One of my professional duties in my past ten years was monitoring systems. Even my diploma thesis was dedicated to distributed monitoring (altough my professor sucked badly). Apart from a few custom-programmed scripts to analyze special situations (e.g. proxy clusters) I used tools that fellow administrators will find familiar: Nagios and Cacti. And another less famous text-configuration-based monitoring tool called Cricket. That worked well somehow but Cricket was hard to learn for my coworkers and Cacti seems unreliable and fundamentally broken in terms of SNMP checking. Besides why do I have to set up availability checking in Nagios and set up checking of the same parameters in another software to draw graphs? Just recently I came across an open-source software I hadn t heard of before: Zabbix. And although it has a few rough edges it seems way more professional than other common tools (the commercial tools I saw are even worse than the open-source variants). I tried it and after a lot of reading and trying it looks like it has a good potential to replace Nagios and Cacti. So I thought I d sum up my personal experiences with all of these tools. Nagios. Their makers claim that it s the industry-standard in IT infrastructure monitoring . Honestly it s a great tool but considering how many years it has been existing it barely evolved. During my diploma thesis I wrote an alternative software that I called MrNetwork that dealt with flaws that Nagios hasn t even fixed today. Still Nagios is a tool I have used for many years and it is very reliable. Advantages:

• open source
• large community
• many powerful plugins (and own plugins are easy to create: just write a program that prints a one-line string and set a certain return code)
• easy-to-use web frontend
• debugging plugins is moderately simple.
  
• many thought-out features like host groups or notification options that make your life easier
  
• dependencies (so that you don t get 100 alerts if a router between the Nagios server and other servers went down)
  
• nagvis plugin with a great interactive editor that draws nice management-suitable graphs (although I found the ndo2db interface hard to set up at first and a little flaky)
  

Annoyances:

• The focus is on availability checking you don t get fancy graphs on the values that are monitored (e.g how the CPU load was over time). So you ll need a second tool and set up the same checks there just to get graphs. But availability percentages are computed automatically.
• Textual configuration that has so many different settings that you need to look up the parameters often. A web-based configuration would probably be better (and is available as an add-on but I haven t tested it).
• Third-party plugins are often very badly programmed and barely documented that it appeared easier to reinvent the wheel. ( Look, ma, I can has plugins. )
• Some views on the web interface are not very obvious (e.g. clicking on the title of a host group gives a nice view of all hosts with all services).
• Many plugins don t have corresponding configuration entries so you have to find out how they work and write configuration entries yourself (and those which are preconfigured take some archeology to find out which parameters they expect). This is a huge time-waster for beginners. And in your services configuration you have to verify your checks configuration to understand the meaning of each parameter. Or do you remember what check_http 80!john!doe!10!30!body is supposed to check?
• Every set of parameters of a certain plugin requires a distinct configuration entry. The plugins have dozens of configuration switches that you may need one day. Want to set a timeout on HTTP checks? Write another check configuration. Want to check for a certain string in the HTTP response? Write another check configuration. And so on.
• Most checks are run from the Nagios server itself (the NRPE plugin to do the checks on the respective remote systems somehow refused to work properly here) which is suboptimal and puts a lot of load on the server.
• By default every alert triggers a notification. So if you can t define proper dependencies (e.g. if you want to check your web server in all 30 supported languages and there is some logical error) then you will get spammed with alerts.

Cricket. As Nagios does not support plotting graphs of the monitored values I was in need of another piece of software. Basically Cricket is a frontend to RRD (which stores data in a rotating/round-robin file that keeps data of the last X minutes/hours/days). It has a textual configuration that takes a lot of getting used to. It s main principle is inheritance of settings they call it configuration tree . Which means you have a master DEFAULTS file that contains general settings like how to query SNMP. In a subdirectory you define a certain class of devices that you want to monitor e.g. routers (the DEFAULTS are inherited to this level). Within the routers directory you can just define a list of routers you want to monitor. All settings are inherited from above (parent directories). It s more a geek tool for shell lovers. Advantages:

• very quick to monitor a large set of similar devices once the general device class is defined
• simple web interface
• very reliable
• can monitor SNMP values (it does this very well) or execute external scripts thus can be easily extended
• flexible graphing you can sum up values of two graphs into a new graph (aka mtargets multiple targets)
• different check frequencies can be configured for different subtrees through cron (by default values are collected every 5 minutes this can be set as low as one minute if needed)

Annoyances:

• the textual configuration is error-prone (leading to funny Perl errors that can be hard to debug)
• users may expect to see all parameters of a certain device instead of all devices having a certain parameters ( Give me the statistics of router42 instead of Let s see the temperature of all routers we have. )
• customizing the graphs (drawn by RRD tool) isn t trivial
• Frequency of checks is by default 5 minutes. Before RRD can draw the first value of a graph it needs three values. So you ll be waiting 15 minutes before you see any results.
• RRD rounds data by default. So the yearly graph doesn t show the peaks that the daily graphs do. (This can be fixed by not graphing the average values but the maximum values.) Long-time archiving of graphed data is not possible without throwing away the RRD files and manually customizing them. Changing the monitoring frequency (aka heartbeat ) is not possible either without throwing away the data and starting from scratch either.
• No proper built-in alerting in case certain thresholds are exceeded.

Cacti. Another frontend to RRD and a pretty sophisticated one. Nearly everything is configured through its web interface. And the result is beautiful. It s not entirely reliable though and SNMP support (at least in version 0.8.7b) is a big fail. I like Cacti for its user interface is much better than Cactis but it s less reliable and flexible. Advantages:

• Beautiful and (for most features) simple web interface. Nice features like graphs that can be zoomed using Javascript.
• Fine-grained permissions system. So a certain user may get read-only access to a certain subtree.
• The tree where graphs are placed can be configured freely so you get exactly the view you want.

Disadvantages:

• Doesn t hide the RRD magic very well. The user is easily confused by templates, data sources and the like.
• Graphing sometimes just stops working for no reason or values are missing although the server isn t overloaded and other software doesn t show such outages. According to a quick search on the lazyweb I m not the only one with such effects.
• Setting up many systems means a lot of clicking in the web interface. Setting up new kinds of checks (aka templates ) means even more clicking and is very error-prone.
• The quality of some third-party templates I tested was pretty bad. Creating new templates is tedious, error-prone, frustrating and close to black magic. Nothing for the casual user at least.
• Doesn t handle SNMP correctly (this is the biggest fail in my opinion and makes it unusable here). Although it knows how to query indexes (e.g. ifDescr to get the names of your network interfaces) it just seems to stored fixed OIDs. So once the SNMP tables change the order or number of items (which isn t unusual) then suddenly other parameters get graphed.
• Frequency of checks is by default 5 minutes. Increasing the frequency leads to missing data and wrong results.
• As it uses RRD and needs 3 valid values you won t see that your monitoring fails until you wait 3 5=15 minutes. Not suitable for impatient non-smokers like me.
• Debugging failed checks is close to impossible. If a check fails then I find myself clicking around randomly trying to find typos because the alternative is digging around in database entries.
• The web interface is sometimes confusing. A refresh of SNMP tables is done by clicking a unmeaning green circle icon. Adding new items to a list is done by clicking an inconspicious Add link that doesn t even look like a link.
• Another UI confusion: graphs are created from the devices view. But they are deleted from the graph management view.
• No alerting in case certain thresholds are exceeded. Another tool like Nagios would still be needed to notify you.
• Can t sum up multiple targets so monitoring failover clusters doesn t work well.
• RRD averages data when putting daily values into weekly values, weekly into monthly and monthly into yearly. So the yearly graph doesn t show the peaks that the daily graphs do. (This can be fixed by not graphing the average values but the maximum values.) Long-time archiving of detailed graphed data is not possible (RRD). Changing the monitoring frequency (aka heartbeat ) is not possible either without throwing away the data and startin from scratch.

