiny teeny achievement of DebCamp (among a handful of beers already) is an upload of python-debian 0.1.11, implementing among other things support for parsed dependencies and a major overhaul changelog parsing (thanks to James Westby). Unfortunately we are going to miss Lenny with this release, but after all it is a package mostly meant for Debian Developers, so it is probably not a big deal.

Sure, that sounds fairly formal to send a report for holidays, doesn't it? Anyway, as I have a few (often Debian/FLOSS related) friends around the world who are reading my blog entries, this might interest them so that's indeed a report..:-)...and I have time for it, so... I'm currently going back from Cahors to Maurepas (home), on my way to Debconf. We spent 10 days in Cahors with Elizabeth and the girls, finally joined by Jean-Baptiste on Sunday. We had great time over there, enjoying the richness of Quercy:

• heat (I need that before MDQ winter)
• nice running spots: for once, I could run by starting from the bottom of hills, climbing *up* and finishing down. I ran a lot, sometimes on very hard tours such as 18km with 300m positive height difference. I also did a few "fast" runs ("fast" here would make a few Debian friends laugh a lot, isn't it Ralf, Dirk.....)
• medieval architecture in Gourdon, Martel, St-Cirq Lapopie, Cahors...
• peace of the Lot valley
• Cahors wine: strong and tasty, of course
• Rocamadour and Trappe d'Echourgnac cheese (I won't bring Rocamadour at Debconf as it wouldn't survive)
• rest, sleep
• McDonald's parking lot for network connectivity
• very little hacking

So, I'm now heading back home, assemble stuff and will take off for Debconf on Thursday 7th (Paris Orly to Madrid, then Buenos Aires via Air Europa: IIRC nobody from Debconf is in the same flight). "Assemble stuff" here also means collecting cheese for the now famous Debconf Cheese&Wine party. That one will be tricky to achieve as most of us are coming from quite far away and...there are only 6 French citizens who attend DC8..:-)). Anyway, I already know that my fellow Nicolas Fran ois (namely nominated as Assistance CheeseMaster recently) will bring some good stuff. I haven't decided yet what to bring. I might be influenced by my holidays, so cheeses from South-West France are highly probable. Cahors wine will be the choice (prepare yourself: that is strong stuff). At Debconf itself, we'll have a quite busy schedule. I intend to mostly work along with Felipe, Nicolas, Grisu and others on i18n.debian.net. I'll have to animate the i18n sessions for which I want to prepare some schedule instead of just "lat's gather and talk" which didn't work so well last year, IMHO. And I have that bloody keynote lecture which, BTW, could be rescheduled if I properly read debconf-discuss as, finally 9am for keynotes seems to be considered too early for the late birds at DC8...:-)... We'll see: I will certainly have something that's not very well cooked and prepared. Expect some improvisation: this year I didn't want to stress myself with a talk, slides and blahblah. Elizabeth will come back from Cahors on Saturday with the kids. She'll have a holiday week at her father's place whil ethe kids will....do their stuff at Maurepas (this is what happens when kids are grown up). We'll gather together again on Aug 18th and I go back to work on 19th. Crazy, I know but I have a very busy and full work schedule for the upcoming next 2 months. September will be a hard time to go through: Jean-Baptiste will start his "Licence Profesionnelle" in Automated and Embarked Systems. He'll do it in shared time: half-time at university for classes and half-time working in a company (which turns out to be Essilor, the world leader for progressive glasses....and the company which Elizabeth is working for). He'll stay at my sister-in-law place during the week (30km away from our place but closer from university and work). Sophie, our 18-year old daughter, will spend the year in Toulouse, to prepare the admission in a Social Workers school. She'll have her own apartment, in the very center of the city, 20 meters away from Place du Capitole. Annoying, isn't it ? :-) So, we'll mostly stay with our "little" Magali, our 16 y.o. who will be attending High School, on her way to Baccalaur at. Tell us about shrinking families.... Now time to work on some slides for the Debconf keynote. Damn.

This past weekend, I took my Canon EF 24-105mm f/4L lens to take some indoor pictures. I had been using it previously to take outdoor pictures, and had used my polarizer, and left it on the lens when I was done. So this weekend, I tried taking it off, and couldn’t. That’s the first time this had happened to me. I wasn’t sure what to do. Fortunately for me, before I did anything too extreme, Adam suggested I get a filter wrench. So I headed over to Wolf Camera to get one. Wolf didn’t have one, so I asked where I could get one, and they suggested someone else who also didn’t have one, but they suggested Keeble & Shuchat Photography, who I had been to before. They did have wrenches, but not in the size that I needed. They suggested I just bring the lens to their repair department, which I did. Fifteen minutes later, the filter still wasn’t off the lens, and they had given up. My lens is now on its way to Canon USA for a repair, and hopefully I’ll get both parts back, separated, and in usable condition. They estimated the cost would be somewhere between two and three hundred dollars. I guess that’s what happens when a lens that costs $1000 and a filter that costs $100 decide to misbehave in tandem. And I was hoping the repair would be a simple $5 filter wrench!

Hi, it’s that time again: new alpha version of Adept hits the block. For the unaware, Adept is an APT front-end for KDE. You can do all the cool stuff with it that the other kids can’t. Join the fun! New features since Alpha 5 (the list is a little less staggering than the last time, sorry about that, but it’s only been a week)

• Tags are back! Enhance your searches with tags. Very cloudy, very buzzword-compliant, so very web two-oh. It actually works, too! (No irony intended. Maybe…)
• Status-based filtering,
• improved search in installer,
• much better error handling for dpkg and download errors,
• lost icons are back and a load of other bugfixes.

Where to get I have again prepared binary packages, this time even more of them (a Hardy backport is included). Traditionally, in Debian, you can install alpha 6 from experimental:

apt-get install -t experimental adept

The sources.list goes:

deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian experimental main

If you are on Kubuntu Intrepid, the line is:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/mornfall/ubuntu intrepid main

and finally, on Kubuntu Hardy, the lines are (BUT: read below!)

