Search Results: "wagner"

11 September 2013

Jan Wagner: ownCloud for Debian wheezy

Unfortunately ownCloud is not available in Debian wheezy. Even if it was promised to provide a package via backports, this seems never to happen. As I don't like the idea of adding source lists of testing/unstable/experimental to production systems, I walked the long and painfull path of backporting all (build-)dependencies and pushed them into our wheezy-backports repository. If you want to give it a try on Debian wheezy, you could install the packages from our wheezy-backports repository: 

    # wget "http://ftp.cyconet.org/debian/sources.list.d/wheezy-backports-cyconet.list" \
        -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/wheezy-backports-cyconet.list
    # aptitude update
    # aptitude -t wheezy-backports install owncloud owncloud-mysql
For adding our archive key, you can just install the package "debian-cyconet-archive-keyring"

3 September 2013

Jan Wagner: nagios-plugins: Call for testing

Some of you might have noticed there is a new nagios-plugins version in the row. To support upstream in evaluating bugs and bringing the code to a wider audience, I uploaded the latest development version into Debian unstable. Since this package version contrib/ is dropped by upstream. But we stopped shipping the latest plugins of contrib/ with Debian wheezy. We also removed perlmods/ from the upstream tarball, as this was never used by our package. The packaging changes are: 
* New upstream git snapshot (b15adb7762)
  - Adjust debian/copyright
* Droped the following upstream integrated patches
  - 05_fix_gets_undefined_in_iso_c11.dpatch
  - 10_check_apt_perfdata.dpatch
  - 11_check_nt_npe.dpatch
  - 12_check_smtp_double_threshold.dpatch
* Fix removing empty /usr/include
* Add new check_dbi into nagios-plugins-standard
* Remove whois from Recommands, as check_bgpstate is removed
* Cleanup debian/rules from unused stuff
* Provide information about repackaging
  - Extend debian/README.source
  - Add debian/bin/repack.sh
* Updating standards version to 3.9.4 (no changes needed)
* Add libfreeradius-client-dev to build-deps and remove libradiusclient-ng-dev
  (Closes: #721621)
* Remove traces of contrib/ from debian/copyright
* Remove command.cfg from examples in nagios-plugins-common, it was removed
  upstream
The Debian Nagios Maintainer and Upstream Developer are asking you to try out this new package on non production systems. Not that we think there might be a high risk for damage, but you know .. :) The latest version of the plugins are running on several systems already, but it is nearly impossible to test all scenarios even automated. If you find bugs, please report all packaging bugs into the BTS. Upstream bugs you might consider to report in the upstream bugtracker. If you want to give it a try on Debian wheezy, you could install the packages from our wheezy-backports repository: 
    # wget "http://ftp.cyconet.org/debian/sources.list.d/wheezy-backports-cyconet.list" \
        -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/wheezy-backports-cyconet.list
    # aptitude update
    # aptitude -t wheezy-backports install nagios-plugins
For adding our archive key, you can just install the package "debian-cyconet-archive-keyring"

31 July 2013

Jan Wagner: Updated roundcube for wheezy

Roundcube is one of the well known OpenSource solutions for accessing Mails via webinterface. Unfortunately the package in wheezy is ~2 years old.
In Debian unstable the package was updated, but #714727 is blocking the migration to jessie. In the meanwhile I backported the package to wheezy. For everybody still using the sqlite (v2) backend, see here. There is no automatic migration from sqlite to sqlite3 backend.
For everybody using the package roundcube-plugins-extra, I created an updated package for roundcube 0.9 and submitted my changes to the Debian Roundcube Maintainers. If you want to give it a try, you could install the packages from my wheezy-backports repository: 
# wget "http://ftp.cyconet.org/debian/sources.list.d/wheezy-backports-cyconet.list" \
    -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/wheezy-backports-cyconet.list
# aptitude update
# aptitude -t wheezy-backports install roundcube-mysql roundcube-plugins roundcube-plugins-extra
For adding my archive key, you can just install the package "debian-cyconet-archive-keyring"

24 July 2013

Jan Wagner: Frag is bigger than frame.