Zenoss. People pointed me to Zenoss which is supposed to offer the same functionality as other monitoring systems but is much more integrated. So this short list is more a quick one-day-experimental expression than a thorough analysis. But in the end much of the fuss is just marketing. Advantages:

• Beautiful web interface
• Nice gimmicks like google maps integration to show you where your servers are down worldwide. Only makes sense when monitoring networks with several/many remote locations.
• Can partly discover parameters of systems automatically. That works for static routes (although I wonder why the heck I want to monitor static routes), file systems and network interfaces. On the other hand processes can t be discovered automatically and have to be set up manually.
• Does not come with a specific agent but plays rather well with plain old SNMP.
• Can monitor Windows through native WMI.
• Large fanbase.

Annoyances:

• Web interface feels slow (Zope is bloated)
• Opaque operation. It does not tell what s actually going on. You can add monitoring and check back later if anything worked they way you want.
• Questionable reliability. In a test here I was monitoring a running process. The process was said to be down and suddenly went to up after a while although nothing had changed on the system.
• Just one dashboard. Several dashboards similar to Zabbix screens would be nice.
• Configuration and data is spread across MySQL, the internal Zope database storage and RRD files on disk.
• The dependency graph is a nice Flash-based applet displaying how the systems are connected. But it does not show any details about the systems aside from whether they are up or down. And clicking on a host does not take you anywhere but center on the system. Beautiful but it could do so much more than just look beautiful.
• I dislike the way that things are configured. The context menu with the down arrow needs to be used. I d prefer simple add or delete actions instead of navigating the menu all the time. Looks like Javascript is used wrongly here.
• Limited open-source version. Full version needs to be paid for.

Zabbix. This is the tool I have been evaluating for the past two weeks and currently I m moving all checks away from Nagios and Cacti and put it into Zabbix. So the following list is more a first impression instead of a year-long experience. (I m using Zabbix 1.6.5 here. Debian Lenny s 1.4 version lacked some interesting features like proper SNMP handling so I backported the newer version to Lenny.) Zabbix seems very close to the perfect monitoring system I had always dreamt of. I would have designed it differently in some aspects though. Advantages:

• Availability Monitoring (like Nagios) and graphing (like Cacti) is combined into one tool.
• Highly configurable. User John may just get an SMS for problems of high severity during the weekend and on weekdays get a Jabber message. Even automatic actions like restarting services can be set up.
• The notifications actually help the person who gets the message. Low disk space on /var on web5 with an additional comment is pretty helpful even when sent via SMS.
• Very performant. The remote agent gathers the information on each system.
• Fast web interface.
• Sophisticated monitoring of web sites. Zabbix can follow a path of simulated mouse clicks on a web site and check for functionality and response time.
• Real-time graphs. Values are by default collected every 30 seconds. You quickly see where you are going.
• Permissions system. Certain users can be limited to certain views.
• Gathered data is stored in a database (MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite) instead of an RRD file. Storage periods (aka history ) can be configured freely. Backup up the database is all there is to be done.
• Agent for remote checks simply works (and is available on Debian Lenny) and can even call scripts or shell one-liners to gather information. The agent can gather a lot of information locally and send it to the Zabbix master server. Works on several operating systems and even on Windows (just set up monitoring of Windows services and processes successfully).
• Templates (that can even link to further templates) save time in setting up many checks.
• Graphs (plots of values over time) can be customized like which items are plotted and in what way. Even pie charts are possible.
• Even the parameters that don t get an explicit graph can be graphed at any time. E.g. the agent has tracked the CPU load on a system that you never cared about then you can graph that with one mouse-click.
• Screens and slide shows can be used for high-level views (aka dashboards ) or to be displayed on a big geeky display. They can combine textual display of the status as well as clocks, ad-hoc graphs or predefined graphs.
• Very flexible trigger expressions. For example you can tell a trigger to fire if the average system load over the last 15 minutes is above a certain value. As all measured parameters are stored in a backend database you can use all kinds of mathemical expressions. Like firing a trigger if the average number of running processes during the last half hour is above 50. All other software I tested just has access to the last value gathered.
• Customized alerting is simple through shell-based alert scripts.
• Remote monitoring made easy by using a Zabbix proxy.
• Paid support and paid custom programming available. But the software is completely open-sourced.
• 320 page PDF manual with screenshots and nice references. (Although I d personally prefer an online help. Currently the ? link within the web interface just points to the PDF that you can download.)

Annoyances:

• A lot of mouse moving and clicking is required to set up things. For example setting up an alert if the free space on a disk on a certain server is getting too low then you need to set up hosts, items, triggers and actions. Some of the clicking seems redundant. E.g. I didn t find a way to create triggers automtically for a set of checks. If I monitor how full the /home partition is then I d like to set a threshold in the same configuration step.
• Takes a little patience understanding the concepts although they make sense after half a day.
• The web interface is crammed full of features. For casual users it s confusing to navigate.
• The map editor is close to unusable. You can put icons and connections into the graph but have to define the X and Y coordinated manually. This feature is nice but desperately needs a good interactive map editor like nagvis uses.
• Does not detect the available assets in a monitored server automatically. Imagine that you want to monitor the space on all disk partitions on a system. You will have to copy over or create the check items manually or define all possible checks in a template and disable those you don t need. Cacti handles that better by offering you a list of partitions to monitor. Zenoss can do that partly. The zabbix agent should be able to handle such a service discover automatically. (The built-in Discovery feature rather seems to detect new servers in a given network range automatically. But that s something different.)

See also: Ben Rockwood s blog Further similar software I didn test thoroughly: Hyperic and Opsview (I ll surely update this blog post while I learn more about Zabbix.) All of the above tools are great. I m not meaning to say that Zenoss is total crap for example. The differences are subtle. And whether a piece of software suits your needs really depends on your expectations. I love that all this software is available as open-source. And a totally unscientific but fun analysis of the community is counting the number of active people in the respective channels on the Freenode IRC network:

• #nagios: 133 users
• #cacti: 58 users
• #cricket: 2 users
• #zenoss: 54 users
• #zabbix: 61 users

Either Nagios has the largest fanbase or perhaps that means that the majority of people needs help with it.

