I've spent the past few days trying to get MMS to work on the N900.

EDIT: Seems frals has managed to beat me! read more

In Egypt s sandy silence, all alone,
Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws
The only shadow that the Desert knows:
I am great OZYMANDIAS, saith the stone,
The King of Kings; this mighty City shows
The wonders of my hand. The City s gone,
Nought but the Leg remaining to disclose
The site of this forgotten Babylon. We wonder, and some Hunter may express
Wonder like ours, when thro the wilderness
Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chace,
He meets some fragments huge, and stops to guess
What powerful but unrecorded race
Once dwelt in that annihilated place. Horace Smith

Many of us that can afford an Internet connection still qualify as exceedingly rich compared to, for example, many poor people in Africa. On a scale of centuries, the ancient centers of civilization and wealth tend to collapse. Even Rome, with over a million inhabitants in its day of ancient prominence, shrank to only 20,000 over the course of history. Some other ancient cities no longer dot our maps. It helps us, perhaps, to have some perspective. Those magnificent working monuments to wealth in New York, London, or Tokyo probably won t be there 1000 years from now. What will?

I run a personal server that hosts web space for a few friends. Probably the most popular thing to do with the space is to install WordPress and run a personal blog. A few days ago, I discovered some attackers were abusing one of the sites. Once we upgraded the site to the latest version of WordPress, the attack went away. So I wrote a tool that, every night, emails me a report of the locations of old versions of WordPress. A sample email:

Current version of WordPress: 2.9

oldroommate has WordPress 2.5 in /home/oldroommate/web/oldroommate.com/

Eek! WordPress 2.5 is old!

How it works Each time it runs, it looks at wordpress.org to see what the current version is. The code to do that is written in Python and uses lxml.html. It prints the current version in the report, and it uses it when analyzing WordPress installs. To analyze WordPress installs, it executes locate readme.html, looking for WordPress's tell-tale documentation file. For every such readme.html, if it matches a simple regular expression suggesting it's a WordPress readme file, it performs the following analysis:

• It does some simple seding and greping looking for the version of WordPress described by that file.
• If the version detected is older (as calculated by dpkg --compare-versions), it creates a one-line report like the one above about oldroommate.

If it found any installs of old WordPress, it prints a report like the one blockquoted above to stdout.

How to use it To get emails, I run it with cron. You can add a stanza like this to your crontab (edit it with crontab -e):

@daily cd find-out-of-date-wordpress; ./look.sh

Ta-da, nightly reports.

To get a copy Do a git clone:

git clone git://git.asheesh.org/find-out-of-date-wordpress.git

or browse its gitweb.

Feedback I'm quite interested to hear what others do to avoid old web apps being attacked. If there's another bit of software that monitors web apps for needing upgrades, I'd love to hear about it! Obviously if you have feedback on this tidbit I wrote, let me know. (To me, apt-get doesn't seem to be the answer. Web apps (especially PHP ones) don't usually seem to support keeping the code in one place with multiple different configuration files. And users get excited about the latest and greatest and don't want to wait for me to upgrade, and I can't blame them.) If some of you don't like the Python dependency or anything else, I do welcome patches!

It's the late afternoon of the first day of 2010 here, though I suppose its still 2009 for someone for a little while.

After a lot of waiting, JFFNMS release candidate 1 for 0.8.5 got uploaded to sourceforge. This release is mainly about fixing some database release bugs 0.8.4 had and they're all caused by the fact that working with PHP and database to release code is plain awful.

The problem is tracking changes in your database. So version 1 has 3 tables and 60 rows, version 2 has 4 tables and 90 rows, but what changed? Everything I've seen so far is a bit of a hack or is real fiddly. JFFNMS release process is both which is why I'll go and release several versions of C code or Debian packages before trying to crack that nut again.

