Sunday afternoon I came back from the QA meeting in M rida (Spain). I host some of the pictures on my machine: http://www.marioiseli.com/stuff/qa-extremadura-2007/ (thanks to Cyril Brulebois for the pics) As I have written to debian-devel-announce yesterday, I was mostly working on MIA stuff, it was also great to have some personal discussions with several DDs. I hope that there will be such a great meeting again, maybe next year. Monday in the evening I got a phonecall from the company where I had a personal interview last tuesday. They can adopt my apprenticeship. Yay… There are several reasons why I want to leave my current workplace (Stadt Grenchen): I have almost nothing to do, I learn nothing anymore, some people in my team were an interpersonal catastrophe, noone knows what the work “responsibility” means. I don’t want to go into the detail, but at least they reached that I got several nervous breakdowns, ending at the doctor wednesday afternoon. As I told, my nerves are down, I can’t sleep during the night here, motivation for life was down in the cave. This week I don’t need to work at all (medical certificate) and the next 2 weeks only 50%, so enough time to relax and get healthy again. Also thanks to my girlfriend Lisa for always being there for me… Tomorrow we will be a pair for already 4 months, Tempus fugit…
01.02.2008 I will start then my new job as a Systems Administrator and Networking-Dude for an ISP, more details will follow Regards,

Right now, some Debian Developers (and also not yet Developers, like me:), are on
the work sessions in Extremadura, I am on the QA and release teams meeting.

We started in the morning with presentations (see also the schedule). Any comments and suggestions welcomed, please add comments below the post.

Lucas Nussbaum presenting:


Most of us:



And in details, names from left to right. Cyril Brulebois, Gon ri Le Bouder:


Luk Claes, Marc 'HE' Brockschmidt, J rg Jaspert, Lars Wirzenius:


Fabio Tranchitella, Bernd Zeimetz, Mario Iseli, Luk Claes:


Filippo Giunchedi, Stefano Zacchiroli, Tzafrir Cohen, Simon Richter, Faidon Liambotis:


And again, so that Faidon is visible:

What’s up with myself? I ask me this question myself after many of you asked me about what’s going on with me. I have a quite difficult time right now - ok - more precisely: Already for about a month or so. Several people who were very important for me let me hang. I have a lot of personal troubles at my workplace, different troubles in my circle of friends and also have worries about my girlfriend who considers to move to Germany in January. I do even miss my personal energy and motivation. I look forward to solve my situation at work, look forward to the QA meeting in ~2 weeks and hope to have some real holidays in december to relax a little bit. In that case… Regards,

Hello World ok, second night of my birhday is over, went again to the pub with some of my very important people. The day today was quite different - not only joy, fun, and … Today also other facts were playing an important role - Remember people who can’t be here tonight (dead), lost love and new targets. Nevertheless, I’m quite happy and enjoy the last hours of this night. Regards, Mario (with different emotions)

So, I just came back home (quite drunk), had a very nice evening with my girlfriend and then went to the pub where I got quite a lot of free beer after 00:00, I’m finally 18 now! That does mean I’m no more underage! Regards, Mario

Hello World Today I found “Asirra” on one of my favourite Newssites. Ok, I have mostly disabled comments on my blog due to the spam, but since I have a funny protection they are allowed again. Thanks to Microsoft for writing as an exception a good piece of Software which is also free and you find even an installation guide for Debian Have fun commenting!

Hello World, a tape streamer of one of our customers died two days ago and we haven’t anymore warranty on this device, a new infrastructure will be realized soon anyway. So, we needed a cheap temporary solution. We bought a WD network harddisk for home use and “remote access over the internet”, even if we only need local access to it. It’s a 500 GB harddisk and you find several short GPL references in the crappy 5-pages-manual. Ok, this sounded already interesting. I read the manual and see that only Windows 2000 and Windows XP are supported and that you have to install a very proprietary Windows tool to start using the harddisk. Later there would also be a webinterface available, after the initialization. Ok, so I wanted to know if it’s possible to access the drive also with other operating systems. I connected the RJ45 port of the harddisk with my ethernet card with a cross-over cable and started to sniff with ngrep on the interface. After waiting a while I got this message some strange from a APIPA address to a Multicast address. Ok, assigned my local interface an address in the APIPA range and connected with my browser to it: T 169.254.71.58:80 -> 169.254.71.57:56819 [A]
HTTP/1.1 200 OK.
Transfer-Encoding: chunked.
Date: Thu, 30 Nov 2006 23:12:51 GMT.
0: no-cache.
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8.
Server: lighttpd/1.4.3.
Very interesting… lighttpd The device asks for a password, I went to the website of WD to read the “full manual” (as the CDROM isn’t readable with Linux as it seems), in the support part I found something about “admin” and “123456″. With this information I could login on the device and saw that it does nothing else than Samba (3.0.14) and it’s also accessible via smbclient. Without the proprietary tool, without sending personal information to Westerndigital and getting stupid newsletters. Maybe I will remove the harddisk from the case later and install it on my workstation (it isn’t reachable except port 80 and the netbios stuff) to see what exactly is on it. At least I know that it’s an ext3 filesystem. I think vendors who use embedded Linux systems for their devices and use such proprietary clients, give not more information about it are just crap. It’s something like unfair for the free-software community. (even if it works unofficially with an uncommon way) [Update] A little codesnippet from the Webinterface… very useful function moveArrow(ycord) // vert cord of layer