Over on Planet Ubuntu there is a VRMS meme winding down. Usually I tend to think web log aggregator memes are an abomination, however, this one is a little more interesting, especially if Debian folk pick it up. It seems like many Planet Ubuntu posters require some non-free stuff, examples include; graphics and other drivers/firmware, Flash (Gnash/Swfdec aren't there yet), Sun Java (despite OpenJDK), RAR 3.0 archives, LHZ archives (despite jlha), Microsoft fonts (despite ttf-liberation), icon themes, ICC profiles, mind mapping, support for codec DLLs from Windows, VirtualBox drivers for Windows, the Opera web browser, games and other things. For Debian users, the popcon information pretty much confirms the above issues. Some other stuff Debian users use that isn't in Debian include; patented codecs, skype, acroread, the non-free version of VirtualBox and more. Next, lets get in on the getting your meme on part. On my Dell Inspiron 6400 laptop I have following Debian non-free/contrib stuff installed; firmware-iwlwifi, gcc-doc, gcc-doc-base, gcc-4.3-doc, autoconf-doc, gdb-doc, make-doc. On my OpenMoko FreeRunner phone I have nothing installed from Debian non-free/contrib. My wireless router and ADSL modem don't run Debian. The wireless router is a MIPS-based Netgear WGR614L (that is marketed as supporting DD-WRT, OpenWRT and Tomato) so I could conceivably install OpenWRT etc or Debian on it, but I haven't gotten around to that yet. The ADSL modem is a MIPS-based Siemens SpeedStream 4200, but it looks like that would require a significant amount of effort to get running FLOSS. Lets ponder my laptop freeness a bit more. The docs are all FSF-free, but not DFSG-free. It appears they are not DFSG-free because the FSF will not allow 28 words of FSF/GNU advertising to be removed (I'm not sure if Debian or the FSF is more pedantic). I'm not aware of any DFSG-free alternatives to them and I don't particularly care about the restrictions. My wireless card is an Intel 3945ABG mini PCI card that requires the kernel to upload the iwlwifi firmware before it works. Intel refuse to release firmware source code under a free license, citing FCC requirements. I'm not aware of any free firmware (or firmware reverse engineering efforts) for this device so the only alternative is to use wired Ethernet or buy another wireless card. Ethernet wires everywhere would be very inconvenient, so I've been thinking about trying to replace the card or laptop as soon as I am able. Since Atheros has released GPLv2 firmware for its AR9170 802.11n USB chipset I'll probably get something released by Atheros. I wonder why the FCC didn't prevent Atheros from releasing modifiable firmware, perhaps Intel will change their position too. So, what other software is on my laptop apart from Debian? Lets see, nothing on the HD apart from GRUB 2, /boot containing a Linux image/initrd from Debian and the LUKS partition containing swap and the Debian ext3 rootfs. Coreboot laptop support seems to be in the very early stages so I have no alternative to the supplied Dell BIOS at the moment. There is also the CPU microcode and other firmware installed in the various devices on the system, at least the HD, Ethernet, Bluetooth, GPU, DVD drive etc. have some kind of firmware in them. Some of this firmware is updatable using software from the Dell Linux repositories. Lets ponder my phone freeness a bit more. On it I have two copies of the u-boot bootloader (one in the protected NOR flash), u-boot is free. The NAND flash has an old Qt Extended Improved (QTEI) install that I need to copy stuff off and wipe. I also have a 4GB microSD card containing QTEI, Debian, FDOM and SHR. Now that QtMoko has brought QTEI to Debian packages I can probably ditch the QTEI install. I read that OM2009 is being merged into SHR so I can get rid of FDOM. That leaves SHR and Debian/QtMoko (nothing non-free). IIRC SHR does contain some firmware for devices that the OpenMoko FreeRunner doesn't contain, but that will get removed as Linux upstream moves more and more of that into linux-firmware.git. Nothing more on the main flash or microSD storage, so what else? The OpenMoko contains lots of hardware, but the main problematic devices here are the AR6000 Wi-Fi chip and the TI Calypso GSM device. The AR6000 is an issue because the firmware embedded in the chip is non-free and FullMAC so it is hard to add new features like AP mode or improve the connection quality/etc. In addition the firmware currently on the device is a development version of a 2.0 version (1.x was apparently broken) and further development does not seem to be happening yet. Since Atheros GPLed the AR9170 firmware I idly wonder if they could be convinced to release the source and GPL the AR6000 firmware. Perhaps a life-size gold statue of RMS would help there. The GSM device is problematic because of various bugs in the firmware. It apparently is an ARM chip with Nucleos, so perhaps uCLinux or something could be ported to it or written for it. There has been at least one discussion about hacking the GSM firmware (thar be dragons). Searching for some keywords extracted from the end of the first mail in that thread lead to some interesting results indeed. Lets ponder my network freeness a bit more. I should allocate some time to investigate putting Debian on my wireless router and ADSL modem. These generally just work except the ADSL modem reboots itself a lot during the summer. The just-works status of these devices means that messing with them is problematic in case I brick them (luckily I have a spare for the ADSL modem though). I presume OpenWRT and similar have replacements for all the software on my wireless router, drivers may be an issue though. I use gmail for reading email lists, mainly because of intertia, cheapness and because the interface has no GUI FLOSS peers yet (sup-mail exists for console use). TangoGPS, OpenStreetMap and other tools are slowly replacing my use of Google Maps, although I imagine routing will remain an issue for many years yet. One of the tech groups I'm involved in uses Plesk as a hosting control panel, mainly out of intertia, I'm not familiar with any FLOSS replacement though. Some of the upstream FLOSS projects I'm involved with use sourceforge as a hosting platform. There is a certain level of lock-in with SF.net, most of the data is easily exportable though. Lets ponder my software freeness in comparison to Planet Ubuntu posters. I have no freeness issues with drivers at the moment, however firmware seems likely to have freeness issues for a long time to come. I've avoided the need for the Adobe Flash Player by using swfdec and clive for downloading videos for some sites. swfdec works OK for some sites, some that I care about where it doesn't work and clive cannot download video include Vimeo, abc.net.au and sbs.com.au. For Vimeo you can download raw video if you have a login, but I do not, bugmenot is unreliable and Vimeo doesn't seem to be accepting new registrations. SBS I watch on television and ABC I get no reception so I just don't watch it. Java isn't an issue now that OpenJDK exists. I sometimes need to extract RAR 3.0 archives, which I do by copying the files to a friend's Windows machine or using a RAR extractor website. There is no free implementation of a RAR 3.0 extractor yet. I seem to remember that there is source code for a non-free extractor so presumably a clean-room documentation and reimplementation effort could fix this. I don't encounter LHZ files, but jlha-utils is available for if I do. I feel no need to install Microsoft fonts since the Liberation fonts and DejaVu meet my general font needs and Debian contains fonts covering all the scripts of Unicode (except for about half the huge amount of Han characters). In my music collection, only the Voxware audio codec and DigiTrakker MDL files are not supported by Rhythmbox, but I don't really miss those few tracks. I rarely have audio/video codec issues with video from the Internet. I don't have a use for Opera. Thanks in part to the efforts of the Debian games team, games from Debian main (such as warzone2100) satisfy my gaming needs. I just don't use Skype. Overall, I'm generally happy with my level of software freedom. My main strategy for preventing regressions in my software freedom is to just avoid doing things that require non-free software. The most problematic FLOSS issues for me are Flash support (adoption of the HTML5 video tag will resolve this for me), RAR 3.0 support and firmware. Please feel free to contact me with any comments or questions. Happy Software Freedom Day everyone!

