Who s not? Same procedure as every year.

(okay, lolando prefers ski ng but ) Anyway. A cow orker told me that Belgium again/still has no gouvernment, and they have been asked to grow out their beards until they do. I found evidence on the net but won t link it here, also it s on German anyway. Let s all join in. (Besides, I now have an excuse to not shave, maybe even my grandmother will accept this one ) RT said on IRC that mksh will probably work on MSYS. My Debian/m68k stuff is coming around nicely, but I still haven t gotten around to do everything planned, plus I need to grow a new kernel and eglibc, after the latest uploads, and the 2.6.37 based one panics. Also I ve got to take care to not overwork myself. (And make a MirBSD ISO for FOSDEM.) But hey, it s been not working for some time and better now. And slow anyway yet we re progressing. Does anyone know how to debug that a C programme only calling res_init(3) segfaults? Benny is apparently not just working on making NetBSD pkgsrc available on MirOS BSD (picking up my work from 4+ years ago) but also replacing The MirPorts Framework with it. Sad, as I got a request for a gajim MirPort over a cocktail just this evening

I finally got a few hours free this morning to check an item off my home system administration checklist: upgrading the wireless router's firmware to OpenWRT. There were a couple motivations for this, including the fact that my SoundBridge Radio couldn't maintain a connection to my firefly server using the built-in firmware, and I had read that OpenWRT would work better. Since this is posted on Planet Debian, I should mention why I didn't use DebianWRT. The basic answer is this text at the top of the DebianWRT homepage:

Currently the most common methods used to run Debian on these systems is to install OpenWRT or a similar firmware, add disk space either by USB storage or NFS, create a debian chroot by either running cdebootstrap from inside OpenWRT or debootstrap --foreign on a PC, and running Debian from this chroot. For example, instructions for the WLHDD.

I'm not sure whether this is because DebianWRT is experimental, or because its goal is to use routers as cheap general computers. Either way, it sounds way too complicated and/or fragile for what I'm interested in (i.e., a wireless router with better software). The goal here is to get something that does a better job than the built-in WRT firmware, but doesn't require too much tinkering to get working or to maintain. I have plenty of outlets for my tinkering urges already. Nothing here was exactly difficult, but it was hard to find all the information I needed to get things working. Hopefully documenting the steps I went through here will save someone else some time. Step 1: acquire the firmware This was trickier than you might think. If you click on the download link at the OpenWRT web site, you end up at the top of an FTP server populated with a vast quantity of stuff. Worse, when you find the actual firmware images, you'll quickly discover that there are piles and piles of them divided between sixteen directories, and no guidance as to which one to pick. And picking the wrong one will turn your beautiful router into a doorstop. Luckily, the OpenWRT documentation contains a section called "Getting Started". Unluckily, that section consists of the following text:

1.1 Getting started 1.1.1 Installation 1.1.2 Initial configuration 1.1.3 Failsafe mode

Whoops, someone forgot to execute on a TODO. Undeterred, I consulted the usual fallback reference, Google. It pointed me at several references, some of which were hidden on other parts of the OpenWRT site. Armed with these, I was able to determine that:

1. My WRT54GL v1.1 probably uses a Broadcom 5352 chipset.
2. The correct firmware, according to multiple sources, is probably in the kamikaze top-level director, the latest version's subdirectory, and the bcrm-2.4 directory under the version (the link is to 8.09.2, which is current as of March 6, 2010). Apparently the bcrm47xx directory doesn't have wireless support; it helpfully contains a file called NO-BROADCOM-WIRELESS to warn you off, but unhelpfully doesn't include any additional information in that file (like what exactly is broken or that you can find a working firmware in a sibling directory) ... oh well.
3. The firmware file that you want is openwrt-wrt54g-squashfs.bin, even though it doesn't match the model number of the router. This directory could use a README file explaining which hardware is supported by each of the dozen or so firmware files it contains.

Step 2: install the firmware After Step 1, this was a real relief. I just used the built-in Linksys firmware installer, pointed it at the .bin file, and it went. Step 3: configure the router The installation guide I followed was pretty much silent about what to do after I got the firmware on. Luckily, this is just a software problem, meaning it's much more familiar territory for me.

