Search Results: "ron"

14 July 2012

Christian Perrier: Debconf 12 work

As already written, even though it seems, I didn't spend my time running at Debconf12. Or eating cheese... Or (tentatively) hiking volcanoes... Or helping people to kill each other with socks... Or drinking beers... Not *only* all of these (some of them at the same time, though hiking a volcano while eating cheese and drinking beers is not particularly easy)....but also some Debian work. So, I uploaded a backport of samba to squeeze backports and our squeeze users should now have the same samba version than wheezy ones. I also stopped several cronjobs on i18n.debian.net and moved some material there as links have been (or should be) moved to the brand new i18n.debian.org (and its alias l10n.debian.org). I did a major cleanup in tasksel, committed several fixes, proposed others for review (mostly to Joey Hess). All this in preparation for a soon-to-come upload, probably after D-I beta1 which has been prepared by Cyril Brulebois while he was.....not attending Debconf12.. I also followed the integration of Sorina Sandu's work on netcfg for link detection and network ESSID choice in Debian Installer. Sorina is doing well in her GSOC work, because she's clearly someone with great capabilities who we will, I hope, be able to keep contributing to Debian. We can also thank the mentoring work of Gaudenz Steinlin to guide Sorina through D-I's arcanes. I also went through the current status of debconf translation completeness in testing for the 7 languages that target 100% (Czech, German, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Russian, Swedish). Here, the point is mostly taking care that fixes are either: I can we have good chances to achieve this goal for at least 6 of these 7 languages (Czech might be more tricky as several translations are not yet made). Finally, I also did most of my regular Debian work (which usually takes 1-2 hours every day)...and bits of my paid work (sorry for those people who I shared the table at breakfast, but that was my only common time window with my team at work). So, well, quite productive weeks, once again.

Christian Perrier: DebConf running: stage 11

This morning, I ran again with No l, my longstanding Debian running friend. The goal was, this time, to explore the South-East heights of Managua. I noticed a road that seemed to be quiet enough and not requiring a too long transit through busy, noisy and bad smelling highways. So, at 06:00 we headed from the Seminole hotel to the road to Masaya (the very large highway that goes in front ofMetrocentro). We had to run along it for a bit less than 2km. Not the best thing but the road was not very busy at that time. Then, we turned right into a road heading towards a quite "classy" neighbourhood where roads are well paved, there are sidewalks, etc, etc. It was going up ALL TIME LONG, which is interesting as a start. This placed is named "Lomas de Santo Domingo" in Google Maps. We even found there the embassy of the Islamic Republic of Iran. I can tell you, the Iran ambassador is quite living in a neat place and probably very happy to be there..:-) Fromthere, a very good concrete road starts to go up and up and up and up. many many very high standard villas, with fences, guards, etc. Strangely, there were several "For Sale" signs instead of "Se Vende". So, I guess this is a sign that this place is mostly inhabited by (very rich) foreigners, diplomats, etc. This very nice road was also....climbing a lot: 180m in 3.5km, so 5.1% average, but sometimes closer to 10%! At the very end of the road, we however ended....on a fence. It's apparently guarding the final part of the road where even more fancier villas seem to be, according to the satellite view..:-). We tried to use a small path up, but had to stop quite quickly. (OK, No l is definitely blurry there....blame the tired eyes after 8.7km climbing all the way) And then, all we had to do was....going down..:-). Being both in a fairly good shape, that went quite fast. But we both agreed that the final part, above 12km/h along the highway, with the sun hitting hard, was quite a challenge. I really admire those people who happen to run long distance in places like Managua. I can't even imagine running a marathon here.... GPS trace of what finally turns out to be my longest run here as of now with 17.5km in about 1h40.

Jonathan Carter: Debconf 12 Managua, Nicaragua


It s the last day of Debconf 12 in Managua, it s the first ever Decbonf I ve attended and it has been just awesome.

There s so much I could talk about and it would take forever to put down, but here s a few highlights for me:
  • My first time in Nicaragua and also Central America! First time I ve ever seen a vulcano!
  • The Bits from the DPL talk was great, Zack pretty much hit several nails on the head of why I love the Debian project so much
  • The Debian Cheese and Wine party was off the wall, the food and the drinks were awesome and it was a lot of fun
  • I ve been attending some of the Debconf organising sessions, I was considering getting a few people together so that we could put in a bit for Sherbrooke for 2016, but then I learned that a bunch of people are already getting together to put a bid together for Montr al in 2014, so I ll get involved with that instead. Stefano and I have also been talking about a hypothetical Debconf in 2018 or 2020 in Cape Town or Stellenbosch. As much as we want a Debconf in Africa, neither of us will have time to organise a team for that in the short term. I m hoping that being involved in the Montr al bid (and hopefully an event) will give me good experience for the Cape Town one.
  • The day trip in the middle of the week was great. I just spent the whole day lying in a hammock, drinking beer and staring at the ocean. I think I needed that.
  • The Debian key signing party was good, I got my key signed by more than 20 Debian contributors this week.
  • The sessions and BoFs were great. I learned a lot about the Debian project this week and filled up a few gaps in my knowledge.
  • I got involved with the video team and played camera man for a few sessions for the live video feeds. It was surprisingly fun. I took some photos too during the week but my camera is really awful, I need to get a new one by the next Debconf.
  • The people of Nicaragua are awesome. Everyone here is so friendly and helpful, it turned
  • There s probably too much other things to mention and I ll never get a blog entry out if I even try, but thanks to everyone who made this Debconf possible, even Pollito.

13 July 2012

Matthew Garrett: Microsoft's ill-chosen magic constants

Paolo Bonzini noticed something a little awkward in the Linux kernel support code for Microsoft's HyperV virtualisation environment - specifically, that the magic constant passed through to the hypervisor was "0xB16B00B5", or, in English, "BIG BOOBS". It turns out that this isn't an exception - when the code was originally submitted it also contained "0x0B00B135". That one got removed when the Xen support code was ripped out.

At the most basic level it's just straightforward childish humour, and the use of vaguely-English strings in magic hex constants is hardly uncommon. But it's also specifically male childish humour. Puerile sniggering at breasts contributes to the continuing impression that software development is a boys club where girls aren't welcome. It's especially irritating in this case because Azure may depend on this constant, so changing it will break things.

So, full marks, Microsoft. You've managed to make the kernel more offensive to half the population and you've made it awkward for us to rectify it.

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Russell Coker: Some Proprietary Platform Issues

Android vs iPad I m currently in discussions with a client about a potential future project which involves a tablet computer talking to some electronic equipment. The options are an Android tablet and an iPad. One advantage of Android is that it runs on devices of all shapes and sizes, so we can choose a device that fits the need rather than designing everything around the iPad. But the real problem with iPad is Apple. To run an app on an iPad you need to submit it to Apple, hopefully get it accepted into the App Market, then install it. This process causes some delay, a minor fee, and has the potential to derail the project if Apple doesn t accept the app on the first try. With Android there is no need to even deal with Google, the app can be installed directly without the Google Play store. I may end up working with an iPad (which admittedly is really nice hardware), but it seems most likely that the project in question will run on Android only. Windows vs Linux and Apple OS/X One of my clients recently paid a web development company to redevelop his web site. I turned out that the web developers in question only knew how to develop for Windows and my client didn t discover this until too late. Now a site that s currently using a small fraction of the resources on a $80 per month Linode instance will run on a Windows virtual server costing $300 per month (which includes SQL server license). The Windows virtual server will probably be managed (because my client uses only Apple and Linux systems and doesn t employ anyone with Windows skills) which adds an extra $100 per month. If the server isn t managed then they will have to hire someone to apply patches and that won t necessarily be cheaper. So using Windows is going to cost my client an extra $400 per month when compared to the possibility of running a Linux system on the existing virtual server. Even if my client had someone with Windows skills to run the server it would still be an extra $300 per month. If the NBN was available then my client could run a Windows server in their office, but it s not yet available in their area. Even for a company that employs people with more Windows skills than Linux skills there are still economic factors in favor of Linux due to smaller hardware requirements and the lack of license fees for all the core software (OS, database server, web server, etc). Summary These anecdotes aren t unusual, it s the sort of thing that happens all the time. Sometimes the result is good (EG avoiding the iPad), sometimes it isn t (being stuck with a proprietary web service). I think I ll have to suggest to my clients that every contract have a no proprietary software clause. Contracts can be amended if there is a reason, but it seems best to make a preemptive strike against companies that sneak proprietary software in and cause significant unexpected expense and difficulty. Related posts:
  1. The Lenovo U1 Hybrid an example of how Proprietary OSs Suck Lenovo have announced their innovative new U1 Hybrid laptop [1]....
  2. My Prediction for the iPhone I have previously written about how I refused an offer...
  3. Liberty and Mobile Phones I own two mobile phones at the moment, I use...

