Well that happened,
and uneventfully as well.
Now if only IntaServe actually
made it possible to update glue records, everything would be done...
What is it with domain registrars and glue records? Are glue records that
much of an edge case these days that no one bothers having an interface for
managing them?
Some time ago, there was some flamewars^H^Hdebate about the Release Team’s removals of RC-buggy packages from testing. Basically, some people claimed that popular packages shouldn’t be removed, even if RC-buggy.
But, do we really miss popular packages in testing?
It’s difficult to know. You could get the popcon data, and compare it with the Packages files for testing and unstable. Or work with source packages (which removes a lot of noise), but then, you have to convert the popcon data (which uses binary packages names) to source packages. Not completely trivial.
That’s where the Ultimate Debian Database GSOC project comes to the rescue. The goal of Christian von Essen’s project is to gather data from various sources in Debian into a single SQL DB, so queries that combine all those data sources can easily be written.
For example, here is the query that lists the source packages that are in unstable, but not in testing, sorted by their popcon (using the number of insts of the most popular binary package of the source package as value for the source package):
SELECT DISTINCT unstable.package, insts FROM (SELECT DISTINCT package FROM sources WHERE distribution = 'debian' and release = 'sid') AS unstable, popcon_src WHERE unstable.package NOT IN ( SELECT package FROM sources WHERE distribution = 'debian' AND release = 'lenny') AND popcon_src.source = unstable.package ORDER BY insts DESC;
lzo 64962 gnome-cups-manager 32346 db4.6 20708 ffmpeg-debian 12908 freetype1 10569 flashplugin-nonfree 7116 perlftlib 6769 nvidia-graphics-drivers 3864 wxwindows2.4 3640 dvi2tty 2239 kdebase-runtime 1725 easytag 1717 g-wrap 1582 yaird 1507 slocate 1499 youtube-dl 1390 hugin 1275 w3c-libwww 1058Interested in UDD? Join #debian-qa or debian-qa@lists.d.o (or talk to me @DebConf!)
When I gave a Revealing Errors talk at Lug Radio Live USA, I had the
misfortune of being up against Robert Love's talk on Android which many
people at the conference wanted to see -- myself included! One person
who showed up to my talk anyway was Allison Randall. She was
apparently entertained enough to invite me to give a short version of
the talk as one of the keynote presentations at OSCON 2008!
In the talk, I covered the ideas behind my Revealing Errors project
and quickly walked through a few examples that showcase what I'm trying
to do. I'm happy with the result: a couple thousand people showed up for
the talk despite the fact that it was at 8:45 AM after the biggest
"party night" of the conference!
For those that missed it for whatever reason, you can watch a video
recording that O'Reilly made and that I've embedded below.
A larger version of the Flash video as well as a QuickTime version is
over on blip.tv and I've created an OGG Theora version for all
my freedom loving readers.
# progress' is the object that does progress reporting. Commandline options # can choose a silent one, a machine readable one or a user readable one. # Lock the session so that we prevent concurrent updates lockfd = os.open(XAPIANDBLOCK, os.O_RDWR os.O_CREAT) lockpyfd = os.fdopen(lockfd) try: fcntl.lockf(lockpyfd, fcntl.LOCK_EX fcntl.LOCK_NB) # ServerProgress is a proxy progress reporter that listens for # connections on a Unix socket, and broadcasts progress status updates both # to the local progress reporter and to whoever connects to the socket. progress = ServerProgress(progress) except IOError, e: if e.errno == errno.EACCES or e.errno == errno.EAGAIN: progress.notice("Another update is already running: showing its progress.") # ClientProgress' is another proxy class that connects to the socket # forwards progress updates to whatever the user has chosen as the # local progress indicator. childProgress = ClientProgress(progress) childProgress.loop() sys.exit(0) else: raise
update-apt-xapian-index:
# update-apt-xapian-index
Reading Debtags database: done.