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/kubuntu-members-kde4/ubuntu hardy main
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/mornfall/ubuntu hardy main

Big fat warning: Due to somewhat unexpected difficulties, Adept requires newer APT than available in Hardy. This means, adding the above sources.list lines will upgrade your apt to a version from Intrepid, that’s also completely untested on anything resembling a Hardy installation. Be wary. Moreover, installing Adept means means KDE 4.1 for Hardy users. (This does not apply to Intrepid users, they are already on the cutting edge and no extra dangers lie this way.) (For all Kubuntu users, there are more instructions to be found on https://launchpad.net/~mornfall/+archive.) Heroes of Alpha 6 I hereby nominate the “Heroes of Alpha 6”, for their deeds that helped Adept move forward:

• Yuriy Kozlov, for early pre-release testing and numerous patch contributions throughout the 3.0 alpha series
• Jonathan Thomas (JontheEchidna), for discovering two bugs:
  • failed downloads resulted in a cryptic internal errors
  • an installer crash when using the search
• Samuel James Sarette (lunarcloud), for discovering that you could start apply changes twice in a row, by switching back to changes and hitting apply again (not surprisingly screwing up Adept)
• and finally, Jonathan Riddell, as there’d be no 3.0 alpha series without him…

(And a totally flirtless wink towards Blauzahl, who somehow inspired me to actually do some bugzilla sorting…) And now, it’s easy to join the ranks of these heroes — just test the new alpha version and find bugs. Immortality won’t escape your grasp. Also, please don’t forget to read the next section. Jobs for Alpha 6 Sorting through Launchpad for bugs that have been fixed in alpha 6 (compared to 2.1) would be really awesome. It is a big list and many of them are likely to need testing. (I can take care of that for the KDE bugzilla, but launchpad is a task just too daunting for me and my time possibilities, so help would be very much appreciated). Notifier is still not included. The components to test are (if you have sudo, kdesu for the rest):

sudo adept
sudo adept installer
sudo adept updater

Please give a go to all of them, report rough edges, crashes and all that, either through IRC (mornfall at freenode, oftc) or mail me-at-mornfall-dot-net or use KDE Bugzilla. Known Issues

• Sometimes, it seems that the installer search manages to break the layout. Change the search text and try again, it might fix itself. If you find a way to reproduce, please let me know!
• The installer search is still a little wonky at times (and maybe slow, dunno). And when there are no results, it keeps whatever groups there were before, they are just all empty. Oops.
• Icons fail to load on Kubuntu Hardy.
• Search seems to crash Adept just after installation on Hardy (could be related to xapian database update). Starting it again seems to help though. UPDATE: this does happen on other distributions as well. You run into the problem if you don’t have apt-xapian-index installed, you install it together with adept and then run adept right away. Then you get a crash on first search. Just restart adept and all should work just fine.
• UPDATE: When recovery fails, Adept will crash instead of reporting the error and closing gracefully. Run dpkg —configure -a.
• UPDATE: Don’t run adept through kdesudo on Kubuntu. It seems to cause mysterious issues with dpkg (and especially hal upgrades). No insight so far as to what is the problem.

Short introduction: Adept is an APT frontend for KDE. You can use it to search for packages, install, uninstall, upgrade, all the usual things. It’s gone through a number of changes since 2.1, which has been the default package manager on Kubuntu for some time now. What’s new since 2.1

• A KDE 4 application,
• mostly rewritten from scratch,
• more reliable already (in alpha) than 2.1,
• much better & more reliable handling of interactive installs (debconf, changed config files),
• fulltext search (powered by Xapian),
• all new user interface,
• faster and more responsive in about every respect.

Where to get Since compilation is still not that trivial (well, it’s 3 packages to compile and install, really, and you have to get them with darcs), I have prepared binary packages for the two main “target distributions”. In Debian, you can install alpha 5 from experimental:

apt-get install -t experimental adept

The sources.list line is:

deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian experimental main

If you are on Kubuntu Intrepid, the line is

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/mornfall/ubuntu intrepid main

(more instructions on https://launchpad.net/~mornfall/+archive) What (and how) to test All of the previous components (save for notifier, which is not included at all yet) have been merged into a single binary, that is adept. I have missed desktop files in this alpha (it might be a little on purpose too, as I’d like people to run the program from terminal to be able to check the debug output and possibly send it along with problem reports). If you have sudo (Kubuntu-ers do, the rest can use kdesu or similar):

sudo adept
sudo adept installer
sudo adept updater

are the magic commands. Please give a go to all of them, report rough edges, crashes and all that, either through irc (mornfall at freenode, oftc) or mail me-at-mornfall-dot-net or use KDE Bugzilla to report bugs. Missing features I have one outstanding issue on “must have for 3.0”, that being filtering packages according to their state. There is also no actual way to browse through the 19k+ packages, but might have to give for 3.0. A “browsing” mode is likely for 3.1, although still could make it for 3.0 if I get my act together on that one. We’ll see how alpha testing goes, maybe I’ll have hands full of bugs to fix and won’t get anywhere on features… Known Issues

• It seems that alpha5 does not play very well with the “autoremove” apt-get feature, I have that on todo, but please don’t blindly run autoremove after using alpha5.
• It seems to crash upon exit, with a “double free or corruption” error from glibc. I’ll deal with that.
• In alpha3, it used to keep running after you have closed its window. Please check that you don’t have stray adept process after exiting (I have not seen that happen in alpha5, but you never know) and if you do, please report.
• The search in installer is case-sensitive, exact substring match, against I think short description only. That needs to be addressed.

