Amounts are to taste:
[Stage one]
Chopped red onion
Chopped garlic
Chopped fresh ginger
Chopped big red chillies (mild)
Chopped birds eye chillies (red or green, quite hot)
Chopped scotch bonnets (hot)
[Fry onion in some olive oil. When getting translucent, and rest of ingredients. May need to add some more oil. When the garlic is browning. On to stage two.]
[Stage two]
Some tins of chopped tomato
Some tomato puree
Some basil
Some thyme
Bay leaf optional
Some sliced mushroom
Some chopped capsicum pepper
Some kidney beans
Other beans optional (butter beans are nice)
Lentils optional (Pro tip: if adding lentils to adding lentils, especially red lentils, I recommend adding some garam masala as well. Lifts the flavour.)
Veggie mince optional
Pearled barley very optional
Stock (some reclaimed from swilling water around tom tims)
Water to keep topping up with if it get too sticky or dry
Dash of red wine optional
Worcester sauce optional
Any other flavouring you feel like optional (I quite often add random herbs or spices
[[Secret ingredient: a spoonful of Marmite]]
[Cook everything up together, but wait until there is enough fluid before you add the dry/sticky ingredients in.]
[Serve with carb of choice. I currently fond of using Ryvita as dipper instead of tortilla chips.]
[Also serve with a a cooler such as natural yogurt, soured cream or something else. You want more than one type of chilli in there to broaden the flavour. I use all three, plus occasionally others as well. If you are feeling masochistic you can go hotter than scotch bonnets, but I although you may get something of the same heat, I think you lose something in the flavour. BTW if you get the chance, of all the tortilla chips, I think blue corn ones are the best. Only seem to find them in health food shops. There you go. It s a Zen recipe, which is why I couldn t give you a link. You just do it until it looks right, feels right, tastes right. And with practice you get it better and better.

Looks like it is time to change all the passwords again. There s a tiny little flaw in a CDN used everywhere, it seems. Here s a quick hack for users of the pass password manager to qickly find the domains affected. It is not perfect, but it is fast. :) Update: The previous example used parallel. Actually, I didn t need that. Turns out, using grep correctly is much faster than using grep the wrong way. Lession: Read the manual. :)

Just been watching the video for Kate Bush The Red Shoes (I have actually seen the 1948 film). I came to a strange realisation. Activism, especially LGBTQ activism, is like the Red Shoes. When you put them on, you dance their dance, and you can never take them off. I wonder how many other people have had this happen to them, and understand.

On a Linux system with desktop-file-utils installed, the default application for opening a file with a file manager, from a web browser, or using xdg-open on the command line is not static. The last installed or upgraded application becomes the default. For example: After installing gimp, that application will be used to open any of the many types of files it supports. This lasts until another application which can open those mime types is installed or upgraded. If I later install or upgrade mupdf , that application will be used for PDF, until, etcetera. There are several bug reports filed for this confusing behaviour: Debian: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=525077 Ubuntu: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gimp/+bug/574342 Firefox: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=727422

Components

/usr/bin/update-desktop-database is a command in the package desktop-file-utils This command is run in the package postinst script, and triggers on writes to /usr/share/applications where .desktop files are written.

/usr/share/applications This directory contains a list of applications (files ending with .desktop). These desktop files include mime types they are able to work with. The mupdf.desktop example shows it is able to work with (among other) application/pdf

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=MuPDF
GenericName=PDF file viewer
Comment=PDF file viewer
Exec=mupdf %f
TryExec=mupdf
Icon=mupdf
Terminal=false
Type=Application
MimeType=application/pdf;application/x-pdf;
Categories=Viewer;Graphics;
NoDisplay=true
[Desktop Action View]
Exec=mupdf %f

The gimp.desktop application entry shows it is more capable:

[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Type=Application
Name=GNU Image Manipulation Program
# [...]
MimeType=image/bmp;image/g3fax;image/gif;image/x-fits;image/x-pcx;image/x-portable-anymap;image/x-portable-bitmap;image/x-portable-graymap;image/x-portable-pixmap;image/x-psd;image/x-sgi;image/x-tga;image/x-xbitmap;image/x-xwindowdump;image/x-xcf;image/x-compressed-xcf;image/x-gimp-gbr;image/x-gimp-pat;image/x-gimp-gih;image/tiff;image/jpeg;image/x-psp;application/postscript;image/png;image/x-icon;image/x-xpixmap;image/svg+xml;application/pdf;image/x-wmf;image/x-xcursor;

However, I m quite sure I do not want gimp to be the default viewer for all those file types.

/usr/share/applications/mimeinfo.cache This is a list of MIME types, with a list of applications able to open them. The first entry in the list is the default application. You may also have one of these in ~/.local/share/applications for applications installed in the user s home directory. Examples: With gimp.desktop first, xdg-open test.pdf will use gimp

[MIME Cache]
# [...]
application/pdf=gimp.desktop;mupdf.desktop;evince.desktop;libreoffice-draw.desktop;

After uninstalling and reinstalling mupdf, mupdf.desktop is first in the list, and xdg-open test.pdf will use mupdf

[MIME Cache]
# [...]
application/pdf=mupdf.desktop;gimp.desktop;evince.desktop;libreoffice-draw.desktop;

The order of .desktop files in mimeinfo.cache is the reverse of the order they are added to that directory. The last installed utility is first in that list.