Since 2 weeks I'm faced with some problems at a Xen hosting environment based on Debian wheezy. The issue is, that one specific domU is regularly failing network. The investigations showed, that no network packets from and to this system are seen on the the network interface in the domU and on the bridge interface in the dom0.
The funny part is, that the firewall on the dom0 now is logging packet rejects on the interface of the effected system and one interface of an other specific domU for the destination address. One pack and rejects on both interfaces ... really strange!
Shutting down the domU and recreating them doesn't help. Even if restarting other domUs, those are also effected by now. The only way to fix is to reboot the entire dom0. After several investigations I stumpled upon the following in the dmesg: 
vif-xm116: Frag is bigger than frame.
vif-xm116: fatal error; disabling device
xenbr0: port 4(vif-xm116) entering disabled state
A quick search at the famouse search engine revealed, there seems something bigger. Even a Debian bug is open since February. Unfortunately this problem is still unfixed in wheezy and squeeze.
But ... there is hope in sight! Ian Campbell provided packages based on top of the latest kernel packages with a call for testing. Installing them seems to fix the issue in my environment. So we just have to hope this will get fixed soon, as this regression is really annoying. Thanks to all who make this happen in advance!

19 July 2013

Jan Wagner: Debian (wheezy) 7.x and mailscanner

Mailscanner is an e-mail security and anti-spam solution for e-mail gateways. In combination of postfix it uses a very ugly way messing around in postfixs queue directories. Anyways .. if you are still interested, keep reading. Mailscanner was removed from Debian, so it's not available in wheezy. Anyways ... there is a web 2.0 Frontend for Mailscanner, called Baruwa, which provides mailscanner packages for Debian. Add the baruwa sources file 
cat > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mailscanner.list << 'EOF'
deb http://apt.baruwa.org/debian wheezy main
deb-src http://apt.baruwa.org/debian wheezy main
EOF
Optional, install the GPG key for the reprosority 
wget -O - http://apt.baruwa.org/baruwa-apt-keys.gpg   apt-key add -
If you're running squeeze with Mailscanner, you should do this before upgrading to wheezy. If you are installing Mailscanner on a fresh wheezy, just: 
aptitude update && aptitude install mailscanner
As of Version 4.78 and above, you can place you local changes into /etc/MailScanner/conf.d/, no need to mess directly around into /etc/MailScanner/MailScanner.conf

13 May 2013

Jan Wagner: 500 OOPS: vsftpd: refusing to run with writable root inside chroot ()

If you updated recently your system to Debian wheezy and you are using vsftpd with enabled chrooted local users ... 
[~] # grep -i  ^chroot_local_user=yes /etc/vsftpd.conf   tail -1
chroot_local_user=YES
... you maybe faced with the following problem: 
500 OOPS: vsftpd: refusing to run with writable root inside chroot()
Login failed.
This problem raised already in Bug #656900 and it was fixed by adjusting the documentation. Beside that there maybe configurations you want to relax such a strict check. Unfortunately this feature was implemented in version 3.0.0 which is not part of Debian wheezy: 
- Add new config setting "allow_writeable_chroot" to help people in a bit of
a spot with the v2.3.5 defensive change. Only applies to non-anonymous.
The Frontier Group created a patched package of vsftpd for Ubuntu. After reviewing the patch we decided to also create a Debian package for wheezy. You can easily install the package by the following sniplet: 
echo "deb http://ftp.cyconet.org/debian wheezy-updates main non-free contrib" >> \
/etc/apt/sources.list.d/wheezy-updates.cyconet.list; \
aptitude update; aptitude install -t wheezy-updates debian-cyconet-archive-keyring vsftpd && \
echo "allow_writeable_chroot=YES" >> /etc/vsftpd.conf && /etc/init.d/vsftpd restart
Updates, in case of bugfixes in Debian wheezy, should be also available through this distribution channel.

20 March 2013

Jan Wagner: Chemnitzer Linux-Tage 2013!