If you are wondering what JFFNMS is, its a Network Management System. It makes graphs and red/green icons depending on the status of your routers and servers. Written in PHP and web based and of course licensed under the GPL

Sandro, I was about to write that I wouldn't join you in the club of Those Who Reviewed The Entire Debian Mailing Lists, at least for 2009. And, finally, in a very last rish, I ade it and completed my remaining 541 mails to review in the bloody debian-user mailing list. By the way, you could be interested in learning that I flagged all messages from the "Sponge Burning A Republican!" giant thread (probably the biggest thread in Debian mailing lists ever) as spam. That's debatable but such huge crap is definitely not something I personnally think belonging to the Debian mailing list archives..:-) To others: we still need a few other crazy minds to continue cleaning up spam from our lists archives (at least, debian-boot is in the way to become the first entirely spam-free mailing list on lists.debian.org).

I ve spent the last week packaging VMware Workstation 7.0.0 at work. Looking around on the net, I ve been unable to find anything helpful about packaging this new version, so it seems nobody s got around to packaging it yet. I ve asked our customer for its approval for releasing our packaging scripts to the community and got it, so here are our packaging scripts for this version, courtesy of EDF. See the instructions in debian/README.source for what has to be done to turn it into a full source package. The packaging is based on our previous 6.5.2 packaging, which was itself based (partially, at least) upon the Gento 6.5.2 ebuild. It uses a tweaked vmware-installer to install the products to debian/tmp, then makes use of the vmware-installer database to populate the packages. I think this method should work with any VMware product using vmware-installer 1.1. Packages have been built and tested on Etch and Lenny. Hope it helps! Bugs, comments, questions to the email address listed as Maintainer in debian/control, please :-)

Christian writes about differences on the international level; how even something as simple as people's names isn't always easy, and that one has to be quite careful to avoid calling people 'Dear Verhelst', or some such, because you assumed that their first name was indeed their given name, while in their culture the last name is the given name. Funnily, Christian advocates using capital letters to clarify which part of one's name should be considered the family name. Sorry to disappoint you, Christian. Writing one's last name with all capitals is a French typographical convention. While it is understood in other places, it is not often used outside of France (except in organisations with a strong link to France, obviously); and it is, in fact, shouting. It is also not actually helping any. I should, in fact, somewhere in my mailbox archive have an email reply from a South Korean guy that starts off like so: Dear TIA, to which I then had to explain that no, TIA is not my first name, it is an abbreviation for "Thanks In Advance". Note the use of capitals.

• Interesting software updates uploaded to experimental:
  • GCC 4.5 (Read changelog).
  • Blender 2.50 alpha 0. More info in Cyril s blog post.
  • Icedove 3.0 RC2. (Read changelog)
• Linux kernel 2.6.32 has been available in unstable for about 2 weeks. Ben Hutchings posted a quick update about the status the plans announced by the kernel team after their meeting.
• Christian Perrier blogged about what is going on in the Font packaging Team.
• The Python Policy has been updated. The last step remaining before uploading Python 2.6 to unstable, it is dropping Python 2.4 as supported version. About 50 bugs needs to be addressed for this.
• Russ Allbery blogged about the release of lintian 2.3.0 with a lot of improvements and code changes. It is interesting to highlight the new option -F or --ftp-master-rejects that shows only those tags that might result in an automated reject when uploading the package to the Debian achive.

