Lenovo have announced their innovative new U1 Hybrid laptop [1]. It consists of a tablet-style device with a resistive touch-screen that runs Linux on a 1GHz ARM processor which attaches to a base computer that has a keyboard and a Core2 processor running Windows 7. They apparently have some special software to synchronise web browsing on both computers so you can maintain your web sessions when you detach the computers. How they manage to use the power of the Core2 CPU for javascript and flash intensive web sites while allowing the active browser sessions to migrate to a different OS must be a neat technical trick. Revision3 have a youtube review of the U1 which shows what it can do in terms of the hardware interface [2] Running two computers requires having two batteries, motherboards, etc which means more weight or means less battery life for the weight, whichever way you think of it the user is losing because of this choice. The idea of having two computers in one is one of these cool technical ideas which just won t provide a benefit for the users. The best thing for the users would be to have a single light-weight computer that provides an adequate amount of performance. A 1GHz ARM processor should give good performance when running Linux for most tasks (web browsing, office applications, and most games). So it seems that a good tablet with some USB ports and a matching USB keyboard would be a better option. Maybe you could have a spare battery integrated with the keyboard as most times when you want a full sized keyboard weight isn t such a big problem. The problem with MS-Windows in regard to such machines is that performance is poor and processors other than i386 and AMD64 have never really been supported (sure you can buy MS-Windows-based PDAs that have ARM and PPC CPUs, but the application support for them is minimal). These problems will never be solved. MS wants to compel users to continually upgrade their software, this requires always adding new features (bloat) while an older or less featureful OS is often a better option for lesser hardware. Vendors of proprietary applications will never support the range of CPU architectures that a free software distribution such as Debian or NetBSD supports (not that NetBSD is an ideal tablet OS but it does demonstrate what can be done if you want a portable OS). These inherent flaws in the proprietary software environment lead to some unusual hardware being designed to work around them such as the Lenovo U1. I don t have any reason to believe that the Lenovo is a bad machine, it sounds like a reasonable work-around for some of the problems that MS-Windows has forced on the industry. But I believe that it would be a much better machine if it was lighter, had a better battery life, and had a choice of keyboards all of which would have been achieved if it was designed as an ARM-only tablet machine that you can connect to an external keyboard. They could even have used a multi-core ARM CPU. But the market for such systems apparently isn t large enough for Lenovo (or anyone else) to ship ARM laptops for serious use. There have been a couple of netbooks released recently with CPUs that don t support the i386 or AMD64 instruction set, but they were aimed at web browsing use not general purpose computing. Almost everything that I do on computers could be done at least as well with a CPU that doesn t run an Intel-based instruction set, the only exception is virtualisation which doesn t seem to be well supported on architectures other than AMD64 nowadays.

• [1] http://lenovoblogs.com/insidethebox/?p=366
• [2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5DYuVN6nuY

Here is a great talk from the Chaos Communication Congress about Tor and censorship: lessons learned. It's the inside scoop from the Tor guys on how they're keeping Tor usable inside China, Iran, etc despite attempts to block it. If you're like me, you have resources and would like to help Tor, but the exposure of running a exit node is way too high, and even running an non-exit node seems risky. Now there's a third option, running a bridge which can be used to get to the Tor network. The great thing about doing this is that you can be pretty sure anyone using your Tor bridge is the kind of person you want to help (and not some spammer or worse). There's little reason to use a Tor bridge unless your ISP/Government is repressing you. Also, the worst thing that is likely to happen to your bridge is that $COUNTRY discovers its IP and blocks it. So the benefits seem focused and high, and the risks easily managed.