Application Trace This was fun to dig into. I ve just gotten some training which included a a better look at auditd. Auditd is a nice hammer, and this problem was a good nail. I ran the command under autrace , and then looked for the order of reads from each run. When mupdf is installed last, mupdf.desktop is read last, and placed first in the list of applications:

root@laptop:~# autrace /usr/bin/update-desktop-database
Waiting to execute: /usr/bin/update-desktop-database
Cleaning up...
Trace complete. You can locate the records with 'ausearch -i -p 13507'
root@laptop:~# ausearch -p 13507   aureport --file   egrep 'gimp mupdf'
389. 12/09/2016 17:35:37 /usr/share/applications/gimp.desktop 4 yes /usr/bin/update-desktop-database 1000 8002
390. 12/09/2016 17:35:37 /usr/share/applications/gimp.desktop 2 yes /usr/bin/update-desktop-database 1000 8003
391. 12/09/2016 17:35:37 /usr/share/applications/mupdf.desktop 4 yes /usr/bin/update-desktop-database 1000 8010
392. 12/09/2016 17:35:37 /usr/share/applications/mupdf.desktop 2 yes /usr/bin/update-desktop-database 1000 8011
root@laptop:~# grep application/pdf /usr/share/applications/mimeinfo.cache
application/pdf=mupdf.desktop;gimp.desktop;evince.desktop;libreoffice-draw.desktop;

Reinstalling gimp puts that first in the entry for application/pdf

root@laptop:~# apt install --reinstall gimp
[...]
Preparing to unpack .../gimp_2.8.18-1_amd64.deb ...
Unpacking gimp (2.8.18-1) over (2.8.18-1) ...
Processing triggers for mime-support (3.60) ...
Processing triggers for desktop-file-utils (0.23-1) ...
Setting up gimp (2.8.18-1) ...
Processing triggers for gnome-menus (3.13.3-8) ...
[...]
root@laptop:~# autrace /usr/bin/update-desktop-database
Waiting to execute: /usr/bin/update-desktop-database
Cleaning up...
Trace complete. You can locate the records with 'ausearch -i -p 15043'
root@laptop:~# ausearch -p 15043   aureport --file   egrep 'gimp mupdf'
389. 12/09/2016 17:39:53 /usr/share/applications/mupdf.desktop 4 yes /usr/bin/update-desktop-database 1000 9550
390. 12/09/2016 17:39:53 /usr/share/applications/mupdf.desktop 2 yes /usr/bin/update-desktop-database 1000 9551
391. 12/09/2016 17:39:53 /usr/share/applications/gimp.desktop 4 yes /usr/bin/update-desktop-database 1000 9556
392. 12/09/2016 17:39:53 /usr/share/applications/gimp.desktop 2 yes /usr/bin/update-desktop-database 1000 9557
root@laptop:~# grep application/pdf /usr/share/applications/mimeinfo.cache
application/pdf=gimp.desktop;mupdf.desktop;evince.desktop;libreoffice-draw.desktop;

Configuration The solution to this is to add configuration so it will use something else than the default. The xdg-mime command is your tool. The various desktop environments often do this for you. However, if you have a lightweight work environment, you may need to do this yourself for the MIME types you care about.

ssm@laptop ~ :) % xdg-mime query default application/pdf
gimp.desktop
ssm@laptop ~ :) % xdg-mime default mupdf.desktop application/pdf
ssm@laptop ~ :) % xdg-mime query default application/pdf
mupdf.desktop

This updates ~/.local/share/applications/mimeapps.list , and you should now have set your preferred PDF reader.

From last month s toybox of distractions, I ve spent time with GitLab CI, Ansible, Prometheus and OpenShift. GitLab CI is a lot like Travis CI, and a little less like Jenkins. When a commit is pushed to the repository in GitLab, and the branch contains a .gitlab-ci.yml file, a GitLab CI runner will check out the repository, and follow the instructions in that file. Useful for configuration syntax checks, unit tests, and puppet environment deployments. I ve mostly used Ansible for orchestration, performing tasks across a number of nodes. I ve used it much configuration management for a bit, and from what I see, it can do that rather well, too. I ve used Puppet in production for a bit (I committed revision 1 in the old puppet configuration management repository at work in 2007-07-04). A new perspective on configuration management is good. Prometheus is a master-node stats gatherer and presenter. It does a single HTTP GET to fetch all metrics in a single request. I ve used Munin for a long, long time, and while the plugin ecosystem is far larger for Munin, the Prometheus master scales much better (millions of metrics per minute on a modern machine). I use Grafana to present graphs from Prometheus and logs from Elasticsearch in the same dashboard. Prometheus can collect data from a munin node, using a munin node exporter. Last week I got training in OpenShift, which was an eye-opener. I ve used Docker for a good while, and planned to introduce Kubernetes, as well as an imperial buttload of shell scripts to keep it all automated. Thankfully, OpenShift Origin already includes Kubernetes and does the required automation. An OpenShift cluster is now being added to the core infrastructure to do the required care and feeding of the herd of APIs and microservices written over the years. Bunch it together behind an API Management Gateway, and you should be able to label the whole thing Microservice Architecture . I m not running out of fun things to do for a while.