Reward For the brave, fearless testers, I unfortunately cannot promise anything else than fuzzy feeling for doing a good thing… I won’t be at aKademy nor Debconf this year, so I can’t even promise beers. Maybe next time. ; - )

I recently bought a new MSI laptop and I am really pleased with my choice so far.

Since with the previous laptop I managed to kill two of my desired features, long battery life and pretty portable, I decided is time to look really well and see what the market has to offer.

I settled on a MSI PR200WX-058EU which has the following:

• built on a Centrino platform
• Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU T8300 @ 2.40GHz
  
• Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 4965 AG or AGN
• Intel mobile chipset
• 3GB of memory (yes, I would have enjoyed 4, but it seems the 32 bit barrier still decides hardware configurations)
• 320GB HDD
• DVD+/-RW
• Mobile GM965/GL960 Integrated Graphics Controller
• 12" wide screen (1280x800)
• 1 Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168B PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet
• 8 cell battery by default (long battery life)
  
• 1 USB 2.0 Camera - uses luvc driver
• bluetooth
• 1 card reader
• 3 USB port, 1 HDMI, 1 D-sub 15 connector, 1 PCI Express port, modem port
• fingerprint reader
• an advertised weight of 1.8kg (I weighted it at 2.1kg with the 8 cell battery)
  

In other words a small and mobile powerhouse for which I payed 3800 RON (approx. 1100 ). I'd say not too bad at all.

Thanks to Gon ri Le Bouder and some searches on the internet I concluded that
the brand is not bad at all, and now that I have it I really am sure.

Of course, I installed Debian Lenny on it (I also sent an installation report), and, in spite of the initial problems, I managed to make the laptop work pretty nice, but I am especially excited about the webcam, which works with the linux-uvc driver.


There were some issues, but I managed to fix some them while I have been ignoring some other. The LaptopTestingTeam page for MSI PR200 on the ubuntu wiki was very helpful.
What have I been ignoring?

• it seems that from time to time the battery charge status isincorrect, or acpi report that the AC is plugged in
• headphones don't automatically turn off the speakers
• fingerprint reader is not used yet, but I intent to experiment at some point with it (authentication via the fingerprint would be cool)
  
• the keyboard seems a little bit too hard (but I hope it will loose up with time)
• modem isn't probably working, but I don't think I'll ever try
• there are some issues in gnome-power-manager which cause strange behaviour and grief wrt screen brighness
• sleep doesn't work,but hibernation does
  

What would you do if I'd tell you that the battery lasts 4 hours or even more while the wlan is on and working (browsing and stuff like installing new packages, configs) with the brightness set to minimum?


I am really excited about this and I can say that I think I have found my next generation laptop, so if you're thinking of a cheap mobile powerhouse on which Linux must run, this laptop might be for you.

I find the following to be selling points (for a Linux buyer or others):

• comes with FreeDOS, so no extra money for an OS you don't use
  
• wifi works
• webcam works with luvc
• no big problems during install (the most severe are already fixed)
• long battery life, even when using wifi (4+ hours in browsing+some package installation mode, according to my tests)
• light enough to carry around easily (2.1kg, 2.4kg with charger)
• nice design - some people asked me if I bought a MacBook
• 4 state kill switch for all possible combinations for wifi/bluetooth
• hibernate works with 2.6.24 or newer (sleep doesn't, but I will try a few things later)
  
• there's no mechanical latch for the lid, there is a magnet, so there's no plastic to be broken, the laptop is more robust
• the 8 cell battery is thicker than the regular one, allowing better ventilation
• it seems it doesn't get too hot to put on my lap (still, I am a little afraid of blocking its ventilation due to the fabric of my clothes, so I'll probably try to carry around a hard paperboard or something like that)
• the big resolution 1280x800 (for this screen size) seems to partly compensate for the reduced physical size of the screen (12")
• bright screen

So, thanks again to Gon ri, Debian Installer team, LVM2 maintainers, Ubuntu Laptop Testing team, linux uvc developers, Lilo developers and maintainers, all the nice people who made and still make Debian possible.

One thing that seems overlooked by most people who discuss productive work habits is the varying mental capacity for performing different types of work. While it’s well known that alcohol and other substances decrease mental ability and it’s slightly less well known that sleep deprivation has a similar affect to being drunk [1], the reference cites the case of medical residents - the effects of sleep deprivation can affect people with medical training who presumably are better qualified to recognise and mitigate such problems than most people. Previously I wrote about increasing efficiency through less work [2], which was mainly based on the total number of hours worked in a week - with some mention of extreme fatigue. However it seems obvious that things aren’t that simple. The ability to perform work can be reduced due to temporary issues, poor sleep the previous night (not the same as sleep deprivation but enough to decrease performance), general health (I find that having a cold really reduces the quality and quantity of my work), and physical state (skipping a meal due to being busy can lead to lower quality work). For the work I do (system programming and system/network administration) there are a range of tasks that I need to perform, which require different levels of skill. Now when I have several tasks that need to be done it makes sense to do the most demanding task that I can do well. The problem is in assessing my own ability to perform such tasks, while I can have a general idea of how alert I feel, it seems likely that self assessment by subjective criteria will decrease in accuracy at least as fast as my ability to perform the work in question. So having an ability to assess my mental capacity at any time seems useful in determining when to work on the hard tasks, when to work on easy tasks, and when to just give up and go to bed! ;) Fortunately I have found a benchmark that seems to give reasonable results. I have found that I can reliably solve the game Codebreaker (based on the board game Mastermind [3]) on the Familiar distribution of Linux running on my iPaQ in under 30 seconds when I’m fully alert. So far my tests have indicated that when I seem less alert (due to finding tasks difficult which should be easy or making mistakes) the amount of time taken to complete the game increases (my worst day was when I couldn’t complete it in under a minute). It seems likely that someone who is doing intellectual work could take one day off work a week without a great decrease in productivity if it was their least productive day. If there was a factor of three difference in productivity between the best and worst days then skipping the worst day might decrease productivity by 10% if the 8 hours in question were used doing something as demanding as working. If what might have been the least productive day had been spent relaxing followed by going to sleep earlier than usual then it doesn’t seem impossible for productivity to be increased enough on the next day to provide a net benefit. One thing I plan to do from now on is to use Codebreaker to help me determine when I should cease work in the evening. If I take more than a minute to complete it (or have difficulty in solving it) then it’s probably best to finish work for the day.

