Search Results: "Guido Trotter"

23 December 2007

Guido Trotter: Switching to Gentoo

…no, just kidding! But I almost feel like it, after spending the last few days backporting gtk+2.0 (and the relative dependencies) from sid to etch, in order to build the newest xchat… and now I could tackle gimp… :D (ok, maybe I should just switch my laptop to lenny or sid… but for now running etch plus a few backports has worked fine… we’ll just have to see how many is “a few”). BTW should I upload all this to bpo (now or when the packages hit lenny)? On one side it might be nice… On the other, it’s definitely *a lot* of packages and dependencies… Maybe it’s slightly out of their scope…

16 November 2007

Guido Trotter: LISA: done!

LISA’07 is over, and just concluded with a great talk about “Cooking at the Keyboard”, which of course I liked a lot, being this one of my favorite hobbies! This was my first LISA conference, and I had an all-round experience, giving an invited talk, hosting a BoF and speaking during the Hit The Ground Running track. Of those three the most fun has been the HTGR talk, in which I quickly summarized the Ganeti platform in 10′ and was able to answer a few questions in the last 5′. I definitely liked giving the invited talk, and I think the idea my teammates had to not just talk but actually give a live demo of our platform was very successful, even if it took some time and effort to prepare. The BoF was nice because it gave people chance to give more feedback and to talk about their ideas, it’s probably the session I learned more from. The slides for the talk are on the conference page, and the ones for HTGR will be soon! Globally it’s been a very intense week of talks, sessions, hallway chats, work and fun, and I definitely hope to be at LISA’08, next November in San Diego (it’s a bit like going back home, isnt it?)! I’m really glad to have come and want really to thank all the people who made this possible and all the people I met here, who made this event so good!

1 September 2007

Guido Trotter: Ganeti

Just a couple of days ago we finally opensourced Ganeti, a cluster virtualization platform based on Xen. In the last few months I joined the Ganeti team, which is based in Zurich, and worked with them on the development of this software! I’m really happy now to be able to share the result of what we’ve been doing with the rest of the world! For more information you can have a look at the project page! Of course an ITP has been filled! (ok, actually two because I didn’t notice someone in my team had already done one!) PS I’m away for the weekend, forgot my charger and am running out of battery! I’ll be back online on monday, I guess! :)

22 August 2007

Guido Trotter: LISA, I m coming! :)

It’s official: I will be representing my team at USENIX’s 21st Large Installation System Administration Conference (LISA) in Dallas (TX), speaking about the project we’re working on! My talk will be on Thursday 15th November! Check out the program: http://www.usenix.org/events/lisa07/tech/#thursday Wow, I’m so happy! :)

12 July 2007

Guido Trotter: Racconto catastrofico/Catastrophic novel

Oggi mi e stato passato il link a questo raccontino di fantascienza catastrofica… E carino, scritto bene, tecnicamente preciso (cosa rara oggigiorno). E anche decisamente intenso, specie in alcuni punti… Mi ha lasciato un po’ sotto shock, devo dire… Se vi va provate a leggerlo! Today I received a link to this catastrophic sci-fi short novel story… It’s nice, well written, and technically precise (which doesn’t happen so often). It’s also a bit shocking at points, and has definitely hit me a bit… Try to read it, if you want! http://baens-universe.com/articles/When_Sysadmins_Ruled_the_Earth

2 July 2007

Guido Trotter: Work life :) (ed e tutto piratissimo )

Foto by conall, during last friday’s Eng Crawl! And this is the debian kilt, worn in the office! :)

18 January 2007

Guido Trotter: Real Life Race Condition

When one studies Race Conditions in Operating Systems they tend to seem some weird computer problem, maybe even a hard one to understand… Yesterday I had the proof they’re actually a real life issue! Our office in zurich has a form to order dinner online, to be filled in before 5pm, which I did, just after my colleague, one minute before 5 or so. The system got my order and accepted it. It also sent me mails to remember to fetch the food except… there was none! It seems like my pizza got caught in a race condition between the actual ordering and the official closing of the web form. (My collegue’s food was delivered normally ) Race conditions seem to be much more real when what gets lost is your dinner! (Well, I managed to eat anyway, later, luckily!)

4 June 2006

Enrico Zini: Dapper on XEN (part 1/1, unfinished)