Matthew Garrett: A 12pt font should look useful everywhere

In the past I used to argue that accurate desktop DPI was important, since after all otherwise you could print out a 12 point font and hold up the sheet of paper to your monitor and it would be different. I later gave up on the idea that accurate DPI measurement was generally useful to the desktop, but there's still something seductively attractive about the idea that a 12 point font should be the same everywhere, and someone recently wrote about that. Like many seductively attractive ideas it's actually just trying to drug you and steal your kidneys, so here's why it's a bad plan.

Solutions solve problems. Before we judge whether a solution is worthwhile or not, we need to examine the problem that it's solving. "My 12pt font looks different depending on the DPI of my display" isn't a statement of a problem, it's a statement of fact. How do we turn it into a problem? "My 12pt font looks different depending on which display I'm using and so it's hard to judge what it'll look like on paper" is a problem. Way back in prehistory when Apple launched the original Mac, they defined 72dpi as their desktop standard because the original screen was approximately 72dpi. Write something on a Mac, print it and hold the paper up to the monitor and the text would be the same size. This sounds great! Except that (1) this is informative only if your monitor is the same distance away as your reader will be from the paper, and (2) even in the classic Mac period of the late 80s and early 90s, Mac monitors varied between 66 and 80dpi and so this was already untrue. It turns out that this isn't a real problem. It's arguably useful for designers to be able to scale their screen contents to match a sheet of paper the same distance away, but that's still not how they'll do most of their work. And it's certainly not an argument for enforcing this on the rest of the UI.

So "It'll look different on the screen and paper" isn't really a problem, and so that's not what this is a solution for. Let's find a different problem. Here's one - "I designed a UI that works fine on 100DPI displays but is almost unusable on 200DPI displays". This problem is a much better one to solve, because it actually affects real people rather than the dying breed who have to care about what things look like when turned into ink pasted onto bits of dead tree. And it sounds kind of like designing UIs to be resolution independent would be a great solution to this. Instead of drawing a rectangle that's 100 pixels wide, let me draw one that's one inch wide. That way it'll look identical on 100dpi and 200dpi systems, and now I can celebrate with three lines of coke and wake up with $5,000 of coffee table made out of recycled cinema posters or whatever it is that designers do these days. A huge pile of money from Google will be turning up any day now.

Stop. Do not believe this.

Websites have been the new hotness for a while now, so let's apply this to them. Let's imagine a world in which the New York Times produced an electronic version in the form of a website, and let's imagine that people viewed this website on both desktops and phones. In this world the website indicates that content should be displayed in a 12pt font, and that both the desktop and phone software stacks render this to an identical size, and as such the site would look identical if the desktop's monitor and the phone were the same distance away from me.

The flaw in this should be obvious. If I'm reading something on my phone then the screen is a great deal closer to me than my desktop's monitor usually is. If the fonts are rendered identically on both then the text on my phone will seem unnecessarily large and I won't get to see as much content. I'll end up zooming out and now your UI is smaller than you expected it to be, and if your design philosophy was based on the assumption that the UI would be identical on all displays then there's probably now a bunch of interface that's too small for me to interact with. Congratulations. I hate you.

So "Let's make our fonts the same size everywhere" doesn't solve the problem, because you still need to be aware of how different devices types are used differently and ensure that your UI works on all of them. But hey, we could special case that - let's have different device classes and provide different default font sizes for each of them. We'll render in 12pt on desktops and 7pt on phones. Happy now?

Not really, because it still makes this basic assumption that people want their UI to look identical across different machines with different DPI. Some people do buy high-DPI devices because they want their fonts to look nicer, and the approach Apple have taken with the Retina Macbook Pro is clearly designed to cater to that group. But other people buy high-DPI devices because they want to be able to use smaller fonts and still have them be legible, and they'll get annoyed if all their applications just make the UI larger to compensate for their increased DPI. And let's not forget the problem of wildly differing displays on the same hardware. If I have a window displaying a 12pt font on my internal display and then drag that window to an attached projector, what size should that font be? If you say 12pt then I really hope that this is an accurate representation of your life, because I suspect most people have trouble reading a screen of 12pt text from the back of an auditorium.

That covers why I think this approach is wrong. But how about why it's dangerous? Once you start designing with the knowledge that your UI will look the same everywhere, you start enforcing that assumption in your design. 12pt text will look the same everywhere, so there's no need to support other font sizes. And just like that you've set us even further back in terms of accessibility support, because anyone who actually needs to make the text bigger only gets to do so if they also make all of your other UI elements bigger. Full marks. Dismissed.

The only problem "A 12pt font should be the same everywhere" solves is "A 12pt font isn't always the same size". The problem people assume it solves is "It's difficult to design a UI that is appropriate regardless of display DPI", and it really doesn't. Computers aren't sheets of paper, and a real solution to the DPI problem needs to be based on concepts more advanced than one dating back to the invention of the printing press. Address the problem, not your assumption of what the problem is.

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Jonathan McDowell: Revoked: 0xF1BD4BE45B430367 (1024D key)

I generated 0x94FA372B2DA8B985 (my 4096R GPG key) back in 2008, and revoked my old 1024R v3 key around the same time. However I left my main 1024D key alone, figuring I'd get round to revoking it at some point once the new one was sufficiently trusted. This probably happened some time ago, so today I have finally revoked this key: 
pub   1024D/0xF1BD4BE45B430367 1999-10-26 [revoked: 2012-07-13]
uid                            Jonathan McDowell <noodles@earth.li>
If you're not in the habit of refreshing your GPG keyring regularly now might be a good time to (gpg --refresh-keys) or at the very least pull my updated key (gpg --recv-key 0xF1BD4BE45B430367) to make sure you don't accidentally continue to use it. (If I haven't signed your key with my stronger one please do wave a fingerprint/ID at me next time we meet, and ask me for the same in return.)

12 July 2012

Christian Perrier: DebConf running: stages 8 and 9

I failed. I didn't go running the day after the Cheese and Wine party (tuesday). I wonder why...:-) Indeed, I was feeling well, but slightly tired and I woke up at 8am, which means that I would have to go out quite late, in the heat...and run while feeling tired. And something I have learnt in all my running activities is that when one feels not in shape, better not insist. This is where injuries can come. Moreover, the next day was meant to be the Day Trip, with a goal for me: climb the Cerro negro volcano as fast as I can, training with my sticks for difficult climbs, in the heat...in the perspective of future races I would like to do in French Alps, in the upcoming years (such as La Montagn'hard : I recommend watching the video). Sadly, a landslide has cut the road 2km away from the starting point and, despite my desperate attempts to still form a group of "strong people" to go there and do the extra 4km walk anyway....we later learned that the entire road to Cerro Negro is closed and we'd have no chance to go on it. That infortunate, though I hopefully have another chance in the upcoming two weeks, where I'm supposed to come back and climb the volcano with Elizabeth (but, I of course will not leave my beloved one alone on a volcano!). So, I ended up staying on the beach at Las Pe itas. And, as I explained to No l, on days where I *decided* to run, I *need* to run. It's like a drug as you'd guess. So, I went running on the beach..:-). In the early afternoon, during a very hot day (probably the best weather we ever had, which makes me even more regret "my" volcano), about 34 C, no shade...and some wind, and sand...:-) Running on the beach is not as hard as one would imagine as long as you stay at the limit of the water, where the sand is compact. Indeed, this is even good for articulations as the sand soil is of course soft and absorbs impacts. The only drawback is that this beach is quite not so flat and this is sometimes like running across a hill all time long. Anyway, I went north up to Poneloya, up to the point where a river blocks the path along the beach, then I headed back. I had originally the intent to continue south-east, past the place where we were, up to the start of Juan Venaco island. However, the face wind when comign back, as well as the very hot sun, really achieved me....and I decided it would be wiser to stop. I however couldn't resist running IN the waves, which means I now have very humid shoes (but I have two pairs of those...:-)) Today (Thursday), was a more standard run in Managua, with No l and Ralf. We once again went to the South suburbs hills. All three of us were suite tired as it seems, so we chose a quite slow pace and, still, the climb was not that easy. We went the same way I went with Ralf a few days ago, but we didn't enter the "dogs path" this time, but rather tried to continue the road south. After 4.5 km, we had however to stop because the path didn't go further and, anyway, I think it was enough for all of us..:-) The way back, we tried another way, which was not particularly touristic (close to the National Soccer Stadium....a not so impressive stadium, but soccer is not the national sport here in Nicaragua, where people are more in base-ball or boxing). Both GPS traces: See you tomorrow for yet another GPS trace..:-)