• [1] http://www.marketwatch.com/News/Story/Story.aspx?guid=%7B00065B6D-36F9-44C0-AEC9-8E4FF76151DA%7D&siteid=google&print=true&dist=printMidSection


• [2] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2007/11/02/increasing-efficiency-through-less-work/


• [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastermind_(board_game)

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Running the Galician debconf template translation as an one-man show has an obvious problem: translations don’t get reviewed. Being only one, I would only catch typos, and the odd thinko, which is not very useful. The real use of reviews is to see if the grammar is sound, see if the translation sounds natural or forced, etc., and it has to be someone else who does it. If I review my own translations, of course they’ll be perfect. When someone else picks those translations up after I stop doing them, it would be useful to make a full review. Fortunately, I’ve been keeping a compendium of (almost) all debconf template translations, so doing the review is as simple as downloading that single file and reading it. I’d recommend that one single person read the full document and makes notes of grammatical/orthographic mistakes, common patterns, vocabulary choices, etc., and then those notes should be used to go through the compendium again and fix and update everything. The result would be useful for two things: First, it is a very big collection of examples you can point people to when they don’t know what style to use to translate. So, when someone asks in the mailing list about the best way to translate Couldn’t create temporary file , you can search for similar sentences, see how they were translated and suggest the same solution. Second, you can use that compendium to apply the results of the review to all translated packages very quickly. The idea is to regenerate the .PO file from the compendium. You can do it actively (see what packages have had their debconf templates translated into Galician, download .POT files, apply compendium, upload .PO files) or reactively (when you have to update a .PO file, download the .POT instead and apply the compendium, then update the resulting .PO file).

Michael Janke has written an interesting article about data flows in networks [1], he describes how data from the Internet should be considered to have low integrity (he refers to it as “untrusted”) and that as you get closer to the more important parts of the system it needs to be of higher integrity. It seems to me that his ideas are very similar in concept to the Biba Integrity Model [2]. The Biba model is based around the idea that a process can only write data to a resource that is of equal or lower integrity and only read data from a resource that is of equal or higher integrity, this is often summarised as “no read-down and no write-up“. In a full implementation of Biba the OS would label all data (including network data) as to it’s integrity level and prevent any communication that violates the model (except of course for certain privileged programs - for example the file or database that stores user passwords must have high integrity but any user can run the program to change their password). A full Biba implementation would not work for a typical Internet service, but considering some of the concepts of Biba while designing an Internet service should lead to a much better design (as demonstrated in Michael’s post). While considering the application of Biba to network design it makes sense to also consider consider the Bell LaPadula model (BLP) [3]. In computer systems designed for military use a combination of Biba and BLP is not uncommon, while a strict combination of those technologies would be an almost insurmountable obstacle to development of Internet services I think it’s worth considering the concepts. BLP is a system that is primarily designed around the goal of protecting data confidentiality. Every process (subject) has a sensitivity label (often called a “clearance”) which is comprised of a sensitivity level and a set of categories and every resource that a process might access (object) also has a sensitivity label (often called a “classification”). If the clearance of the subject dominates the classification of the object (IE the level is equal or greater and the set of categories is a super-set) then read access is permitted, if the clearance of the subject is dominated by the classification of the object then write access is permitted, and the clearance and classification have to be equal for read/write access to be permitted. This is often summarised as “no write-down and no read-up“. SGI has published a lot of documentation for their Trusted Irix (TRIX) product on the net, the section about mandatory access control covers Biba and BBLP [4]. I recommend that most people who read my blog not read the description of how Biba and BLP works, it will just give you nightmares. The complexity of either Biba or BLP (including categories) is probably too great for consideration when designing network services which have much lower confidentiality requirements (even the loss of a few million credit card numbers is trivial compared to some of the potential results of leaks of confidential military data). But a simpler case of BLP with only levels is worth considering. You might have credit card numbers stored in a database classified as “Top Secret” and not allow less privileged processes to read from it. The data about customers addresses and phone numbers might be classified as “Secret” and all the other data might merely be “Classified”. One way of using the concepts of Biba and BLP in the design of a complex system would be to label every process and data store in the system according to it’s integrity and classification/clearance. Then for the situations where data flows to processes with lower clearance the code could be well designed and audited to ensure that it does not leak data. For situations where data of low integrity (EG data from a web browser) is received by a process of high integrity (EG the login screen) the code would have to be designed and audited to ensure that it correctly parsed the data and didn’t allow SQL injection or other potential attacks. I expect that many people who have experience with Biba and BLP will be rolling their eyes while reading this. The situation that we are dealing with in regard to PHP and SQL attacks over the Internet is quite different to the environments where proper implementations of Biba and BLP are deployed. We need to do what we can to try and improve things, and I think that the best way of improving things in terms of web application security would involve thinking about clearance and integrity as separate issues in the design phase.

• [1] http://lastinfirstout.blogspot.com/2008/07/presumed-hostile-your-application-is.html


• [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biba_Integrity_Model


• [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell-LaPadula_model


• [4] http://techpubs.sgi.com/library/tpl/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?coll=0650&db=bks&fname=/SGI_EndUser/books/TCMW_UG/sgi_html/ch02.html

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Well, tomorrow will be one week since my last of the prescription drugs, and the last Tylenol I had was on Tuesday. I think I'm finally free of these damned things.