I recently tried to improve my way to interact with people by mail, in my free software work. Particularly, my intent is to be "better" in using other people names and specific politeness rules. As many of my readers may guess, being involved in internationalization means interacting with people of different cultures. And, when it comes at names, this is just a nightmare..:-) Most so-called "westerners" (western of what, by the way?) are used to the common tradition we share to use people's "first" name....at first...followed by what is most often the "family" name (the one we usually get from our parents). As a consequence, it is fairly easy for me to guess that, interacting with someone named "Barack Obama", I can use "Dear Barack" if I'm in position to use his first name and "Mr Obama" if I need to show some respect distance whatever. Also, as most "western" names are quite familiar in my ears (international culture, blah blah), I can easily guess what is a first name and what is a family name (though, here, "Barack" is probably not the best example). Gender may become a little bit trickier in several cases, but, thankfully, in English, "Dear" does not change with gender (but the third person does whic sometimes leads to problems). The problem arises when interacting with many other culturally different people such as my friends in Japan, China, India, Africa, etc. Here, dammit, the habits might vary a lot and things get harder. Should I call my friend "Kenshi Muto" as "Dear Kenshi", "Kenshi-san", "Muto-san" or whatever? From my readings, I see that most Japanese people do put their family name at first. So, I should then call him "Dear Muto" if I'm very close to him (oh, maybe it's 'her', by the way, who knows?)...or maybe "Kenshi-sensei" because he (oh...or she) is a respected figure in the Japanese FLOSS community...or whatever. Damn! Thankfully, I know Kenshi for years, we're good friends and I know that he's using the "western" way to write his name. I also know he's a man : after 5 or 6 Debconfs, you know everything about people! But, of course, it becomes harder when it comes at people I never had contacts before.....and I don't want to appear as impolite, or silly so, then we jump into my daily "nightmare". Using Wikipedia for hints about Chinese, Indian (the many ones) or even Icelandic or Indigenous peoples of the Americas helps a lot, still. I can only encourage my various friends in free software to do the same. We probably all deeply appreciate when someone shows some knowledge of our culture or at least tries to do his her best to understand our culture. That is probably also part of the mutual enrichment we get in our free software activities. As a tribute for this, I now write my own name as "Christian PERRIER" in my email headers, so that people have a slightly better clue that "Perrier" is my family name and that someone who wants to be familiar with me should call me "Dear Christian". I can probably ncourage my friends all around the world to do the same. For once, using capitals is not about 'shouting' but more about helping other people to figure things out. Next blog writing about the interesting challenge we all face in free software meetings and conferences: shake hands, kiss, hug or just wave? :-)

One of the most frustrating things about being an untenured anthropology professor (aside from being untenured) is that, for the most part, the articles you must write to get tenure strike those you write about as hopelessly boring and jargony. I always imagine that when geeks read my articles, the experience can be represented as follows:

%*&%*&*(((& Linux *(&*(^%&%%^%% DeCSS &*(&^&&*^&^&^& Free Speech %^&%^%^%%^ Hacking &*(&^*(^^*^**^*Code*((*&&**&&*&* Emacs **(**)*( New Maintainer Process *&())))))))))&*&7&&*&)*&*&*&& DMCA **(**((( Copyleft. ****W$$&& TINC

Well, finally, I have my hands on the uncorrected proofs of an article that is far far more readable, accessible, and truth be told, romantic than anything I have written The Hacker Conference: A Ritual Condensation and Celebration of a Lifeworld. This article s ancestry goes back to this ancient blog entry that I wrote after Debconf4 in Brazil, later made it into my dissertation, and finally a gabillion years later is on the verge of publication. Debian developers, in particular, might dig this piece. I made use of your blog entries, mailing list discussions, interviews, and photos to reveal what is special about these events and also memorialize some important events, such as the the founding of Debian Women. So while some I am sure some academics will find this piece distasteful for idealizing these events, so be it. I grew very fond of these conferences, they changed the way I thought of computer hacking, and why not write something that makes those you worked with feel good (as opposed to bored and confused). Finally, academics have totally missed the theoretical boat when it comes to conferences, which are probably one of the most important ritual forms of modernity and yet there is so little written on them an issue I address briefly in the conclusion. Note that this version has various mistakes (including the name of Joel Espy Klecker and the caption under Figure 3, and Figure 9). Since many of your are human debugging machines, if anyone takes a preview read and finds any typos, feel free to send along as I will be sending the proofs back next week.