Here s stuff that I d like to do this year, more or less by decreasing order of importance:

• translate my Debian book into English and get it published;
• finish the cleanup of the perl API in dpkg-dev in order to create libdpkg-perl;
• create dpkg-buildflags to export default build flags that packages should use (and get rid of the code setting those environment variables in dpkg-buildpackage), needed to properly fix #489771;
• ensure the new source formats continue to gain acceptance by improving whatever is needed;
• design a generic vcs-buildpackage infrastructure to be integrated in dpkg-dev. This design will probably happen through a DEP (Debian Enhancement Proposal) to ensure we have had proper discussion before someone gets to the implementation;
• continue fixing dpkg bugs faster than they are reported;
• enhance our infrastructure to ease interaction between contributors and to have a better view of how each package is maintained (see my last blog entry on this topic);
• update the developers-reference where needed and fix some of the numerous wishlist bugs;
• rewrite in C the last perl scripts provided by the dpkg binary package (update-alternatives/mksplit mainly, for dpkg-divert there s a preliminary patch available already) so that it s easier to build a minimal system without perl-base;
• integrate the 3-way merge tool for Debian changelogs in dpkg-dev;

All of this probably doesn t fit in my free time (being a father since last month does not help increasing my free time ), so if you re interested in seeing one or more of those projects completed, and if you know some person/company that could sponsor them, get in touch with me! Partagez cet article / Share This

Facebook seems to have little interest in protecting its users from a huge flow of common scam/spam. Sure they do get active when accounts are mass hacked, and I havn't seen a "Facebook virus" for some time. Their JavaScript filtering is pretty neat, and they have implemented dereferrer pages they can use to quickly stop URLs from spreading.However, some of my friends keep on joining very dubious groups and installing very dubios applications. No wonder "FarmVille" is sometime nicknamed "ScamVille". There still is a lot of money to make in dubious ways.The big problem with Facebook is that everyone can set up groups and applications that look like they might be real. This is why people keep on installing "Mafia wars gifts" applications that have nothing to do with the actual game except the name. And sometimes not even realize they don't actually get these gifts in the real game.Even worse are the "pimp" groups. It's a classic pyramid scheme. Invite all your friends to the group, then you get extra Mafia points. Facebook really needs to stop that.A quick search for "invite proof" - these groups usually require you to post "proof" of having invited all your friends - turns up 246 groups, almost all of which promise you Mafia stuff.Searching for "getElementsByTagName" in Facebook turns up "over 500" groups. This string is a JavaScript command commonly used to auto-invite all your friends to a group. A typical mass-spread group will use this in its "join instructions".Facebook needs to combat this kind of spam/scam. And it's not too hard. Just actually check user complaints/reports, do simple searches like the ones I posted above, and have some employee go through them and just delete all these dubious mass-join groups. Pyramid schemes likely violate the Facebook TOS, and they definitely are illegal in at least Germany.

Yesterday was ~30C in my area, today was well over 30C during the day (although cooler in the evening). They forecast 33C for tomorrow in Melbourne, but that means where I live it will probably be about 36C (it s always a few degrees hotter than the overall forecast for the city). Monday is predicted to be 41C and Tuesday may be 32C. I turned off my SE Linux Play Machine this morning and will probably leave it off until at least Tuesday evening. The hardware I use for the Play Machine is fairly energy efficient, but it s in a confined space with some other electronic stuff so it s best not to take chances. I ll probably leave it offline for about half the duration of January and February. I miss Amsterdam and London weather.

Since I released forked-daapd, I ve got a couple of emails about porting it to FreeBSD. Apart from isolating and reimplementing the parts of the code using signalfd and inotify, there isn t much work to do beside taking care of the usual libc/platform issues. However, when you don t know the codebase and don t know the APIs you re replacing, it makes it a bigger job. So, I ve just spent a day going through FreeBSD documentation, installing FreeBSD 8.0 in qemu (because it wouldn t install on my spare machine due to a bootloader issue that s at least 5 years old ), and started porting the codebase. A dozen or so commits later, forked-daapd builds and runs on FreeBSD. With one caveat: the filescanner doesn t update the database on the fly when the library directory is modified. While I ve put in support for kqueue/kevent to replace inotify, it s only a stub for now. Someone will have to write the code to actually act on the events and trigger the rescans/database updates. kqueue/kevent delivers a lot less information compared to inotify, which means there s a lot of work needed to track renames and moves. And I didn t feel like doing it. So, FreeBSD users: send patches! :)