Ritesh Raj Sarraf: Reporting bugs with Apport

So yet another bug reporting tool. :-)When I prepared Apport for Debian, I wasn't sure how it will look going forward. If you look at the current one lying in experimental, it just detects your crashes and pops up in your systray. It doesn't have the mechanism to interact with BTS.So, like the title of this post says, this is the first worthy feature for Apport in the context of Debian.Apport Detail ReportNothing special here. You would have seen a similar window before if you have installed apport. What changes with this release is, that now, when you check the Send an error report to help fix this problem, it will really file a bug report on the BTS.Here's what the emailed bug report will look like: 
Package: leafnode
Version: 2.0.0.alpha20090406a-1
=============================
ProblemType: Crash
Architecture: amd64
Date: Tue Jul  3 00:08:02 2012
Dependencies:
 adduser 3.113+nmu3
 base-passwd 3.5.24
 cron 3.0pl1-123
 debconf 1.5.44
 debianutils 4.3.1
 dpkg 1.16.4.3
 gcc-4.7-base 4.7.1-2
 libbz2-1.0 1.0.6-3
 libc-bin 2.13-33
 libc6 2.13-33
 libclass-isa-perl 0.36-3
 libdb5.1 5.1.29-4
 libfile-copy-recursive-perl 0.38-1
 libgcc1 1:4.7.1-2
 libgdbm3 1.8.3-11
 liblzma5 5.1.1alpha+20120614-1
 libpam-modules 1.1.3-7.1
 libpam-modules-bin 1.1.3-7.1
 libpam-runtime 1.1.3-7.1
 libpam0g 1.1.3-7.1
 libpcre3 1:8.30-5
 libpopt0 1.16-7
 libselinux1 2.1.9-5
 libsemanage-common 2.1.6-6
 libsemanage1 2.1.6-6
 libsepol1 2.1.4-3
 libswitch-perl 2.16-2
 libustr-1.0-1 1.0.4-3
 libwrap0 7.6.q-23
 logrotate 3.8.1-4
 lsb-base 4.1+Debian7 [modified: lib/lsb/init-functions]
 multiarch-support 2.13-33
 netbase 5.0
 openbsd-inetd 0.20091229-2
 passwd 1:4.1.5.1-1
 perl 5.14.2-12
 perl-base 5.14.2-12
 perl-modules 5.14.2-12
 sensible-utils 0.0.7
 tar 1.26-4
 tcpd 7.6.q-23
 update-inetd 4.43
 zlib1g 1:1.2.7.dfsg-13
Disassembly:
 => 0x7f8e69738475 <*__GI_raise+53>:	cmp    $0xfffffffffffff000,%rax
    0x7f8e6973847b <*__GI_raise+59>:	ja     0x7f8e69738492 <*__GI_raise+82>
    0x7f8e6973847d <*__GI_raise+61>:	repz retq 
    0x7f8e6973847f <*__GI_raise+63>:	nop
    0x7f8e69738480 <*__GI_raise+64>:	test   %eax,%eax
    0x7f8e69738482 <*__GI_raise+66>:	jg     0x7f8e69738465 <*__GI_raise+37>
    0x7f8e69738484 <*__GI_raise+68>:	test   $0x7fffffff,%eax
    0x7f8e69738489 <*__GI_raise+73>:	jne    0x7f8e697384a2 <*__GI_raise+98>
    0x7f8e6973848b <*__GI_raise+75>:	mov    %esi,%eax
    0x7f8e6973848d <*__GI_raise+77>:	nopl   (%rax)
    0x7f8e69738490 <*__GI_raise+80>:	jmp    0x7f8e69738465 <*__GI_raise+37>
    0x7f8e69738492 <*__GI_raise+82>:	mov    0x34e97f(%rip),%rdx        # 0x7f8e69a86e18
    0x7f8e69738499 <*__GI_raise+89>:	neg    %eax
    0x7f8e6973849b <*__GI_raise+91>:	mov    %eax,%fs:(%rdx)
    0x7f8e6973849e <*__GI_raise+94>:	or     $0xffffffff,%eax
    0x7f8e697384a1 <*__GI_raise+97>:	retq
DistroRelease: Debian 7.0
ExecutablePath: /usr/sbin/fetchnews
ExecutableTimestamp: 1265584779
Package: leafnode 2.0.0.alpha20090406a-1
PackageArchitecture: amd64
ProcCmdline: /usr/sbin/fetchnews
ProcCwd: /
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=en_US:en
 LC_TIME=en_IN.UTF-8
 LC_MONETARY=en_IN.UTF-8
 PATH=(custom, no user)
 LC_ADDRESS=en_IN.UTF-8
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 LC_TELEPHONE=en_IN.UTF-8
 LC_NAME=en_IN.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/sh
 LC_MEASUREMENT=en_IN.UTF-8
 LC_NUMERIC=en_IN.UTF-8
 LC_PAPER=en_IN.UTF-8
ProcMaps:
 00400000-00421000 r-xp 00000000 08:06 4464934                            /usr/sbin/fetchnews
 00621000-00622000 rw-p 00021000 08:06 4464934                            /usr/sbin/fetchnews
 00622000-00623000 rw-p 00000000 00:00 0 
 00be4000-00c05000 rw-p 00000000 00:00 0                                  [heap]
 7f8e68edc000-7f8e68eef000 r-xp 00000000 08:06 1179776                    /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libresolv-2.13.so
 7f8e68eef000-7f8e690ee000 ---p 00013000 08:06 1179776                    /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libresolv-2.13.so
 7f8e690ee000-7f8e690ef000 r--p 00012000 08:06 1179776                    /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libresolv-2.13.so
 7f8e690ef000-7f8e690f0000 rw-p 00013000 08:06 1179776                    /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libresolv-2.13.so
 7f8e690f0000-7f8e690f2000 rw-p 00000000 00:00 0 
 7f8e690f2000-7f8e690f7000 r-xp 00000000 08:06 1180036                    /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libnss_dns-2.13.so
 7f8e690f7000-7f8e692f6000 ---p 00005000 08:06 1180036                    /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libnss_dns-2.13.so
 7f8e692f6000-7f8e692f7000 r--p 00004000 08:06 1180036                    /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libnss_dns-2.13.so
 7f8e692f7000-7f8e692f8000 rw-p 00005000 08:06 1180036                    /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libnss_dns-2.13.so
 7f8e692f8000-7f8e692fa000 r-xp 00000000 08:06 1183392                    /lib/libnss_mdns4_minimal.so.2
 7f8e692fa000-7f8e694f9000 ---p 00002000 08:06 1183392                    /lib/libnss_mdns4_minimal.so.2
 7f8e694f9000-7f8e694fa000 rw-p 00001000 08:06 1183392                    /lib/libnss_mdns4_minimal.so.2
 7f8e694fa000-7f8e69505000 r-xp 00000000 08:06 1180055                    /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libnss_files-2.13.so
 7f8e69505000-7f8e69704000 ---p 0000b000 08:06 1180055                    /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libnss_files-2.13.so
 7f8e69704000-7f8e69705000 r--p 0000a000 08:06 1180055                    /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libnss_files-2.13.so
 7f8e69705000-7f8e69706000 rw-p 0000b000 08:06 1180055                    /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libnss_files-2.13.so
 7f8e69706000-7f8e69883000 r-xp 00000000 08:06 1179700                    /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc-2.13.so
 7f8e69883000-7f8e69a83000 ---p 0017d000 08:06 1179700                    /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc-2.13.so
 7f8e69a83000-7f8e69a87000 r--p 0017d000 08:06 1179700                    /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc-2.13.so
 7f8e69a87000-7f8e69a88000 rw-p 00181000 08:06 1179700                    /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc-2.13.so
 7f8e69a88000-7f8e69a8d000 rw-p 00000000 00:00 0 
 7f8e69a8d000-7f8e69a95000 r-xp 00000000 08:06 1180031                    /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libcrypt-2.13.so
 7f8e69a95000-7f8e69c94000 ---p 00008000 08:06 1180031                    /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libcrypt-2.13.so
 7f8e69c94000-7f8e69c95000 r--p 00007000 08:06 1180031                    /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libcrypt-2.13.so
 7f8e69c95000-7f8e69c96000 rw-p 00008000 08:06 1180031                    /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libcrypt-2.13.so
 7f8e69c96000-7f8e69cc4000 rw-p 00000000 00:00 0 
 7f8e69cc4000-7f8e69cc6000 r-xp 00000000 08:06 1180047                    /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libdl-2.13.so
 7f8e69cc6000-7f8e69ec6000 ---p 00002000 08:06 1180047                    /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libdl-2.13.so
 7f8e69ec6000-7f8e69ec7000 r--p 00002000 08:06 1180047                    /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libdl-2.13.so
 7f8e69ec7000-7f8e69ec8000 rw-p 00003000 08:06 1180047                    /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libdl-2.13.so
 7f8e69ec8000-7f8e69ed5000 r-xp 00000000 08:06 1179893                    /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libpam.so.0.83.0
 7f8e69ed5000-7f8e6a0d4000 ---p 0000d000 08:06 1179893                    /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libpam.so.0.83.0
