As announced 3 weeks ago, the Debian project was present at Chemnitzer Linuxtage. Several talks and workshops where held by people related to the Debian project. At the booth we had talks and discussions with exhibitors and visitors, unfortunately I didn t had much time to visit more than small parts of two lectures. Unfortunately (for the visitors) we didn t had any merchandising on board, while we received several requests. On Sunday Axel surprised us with some leftovers from fosdem of debian.ch merch. At the booth we had a demo machine running Babelbox and xpenguins, which attracted visitors very well. We received also more than one Just thank you by satisfied users. :) Four different talks and one workshop were held by Debian people, but they were not specific to the Debian. The workshop was about OpenStreetMap, lectures was about commandline helpers, grep everything, quality analyzing and team management in opensource projects and Conkeror and other keyboard based webbrowsers. Many thanks to Jan Dittberner, Andreas Tille, Christian Hoffmann, Florian Baumann, Christoph Egger, Axel Beckert, Adam Schmalhofer, Markus Schnalke, Sebastian Harl and Patrick Matth i for running the booth, answering a wide range of questions or just chatting with visitors . A special thank to TMT GmbH & Co. KG for providing the complete equipment and sponsoring it s transportation. At the end we have to send a big thank to the organizing team of the Chemnitzer Linuxtage. It was fun and a pleasure to find new friends and meet old ones of the Free Software community. A small sidenote was anybody aware that OpenSuSE Package search is using screenshots.debian.net?

• nagios-plugins
  • stable: uploaded 1.4.15-3squeeze1 fixing #623702
  • testing: entered 1.4.15-4, this basically reduced the dependency footprint of nagios-plugins-standard (#569028)
  • squeeze-backports: uploaded 1.4.15-4~bpo60+1
• icinga
  • unstable: Alexander Wirt uploaded 1.4.0-2
  • squeeze-backports: uploaded 1.4.0-2~bpo60+1
  • lenny-backports-sloppy: uploaded 1.4.0-2~bpo50+1
• nagstamon
  • squeeze-backports: uploaded 0.9.6.1-2~bpo60+1, which works with icinga 1.4
• nagios3
  • unstable: Alexander Wirt uploaded 3.2.3-2
• check-mk
  • unstable: Alexander Wirt uploaded 1.1.10-1
• icli
  • unstable: Uli Martens uploaded 0.4-2, this fixes #623325
• nagircbot
  • testing: John Morrissey uploaded initially some weeks ago 0.0.32-1
• mod-gearman
  • testing: Stig Sandbeck Mathisen uploaded initially some weeks ago 1.0.3-1
• pnp4nagios
  • testing: Sebastian Harl uploaded some weeks ago 0.6.12-1
  • squeeze-backports: Sebastian Harl uploaded 0.6.12-1~bpo60+1

Some more about packaging nagios and icinga related packages can be found at our team site.

Supposedly, my low, casual shoes contain some longish and slender piece of metal in the sole. At least, that's what the X-rays at the airport detected when I was flying back from FOSDEM. While it isn't shaped like a typical knife, I didn't know how to tell it apart from a potentially hidden blade. Well, I guess that's what the people doing the security control are trained for ... Interestingly enough, it was only detected at the Zurich airport - neither the metal detectors in Nuremberg nor those in Brussels seemed to care about it.

Yesterday, collectd 4.3.0-1 has been uploaded to Debian unstable. The most important changes since 3.x are (in chronological order):

• the much improved plugin infrastructure offers a lot more flexibility
• the much improved networking code offers a lot more flexibility
• the new bindings to Perl allow plugins to be written in the scripting language Perl
• the new unixsock and exec plugins allow external programs to communicate with the daemon and submit data
• integration with Nagios has been implemented
• support for flexible intervals has been added
• support to read values from SNMP enabled devices has been added
• basic support for monitoring has been added
• many new plugins

See the changelog for details. About collectd:
collectd is a small daemon which collects system information periodically and provides mechanisms to monitor and store the values in a variety of ways. It is written in C for performance. Since the daemon doesn't need to startup every time it wants to update the values it's very fast and easy on the system and allows very fine-grained statistics.

• Froscon rocks!
• explored some more software in more detail, including op, dconf, dstat, unoconf, dwscan, ikiwiki, openQRM, Pentabarf, sl
• it was great to meet so many people (some of them for the first time in RL), including Alexander ‘formorer’ Wirt, Timo ‘Spida’ Boettcher, Marc ‘HE’ Brockschmidt, Bernd Zeimetz, Thomas ‘MrFai’ Lange, Sebastian Harl, Elmar Hoffmann, Martin Zobel-Helas, Luk Claes, Christoph ‘myon’ Berg, Klaus Knopper, Sven Guckes, Dag Wieers and many more…
• using ‘vlock -a -n’ with Debian package >=2.0-2 rocks when using libthinkfinger and authentication via ’swipe finger’ (thanks, formorer :-))
• having Debian release managers (hi Zobel and Luk :-)) by hand rocks
• the book shop at Froscon (Lehmanns) provided one of the best selection of books I’ve seen on an Open-Source event so far (fsck, 3 more books for my library)
• organization of the event was very good
• sadly the press plant made a fscking error when shipping the froscon edition of grml-CDs, so 1000 grml-CDs failed to arrive in time
• thanks to Pierre Schmitz and the Archlinux team for providing us linux-user DVDs containing grml 1.0 and grml64 0.1!

This little Lego robot runs (well, drives) with Debian ;-)

The Debian-Team at the Debian-booth of Froscon 2007: Standing (from left): Bernd Zeimetz, Thomas ‘MrFai’ Lange, Sebastian Harl, Elmar Hoffmann, Martin Zobel-Helas, Luk Claes;
Sitting in the middle: Christoph ‘myon’ Berg

Last weekend was quite productive. First, Joerg Jaspert updated the dak installation on backports.org, which means we can also use ~ in version numbers. What does it mean? We no longer need to lower the Debian revision of the version number, 1.2.3-4 becomes 1.2.3-4~foo instead 1.2.3-3foo. Martin F. Krafft suggested to use 1.2.3-4~bpo.1 instead 1.2.3-4~bpo1, and I like the idea, it looks indeed better. Daniel Baumann already modified the contribute page on our website. Speaking about the website... it's now based on a wiki, thanks to Sebastian Harl, who implemented the old website design into the new Dokuwiki installation. If you want an account to edit something, just drop me a mail.