I wrote a plugin for Hudson today, which integrates Devel::Cover (Perl's test coverage tool) into the build reports. Actually, that's currently an exaggeration. All it does is add a checkbox in the configure page, and a link to Devel::Cover's reports on the build page when it's enabled. I spent the day remembering how to program in Java. Tomorrow I might be in a position to extend it into something more attractive - I'll publish it very soon, but I need to run it past my employer. Watch this space. In other news, I volunteered to package Hudson for Debian, and then discovered just how many dependencies it has. This should keep me going until squeeze+1, I think.

I love unicode. You should too. For the unicode-lover out there, Joachim Breitner recently created an xscreensaver hack called unicode and uploaded it to debian. [1] I didn't like the default colourscheme of black text on a white background, so I hacked it to support colour configurability. The patches are in the Debian package as of version 0.2-1. If you're using xscreensaver, you can configure it using the xscreensaver configuration dialog for a subset of the available colours. If you want different colours, you can edit ~/.xscreensaver by hand. Gnome screensaver, however, does not have a configuration UI, opting instead to present a simpler interface and also allow administrators to lock down the screensaver configuration if desired. You can still configure the screensaver on unlocked systems without a GUI. Here's how to do it. [2] At a terminal:

mkdir -p .local/share/applications/screensavers
cp /usr/share/applications/screensavers/unicode.desktop .local/share/applications/screensavers
editor .local/share/applications/screensavers

There's an Exec line in the file that should look like this:

Exec=/usr/lib/xscreensaver/unicode -root

Change it to look like this:

Exec=/usr/lib/xscreensaver/unicode -root -background <bgcolor> -foreground <fontcolor>

Swap the two colours with any X11 colour of your choice. Make sure to quote any multiple-word colour names. I like black as a background, with white or firebrick or another non-jarring bright colour as the font colour. If you want, you can also change the "Name" field in the file, but it's not necessary for things to work. Now, open up gnome-screensaver-preferences and select the new screensaver. Lastly, leave your laptop strategically with the screensaver on to geek out all your friends with your unicode prowess. [1] Thanks Joachim! [2] There is actually another way to do it, if you prefer to interact graphically. For the other method, get /usr/share/applications/screensavers/unicode.desktop, edit it to your taste, and then drag-and-drop it onto gnome-screensaver-preferences, which will automatically put it in the right place in .local. You may need to restart gnome-screensaver preferences in order to see the new screensaver in the selection box. The feedback isn't very good.