It's worth noting that these bottles aren't all empty, but this doesn't include the ones given to me in the hospital, the various stomach things I had to take so that the steroids didn't hurt me, and the various bottles of Tylenol that I lost from being such a basket case (Everyone, especially Angie, has been so patient with me with the mood swings, the memory holes, etc. Thank-you so much!) Based on this, I'm assuming that the count probably evens out. I totalled the number of pills in these bottles: 1333.

I've heard that there's an org, "Doctors Without Borders" to which I can donate the ones that I will definitely not need again, like the steroids and such. I'll hunt them down soon.

Next update: Tuesday. I get to see the surgeon again and my movement restrictions are expected to be lifted. That means the only other visit is to the oncologist who *still* after 5 months can't manage to schedule an appointment with me. They're the ones who finally phoned a week ago to schedule one. I wanted to check with my surgeon on something, and when I went to phone them back, their call display number isn't valid. They were supposed to phone me back anyway, but I also asked my surgeon's practice coordinator to arrange it for me. Still nothing. *sigh* I'm going to take the opportunity at the hospital to go talk to them in person to see if I can get things moving. We're still at the stage where noone expects anything, but they want the tests to make sure that's actually the case.

Still, I'm excited to be this far. It's nice to finally feel like I'm thinking somewhat more clearly now.

On Thursday my new InterNode ADSL2+ service was connected [1]. I needed to get a connection with a larger download cap and a better upload speed because one of my clients wants me to transfer some significant amounts of data as well as hosting some Xen DomU’s for him. Strangely InterNode couldn’t offer a regular ADSL service but could offer Naked DSL (which means DSL without a phone service on the same pair of wires). So I now have Naked ADSL 2+[2] although unfortunately the line speed is reported as being 8263/814 Kbps - ADSL2 speed. For the moment this will do, but I’ll investigate the possibility of improving this eventually. Another strange thing about this is that Optus is the carrier for the ADSL line, Telstra is the monopoly telco with the vast majority of local-loop copper pairs so it’s surprising that I end up with Optus owning my copper - the wires in question were used by the previous owner of my house for a Telstra connection! On Friday I converted my network to using the new ADSL link and on Saturday I got my SE Linux Play Machine online again [3]. I could have managed the transition without ~20 hours of down-time for the Play Machine, but as I only get a few logins per day it didn’t seem to be worth the effort of rushing it. Also on Friday I got a new 3G modem from Three [4]. They advertise that the USB or PC-Card modem will cost $5 per month on a 24 month plan, but when I ordered it I discovered that as I have an existing mobile phone plan with them the $5 per month is waived. So all that I have to pay is $15 per month for a 1GB data allowance (which is about the best deal available). A client is paying for this so that I can provide remote support for his network. I had previously written about my search for an ideal mobile SSH client [5], I ended up getting an EeePC 701 which cost $300, an 8G SD card and 8G USB stick (for expanding the internal storage and for moving files around respectively) which cost $83, and now $15 per month over 24 months for net access. That gives a total of $743 for two years of mobile net access. This compares well to the $960 that an iPhone would cost over two years and provides a lot more utility (while admittedly not fitting into a pocket). Dave Hall [6] gave me a lot of great advice about selecting and using 3G modems. He recommended that I get the E220 modem as it’s easy to configure (mine was easy on Debian/Lenny but didn’t work with a Debian/Etch kernel as the necessary driver was not available). Three also sells another model the E169G which is apparently tricky to set up. There was one mistake made in the design of the E220, the cable is installed in such a way that the LED which indicates connection status is going to be face-down when connected to almost any laptop which has horizontally mounted USB ports (which includes all the thinner ones). Here is the PPP chatscript for use with an E220 modem (suggested file name /etc/chatscripts/three):

ABORT 'BUSY'
ABORT 'NO CARRIER'
ABORT 'ERROR'
'' AT
OK ATQ0V1E1S0=0&C1&D2+FCLASS=0
OK 'AT+COPS=0,0,"3TELSTRA",2'
OK AT+CGATT=1
OK AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","3netaccess"
OK ATDT*99**3# Here is the ppp configuration file which references the above chatscript:
/dev/ttyUSB0
230400
noauth
defaultroute
usepeerdns connect "/usr/sbin/chat -v -f /etc/chatscripts/three"

• [1] http://www.internode.on.net/


• [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adsl2+


• [3] http://www.coker.com.au/selinux/play.html


• [4] http://www.three.com.au/


• [5] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2008/07/16/mobile-ssh-client/


• [6] http://davehall.com.au/

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Steven Levitt gave an interesting talk for TED about the economics of a crack-dealing gang [1]. He makes some interesting comparisons with the way that corporations work. Top 10 strangest terrorism patents [2]. Items 1 and 4 have been implemented many years ago, item 5 was probably implemented by the CIA decades ago (they did many similar things), item 7 will probably kill a significant portion of the passengers (bummer if it goes off accidentally), item 8 has the same problem but will only target nervous people (calm terrorists can do what they want), and the creator of item 9 doesn’t seem to have much idea about how much energy is contained by high explosive. Supporters of Barack Obama are adopting Hussein as their middle-name to support him and oppose some of the unreasonable claims from extremists [3]. I’m not planning to call myself Russell Hussein Coker. Chris Samuel summarises the latest CSIRO report about droughts caused by climate change [4]. He notes that most simulations are based on lower levels of CO2 than we are expecting… Interesting article in the Guardian about car use in the US [5]. It suggests that soon suburbs will be slums occupied by the poor an unemployed and inner city areas will experience a revival. Recently I’ve been putting the papers I’ve presented at conferences online on my documents blog (see this link for the “papers” category) [6]. The papers are almost unchanged from when I published them, I fixed up some broken URLs and made some notes on relevant things that have happened since publication but made no essential changes to the text. Linux.com article about Bonnie++ [7]. It’s well written and covers most of the features quite well. An unfortunate omission is the fact that if you want to run Bonnie++ from the root account you can specify “-u user” on the command-line to run the test as a different user, or you can use “-u root” if you REALLY want to run it as root. A Linux.com article with the source code for a Perl script to create charts from Bonnie++ results [8]. I had always planned that other people would write programs like this, I’m glad to see someone finally publish the source to one!

