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12 <div class="title">
13 <h1>
14 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/">Petter Reinholdtsen</a>
15
16 </h1>
17
18 </div>
19
20
21 <h3>Entries tagged "debian".</h3>
22
23 <div class="entry">
24 <div class="title">
25 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Gratulerer_med_19__rsdagen__Debian_.html">Gratulerer med 19-årsdagen, Debian!</a>
26 </div>
27 <div class="date">
28 16th August 2012
29 </div>
30 <div class="body">
31 <p>I dag fyller
32 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120813">Debian-prosjektet 19
33 år</a>. Jeg har fulgt det de siste 12 årene, og er veldig glad for å kunne
34 si gratulerer med dagen, Debian!</p>
35
36 </div>
37 <div class="tags">
38
39
40 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk</a>.
41
42
43 </div>
44 </div>
45 <div class="padding"></div>
46
47 <div class="entry">
48 <div class="title">
49 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html">Song book for Computer Scientists</a>
50 </div>
51 <div class="date">
52 24th June 2012
53 </div>
54 <div class="body">
55 <p>Many years ago, while studying Computer Science at the
56 <a href="http://www.uit.no/">University of Tromsø</a>, I started
57 collecting computer related songs for use at parties. The original
58 version was written in LaTeX, but a few years ago I got help from
59 Håkon W. Lie, one of the inventors of W3C CSS, to convert it to HTML
60 while keeping the ability to create a nice book in PDF format. I have
61 not had time to maintain the book for a while now, and guess I should
62 put it up on some public version control repository where others can
63 help me extend and update the book. If anyone is volunteering to help
64 me with this, send me an email. Also let me know if there are songs
65 missing in my book.</p>
66
67 <p>I have not mentioned the book on my blog so far, and it occured to
68 me today that I really should let all my readers share the joys of
69 singing out load about programming, computers and computer networks.
70 Especially now that <a href="http://debconf12.debconf.org/">Debconf
71 12</a> is about to start (and I am not going). Want to sing? Check
72 out <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/cs-songbook/">Petter's
73 Computer Science Songbook</a>.
74
75 </div>
76 <div class="tags">
77
78
79 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>.
80
81
82 </div>
83 </div>
84 <div class="padding"></div>
85
86 <div class="entry">
87 <div class="title">
88 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatically_upgrading_server_firmware_on_Dell_PowerEdge.html">Automatically upgrading server firmware on Dell PowerEdge</a>
89 </div>
90 <div class="date">
91 21st November 2011
92 </div>
93 <div class="body">
94 <p>At work we have heaps of servers. I believe the total count is
95 around 1000 at the moment. To be able to get help from the vendors
96 when something go wrong, we want to keep the firmware on the servers
97 up to date. If the firmware isn't the latest and greatest, the
98 vendors typically refuse to start debugging any problems until the
99 firmware is upgraded. So before every reboot, we want to upgrade the
100 firmware, and we would really like everyone handling servers at the
101 university to do this themselves when they plan to reboot a machine.
102 For that to happen we at the unix server admin group need to provide
103 the tools to do so.</p>
104
105 <p>To make firmware upgrading easier, I am working on a script to
106 fetch and install the latest firmware for the servers we got. Most of
107 our hardware are from Dell and HP, so I have focused on these servers
108 so far. This blog post is about the Dell part.</P>
109
110 <p>On the Dell FTP site I was lucky enough to find
111 <a href="ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/catalog/Catalog.xml.gz">an XML file</a>
112 with firmware information for all 11th generation servers, listing
113 which firmware should be used on a given model and where on the FTP
114 site I can find it. Using a simple perl XML parser I can then
115 download the shell scripts Dell provides to do firmware upgrades from
116 within Linux and reboot when all the firmware is primed and ready to
117 be activated on the first reboot.</p>
118
119 <p>This is the Dell related fragment of the perl code I am working on.