1. First things first: I checked that I could still get a DHCP lease. It worked.
2. Armed with that, I tried telneting to the router. I used the resulting root prompt to set a password on the root account.
3. I logged out and tried telneting in. Apparently the router is configured to disallow root logins over telnet if you don't have a password. Good for them (although why allow telnet at all?); oops for me.
4. Luckily, an ssh server was installed by default. I like using keys to log in, so I tracked down the documentation on configuring the server to use public-key authentication; it turns out there's a single global key file named /etc/dropbear/authorized_keys that's exactly like OpenSSH's per-user authorized_keys file. No idea what would happen if I had multiple users, but I won't.
5. The next obstacle: I didn't have an Internet connection. For some reason, my cable modem didn't want to give the router a DHCP lease. On the off-chance that it was remembering too much, I rebooted it and ran ifup wan. That fixed the problem. I still don't know why.
6. Not a step, but a useful note: in the process of figuring the above out, I found readlog. It's basically dmesg for syslog files; it shows the most recent lines written to syslog. This is useful because there isn't a real syslog file, due to the fact that there would be no room to store it on the 54GL.
7. Finally, I had to get wireless working. The documentation is very helpful when it comes to describing the syntax of the wireless configuration. Unfortunately, I read the list of encryption options and missed the section right below where their meanings are explained (although, to be honest, I might not have understood the implications of the explanation without the research I did anyway).

   option encryption none, wep, psk, psk2, wpa, wpa2

   I wanted WPA2 encryption, so I entered wpa2. And nothing worked. After a good hour of trying different options on the client, swapping software components in and out on the router, experimenting with the encryption key syntax, and crawling Google, I finally found my answer. If you just want WPA2 encryption, you must not use wpa2 as the encryption type. Instead, use psk2. It turns out out that wpa2 actually means use WPA2 and also use an external RADIUS server for authentication. psk2 is the system you're familiar with from a typical consumer wireless router.

Step 4: enjoy And with that, it works. Unfortunately, contrary to what I wrote here originally, my Roku still doesn't work. On the other hand, having a real Linux installation is helpful for debugging it. Currently my suspicion is that the router isn't passing multicast packets between the wired and wireless interfaces (broadcast works fine, multicast doesn't). That said, it seems like if I restart Firefly just before I start playing music, I can play reasonably reliably -- as long as I don't stop, because if I do, the Roku forgets that the music server is there. Either way, I've spent about as much time fighting this as I can afford. One lingering worry I have is security; unlike Debian, which has both a security mailing list and tools to inform me when I need to install a security update, the OpenWRT firmware doesn't seem to have any mechanism for distributing security notices. True, there is an openwrt-security-announce list, but it appears to be entirely unused, as is openwrt-announce. Something to keep an eye on, then. Also (file under note to self), I need to remember to verify that the router isn't exposing services to the outside world. The default iptables configuration is hideously complex; with just a quick glance, it could be setting up a floral shop for all I can tell. I'll need to test this empirically and maybe analyze the rules in more depth.

Two days ago I read about the Ada Lovelace day, which was an event were men and women were asked to blog about the women in technology which made an impact on them, in an effort to present girls (and women) all over the world with female role models in technology.

In similar though more personal motivation I choose my machine naming scheme at home two years ago: my (virtual) machines at home are named after women who made a difference, mostly in IT, but also some in more general science. Even though this list is not 100% in the spirit of pointing out the one woman who made a personal difference to one self, I thought I share my list, as I found it very interesting to learn about these great women myself.

goldberg is named after Adele Goldberg, who pioneered the smalltalk programming language in the 70s. According to a sympathetic annecdote she refused to show the system to Steve Jobs and only did so after her superiors ordered her to do so. Thats were Apple got many ideas which made them famous for being innovative...

goldwasser is named after Shafi Goldwasser, who is a RSA professor at MIT, doing research in complexity theory, cryptography and computational number theory. She is the co-inventor of zero-knowledge proofs.