For a long time it has been obvious that in all cases anti-piracy technologies discourage purchases and in many cases encourage piracy. I first discovered the significance of this in about 1991 when I attended a public lecture by a senior employee of Borland and a member of the audience claimed that the Borland product he bought didn t function correctly due to anti-piracy measures. The Borland employee firmly stated that Borland did not use anti-copying technology on any of it s products, didn t have any plans to do so, and the problem in question must have been caused by something else. Of all the hostile questions that were asked, this was the only one that caused the speaker to appear agitated so it was obviously an issue that was considered to be important within Borland. In the late 80 s anti-piracy measures were mostly based around creating floppy disks that couldn t be easily copied (violations of various aspects of the disk formatting standards). This meant that you couldn t make a backup copy of the data, so it wasn t uncommon for people to seek pirate copies of their commercial software for daily use to avoid wearing out their valuable original floppy disks. Then the dongle was invented and people who bought software sometimes sought pirate copies so that they could use their printer and their commercial software without having to change plugs on their PC. But in those cases the benefits to uncrippled software to the users were small. Now a large part of the battle on copy protection concerns DVDs. If you had a DVD of a recent movie and an MP4 which would you rather watch? Would you prefer to be forced to watch some anti-piracy rubbish for a couple of minutes at the start of the movie (with fast-forward disabled) or would you prefer to just start watching it? Would you prefer to be able to pre-program the sections of the movie that you watch (as some parents desire to skip the sex and/or violence in movies for their teenagers) or would you prefer to be forced to watch the movie straight-through with only a manual fast-forward to skip sections? Would you prefer to have a DVD that can t be played properly on many (most?) computers because of the CSS encoding or an MP4 that plays on everything from PCs to mobile phones without an issue? Would you rather have 100 movies in the spare space on your laptop hard drive when you travel and 1000 movies on your desktop system or the much smaller number of boxed DVDs that you can store? I think that in most cases a pirate MP4 will give a better experience than a DVD. So the question is, why pay for a DVD when in most cases you get a lesser experience than you will get from a MP4 file downloaded by bittorrent? One reason for buying the DVD is to support the film industry. But I doubt that such a profitable industry will get much sympathy in today s economy. Another reason is the morality, some people consider piracy to be theft (it isn t by definition theft requires that for at least a moment the property be completely in the possession of the thief) and therefore avoid it. One technical reason for buying a DVD is the fact that it may have multiple languages supported, it will have subtitles, it may have an audio track with the creators giving a commentary, and it may have extra scenes that were cut from the main release. I believe that work on adding subtitles to the video file formats is a work in progress, so it s only a matter of time before the DVD rips include all this extra data. Really the content creators should focus on making a product that meets the needs of users and that they want to pay for. Pirating books is technically possible, but almost no-one does it. Some successful authors such as Charles Stross freely publish significant parts of their work and Cory Doctorow freely publishes all his work in electronic form. Books just work well, they meet the needs of users and people want to buy them. Sure they can sell them second hand, lend them to other people, and it s technically possible to pirate them, but they remain profitable. On my documents blog I have a page of links to free short stories that I liked [1] and a page of links to free books [2]. It seems to me that creators of other copyright content should consider how they can be of service to their customers. We are all familiar with corporations and misguided individuals who get whiny about the supposed losses due to piracy. Bruce Everiss has unfortunately joined this trend and demanded the disconnection of Internet users based on unproven accusations of game piracy [3]. I don t know whether the game buying experience sucks as badly as the DVD buying experience, but based on the reports of locked-down consoles that have to be cracked before they run Linux I expect that the modern game industry is doing at least as badly as the movie industry. They need to provide things that users want! One thing to note is that a Windows or console game player who uses pirate games will probably buy some games at some future time, while someone like me who uses free software both by principle and because it gives a better user experience will probably never pay for a game (I haven t got time to play all the free games so I probably wouldn t even buy a Linux game).

• [1] http://doc.coker.com.au/fiction/free-short-stories/
• [2] http://doc.coker.com.au/fiction/free-books/
• [3] http://www.bruceongames.com/2010/01/05/304149300-stolen-from-activision/

It is our pleasure to announce that Aur lien Jarno is now an assistant to the Debian Security Team.

He will concentrate most of his efforts on security support for the new kFreeBSD kernel.

Thanks Aur lien, and welcome to the team.