// ignore this function
//
// if(document.layers). //NN4+
//
// document.layers[”MenuArrow”].moveToAbsolute(xcord,ycord);
//
// else if(document.getElementById). //gecko(NN6) + IE 5+
//
// var obj = document.getElementById(”MenuArrow”);
//
obj.style.top = ycord;
//
// else if(document.all).// IE 4
//
// document.all[”MenuArrow”].style.top = ycord;
//

Hello World I have finally a new Hackergotchi, I can’t do that myself since I’m quite unable to do any graphics work. So my coworker Markus Roth helped me, thank you! I will upload it to the SVN and modify the configfile according as soon as the CVS->SVN migration for planet.debian.org is over. Thanks and Regards,

Hello World While reading planet.ubuntu.com I notified especially the post from Christer Edwards, “Call for Ubuntu stats”. Especially the following two questions seem very interesting to me:

• Estimated number of users
• Estimated number of countries deployed

Does anyone have an idea? I don’t see a way how we can calculate that, the mirrors are decentral, Debian doesn’t force it’s user to register somewhere. Nevertheless, some numbers (no matter if really precise) would be very interesting. Please send comments or get in contact with me by E-Mail. Thanks and regards,

Those who read debian-private knew it, some others were informed too. I was (at least for Debian) in Vacation until last weekend. The main reason was that I didn’t have time at my workplace to work on Debian because of other quite urgent projects which were open. Tomorrow I will package bluez-libs 3.18 which was released by upstream yesterday and review some other packages and maybe sponsor them. In the evening I was also very busy this week, dinner here, dinner there, meet some friends, wait until girlfriend comes home from the theater. I didn’t really sleep more than 5 hours per night and this since about 3 weeks now. At least, my ~/TODO list became much shorter and I hope I will find more sleep now, more time together with Lisa and at work I will have 3-4 hours per day for Debian again. Ah, by the way, thanks to all people who were involved with updating packages.debian.org! Ah, 2nd by the way: I booked my flight to Berlin for 25.12.2007 and the flight back on 31.12.2007, see you during 24c3, send me an E-Mail if you want to go for a beer with me, keysigning, whatever

Hello World, I’m organizing a little birthday party for the Debian project in Switzerland, G rkan created a Wikipage where you will be able to find more information in a few days, if you also want to have an event also link it on the Wikipage. Happy international celebrating Thanks to debian.ch for food/drink sponsorship.

First of all an introduction for the readers outside of Switzerland: Swisscom is a monopolistic organization which has the right to install DSL infrastructure in Switzerland and sells those line to the Wholesale-Customers (aka the “normal” providers).
Some weeks ago Swisscom increased the bandwidth for the business customers (aka myself for example) and since then my connection failed at least once per day. The only solution to fix that was resetting the whole ADSL modem which fits as a bridge to PPPoE and then restart the pppd after all. Since I’m not often at home but use the machines from remote over ssh to read mail, irc, debug dns stuff, test software on one of the public sid machines. So, my systems are totally unreliable.
I wrote a mail to my provider some weeks ago, didn’t really get e good feedback. When I called them by phone I was told that Swisscom reduced my bandwidth again and this should resolve the problem. Dear Swisscom, it still does _NOT_ work and I have several disconnects per day. I wanted to use my machines when I was at Debconf7 last week in Scotland, but at the time when I arrived at Teviot my line was down and I had to read my mail during this time via IMAP from the 2nd MX.
I also have the feeling that my provider doesn’t want to help me, nobody gave me instructions on how I could debug this better, they just gave me a formular to open a troubleticket itself and there I would need to subscribe that all costs have to be payed by myself what I can’t as a student. Ok, so I have a total unstable Internet connection and as it looks like I have to switch from ADSL to Cable internet in a few months, even if that also has big disadvantages.