One of the most frustrating things about being an untenured anthropology professor (aside from being untenured) is that, for the most part, the articles you must write to get tenure strike those you write about as hopelessly boring and jargony. I always imagine that when geeks read my articles, the experience can be represented as follows:

%*&%*&*(((& Linux *(&*(^%&%%^%% DeCSS &*(&^&&*^&^&^& Free Speech %^&%^%^%%^ Hacking &*(&^*(^^*^**^*Code*((*&&**&&*&* Emacs **(**)*( New Maintainer Process *&())))))))))&*&7&&*&)*&*&*&& DMCA **(**((( Copyleft. ****W$$&& TINC

Well, finally, I have my hands on the uncorrected proofs of an article that is far far more readable, accessible, and truth be told, romantic than anything I have written The Hacker Conference: A Ritual Condensation and Celebration of a Lifeworld. This article s ancestry goes back to this ancient blog entry that I wrote after Debconf4 in Brazil, later made it into my dissertation, and finally a gabillion years later is on the verge of publication. Debian developers, in particular, might dig this piece. I made use of your blog entries, mailing list discussions, interviews, and photos to reveal what is special about these events and also memorialize some important events, such as the the founding of Debian Women. So while some I am sure some academics will find this piece distasteful for idealizing these events, so be it. I grew very fond of these conferences, they changed the way I thought of computer hacking, and why not write something that makes those you worked with feel good (as opposed to bored and confused). Finally, academics have totally missed the theoretical boat when it comes to conferences, which are probably one of the most important ritual forms of modernity and yet there is so little written on them an issue I address briefly in the conclusion. Note that this version has various mistakes (including the name of Joel Espy Klecker and the caption under Figure 3, and Figure 9). Since many of your are human debugging machines, if anyone takes a preview read and finds any typos, feel free to send along as I will be sending the proofs back next week.

I started to write this review last night, and went looking for Wil Wheaton s blog, where many of the stories came from, so I can link to it from my review. It was getting late, I was tired, and so I was a bit disoriented for a few seconds when I saw my own words flash up on the screen. At the time, his most recent story had excerpted my review of paper books. Wow, I thought. This never happens when I m about to review Dickens. And actually, it s never happened before, ever. I ll admit to owning a big grin when I saw that one of my favorite authors liked one of my blog posts. And Wil Wheaton is one of my favorite authors for sure. I enjoy reading others too, of course, but Wil s writing is something I can really identify with like no other. My parents were never in a London debtor s prison like Dickens were; I was never a promising medical student like A. C. Doyle. But I was, and am, a geek, and Wil Wheaton captures that more perfectly than anyone. After I read Just a Geek a few years ago, I gave it to my wife to read, claiming it would help her understand me better. I think it did. In The Happiest Days of Our Lives, Wil recounts memories of his childhood, and of more recent days. He talks of flashbacks to his elementary school days, when he and his classmates tried to have the coolest Star Wars action figures (for me: calculator watches). Or how his aunt introduced him to D&D, which reminded me of how my uncle got me interested in computers. Teaching himself D&D was an escape for the geeky kid that wasn t good at sports, as teaching myself Pascal and C was for me. Between us, the names and activities are different, but the story is the same. I particularly appreciated Wil s reflections on his teenage years. Like him, at that age, I often found myself as the youngest person in a room full of adults. Yet I was still a teenager, and like any teenager, did some things that I look back on with some embarrassment now. Wil was completely honest with himself he admitted crashing a golf cart on the Paramount studio lot, for instance, but also reminds me that he was a teenager then. He recognizes that he didn t always make the best choices and wasn t always successful with what he did, but isn t ashamed of himself either. That s helpful for me to remember; I shouldn t be unreasonably harsh on my 16-year-old self, and need to remember that I had to be a teenager too. I also identify with him as a dad. He wrote of counting the days until he could teach his boys about D&D, about passing on being a geek to his sons. I ve had a similar excitement about being able to help Jacob build his first computer. Already Jacob, who is 3, loves using the manual typewriter I cleaned up for him, and spent an hour using the adding machine I dug out on Sunday while I was watching the boys. (I regret that I didn t have time to take it apart and show him how it worked right then when he asked). And perhaps his 2nd-favorite present of Christmas was the $3.50 large-button calculator with solar cell power I got him as an impulse buy at the pharmacy the other day. He is particularly enamored with the square root button because a single press replaces all the numbers on the screen with completely different numbers! I can t find the exact passage now, but Wil wrote at one point about his transition from a career in acting to a career in writing. He said that he likes the feeling he gets when his writing can touch people. He s been able to redefine himself not as a guy that used to be an actor on Star Trek but a person that is a good author, now. I agree, and think his best work has been done with a keyboard instead of a camera. And that leaves me wondering where my career will take me. Yes, I m an author, but of technical books. Authors of technical books rarely touch people s hearts. There s a reason we read Shakespeare and Dickens in literature classes, but no high school English teacher has ever assigned Newton s Opticks, despite its incredible importance to the world. Newton revolutionized science, mathematics, and philosophy, but Opticks doesn t speak to the modern heart like Romeo and Jiuliet still does. Generations of people have learned more about the world from Shakespeare than from Newton. I don t have Wil s gift for writing such touching stories. I ve only been able to even approach that sort of thing once or twice, and it certainly won t make a career for me. Like Wil, I m rarely the youngest person in the room anymore. His days of being a famous teenage actor on a scifi series are long gone, as are mine of single-handedly defeating entire teams at jr. high programming contests. (OK, that s a stretch, but at the time it sure felt exciting.) But unlike him, I m not completely content with my niche yet. I blog about being a geek in rural Kansas, where there still aren t many. I m a dad, with an incredible family. And I write about programming, volunteer for Debian and a few other causes, and have a surprisingly satisfying job working for a company that builds lawn mowers. And yet, I have this unshakable feeling of unsettledness. That I need to stop and think more about what I really want to do with my life, perhaps cultivate some talents I don t yet have, or perhaps find a way to make my current path more meaningful. So I will take Wil s book as a challenge, to all those that were once sure of what their lives would look like, and are less sure with each passing year: take a chance, and make it yours. And on that score, perhaps I ve done more than I had realized at first. Terah and I took a big chance moving to Kansas, and another one when we bought my grandparents run-down house to fix up and live in. Perhaps it s not a bad idea to pause every few years and ask the question: Do I still like the direction I m heading? Can I change it? Wil Wheaton gives me lots to think about, in the form of easy-to-read reflections on his own life. I heartily recommend both Just a Geek and The Happiest Days of Our Lives. (And that has nothing to do with the fact that the Ubuntu machine he used to write the book probably had installed on it a few pieces of code that I wrote, I promise you.)