 7f8e6a0d4000-7f8e6a0d5000 r--p 0000c000 08:06 1179893                    /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libpam.so.0.83.0
 7f8e6a0d5000-7f8e6a0d6000 rw-p 0000d000 08:06 1179893                    /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libpam.so.0.83.0
 7f8e6a0d6000-7f8e6a112000 r-xp 00000000 08:06 1182916                    /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libpcre.so.3.13.1
 7f8e6a112000-7f8e6a312000 ---p 0003c000 08:06 1182916                    /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libpcre.so.3.13.1
 7f8e6a312000-7f8e6a313000 rw-p 0003c000 08:06 1182916                    /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libpcre.so.3.13.1
 7f8e6a313000-7f8e6a333000 r-xp 00000000 08:06 1180134                    /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/ld-2.13.so
 7f8e6a503000-7f8e6a507000 rw-p 00000000 00:00 0 
 7f8e6a530000-7f8e6a532000 rw-p 00000000 00:00 0 
 7f8e6a532000-7f8e6a533000 r--p 0001f000 08:06 1180134                    /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/ld-2.13.so
 7f8e6a533000-7f8e6a534000 rw-p 00020000 08:06 1180134                    /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/ld-2.13.so
 7f8e6a534000-7f8e6a535000 rw-p 00000000 00:00 0 
 7fffbc06e000-7fffbc08f000 rw-p 00000000 00:00 0                          [stack]
 7fffbc1ff000-7fffbc200000 r-xp 00000000 00:00 0                          [vdso]
 ffffffffff600000-ffffffffff601000 r-xp 00000000 00:00 0                  [vsyscall]
ProcStatus:
 Name:	fetchnews
 State:	S (sleeping)
 Tgid:	6872
 Pid:	6872
 PPid:	6871
 TracerPid:	0
 Uid:	9	9	9	9
 Gid:	9	9	9	9
 FDSize:	64
 Groups:	9 
 VmPeak:	   21440 kB
 VmSize:	   21276 kB
 VmLck:	       0 kB
 VmPin:	       0 kB
 VmHWM:	     984 kB
 VmRSS:	     984 kB
 VmData:	     380 kB
 VmStk:	     136 kB
 VmExe:	     132 kB
 VmLib:	    2132 kB
 VmPTE:	      64 kB
 VmSwap:	       0 kB
 Threads:	1
 SigQ:	0/23227
 SigPnd:	0000000000000000
 ShdPnd:	0000000000000000
 SigBlk:	0000000000000000
 SigIgn:	0000000000000000
 SigCgt:	0000000000000000
 CapInh:	0000000000000000
 CapPrm:	0000000000000000
 CapEff:	0000000000000000
 CapBnd:	ffffffffffffffff
 Cpus_allowed:	f
 Cpus_allowed_list:	0-3
 Mems_allowed:	00000000,00000001
 Mems_allowed_list:	0
 voluntary_ctxt_switches:	6
 nonvoluntary_ctxt_switches:	1
Registers:
 rax            0x0	0
 rbx            0x0	0
 rcx            0xffffffffffffffff	-1
 rdx            0x6	6
 rsi            0x1ad8	6872
 rdi            0x1ad8	6872
 rbp            0x0	0x0
 rsp            0x7fffbc08d4f8	0x7fffbc08d4f8
 r8             0x7f8e6a504700	140249645729536
 r9             0x6d6f642064656966	7885631562835126630
 r10            0x8	8
 r11            0x246	582
 r12            0x0	0
 r13            0x7fffbc08d920	140736348084512
 r14            0x0	0
 r15            0x0	0
 rip            0x7f8e69738475	0x7f8e69738475 <*__GI_raise+53>
 eflags         0x246	[ PF ZF IF ]
 cs             0x33	51
 ss             0x2b	43
 ds             0x0	0
 es             0x0	0
 fs             0x0	0
 gs             0x0	0
Signal: 6
SourcePackage: leafnode
Stacktrace:
 #0  0x00007f8e69738475 in *__GI_raise (sig=<optimized out>) at ../nptl/sysdeps/unix/sysv/linux/raise.c:64
         pid = <optimized out>
         selftid = <optimized out>
 #1  0x00007f8e6973b6f0 in *__GI_abort () at abort.c:92
         act =  __sigaction_handler =  sa_handler = 0x7f8e69850d3d, sa_sigaction = 0x7f8e69850d3d , sa_mask =  __val =  140736348083740, 140249634747968, 0, 0, 140736348084512, 140249631083424, 140249645738440, 0, 4294967295, 206158430232, 1, 6427272, 0, 0, 0, 0 , sa_flags = 1781664242, sa_restorer = 0x1 
         sigs =  __val =  32, 0 <repeats 15 times> 
 #2  0x0000000000416292 in ?? ()
 No symbol table info available.
 #3  0x0000000000411c80 in ?? ()
 No symbol table info available.
 #4  0x0000000000406952 in ?? ()
 No symbol table info available.
 #5  0x00007f8e69724ead in __libc_start_main (main=<optimized out>, argc=<optimized out>, ubp_av=<optimized out>, init=<optimized out>, fini=<optimized out>, rtld_fini=<optimized out>, stack_end=0x7fffbc08d918) at libc-start.c:228
         result = <optimized out>
         unwind_buf =  cancel_jmp_buf =  jmp_buf =  0, 498162418289285118, 4206480, 140736348084512, 0, 0, -498021567843461122, -435434157313288194 , mask_was_saved = 0 , priv =  pad =  0x0, 0x0, 0x418360, 0x7fffbc08d928 , data =  prev = 0x0, cleanup = 0x0, canceltype = 4293472 
         not_first_call = <optimized out>
 #6  0x0000000000402fb9 in ?? ()
 No symbol table info available.
 #7  0x00007fffbc08d918 in ?? ()
 No symbol table info available.
 #8  0x000000000000001c in ?? ()
 No symbol table info available.
 #9  0x0000000000000001 in ?? ()
 No symbol table info available.
 #10 0x00007fffbc08ee96 in ?? ()
 No symbol table info available.
 #11 0x0000000000000000 in ?? ()
 No symbol table info available.
StacktraceTop:
 ?? ()
 ?? ()
 ?? ()
 __libc_start_main (main=<optimized out>, argc=<optimized out>, ubp_av=<optimized out>, init=<optimized out>, fini=<optimized out>, rtld_fini=<optimized out>, stack_end=0x7fffbc08d918) at libc-start.c:228
 ?? ()
ThreadStacktrace:
 .
 Thread 1 (LWP 6872):
 #0  0x00007f8e69738475 in *__GI_raise (sig=<optimized out>) at ../nptl/sysdeps/unix/sysv/linux/raise.c:64
         pid = <optimized out>
         selftid = <optimized out>
 #1  0x00007f8e6973b6f0 in *__GI_abort () at abort.c:92
         act =  __sigaction_handler =  sa_handler = 0x7f8e69850d3d, sa_sigaction = 0x7f8e69850d3d , sa_mask =  __val =  140736348083740, 140249634747968, 0, 0, 140736348084512, 140249631083424, 140249645738440, 0, 4294967295, 206158430232, 1, 6427272, 0, 0, 0, 0 , sa_flags = 1781664242, sa_restorer = 0x1 
         sigs =  __val =  32, 0 <repeats 15 times> 
 #2  0x0000000000416292 in ?? ()
 No symbol table info available.
 #3  0x0000000000411c80 in ?? ()
 No symbol table info available.
 #4  0x0000000000406952 in ?? ()
 No symbol table info available.
 #5  0x00007f8e69724ead in __libc_start_main (main=<optimized out>, argc=<optimized out>, ubp_av=<optimized out>, init=<optimized out>, fini=<optimized out>, rtld_fini=<optimized out>, stack_end=0x7fffbc08d918) at libc-start.c:228
         result = <optimized out>
         unwind_buf =  cancel_jmp_buf =  jmp_buf =  0, 498162418289285118, 4206480, 140736348084512, 0, 0, -498021567843461122, -435434157313288194 , mask_was_saved = 0 , priv =  pad =  0x0, 0x0, 0x418360, 0x7fffbc08d928 , data =  prev = 0x0, cleanup = 0x0, canceltype = 4293472 
         not_first_call = <optimized out>
 #6  0x0000000000402fb9 in ?? ()
 No symbol table info available.
 #7  0x00007fffbc08d918 in ?? ()
 No symbol table info available.
 #8  0x000000000000001c in ?? ()
 No symbol table info available.
 #9  0x0000000000000001 in ?? ()
 No symbol table info available.
 #10 0x00007fffbc08ee96 in ?? ()
 No symbol table info available.
 #11 0x0000000000000000 in ?? ()
 No symbol table info available.
Title: fetchnews crashed with SIGABRT in __libc_start_main()
Uname: Linux 3.4-trunk-amd64 x86_64
UserGroups:
The first 2 lines should be enough for the BTS server to file the bug report to the correct package and against the correct version.If you paid attention in the screen shot and the email report, you will notice that the email report does not include the CoreDump section. This was knocked off intentionally as we currently might not need it. If there is a need, the data is always available on the user's apport database, and the dev/user and seek it on a need basis. But in case, if a day comes when we really want it, that too is possible. The same email report will have the CoreDump seciton with a section like the following:
CoreDump: base64 
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 7xNNReLV6SpPH/NUzH0OWZNHkPAVYPl+Npo9GEaua1GDtfIF2ni7wz+5QP5fOOOIXxxTJYjWPgP/bfLQHSLRkUd3hTgv749PWm7FP7r0FcDP15U/cmO9fL4jLFNgzkaiBr4zwWL//QaYtey3vH/NtBrxEbbBHFJk6bOTuFt4v9cmwj4N/vn4ODg4ODg4ODg4OD4/wE3aZ7/G/H8n60B2aDfFmVs9kOf/5vJ325CV2n+HSgol59tKvYiasZmxRzNJCeIhG0q7gY1Y4OCA1UlsKl4b5hRxWxhu2Vdmq0Dp6vYi8UxS5SgCmdEuBiEi4F