I’m just sitting in the night venue of Debconf7 and do several tasks in the same moment, that includes: * Getting kind of a spanish course on IRC in #debian-qt-kde * Get some news from friends in .ch via MSN (there were several unweathers and other troubles) * Think about tdbackup which is the topic of this blog entry. So what is tdbackup? It is just another backup implementation but it should work kind of distributed. I manage several servers and in that farm are 3 backup servers with a tape drive, every sunday i mount parts of the other machines via NFS and write them with tar to the tape. Until I did that by hand because there was no implementation which fits my needs unfortunately. This is the point where tdbackup jumps in. I want to create a GUI which edits an ini file in the form of: [backupmachine 1] mount = bla1:/home mount = bla2:/home tdbackup will then distribute a specifically generated configfile to each backuphost and a little python script which is called by cron and mounts the file systems, write some information into mysql and generate warning messages via e-mail if the tape is almost full. So, I will be able to sleep better because the stuff is auto-documented in a way. I’m still thinking about how exactly i want to implement that, if there are any interested people who would like to join that project, please just tell me.

Hello World Debconf (16.6.2007) is getting closer, in 77 hours I will take the train to the airport in Geneva and then fly to Edinburgh. I didn’t really organize anything yet so it becomes stressful.
* Today I organized a kilt from a friend, looks quite funny, I will wear it on Saturday.
* Wednesday I want to prepare my private notebook and maybe even my IBM x60s from the office.
* Wednesday I want to prepare my digital camera and clean the memory stick.
* Wednesday I’ll organize 95 for the LPI exams.
* Wednesday evening I’ll go out with some friends to have party (several of my friends go to the Greenfield festival Thursday evening and I go to Debconf, time to celebrate)
* Thursday evening I will leave work early and go to Biel to buy some clothes for me, cheese for madduck and the othere Cheese’n'Wine participiants, chocolate for ana, cookies for Joerg. (If you also want something from .ch, please ping me on IRC)
* Thursday after shopping I need to go to a business dinner in a Mongolian BBQ restaurant.
* Friday I need to organize some W-Lan cards for the airport in Geneva in a Swisscom-Shop.
* Friday I would like to bring a friend a birthday gift.
* Friday I would like to go to have a drink with my ex-girlfriend.
* Friday night I need to prepare my baggage including all technical stuff. So you see, several tasks I have to do (this weren’t all of them) and I hope to be able to do all of that See you in Teviot, Saturday afternoon!

I already had the idea to get LPI certified - expensive fun. Thanks to Joerg and co. for organizing the cheap exams during Debconf, I already have signed-up for LPI101 in the morning and LPI102 in the afternoon and wrote our $$$-director of the comany a mail that I’d like to get 95 more at the end of this month. Finally a little reference to the blog of Martin F. Krafft - and especially “Why? I am a Debian developer”. I think this is just bullshit, sorry. LPI is dedicated for system administrators, BOFHs, techies, however. Not that stuff what a Debian developer is doing. I mean, a DD should have knowledge about Debian including knowledge about software development, documentation, how to build packages, write some scripts… But does he need to know how to manage iptables or know where you need to set the fontserver? I think no… LPI asks many questions about old stuff, like the XFS, ISA Cards, Analog modems usw. The normal user today doesn’t need to care about this things, even a Debian developer mustn’t. I think many DDs never have touched an ISA card. So, I will participate in the exams, please don’t blame me if I fail.