120 Are there anyone working on similar tools for firmware upgrading all
121 servers at a site? Please get in touch and lets share resources.</p>
122
123 <p><pre>
124 #!/usr/bin/perl
125 use strict;
126 use warnings;
127 use File::Temp qw(tempdir);
128 BEGIN {
129 # Install needed RHEL packages if missing
130 my %rhelmodules = (
131 'XML::Simple' => 'perl-XML-Simple',
132 );
133 for my $module (keys %rhelmodules) {
134 eval "use $module;";
135 if ($@) {
136 my $pkg = $rhelmodules{$module};
137 system("yum install -y $pkg");
138 eval "use $module;";
139 }
140 }
141 }
142 my $errorsto = 'pere@hungry.com';
143
144 upgrade_dell();
145
146 exit 0;
147
148 sub run_firmware_script {
149 my ($opts, $script) = @_;
150 unless ($script) {
151 print STDERR "fail: missing script name\n";
152 exit 1
153 }
154 print STDERR "Running $script\n\n";
155
156 if (0 == system("sh $script $opts")) { # FIXME correct exit code handling
157 print STDERR "success: firmware script ran succcessfully\n";
158 } else {
159 print STDERR "fail: firmware script returned error\n";
160 }
161 }
162
163 sub run_firmware_scripts {
164 my ($opts, @dirs) = @_;
165 # Run firmware packages
166 for my $dir (@dirs) {
167 print STDERR "info: Running scripts in $dir\n";
168 opendir(my $dh, $dir) or die "Unable to open directory $dir: $!";
169 while (my $s = readdir $dh) {
170 next if $s =~ m/^\.\.?/;
171 run_firmware_script($opts, "$dir/$s");
172 }
173 closedir $dh;
174 }
175 }
176
177 sub download {
178 my $url = shift;
179 print STDERR "info: Downloading $url\n";
180 system("wget --quiet \"$url\"");
181 }
182
183 sub upgrade_dell {
184 my @dirs;
185 my $product = `dmidecode -s system-product-name`;
186 chomp $product;
187
188 if ($product =~ m/PowerEdge/) {
189
190 # on RHEL, these pacakges are needed by the firwmare upgrade scripts
191 system('yum install -y compat-libstdc++-33.i686 libstdc++.i686 libxml2.i686 procmail');
192
193 my $tmpdir = tempdir(
194 CLEANUP => 1
195 );
196 chdir($tmpdir);
197 fetch_dell_fw('catalog/Catalog.xml.gz');
198 system('gunzip Catalog.xml.gz');
199 my @paths = fetch_dell_fw_list('Catalog.xml');
200 # -q is quiet, disabling interactivity and reducing console output
201 my $fwopts = "-q";
202 if (@paths) {
203 for my $url (@paths) {
204 fetch_dell_fw($url);
205 }
206 run_firmware_scripts($fwopts, $tmpdir);
207 } else {
208 print STDERR "error: Unsupported Dell model '$product'.\n";
209 print STDERR "error: Please report to $errorsto.\n";
210 }
211 chdir('/');
212 } else {
213 print STDERR "error: Unsupported Dell model '$product'.\n";
214 print STDERR "error: Please report to $errorsto.\n";
215 }
216 }
217
218 sub fetch_dell_fw {
219 my $path = shift;
220 my $url = "ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/$path";
221 download($url);
222 }
223
224 # Using ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/catalog/Catalog.xml.gz, figure out which
225 # firmware packages to download from Dell. Only work for Linux
226 # machines and 11th generation Dell servers.