lovelace is named after Ada Lovelace, and is widely recognized as the first programmer, who wrote a program (something that manipulated symbols according to rules) for a machine which has not even been build at that time. Of course, some men on this planet object to her being the first programmer, as work by women is always insignificant... </irony or maybe sarcasm>

bunten is named afer Danielle Bunten Berry, who was a game designer and programmer best known for the games M.U.L.E. and Seven Cities of Gold.

holberton is named after Betty Holberton, who was one of the six original programmers of ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic digital computer, during and after World War II.

hopper is named after Grace Hopper who wrote the first compiler ever, the A compiler. She was also heavily involved in creating COBOL and standardizing COBOL and FORTRAN.

koller is named after Daphne Koller who does AI research at MIT and who seems to behind the idea of bayesian machine learning, which you might know from your spam filters... (I can only state her involvement in bayesian learning so vaguely as I'm basically clueless about the topic :)

leveson is named after Nancy Leveson who is also an MIT professior and is an expert in systems and software safety.

Last but not least I like to remark that none of the women above is even nearly covered with what I wrote here or what is written in wikipedia, which I used as my main source for this blog post. It's simple impossible to sum up one life that brief and be close to accurate.

And then there is another group of women whose achievements are noteworthy as well and who choose to present themselves on that webpage to show others that Debian is not a mens club. Thank you (a lot) for that and for your other contributions to Debian! If you want to learn more about these giants, I recommend this talk. Guess who's achievements I admire most in this group ;-)

Somewhat unrelated I wish to shout cheers to Yvonne, who tought me many things and who died six years ago today. You will also not be forgotten, though the pain is mostly gone now (well, it's gone, except for days like today). Thank you, among other stuff, for teaching me to celebrate and cheer every day, even if not everything is cheerful. Wenn die Nacht am tiefsten, ist der Tag am n chsten! :-)

For a few weeks Laurent Vivier, Blue Swirl and myself have been working on getting QEMU PowerPC working correctly with recent distributions. QEMU used to rely on OpenHackWare for the OpenFirmware implementation on PowerPC. It is a very limited implementation (for example it as no Forth support), which is unable to boot most 2.6.x kernels with the OldWorld emulation. It is able to boot recent kernels with the PReP emulation, but things like the PCI bus emulation are not working correctly. Moreover the PReP kernels are gone with the removal of the arch/ppc tree. OpenBIOS was already used for the OpenFirmware implementation of Sparc 32 and Sparc 64 targets. It now supports PowerPC for the OldWorld emulation. As a result it is now possible to use Debian PowerPC under QEMU emulating an OldWorld machine. What works?

• Display (partly), keyboard, hard disk, network;
• Booting from CD-ROM or from disk using Quik;
• Installation of Debian Etch or Lenny (but due to a bug in debian-installer quik.conf has to be fixed manually);
• Standard Debian kernels;
• G3 CPU emulation: the testsuite results of the GNU libc 2.7 and of GCC 4.3 (Debian packages) are the same than on a real machine.
• virtio devices

What doesn t work / has to be done?

• A few devices part of the MacIO chipset are not emulated and/or are replaced by other devices: IDE, SCSI, Ethernet and sound;
• The red and green colors are reversed, in some modes only (in debian-installer for example);
• X only outputs some strange images;
• PCI devices using I/O ports don t work (like the RTL8029 card, or the RTL8139 card with the 8139too driver).

For those who want to test, an Etch image is available. You will need to compile QEMU by manually given that the version in Debian is too old and that openbios-ppc is still in the NEW queue.

You know you've got a bunch of Mennonites together when the pastor spontaneously asks the church to sing "Jesus Loves Me" while the children walk up for their children's story. And, without music, everybody spontaneously breaks into beautiful 4-part harmony. It must be genetic or something.

It was a day of beautiful singing of hymns a week ago for Tabor Mennonite Church's centennial. It's hard to write about that weekend, in fact -- it was such a nice experience.

Sunday ended with opening the box sealed in the church's cornerstone back in 1965 when the current building was built. Rudy Schmidt, the person that sealed it up back then, was on hand to open it back up. They took out the stone and removed the box. Before the box was opened, Rudy told a story:

Back in 1965, I was the one to solder this box shut. While I was doing this, all of a sudden I smelled burning from inside. I figured I must have caught something inside on fire. I asked Jake Koehn (another person on the building committee) what to do. Jake said, "Nobody will ever see it again, just put it in." So let's open it!