Now, Is this going to be useful? Will we get flooded with bug reports?
 
Usefulness: I think this will uncover many bugs that might be getting unnoticed today. Take this example itself. This bug was detect against the leafnode package's fetchnews binary. That binary does a quiet job in the background, fetching news. I never was aware that it had been crashing. As a system-wide monitoring tool, apport was able to detect, trap and inform the user of the crash. So I think this will be useful and improve the overall quality.
Abuse/Flood: This is something I can't predict. Perhaps it will bring in challenges if people just blindly click on the Send Report button. One option can be to have the "Send Report" checkbox unchecked by default. That'll hopefully lower down the possibilities.
 
What do you think? Let me know your comments.
This change will soon be pushed to apport in experimental. Hopefully this weekend.
 
I want to wrap up this post with a Thank You note to Martin Pitt and his team who created Apport, and with such simplicity. It took me 30 lines of code to adapt it to Debian. My intent with Apport is to keep the changes to the minimum so that we can always leverage new features and fixes that Apport brings in. So, as far as I'll try, there will be no drift from its original shape.
Categories:
Debian-Blog
Tools
Keywords:
apport
RHUT

11 July 2012

Paul Tagliamonte: The "hell-server"

I s pose a better name would be How to preform automated deep-source checks I ve pushed the code to paultag/qlight, and it s just for personal use at the moment. It s built to use paultag/sb around sbuild. Basically, it preforms a crudload of tests such as licensecheck, suspicious-source, pyflakes, bashisms, cppcheck, php in linter mode, and a ton of other checks. You can see a large majority of them in the source file. The batch runner is a singleton , so it s safely called more then once. It s running on a 5-minute cron, and I ve configured a dput target to push it into it s queue & run the enqueue script. Here s some example output from a random package I had lying around: 
  ===== build status =====
sbo-run-clang  successful
sbo-run-gcc  successful
  ===== global status =====
Ran plugin extract, exit code 0
Ran plugin watch, exit code 0
Ran plugin licensecheck, exit code 0
Ran plugin validate-source, exit code 0
Ran plugin build, exit code 0
Ran plugin descr, exit code 0
Ran plugin lintian, exit code 0
  ===== descr =====
I: PT: Does this sound right? "gbemol is/are a(n) Graphical frontend for the Music Player Daemon (MPD)"
  ===== piuparts =====
   [last 20 lines]
  ===== licenses =====
BSD (3 clause) 
GPL (v2 or later) 
GPL (v2 or later) GENERATED FILE
GPL (v2 or later) (with incorrect FSF address) 
LGPL (v2 or later) (with incorrect FSF address) 
*No copyright* GPL (v2 or later) 
*No copyright* UNKNOWN
  ===== lintian =====
I: gbemol: spelling-error-in-binary usr/bin/gbemol Wheter Whether
W: gbemol: hardening-no-relro usr/bin/gbemol
I: gbemol: spelling-error-in-manpage usr/share/man/man1/gbemol.1.gz allows to allows one to
  ===== watch =====
-- Scanning for watchfiles in .
-- Found watchfile in ./debian
-- In debian/watch, processing watchfile line:
   http://sf.net/gbemol/gbemol-(.*)\.tar.gz
-- Found the following matching hrefs:
     gbemol-0.3.tar.gz
     gbemol-0.3.1.tar.gz
     gbemol-0.3.2.tar.gz
Newest version on remote site is 0.3.2, local version is 0.3.2
 => Package is up to date
-- Scan finished
  ===== source issues =====
suspicious-source:
bashisms:
script ./ltmain.sh does not appear to have a #! interpreter line;
you may get strange results
possible bashism in ./ltmain.sh line 368 ($RANDOM):
        my_tmpdir="$ my_template -$ RANDOM-0 $$"
error: ./ltmain.sh: Unterminated quoted string found, EOF reached. Wanted: <">
pyflakes:
cppcheck:
[src/gbemol-utils.c:167]: (error) Memory leak: path
[src/libmpdclient.c:1654]: (error) Possible null pointer dereference: output - otherwise it is redundant to check if output is null at line 1663
[src/libmpdclient.c:1655]: (error) Possible null pointer dereference: output - otherwise it is redundant to check if output is null at line 1663
[src/libmpdclient.c:1656]: (error) Possible null pointer dereference: output - otherwise it is redundant to check if output is null at line 1663
[src/libmpdclient.c:1664]: (error) Possible null pointer dereference: output - otherwise it is redundant to check if output is null at line 1663
phplint:
desktop validate:
.//.pc/desktop_file.patch/gbemol.desktop: warning: key "Encoding" in group "Desktop Entry" is deprecated
.//.pc/desktop_file.patch/gbemol.desktop: error: (will be fatal in the future): value "gbemol.png" for key "Icon" in group "Desktop Entry" is an icon name with an extension, but there should be no extension as described in the Icon Theme Specification if the value is not an absolute path
.//.pc/desktop_file.patch/gbemol.desktop: warning: value "Application;AudioVideo;Player;" for key "Categories" in group "Desktop Entry" contains a deprecated value "Application"
mp3check:
mp3val:
fontlint:
ftvalid:
msgfmt:
POFileChecker:
POFileSpell:
pngcheck:
jpeginfo:
ogginfo:
oggz-validate:
xmllint:
lacheck:
jslint:
check for environ calls to home:
check for use of /tmp:
./intltool-extract.in:    $OUTFILE     = "./tmp/$OUTFILE.h"
check for use of system():
./aclocal.m4:    lt_ld_extra= awk '/^include /   system(sprintf("cd /etc; cat %s 2>/dev/null", \[$]2)); skip = 1;     if (!skip) print \[$]0; skip = 0;  ' < /etc/ld.so.conf   $SED -e 's/#.*//;/^[  ]*hwcap[    ]/d;s/[:,  ]/ /g;s/=[^=]*$//;s/=[^= ]* / /g;/^$/d'   tr '\n' ' ' 
./intltool-merge.in:    return 1 if ((-x $file) or (system("$file -l >$devnull") == 0));
./intltool-merge.in:    system ("$iconv -f $encoding -t UTF-8 <$devnull 2>$devnull");
./intltool-update.in:    return 1 if ((-x $file) or (system("$file --version >$devnull") == 0));
./intltool-update.in:          system ($EXTRACT, "--update", "--srcdir=$SRCDIR",
./intltool-update.in:          system ($EXTRACT, "--update", "--type=$gettext_type", 
./intltool-update.in:    system ("$MSGMERGE", "-o", $outfile, $infile, "$MODULE.pot");
./intltool-update.in:    system ("$MSGFMT", "-o", "$devnull", "--verbose", $output_file);
./intltool-update.in:   system ("$MSGFMT", "-o", "$devnull", "--verbose", "$SRCDIR/$lang.po");
./configure:    lt_ld_extra= awk '/^include /   system(sprintf("cd /etc; cat %s 2>/dev/null", \$2)); skip = 1;     if (!skip) print \$0; skip = 0;  ' < /etc/ld.so.conf   $SED -e 's/#.*//;/^[   ]*hwcap[    ]/d;s/[:,  ]/ /g;s/=[^=]*$//;s/=[^= ]* / /g;/^$/d'   tr '\n' ' ' 
./intltool-extract.in:        system ("mkdir -p $dirname");
./intltool-extract.in:        system("mkdir tmp/"); 
./debian/gbemol.1:the \fBDebian\fP system (but may be used by others).  Permission is 
./debian/manpage.sgml:      the &debian; system (but may be used by others).  Permission is
  ===== sbo-run-clang.log warnings =====
update-binfmts: warning: unable to close /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc/register: Invalid argument
update-binfmts: warning: unable to enable binary format python2.6
dpkg-source: warning: extracting unsigned source package (gbemol_0.3.2-2.dsc)
dpkg-buildpackage: warning: using a gain-root-command while being root
gbemol-preferences.c:483:13: warning: 'gbemol_preferences_load_spin' defined but not used [-Wunused-function]
gbemol-net.c:60:11: warning: variable 'res' set but not used [-Wunused-but-set-variable]
dpkg-shlibdeps: warning: package could avoid a useless dependency if debian/gbemol/usr/bin/gbemol was not linked against libfontconfig.so.1 (it uses none of the library's symbols).
dpkg-shlibdeps: warning: package could avoid a useless dependency if debian/gbemol/usr/bin/gbemol was not linked against libatk-1.0.so.0 (it uses none of the library's symbols).
dpkg-shlibdeps: warning: package could avoid a useless dependency if debian/gbemol/usr/bin/gbemol was not linked against librt.so.1 (it uses none of the library's symbols).
dpkg-shlibdeps: warning: package could avoid a useless dependency if debian/gbemol/usr/bin/gbemol was not linked against libgio-2.0.so.0 (it uses none of the library's symbols).
dpkg-shlibdeps: warning: package could avoid a useless dependency if debian/gbemol/usr/bin/gbemol was not linked against libcairo.so.2 (it uses none of the library's symbols).
dpkg-shlibdeps: warning: package could avoid a useless dependency if debian/gbemol/usr/bin/gbemol was not linked against libpango-1.0.so.0 (it uses none of the library's symbols).
dpkg-shlibdeps: warning: package could avoid a useless dependency if debian/gbemol/usr/bin/gbemol was not linked against libpangocairo-1.0.so.0 (it uses none of the library's symbols).
dpkg-shlibdeps: warning: package could avoid a useless dependency if debian/gbemol/usr/bin/gbemol was not linked against libfreetype.so.6 (it uses none of the library's symbols).
dpkg-shlibdeps: warning: package could avoid a useless dependency if debian/gbemol/usr/bin/gbemol was not linked against libpangoft2-1.0.so.0 (it uses none of the library's symbols).
dpkg-gencontrol: warning: File::FcntlLock not available; using flock which is not NFS-safe
     + add misc-depends to fix lintian warning.
  ===== sbo-run-gcc.log warnings =====
dpkg-source: warning: extracting unsigned source package (gbemol_0.3.2-2.dsc)
dpkg-buildpackage: warning: using a gain-root-command while being root
gbemol-preferences.c:483:13: warning: 'gbemol_preferences_load_spin' defined but not used [-Wunused-function]
gbemol-net.c:60:11: warning: variable 'res' set but not used [-Wunused-but-set-variable]
dpkg-shlibdeps: warning: package could avoid a useless dependency if debian/gbemol/usr/bin/gbemol was not linked against libfontconfig.so.1 (it uses none of the library's symbols).
dpkg-shlibdeps: warning: package could avoid a useless dependency if debian/gbemol/usr/bin/gbemol was not linked against libatk-1.0.so.0 (it uses none of the library's symbols).
dpkg-shlibdeps: warning: package could avoid a useless dependency if debian/gbemol/usr/bin/gbemol was not linked against librt.so.1 (it uses none of the library's symbols).
dpkg-shlibdeps: warning: package could avoid a useless dependency if debian/gbemol/usr/bin/gbemol was not linked against libgio-2.0.so.0 (it uses none of the library's symbols).
dpkg-shlibdeps: warning: package could avoid a useless dependency if debian/gbemol/usr/bin/gbemol was not linked against libcairo.so.2 (it uses none of the library's symbols).
dpkg-shlibdeps: warning: package could avoid a useless dependency if debian/gbemol/usr/bin/gbemol was not linked against libpango-1.0.so.0 (it uses none of the library's symbols).
dpkg-shlibdeps: warning: package could avoid a useless dependency if debian/gbemol/usr/bin/gbemol was not linked against libpangocairo-1.0.so.0 (it uses none of the library's symbols).
dpkg-shlibdeps: warning: package could avoid a useless dependency if debian/gbemol/usr/bin/gbemol was not linked against libfreetype.so.6 (it uses none of the library's symbols).
dpkg-shlibdeps: warning: package could avoid a useless dependency if debian/gbemol/usr/bin/gbemol was not linked against libpangoft2-1.0.so.0 (it uses none of the library's symbols).
dpkg-gencontrol: warning: File::FcntlLock not available; using flock which is not NFS-safe
     + add misc-depends to fix lintian warning.
Not as interesting as it can get, but still pretty cool. Andrea, I swear I m not picking on you :) More to come later (hopefully) :)