So this morning, along with a few other members of staff, I was filmed for a Diversity and Inclusion video for Ada Lovelace Day at work. Very positive experience, and I was wearing my rainbow chain mail necklace made by the wonderful Rosemary Warner, and a safety pin, which I had to explain the meaning of to the two peeps doing the filming. We all of us read the same script, and they are going to paste it together with each of us saying one sentence at a time. The script was not just about gender, it also mentioned age, skills, sexual orientation and physical ability among other things (I cannot remember the entire list). I was very happy and proud to take part.

As some of the world knows full well by now, I've been noodling with Go for a few years, working through its pros, its cons, and thinking a lot about how humans use code to express thoughts and ideas. Go's got a lot of neat use cases, suited to particular problems, and used in the right place, you can see some clear massive wins. I've started writing Debian tooling in Go, because it's a pretty natural fit. Go's fairly tight, and overhead shouldn't be taken up by your operating system. After a while, I wound up hitting the usual blockers, and started to build up abstractions. They became pretty darn useful, so, this blog post is announcing (a still incomplete, year old and perhaps API changing) Debian package for Go. The Go importable name is pault.ag/go/debian. This contains a lot of utilities for dealing with Debian packages, and will become an edited down "toolbelt" for working with or on Debian packages. Module Overview Currently, the package contains 4 major sub packages. They're a changelog parser, a control file parser, deb file format parser, dependency parser and a version parser. Together, these are a set of powerful building blocks which can be used together to create higher order systems with reliable understandings of the world. changelog The first (and perhaps most incomplete and least tested) is a changelog file parser.. This provides the programmer with the ability to pull out the suite being targeted in the changelog, when each upload was, and the version for each. For example, let's look at how we can pull when all the uploads of Docker to sid took place: The output of which looks like: control Next is one of the most complex, and one of the oldest parts of go-debian, which is the control file parser (otherwise sometimes known as deb822). This module was inspired by the way that the json module works in Go, allowing for files to be defined in code with a struct. This tends to be a bit more declarative, but also winds up putting logic into struct tags, which can be a nasty anti-pattern if used too much. The first primitive in this module is the concept of a Paragraph, a struct containing two values, the order of keys seen, and a map of string to string. All higher order functions dealing with control files will go through this type, which is a helpful interchange format to be aware of. All parsing of meaning from the Control file happens when the Paragraph is unpacked into a struct using reflection. The idea behind this strategy that you define your struct, and let the Control parser handle unpacking the data from the IO into your container, letting you maintain type safety, since you never have to read and cast, the conversion will handle this, and return an Unmarshaling error in the event of failure. Additionally, Structs that define an anonymous member of control.Paragraph will have the raw Paragraph struct of the underlying file, allowing the programmer to handle dynamic tags (such as X-Foo), or at least, letting them survive the round-trip through go. The default decoder contains an argument, the ability to verify the input control file using an OpenPGP keyring, which is exposed to the programmer through the (*Decoder).Signer() function. If the passed argument is nil, it will not check the input file signature (at all!), and if it has been passed, any signed data must be found or an error will fall out of the NewDecoder call. On the way out, the opposite happens, where the struct is introspected, turned into a control.Paragraph, and then written out to the io.Writer. Here's a quick (and VERY dirty) example showing the basics of reading and writing Debian Control files with go-debian. Output (truncated!) looks a bit like: deb Next up, we've got the deb module. This contains code to handle reading Debian 2.0 .deb files. It contains a wrapper that will parse the control member, and provide the data member through the archive/tar interface. Here's an example of how to read a .deb file, access some metadata, and iterate over the tar archive, and print the filenames of each of the entries. Boringly, the output looks like: dependency The dependency package provides an interface to parse and compute dependencies. This package is a bit odd in that, well, there's no other library that does this. The issue is that there are actually two different parsers that compute our Dependency lines, one in Perl (as part of dpkg-dev) and another in C (in dpkg). To date, this has resulted in me filing three different bugs. I also found a broken package in the archive, which actually resulted in another bug being (totally accidentally) already fixed. I hope to continue to run the archive through my parser in hopes of finding more bugs! This package is a bit complex, but it basically just returns what amounts to be an AST for our Dependency lines. I'm positive there are bugs, so file them! Gives the output: version Right off the bat, I'd like to thank Michael Stapelberg for letting me graft this out of dcs and into the go-debian package. This was nearly entirely his work (with a one or two line function I added later), and was amazingly helpful to have. Thank you! This module implements Debian version comparisons and parsing, allowing for sorting in lists, checking to see if it's native or not, and letting the programmer to implement smart(er!) logic based on upstream (or Debian) version numbers. This module is extremely easy to use and very straightforward, and not worth writing an example for. Final thoughts This is more of a "Yeah, OK, this has been useful enough to me at this point that I'm going to support this" rather than a "It's stable!" or even "It's alive!" post. Hopefully folks can report bugs and help iterate on this module until we have some really clean building blocks to build solid higher level systems on top of. Being able to have multiple libraries interoperate by relying on go-debian will be a massive ease. I'm in need of more documentation, and to finalize some parts of the older sub package APIs, but I'm hoping to be at a "1.0" real soon now.