227 sub fetch_dell_fw_list {
228 my $filename = shift;
229
230 my $product = `dmidecode -s system-product-name`;
231 chomp $product;
232 my ($mybrand, $mymodel) = split(/\s+/, $product);
233
234 print STDERR "Finding firmware bundles for $mybrand $mymodel\n";
235
236 my $xml = XMLin($filename);
237 my @paths;
238 for my $bundle (@{$xml->{SoftwareBundle}}) {
239 my $brand = $bundle->{TargetSystems}->{Brand}->{Display}->{content};
240 my $model = $bundle->{TargetSystems}->{Brand}->{Model}->{Display}->{content};
241 my $oscode;
242 if ("ARRAY" eq ref $bundle->{TargetOSes}->{OperatingSystem}) {
243 $oscode = $bundle->{TargetOSes}->{OperatingSystem}[0]->{osCode};
244 } else {
245 $oscode = $bundle->{TargetOSes}->{OperatingSystem}->{osCode};
246 }
247 if ($mybrand eq $brand && $mymodel eq $model && "LIN" eq $oscode)
248 {
249 @paths = map { $_->{path} } @{$bundle->{Contents}->{Package}};
250 }
251 }
252 for my $component (@{$xml->{SoftwareComponent}}) {
253 my $componenttype = $component->{ComponentType}->{value};
254
255 # Drop application packages, only firmware and BIOS
256 next if 'APAC' eq $componenttype;
257
258 my $cpath = $component->{path};
259 for my $path (@paths) {
260 if ($cpath =~ m%/$path$%) {
261 push(@paths, $cpath);
262 }
263 }
264 }
265 return @paths;
266 }
267 </pre>
268
269 <p>The code is only tested on RedHat Enterprise Linux, but I suspect
270 it could work on other platforms with some tweaking. Anyone know a
271 index like Catalog.xml is available from HP for HP servers? At the
272 moment I maintain a similar list manually and it is quickly getting
273 outdated.</p>
274
275 </div>
276 <div class="tags">
277
278
279 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
280
281
282 </div>
283 </div>
284 <div class="padding"></div>
285
286 <div class="entry">
287 <div class="title">
288 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_is_booting_into_runlevel_1_different_from_single_user_boots_.html">How is booting into runlevel 1 different from single user boots?</a>
289 </div>
290 <div class="date">
291 4th August 2011
292 </div>
293 <div class="body">
294 <p>Wouter Verhelst have some
295 <a href="http://grep.be/blog/en/retorts/pere_kubuntu_boot">interesting
296 comments and opinions</a> on my blog post on
297 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_should_start_from__etc_rcS_d__in_Debian____almost_nothing.html">the
298 need to clean up /etc/rcS.d/ in Debian</a> and my blog post about
299 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_missing_in_the_Debian_desktop__or_why_my_parents_use_Kubuntu.html">the
300 default KDE desktop in Debian</a>. I only have time to address one
301 small piece of his comment now, and though it best to address the
302 misunderstanding he bring forward:</p>
303
304 <p><blockquote>
305 Currently, a system admin has four options: [...] boot to a
306 single-user system (by adding 'single' to the kernel command line;
307 this runs rcS and rc1 scripts)
308 </blockquote></p>
309
310 <p>This make me believe Wouter believe booting into single user mode
311 and booting into runlevel 1 is the same. I am not surprised he
312 believe this, because it would make sense and is a quite sensible
313 thing to believe. But because the boot in Debian is slightly broken,
314 runlevel 1 do not work properly and it isn't the same as single user
315 mode. I'll try to explain what is actually happing, but it is a bit
316 hard to explain.</p>
317
318 <p>Single user mode is defined like this in /etc/inittab:
319 "<tt>~~:S:wait:/sbin/sulogin</tt>". This means the only thing that is
320 executed in single user mode is sulogin. Single user mode is a boot
321 state "between" the runlevels, and when booting into single user mode,
322 only the scripts in /etc/rcS.d/ are executed before the init process
323 enters the single user state. When switching to runlevel 1, the state
324 is in fact not ending in runlevel 1, but it passes through runlevel 1
325 and end up in the single user mode (see /etc/rc1.d/S03single, which
326 runs "init -t1 S" to switch to single user mode at the end of runlevel
327 1. It is confusing that the 'S' (single user) init mode is not the
328 mode enabled by /etc/rcS.d/ (which is more like the initial boot
329 mode).</p>
330
331 <p>This summary might make it clearer. When booting for the first
332 time into single user mode, the following commands are executed:
333 "<tt>/etc/init.d/rc S; /sbin/sulogin</tt>". When booting into
334 runlevel 1, the following commands are executed: "<tt>/etc/init.d/rc
335 S; /etc/init.d/rc 1; /sbin/sulogin</tt>". A problem show up when
336 trying to continue after visiting single user mode. Not all services
337 are started again as they should, causing the machine to end up in an
338 unpredicatble state. This is why Debian admins recommend rebooting
339 after visiting single user mode.</p>
340
341 <p>A similar problem with runlevel 1 is caused by the amount of
342 scripts executed from /etc/rcS.d/. When switching from say runlevel 2