Rebuilding Xapian index... 20%
And suppose I run another one:
# update-apt-xapian-index
Another update is already running: showing its progress.
Rebuilding Xapian index... 20%
And suppose I run yet another one:
# update-apt-xapian-index --batch-mode
notice: Another update is already running: showing its progress.
begin: Rebuilding Xapian index
progress: 19/100
progress: 20/100
And suppose I run yet another one (running with -q shows
nothing, but it will wait until the master indexer has
finished):
# update-apt-xapian-index -q
This way, the advanced package manager (adept 3
does this) will show a progress indicator and correctly let the
user know when indexing has finished... only, if an update is
already running, the progress indicator will not start at 0%
because the update was already in progress, and the user will
think: "wow, I've been lucky!".
The server side of the socket only uses nonblocking I/O, so
there's no risk of slave indexers causing the master indexer to
hang.
It's been simple to implement, and brillant. It is in
apt-xapian-index 0.15, which I have just uploaded to
sid. Shame it's a bit late for lenny.
When working on mailservers, I’ve noticed that Yahoo’s mailservers seem to “punish” others by sending code 421 (service not available) for a few minutes for a first report of spam that originated from there, longer for a second report and so on. Yahoo’s help pages suggest they do this if you don’t “comply with our guidelines (described below)” (which aren’t actually described below).
That system seems to completely screw everyone on a server if a user forwards their own email to Yahoo and then flags some as spam, or if a website user who registered with a Yahoo mail address then closes their Yahoo account without updating their registration details. In the worst cases, a server’s mail queue can become clogged with stuff that it can’t forward to Yahoo. I’ve suggested that server owners ban forwarding to Yahoo, but not all have done that yet.
Yahoo’s server-punishing tactics are particularly unfair because of the amount of spam we receive from Yahoo - when I tried rejecting that, the server tested seemed to get more 421 punishment for that. I now usually direct it to a blackhole, which feels a bit dangerous.
Now I’ve just seen this from Indymedia which makes it sound like Yahoo’s getting even worse recently:-
“Yahoo doesn’t make it so easy for us. They do (unintendedly) transport a remarkable amount of spam, often sent by robots which automatically (and wide scale) crack Yahoos’ new account signup CAPTCHAS (those images with the cats + dogs + digits + letters in them) just to relay their spam through Yahoo. So it’s not easy to determine who sends legitimate email through Yahoo and who does not.”I wrote about some alternative service providers back in 2006, including ippimail, which Yahoo users might like to change to. I’d be interested in comments about any new arrivals in this field. BT internet customers are probably using Yahoo-hosted email too. I recommend changing to The Phone Co-op, but my company is an agent for them, so I would say that, wouldn’t I?
Usually, files in /etc/pam.d/ are simple, linear descriptions of how a user should be authenticated, e.g. Try to authenticate him against ldap, and then against the local data base . But sometimes, you want something more advanced, for example If the user is called guest, please authenticate him with pam_dbus, otherwise use regular pam_unix. This is possible, and here I ll note down how to do that.There are actually two problems to solve: How to detect the username, and then how to do the flow control.For the first problem, I recently discovered the pam_succeed_if module, that allows for relatively advanced logic for checking uids, usernames, hostnames and group membership. For our case, the line would readauth ? pam_succeed_if.so quiet user = guestNow what next? If we just wanted to allow unrestricted access to guest, we could put sufficient for the questionmark. But we need something like if..then..else. Unfortunately (and I hope this will be fixed eventually), the only flow control available is skip the next n lines . So we can skip to pam_unix when this module fails (i.e. the user was someone else but guest), and if we did not skip, we can run the guest-specific module and then skip over pam_unix. So here is the complete snippet:
auth [default=2 success=ignore] pam_succeed_if.so quiet user = guestYou can read more about this advanced configuration in the PAM Administration guide. And here is the corresponding configuration for gdm, where guest can always login:
auth [success=ok new_authtok_reqd=done ignore=ignore default=die] pam_dbus.so
auth [default=1] pam_permit.so
auth required pam_unix.so
auth [default=2 success=ignore] pam_succeed_if.so quiet user = guestSo I have a guest account with a locked password and I can allow ssh logins with a mouse click and use it directly with gdm. I probably should put the gdm configuration also in xscreensaver to not lock me out.