10 July 2012

Arnaud Quette: Definitive solution to IPMI over LAN with Dell iDrac Express

I have this bunch of Dell R610, with iDrac6 Express management cards. I used these, among other things, for developing IPMI support in NUT and working on Infrastructure & Cloud power management. But that's the topic of another post (still, if you're interested in, check this and that). The thing is that this "IPMI" monitoring development has been limited to local support (Ie, power supplies can't be monitored remotely by the nut-ipmipsu driver), due to an issue : any attempt to enable IPMI access over the network was miserably failing! Well, these attempts were limited to a couple of 15 minutes runs, without plain motivation, almost a year ago. The various firmwares were up to date (iDrac 1.70, ...) , everything was running and configured fine, locally. But still... no IPMI available through the network! Looking on the Net, I've learned that many Dell customers with iDrac Express cards, were having the same issue. Dell support seems to have replaced tons of motherboards! There, I switched to other things, and time has passed.... A good year later (last week), I decided that it was time to get back on this. And I've found the solution there Incredible: this was due to a 'bug' in the Broadcom NetXtreme II LoM (LAN on Motherboad) firmware! I've not had time to dig this issue in depth, but here is a base explanation, for what it's worth: Some LoM initial self tests are failing. Thus, the LoM are not switched to the managed mode, and can't actually be available for BMC management (thus no IPMI over the network). In my case, the tests were wrongly failing at 'A07', a test which tries to establish a Gigabit connection! Strangely, all these servers are connected on a Gb switch! Not a fully satisfactory answer, but that said, there is a solution, and I've not much time to pour into this investigation (comments may always change my mind though!). So here is a comprehensive procedure to fix this, from your Linux system, and using FreeDOS:
$ mkfs.msdos /dev/sdX1
Note: 'X' is to be replaced by the exact name of your USB key. An hint: call 'tail -f /var/log/syslog" and unplug / replug your USB key. You will see some entries like "...sdb Attached SCSI removable disk". So, there, it's "sdb".
$ qemu -boot a -fda balder10.img -hda /dev/sdX A:\> sys c: A:\> xcopy /E /N a: c:
Note that you will need "root" privileges.
$ qemu -hda /dev/sdX
$ unzip Bcom_LAN_14.2.x_DOSUtilities_A03.exe
c:\ uxdiag -t abcd mfw 1
For what it's worth (again), I just hope that it will be useful to others... I will now prepare another post using using FreeIPMI to manage your servers, the GNU way... cheers,
-- Arno Thanks to Jordi Clariana, his enlightening post, Daniel for this one, Aur lien was motivating me again in solving this iDrac Express issue and Al Chu (FreeIPMI project leader) for all his invaluable help on IPMI.

Gerfried Fuchs: Mermaids Reloaded

It's almost seven years now since I wrote/published Mermaids. It was an important step in my life, confessing publicly what I've found out about myself, how I feel and identify myself. It definitely has been a certain turning point in my life. A year later, there was the Debconf6 in Mexico, which was just as important. I was wearing a skirt for the first time, and that for the whole duration of the two weeks. It was an enormous feeling of freedom, and I knew I was feeling at home. That was also the time I shaved off my beard. And since? Well, I sort of limited myself to these two weeks every year. Debconf is my haven, Debconf is my home. Here I allow myself to be myself. Debian is my family. And like in every family, there are people who won't understand, but that doesn't matter. I feel comfortable to express myself in this crowd in the way I feel. Being abroad seems to help with the confidence, and it seems like it also shines through. I haven't had lots of strange looks. To the contrary, when I went with a skirt to a homosexual acceptance event at home in Vienna, there was a group of gays who were pointing and laughing. Quite an interesting experience, one would assume that people who are wanting more acceptance would be more acceptable and tolerant themselves... But, I don't think I will ever take the step toward actually turning my body into a female one. It was an important step for me to find out about my inner self, and it actually managed to make me accept my male body; even though I can totally relate to people not being able to understand this both people not in the situation and people being in the situation and needing the physical adjustment to be able to be happy again. But this is what and how I am: Contents may vary from packaging. This though has an inherited problem: as I am not (usually) heading for a female appearance (besides my skirt during Debconf), people keep addressing me with a male pronoun, even, or rather especially when using my nick Rhonda. This is something that I consider a fair bit disturbing, especially when it comes from people that I consider to address with the term friends. One would assume that people who you share a fair bit of private life with would be the ones who can understand and relate better than others. But that's where we are, and I also can understand the troubles: I'm not giving them much visual help for fixing their thoughts. I found the confidence in my body, and like most of you know, I have a son I dearly love (and miss like hell these two weeks), so I know how to use the tools it comes with, frankly spoken. But I won't go the road to adjust my body to be a female one instead, just to convince people that I really am the female person that I identify as. It might be hard for you to understand that, it might be hard for you to accept it it is also hard for me, to fight for the acceptance that I thought are an inherent part of the term friendship. I have deepest respect for the people who feel the requirement and have the strength to adjust their body to their mind. It though just isn't the road for me. I already have enough uncertainties in my life to cope with, and I don't need another one to deal with, related to that I might not be able to accept my body after the transition than I am able to accept it now. It's just not important enough for me to find my place. My place is here, my home is Debconf.