343 to runlevel 1, the services started from /etc/rcS.d/ are not properly
344 stopped when passing through the scripts in /etc/rc1.d/, and not
345 started again when switching away from runlevel 1 to the runlevels
346 2-5. I believe the problem is best fixed by moving all the scripts
347 out of /etc/rcS.d/ that are not <strong>required</strong> to get a
348 functioning single user mode during boot.</p>
349
350 <p>I have spent several years investigating the Debian boot system,
351 and discovered this problem a few years ago. I suspect it originates
352 from when sysvinit was introduced into Debian, a long time ago.</p>
353
354 </div>
355 <div class="tags">
356
357
358 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
359
360
361 </div>
362 </div>
363 <div class="padding"></div>
364
365 <div class="entry">
366 <div class="title">
367 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_should_start_from__etc_rcS_d__in_Debian____almost_nothing.html">What should start from /etc/rcS.d/ in Debian? - almost nothing</a>
368 </div>
369 <div class="date">
370 30th July 2011
371 </div>
372 <div class="body">
373 <p>In the Debian boot system, several packages include scripts that
374 are started from /etc/rcS.d/. In fact, there is a bite more of them
375 than make sense, and this causes a few problems. What kind of
376 problems, you might ask. There are at least two problems. The first
377 is that it is not possible to recover a machine after switching to
378 runlevel 1. One need to actually reboot to get the machine back to
379 the expected state. The other is that single user boot will sometimes
380 run into problems because some of the subsystems are activated before
381 the root login is presented, causing problems when trying to recover a
382 machine from a problem in that subsystem. A minor additional point is
383 that moving more scripts out of rcS.d/ and into the other rc#.d/
384 directories will increase the amount of scripts that can run in
385 parallel during boot, and thus decrease the boot time.</p>
386
387 <p>So, which scripts should start from rcS.d/. In short, only the
388 scripts that _have_ to execute before the root login prompt is
389 presented during a single user boot should go there. Everything else
390 should go into the numeric runlevels. This means things like
391 lm-sensors, fuse and x11-common should not run from rcS.d, but from
392 the numeric runlevels. Today in Debian, there are around 115 init.d
393 scripts that are started from rcS.d/, and most of them should be moved
394 out. Do your package have one of them? Please help us make single
395 user and runlevel 1 better by moving it.</p>
396
397 <p>Scripts setting up the screen, keyboard, system partitions
398 etc. should still be started from rcS.d/, but there is for example no
399 need to have the network enabled before the single user login prompt
400 is presented.</p>
401
402 <p>As always, things are not so easy to fix as they sound. To keep
403 Debian systems working while scripts migrate and during upgrades, the
404 scripts need to be moved from rcS.d/ to rc2.d/ in reverse dependency
405 order, ie the scripts that nothing in rcS.d/ depend on can be moved,
406 and the next ones can only be moved when their dependencies have been
407 moved first. This migration must be done sequentially while we ensure
408 that the package system upgrade packages in the right order to keep
409 the system state correct. This will require some coordination when it
410 comes to network related packages, but most of the packages with
411 scripts that should migrate do not have anything in rcS.d/ depending
412 on them. Some packages have already been updated, like the sudo
413 package, while others are still left to do. I wish I had time to work
414 on this myself, but real live constrains make it unlikely that I will
415 find time to push this forward.</p>
416
417 </div>
418 <div class="tags">
419
420
421 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
422
423
424 </div>
425 </div>
426 <div class="padding"></div>
427
428 <div class="entry">
429 <div class="title">
430 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_missing_in_the_Debian_desktop__or_why_my_parents_use_Kubuntu.html">What is missing in the Debian desktop, or why my parents use Kubuntu</a>
431 </div>
432 <div class="date">
433 29th July 2011
434 </div>
435 <div class="body">
436 <p>While at Debconf11, I have several times during discussions
437 mentioned the issues I believe should be improved in Debian for its
438 desktop to be useful for more people. The use case for this is my
439 parents, which are currently running Kubuntu which solve the
440 issues.</p>
441
442 <p>I suspect these four missing features are not very hard to
443 implement. After all, they are present in Ubuntu, so if we wanted to
444 do this in Debian we would have a source.</p>
445
446 <ol>
447
448 <li><strong>Simple GUI based upgrade of packages.</strong> When there