I think Rudy has been wondering all these years whether he set it on fire or not.

The box was opened, and other than a few scorch marks on an envelope, was completely intact and in good shape. There was a copy of a local newspaper from 1965 with a headline about Goldwater, copies of programs of dedication for the new building and parsonage, a Bible, copies of the church constitution, and all sorts of other interesting things. To that we will add a copy of our centennial book (which I helped develop), CDs with recordings of our centennial activities, programs from the centennial celebration, and photos of the weekend.

Earlier on Sunday, we had a long but good worship service with sermons from two former pastors. The choir sang, including a song commissioned for the occasion by Larry Nickel. We got applause after that one (which happens occasionally, but not regularly, in our church). All the living former pastors, and the widow of one of them, served communion as well.

The service ended with the congregation singing the "Mennonite Anthem". I think it was the most beautiful singing of that song I've ever heard. We had 352 people in church that day, and it seemed that not one person was going to let the moment go by without singing.

Saturday had started off with outdoor activities in the church park. There was old-fashioned soap making, remembering how church members used to store fat all year, then get together to make soap for use in their homes and to donate to the needy. There was rope making, wool spinning, and rides for the children. Under the tent, we had some great music the local Greenhorns band, and the former pastors all shared some memories and stories about their time here.

On Saturday evening, we had a meal and a drama -- and managed to somehow fit 321 people into the church basement for the meal. We think that's a record! The drama was written for the occasion by one of our members. John Gaeddert, a pastor here in the early 1970s, has become an expert wood carver in his spare time. He had carved a piece for us to celebrate the occasion, and presented it during the drama. That fit right in, because the drama was called "Bring Your Own Hedgepost" -- back in the early days of the church, each member was supposed to do just that so they would have a place to tie their horses.

Friday night was a lecture by James Juhnke about our first paster, P. H. Richert, who was pastor for nearly 40 years. Quite entertaining and interesting.

I think the highlight of the weekend for me was getting to talk to some of the former pastors I never knew well. I had a few minutes to chat with John Gaeddert. I introduced myself, and he said, "Oh! I don't think I've met you, but I've heard your name a few times this weekend. You're on the centennial committee, right?" Yes indeed. I was born after he left this church, but he knew my grandparents -- which means he also knows exactly where we live. John and his wife Mary are both such warm and friendly people that it feels like I've known them much longer than a few days!

I got to chat with Jim Schrag too. He was pastor at Tabor until I was about 5 or 6. He didn't remember me specifically, but he was also interesting to talk with. He was one of the people that worked on a detailed history book in 1983 for the church's 75th anniversary. He told me that he processed most of the black and white photos for that book in a darkroom in his basement. I hadn't known that -- and mentioned I had found all those photos in the church archives and had scanned them all in. Jim requested a copy.

Terah found Lenore Waltner, wife of former pastor James Waltner, who passed away about a year ago. James had started his career as a pastor at Tabor, and ended it at College Mennonite Church in Goshen, IN, where Terah grew up. So she knew him, but I didn't. Terah introduced herself to Lenore, who seemed quite excited to make this sort of family connection!

And Brenda Martin Hurst, another former pastor, found Terah and introduced herself. Terah said that Brenda said something like, "Hi, I'm Brenda, and I don't think I know you!" These pastors all want to get to know everybody, I think!

Instructions how to use etchanhalf kernels are available too, please report problems to the mailinglist mentioned there.

I still have oldworld powerpc hardware to give away, if someone wants to have those for testing the new snd-powermac driver or whatever, please contact me. Appearantly my mail didn't make it to the powerpc list when I originally sent it, so I've just resend it.

Today I will switch the second PCs of my parents to Debian etch. They seem to like it and "Gnome is not really different than Windows" ;-)

Last week, while I was already busier than I like, the cpu fan of my pegasos powerpc server blew off, and the resulting heat then killed the CPU. Which was quite a pain, as I used powerpc vservers on it, for which I had no replacement hardware. Or so I thought.