auth required pam_permit.so
auth [default=1] pam_permit.so
auth required pam_unix.so
I had to move a mailing list from SourceForge to a self-hosted Mailman
instance while preserving all the user options. Since one has no shell access
to these SF's Mailman I decided to extract the information from the Web-Interface,
which sadly enough is no easy task. There is no complete list available but only
chunked by starting letter and in groups of 30 addresses or less.
Since the mailing list in question had about 1500 subscribers manual transcription
was really no option. So I wrote a small script that automatically extracts all the
information and outputs it in a CSV-like format.
I've also hacked Mailman's add_members script to set all these options from this
format.
In case someone finds this useful, both are available on my git
server under free licenses:
I’m the happy owner of a nice geeky toy: a Suunto X6HR watch, that includes an altimeter and an heart rate monitor, which I use mainly for moutain biking and hiking.
During outings, the watch can log the altitude and heart rate every 2, 10 or 60 seconds, and the data can be transfered to a PC using a serial interface. The problem is that Suunto only provides software for Windows. I got tired of using virtualbox to connect to the watch (qemu doesn’t work, Suunto Activity Manager apparently does strange things with the serial port), so I reverse-engineered the protocol (using skimanager and J rome Kieffer’s work as a basis) and implemented a script to fetch the logs, and export them in a format suitable for gnuplot.
Of course, Suuntux is publicly available. I’d be happy to hear from you if it works for you too. Also, if you own a Suunto X6 (similar watch, without HRM), I’d be interested in supporting it too (if it’s not supported already).
Below is a example graph, from a short mountain bike ride just before leaving for Debconf.
Kris blogs
about akademy being in Sint-Katelijne-Waver—which, since I moved to
Mechelen, is my
backyard, really—and wonders why nobody in the Belgian FLOSS
community talked about it.
It's not that I didn't know; Sune Vuorela, one of our Debian KDE
developers, mentioned it to me a few months ago. He knew about our
office in Mechelen, since he slept there at some FOSDEM a few years
back. Of course, my first reaction was "oh, you'll pay me a visit then,
right?", though I quickly realized "hang on, won't I be in Argentina then?"
Turns out that's was the case. So I didn't bother blogging; perhaps I
should have.
Thing is, I've always felt like the Belgian FLOSS community is
somewhat disjunct. It shouldn't be; we have a bunch of healthy and
working community communication things, we have timely dinner meetings and drink meetings; and we even have a big important international developers
meeting in the heart of our country. Even with that, I feel that
more could be done. For example, I would probably like more unorganized
social gatherings (say, more "lets-have-a-beer-now" type of meetings),
and other things.
Is this just me? I dunno.
One of the things of getting too much mail is that you will
get swamped in it, sometimes to the level of not even managing to figure
out there's been replies on your blog for the past several weeks.
Oops.
Apparently quite a number of people answered to my
blog post about the belgian government issues, and I only found out
right before leaving for Argentina. They're now all accepted from
moderation, but that doesn't mean I can't follow up on them anymore.