• [1] http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/29


• [2] http://www.neatorama.com/2008/06/27/top-10-strangest-anti-terrorism-patents/


• [3] http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/29/us/politics/29hussein.html


• [4] http://www.csamuel.org/2008/07/06/csiro-bom-report-drought-exceptional-circumstances-not


• [5] http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/jul/06/travelandtransport.usa?gusrc=rss&feed=networkfront


• [6] http://doc.coker.com.au/category/papers/


• [7] http://www.linux.com/feature/139742


• [8] http://www.linux.com/feature/139743

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Well that certainly wasn't worth the amount of angst I'd pre-allocated it. The upgrade went reasonably smoothly. Lowlights included:

• aptitude wanting to uninstall sendmail in favour of exim4. I think mailman was the culprit. I wasn't in the mood to get to the bottom of it, I just upgraded Sendmail first, then stuck it on hold, the Aptitude decided to upgrade Mailman as well, which is what makes me think it was Mailman
• inetd coming back from the dead. I probably removed all of the rcN.d links instead of just the start ones.
• gallery got upgraded on me despite it being on hold, so I had to scramble to repatch it afterwards to reenable friends.andrew.net.au

I'm certainly glad to be getting security updates again. Given how smoothly this went, I'll definitely not procrastinate on upgrading to Lenny when it releases.

Sometimes things like these happen. Noone really did expect it, but it did: blosxom Version 2.1 got released by the new Upstream Team. It does incorporate all previous Debian patches which I'm quite happy about, and contains other long standing and needed fixes and changes. Though, there is also a tiny drawback in that, especially for the Debian package: some of the changes might not be totally approved by all the users of the Debian package. This is unfortunate, but it had to be done to get the package finally yet in a cleaner state (maybe you remember the cleanup run when I originally took over the package). Please be sure to read the NEWS.Debian entry (apt-listchanges might help here) about the most important changes, one of them might even mean that upgrades to this package will flood planets. This is extremely unfortunate but for getting things clean unavoidable:

blosxom (2.1.0-1) unstable; urgency=low
  * This update is a major switch, all local patches have been incorporated
    into upstream version again. Furthermore, html and rss flavours are now
    included in the blosxom script directly and the old 1993 and index
    flavours are not included anymore, to get rid of some further historical
    annoyances with the packaging.
  * MOST IMPORTANTLY: This update adds a new tag into rss feeds:
    <guid isPermanentLink="true"> which helps to notice duplicates and not let
    them appear again on planets. Though, for the time of switching it might
    mean that your last entries might appear as new when planet doesn't check
    <link> (which already should be cached) when finding <guid>. This is
    unfortunate but not really avoidable. To limit impact a new plugin was
    added: 00RssLimit which turns the syndicated feed in only pick up the last
    5 entries.
  * The plugin timezone got disabled and gets only installed into a new
    /etc/blosxom/plugins-available directory which is the first step to the
    planned blosxom-plugins package. If you found it useful and made use of it
    just symlink it from the plugins directory.
 -- Gerfried Fuchs <rhonda@debian.at>  Fri, 25 Jul 2008 16:19:49 +0200

Technically it means you might want to tweak the included 00RssLimit plugin to even just 1 until you blogged some more and raise it with time if your blog runs through some planet. If you do the upgrade, did set 00RssLimit to 1 and do not reappear with your last entry on your planet sites feel free to switch it back. Again, this is an unfortunate situation, and it's not really related to the Debian package only–the addition of the <guid> tag happened upstream and will affect all users of blosxom. It's just that I added the selfwritten 00RssLimit plugin to reduce the impact for the Debian users. Hope you don't mind. ;) Ah yes, and if you might ask where the package is: I did put it into my website for now so people have some time to stumble upon this blog entry before they install the package from unstable without prior notice and maybe not even using apt-listchanges. I will upload the package within the next day.

Last summer we tried to organise a Cinema d'estiu movie projections in Benimaclet's Church Square, in an attempt to promote social activities in the street done by the neighbours, for the neighbours. The response was very positive, and the first two projections attracted many people, who would bring a chair and their dinner to the old town's square to watch a movie. Unfortunately, the authorities, who were completely out of the loop, weren't happy and on the 3^rd week the Local police appeared and said that that kind of activities needed official permits, and disallowed the projection. For this year's summer, we decided we'd try to do the projections once again, and learned that only a legally-established organisation can do the paperwork to get an authorisation. In parallel, some neighbours of Benimaclet, who had liked last year's idea, were working on their own to repeat the experience, and somehow Clara was contacted by them, and we ended up collaborating. As these people are members of the Associaci de ve ns of Benimaclet, there were legally able to do the paperwork, and soon we agreed on the four movies for this year, to be played every Sunday of July at 22:00h. Our pick for Sunday 6^th was Giuseppe Tornatore's Cinema Paradiso, followed on the 13^th by Elling, a Norwegian comical drama by Petter N ss which I hadn't seen and I can totally recommend. Last week we saw Poniente, a Spanish film by Chus Guti rrez that focus on immigration issues in the South East of Spain, based on the racist happenings of El Ejido of 2000. Finally, next Sunday is the turn for some political action with V for Vendetta. A note for Benimaclet neighbours: if you don't come to see the movie, be aware that we plan to pump up the volume a lot for this one. You're definitely going to hear it from home. ;) We're very happy about the response of the neighbours this year. Not having done any effort to announce this around the city, except for a few posters around Benimaclet during the last week of June, people clearly remembered last year's experience and the pla a de Beni was full of chairs for all three weekends. It really helps to turn around during a projection and see so many people behind you participating in something you've invested some of your own time and money. It's probably too late now, but there's some talk of extending this to the Sundays in August, so we'll see. Also, we plan to do a picaeta for attendees as a small closing party for this year's cycle. See you on Sunday, and enjoy V!