Also this year the Debian project was present at Chemnitzer Linuxtage, this time right next the debianforum.de booth. The booth folks arriving on friday organized a flashmob at Expitas after booth setup. Unfortunatly our second planned flashmob at the mensa was boycotted by much more students, so we ended up in the Turm-Brauhaus, which is a great location with good drinks but the service was very harshly. On the next two days at the booth we chatted and discussed with visitors and other exhibitors a wide variety of questions, including 'When will be (the next Debian version) released?' and 'Are there installation disks available?'. The answers was as always 'When we are ready and we will have reached the quality-level we defined', 'No we don't have installation medias, as they are always outdated. Do you have an USB-dongle with you?'. Merchandising was requested by visitors as always, but we just had some leftovers of fosdem, brought by Axel. The demonstration was as usual a small box running Babelbox and xpenguins which worked out the last years too. This year there were three lectures held by Debian related people, about Debian GIS, Aptitude - known but even unknown and SSH and unreliable network connections. The organisation team did a really great job. The social event at saturday night was very exciting and we left it early in the morning. The whole event was indeed fun and a pleasure to find new friends and meet old ones of the Free Software community. Many thanks to Florian Baumann, Jan Dittberner, Andreas Tille, Christian Hoffmann, Axel Beckert, Markus Rekkenbeil, Daniel Schier, Jonas Genannt, Jan H rsch and kurio for taking care and running the booth, which worked out this year extreme smoothly from my point of view. Likewise as the last years a special thanks to TMT GmbH & Co. KG, which kindly donated additional boothtickets, the equipment, its transportation and accommodation for almost half of the booth staff.

27 February 2013

Jan Wagner: Chemnitzer Linux-Tage 2013?

Also this year I registered a booth in the name of the Debian Project at Chemnitzer Linux-Tage. Unfortunalety this is the second time in the row, that we seem to be short of manpower while preparing the booth. Actually just one person was able to commit his available time. A general offer was announced by 3 people (including me). This makes me a little sad, cause CLT is a very community driven event which is really nice organized. I always liked to chat and discuss with very interesting people from other projects and visitors. As the CLT runs a 6 track lecture program with commonly very good lectures, it is not possible to get the booth running into good shape with such a small amount of volunteers. If you feel you are interested into visiting the Chemnitzer Linux-Tage and want to make our booth a success like last years for the Debian Project, please have a look into my announcment and our coordination wiki. So please ... let come more brave people into our band wagon! Don't wait to long! Registration period for (possibly sponsored) Booth tickets (read here) ends on 4th March, many thanks!

18 February 2013

Jan Wagner: Airprint support broken in Debian wheezy?

Some of our customers are using central CUPS systems for managing their printer infrastructure. In the last years the demand for support printing (called Airprint) from mobile apple products increased. This worked well for us on Debian squeeze as documented here (updated scrips). I tried this on a fresh installed Debian wheezy amd64, but no printer was found on any IOS device. Hmm .... let's see if the printer is announces via avahi: 
$ avahi-browse -a   grep -i print
+   eth0 IPv6 Kyocera FS-1020D @ service                    Internet Printer     local
+   eth0 IPv6 AirPrint Kyocera @ service                    Internet Printer     local
+   eth0 IPv4 Kyocera FS-1020D @ service                    Internet Printer     local
+   eth0 IPv4 AirPrint Kyocera @ service                    Internet Printer     local
WTF?!? Fortunately we have an Ubuntu 12.04 running in our office and printing from IOS devices works without problems (without copying any files to /etc/avahi/services/): 
$ avahi-browse -a   grep -i print
+   eth2 IPv6 Ricoh Aficio MP C2800 @ printing              Internet Printer     local
+   eth2 IPv6 Ricoh Aficio MP 171 @ printing                Internet Printer     local
+   eth2 IPv4 Ricoh Aficio MP 171 @ printing                Internet Printer     local
+   eth2 IPv4 Ricoh Aficio MP C2800 @ printing              Internet Printer     local
I just copied the whole configuration over to my wheezy system, but it didn't worked out. I tried this all on a kfreebsd-i386 system again without success. Sorry, but I don't understand the source of this issue. Cups on wheezy has the same upstream version as on precise. Avahi-daemon on wheezy is just one minor version ahead off precise. Is this a bug/incompatibility in cups and/or avahi? A missing patch compared to the packages of precise? Is this a configuration problem? Update: Looking into LP #1054495 and the debdiff of cups 1.5.3-0ubuntu6 indicates, that there seems modifications beside simple changes of mime configurations files. Update: The fix for LP #1054495 does really fix the problem on wheezy too. With the help of Didier Raboud I was able test a binary package with this fixapplied on our test setup. The good news is, there are no extra modifications needed beside just configuring cups to export it's printers for enabling support for iOS devices. I opened #700961 and hopefully release managment will accept this fix for wheezy. Hints, rants and comments could be send to 'blog - at - waja - dot - info' or via @blogwajainfo.