Most of them just agree with what I have to say, or posit another
opinion (which is fine), but some clearly show a misunderstanding of
what I was trying to say. So, since I don't want to appear as one
posting gibberish, allow me to clarify:
"I could say that some other things about the past deb cle also puzzle me, such as the insistence of some people to get an unconditional split of BHV, thereby destroying all chances of even remotely reaching a compromise." You are saying that you would accept giving in to the demands of the Francophones that the Flemish give up territory. (Think about it, what century are they from? In what other country does one community demand the enlargement of its territory as an exchange for fixing a situation which the constitutional court has ruled to be illegal?)Thanks for asking, but no, I'm not saying that. Let's be clear about this: there's a huge difference between a position that says "we need to split BHV, period" on the one hand, and "we need to give territory to the francophone community" on the other. It should be perfectly possible to, say, have the flemish community come up with some benefit to the francophone community in some respect somewhere that does not include "giving territory to the south of france"; but apparently the "negotiators" think not. To quote just one example: at some point Reinders (MR) suggested that a federal election circle be created to replace BHV, so that francophone politicians could still be elected in flanders, but also the other way around. This proposal was however killed by flemish politicians before the press as "not even negotiable" without even having discussed it. This, and other similar examples, I do not understand. After all, the fact that the constitutional court has ruled the current situation to be illegal does not change anything about the fact that this is still a request from the Flemish part of the country, and not from the Francophones; anyone telling you anything else is simply lying. There's nothing wrong with wanting something and being declared correct in court, of course; but there is something wrong with wanting that unconditionally. Unless you won a war, that is. And then still. Of course, not caring about much of the definitions of many political parties and not being a politician in any way, I ticked off someone who just happens to be a member of one of the parties I don't even like in the first place. Amedee, in case it matters: I didn't call CD&V a "Catholic" party to imply anything, but simply because I'm blissfully ignorant of the difference between Catholic and Christian. And happily so, too, given the CD&V's current behaviour. Oh, and the SP.A is not my favourite party; it's just that they seemed to be the more sensible of the lot during the last elections' campaigns. What's really my favourite party isn't something I'll tell you (or anyone), though.
Sami,
it's really not that bad.
There are, as you say, many variables to modify the behaviour of
several programs. What you seem to have missed, though, is that there
are really only four types of variables:
Trying to debug a race condition in dsh.
I received a report that dsh drops a few hosts when running 'hostname' on parallel on 1000+ node clusters.
I have set up some testsuite and simulation environment, and found some possible causes, and
managed to reduce that rate to about 1/3000. However, it's not zero, and I feel uneasy that not all corner cases have been found. I hate this feeling.
As mentioned earlier, I've uploaded a new
Pyroman release to
Debian. I've also updated the download at the
download page on
alioth for the non-Debian users.There is just one single user-visible change (under the hood I switched some
Python API so you need python 2.4+ now, which was available in sarge already):This version has a new command line option, "--verification-cmd". This can be
used to point to a script file to verify network connectivity. For example, you
could try to send a ping to the next router, or you could ssh to another host,
have it ssh back and touch a flag file in /tmp to signal success.Similar to the --safe option, it is meant as a safety feature to avoid locking
yourself out of your system. But while --safe needs to be used interactively,
this new command could be used when automatically activating new firewall
rules, e.g. triggered by cfengine or some other configuration management. If
the verification command does not succeed, the firewall rules will
automatically be rolled back to the previous state.Note that I didn't get around to add IPv6 support yet. It would definitely be
desirable to add ip6tables support, but I currently do not have any experience
with IPv6, so I'm not sure I'd know how to do things right. Of course I'd
welcome any patches.(In case you havn't read about pyroman yet - it's yet another tool to
configure iptables firewalls. It puts a thin abstraction layer on top of
iptables, but the main benefit is that it uses "iptables-restore" to quickly
mass-set all the firewall rules - other tools tend to invoke several hundred
iptables processes to achieve the same - and if any error occurs it will both
give you a clear indication of which rule caused the error and rolling back
your firewall to the previous state.)
apt-get install -t experimental adept
deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian experimental main
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/mornfall/ubuntu intrepid main
adept. I have missed
desktop files in this alpha (it might be a little on purpose too, as I’d like
people to run the program from terminal to be able to check the debug output
and possibly send it along with problem reports).
If you have sudo (Kubuntu-ers do, the rest can use kdesu or similar):
sudo adept
sudo adept installer
sudo adept updater
Next.