a short update on my RC-bug squashing activities:

• #526210 scim-kmfl-imengine: "FTBFS with GCC 4.4: missing #include"
  apply patch from the BTS, upload to DELAYED/2
• #531715 gcin: "FTBFS with GCC 4.4: missing #include"
  add comment to BTS, later NMU'd by zack
• #534600 spatialindex: "spatialindex: FTBFS with GCC 4.4"
  apply patch from the BTS, upload to DELAYED/2
• #539543 hubbub: "FTBFS with GCC 4.4: 'cptr' may be used uninitialized"
  apply patch from the BTS, upload to DELAYED/2
• #546386 fam: "FTBFS with gcc4.4"
  apply patch from the BTS, upload to DELAYED/2
• #549223 chuck: "fails to build with gcc-4.4/newer eglibc"
  apply patch from the BTS, upload to DELAYED/2
• #550115 gbgoffice: "FTBFS: invalid const conversion"
  apply patch from the BTS, upload to DELAYED/2
• #553706 glob2: "FTBFS with GCC 4.4: 'class GAGCore::StreamBackend' has no member named 'getc'"
  apply patch from the BTS, upload to DELAYED/2

remarks:

• to be honest, these were all easy bugs, I just grabbed existing patches (by Martin Michlmayr, peter green, & several Ubuntu folks).
• reactions so far: one "thank you" mail, no other comments.

According to the man page, there are three ways to exclude files from being tracked by git.

Shared list of files to ignore The most well-known way of preventing files from being part of a git branch is to add such files in .gitignore. (This is analogous to CVS' .cvsignore files.)