Jan Wagner: Learning Git Branching

If you are comming from an old SCM like subversion, you may have difficulties to internalize the new workflow. Peter Cottle created Learn Git Branching which is really nice.

Jan Wagner: Server Management

Server management on daily basis in a growing environment could be a challenge. Most of the tasks is here done with ClusterSSH in help with a homebrew mail notification. Unfortunately this workflow is not scaling well for 200+ systems. I had a look into apt-dater but this seems not to fit our workflow. FAI looks a bit overengineered at the first glance. Maybe Puppet is an option? There seems to be many extensions for it, unfortunately ruby is needed on every single node. Is there a CTO-compatible overview about puppet, any other alternatives? ;) Update: Many thanks for the hints from Andr Lu s Lopes, Stig Sandbeck Mathisen, Phil Miller, Steve Kemp, Andrew Latham, Bob Proulx and Natxo Asenjo Old but conceptual still valid: www.infrastructures.org, for example Bootstrapping an Infrastructure Other thoughts: push- or pull-infrastructure? Software footprint (on nodes and your central instance)! Hints, rants and comments could be send to 'blog - at - waja - dot - info' or via @blogwajainfo.

17 February 2013

Jan Wagner: Server Management

Server management on daily basis in a growing environment could be a challenge. Most of the tasks is here done with ClusterSSH in help with a homebrew mail notification. Unfortunately this workflow is not scaling well for 200+ systems. I had a look into apt-dater but this seems not to fit our workflow. FAI looks a bit overengineered at the first glance. Maybe Puppet is an option? There seems to be many extensions for it. Is there a CTO-compatible overview about puppet, any other alternatives? ;) Hints, rants and comments could be send to 'blog - at - waja - dot - info'.

13 February 2013

Jan Wagner: Searching painting: Strawberry and Man on Pumps with Sparkling wine

We are searching a motive for a painting or a painting itself for a quite while now. This should find it's place in our living room. Unfortunately we didn't found one, which matched our both prospect and/or wasn't compatible with the rest of our living room. Yesterday we stumbled upon a motive which was quite nice, but was too small and it was neighter possible to get it in a bigger size nor to find out who was the origin painter of the picture. Now we are searching for the name of the picture and/or the painter. Any hints appreciated at 'blog - at - waja - dot - info'. A photo with higher resolution can be found here Update: Okay ... an unknown people (many thanks) hinted me, that google image search is the tool that could be very usefull. Google revealed that the painter is Inna Panasenko. P.S. Is it noticeable that I'm in vacation mode? ;)

Jan Wagner: Tracking coffee consumption

Are you consuming a way too much coffee and have reached the junkie level like me? Maybe coffeestats.org can help out and visualize your coffee usage.

2 February 2013

Jan Wagner: Search picture(s)

Today we where packing back our holiday decorations into boxes. We also had a music box to put away. Do you see the defect in the picture? ;) No? Okay ... some years ago my oldest daughter broke it into some pieces and a friend of us (Hi muempf! ;) did glue all together. When he showed us the nice music box, it was recovered very well, but one detail was changed from original. One horseman wasn't reassembled as the other onces. If you you didn't found the defect, please have a look here. You had fun with this? Maybe this is another one for you, I took that photo on christmas eve when my youngest daughter had placed her new 'Lisa Plastic': Keep smiling!