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9 July 2012

Jonathan McDowell: SVG::TT::Graph::TimeSeries and the Debian keyring

I'm at DebConf 12 and I've decided to use my time to clear out some minor bits and pieces I've been planning for a while. One of these was to do some graphing of the Debian keyrings over time. The bzr repository goes back to March 2008, but I've also got copies of keyrings for releases back to slink (February 1999). I've been a long time user of GD::Graph under Perl, but recently discovered SVG::TT::Graph and have been meaning to play with it. So I did. First up, number of keys in each keyring: ring-totals.png Most of the interesting data is towards the right, but we can also see the point where our v4 keyring overtook v3 keys back in 2001. More recently there's the end of our v3 support in 2010, and the steady increase of Debian Maintainers. The tiny green line is the Debian non-upload keyring. Next I looked at key size (limiting myself to the DDv4 keyring to make things simpler): key-sizes.png Here we can see the steady increase of 4096 bit keys since 2009, and to a lesser extent 2048 bit keys. There are a few other sizes - 1 10k key, 1 8k key and 2 3k keys (I suspect these are tied to OpenPGPv2 cards). We're up to 28% of the keyring being stronger keys, but there's still a long way to go. (Interestingly the Debian Maintainer keyring is much better with 65% of keys being 2k or larger. The non-upload keyring is all 2k or greater.) Finally I graphed key type, again limiting myself to the DDv4 keyring: key-types.png No real surprises here; DSA far and away the most common with RSA usage increasing as part of the move to larger key sizes. In the past we had a few Elgamal signing keys, but these were shown to be compromised thus disappeared entirely. What do these graphs show me? At least the following: (You should be able to click on the graphs for larger version.)

Benjamin Mako Hill: Wiki Conferencing

I am in Berlin for the Wikipedia Academy, a very cool hybrid free culture community plus refereed academic conference organized, in part, by Wikimedia Deutschland. On Friday, I was very excited to have been invited to give the conference's opening keynote based on my own hybrid take on learning from failures in peer production and incorporating a bunch of my own research. Today, I was on a panel at the conference about free culture and sharing practices. I'll post talks materials and videos when the conference puts them online. I will be in Berlin for the next week or so before I head to directly to Washington, DC for Wikimania between the 11th and 15th. I'll be giving three talks there: Between then and now, I'm taking the next week in Berlin to catch up on work, and with friends. If you're in either place and want to meet up, please get in touch and lets try to arrange something.

Benjamin Mako Hill: The Global Iron Blogger Network

Since last November, I've been participating in and coordinating Iron Blogger: a drinking club where you pay $5 to a "beer" pool if you fail to blog weekly. The revival of Iron Blogger in Boston has been a big success. Even more exciting, however, is that Iron Blogger concept has spread. There are now two other Iron Blogger instances: in San Francisco coordinated by Parker Higgens, and in Berlin run by Nicole Ebber and Michelle Thorne. Yesterday, we convened a virtual meeting of the Global Iron Blogger Council (i.e., an email thread) and we all agreed a new on iron blogger rule that might sweeten the deal for jet-setting prospective Iron Bloggers: any paid-up member of any Iron Blogger club can attend meet-ups in any other Iron Blogger cities if they happen to be in town for one. Because We Are One. If you want to join us in Boston, we have some room through attrition. Rust bloggers, perhaps? If you'd like to join, you should contact me. And if you'd like to set up your own in a different city, the code is in git. One warning, however. As those of us that have set it up have figured out, the documentation for the software to run Iron Blogger is between poor and non-existent. If you do want to set up your own instance, please get in touch. I'm happy to give you some pointers that you'll probably need but, more importantly, I'd like to work with the next brave soul to put together documentation of the setup process along the way.

John Goerzen: Decisions on Listening to Music

A couple of days ago, I commented about my thoughts on finding a better way to listen to music, and asked for suggestions. I ve checked out the avenues suggested, and here are my thoughts so far. Streaming service: Spotify Of the streaming service offerings, Spotify seems the most compelling. It has both Linux and Android clients. The Linux client is unofficial and a bit buggy, but serviceable. The service is fairly nice, and the serendipity of listening to radio of tracks like any track or artist I may pick is an incredible feature. It will mean a different mindset; rather than carefully choosing what I buy, I have a vast catalog at my fingertips. I d have to give up some control, but might be better off for it. Spotify can play local files, but sadly lacks support for FLAC that most of my collection is in. A little work with the shell, and I had a quick multi-core FLAC to MP3 conversion done. It can also identify local files and match them up with its catalog, but it does a somewhat poor job of it, despite the fact that my files are tagged by Musicbrainz. There are also a fair number of albums in my collection (from Magnatune and from local artists) that aren t in Spotify s catalog and probably never will be. I may wind up using git-annex or something like it to sync them between PCs. Surprisingly, it doesn t have any kind of web-based player available. It has a lot of features, but many of them are under-documented. Subsonic / Supersonic The idea of being able to stream music anywhere certainly has appeal, and the idea of streaming that music from my own machine my own collection is quite the appealing one. Subsonic seems to be the standard that people recommend for this. It has a web-based player that works well, as well as mobile clients for various platforms. The Android mobile client is particularly well-regarded and is probably the best one here, aside from Spotify. The playlists work well, as expected, and generally it has the appearance of a well-rounded system. There is a lot of flexibility in bitrates; maximum bitrates can be set per-user and per-client. It, of course, transcodes on the fly. My chief gripe about Subsonic is that it has no true album/artist/genre browser. Its main browser is mostly a filesystem browser. I have used clients that show album/artist/genre panes or sortable lists, based on tags, for so long that my filesystem organization is rather different centered around bitrate of rip, origin, etc. It is not very easy to navigate my collection in that way. The search feature can search artist and album, and this can partially make up for it. But there is simply no way to see a list of all artists in the collection. The server is written in Java, and takes up 362MB at startup. That s, I guess, decent for a Java server, but doesn t make me pleased as I d be running it on lower-end hardware. Supersonic is a git-maintained actively synced subsonic fork which removes the license cost (the source is GPL3 anyhow so that wasn t a big deal). Ampache Often mentioned in the same breath as Subsonic, this is yet another frequent suggestion for streaming your own collection. Its primary player is web-based, like Subsonic. It has full artist/genre browsers, and adds tag cloud and various other options as well by default, it loaded the tag cloud with my genre tags, which was a nice touch. The search feature is a little less robust, as it simply searches anywhere and returns a list of all matching tracks, rather than listing matching albums and artists before going into the list of all tracks. But that is somewhat of a minor nit. Ampache s web-based player, liks Subsonic s, uses Flash, but the implementation is really quite awkward. You can t simply click a play button and have playback start. Rather, you must add things to the playlist (queue), a frame on the web interface. Then, you must click play in THAT frame, which launches a new window for the player and transfers its contents to it. You thus have two separate running playlists. And if you think you can just add to the playlist of the player window, think again; you can only replace it. It is simply not possible to add a track to the end of that list without losing your existing place. This makes the usefulness of the web-based player rather, well, low. Playlist functionality in Ampache is rather odd. You can have playlists, but if you want to add a track to a saved playlist, first you have to clear you current playlist, then add the track to it, then save it to the existing playlist. Frontends for Ampache exist in banshee and in amarok. Banshee s is broken, and simply silently fails to do anything. Unless you look in the console, in which case you ll see a .NET backtrace. Banshee has had these mysterious errors for me for years. The Amarok plugin is so basic that you can browse by artist but not by album, and is almost unusable. There is also a rhythmbox plugin in Debian, but it is apparently for an old version of Rhythmbox and no longer works. The best frontend is a dedicated Ampache frontend called Viridian. It has a nice interface, provides features such as taskbar integration, and generally works pretty well. The only thing it s bad at is playlists, and here it s even worse than the web interface. It doesn t support modifying the server-side playlists at all. And accessing one is an annoying load playlist operation, that replaces your current play queue (also called the playlist ) with its contents by default. Several Android clients exist for Ampache, though it seems only one has seen any updates since 2010. mpd This is an interesting program, as it is designed more to provide multiple points of control for a single player than it is to stream a single collection to multiple devices. Nevertheless, I tested its HTTP and icecast stream modules. (It can also stream with PulseAudio, but PulseAudio causes devious breakage on my workstation, so I refuse to bother.) This could be made to work reasonably well on my LAN using the gmpc client. There are several Android clients as well, though none of them integrate as well as Subsonic or Spotify. Most seem focused on controlling a remote player. The ones that do stream do so with some hiccups, and don t integrate controls with the lock screen. gmpc is a reasonable control program and, combined with mplayer, makes a decent player. It can browse the database every way I d want to. It doesn t let me right-click on tracks to add them to playlists, but I can use copy/paste to do so, or add them to the play queue and from there to a playlist. It s annoying, but not completely unworkable. But here s the real concern. mpd has no provision whatsoever for any sort of encryption such as SSL. If I want to be listening to my music collection from on the road, I don t really wish to open up a streaming music service for the entire Internet. Nor do I really want to mess with SSH tunnels and the like, which are cumbersome on Android (and can be in general). This is pretty much a fatal flaw to me. Google Music An interesting service, but ultimately one I don t see the point for in my situation where I already have my music on a PC that is always on. It would probably accommodate my entire collection free, but how many weeks would it take me to get it there? And how would it stay in sync? It simply doesn t offer me any compelling advantage over streaming direct from my PC, so I don t see much need to bother with it. Others I briefly considered Streeme (poor mobile support), Audiogalaxy (no Linux support), Jinzora (appears dead), and Sockso (no mobile support). I also briefly considered other streaming services such as Pandora, Slacker, rdio, etc., but based on reviews didn t think that they were worth bothering with. Conclusions I m left mainly considering Spotify and Subsonic. For right now, I m going to try Spotify and see where that leads me, but may wind up getting back to Subsonic if I can t find tracks I want with Spotify.