449 are new packages available for upgrades, a icon in the KDE status bar
450 indicate this, and clicking on it will activate the simple upgrade
451 tool to handle it. I have no problem guiding both of my parents
452 through the process over the phone. If a kernel reboot is required,
453 this too is indicated by the status bars and the upgrade tool. Last
454 time I checked, nothing with the same features was working in KDE in
455 Debian.</li>
456
457 <li><strong>Simple handling of missing Firefox browser
458 plugins.</strong> When the browser encounter a MIME type it do not
459 currently have a handler for, it will ask the user if the system
460 should search for a package that would add support for this MIME type,
461 and if the user say yes, the APT sources will be searched for packages
462 advertising the MIME type in their control file (visible in the
463 Packages file in the APT archive). If one or more packages are found,
464 it is a simple click of the mouse to add support for the missing mime
465 type. If the package require the user to accept some non-free
466 license, this is explained to the user. The entire process make it
467 more clear to the user why something do not work in the browser, and
468 make the chances higher for the user to blame the web page authors and
469 not the browser for any missing features.</li>
470
471 <li><strong>Simple handling of missing multimedia codec/format
472 handlers.</strong> When the media players encounter a format or codec
473 it is not supporting, a dialog pop up asking the user if the system
474 should search for a package that would add support for it. This
475 happen with things like MP3, Windows Media or H.264. The selection
476 and installation procedure is very similar to the Firefox browser
477 plugin handling. This is as far as I know implemented using a
478 gstreamer hook. The end result is that the user easily get access to
479 the codecs that are present from the APT archives available, while
480 explaining more on why a given format is unsupported by Ubuntu.</li>
481
482 <li><strong>Better browser handling of some MIME types.</strong> When
483 displaying a text/plain file in my Debian browser, it will propose to
484 start emacs to show it. If I remember correctly, when doing the same
485 in Kunbutu it show the file as a text file in the browser. At least I
486 know Opera will show text files within the browser. I much prefer the
487 latter behaviour.</li>
488
489 </ol>
490
491 <p>There are other nice features as well, like the simplified suite
492 upgrader, but given that I am the one mostly doing the dist-upgrade,
493 it do not matter much.</p>
494
495 <p>I really hope we could get these features in place for the next
496 Debian release. It would require the coordinated effort of several
497 maintainers, but would make the end user experience a lot better.</p>
498
499 </div>
500 <div class="tags">
501
502
503 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
504
505
506 </div>
507 </div>
508 <div class="padding"></div>
509
510 <div class="entry">
511 <div class="title">
512 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Perl_modules_used_by_FixMyStreet_which_are_missing_in_Debian_Squeeze.html">Perl modules used by FixMyStreet which are missing in Debian/Squeeze</a>
513 </div>
514 <div class="date">
515 26th July 2011
516 </div>
517 <div class="body">
518 <p>The Norwegian <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</A>
519 site is build on Debian/Squeeze, and this platform was chosen because
520 I am most familiar with Debian (being a Debian Developer for around 10
521 years) because it is the latest stable Debian release which should get
522 security support for a few years.</p>
523
524 <p>The web service is written in Perl, and depend on some perl modules
525 that are missing in Debian at the moment. It would be great if these
526 modules were added to the Debian archive, allowing anyone to set up
527 their own <a href="http://www.fixmystreet.com">FixMyStreet</a> clone
528 in their own country using only Debian packages. The list of modules
529 missing in Debian/Squeeze isn't very long, and I hope the perl group
530 will find time to package the 12 modules Catalyst::Plugin::SmartURI,
531 Catalyst::Plugin::Unicode::Encoding, Catalyst::View::TT, Devel::Hide,
532 Sort::Key, Statistics::Distributions, Template::Plugin::Comma,
533 Template::Plugin::DateTime::Format, Term::Size::Any, Term::Size::Perl,
534 URI::SmartURI and Web::Scraper to make the maintenance of FixMyStreet
535 easier in the future.</p>
536
537 <p>Thanks to the great tools in Debian, getting the missing modules
538 installed on my server was a simple call to 'cpan2deb Module::Name'
539 and 'dpkg -i' to install the resulting package. But this leave me
540 with the responsibility of tracking security problems, which I really
541 do not have time for.</p>
542
543 </div>
544 <div class="tags">
545
546
547 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fiksgatami">fiksgatami</a>.