Puppet 4 has been uploaded to Debian unstable. This is a major upgrade from Puppet 3. If you are using Puppet, chances are that it is handling important bits of your infrastructure, and you should upgrade with care. Here are some points to consider.

Read Puppet s upgrade checklist First, there are a number of changes in Puppet itself. There is an upgrade checklist for Puppet (the software) published by Puppet (the company). Please read this before you upgrade, and not after.

Using exported resources? In Puppet 4, using exported resources requires PuppetDB, which is not packaged in Debian.

Getting PuppetDB Puppet provides good installation documentation for PuppetDB, and an apt software repository where you you can get the packages you require.

Editor support packages The packages vim-puppet and puppet-el provide support for editors Vim and Emacs. These are no longer built from the puppet source package. The sources for these have moved to separate repositories, and will get individual source packages. For vim-puppet, there are two alternatives for new packaging, rodjek/vim-puppet, and puppetlabs/puppet-syntax-vim For puppet-el puppetlabs/puppet-syntax-emacs and lunaryorn/puppet-mode are available.

I ve uploaded puppet 4.4.2-1 to Debian experimental. Please test with caution, and expect sharp corners. This is a new major version of Puppet in Debian, with many new features and potentially breaking changes, as well as a big rewrite of the .deb packaging. Bug reports for src:puppet are very welcome. As previously described in #798636, the new package names are:

• puppet (all the software)
• puppet-agent (package containing just the init script and systemd unit for the puppet agent)
• puppet-master (init script and systemd unit for starting a single master)
• puppet-master-passenger (This package depends on apache2 and libapache2-mod-passenger, and configures a puppet master scaled for more than a handful of puppet agents)

Lots of hugs to the authors, keepers and maintainers of autopkgtest, debci, piuparts and ruby-serverspec for their software. They helped me figure out when I had reached good enough for experimental . Some notes:

• To use exported resources with puppet 4, you need a puppetdb installation and a relevant puppetdb-terminus package on your puppet master. This is not available in Debian, but is available from Puppet s repositories.
• Syntax highlighting for Emacs and Vim are no longer built from the puppet package. Standalone packages will be made.
• The packaged puppet modules need an overhaul of their dependencies to install alongside this version of puppet. Testing would probably also be great to see if they actually work.

I sincerely hope someone finds this useful. :)

On any given server, or workstation, knowing what is at the other end of the network cable is often very useful. There s a protocol for that: LLDP. This is a link layer protocol, so it is not routed. Each end transmits information about itself periodically. You can typically see the type of equipment, the server or switch name, and the network port name of the other end, although there are lots of other bits of information available, too. This is often used between switches and routers in a server centre, but it is useful to enable on server hardware as well. There are a few different packages available. I ve looked at a few of them available for the RedHat OS family (Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, ) as well as the Debian OS family (Debian, Ubuntu, ) (Updated 2016-04-29, added more recent information about lldpd, and gathered the switch output at the end.)

ladvd A simple daemon, with no configuration needed. This runs as a privilege-separated daemon, and has a command line control utility. You invoke it with a list of interfaces as command line arguments to restrict the interfaces it should use. ladvd is not available on RedHat, but is available on Debian. Install the ladvd package, and run ladvdc to query the daemon for information.

root@turbotape:~# ladvdc
Capability Codes:
    r - Repeater, B - Bridge, H - Host, R - Router, S - Switch,
    W - WLAN Access Point, C - DOCSIS Device, T - Telephone, O - Other
Device ID        Local Intf Proto Hold-time Capability Port ID
office1-switch23 eno1       LLDP  98        B          42

Even better, it has output that can be parsed for scripting:

root@turbotape:~# ladvdc -b eno1
INTERFACE_0='eno1'
HOSTNAME_0='office1-switch23'
PORTNAME_0='42'
PORTDESCR_0='42'
PROTOCOL_0='LLDP'
ADDR_INET4_0=''
ADDR_INET6_0=''
ADDR_802_0='00:11:22:33:44:55
VLAN_ID_0=''
CAPABILITIES_0='B'
TTL_0='120'
HOLDTIME_0='103'

my new favourite :)

lldpd Another package is lldpd , which is also simple to configure and use. lldpd is not available on RedHat, but it is present on Debian. It features a command line interface, lldpcli , which can show output with different level of detail, and on different formats, as well as configure the running daemon.

root@turbotape:~# lldpcli show neighbors
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
LLDP neighbors:
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Interface:    eno1, via: LLDP, RID: 1, Time: 0 day, 00:00:59
  Chassis:
    ChassisID:    mac 00:11:22:33:44:55
    SysName:      office1-switch23
    SysDescr:     ProCurve J9280A Switch 2510G-48, revision Y.11.12, ROM N.10.02 (/sw/code/build/cod(cod11))
    Capability:   Bridge, on
  Port:
    PortID:       local 42
    PortDescr:    42
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Among the output formats are json , which is easy to re-use elsewhere.

root@turbotape:~# lldpcli -f json show neighbors

 
  "lldp":  
    "interface":  
      "eno1":  
        "chassis":  
          "office1-switch23":  
            "descr": "ProCurve J9280A Switch 2510G-48, revision Y.11.12, ROM N.10.02 (/sw/code/build/cod(cod11))",
            "id":  
              "type": "mac",
              "value": "00:11:22:33:44:55"
             ,
            "capability":  
              "type": "Bridge",
              "enabled": true
             
           
         ,
        "via": "LLDP",
        "rid": "1",
        "age": "0 day, 00:53:23",
        "port":  
          "descr": "42",
          "id":  
            "type": "local",
            "value": "42"
           
         
       
     
   
 

lldpad A much more featureful LLDP daemon, available for both the Debian and RedHat OS families. This has lots of features, but is less trivial to set up.