8 July 2012

Jonathan Wiltshire: Point Release Security, Reloaded

When I first undertook the tracking of minor security fixes in point releases, I quickly out-scaled flat text files and a good memory. A Python library and sqlite database helped automate sending notifications and keeping tabs, but the manual work associated with tracking incoming bugs from the security team, applications to and responses from the release team, and the action or inaction of maintainers was still too time-consuming to be useful. This weekend I deployed pyprsc2, with a public view at http://prsc.debian.net/tracker/<bug>. I had planned to do this at Debconf12, but given the circumstances still, it needed doing anyway and what better time? Result: my work now involves adding tracks where required; keeping an eye on the notified list for manual prods; and after a point release, archiving the included bugs and updating the suite version numbers. Bliss. Features: Todo: Technical: prsc.debian.net leverages large parts of the Django MVC framework in fact, this was really a learning exercise in disguise since I want to use Django on some more complex projects later. BTS synchronisation is handled by python-debianbts, and synchronisation with proposed-updates is through XML and lxml/objectify (thanks to the release team s awesome XML queue viewer and Adam adding bug numbers to it). Since this was a learning exercise, some of the Python is probably questionable at best and downright wrong at worst, so it probably needs some work still.
Point Release Security, Reloaded is a post from: jwiltshire.org.uk Flattr

Petter Reinholdtsen: Debian Edu interview: George Bredberg

The Debian Edu / Skolelinux project have users all over the globe, but until recently we have not known about any users in Norway's neighbour country Sweden. This changed when George Bredberg showed up in March this year on the mailing list, asking interesting questions about how to adjust and scale the just released Debian Edu Wheezy setup to his liking. He granted me an interview, and I am happy to share his answers with you here. Who are you, and how do you spend your days? I'm a 44 year old country guy that have been working 12 years at the same school as 50% IT-manager and 50% Teacher. My educational background is fil.kand in history and religious beliefs, an exam as a "folkhighschool" teacher, that is, for teaching grownups. In Norwegian I believe it's called "Vuxenupplaring". I also have a master in "Technology and social change". So I'm not really a tech guy, I just like to study how humans and technology interact and that is my perspective when working with IT. How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu project? I have followed the Skolelinux project for quite some time by now. Earlier I tested out the K12-LTSP project, which we used for some time, but I really like the idea of having a distribution aimed to be a complete solution for schools with necessary tools integrated. When K12-LTSP abandoned that idea some years ago, I started to look more seriously into Skolelinux instead. What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian Edu? The big point of Skolelinux to me is that it is a complete distribution, ready to install. It has LDAP-support, MS Windows integration tools and so forth already configured, saving an administrator a lot of time and headache. We were using another Linux based thin-client system called Thinlinc, that has served us very well. But that Skolelinux is based on VNC and LTSP, to me, is better when it comes to the kind of multimedia used in schools. That is showing videos from Youtube or educational TV. It is also easier to mix thin clients with workstations, since the user settings will be the same. In our VNC-based solution you had to "beat around the bush" by setting up a second, hidden, home-directory for user settings for the workstations, because they will be different from the ones used on the thin clients. Skolelinux support for diskless workstations are very convenient since a school today often need to use a class room projector showing videos in full screen. That is easily done with a small integrated media computer running as a diskless workstation. You have only two installs to update and configure. One for the thin clients and one for the workstations. Also saving a lot of time. Our old system was also based on Redhat and CentOS. They are both very nice distributions, but they are sometimes painfully slow when it comes to updating multimedia support and multimedia programs (even such as Gimp), leaving us with a bit "oldish" applications. Debian is quicker to update. What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian Edu? Debian is a bit too quick when it comes to updating. As an example we use old HP terminals as thinclients, and two times already this year (2012) the updates you get from the repositories has stopped sound from working with them. It's a kernel/ALSA issue. So you have to be more careful properly testing the updates before you run them in a production environment. This has never happened with CentOS. I also would like to be able to set my own domain-settings at install time. In Skolelinux they are kind of hard coded into the distribution, when it comes to LDAP and at least samba integration. That is more a cosmetic/translation issue, and not a real problem. Running MS Windows applications within the Skolelinux environment needs to be better supported. That is, running them seamlessly via RDP, and support for single-sign on. That will make the transition to free software easier, because you can keep the applications you really need. No support will make it impossible if you work in a school where some applications can't be open source. As for us we really need to run Adobe InDesign in our journalist classes. We run a journalist education, and is one of the very few non university ones that is ok:d by Svenska journalistf rbundet (Swedish journalist association). Our education gives the pupils the right of membership there, once they are done. This is important if you want to get a job. Adobe InDesign is the program most commonly used in newspapers and magazines. We used Quark Express before, but they seem to loose there market to Adobe. The only "equivalent" to InDesign in the opensource world is Scribus, and its not advanced enough. At least not according to the teacher. I think it would be possible to use it, because they are not supposed to learn a program, they are supposed to learn how to edit and compile a newspaper. But politically at our school we are not there yet. And Scribus lacks a lot of things you find i InDesign. We used even a windows program for sound editing when it comes to the radio-journalist part. The year to come we are going to try Audacity. That software has the same kind of limitations compared to Adobe Audition, but that teacher is a bit more open minded. We have tried Ardour also, but that instead is more like a music studio program, not intended for the kind of editing taking place in a radio studio. Its way to complex and the GUI is to scattered when you only want to cut, make pass-overs, add extra channels and normalise. Those things you can do in Audacity, but its not as easy as in Audition. You have to do more things manually with envelopes, and that is a bit old fashion and timewasting. Its also harder to cut and move sound from one channel to another, which is a thing that you do frequently because you often find yourself needing to rearrange parts of the sound file. So, I am not sure we will succeed in replacing even Audition, but we will try. The problem is the students have certain expectations when they start an education towards a profession. So the programs has to look and feel professional. Good thing with radio, there are many programs out there, that radio studios use, so its not as standardised as Newspaper editing. That means, it does not really matter what program they learn, because once they start working they still have to learn the program the studio uses, so instead focus has to be to learn the editing part without to much focus on a specific software. Which free software do you use daily? Myself I'm running Linux Mint, or Ubuntu these days. I use almost only open source software, and preferably Linux based. When it comes to most used applications its OpenOffice, and Firefox (of course ;) ) Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to get schools to use free software? To get schools to use free software there has to be good open source software that are windows based, to ease the transition. But it's also very important that the multimedia support is working flawlessly. The problems with Youtube, Twitter, Facebook and whatever will create problems when it comes to both teachers and students. Economy are also important for schools, so using thin clients, as long as they have good multimedia support, is a very good idea. It's also important that the open source software works even for the administration. It's hard to convince the teachers to stick with open source, if the principal has to run Windows. It also creates a problem if some classes has to use Windows for there tasks, since that will create a difference in "status" between classes, so a good support for running windows applications via the thin client (Linux) desktop is essential. At least at our school, where we have mixed level of educations, from high-school to journalist-school. Update 2012-07-09 08:30: Paul Wise tipped me on IRC about three useful sources related to Free Software for radio stations: the LWN article Radio station management with Airtime, Airtime which claim to be a Free open source radio automation software and Rivendell which claim to be complete radio broadcast automation solution. All of them seem useful to the aspiring radio producer.

Lars Wirzenius: Obnam 1.1 (backup software)

I've released Obnam version 1.1, released 2012-06-30, but only announced now since I had trouble building the packages for code.liw.fi.

Steve Kemp: Misc update.

I got a few emails about the status panel I'd both toyed with and posted. The end result is that the live load graphs now have documentation, look prettier, and contain a link to the source code. Apart from that this week has mostly involved photographing cute cats, hairy dogs, and women in corsets. In Debian-related news njam: Insecure usage of environmental variable was closed after about 7 months, and I reported a failure of omega-rpg to drop group(games) privileges prior to saving game-state. That leads to things like this: 
skx@precious:~$ ls -l   grep games
-rw-r--r--   1 skx games   14506 Jul  8 15:20 Omega1000
Not the end of the world, but it does mean you can write to directories owned by root.games, and potentially over-write level/high-score files in other packages leading to compromises. ObQuote: "Your suffering will be legendary, even in hell! " - Hellraiser II (Did you know there were eight HellRaiser sequels?)

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