I was really happy a few years back, when Martin announced he'd start working on netconf. Not just because I agreed with his assessment that ifupdown needed replacement; also because I had been thinking about a good way to implement such a thing, and had been planning to start writing 'soon'. With Martin's announcement, I made a few suggestions to give him some input, and then put my plans away I had more important things to take care of, anyway. Unfortunately, netconf did not manage to reach the ambitious goals that Martin set out, mainly due to lack of contributors. I wanted to help out; I really did. But Martin's choice of python to implement a 'prototype' which then had to be reimplemented in C or C++ didn't get me very thrilled. Not just because I have a severe dislike of python; also because implementing something twice is, in my humble opinion, not quite the best way to do something like this. But hey, who am I, if I don't put my code out there. Never the less, I tried helping. I really did. During debconf8 at Mar del Plata, I approached Martin with the suggestion that I start reimplementing those bits that were unlikely to change anymore in C, as a first step toward something that could be in the base system. Unfortunately, that didn't happen. After trying for about two weeks, I just gave up. I thought I could read python code and reimplement that so that it would work the same way, but I couldn't. I thought I could implement python modules in C without knowing python, but as it turns out that's a laughable idea. For several months then, I didn't think about it anymore. In March of this year, however, I got a little bored. And what does one do when they get bored? Right, you find something to do. I my case, that was 'figure out how bison works'. I'd of course known about parser generators for quite a while, but just never had the time to dive in deep and figure out how they work. When I needed to do a config file for nbd, I instead hand-wrote my parser and used a lexer from libglib. But I wanted to learn how to do things properly, so I sat down. Long story short, when I had to choose something somewhat more complex to implement, I thought 'how about a hypothetical config file for a network configuration utility', and I started implementing that. It turned out to be fun, so I didn't stop after I knew enough about bison. And just last week, for the first time I successfully used it to bring up my wired interface using DHCP -- and bring it down again. It can also already manage static interfaces through netlink, though it isn't quite able to the equivalent of 'ip addr flush' yet. Fun. The system is quite flexible. It has a plugin interface (which needed some refinement that I did using some help on IRC just today), which should allow developers to implement extra functionality by just dropping a shared object in the right directory. In fact, I'm working on the wireless support (hence my blog post of last week) as a plugin. Obviously the code isn't remotely ready yet. The wireless code has a long way to go. The firewall module needs to be started. It will probably crash and burn if put to the test. But even so, it already has one feature that ifupdown, in its 10 years of existence, never acquired: it will not try to DHCP off an interface if it finds out that there is no cable connected to it unless you wrote a configuration that asks you to do so. I wanted things to be as simple as possible, and therefore the minimal valid configuration file that will do something useful is the following:

That's right, it's empty. This will cause the system to bring up the 'lo' interface at bootup, and do nothing else. If you say 'ifup eth0', where eth0 is a valid and existing interface, it will first check whether there is a link, and if so, DHCP off of it. There's much to do still, but I have now reached a point where I feel the system is ready to meet all challenges it should be able to meet (or so I hope), and where it might be nice if interested people check it out. The code is in a git repository that's mirrored on git.debian.org, github.com, and my own git.grep.be. The latter is my --mirror repository, but is not available for cloning to anyone else. If you're interested in checking it out, you may want to start with doc/tech.txt, and/or examples/ipcfg.cfg. I updated the former just yesterday, so it's quite up-to-date. On the other hand, while the latter shows the direction I would like the system to take, the code is a far cry from implementing everything shown there, and it has been a while since I last checked that file out, so the comments in there are, in some cases, somewhat outdated. But that's good, because I want to keep the file as a reference of the goals that I originally had, before I'd written this whole corpus of code, so that I can go back at some undefined point in the future and fix things. Comments are (more than) welcome.

mach package page. IM SOOOOO SORRY TO LUCAS AND HIS FANS AND HIS MOM.

Two things that have been annoying me for a long time have been fixed recently, and I discovered those two new features the same day (rainy week-ends are good for you).

• OpenSSH s problem with networks with large bandwidth-delay product has been fixed in OpenSSH 5.1. The problem was that OpenSSH has its own windowing system over TCP s, and that its buffer were two small to be able to maximise the bandwidth on, say, a 1 Gbps link with 10ms latency, so you would get a ridiculous bandwidth because of that, even if TCP was correctly tuned. A patch (hpn-ssh) has been existing for a long time, but strangely, people don t like patching their SSH servers and clients.
  That means I can now get decent bandwidth using scp or rsync over long distance links.
• The radeon driver now supports TV out for R600 cards (including my X1250). I can now stop using the proprietary fglrx driver, and make the computer under the TV completely free!

OK, both changes have been there for a long time, but I m sure I m not the only one who didn t notice them at the time. Big Thank You to both groups of developers (especially to the ati/radeon developers, who have been very helpful on IRC to troubleshoot my setup).

Here are some notes about bootstrapping a Centos or Fedora chroot from Debian. It should also work from Ubuntu with minor changes, but I haven t checked. The following should really be done in a chroot, since some commands will install files in your /etc or elsewhere, ignoring the --installroot passed to yum. The following instructions are for Centos, but replacing all occurences of centos with fedora should work.

• apt-get install yum rpm python-m2crypto
• apt-get install -t experimental rpm (needed because some packages, like bash, require features not available in unstable s rpm package error message about rpmlib(BuiltinLuaScripts)).
• mkdir -p /tmp/centos/var/lib/rpm
• rpm --root /tmp/centos --initdb
• Go to http://rpm.pbone.net or http://www.rpmfind.net, search for centos-release or fedora-release, and download the rpm for the version you want.
• rpm -ivh --force-debian --nodeps --root /tmp/centos centos-release*rpm (that populates /tmp/centos/etc with information about the centos repositories)
• yum --installroot /tmp/centos/ install yum . That fails because of missing GPG information in /etc/pki. Do ln -s /tmp/centos/etc/pki /etc/pki, then again yum --installroot /tmp/centos/ install yum.
• mount -t proc foo /tmp/centos/proc
• mount -t sysfs foo /tmp/centos/sys
• chroot /tmp/centos /bin/bash --login
• cd /var/lib/rpm && rm * (simplest way to avoid problems between db versions for Debian s RPM and centos RPM)
• rpm --initdb
• yum install yum (again, to restore the rpm db)
• yum install vim-minimal less
• That s all!