548
549
550 </div>
551 </div>
552 <div class="padding"></div>
553
554 <div class="entry">
555 <div class="title">
556 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Norwegian_FixMyStreet_have_kept_me_busy_the_last_few_weeks.html">A Norwegian FixMyStreet have kept me busy the last few weeks</a>
557 </div>
558 <div class="date">
559 3rd April 2011
560 </div>
561 <div class="body">
562 <p>Here is a small update for my English readers. Most of my blog
563 posts have been in Norwegian the last few weeks, so here is a short
564 update in English.</p>
565
566 <p>The kids still keep me too busy to get much free software work
567 done, but I did manage to organise a project to get a Norwegian port
568 of the British service
569 <a href="http://www.fixmystreet.com/">FixMyStreet</a> up and running,
570 and it has been running for a month now. The entire project has been
571 organised by me and two others. Around Christmas we gathered sponsors
572 to fund the development work. In January I drafted a contract with
573 <a href="http://www.mysociety.org/">mySociety</a> on what to develop,
574 and in February the development took place. Most of it involved
575 converting the source to use GPS coordinates instead of British
576 easting/northing, and the resulting code should be a lot easier to get
577 running in any country by now. The Norwegian
578 <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</a> is using
579 <a href="http://www.openstreetmap.org/">OpenStreetmap</a> as the map
580 source and the source for administrative borders in Norway, and
581 support for this had to be added/fixed.</p>
582
583 <p>The Norwegian version went live March 3th, and we spent the weekend
584 polishing the system before we announced it March 7th. The system is
585 running on a KVM instance of Debian/Squeeze, and has seen almost 3000
586 problem reports in a few weeks. Soon we hope to announce the Android
587 and iPhone versions making it even easier to report problems with the
588 public infrastructure.</p>
589
590 <p>Perhaps something to consider for those of you in countries without
591 such service?</p>
592
593 </div>
594 <div class="tags">
595
596
597 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fiksgatami">fiksgatami</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/kart">kart</a>.
598
599
600 </div>
601 </div>
602 <div class="padding"></div>
603
604 <div class="entry">
605 <div class="title">
606 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_NVD_and_CPE_to_track_CVEs_in_locally_maintained_software.html">Using NVD and CPE to track CVEs in locally maintained software</a>
607 </div>
608 <div class="date">
609 28th January 2011
610 </div>
611 <div class="body">
612 <p>The last few days I have looked at ways to track open security
613 issues here at my work with the University of Oslo. My idea is that
614 it should be possible to use the information about security issues
615 available on the Internet, and check our locally
616 maintained/distributed software against this information. It should
617 allow us to verify that no known security issues are forgotten. The
618 CVE database listing vulnerabilities seem like a great central point,
619 and by using the package lists from Debian mapped to CVEs provided by
620 the testing security team, I believed it should be possible to figure
621 out which security holes were present in our free software
622 collection.</p>
623
624 <p>After reading up on the topic, it became obvious that the first
625 building block is to be able to name software packages in a unique and
626 consistent way across data sources. I considered several ways to do
627 this, for example coming up with my own naming scheme like using URLs
628 to project home pages or URLs to the Freshmeat entries, or using some
629 existing naming scheme. And it seem like I am not the first one to
630 come across this problem, as MITRE already proposed and implemented a
631 solution. Enter the <a href="http://cpe.mitre.org/index.html">Common
632 Platform Enumeration</a> dictionary, a vocabulary for referring to
633 software, hardware and other platform components. The CPE ids are
634 mapped to CVEs in the <a href="http://web.nvd.nist.gov/">National
635 Vulnerability Database</a>, allowing me to look up know security
636 issues for any CPE name. With this in place, all I need to do is to
637 locate the CPE id for the software packages we use at the university.