1 February 2013

Jan Wagner: Creative destruction

Today short before ending business hours I was noticed that there is a problem with a server system (domU). Login with unprivileged user was possible but using "su" didn't worked, also login in as root via privkey failed. Fortunately I was able to connect via xen console and login via tty. Looking into the bash history the reason revealed quickly: 
4979 2013-02-01 15:03:39 cd /var/www/test.org/data/galleries/
4980 2013-02-01 15:03:43 chown www-data:www-data -R /var/www/test.org/data/galleries/
4981 2013-02-01 15:04:36 ls -la
4982 2013-02-01 15:04:46 ls -la
4983 2013-02-01 15:04:54 chown www-data:www-data -R /*
4984 2013-02-01 15:07:42 chown www-data:www-data -R /var/www/test.org/data/galleries/
4985 2013-02-01 15:36:55 chown www-data:www-data -R /var/www/test.org/data/galleries/
This made my day (and maybe parts of the rest of the weekend). For recovery our 1st Level mounted the domU-fs on the dom0 to '/tmp/recover' and did: 
2131  2013-02-01 21:29:28 cd /tmp/recover
[...]
2142  2013-02-01 21:31:17 rm -r lib64/
The experienced reader may see the problem: 
# ls -lad lib64
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 4 Jun 28  2011 /lib64 -> /lib
So also the dom0 was knocked out ... what a funny evening (and maybe night). Maybe our staff looked similar like here.

28 January 2013

Ben Hutchings: Testing network link state

Jan Wagner writes about using ethtool to poll the link state on network devices. While I'm pleased to see another happy ethtool user, it's a bit heavyweight for reading one bit of information and it's not ideal for scripting. Much information about each network device is available under the /sys/class/net/name directory, including the carrier and speed attributes. (When the interface is down, some of these attributes cannot be read.) It's also possible to listen for link changes (rather than polling periodically) using the rtnetlink API, but this is probably not suitable for munin.