Update: Jaldhar Vyas pointed me to mach, and Paul Wise to mock. Both packages are available in Debian, but use config files for each release shipped in the package. Unfortunately, both packages are out of date, and don t include Fedora 9 or newer. Also, mock doesn t support Centos.

Anyway, both packages could use a new maintainer. Don t hesitate to jump in!

Subscribing to packages on the PTS is really useful to stay informed of everything happening with those packages. Unfortunately, managing your PTS subscriptions is really a challenge. Here is how I proceed to subscribe to packages I forgot to subscribe after uploading them:

• To get the list of your subscriptions, connect to master.d.o, and run
  /org/packages.qa.debian.org/bin/get-summary-subscribers.pl grep your@email
  That s also a way to know who is interested in your packages. :-)
• You can use UDD (from master) to know the list of packages you should probably be subscribed to, that is, packages you maintain or co-maintain in sid:
  psql -A -t service=udd -c "select source from sources
where distribution='debian' and release='sid'
and maintainer_email='your@email'
union select source from uploaders
where distribution='debian' and release='sid'
and email='your@email';"
• You can them use combine to find the packages you should subscribe to, and mass-subscribe using the email interface.
• Then, you are done, or almost done: mass-confirming PTS subscriptions is a PITA because of #340863.

Some more info:

• The PTS lives on master, in /org/packages.qa.debian.org.
• The script that handles emails send to pts@ is bin/control.pl.
• The spool dir for pending requests is spool/. The files are simple text files.
• You can send multiple commands per email. Sending them in the subject might be broken. (at least it failed for me)
• You don't need to take special care of the From for your emails. It's ignored (unless you subscribe without specifying an email address).

The two RSS feeds previously at http://people.debian.org/~filippo/NEW_rss/ have been moved to a more proper location on ftp-master and the script (tools/queue_rss.py) merged into dak thanks to ganneff.

JFTR the script scans a directory with .changes files (which happens to be NEW in this case) and generates the said feeds, it is not tied to ftp-master and requires python-pyrss2gen and python-debian.

I have a problem with Debconf, but it's far from specific to Debconf. If anything, it's specific to me. I have a short term memory for people, and I tend to forget faces, names and nicknames. And their mappings. Which means that people I haven't seen in a few years tend to get blank looks, puzzled frowns and/or awkward greetings from me. Sometimes I know the face but it takes me a while to put a name on it, sometimes a nickname pops up, sometimes just a feeling that I've met a person for such-and-such occasion in such-and-such place. Sometimes I get it all rushing back at me after a few minutes. This has happened a few times already at this Debconf, and is likely to happen again, except for people who'd be hard to forget (colourful shirts, memorable hairstyles and exuberant personalities tend to stick in my memory). This is bothering me as much as you, and I would like to apologise to all people I'm likely to offend. Sorry, all of you. Whoever you are.

Welcome to this month's FusionForge news batch. I did a presentation of FusionForge at the Libre Software Meeting (Rencontres Mondiales du Logiciel Libre, in French) earlier this month, to explain where we come from and where we hope to go. Many people attended despite the talk being early on the morning following the formal dinner, and the questions showed interest, which is encouraging for the project as a whole. I don't think the talk has been recorded, but the summary and slides are available on the RMLL website. The big news, though, is that I'm currently at the Debian Conference, Debconf, and that I also attended Debcamp before that. Debcamp is a very productive get-together of developers from all across Debian, and I took the opportunity to get help from them. I spent the first few days refactoring some of the code that was duplicated between the CVS and Subversion plugins, and the result is that version control plugins are now much easier to implement. Case in point: I managed to get the attention of a few users of other tools, and since they only had to implement small specific parts, we now have almost complete plugins for Bazaar, Darcs and Git, and Mercurial will probably follow. CPOLD was done too, but mostly as a proof of concept. If you're around, come and see me, we'll finish the support for your favourite tool together. Or even start it (I haven't started on Arch and Monotone for lack of perceived interest, but I'm quite open to these tools too). In both cases, I promise it won't take long. This code currently only lives on a temporary branch based off FusionForge 4.8, but I'll port that to trunk and commit it in the coming weeks.

Order Without Law is a fantastic book by Robert Ellickson published in 1991. In a way, the book is an in-depth case study of the irrelevance of law. Subtitled, "how neighbors settle disputes," Ellickson shows how people solve complicated problems in an archetypal area of liability law without knowledge of the law. Ellickson shows that even when people know exactly what the law says, they often ignore it in favor of community norms and, in his examples, models of "neighborliness." Specifically, the book is about how neighbors in northern California settle disputes related to damage caused by roaming cattle, how neighbors construct and share costs of fences, and how, although the law is frequently debated in relation to classifying land as either open or closed to free grazing, the law tends to take a back seat to unwritten norms in the way that problems are actually solved. There is order and a shared understanding of rules in Ellickson's account; it just has very little to do with the law. As part of his description, Ellickson goes into some detail about the types of damage that cattle cause. For example, Ellickson describes how bulls, will often break down barbed wire fences and go on rampages impregnating heifers, eating vast amounts of food, and destroying crops and equipment. When I was on a long bike trip through northern California a few weeks ago, I was sitting under a tree waiting for my cyling partner to catch up. A giant black bull nearby noticed me. Shorting, mooing, and shaking ribbons of slobber from its mouth, it lumbered toward me. Only a rather weak-looking barbed wire fence separated us. All I could think about was Order Without Law.