Contributed by:Steffen Joeris, on behalf of the Security Team

5 years ago I founded my own company Freexian SARL with the goal to make a living out of my free software experience. I marketed the company as being specialized on the Debian distribution in the hope to combine my Debian work and my professional work. Given that Freexian is still alive I think I met the first goal. My free software experience allowed me to complete many projects: a large number of development projects for embedded devices running a custom Linux distribution (usually built with debian udebs), the development of a Debian derivative (SLIS) and some recurring tasks of remote system administration. However, even if I use Debian daily for all my work, very few of the projects that I complete for customers have direct results in terms of improvements for Debian (except some bugreports and some related fixes). And even when I m able to contribute something back to Debian, it s usually not in areas that I care about. My focus within Debian is on the technical and organizational infrastructure of the project: as a dpkg/dpkg-dev maintainer I try to improve the packaging infrastructure, as a QA member I maintain the Package Tracking System to ease collaboration, as an Alioth admin I ensure all DD can host VCS repositories for their Debian related projects, as a developers-reference co-maintainer I try to share good packaging practices, etc. Given this bias, it s difficult to find customer projects that would let me contribute in those areas. Thus I think I need to try another approach: the simplest solution would be to find sponsors for some of my own Debian-related projects (if you have something else to suggest, please leave a comment either in the blog or by mail). That said finding sponsors looks like a difficult task in itself. While I can imagine (for example) a company using Debian on embedded devices that would like to sponsor the rewrite of update-alternatives in C in order to get rid of the perl dependency in the dpkg package (if you know such a company, get in touch with me!), I don t see who would have an interest in sponsoring the time that I need to contribute new sections to the developers-reference manual. But who knows maybe I should just try and publicly solicit sponsorship for some of the projects that I care about. In any case, suggestions and comments are welcome! Partagez cet article / Share This

The Lenny version of the spamassassin package contains a regular expressions that considers as coming from the future mails dated in 2010. Starting from a couple of days ago, that has increased the possibility of false positives.
More information about that can be found in some blog posts such as this one and in the Debian BTS, bug #563245.

If you are running spamassassin on a Debian machine, you should probably upgrade it to avoid false positives. That can be easily achieved using the volatile version of spamassassin 3.2.5-2+lenny1.1~volatile1. More information about this update and instructions of how to update in this announcement from the debian-volatile-announce mailing list.

Generally, it is a good idea to have a volatile line in your sources.list. Read more about the debian-volatile project in their website.

Unstable users only need to make sure they update to the latest version available in the archive 3.2.5-7.

Contributed by: Stefano Zacchiroli

The MirBSD Midi-ISO (bi-arch manifold boot) and NetInstall for both i386 and sparc have been upgraded to the 20091226 snapshot (sorry for the delay). A separate news announcement will be done when a full ISO (MirBSD + MirGRML) is done. Other than that, I have fixed a couple of things all over the place, jupp for example. The planned release of mksh R39b is still not done though, as I m only human as well, and too much hacking isn t something one can do without relaxing some in between. On the Debian front, my RCBD #1 was continued, here s #1 results:

• Carry over from day #1
• bug #552791 acorn-fdisk Copyright file does not contain verbatim copy of the license or a pointer to one
• bug #562647 gidentd Does not work with ipv4 after recent change in netbase
• bug #558812 dietlibc incorrect license in debian/copyright
• bug #531937 autossh FTBFS on mipsel due to missing -fPIC
• New ones
• bug #563522 acorn-fdisk cleanup patches
• bug #563525 gidentd cleanup patches

Explanations: I did go overboard during the first patching session, but I suppose this is what the NM learning period is for too. The autossh maintainer said thanks and will probably integrate my patches, so I don t need to NMU. I could close the dietlibc bug. The other two didn t look as good, I had to separate the fix for the RC bug (and other required fixes, such as ftp-master rejects there were none though) and my other fixes; I submit the former as NMU diffs again and pointed Zack to the .dsc files, and opened the aforementioned two new bugs with the rest of the diffs, so the proper maintainers can take and apply them. There s questioning if gidentd should be removed (see the PR for more); the acorn-fdisk upstream (arm-fdisk it s called there) is not actively developing but will receive patches; the autossh maintainer said thanks but I didn t yet hear back from upstream. The binutils as intel_mode bug was fixed upstream and in experimental for my case, but I had to reopen things because the variant documented in binutils-current still doesn t work, so others (who use the new, more intel-like, syntax) don t run into it. Luk sent me a request to do more mipsel-FTBFS-due-to-toolchain-bugs workarounds. Will do (but can t promise to do so before the upcoming BSP. Robert Millan incorporated something like manifold-boot into GRUB 2, after I described it to him (the debian-bsd@ people are currently sorting out some heisenbugs with it, though). Now there s three variants (but then, this helps spotting bugs that don t appear in all implementations). sendmail 8.13.4 is out, I wonder when OgreBSD will upgrade I could do it myself again, but this time it s not that urgent. Still waiting for the TLS extension, though