Here's an example:

*.generated.html
/config.php

The above ignore list will prevent automatically generated HTML files from being committed by mistake to the repository. Because this is useful to all developers on the project, .gitignore is a good place for this.

The next line prevents the local configuration file from being tracked by git, something else that all developers will want to have.

One thing to note here is the use of a leading slash character with config.php. This is to specifically match the config file in the same directory as the .gitignore file (in this case, the root directory of the repository) but no other. Without this slash, the following files would also be ignored by git:

/app/config.php
/plugins/address/config.php
/module/config.php

Local list (specific to one project)For those custom files that you don't want version controlled but that others probably don't have or don't want to automatically ignore, git provides a second facility: .git/info/exclude

It works the same way as .gitignore but be aware that this list is only stored locally and only applies to the repository in which it lives.

(I can't think of a good example for when you'd want to use this one because I don't really use it. Feel free to leave a comment if you do use it though, I'm curious to know what others do with it.)

Local list (common to all projects)Should you wish to automatically ignore file patterns in all of your projects, you will need to use the third gitignore method: core.excludesfile

Put this line in your ~/.gitconfig:

[core]
excludesfile = /home/username/.gitexcludes

(you need to put the absolute path to your home directory, ~/ will not work here unless you use git 1.6.6 or later)

and then put the patterns to ignore in ~/.gitexcludes. For example, this will ignore the automatic backups made by emacs when you save a file:

*~

This is the ideal place to put anything that is generated by your development tools and that doesn't need to appear in your project repositories.

Over the past weeks, a couple of contributors sent me fixes and new features for forked-daapd. Thanks to you all! The biggest change is the addition of TV shows metadata as found, for instance, in TV shows bought on the iTunes store. Together with the added support for FrontRow and QuickTime clients, this means forked-daapd is a lot more able at streaming video files than it ever was. Kudos to Ace Jones for his work! Note, however, that you ll need a patched version of ffmpeg to pick up the TV shows metadata from your MP4 files. At the time of writing, the patches have not landed into ffmpeg upstream yet, and it s a bit unclear when this will happen. Contact Ace for the patch and instructions, see the commits in the git tree for his email address. Git tree on Alioth: http://git.debian.org/?p=users/jblache/forked-daapd.git (git URIs on the page)

Somehow, I'm still lacking the optimal media player application. Many popular ones are totally overloaded (e.g. amarok). Others like totem seems to be just a minimalistic frontend for a particular backend.My current choice:

• Single-shot playback: to view a random song or video I usually open them with Totem (the GNOME default) and that works okay
• Library: I use MPD as player because it just seems to be rock stable. As UI I currently use Sonata, but I don't use it for much more than choosing a song from the currentl playlist.
• Editing: ExFalso seems to have the best ID3v4 support, in particular it also allows multiple genre fields. (Note that Vorbis even suggests you should use multiple artist fields instead of the common "Arist A & Artist B" way of filling the fields)

However, there is one thing I'm really not satisfied with: when putting together a CD compilation for friends (say, as Christmas present), they are quite useless. A key issue here is the total playlist length. Guess what, I want to make sure it fits on a single CD. So I really need to know the total playlist length. Why do so many media players (e.g. totem, alsa-player-gtk, xfmedia4, vlc, mplayer, ...) not show you the total playlist length? They did read all the files to get artist and title. Many even have the individual song lengths, just not the total sum.In the past I've been using old XMMS1 to check for the total length, or a CD burning application like K3B by repeatedly importing my current folder.Right now, I'm using Quod Libet (since I like the tag-editing component exfalso a lot) to arrange the playlist. It also gives me the total length, albeit I belive I've had incorrect song lengths in it before (broken VBR files?), and it's not perfect, too: being database-driven it has really long startup times for occasional users (because of updating the database) and is much more heavyweight. I also believe I've lost some playlists because I had moved my files around once ... so I'm a bit sceptical.Anyway, there are still hundreds of media players I havn't looked at. Don't bother me to send me an email about one I havn't mentioned!But if you are developing a media player, please consider the use case of putting together a music CD for your friends. In particular, for users that do not use your player all day.