I need to do some work on a Dapper system, so it's time to try out xen:
apt-get install linux-image-2.6-xen-686 xen-hypervisor-3.0-i386 xen-utils-3.0 xen-tools
xen-tools tries to recommend xen, which is old and has been requested to be removed from the archive. The recommends needs to be ignored, which is not that trivial to do with aptitude. The linux-image doesn't happen to have an initrd. The bug has already been reported. One can recreate one using:
mkinitrd -o/boot/initrd-2.6.16-2-xen-686.img  2.6.16-2-xen-686
Then one adds this to /boot/grub/menu.lst:
title Xen
root (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/xen-3.0-i386.gz
module /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.16-2-xen-686 root=/dev/hda1
module /boot/initrd.img-2.6.16-2-xen-smp
And it boots lovely:
# xm list
Name                              ID Mem(MiB) VCPUs State  Time(s)
Domain-0                           0      939     2 r-----  4677.9
Now xen-tools provides xen-create-image. I'll try to create the Dapper image (deboostrap in my system has already been changed to be able to install dapper):
xen-create-image --size=4G --swap=128M --dhcp --volume=marvin \
                 --hostname=cavazza --dist=dapper --fs=xfs
But I get:
[...]
Creating swapfile : /dev/marvin/cavazza-swap
Done
Creating disk image: /dev/marvin/cavazza-root
Done
Creating xfs filesystem
Done
Installing the base system.   This will take a while!
Copying files from host to image.
Finished
Something went wrong with the debootstrap installation
Aborting
I love detailed error messages. This one is not. So I'll have to do by hand. The documentation says:
Before you can start an additional domain, you must create a configuration file. We provide two example files which you can use as a starting point:
  • /etc/xen/xmexample1 is a simple template configuration file for describing a single VM.
  • /etc/xen/xmexample2 file is a template description that is intended to be reused for multiple virtual machines. Setting the value of the vmid variable on the xm command line fills in parts of this template.
But in Debian there's no trace of the two example files. I've reported to Guido Trotter. Then I googled for the two files and found them. Now, on to adapt Dapper to run under Xen. The good Ubuntu wiki has an HOWTO which crudely makes you install the Tarballed Pre-built installations of Xen 3.0. It's sad that xen-enabled kernels didn't make it into Dapper roper. I can make this:
kernel = "/boot/vmlinuz-xen-domu"
memory = 128
name = "Dapper"
disk = [ 'phy:marvin/dapper,hda1,w' ]
dhcp="dhcp"
root = "/dev/hda1 ro"
I used the pre-built kernel as a domU, but:
Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(3,1)
Sigh. I'll try with the Debian Xen-enabled kernels. Installing yaird and linux-image-2.6.16-2-xen-686_2.6.16-14_i386.deb and linux-modules-2.6.16-2-xen-686. It WORKS! Now, that's not Dapper: that's a debootstrap install of it. No user, no root password, no desktop, no shiny Ubuntu custom config. How to finish the installation? No idea. In the past, I could run base-config, but now it doesn't exist anymore. It seems that the best bet is not to use debootstrap, but to install the CD in the LVM partition using QEMU and then chroot into it and then install the debian xen kernel to boot it. A QEMU install will take ages, and I expect some trouble, like getting partman to see LVM. Maybe I better install on a disk image file and then use tar and netcat to bring the ubuntu installation out of the disk image and into the LVM image. For today, I didn't make it. This job slips another day. Frustration. I hope that at least this description of my efforts so far can be helpful to someone trying similar things. One suggestion I got was to boot the Dapper CD and install from there. I can't: this computer has no bootable CD. Update: I found out http://xensource.com/summerofcode.html and it says:
Project Idea 3: Xen Desktop Outside of Domain 0 This project would deliver a Xen desktop to the user of a client system that presents an abstraction of a virtual desktop to the user in which multiple guests share the virtual desktop, each with a subset of the desktop resources (pixels, etc). Smart management of the sound drivers would allow mixing of sound from multiple guests to the single device used for output. Microphone input could be broadcast to all guests. Technologies such as ALSA already emulate playback settings by downsampling for the hardware etc. so its not hard to imagine a xen-snd-front device munging the data to a common format used for the internal sound card. Issues: synchronization of playback.
So, what I'm trying to do has been proposed as a SoC project and (I guess) is something that can't be done overnight. Although I was planning to run a diskless gdm accessed with XDMCMP from domain0's X server, and to just hand out the audio card to the domU using pciback, so my task would have been easier. Thus I give up using Xen for this one. I'll work around the lack-of-bootable-cd limitation of this computer by installing Ubuntu using QEMU. Which I found out requires using the "Alternate install" CD. The desktop install CD is a live CD installing with Ubuntu Expresso, and the live CD doesn't seem to work in QEMU. Or, I'll install in a LVM partition in the laptop and then move it around using the network. This one's probably faster. Could this experience be an interesting use case for Edgy Eft?