One of the most significant tasks performed by a SE Linux system is loading the “policy“. The policy is the set of rules which determine what actions are permitted by each domain. When I first started using SE Linux (in 2001) the kernel knew where to find the policy file and would just read the data from disk as soon as it had mounted the root filesystem. Doing such things is generally considered to be a bad idea, but it was an acceptable mechanism for an early release. One issue is that the policy needs to be loaded very early in the system boot process, before anything significant happens. In the early days the design of SE Linux had no support for a process to change it’s security context other than by executing another process (similar to the way a non-root process in the Unix access control system can not change it’s UID, GID, or groups). Although later on support for this was added, it was only available as the request of the application (an external process could not change the context of an application without using ptrace - a concept that is too horrible to contemplate) and I am not aware of anyone actually using it. So it’s almost a requirement that there be no more than one active process in the system at the time that policy is loaded, therefore it must be init or something before init that loads the policy. When it was decided that a user-space program had to instruct the kernel to load the policy we had to determine which program should do it and when it should be done, with the constraint that it had to be done early. The most obvious solution to this problem was to load the policy in the initramfs (or initrd as it was known at the time). One problem with this is that the initramfs is limited in size by kernel compilation options and may need to be recompiled to fit a bigger policy. As an experiment to work around this limitation I had a small policy (which covered the domains for init and the scripts needed for the early stages for system boot) loaded in the initramfs and then later in the boot process (some time after the root filesystem was mounted read/write) the full policy was loaded. A more serious problem with including policy in the initramfs was that it required rebuilding the initramfs every time the policy changed in a significant way, of course scripts could not determine when a change was significant (neither could most users) so that required needless rebuilds (which wastes time). Even with a small policy for early booting loaded it was still sometimes necessary to change it and update the initramfs. I believe that as a general rule an initramfs should only be rebuilt when a new kernel is installed or when a radical change is made to the boot process (EG moving from single disk to software RAID, changing between AMD and Intel CPU architecture, changing SCSI controller, or anything else that would make the old initramfs not boot the machine). The initramfs that was used to boot my machine is known to actually work, the same can not be said for any new initramfs that I might generate. But the deciding factor for me was support of machines that did not use an initramfs or initrd (such as the Cobalt machines [1] I own). To solve these problems I first experimented with a wrapper for init. The idea was to divert the real init to another file name (or use the init= kernel command-line option) and then have the wrapper load the policy before running the real init. I never intended that to be a real solution, just to demonstrate a point. Once I had proven that it was possible to load the policy from user-space before running the real init program it was a small step to patch init to do this. One slightly tricky aspect of this was in getting the correct security context for init. The policy has always been written to allow a domain transition from kernel_t to init_t when a file of type init_exec_t is executed. The domain kernel_t is applied to all active processes (including kernel threads) at the time the policy is loaded. So init only has to re-exec itself to get the correct context. Fortunately init is designed to do this in the case of an upgrade so this was easy to manage. Since that time every implementation of SE Linux apart from some embedded systems has used init to load the policy. The latest trend in Linux distributions seems to be using upstart [2] as a replacement for the old SysV Init. The Fedora developers decided to make nash (a program that comes from the mkinitrd source tree in Fedora and is a utility program for a Red Hat based initramfs) load the SE Linux policy as it would apparently be painful to patch every init to load the policy. As far as I am aware there are only three different init programs in common use in Linux, the old SysV Init (which used to be used by everyone), Busybox (for rescuing broken systems and for embedded systems), and now Upstart (used by Ubuntu and Red Hat since Fedora 9). Embedded systems need to work differently to other systems in many ways (having the one Busybox program supply the equivalent to most coreutils in one binary is actually a small difference compared to the other things), and modifying the policy load process for embedded systems is trivial compared to all the other SE Linux work needed to get an embedded system working well. There are at least two commonly used initramfs systems (the Debian and Red Hat ones) and probably others. As one init system (SysV Init) already has SE Linux support it seems that only one needs to be patched to have complete coverage. I’ve just written a patch for Upstart (based on the version in Debian/Experimental) and sent it to an Ubuntu developer who’s interested in such things. I also volunteer to patch any other init system that is included in Debian (I am aware of minit and will patch it as soon as it’s description does not include “this package is experimental and not easy to install and use“). It seems to me that repeating the work which was done for SysV Init and upstart for any other init system will be little effort, at worst no greater than patching an initramfs systems (and I’ll do it). As the number of initramfs systems that would need to be patched would exceed the number of init systems it seems that less work is involved in patching the init systems. The amount of RAM required by the initramfs is in some situations a limitation on the use of a system, when I recently did some tests on swap performance by reducing the amount of RAM available to a Xen DomU [3] it was the initramfs that limited how small I could go. So adding extra code to the initramfs is not desired. While this will be a small amount of code in some situations (when I patched /sbin/init from Upstart it took an extra 64 bytes of disk space on AMD64), dragging in the libraries can take a moderate amount of space (the fact that an LVM or encrypted root filesystem causes SE Linux libraries to be included in the initramfs is something that I consider to be a bug and plan to fix). Finally not all boot loaders support an initrd or initramfs. I believe that any decision which prevents using such sweet hardware as Cobalt Qube and Raq machines from being used with SE Linux is a mistake. I have both Qube and Raq machines running fine with Debian SE Linux and plan to continue making sure that Debian will support SE Linux on such hardware (and anything with similar features and limitations).