RCBW - #17 Given that my "most blogged" Debian activity since last summer has been RCBW, what else could be my first post of 2010 if not a RCBW update? With further ado, here are this week squashes by yours truly:

• bug #559898 - flowcanvas - fixed in unstable, tag as needed
• bug #562503 - man-db - downgrading severity (RC-ness was in zlib, which is now fixed)
• bug #541610 - docbook2odf - switch dep away from (now gone) libxml-sablot-perl
• bug #528088 - ttf-aenigma - fonts are actually free, as detailed in debian/copyright
• bug #544113 - tiger - remove dep on essential package (bonus: misc deps/debhelper fixes)
• bug #561466 - ttf-beteckna - rebuild against fixed defoma (thanks Julien Cristau who spotted a wrong fix of mine)
• bug #561470, bug #549987 - halevt - add missing dep on policykit (bonus: QA upload with misc fixes)

No particular remarks, but a long overdue tip of the week: the turmzimmer BTS interface is a great tool for bug squashing. Still, it has a issue with comments which can slow down some activities, but which you can help getting better! First of all you should know that comments are per-package and not per-bug (which might not be obvious, especially since often packages listed on the page have just one bug per-package). That means that you should generally mention the bug you are referring to when you post comments, unless the comments are really package-specific. Additionally, old comments are persistent, so you might get baffled by old comments that "invalidate" current issues. So, if you notice a comment that predates the actual bug numbers, please remove the comment by editing it and stating "no comment" in the form. Ah, happy new year (in case you care about sharp, calendar-based time partitions).

Two weeks after the Rcpp 0.7.0 release, Romain and I are happy to announce release 0.7.1 of Rcpp. It is currently in the incoming section of CRAN and has been accepted into Debian. Mirrors will catch up over the next few days, in the meantime the local page is available for download too. A lot has changed under the hood since 0.7.0, and this is the first release that really reflects many of Romain's additions. Some of the changes are

• A new base class Rcpp::RObject that replaces RcppSexp (which is still provided for compatibility); it provides basic R object handling and other new classes derive from it.
• Rcpp::RObject has real simple wrappers for object creation and a SEXP operator for transfer back to R that make simple interfaces even easier.
• New classes Rcpp::Evaluator and Rcpp::Environment for expression evaluation and R environment access, respectively.
• A new class Rcpp::XPtr for external pointer access and management.
• Enhanced exception handling: exception can be trapped at the R even outside of try/catch blocks, see Romain's blog post for more.
• Namespace support with the addition of a Rcpp namespace; we will be incremental in phasing this in keeping compatibility with the old interface
• Unit test for most all of the above via use of the RUnit package, and several new examples.
• Inline support has been removed and replaced with a Depends: on inline (>= 0.3.4) as our patch is now part of the current inline package as mentioned <here.

As before, fuller details are in the ChangeLog on the Rcpp page.

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!

With the help of a couple of friends, we ve put a 4.5T RAID-5 machine on our network and I m trying to figure out how to share the storage with the rest of the hosts. In the past, I have used NFS and CIFS/Samba to provide access to remote hosts. This has generally worked okay so long as the server stays online. I don t know if the results are going to be much different, but I am now trying a different approach. I plan to run an iSCSI server, and I ve already configured AoE (ATA over Ethernet). I ve exported a block device on the network segment and mounted it on a remote host. This was pretty easy to configure. There is a bit of documentation on the internet already, but I ll give another quick overview. I gave the storage server the unoriginal name san0 . This host is running debian lenny. I am testing the configuration from my debian sid development host, which has the similarly unoriginal name dev0 . So, think server when you see san0 and client when you see dev0 . I assume that you ve already got an LVM volume group set up. Mine is called vg0 . Correct the following examples to account for any differences. You can use disk partitions instead of LVM logical volumes.