638 This is fairly trivial (I google for 'cve cpe $package' and check the
639 NVD entry if a CVE for the package exist).</p>
640
641 <p>To give you an example. The GNU gzip source package have the CPE
642 name cpe:/a:gnu:gzip. If the old version 1.3.3 was the package to
643 check out, one could look up
644 <a href="http://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/search?cpe=cpe%3A%2Fa%3Agnu%3Agzip:1.3.3">cpe:/a:gnu:gzip:1.3.3
645 in NVD</a> and get a list of 6 security holes with public CVE entries.
646 The most recent one is
647 <a href="http://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/detail?vulnId=CVE-2010-0001">CVE-2010-0001</a>,
648 and at the bottom of the NVD page for this vulnerability the complete
649 list of affected versions is provided.</p>
650
651 <p>The NVD database of CVEs is also available as a XML dump, allowing
652 for offline processing of issues. Using this dump, I've written a
653 small script taking a list of CPEs as input and list all CVEs
654 affecting the packages represented by these CPEs. One give it CPEs
655 with version numbers as specified above and get a list of open
656 security issues out.</p>
657
658 <p>Of course for this approach to be useful, the quality of the NVD
659 information need to be high. For that to happen, I believe as many as
660 possible need to use and contribute to the NVD database. I notice
661 RHEL is providing
662 <a href="https://www.redhat.com/security/data/metrics/rhsamapcpe.txt">a
663 map from CVE to CPE</a>, indicating that they are using the CPE
664 information. I'm not aware of Debian and Ubuntu doing the same.</p>
665
666 <p>To get an idea about the quality for free software, I spent some
667 time making it possible to compare the CVE database from Debian with
668 the CVE database in NVD. The result look fairly good, but there are
669 some inconsistencies in NVD (same software package having several
670 CPEs), and some inaccuracies (NVD not mentioning buggy packages that
671 Debian believe are affected by a CVE). Hope to find time to improve
672 the quality of NVD, but that require being able to get in touch with
673 someone maintaining it. So far my three emails with questions and
674 corrections have not seen any reply, but I hope contact can be
675 established soon.</p>
676
677 <p>An interesting application for CPEs is cross platform package
678 mapping. It would be useful to know which packages in for example
679 RHEL, OpenSuSe and Mandriva are missing from Debian and Ubuntu, and
680 this would be trivial if all linux distributions provided CPE entries
681 for their packages.</p>
682
683 </div>
684 <div class="tags">
685
686
687 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
688
689
690 </div>
691 </div>
692 <div class="padding"></div>
693
694 <div class="entry">
695 <div class="title">
696 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Which_module_is_loaded_for_a_given_PCI_and_USB_device_.html">Which module is loaded for a given PCI and USB device?</a>
697 </div>
698 <div class="date">
699 23rd January 2011
700 </div>
701 <div class="body">
702 <p>In the
703 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/discover-data">discover-data</a>
704 package in Debian, there is a script to report useful information
705 about the running hardware for use when people report missing
706 information. One part of this script that I find very useful when
707 debugging hardware problems, is the part mapping loaded kernel module
708 to the PCI device it claims. It allow me to quickly see if the kernel
709 module I expect is driving the hardware I am struggling with. To see
710 the output, make sure discover-data is installed and run
711 <tt>/usr/share/bug/discover-data 3>&1</tt>. The relevant output on
712 one of my machines like this:</p>
713
714 <pre>
715 loaded modules:
716 10de:03eb i2c_nforce2
717 10de:03f1 ohci_hcd
718 10de:03f2 ehci_hcd
719 10de:03f0 snd_hda_intel
720 10de:03ec pata_amd
721 10de:03f6 sata_nv
722 1022:1103 k8temp
723 109e:036e bttv
724 109e:0878 snd_bt87x
725 11ab:4364 sky2
726 </pre>
727
728 <p>The code in question look like this, slightly modified for