It was interesting to see Clint Adams describe love and dissatification with configuration management. At work I've got control of 150(ish) machines which are managed via CFEngine. These machines are exclusively running Debian Lenny. In addition to these hosts we also have several machines running Solaris, OpenBSD, and various Ubuntu releases for different purposes. Unfortunately I made a mistake when I setup the CFEngine infrastructure and when writing all the policies, files, etc, I essentially said "OK CFEngine controlled? Then it is Debian". (This has been slowly changing over time, but not very quickly.) But in short this means that the machines running *BSD, Solaris, and non-Debian distributions haven't been managed as well via CFEngine as the rest, even though technically they could have been. A while back I decided that it was time to deal with this situation. Looking around the various options it seemed Puppet was the way of the future and using that we could rewrite/port our policies and make sure they were both cleanly organised and made no assumptions. So I setup a puppetmaster machine, then I installed the client on a range of client machines (openbsd, debian lenny, ubuntu, solaris) so that I could convince myself my approach was valid, and that the tool itself could do everything I wanted it to do. Unfortunately using puppet soon became painful. It has primitives for doing various things such as maintaining local users, working with cronjobs, and similar. Unfortunately not all primitives work upon all platforms, which kinda makes me think "what's the point?". For example the puppet client running upon FreeBSD will let you add a local user, setup a ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file but will not let you setup a password. (Which means you can add users who can login, but then cannot use sudo. Subpar) At this point I've taken a step back. As I think I've mentioned before I don't actually do too much with CFEngine. Just a few jobs:

• Fetch a file from the master machine and copy into the local filesystem. (Making no changes.)
• Fetch a file from the master machine, move it to the local system after applying a simple edit. (e.g "s/##HOSTNAME##/ hostname /g")
• Install a package.
• Purge a package.
• Setup local user accounts, with ~/.ssh handled properly.
• Apply one-line sed-style edits to files. (e.g. "s/ENABLED=no/ENABLED=yes/" /etc/default/foo)

(i.e. I don't use cron facilities, I add files to cron directories. Similarly I don't use process monitoring, instead I install the monit package and drop /etc/monit/monitrc into place.) There is a pretty big decision to make in the future with the alternatives being:

• Look at Chef.
• Stick with CFEngine but start again with a better layout, with more care and attention to portability things.
• Replace the whole mess with in-house-fu.

If we ignore the handling of local users, and sudo setup, then the tasks that remain are almost trivial. Creating a simple parser for a "toy-language" which can let you define copies, edits, and package operations would be an afternoons work. Then add some openssl key authentication and you've got a cfengine-lite. For the moment I'm punting the decision but I'm 90% certain that the choice is CFEngine vs. Chef vs. In-House-Fu - and that puppet is no longer under consideration. Anyway despite having taken months to arrive at this point I'm going to continue to punt. Instead my plan is to move toward using LDAP for all user management, login stuff, and sudo management. That will be useful in its own right, and it will coincidentally mean that whatever management system we do end up using will have on less task to deal with. (Which can only be a good thing.) ObFilm: Terminator II

It was interesting to see Clint Adams describe love and dissatification with configuration management. At work I've got control of 150(ish) machines which are managed via CFEngine. These machines are exclusively running Debian Lenny. In addition to these hosts we also have several machines running Solaris, OpenBSD, and various Ubuntu releases for different purposes. Unfortunately I made a mistake when I setup the CFEngine infrastructure and when writing all the policies, files, etc, I essentially said "OK CFEngine controlled? Then it is Debian". (This has been slowly changing over time, but not very quickly.) But in short this means that the machines running *BSD, Solaris, and non-Debian distributions haven't been managed as well via CFEngine as the rest, even though technically they could have been. A while back I decided that it was time to deal with this situation. Looking around the various options it seemed Puppet was the way of the future and using that we could rewrite/port our policies and make sure they were both cleanly organised and made no assumptions. So I setup a puppetmaster machine, then I installed the client on a range of client machines (openbsd, debian lenny, ubuntu, solaris) so that I could convince myself my approach was valid, and that the tool itself could do everything I wanted it to do. Unfortunately using puppet soon became painful. It has primitives for doing various things such as maintaining local users, working with cronjobs, and similar. Unfortunately not all primitives work upon all platforms, which kinda makes me think "what's the point?". For example the puppet client running upon FreeBSD will let you add a local user, setup a ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file but will not let you setup a password. (Which means you can add users who can login, but then cannot use sudo. Subpar) At this point I've taken a step back. As I think I've mentioned before I don't actually do too much with CFEngine. Just a few jobs:

• Fetch a file from the master machine and copy into the local filesystem. (Making no changes.)
• Fetch a file from the master machine, move it to the local system after applying a simple edit. (e.g "s/##HOSTNAME##/ hostname /g")
• Install a package.
• Purge a package.
• Setup local user accounts, with ~/.ssh handled properly.
• Apply one-line sed-style edits to files. (e.g. "s/ENABLED=no/ENABLED=yes/" /etc/default/foo)

(i.e. I don't use cron facilities, I add files to cron directories. Similarly I don't use process monitoring, instead I install the monit package and drop /etc/monit/monitrc into place.) There is a pretty big decision to make in the future with the alternatives being:

• Look at Chef.
• Stick with CFEngine but start again with a better layout, with more care and attention to portability things.
• Replace the whole mess with in-house-fu.

If we ignore the handling of local users, and sudo setup, then the tasks that remain are almost trivial. Creating a simple parser for a "toy-language" which can let you define copies, edits, and package operations would be an afternoons work. Then add some openssl key authentication and you've got a cfengine-lite. For the moment I'm punting the decision but I'm 90% certain that the choice is CFEngine vs. Chef vs. In-House-Fu - and that puppet is no longer under consideration. Anyway despite having taken months to arrive at this point I'm going to continue to punt. Instead my plan is to move toward using LDAP for all user management, login stuff, and sudo management. That will be useful in its own right, and it will coincidentally mean that whatever management system we do end up using will have on less task to deal with. (Which can only be a good thing.) ObFilm: Terminator II

I've recently been fixing up my VDR setup to work with FreeSat and make it brother/parent friendly. I've applied the EPG patches to get the 7 day guide, setup an autologging in user under gdm with vdr-sxfe running and that left getting the remote working. For some reason my old serial dongle wasn't happy with lirc - it got detected ok, and would show some signal when buttons were pressed but didn't work with the old config. The entire hardware of the box has changed, so it seems likely something isn't quite right (in particular the lirc drivers spew out warnings about SMP bits so I should probably try the dongle under a single core setup to rule that out, but there's also a move to 64 bit involved).

The easy solution to have something sorted for Christmas was to pickup a cheap remote from eBay. This ended up being a Cyberlink remote + USB dongle combo. Worked just fine when plugged in, turning up as a normal input device and the obvious keys doing the obvious things. I wanted all the keys to work though, as I'd got used to having a lot of the VDR functions instantly accessible rather than having to work my way through the menus. Various searches suggested I'd need to use LIRC to access the odder keys. That seemed a lot of hassle for something that was doing the decoding itself. Some playing with xev turned up keycodes for a number of the keys, but there were still a few missing (and important ones at that, such as Red/Green/Yellow/Blue). Further digging found me a suggestion of an Xorg keyboard map that would map the KEY_RED etc from the evdev device into something workable under X. And then I found inputlirc via the Debian package. This is really bloody neat - point it at an evdev device and it will present all of the KEY_* codes out as lirc keys. If you pass the -g parameter it makes sure the key presses only go to lirc as well. Exactly what I want and a doddle to setup - no messing with a big configuration file, just edit /etc/defaults/inputlirc to point to the correct /dev/input/by-id/ file, add the -g to the options in that file and restart.

Now the main remaining task is to get it working with BBC/ITV HD.