So, this is my last evening (and when I remember correctly the first one I’m at home) of my holidays. All began last Friday called “Karfreitag”, a national holiday. To be correct, the first party was already on Thursday and they continued daily till Monday evening. The best event in this time was Sunday afternoon, some minutes after I waked up Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 aka Etch was released, what a feeling. It was especially interesting because it’s the first stable release with some of my packages and it was a great experience to see how releasing and planning works. I often think back to the two bug squashing parties in Zurich, one in September and one in October iirc. Back to my holidays: First it was planned that I go with my sister to Zurich from Monday evening till Thursday evening, but then I got a appalling call from madduck who told me that he is in the hospital in Zurich with several broken bones. We planned to sleep in madducks flat and so we couldn’t get the key and went Tuesday morning. Walking through Zurich, getting some informational material from the University Zurich for my Sister (she maybe wants to study there) and the visiting madduck. After the visit we went again to the center of the city and walked without a real destination. In the evening we finally went to Oerlikon and went to “our” flat. After installing our sleep places (goddamn, I want to have a waterbed) we went to Migros to buy some food and drinks for the evening and the next day. The next day we really got up quite early and visited Zurich with a city guide, a lot of sightseeing and hanging in some bars. In the afternoon Daniel Baumann also was in Zurich and we went to have a drink together and also Tobias Ast came and staid with us till the next evening. We really had fun together and the main thing we did on Thursday was relaxing on the lake of Zurich and in the evening we went home. Then it was finally friday, I looked forward to this day for about one week, why? The release party in Zurich!! It was my first release party on the Irchel area in Zurich, we grilled, had some beer together and talked about god and the world. It also was the first time i met Adrian von Bidder and Mathias St rmer in person, especially with Adrian i had a longer interesting discussion about network devices from Cisco and their special prices. Saturday was already the next party day. When I was 13 we had a supply teacher for our sick teacher for 2 months, I was her horror pupil. Fine - some weeks ago I met her again in a Pub in the evening and we staid together the whole evening and became good friends in a way, so I was also invited (as the only of her pupils) to her flat share party. I met several “new” people and some of them (mostly IT students) recognized my Debian t-shirt and I had some interesting discussions about free software and had to explain the philosophy of Debian to some of them. So yes, now it’s sunday, I’m more tired than before my holidays but I’m really happy, my holidays were great because of some adventures. Regards to all to my friends… Tomorrow I will continue working and have several tasks open, especially upgrading some Debian servers from Sarge to Etch (Spamfilters, LDAP, Proxy servers…) and I hope I won’t have many troubles. In addition I have also some tasks open for Debian which I’d like to complete this week.

Some minutes ago I saw the mail of Joerg Jaspert announcing food and accomodation sponsorship for all who applied in time. I applied at the end of december, exactly at the day where pentabarf was installed and announced on debian-devel-announce, so I will attend. Together with Daniel Baumann I already bought the flight (but I paid my one on my own since I earn a bit money), I will attend Debconf7 from 16th to 24th of June. I think you can’t imagine how happy I am right now and so I would like to say THANK YOU to all sponsors and the Debconf team who organizes all that stuff! I’m looking forward to see as many of you as possible in Edi

Good morning… today I saw the RFP for “pokerth” on WNPP, had a look at upstreams website and just retitled to an ITP. Now my package is ready (and in the queue of my AM to upload )
For those who are bored or like to play poker games I already have a little preview: http://www.marioiseli.com/debian/sid/main/source/games/asciijump_0.0.6-3.dsc
http://www.marioiseli.com/debian/sid/main/binary-i386/games/pokerth_0.3-1_i386.deb Yeah I know, please don’t flame me because I write a blog article just due to one single Debian package, but I really like this game and hope you have fun with it too… Regards… (I’m not responsible when you arrive late at work tomorrow…)

Hi Yesterday I did a new install of my notebook because I had LUKS and for a reason my laptop began to hang totally (with all installed kernels) after several seconds. This was also my first installation with compiz, I really like it even if it’s just eyecandy - it’s cool. _BUT_, then I installed the sun-java-* packages and also the netbeans package which is waiting in the NEW-queue, I can start it, but there’s no content inside the window? So i tested some other java programs and there exactly the same. Finally I found out that when you run compiz all java applications don’t have a content inside of the javax.swing.JFrame objects. Iceweasel seems also not to work (I’m still searching why), because when invoking on the console I don’t get any line of output - just no reaction. But I can blog - thanks to “drivel” which is also a very nice program in my opinion. Yeah, enough talking bad now - in general I’m very happy and it’s a very good system (compared to other days with unstable ), I think etch will become a really good distribution when I look at my notebook, it’s very simple to use, enough eyecandy, most hardware works out of the box. Special thanks for this to the GNOME-Team who did a really god job in the last months! Wish you a nice Sunday and have fun at work tomorrow (I have holidays )

Yesterday was general assembly of the Linux user group Aargau (a place in switzerland). The association hasn’t got enough money, this is a severel months old story already, and the person who managed the money was very inactive. The president also didn’t want to do his job anymore, so we had to search a new advisory board. Unfortunately there weren’t enough members who are interested in this job, so the association will be resolved. This is quite hard for me because I met there some cool people which became (some of them at least) good friends, I say “thank you very much” to G rkan, Daniel, David, Werewolfi, Harzi, Nils, B, Vany and last but not least also to the “swisscom idiot”…
Yeah, there isn’t much more to say about this, only that I will miss those cool evenings very much But from another point of view, yesterday was a very good day because Debian Etch is finally frozen, so we had to celebrate at the LUG-AG meeting and there are some pictures (the big ones are 403, if you want them just send me a mail and I will allow it for your IP). Thanks to all Debian people who helped getting Etch in shape and thanks to the releasemanagers…