Configure lldp for each interface

#!/bin/sh
find /sys/class/net/ -maxdepth 1 -name 'en*'  
    while read device; do
        basename "$device"
    done  
    while read interface; do
         
            lldptool set-lldp -i "$interface" adminStatus=rxtx
            for item in sysName portDesc sysDesc sysCap mngAddr; do
                lldptool set-tlv -i "$interface" -V "$item" enableTx=yes  
                    sed -e "s/^/$item /"
            done
           
            sed -e "s/^/$interface /"
    done

Show LLDP neighbor information

#!/bin/sh
find /sys/class/net/ -maxdepth 1 -name 'en*'  
    while read device; do
        basename "$device"
    done  
    while read interface; do
        printf "%s\n" "$interface"
        ethtool $interface   grep -q 'Link detected: yes'    
            echo "  down"
            echo
            continue
         
        lldptool get-tlv -n -i "$interface"   sed -e "s/^/  /"
        echo
    done

[...]
enp3s0f0
  Chassis ID TLV
    MAC: 01:23:45:67:89:ab
  Port ID TLV
    Local: 588
  Time to Live TLV
    120
  System Name TLV
    site3-row2-rack1
  System Description TLV
    Juniper Networks, Inc. ex2200-48t-4g , version 12.3R12.4 Build date: 2016-01-20 05:03:06 UTC
  System Capabilities TLV
    System capabilities:  Bridge, Router
    Enabled capabilities: Bridge, Router
  Management Address TLV
    IPv4: 10.21.0.40
    Ifindex: 36
    OID: $
  Port Description TLV
    some important server, port 4
  MAC/PHY Configuration Status TLV
    Auto-negotiation supported and enabled
    PMD auto-negotiation capabilities: 0x0001
    MAU type: Unknown [0x0000]
  Link Aggregation TLV
    Aggregation capable
    Currently aggregated
    Aggregated Port ID: 600
  Maximum Frame Size TLV
    9216
  Port VLAN ID TLV
    PVID: 2000
  VLAN Name TLV
    VID 2000: Name bumblebee
  VLAN Name TLV
    VID 2001: Name stumblebee
  VLAN Name TLV
    VID 2002: Name fumblebee
  LLDP-MED Capabilities TLV
    Device Type:  netcon
    Capabilities: LLDP-MED, Network Policy, Location Identification, Extended Power via MDI-PSE
  End of LLDPDU TLV
enp3s0f1
[...]

on the switch side On the switch, it is a bit easier to see what s connected to each interface:

office switch On the switch side, this system looks like:

office1-switch23# show lldp info remote-device
 LLDP Remote Devices Information
  LocalPort   ChassisId                 PortId PortDescr SysName
  --------- + ------------------------- ------ --------- ----------------------
  [...]
  42          22 33 44 55 66 77         eno1   Intel ... turbotape.example.com
  [...]
office1-switch23# show lldp info remote-device 42
 LLDP Remote Device Information Detail
  Local Port   : 42
  ChassisType  : mac-address
  ChassisId    : 00 11 22 33 33 55
  PortType     : interface-name
  PortId       : eno1
  SysName      : turbotape.example.com
  System Descr : Debian GNU/Linux testing (stretch) Linux 4.5.0-1-amd64 #1...
  PortDescr    : Intel Corporation Ethernet Connection I217-LM
  System Capabilities Supported  : bridge, router
  System Capabilities Enabled    : bridge, router
  Remote Management Address
     Type    : ipv4
     Address : 192.0.2.93
     Type    : ipv6
     Address : 20 01 0d b8 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 01
     Type    : all802
     Address : 22 33 44 55 66 77

datacenter switch

ssm@site3-row2-rack1> show lldp neighbors
Local Interface    Parent Interface    Chassis Id          Port info          System Name
[...]
ge-0/0/38.0        ae1.0               01:23:45:67:89:58   Interface   2 as enp3s0f0 server.example.com
ge-1/0/38.0        ae1.0               01:23:45:67:89:58   Interface   3 as enp3s0f1 server.example.com
[...]
ssm@site3-row2-rack1> show lldp neighbors interface ge-0/0/38
LLDP Neighbor Information:
Local Information:
Index: 157 Time to live: 120 Time mark: Fri Apr 29 13:00:19 2016 Age: 24 secs
Local Interface    : ge-0/0/38.0
Parent Interface   : ae1.0
Local Port ID      : 588
Ageout Count       : 0
Neighbour Information:
Chassis type       : Mac address
Chassis ID         : 01:23:45:67:89:58
Port type          : Mac address
Port ID            : 01:23:45:67:89:58
Port description   : Interface   2 as enp3s0f0
System name        : server.example.com
System Description : Linux server.example.com 3.10.0-327.13.1.el7.x86_64 #1 SMP Thu Mar 4
System capabilities
        Supported  : Station Only
        Enabled    : Station Only
Management Info
        Type              : IPv6
        Address           : 2001:0db8:0000:0000:0000:dead:beef:cafe
        Port ID           : 2
        Subtype           : 2
        Interface Subtype : ifIndex(2)
        OID               : 1.3.6.1.2.1.31.1.1.1.1.2