27 January 2013

Jan Wagner: Fixing muninlite for up interfaces without link

Usually I'm monitoring stuff with Icinga (Nagios in the past). But for my small network, I primary needed monitoring of bandwidth. In our commercial environment we are using a closed source software for accounting traffic. There is also a license for testing purpose with a reduced number of sensors available. But I'm neither running windows in this network nor feeling happy with this. Cacti is a bit bloated for this small network and zabbix is (caused by what?) removed in wheezy, beside that I'm not getting the concept behind it. So I thought I could give munin a try and on the first view it doesn't look so bad. Monitoring my half dozens openwrt devices works like a charm by installing muninlite just the package. One central part of the network is a QNAP TS-459 Pro+, hosting a BackupPC and TimeMachine service, proving SMB/AFS data store and running SqueezeBox Server for another half dozen streaming devices. Unfortunately there is no optware package to provide a munin node. So I just copied the shell script of muninlite and the xinet config over from an openwrt device. At first it looked not bad, but than munin wasn't able to collect the data. After a while I realized, that munin was failing when collecting the network informations. A look into the muninlite script revealed that it was failing when trying to discover the interface speed of eth1 via ethtool. In my setup the QNAP is just connected with with one network interface, the second one is unconnected. Unfortunately all network interfaces on QNAP devices are up and therefore listed in /proc/net/dev where muninlite is discovering the network interfaces: 
[~] # grep '^ *\(ppp\ eth\ wlan\ ath\ ra\ ipsec\ tap\ br-\)\([^:]\)\ 1,\ :' /proc/net/dev   cut -f1 -d:   sed 's/ //g
> s/\-/_/g'
eth1
eth0
Let's look into it: 
[~] # ethtool eth0  grep Speed:
    Speed: 1000Mb/s
[~] # ethtool eth0  grep "Link detected:"
    Link detected: yes
[~] # ethtool eth1  grep Speed:
    Speed: Unknown! (65535)
[~] # ethtool eth1  grep "Link detected:"
    Link detected: no
Maybe you see .. the interface eth1 is up but has no link, so there is no speed negotiated and muninlite is failing. Thus I hacked the scripted and now it's working like a charme.
<notextile><figure class="code"><figcaption> (muninlite_fix-unused-up_interface.diff) download</figcaption> 
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--- /opt/sbin/munin-node.orig	2013-01-27 15:13:51.869007214 +0100
+++ /opt/sbin/munin-node	2013-01-27 16:11:20.536006950 +0100
@@ -133,7 +133,7 @@
   if [ -n "$(which ethtool)" ]; then
 	if [ -x "$(which ethtool)" ]; then
   		if ethtool $1   grep -q Speed; then
-    			MAX=$(($(ethtool $1   grep Speed   sed -e 's/[[:space:]]\ 1,\ / /g' -e 's/^ //' -e 's/M.*//'   cut -d\  -f2) * 1000000))
+    			MAX=$(($(ethtool $1   grep Speed   sed -e 's/[[:space:]]\ 1,\ / /g' -e 's/^ //' -e 's/M.*//'   sed -e 's/Unknown\!/0/'   cut -d\  -f2) * 1000000))
     			echo "up.max $MAX"
     			echo "down.max $MAX"
 		fi
@@ -535,19 +535,31 @@
     for INTER in $(grep '^ *\(ppp\ eth\ wlan\ ath\ ra\ ipsec\ tap\ br-\)\([^:]\)\ 1,\ :' /proc/net/dev   cut -f1 -d:   sed 's/ //g
 s/\-/_/g');
     do
-      INTERRES=$(echo $INTER   sed 's/\./VLAN/')
-      RES="$RES if_$INTERRES"
-      eval "fetch_if_$ INTERRES ()   fetch_if $INTER $@;  ;"
-      eval "config_if_$ INTERRES ()   config_if $INTER $@;  ;"
+      if [ -n "$(which ethtool)" ]; then
+        if [ -x "$(which ethtool)" ]; then
+          if [ -n "$(ethtool $INTER   grep 'Link detected: yes')" ]; then
+            INTERRES=$(echo $INTER   sed 's/\./VLAN/')
+            RES="$RES if_$INTERRES"
+            eval "fetch_if_$ INTERRES ()   fetch_if $INTER $@;  ;"
+            eval "config_if_$ INTERRES ()   config_if $INTER $@;  ;"
+          fi
+        fi
+      fi
     done
   elif [ "$PLUG" = "if_err_" ]; then
     for INTER in $(grep '^ *\(ppp\ eth\ wlan\ ath\ ra\ ipsec\ tap\ br-\)\([^:]\)\ 1,\ :' /proc/net/dev   cut -f1 -d:   sed 's/ //g
 s/\-/_/g');
     do
-      INTERRES=$(echo $INTER   sed 's/\./VLAN/')
-      RES="$RES if_err_$INTERRES"
-      eval "fetch_if_err_$ INTERRES ()   fetch_if_err $INTER $@;  ;"
-      eval "config_if_err_$ INTERRES ()   config_if_err $INTER $@;  ;"
+      if [ -n "$(which ethtool)" ]; then
+        if [ -x "$(which ethtool)" ]; then
+          if [ -n "$(ethtool $INTER   grep 'Link detected: yes')" ]; then
+            INTERRES=$(echo $INTER   sed 's/\./VLAN/')
+            RES="$RES if_err_$INTERRES"
+            eval "fetch_if_err_$ INTERRES ()   fetch_if_err $INTER $@;  ;"
+            eval "config_if_err_$ INTERRES ()   config_if_err $INTER $@;  ;"
+          fi
+        fi
+      fi
     done
   elif [ "$PLUG" = "netstat" ]; then
     if netstat -s >/dev/null 2>&1; then
</figure></notextile>

24 January 2013

Jan Wagner: vsftpd running on IPv4 and IPv6 simultaneous

Today I planed to move my FTP server to a new system running Debian wheezy. Usually I'm running vsftpd, so this was also the plan for the new host. As this system is dual stacked, I wanted to offer the service on IPv6 too.
On the old system I started vsftpd via xinetd, as far as I remember was vsftpd in squeeze not able to bind on the IPv4 and the IPv6. Anyways ... I didn't wanted to use any inetd system ... So I looked if there is any way to solve that. By a quick search I found vsftpd-2.3.4-listen_ipv6.patch, which indicated that just binding to [::] will also accept IPv4 connections. Setting the following in /etc/vsftpd.conf worked out like a charm: 
listen=NO
listen_ipv6=YES
I just updated #574837 so hopefully more people can benefit in the future.