Time for an advertisment break: I'm giving away my oldworld powerpc macs, if you are interested in a beige G3, a 7200 or 4400 powermac, contact me. I doubt anyone will, these machines are more then ten years old. So I will probably give them to recycling next week. Be fast!

I'll also give away my pegasos2 board (and case) to the first person asking.

To make a two day story very short, I now run my vserver on a ten year old iMac, the very first model in a translucent case with build-in monitor, with 160 megabytes of RAM and 233 Mhz powerpc CPU. Yay. It's actually ok for what I need it.

The insane part is the booting. The hard disc has a MSDOS partition layout, as this is what the pegasos uses. But the iMac of course needs a HFS layout, so I need to use a boot CD, for which I've used a modified installer CD, where I replaced the kernel and initrd with the one I want. (Mostly because I didn't remember how to create a bootable CD on macs.) For some reason, the mac wouldnt boot this CD directly, so I've decided to use OpenFirmware (OF) to load yaboot (the bootloader) from CD manually and then yaboot will boot the kernel which can mount its root filesystem even from a disk with msdos partition layout :-)

And now I'll tell you about the magic of forth in OpenFirmware - which was only needed because I was stubborn and kept the kernel inside the directory install/powerpc on the CD... In OF you need to seperate pathes with backslashes, but with the OF installed on this iMac you can't type them! (No comment on that.) But you can use forth to evaluate them...

And so I use '" boot cd:,"(5C)install"(5C)yaboot" evaluate' in OpenFirmware, in which I get a prompt through pressing alt-windows-O-F while powering the machine on, to boot my main server at home. Easy.

I don't intend to do this very often (it runs 24/7), my new server has a XScale IXP422 266 mhz CPU and runs Debian armel :-)

But more on this later, now I need to throw out more old hardware, stuff I will never use again and which just takes physical space. Modern hardware is tiny - as can be seen on this huge pic! :-))

Oh, I almost stayed with powerpc: The "Conceptronic Grab'n'GO CH3WNAS" has nice specs too, is a bit cheaper and should be able to run Debian as well, but there are some missing bits until a 2.6 kernel will run and I wanted a solution which works today. And the FSG-3 (has better specs, that is, more RAM and more ethernet ports, allowing 4 vlans and) runs the new armel port already, the sub architecture patches "just" needs kernel mainline inclusion and there is no d-i support yet. But if you press the reset button on poweron, it will query a bootp server for its own IP address and for a file called zImage-recovery... :-)

And for those who care about the finished FOSDEM 2008 videos: unfortunatly I had even more hardware issues (which I refered to in the ... blog posting last week), which blocked me from working on them. But I will resume this work now (most of it is done by the computer anyway). Now, that I brought my laptop to warranty repair and put the disk into my desktop... To be clear: the laptop incident now is not the case I blogged about last week when I just wrote "..." - that was another machine where I intended to postprocess the videos on and now use as my laptop and to postprocess the videos on. I guess now you can somewhat imagine what I thought when my laptop broke two days ago on a harmless wednesday evening?

Hardware. It's great when it works.

The miboot enabled d-i sarge floppies for oldworld powerpc are now available again, you can find them on layer-acht.org. When/if :) I become a DD, I'll move them to people.d.o and leave a note on my webserver...

Just like last year, the video-team (thanks Cesar, por todo!) will make the recordings of this years talks available when they are ready. I will announce them here and on the -qa list then.

Besides this, I have been mostly working on debian-edu and enjoying being in a very nice old town with a bunch of geeks.

I just came back from buying a pack of floppies and a multimedia-card. The 10 floppies were 3 euros, the mmc 12e, but it also has 40 times the capacity. Almost twenty years ago (in 1987 or 88) I bought my first pack of 3.5 inch floppies, for 80 marks, thats 40 euros now, but taking the inflation etc. into account I would say it's more like 80e nowadays. Whatever. I surely hope not to buy floppies ever again. But somehow I doubt it...