This is a fusion recipe from a rather bland just stuff it with ricotta recipe I saw, David Scott s The Peniless Vegetarian , and my own mutations on those themes. I can t give you exact quantities, just make a little more than you will make the hollowed mound (grin), and the rest will make an excellent pasta sauce. Ingredients For an average sized butternut squash, you will need:
1 onion (I prefer red)
3 cloves of garlic
1 capsicum pepper (I prefer green, my ex- preferred red)
Some red lentils
Optional green or brown lentils for texture and flavour. I used some puy
The lentil quantity is hard to estimate, but I ratio 4 red to 1 optional.
Roughly one handful of chopped mushrooms i.e. when chopped, it is one handful
1 tin tinned tomatoes
Some tomato puree
A generous amout of garam masala garam masala is what brings out the flavout in lentils
Some paprike
Optional chilli if using chilli, I recommend fresh of course.
Optional Balsamic vinegar
Optional Marmite Preperation of the Squash
1. Cut the butternut squash in half, length ways. This is very hard, you will need a good large knife, and may require you jumping up and down into the air. This is the second most hard of the procedure. 2. For each half, scoop out the seeds, and pare back the bowl till it is no longer overly fibrous. Discard this, or find a use for the seeds. 3. For each half, scoop a channel of the softer flesh up from the baisin up near the top. This has to be done by feel, is hard and thankless work. Also experimentation required. Reserve this flesh. Preperation of the Filling This is just basically a nice lentil sauce that can be used with pasta, rice, toast etc. Important: this is not a stir fry, but a largish, heavy bottom pan is recommended. 1. Finely peel then chopp the onions and the garlic. Chopp the chillis if used (I am a chilli gal). Please observe Chilli Protocol[0] 2. Wash and chop the pepper and mushrooms. Not finely diced, but not crudite-sized slices. Remember that peppers shrivel down a little, mushrooms a lot. 3. Start frying the onions for a while in some oil (I prefer olive, but others are acceptible), until they just about to go translucent. Then add the garlic and optional chillis until the garlic is just cooking nicely. 4. Add the spices, turn over until all the containts of the pan are covered, and cook for another 30 seconds or so. Then add the tinned tomato, and then add half a can of cold water water which rinsed the tin out with. Stir this around, and make sure it is now at just at a simmer or pre-simmer. 5. Add the lentils. You want 0.5-1 cm of water above the lentils when you have added and stirred. Let these cook and expand for about 5 mins, stirring all the while, all the lentils will stick to the bottom. 6. Add the pepper, mushroom, reserved squash flesh, and optional dash of balsamic vinegar, and half a tea spoon of marmite. Cook and stir until the pepper goes soft. This is the hard part. Add boiling water if really too thick, or some tomato puree if too thin. There is no hard science to this, you want at the end of 10 minutes or so something resembling the thickness in texture of a stiff bolognaise sauce. Assembly
1. Have a baking tray. Whether you prefer to grease, line with foil, or line with baking parchment is up to you. I prefer baking parchment. 2. Stuff those two halves of butternut squash with that sauce you made. It should make a mound of about 1cm about the level. If you feel extravagent, and are not vegan, sprinkle a little grated cheese on top. 3. Place in a pre-heated oven of 200oC. Cooking time should be about 20 mins, but larger ones take longer. The acid test is to briefly take them out, and prod the lower side with a fork. It should go through the skin with little resistance. When ready, serve. It s really a dish in itself, but some people might like a bit of salad, or maybe a light green risotto.

It s been a while since I ve looked at the puppet 4 packaging. During this time, a lot of things have happened.

puppet Puppet 4 is out. I ve done some packaging tests, and they are promising.

puppet-agent Puppet Labs released puppet-agent recently, with instructions. It looks like an umbrella project for building and bundling puppet, facter, augeas, ruby, and everything else to install on puppet managed nodes. It downloads a lot of software over HTTP or git, and verifies at least some of it with md5 checksums. I don t think this is needed for Debian.

puppet-server This really needs packaging. There are probably lots of dependencies not packaged yet. I am not familiar with any of the build tools.

puppetdb Needs packaging. There are probably lots of dependencies not packaged yet. I am not familiar with any of the build tools.

vim-puppet This has moved outside the puppet repository. Both puppetlabs and rodjek have vim modes for puppet. I ve grown very fond of rodjek s vim-puppet.

puppet-el This has moved outside the puppet repository. Both puppetlabs and lunaryorn have emacs modes for puppet.

puppet modules There are a lot of puppet modules in the team VCS.

The Munin project is moving slowly closer to a Munin 3 release. In parallel, the Debian packaging is changing, too. The new web interface is looking much better than the traditional web-1.0 interface normally associated with munin.