Over the last few years, I've been pretty immersed in the world of wikis. A wiki is like a collaborative web site; it lets several people view and edit a web page and link to other pages, maybe new pages that they themselves create. Wikis let tech-savvy people all over the world collaborate on a single web page, a single document. That's a pretty powerful idea, really. The obvious thing to do once an idea like wikis appears is to attempt to cram all of humanity's knowledge into it. Well that's just crazy enough to work. Wikipedia is the gold standard of wikis. It's a collaborative encyclopedia with lots and lots of articles. As the gold standard, it influences people's thinking about wikis in ways that might not be quite true. If Wikipedia were the only wiki you'd ever heard of, you might think that wikis are used to create encyclopedias. If that were true, you'd really only need one of them. If Wikipedia were the only wiki you'd ever heard of, you might be under the false impression that all wikis everywhere are editable by anyone. So if you create a wiki page, it's no longer yours. Other people can scribble on it. Well, some kinds of documents perhaps just aren't suitable for being edited by anyone, and the good news is that you can build a wiki for you and your classmates, or you and your coworkers, and you can decide who gets to edit what. I want to think about a few distinct uses for wikis in different contexts. The most common use is of course to create a knowledge repository; a collection of information written by people who know what they're talking about. That's what Wikipedia is, mostly. That's what the Haskell Prime wiki (which I run) is. And the excellent wiki about the game of Go, Sensei's Library, is also a knowledge repository. But there are other uses for wikis that are pretty cool. I often have to work on proposals with my coworkers. One (horrible) way to do this is to write the first draft in MS Word, email it to everyone, who might edit it and email it back. Of course, only one person can actually edit it at a time, otherwise I have to figure out what everyone did and merge their changes by hand. That's what we, in the computer industry, call teh suck. A better way to do this is to use a version control system, which lets multiple people work on a document at one time. Of course, if you're editing evil document formats like Word, still only one person can edit it at a time, but at least you cut out email, so things are a bit better organized. But wikis are actually a really great way to work on a document with another person. Two or more people can each collaborate on the document using the wiki software over the web. What becomes of the document at that point depends on its ultimate use. Maybe you have to convert it to MS Word or PDF at the end. That's a bit of a bummer. So there are two uses of wikis that I've mentioned: building a knowledge repository, and collaborative writing. Google started a service for collaborating on documents called Google Docs & Spreadsheets, which is probably useful for collaborative writing, but not knowledge repositories. They also acquired a wiki startup a few days ago, so they are clearly trying to get all over this space. There's another very interesting use of wikis that I'll call situation awareness. You can get a really vivid picture of this use of wikis if you take a look at the wikipedia article on the July 2005 London bombings. By the way, I didn't discover this excellent example of situation awareness using wikis. I saw it in the slides for a talk, but I don't know the original source at this point. If you go to that link, you'll see an excellent and up-to-date encyclopedia article about the London bombings. It's not a news article. Go to Google News and try to find a news article from a major news source which is this detailed, up-to-date, and well organized. Most articles you'll find are a snapshot, taken at a particular point in time (when the article was published) that most likely contains an account of the latest developments, and usually brief background in case you missed previous stories. The wikipedia article isn't a snapshot, it's an article that explains things in a logical order, which isn't necessarily chronological. Each wikipedia article contains a link to its own history. You can look back over time and see the article evolve. If you look at the early edit history of that London bombing article, you'll notice something fascinating. The article was created shortly after the bombing, with an account of the information that was known at that time. Within an hour, many people had edited the article, adding information they know about. If you were refreshing that wikipedia entry over & over (or if you were subscribed to it using RSS), you'd see not an account of just the latest developments, but an evolving, logical understanding of the attacks. The article started evolving right away, and it continues to evolve to this moment. That's what I'm calling situation awareness. Don't get me wrong, the mainstream news media is quite good at situation awareness. They do it a bit differently, and their articles or TV stories don't become integrated into a knowledge repository like wikipedia. I've enumerated three somewhat overlapping uses for wikis that I think are pretty interesting to examine:

Knowledge Repositories, which are a lot like encyclopedias,

Collaborative writing, which is a bit like a more elegant version of emailing word documents, and

Situation awareness, which isn't so different from the news; it draws from the news as a source, it can also be authored by the eye-witnesses themselves, and each story becomes an integral part of a knowledge repository. I don't claim that these are an exhaustive, nor are they a partition: Wikis are also used for bug tracking and as web discussion forums, for instance. What other categories can you think of? Email me if you have ideas.

The latest terrible story about a voting machine is here. In summary: 19,000 registered voters, 5,352 ballots cast, 144,000 votes counted by the machine. Does anyone remember the bug in Intel chips that came out something like 10 years ago? It looked (at least at first) like it would only affect a few people under very rare circumstances, but the media totally freaked out and Intel was forced to fix the problem (as well they should). Have we become so numb to bad software that we don't care when the machines we are using to help decide elections have such awful bugs in them? Does anyone notice when the bugs aren't so terribly obvious (negative votes, 138,000 delta from actual votes to counted votes).

A couple of weeks ago I updated my Debian Sid setup on the MacBook to use disk encryption; this post is to document what I did for later reference. The system was configured for dual booting Debian or Mac OS X using refit and grub2 as documented on the Debian Wiki; I don't use the Mac OS X system much, but I left it there to be able to test things and be able to answer questions of Mac OS X users when I have to. The Debian installation was done using two primary partitions, one for swap (I used a partition to be able to suspend to disk without troubles) and an ext3 file system used as the root file system. The plan was to use the Debian Installer to do the disk setup and recover the Sid installation from a backup once the encrypted setup was working OK. Backup for later recovery My first step was to install all the needed packages on the original system; basically I verified that I had the lvm2 and cryptsetup packages installed. The second step was to backup the root file system; to do it I changed to run level 1 and copied the files to an external USB disk using rsync. My third step was to boot into Mac OS X to reduce the space assigned to it; I had a lot of free space that I didn't plan to use with Mac OS X and I thought that this was the best occasion to reassign it to the Debian file system. Encrypted Lenny installation Now the machine was ready for the installer. As I formatted the system a couple of weeks ago I used a daily build of the Lenny Debian Installer, now that Lenny is out I would have used the official version. I booted the installer and on the partition disk step I selected the manual method; I left sda1 and sda2 as they were (the Mac OS X installation uses them) and set up sda3 and sda4 as follows:

• sda3: 256 MB, use as ext3, mount point: /boot
• sda4: 86 GB, use as physical volume for LVM

Note that I decided to put /boot on a plain ext3 partition to be able to use grub2 as the boot loader (if we put the kernel on an LVM logical volume we need to use lilo as the boot loader). Once sda4 was adjusted as LVM I entered on the LVM setup and created a LVM Volume Group (VG) with the name debian, using sda4 as the physical volume. Once the VG was defined I created a couple of Logical Volumes (LV):

• root: 82 GB
• swap: 2 GB

I left some space unallocated to be able to create LVM snapshots (I use them to do backups, I'll post about it on the next days). Once the LV were ready I finished with the LVM setup and went back to the partitioner to configure the Logical Volumes:

• debian-root: use as physicals volume for encryption
• debian-swap: use as pascal volume for encryption, encryption key: random

Once both encrypted volumes were ready I entered on the Configure the encrypted volumes menu and the installer formatted the volumes for encryption and asked for the debian-root pass phrase. Back on the main partitioning menu I set up the debian-root_crypt encrypted volume:

• debian-root_crypt: use as ext3, mount point: /.