• [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt_Networks


• [2] http://upstart.ubuntu.com/


• [3] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2008/05/22/xen-and-swap/

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Today is our third wedding anniversary. We're marking the occasion by having a night at the Tickle Pink Inn, which I can vouch for as being very nice indeed. Unfortunately I ended up on-call this week, so my day off tomorrow isn't going to be as idyllic as it could have been. It's hard to believe we've only been married three years. I think we've already been through more than a lot of married couples would have to go through in a lifetime. Here's to at least another 50 years.

Dear lazyweb, I'm craving for one of these niceties. But unfortunately in Argentina they are very expensive and not easy to find (I think there's not any 'legal' channel to buy them currently). So, anyone coming to DebConf from the States would be so kind as to bring me one of these? They are small (72 128 14 mm) and lightweight (226 grams), and aren't so expensive as to be a big risk; I can buy it from here so you don't even have to lend the money for the time being. So if you want to help make a DebConf organiser happy, you know how :-). I can bribe in the form of a nice bbq at home, or a dinner at some restaurant. Tags: Planet Debian

Here I am writing today to tell something that might not be known outside Brazil at least, I haven t read much in English about it the attempt to turn the Internet into a government surveillance device. This story goes back to 2006 (and even back), when we first successfully blocked the approval of a bill that would, in effect, turn the Brazilian Internet into a giant Big Brother. This bill was introduced by Senator Eduardo Azeredo as a replacement to a series of other similar bills that were attempted before and was followed by a strong resistance by civil organizations, one of those being ASL, of which I am proud of being one of the founders. By that time we ended having it postponed for more debate. It happened that the bill made a come back last weeks, and was pushed into approval by a subcommittee of the Senate (one that was suppose to deal with the constitutionality of bills) and now is heading to the Chamber of Deputies for appreciation. Apart from the first debates back in 2006, nothing happened between then and the approval. The bill have changed a little bit, but not much as to change its effects. In Brazil, we have two legislative houses, Federal Senate and Chamber of Deputies. If a Law Project is proposed by one, is revised by the other. So we have already lost 50% of the fight. Ronaldo Lemos, professor of Funda o Get lio Vargas (think about a Brazilian version of Harvard Law School ) have already stated how dangerous such a Law can be, once approved. In his own words: The wording of the law is too broad, and can be applied in several cases. The interpretation of what is a crime or not will be done by a criminal judge, who is used to deal with homicides and not with technology . Since its approval in Senate, several people have been putting together a resistance. Central to it is a Petition, hosted at Petition Online, that already holds 64-thousand signatures. One of the writers of that petition, Andr Lemos, a university professor and researcher, have said that the regular user will have the feeling of being watched, and not knowing if what he s doing in legal or not: For instance, if I disseminate a virus without knowing, will I be arrested? Can I exchange my files in P2P networks (my pictures, my musics, my text files) without asking for permission? How will the ISPs interpretate these exchanges? Can I copy a part of a text from a blog and paste it into mine? This law creates a feeling of insecurity and generalized fear . FGV s Center for Society and Technology have published an analysis of the Law Project, and have spotted a lot of problems in it. For instance:

• Unlock a cellphone to be used in another carrier or unlock a DVD player, so it reads disks from different regions, can be a crime punished with 1 to 3 years of imprisonment and a fine, as deals article 285-A;
• Copy something from a blog that doesn t state access restrictions is turned into a crime since a blog is covered by copyright and, if not stated otherwise, those restrictions should apply, and someone that copies can be punished with the same 1 to 3 years of inprisonment and a fine, as deals article 285-B;
• Unlock the iPhone using softwares like jailbreak is turned into a crime punished with 2 to 4 years of imprisonment and a fine, as deals article 163-A. Even put a link somewhere in your site pointing to the software jailbreak is considered a crime;
• The ISP is turned into a surveillance apparatus, and is mandate to inform the authorities about any of the crimes the Law deals with, as states article 22.

Thinking of how I can help, after sending an email to every Deputy whose email address I was able to get, I decided to translate the law into English (I also uploaded a version with indentation, since it s pretty hard to understand the whole law without it, if you re not used to), so the World can be made aware of what s going on in Brazil. I also just sent an email with it to EFF, asking for their help. Not that I think they can do much, but they surely will know one or two strings to pull in order to put more pressure on the Brazilian government. I also hope that, once this post reaches Planet Debian, even more people become aware of the issue. In a sense, this is an appeal for all the Freedom Culture lovers out there to take any actions they can to help us prevent this Law Project to become a Law. (In time, I d like to thank Alexandre Oliva, who revised the translation). Update (2008-07-23 11:50): Steve Langasek also revised the translation of the Law Project and I ve made a cherry-pick merge , which resulted in the version currently linked in the text above. Older version of the plain and the indented documents are still available. Thanks Steve!

Unfortunately the free ride I've had for the last oh, gee, it must be something like four years, is coming to an end, so I have to find somewhere else to co-locate daedalus. Thanks Ben, you've saved me a packet! The first step is to figure out roughly how much traffic this thing is doing. Fortunately I've been running Argus on it for donkey's ages, so I should be able to figure that part out. Then I have to find a colo facility, (preferably in Brisbane, to avoid too much dicking about with moving the hardware), which won't charge me an arm and a leg for traffic. I'd prefer a flat monthly fee if possible. I also need to do some soul searching to decide if it's even worthwhile continuing to keep a physical server. I could move my mail to Google Apps, the photos to Picasa, but I kind of like my blog the way it is. I spent a non-trivial amount of money of daedalus about 3 years ago. It's a grunty server. It seems something of a shame to get rid of it, but I could potentially get a virtual server a lot more cheaply. The other option would be to try and generate sufficient income with it to cover its costs, but that has all sorts of tax implications, not to mention having to maintain a service level agreement. I really don't have the time or inclination to be doing all of that on the side. All stuff to think about. I have an amorphous month to move my server, so if anyone out there has suggestions on a colo provider in Brisbane, please drop me a line.