---

Create a logical volume to be exported: cjac@san0:~$ sudo lvcreate /dev/vg0 -n e0.1 -L 5G Load the AoE kernel module: cjac@san0:~$ sudo modprobe aoe Install the package containing the vblade block device export server: cjac@san0:~$ sudo apt-get install vblade Export the block device. Note that the ethernet bridge on which I export the device is called loc : cjac@san0:~$ sudo vbladed 0 1 loc /dev/vg0/e0.1 Install the AoE discovery tools on the client: cjac@dev0:~$ sudo apt-get install aoetools Load the AoE kernel module: cjac@dev0:~$ sudo modprobe aoe Probe for exported AoE devices: cjac@dev0:~$ sudo aoe-discover Verify that our exported device was discovered: cjac@dev0:~$ test -e /dev/etherd/e0.1 && echo "yep"
yep

---

You can now treat /dev/etherd/e0.1 as you would any other block device. You can format it directly, or partition it and format a partition, use it as a device in your software RAID array, use it as swap space (ha), or something completely different. Now to figure out this iSCSI stuff

My first RC Bug-squashing Day (or rather night):

• bug #552791 acorn-fdisk Copyright file does not contain verbatim copy of the license or a pointer to one
• bug #562647 gidentd Does not work with ipv4 after recent change in netbase
• bug #558812 dietlibc incorrect license in debian/copyright
• bug #531937 autossh FTBFS on mipsel due to missing -fPIC

I picked all of them mostly randomly from the list Zack gave me, and except dietlibc they are packages I had not even heard of before. The first one begun easily (track down licencing information, pimp debian/copyright, but I ended up fixing compiler and lintian warnings and even wrote a manpage for it while there (but for this one, I didn t bump the Standards-Version). The second one was only the second one to complete because the others took longer; it s basically a change of a d mon to use two instead of one listening socket, to work with a doble stack OS instead of just a dual stack OS by not using v4-mapped IPv6 addresses (I considered if to use select(2) or poll(2), or to just fork and have two d mons running, but that seemed too ressource-consuming to me so I chose the less-complicated poll(2) method, looking at popa3d(8) s source code (inherited from OpenBSD) in the MirBSD tree since I could not find my network programming book. The third one was basically communicating with upstream; the bug can be blosed with no change to the package. The fourth one took me a while; luckily I have qemu 0.11.0 on MirBSD, and aurel32 s mipsel qemu images helped a great deal; however, cowbuilder --create failed for me, so I ended up waiting almost the entire night for a-g d-u to finish; in the end, it was simply a bug in upstream s configure.ac which is only exposed due to a toolchain bug on mips(el). To do: my AM Zack needs to upload the NMUs (after checking, of course); I need to communicate some of the fixes upstream (the gidentd upstream is NXDOMAIN ), produce a very small testcase for the mipsel toolchain bug, maybe fix some more mipsel FTBFSen as I have a working qemu instance now, but maybe I ll do that at the BSP when I can t find IPv6 bugs or so that I feel I can fix (I also want to do an mksh release which has to be prepared first RSN, and there s still the need to formally publish the MirBSD-current bi-arch snapshot and make another ISO out of it for BT and prepare the multi-BSD USB stick for allbsd.de ). Annoyances: a-g d-u could ask me things at the start before working for some four+ hours instead of in the middle, and the same questions several times (PAM restart). The sid kernel doesn t boot today but did yesterday, the lenny kernel produces this:
Starting the hotplug events dispatcher: udevdudevd[320]: udev: missing sysfs features; please update the kernel or disable the kernel's CONFIG_SYSFS_DEPRECATED option; udev may fail to work correctly
(I hate udev.) And, worst of all, these annoying fireworks (some sounded like originating from inside our staircase, I pity the neighbour s cats) when one wants to hack Finally, I *loathe* CDBS. Debhelper v5 rules! Oh, and I also was under the impression that Firstname LASTNAME was a French thing, and to a much lesser extent Asian. (@bubulle)

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