I didn't need to touch the debian-swap_crypt, it was configured automatically as swap because I choose a random encryption key. At this point I was finished with the partitioning; to finish I installed a minimal system and rebooted to try the system. As I had changed the disk layout I had to re-sync the partition tables from refit; once that was done I was able to boot from the newly installed system. Setting up suspend to disk I was using s2disk to suspend the system; to test if it still worked with the new setup I installed the uswsusp package and adjusted the resume device on the /etc/uswsusp.conf to /dev/mapper/debian-swap_crypt. After my first try I noticed that the resume step failed with the encrypted swap partition because it was using a random key, which means that the swap contents are unrecoverable after a reboot. Looking at the cryptsetup documentation I found that the solution was to use a derived key for the swap partition instead of a random one. The command sequence was as follows:

# disable swap
swapoff -a
# close encrypted volume
cryptsetup luksClose debian-swap_crypt
# change the swap partition setup on the /etc/crypttab file
sed -e -i 's%^debian-swap.*%debian-swap_crypt /dev/mapper/debian-swap debian-root_crypt cipher=aes-cbc-essiv:sha256,size=256,swap,hash=sha256,keyscript=/lib/cryptsetup/scripts/decrypt_derived,swap%' /etc/crypttab
# open the encrypted volumes with the new setup
/etc/init.d/cryptdisks start
# enable swap
swapon -a
# update the initrd image
update-initramfs -u

After executing all those commands the suspend to disk system worked as expected. Recovering the original system If I were going to reinstall the system completely I would have finished here, but in my case I wanted to recover my original system setup (except the minimal changes required to use the encrypted passions, of course). To recover my old installation I backed up some files (/etc/fstab, /etc/crypttab, /etc/uswsusp.conf and the current /boot contents to be able to boot in case of failure with my old kernel) from the current installation, after that I recovered all the files from the initial backup (except the ones just saved) using rsync again and regenerated the initrd images of my old kernels:

update-initramfs -u -k all

After that I rebooted and everything worked as on my original installation (except for the disk encryption, of course).

Yesterday I received a mail message from a Debian user called Ekrem Erdem about my previous post, proposing a different partitioning schema that I found interesting. The basic idea is to swap the order of the technologies, that is, use LVM on top of an encrypted partition instead of encrypting logical volumes. I never thought about this schema because I always use LVM on servers and that is one of the fist things I setup (just after software RAID-1, if the machine has two hard drives); when I was evaluating how to setup my system for encryption I started with the LVM setup and never looked back. The advantage of this setup is that there is only one pass phrase (the one used to unlock the encrypted partition, sda4 in my case), eliminating the need of derived keys (i. e. my swap setup) or key files (I use them to mount snapshots of the encrypted partition non interactively). On the negative side I believe that this setup looses some flexibility:

• On my original model crypted and unencrypted partitions can coexist on the same volume group, while the new setup requires a different volume group for unencrypted volumes.
• If the user wants to have multiple partitions each one can use a different pass phrase or key file.
• If a logical volume is expanded through multiple physical volumes the new setup requires a key for each physical volume, while the original setup only needs one key.

Anyway if the plan is to encrypt all the file systems on a laptop the proposed setup is simpler and, IMHO, as safe as my configuration (remember that my keys are related). I'm not going to change my setup now (it works great), but I'll probably try this one in the future if I need an encrypted setup on a different machine.

Once again, the monthly board meeting of Software in the Public Interest will take place on irc.oftc.net #spi tonight (Wed 16 Sep) at 20:00 UTC. The meeting announcement was posted and there s a proposal for an extra bank account and two projects up for association: Path64 and OSUNIX. The big change for current members is the proposal for contributing membership expiry:

Any contributing member who does not cast a ballot in an annual Board member election shall be considered to be inactive and downgraded to a non-contributing member.

Yet another demonstration of how member ballots are not secret yet. Even if they re not secret like they should be, is it a good idea to feed the ballot data to the membership process? Should Further Discussion be added to the SPI board election, to give members a way to abstain? Should this dramatic change proposal be considered this meeting when it wasn t mentioned in the meeting announcement?

For those who aren t clinically dead, you may have heard of the BBC . The BBC are the state-ish-funded TV network in the UK, and the country s biggest broadcaster, alongside three other major terrestrial broadcasters who make their content widely available without payment ITV, Channel 4, and Five. These broadcasters also make some or all of their programming available for streaming over the Internets usually their home-grown programming only, not licensed stuff from America. Now, once upon a time, the online functionality was mostly offered via a proprietary P2P-and-DRM-based system called Kontiki. Kontiki was unpopular for various reasons for example, it was Windows-only, and banned by several Internet providers due to the use of P2P (e.g. I know such technology is still banned on the University of Oxford network). As a result, this lead to the introduction and eventual replacement of browser-based streaming solutions, starting with the changes made to BBC s iPlayer. iPlayer is nowadays a combination of an Adobe Flash service for web surfers, an unencrypted MP4 streaming service for users of mobile devices such as iPhones, and as of a couple of weeks ago, has streaming support built directly into the PlayStation 3 s user interface too. Oh, and on the PC, it supports DRM-based downloading courtesy of the Adobe Air platform, on Windows, Mac, and Air-capable (x86) Linux. Channel 4 s service 4od, and Five s Demand Five, are also based on Adobe Flash, and streaming-only. They re basic and functional. The final interesting one here is ITV s ITV Player. ITV Player was, until about a week ago, the only non-Flash service, instead making use of Microsoft Silverlight. They have now changed to be Flash-based, like their peers, meaning the entire market mandates use of the Adobe Flash plugin or, at a push, command-line utilities or browser plugins which grab the raw video files from the broadcasters servers, in violation of their licenses. Why is this interesting? Well, when ITV Player used Silverlight, we could watch TV using Free Software: Novell Moonlight 2.0 Beta 1.1 and above worked fine with it, on i386 and AMD64 (and other architectures with a recompile). Now that it s using Flash rather than Silverlight, where do we stand for watching streaming TV legitimately with Free Software? Let s take a peek! Firstly, some preamble. I m running Ubuntu Jaunty, and I hand-compiled a SVN (I think SVN? Maybe Bzr) snapshot of Gnash revision 11485 to ensure I had an up-to-date view of proceedings. It definitely seems to be working, as I m introduced to the world of Flash advertising via Gnash, and Youtube.com also works, more or less. And I m not discussing Adobe s Flash plugin here, for various reasons:

• It s proprietary. Boo.
• It s i386-only in several instances a beta of an AMD64 plugin exists, but your browser will crash on BBC iPlayer sites if you have the iPlayer Adobe Air app installed, as Air is i386-only. And the packages in Ubuntu install the i386 plugin alongside the abominable and crashy nsPluginWrapper.
• Did I mention it was proprietary? If the only way to surf the web on a Free OS is with proprietary software, then we re not doing very well.