2 April 2006

Guido Trotter: Feed readers

By reading Planet Debian through a feed reader (my choice is for liferea) I almost missed everybody being upside down… Luckily I noticed it in time! :)

23 March 2006

Guido Trotter: Graduation

At last, it’s graduation day! I hope everything will be ok! Going to defend my xen thesis in a hour and a half! :)

27 February 2006

Julien Danjou: About Xen in Debian

Some people may have noticed that a thread has recently started about Xen on debian-devel. To sum up the whole story, here it is. Guido Trotter and myself asked Adam Heath, the current official maintainer of Xen, if it was possible to help him (bug #342249) to package Xen 3.
He did not answer to our messages, as he seems to be MIA, so we started with Jeremy Bouse, Ralph Passgang and Yvette Chanco to work and we created a project on Alioth in order to package the latest release. We started our development from the package Ralph made previously. We don't know really why, but Bastian Blank, from the Debian kernel team, uploaded his own package of Xen 3, ignoring our request to work on our side, arguing that this was the work of kernel team to maintain Xen. It seems that actually, the kernel team only pretend to maintain the Dom0 and DomU kernel images, probably as soon as Xen in included in the vanilla kernel, and that Bastian took the decision alone to maintain the hypervizor and userspace tools. Today, we have functionnal and splitted packages of Xen 3, available on the Subversion repository. I made Xen packages with the latest development version of our packages and the Xen testing version. They are available from:
deb http://naquadah.org/~jd/debian/xen stable main
Official backports will be uploaded to backports.org as soon as we will have uploaded a version to sid. But for now, we have to cancel or bypass the upload Bastian made...

Guido Trotter: SSH control connections

After a lot of people blogged or talked about them in various places I decided, some months ago, to try the magic of
ControlMaster auto
ControlPath ~/.ssh/ssh_control_%h_%p_%r
After a couple of months, however, I had to renounce to that setting, at least temporarily, because it broke my ability to work on svn.debian.org… here is what happens when I start working with the repository svn+ssh://svn.debian.org/pkg-xen/
ultrotter@tie:~/debian/xen/trunk$ svn up
At revision 61.
ultrotter@tie:~/debian/xen/trunk$ svn up
Control socket connect(/home/ultrotter/.ssh/ssh_control_svn.debian.org_22_ultrotter): Connection refused
ControlSocket /home/ultrotter/.ssh/ssh_control_svn.debian.org_22_ultrotter already exists
svn: Connection closed unexpectedly
As you can see the first svn operation goes through, but the control file is left behind, causing any other command that connects to the repository to fail, until I delete the file! Anyone has a solution for that? For now I just disabled the setting, even though I liked it for the rest of its effects! :) Guido

25 February 2006

Guido Trotter: The Rosetta Stone (and the failure of watermarking)

An interesting article on why watermarking tecniques for DRM are not likely to succeed!

13 January 2006

Guido Trotter: Great discovery!


Your Inner European is Italian!


Passionate and colorful.You show the world what culture really is.
Who’s Your Inner European?
I usually refrain from publishing test results, but this time I couldn’t resist, since the result was kind of interesting: it seems in fact that my inner european is Italian… Of course I’m actually Italian, so that may have something to do with it! ;) Update: It seems me and Christian are similar: Answering the european test with reverted answers as he does the result is the same: I’m definitely not spanish too… Probably because of my allergy to dances and too-loud parties! :)

4 January 2006

Guido Trotter: Strange planet behaviour

On my ‘technology behaving weirdly’ series: As many other people I flooded planet debian with some old posts by upgrading to wordpress 2.0! The first strange thing is that of all my posts only the first two that ever appeared on the planet were showed again as new. The second one is that no flooding happened happened on QuaQuaPlanet, which is another installation of planet I use with some Italian friends…

Guido Trotter: On Planet Debian, at last!

Hi!
I’m finally on Planet Debian too! :)
Till now I didn’t have the possibility to post here, because I only had a blog in common with some friends! Now thanks to Planet and Wordpress I can have a personal blog, a shared feed with my italian friends, and posts syndicated in different feeds depending from the language and the subject… cool! :)

Guido Trotter: Website fun!

What happened to wml? I tried to make some modifications to my homepage and when I tried to “make” it I noticed it doesn’t compile anymore… On the other hand it seems that wml is the same since year 2000, so… Whatever! I guess I will just need to prepare a new homepage, possibly using some newer technology… Maybe I’ll write it in xml… or… we’ll see! :)

1 January 2006

Guido Trotter: Missing my leap second

All these people reporting that their kernel added a leap second and reported that in the log, and I couldn’t find the message on my systems… (Well, I could check just a couple of them since I’m on vacation and I only have a slow dialup) That’s weird… I wonder why!

26 December 2005

Guido Trotter: linner or

Andrew, with your “linner” you reminded me of last year, when I was abroad, and I used sometimes when I was too busy to have “brunner”, which I defined as a fusion of all the three meals (BReakfast + lUNch + dinNER)! :) Oh, Happy Holidays to everybody!

1 December 2005

Guido Trotter: Horde incompatible with php session.auto_start

It seems that the horde (both version 2 and 3) is incompatible with the php session.auto_start option…
If this option is enabled in fact horde has the strange behaviour of immediately expiring the session of authenticating users, thus avoiding anybody reading their mail… This only happens with newer versions of horde btw: and old one that was installed on the same machine worked fine! Worse thing: none about this seems to be mentioned anywhere… :( And I only found out installing horde on a clean machine and starting to look for differences… which made me lose my whole afternoon (and my class)… sic!

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