New package layout

perl libraries All the Munin perl libraries are placed in libmunin-*-perl , and split into separate packages, where the split is decided mostly on dependencies. If you don t want to monitor samba, or SNMP, or MySQL, there should be no need to have those libraries installed. That does mean more binary packages, on the other hand.

Munin master Munin now runs as a standalone HTTPD, it no longer graphs from cron, nor does it run as CGI or FastCGI scripts. The user munin grants read-write access, while the group munin grants read only access. The new web interface runs as the munin-httpd user, which is member of the munin group. There is a munin service. For now, it runs rrdcached for the munin user and RRD directory.

munin node The perl munin-node and the compiled munin-node-c should be interchangeable, and be able to run the same plugins. Munin node, and Munin async node, should be wholly separate from the munin master. It should be possible to use the perl munin-node package, and the

munin plugins The munin plugins are placed separate packages named munin-plugins-* . The split is based on monitoring subject, or dependencies. They depend on appropriate libmunin-plugin-*-perl packages The munin-plugins-c package, which is is from the munin-node-c source, contains a number of compiled plugins which should use less resources than their shell, perl or python equivalents. Plugins from other sources than munin must work similar to the ones from munin . More work on this is needed.

Testing Late December 2015, I set up Jenkins, with jenkins-debian-glue to build packages, test with autopkgtest and and update my development apt repository on each commit. That helped developing and testing the new Munin packages. The packages are not quite ready to upload to experimental, but they are continuously deployed to weed out bugs. They can be found in my packaging apt repo. (The usual non-guarantees apply, handle with care, keep away from small children, etc )

Comments Munin developers, packagers and users hang out on #munin on the OFTC network. Please drop by if you have questions or comments.

On the 13th of May this year, I legally became Lucy Wayland. I d been living as a woman full time a couple of months before that, but that is when two dear friends witnessed my name change. I am going to post about the whole experience when it is finally into the completion zone. However, this last weekend just gone, I was helping out with the Cambridge (UK) MiniDebConf. I was mostly gophering and front-desk-helpering, with side orders of beverages, so I missed most of the talks. Which is not the point. I met nearly everybody at the conference. Many of them knew me as Jon, a goateed man. I was there as Lucy, a woman. And nobody batted an eyelid.

• Not a single person used my old name
• Not a single person mis-gendered me
• Not a single person referred to my transition

The only time I had to produce my Deed Poll out was for keysigning, as I still do not have photo ID with my new name on. I proffered it along with my passport, so there was no embarrassment. I know other people within Debian have gone through the same process. However, I just have to say how wonderful it is, to be accepted just that way. And hence the title of my article. Our differences bring us together. So many different people from so many different cultures came together, wanted to create, and my change of gender was just irrelevant. And that s how it should be.

Let's Encrypt is now in beta. Here's how to use the automated CA with Hitch TLS proxy, and Varnish HTTP accelerator as a backend for Hitch.

Munin Working on making the munin master fit inside Mojolicious. The existing code is not written to make this trivial, but all the pieces are there. Most of the pieces need breaking up into smaller pieces to fit. Debian Packaging New version of puppet-module-puppetlabs-apache (Closes: #788124 #788125 #788127 ). I like it when a new upstream version closes all bugs left in the bts for a package. A new package, the TLS proxy hitch currently waiting in the queue. Puppet Lots of work on a new ceph puppet module.

I recently wrote about tools to handle archives conveniently. If you just have to handle compressed text files, there are some widely known shortcut commands to mimic common commands on files compressed with a specific compression format. In Debian and derivatives, those tools are part of the according package for that compression utility, i.e. the zcat command is part of the gzip package and the xzfgrep command is part of the xz-utils package. But despite this matrix is quite easy to remember, the situation has a few drawbacks:

• Those tools can only handle the format they re written for (which btw. means that all xz-tools can also handle lzma-compressed files as lzma is xz s predecessor)
• zcat and the other cat variants can t even recognize non-compressed files and throw an error instead of just showing their contents.
• I always tend to think that lzcat and friends are for lzip-based compression as xzcat can handle lzma-compressed files anyway.

This is where the zutils project comes in: zutils provides the functionality of most of these utilities, too, but with one big difference: You don t have to remember, think about or type which compression method has been used for your data, just use zcat, zcmp, zdiff, zgrep, zegrep, or zfgrep and it works independently of what compression method has been used if any or if there are different compression types mixed in the parameters to the same command:

$ zfgrep foobar bla.txt fnord.gz hurz.xz quux.lz bar.lzma

Especially if you use logrotate and let logrotate compress old logs, it s very comfortable that one command suffices to concatenate all the available logfiles, including the current uncompressed one:

$ zcat /var/log/syslog*    

Additionally, zutils versions of these tools also support lzip-compressed files. The zutils package is available in Debian starting with Wheezy and in Ubuntu since Oneiric. When being installed, it replaces the original z* utilities from the gzip package by diverting them away. The only drawback so far is that there neither a zless nor a zmore utility from the zutils project, so zless bla.txt fnord.gz hurz.xz quux.lz bar.lzma will not work as expected even after installing zutils as it is still the one from the gzip package and hence it will show you just the first two files in plain text, but not the remaining ones.