So, Gnash it is. Firstly, it s a PITA to compile, as upstream seem to have misunderstood how AutoFoo works i.e. it detects that you don t have headers installed for certain features, and tells you so, yet still enables those features at configure-time (and obviously fails when building). Hey guys, if I don t have qapplication.h, take the hint and disable KDE support for me like every other bloody app does. With that out of the way, let s get to it! BBC iPlayer Well, what does the landing look like? Looks fine to me! Let s try playing a show! Oh. Um Never mind, then. Seems iPlayer s JavaScript to detect Flash presence doesn t pick up on Gnash, and it bails out. Score so far: 0/1 Demand Five Another former Kontiki partner, how do these guys fare? Hey, that looks pretty good to me! Perhaps we re onto a winner this time? Poot. Gnash is definitely being invoked see the context menu there but it sure isn t doing anything useful. Score: 0/2 Channel 4 4od How do those hip cats at Channel 4 fare? Hm Gotta confess, not feeling too hopeful about this one Oh, well, even worse than iPlayer. What you folks might not recognise is the missing Play buttons which are supposed to be to the right of the program descriptions in that list of episodes. Presumably more Javascript/Flash interop failure. 0/3 ITV Player Last, but not least, how does the newest entrant into Microsoft-free streaming fare? Now, now, in fairness, it s always been this bad, even when they used Silverlight weirdos that they are, ITV have always used Flash for their navigation, even when they used Silverlight for playback. The Flash-based navigation you (don t) see here is barely any better even with the proprietary Flash plugin. What the proprietary plugin does NOT do, however, is consume the 750 or so meg of RAM that Gnash did when sat idle on this screen. I mean, that s not a problem, that s why I have 6 gig in here, but still, not wise on Wifey s netbook. Oh. Well then. 0/4 it is. So? What annoys me here isn t so much that nothing works. I m used to there being temporary gaps in Free Software functionality, that s pretty normal. But I m greatly vexed that one of these four used to work on a Free platform, and now it doesn t and that places like UbuntuForums are filled with people celebrating that fact. Celebrating that ITV have stopped using the evil nasty Microsoft system which happened to have a functional Free replacement and that they ve now moved to a non-Microsoft system which mandates a proprietary plugin. It s not the first time either Major League Baseball in the USA used to use Silverlight for their HD streaming, and now they use a combination of Flash and a proprietary Windows-only extension to Flash to make it load WMV files this is considered a victory. It really isn t. We should NEVER be forced to use Proprietary software in order to surf the web yet now we ve gone from having access to 25% of the UK s streaming TV services via Free Software to 0% of them, and people are happy about it. So, I want you to think long and hard about this question, one which seems to get the oddball answer far too often: What is more important promoting Free Software, or demoting Microsoft Corp?

The NYT has an interesting article about research into treating insomnia over the internet [1]. I wonder how many other psychological issues can be effectively treated over the net. From next year all Cadbury Dairy Milk Chocolate sold in Australia will be made from fair-trade cocoa [2]. Cadbury Dairy Milk Chocolate is the most popular type of chocolate sold in Australia so this is a significant market shift. For a long time Cadbury has sold fair trade chocolate under the name Green and Black. Of course we now have to wait for Cadbury to use fair trade cocoa in all their other chocolate varieties. Mike Rowe gave an interesting TED talk about the value of manual labour [3]. He suggested that there should be a PR campaign for skilled manual labour jobs and noted that his observation (through his work on his Dirty Jobs TV series) was that the people who do some of the less popular jobs appear to be happier. The GapMinder.org web site has some interesting analysis of statistical information on countries and regions [4]. It is based on the work of Hans Rosling who is well known for his high quality TED talks [5]. Unfortunately the web site requires Flash, I will probably try it out with Gnash some time. Miru Kim gave a TED talk about her work photographing herself nude in abandoned buildings and industrial spaces [6]. Among other things she photographed herself lying naked on a pile of bones in the crypt underneath Paris which is fairly dangerous. I ve visited the crypt, it s an interesting experience but I was very careful to touch nothing you never know which of the bones came from victims of smallpox and other nasty diseases. Strangely they have an ongoing problem of visitors stealing bones, when I visited there were several bones at the exit that had been confiscated from visitors some of which had mummified flesh attached Steinar H. Gunderson wrote a good description of the basics of how the TCP protocol works [7]. He also links to a web page he wrote that will measure your potential TCP throughput and give you information on the link. This is really handy if you are behind some sort of firewall and want to know what is being done to your TCP stream when it s in transit. Apparently Christian couples tend to use a shared email account to reduce the risk of cheating [8]. It s hardly a surprise that Christians have a much higher divorce rate than atheists and agnostics [9]. The NY Times has an interesting article about iPhones overloading the AT&T network [10]. Recently I ve been having some problems sending MMS with my Three phone, some relatives who use Three have been having connection problems in certain areas with marginal signal quality, and the download speed of my Three data connection is significantly reduced (used to be ~70KB/s, now I m lucky to get 20KB/s). I suspect that the new smart phones that are being sold are largely to blame. But the up-side is that when they engineer their network to work properly with the smart phones then my Internet use (ssh and basic web browsing) will work really well. Michael Tieman wrote an interesting blog post about software patents which compares them to Land Mines [11]. Of course this analogy falls down badly while the US is still leading the world in manufacturing land mines. Rebecca Saxe gave an interesting TED talk about how brains make moral judgeents [12]. In her research she did some tests with using magnetic pulses to decrease the function of the region of the brain that allows people to judge the others and she was able to significantly affect the results of judgement tests. Brendan Scott analyses the netbook wars and concludes that it has been a significant loss for Microsoft [13]. ArsTechnica has an analysis of the real word-processing requirements [14], they suggest that in most cases MS-Word (and other word-processor) documents could be replaced with HTML or Wiki pages for a better end result.

• [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/11/health/11slee.html
• [2] http://www.news.com.au/story/0,27574,25985054-29277,00.html
• [3] http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/mike_rowe_celebrates_dirty_jobs.html
• [4] http://www.gapminder.org/
• [5] http://www.ted.com/speakers/hans_rosling.html
• [6] http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/miru_kim_s_underground_art.html
• [7] http://blog.sesse.net/blog/tech/2009-08-30-11-33_trying_to_understand_tcp_performance.html
• [8] http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/christian-couples-share-email-accounts-to-stay-faithful-20090907-fdaw.html
• [9] http://www.religioustolerance.org/chr_dira.htm
• [10] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/03/technology/companies/03att.html
• [11] http://opensource.org/node/465
• [12] http://www.ted.com/talks/rebecca_saxe_how_brains_make_moral_judgments.html
• [13] http://brendanscott.wordpress.com/2009/08/10/netbooks-microsoft-a-turning-point/
• [14] http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2009/08/microsoft-word-1983 2009-rest-in-peace.ars

Low-bandwidth versions of the recorded talks are now available. There are currently two exceptions:

• Some of the music for 'Welcome to DebConf 9' is licenced as CC BY-NC-ND, which unfortunately doesn't allow use in a video. I'm discussing this with Marga and hope to upload a new version soon.
• 'Debian por dentro' has a piece missing which should be restored from tape.

While the master versions of all these talks have been checked, not all the generated low-bandwidth versions have. Please let us know on debconf-video@lists.debconf.org if there is something wrong with them other than the following:

• A few of the recordings were unfortunately incomplete; this is indicated by a fade-in or fade-out
• Some of the recordings are in two pieces
• There were a few drop-outs where you will see a black screen and no sound for up to a second
• The text on some slides is unreadable; in this case, refer to the file provided by the speaker or wait for the high-bandwidth version

The high-bandwidth versions will be uploaded over the next week (slow connection is slow).