5 January 2013

Jan Wagner: Brainfucked intellectual property rights

This issue is about a bit specific situation in Germany and it's (mainly tax-financed) public service broadcasting. If you think you are not interested, please skip this entry. :) Just beginning from scratch... In Germany we have (like most european countries) a public service broadcasting. Starting with 2013 the system collecting the funding of the public service broadcasting changed from GEZ to Beitragsservice.
To make it short (and a bit simplified) ... it changed from "most 'families' have to pay" to "every menage has to pay". This means, even if you don't have any device to use the service of the german public service broadcasting but are a menage, you have to pay for it. This sitiation is even more worse than pay-TV. Don't get me wrong ... I'm neither against public service broadcasting nor against paying for it in principle. In the rare cases I'm watching TV, this is most likely a channel of the public service broadcasting. Same counts for the rest of my small family. Mostly we are watching news and documentations ... also some movies are watched. The kids are watching KiKA, which we like cause it's Ads-free and it's not just some cartoons with hidden violence. So we most likely benefit from public service broadcasting. Anyways ... in common we are not using "TV" as most of the others may do. We still like some sort of the broadcast, but we are missing it cause various reasons. For our luck there is a service called 'Mediathek' provided by the most german public service broadcasting channels. If you missed a broadcast or are prevented for any reason, you may watch the broadcast there. Unfortunately the timeframe you can access the broadcast is very short, in most cases 7 days. This is manifested in the so called Rundfunkstaatsvertrag, more precisely in the 12. Rundfunk nderungsstaatsvertrag. The 'Tagesschau' has a good explanation about the issue. This means, in simple words, the tax payed broadcasts needs to be deleted after a (in my eyes) short time. WTF?!? Why do we wipe work we all payed for it? Guess what ... it was implemented by lobbying from commercial print media and private (e.g. ads-financed) TV-channels. A comment about a related problem, which I agree, can be found here. Another challenge ... How do you know there is a broadcasting your are interested in? How do you know when it is broadcasted? I remember, my parents was subscribed to a daily newspaper, which included an additional TV paper, my parents-in-law bought also one.
As we are neither subscribed to a daily newspaper nor buying a TV paper, we have to solve that differently (beside that a printed paper won't help us I think). When we use the opportunity to watch TV at the evening, I just use an electronical TV paper (-app). If we find something which fits, we are fine .. if not, we do other things. This sounds a bit like an old school behaviour and it is not, how I would like to use a media today. I like using a feedreader. You can subscribe differnt 'channels' of information feeds and it is a way I would love to use TV. In the past I used a tool called 'Mediathek', which is a tool for Mac OSX. With this tool it was easily possible to find broadcasts, you could subscribe to so called 'channels', which means broadcasts of a same series for example. You could also mark them as "unread" und "read" .. something like a feedreader.
On the other way, it was also possible to list recent broadcast per genres and popular broadcast of the recent and the last week. This was very comfortable as this was working for several mediathek sites for german public service broadcasting channels in one central place. For every broadcast you could just view it or download it to view it later. You could even download subscribed channels automatically. After using the Mediathek-App and being satisfied by the Mediathek sites of the german public service broadcasting channels for several years, this week the server(s) behind the App was shut down. What the f....?!? On Twitter the author stated that the shutdown was cause by problems with the copyright law. Das Erste, ZDF and WDR denied that they has anything todo with this recent issue. The question is ... what is the direct cause for shutting down such a good service. This smells a bit like the PirateBay issue, but in this case the content which is Mediathek providing access to isn't pirated, but legal hosted. So where is the real issue? In my mind, the german citizen has payed to produce this content and should have the right to access the content is an usable way. The Mediathek App did provide such a way and it is really pissing me off that this access isn't available anymore, at least for this reason. Actually I don't see any solution to access our payed content in a decent way. Footnote: I think it's obscenely, that publishing houses and commercial broadcaster trying to gain their turnover at the expense of the german citizen by forcing the german legislature to implement Depublication,.

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