A year ago I wrote in Useful but Unknown Unix Tools: How wdiff and colordiff help to choose the right Swiss Army Knife about using wdiff and colordiff together. Colordiff ed wdiff output looks like this:

$ wdiff foobar.txt barfoo.txt   colordiff
[-foo-]bar fnord
gnarz hurz quux
bla  +foo+  fasel

But if you have colour, why still having these hard to read wdiff markers still in the text? There exists a tool named dwdiff which can do word diffs in colour without textual markers and with even less to type (and without being git diff --color-words ;-). Actually it looks like git diff --color-words, just without the git:

$ dwdiff -c foobar.txt barfoo.txt
foo bar fnord
gnarz hurz quux
bla foo fasel

Another cool thing about dwdiff (and its name giving feature) is that you can defined what you consider whitespace, i.e. which character(s) delimit the words. So lets do the example above again, but this time declare that f is considered the only whitespace character:

$ dwdiff -W f -c foobar.txt barfoo.txt
foo bar bar fnord
gnarz hurz quux
bla foo fasel

dwdiff can also show line numbers:

$ dwdiff -c -L foobar.txt barfoo.txt
   1:1    foo bar fnord
   2:2    gnarz hurz quux
   3:3    bla foo fasel
$ dwdiff -c -L foobar.txt quux.txt
   1:1    foo bar fnord
   1:2    foobar floedeldoe
   2:3    gnarz hurz quux
   3:4    bla foo fasel

(coloured shell screenshots by aha)

After talking with some LinuxTag guys about which kind of talks are still missing for the upcoming LinuxTag, I submitted another proposal for a still only roughly sketched talk: KISS – Keep it simple and stupid, also on the web.

KISS – “Keep it simple and stupid” is an old and successful principle in the Unix world: Small and simple programs, doing only one thing, but they’re doing perfect, fast and reliable. This principle can also work on the web and make webservers or surf terminals out of already discharged computers.

I planned to show “simple” (or at least “simple to use”) tools like Blosxom or the Website Meta Language, a more slim webserver than Apache (e.g. fefe’s fnord or one of the ACME webservers thttpd, mini_httpd or micro_httpd), slim web-browsers (e.g. like Dillo, Opera, glinks, ViewML or Minimo) and one or more Linux distributions optimized for low end PCs. While thinking about low end PCs, usually the following distributions come to my mind: DeLi Linux, fli4l and Debian Woody. But none of them seems to fit for my talk as perfectly as I would like:

• DeLi Linux is no bad distribution, since it’s designed especially for 386 to Pentium I, but I have some strong disagreements with the maintainer of DeLi Linux, since he sees a very small package list as necessary requirement for a distribution for old PCs. He states that distributions for old PCs “don’t have that many harddisk space” (beyond other, more realistic arguments — but it seemed to be his main argument) while I see a rich package diversity as an quality criteria. (One of the reasons, why I like Debian and dislike Ubuntu.) So I’m not sure if I should present a very raped DeLi Linux to the audience, just to make it fit my needs, although I’m quite curious about his upcoming 0.7 release with the low end, KHTML based ViewML webbrowser. (Apart from me seeing PHP5 and KDE as a big nono on old PCs…)
• Although I still like Debian Woody very much (you know that old story… ;-), it is just too old for making a talk about how to turn old PCs into being usable again. Sarge would be fine, but it was suggested to showcase an easy and fast way to get something ready to run, and I can’t give the auditors a list of all the Debian packages with low resource consumption and therefore usable on low end PCs.
• I haven’t used it yet, but fli4l seems to be very good distribution to turn an old PC into a ISDN or DSL router, even without harddisk. The last time I had a look at fli4l, it used an Apache as (optional) webserver, which wouldn’t fit into my scheme, since I would like to show an alternative to Apache. But as I found out today the recently released version 3.0 of fli4l uses the already mentioned ACME mini_httpd. Cool! They’re on the right way! ;-) Unfortunately it only seems to be used for serving information pages about the fli4l status and not as common webserver. (Please correct me, if this is wrong! I would appreciate it, if I’m wrong at this point. :-)

Since I first read about viewml on the DeLi Linux page, I looked for Debian packages of viewml today. apt-cache search hasn’t found anything on Woody or Sarge and packages.debian.org is still down, so I used Google. I found out, that there at least was a viewml package in Debian since at least 2001, so I expect, it just didn’t make it to stable. But I also found this interesting page on a webserver called www.ubuntulite.org. Ubuntu Lite? That sounds very interesting, since I see Ubuntu not as the baddest idea (expect for it’s horribly resource hunger and only offering one package per application by default ;-), but having an Ubuntu derivative prepackaged for low end PCs and with several webbrowsers instead of only Epiphany (and probably Firefox, don’t they?) would be perfect for my purpose. So I’m currently downloading an Ubuntu Lite ISO and will give it a try on one of my Pentium MMX boxes. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to support Pentium I or AMD K5 since Ubuntu itself only supports i686 and upwards. :-/ But this also means, that it’s no occasion for my Pentium I Compaq LTE 5100 (which I probably will name pony), but currently, after Bartosz’ recent post on Planet Debian, it looks like Debian GNU/kFreeBSD could also be an interesting OS, since it fits all requirements perfectly: Free, Modern, Exotic and all conveniences of Debian. ;-)

Now Playing: Jefferson Starship — We Built This City