On a related silly note, a month ago I drove 240km to get hold of an oldworld G3 mac, to test d-i on it. I wiped the machine but kept its name,

A few months ago, my good friend Kris gave me an OldWorld Powermac (a model 8500/150, even though the processor really runs at 120Mhz) as a donation to the Debian project. I arranged to hand it to Sven Luther, who is very much into Debian on PowerPC, at FOSDEM in Brussels. Due to some misunderstandings, however, Sven did not take the mac with him; so it had been left at the office. And since I don't go to an awful lot of meetings (FOSDEM is probably going to be the only one this year), the mac is likely going to stay at our office. So I thought I'd put it to some good use. I saw last week that the PowerPC dailies hadn't been built for about a week or so. When I asked around, I found out this was because Colin Watson, who usually builds them, does so on his laptop. Since he was not directly available, however (due to him being on vacation or something similar), they were not getting built for about a week. An understandable situation, but rather suboptimal. So, since I had this unused PowerPC machine anyway, I installed Debian on it, called it "ragtime" in accordance with my usual machine naming scheme, did a checkout of the d-i subversion tree, and added the daily-build script to cron. As of yesterday, Frans Pop changed the different configuration items to point to my dailies instead of Colin's; so I guess it's now rather official. Ish. Update: NOW. Not NOT. Aargh.

1. The second day of FOSDEM was (at least) as good as the first day. Though I'll try to find some volunteers to help me out with talk moderation next year, so that I won't have to sit there all the time but actually do have time to speak to random people, rather than having to say "Hi, you're here! Nice to see you! Sorry, but I have to go."
2. Beer is nice. Belgian beer is good. Belgian beer in le Roi d'Espagne together with a few hundred other hackers is very good. Having to yell to get through the noise all night and subsequently losing your voice for the rest of the weekend? Less so.
Several people told me this happened to me last year, too, so I suppose it's correct. I don't remember, however. Must make sure it doesn't happen again.
3. When bringing an oldworld powermac for Sven Luther, it would be great had I actually told him this is your box rather than your box is at the booth; when you want it, go there and pick it up. Doing so might have prevented Sven to pick up the wrong box when going home. As it is, I'm stuck with an oldworld powermac that I have to find storage for, while Sven is stuck with a box that isn't his, and that we have to find out who it belongs to, how to get it to him/her, etc.

Other than that, I love this weekend.

Firefox extensions The release of Firefox 1.5 has awakened my interest in the browser, and a few extensions can make life easier.

View Rendered Source Chart

Really handy for a structured view of an HTML page's source. The big advantage is that is displays generated source too, perfect for figuring out AJAX applications.

Foxpose

Sheer eye candy. Thumbnail all your tabbed pages into one page.

Del.icio.us

Browser button for working with the del.icio.us bookmarks site. I've been reluctant to use remote bookmarks before, this extension might just push me over the edge. Really well thought-out integration with the browser.

Rails in Emacs Seeing as I'm not quite prepared to switch to OS X just in order to get TextMate, I figured it was time again to play with my editing environment. Pages from InVisible Blog and Scott Barron give a lot of tips as to the current state of play with Rails and Emacs. I've now got a reasonably pleasant setup, though I wasn't inclined to go the whole way to running the ECB IDE inside Emacs. On Ubuntu, the packages you are looking for are: speedbar eieio semantic ruby-elisp mmm-mode. I also found pabbrev a very handy interface for tab completion. The future for Ruby and Emacs is looking hopeful. I learned that a proper Ruby grammar for the semantic package is being worked on, which will enable class browsing and intelligent completion. I am still disappointed that there's no version of Emacs that uses Xft or Pango for anti-aliased font rendering. To get sharp fonts, I still need to use a bitmap font like misc-fixed. If I were in the business of offering bounties for open source development, dragging Emacs into the GTK2/Pango era would be the biggest one. Checking the mailing lists indicates that Pango is not suitable for Emacs, but no alternative scheme ever seems to bear fruit. Yet if Aquamacs can do it... If somebody came along with a decent TextMate-a-like for GNOME, I'd pay good money for it. I've never been really happy with an editor since Cygnus Ed. Hallski and I keep talking about this, and only just manage to resist wasting months of time on trying to write one ourselves.