729 readability and to drop the output to file descriptor 3:</p>
730
731 <pre>
732 if [ -d /sys/bus/pci/devices/ ] ; then
733 echo loaded pci modules:
734 (
735 cd /sys/bus/pci/devices/
736 for address in * ; do
737 if [ -d "$address/driver/module" ] ; then
738 module=`cd $address/driver/module ; pwd -P | xargs basename`
739 if grep -q "^$module " /proc/modules ; then
740 address=$(echo $address |sed s/0000://)
741 id=`lspci -n -s $address | tail -n 1 | awk '{print $3}'`
742 echo "$id $module"
743 fi
744 fi
745 done
746 )
747 echo
748 fi
749 </pre>
750
751 <p>Similar code could be used to extract USB device module
752 mappings:</p>
753
754 <pre>
755 if [ -d /sys/bus/usb/devices/ ] ; then
756 echo loaded usb modules:
757 (
758 cd /sys/bus/usb/devices/
759 for address in * ; do
760 if [ -d "$address/driver/module" ] ; then
761 module=`cd $address/driver/module ; pwd -P | xargs basename`
762 if grep -q "^$module " /proc/modules ; then
763 address=$(echo $address |sed s/0000://)
764 id=$(lsusb -s $address | tail -n 1 | awk '{print $6}')
765 if [ "$id" ] ; then
766 echo "$id $module"
767 fi
768 fi
769 fi
770 done
771 )
772 echo
773 fi
774 </pre>
775
776 <p>This might perhaps be something to include in other tools as
777 well.</p>
778
779 </div>
780 <div class="tags">
781
782
783 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
784
785
786 </div>
787 </div>
788 <div class="padding"></div>
789
790 <div class="entry">
791 <div class="title">
792 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_test_if_a_laptop_is_working_with_Linux.html">How to test if a laptop is working with Linux</a>
793 </div>
794 <div class="date">
795 22nd December 2010
796 </div>
797 <div class="body">
798 <p>The last few days I have spent at work here at the <a
799 href="http://www.uio.no/">University of Oslo</a> testing if the new
800 batch of computers will work with Linux. Every year for the last few
801 years the university have organised shared bid of a few thousand
802 computers, and this year HP won the bid. Two different desktops and
803 five different laptops are on the list this year. We in the UNIX
804 group want to know which one of these computers work well with RHEL
805 and Ubuntu, the two Linux distributions we currently handle at the
806 university.</p>
807
808 <p>My test method is simple, and I share it here to get feedback and
809 perhaps inspire others to test hardware as well. To test, I PXE
810 install the OS version of choice, and log in as my normal user and run
811 a few applications and plug in selected pieces of hardware. When
812 something fail, I make a note about this in the test matrix and move
813 on. If I have some spare time I try to report the bug to the OS
814 vendor, but as I only have the machines for a short time, I rarely
815 have the time to do this for all the problems I find.</p>
816
817 <p>Anyway, to get to the point of this post. Here is the simple tests
818 I perform on a new model.</p>
819
820 <ul>
821
822 <li>Is PXE installation working? I'm testing with RHEL6, Ubuntu Lucid
823 and Ubuntu Maverik at the moment. If I feel like it, I also test with
824 RHEL5 and Debian Edu/Squeeze.</li>
825
826 <li>Is X.org working? If the graphical login screen show up after
827 installation, X.org is working.</li>
828
829 <li>Is hardware accelerated OpenGL working? Running glxgears (in
830 package mesa-utils on Ubuntu) and writing down the frames per second
831 reported by the program.</li>
832
833 <li>Is sound working? With Gnome and KDE, a sound is played when
834 logging in, and if I can hear this the test is successful. If there
835 are several audio exits on the machine, I try them all and check if
836 the Gnome/KDE audio mixer can control where to send the sound. I
837 normally test this by playing
838 <a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20101012-chef/ ">a HTML5
839 video</a> in Firefox/Iceweasel.</li>
840
841 <li>Is the USB subsystem working? I test this by plugging in a USB
842 memory stick and see if Gnome/KDE notices this.</li>
843
844 <li>Is the CD/DVD player working? I test this by inserting any CD/DVD
845 I have lying around, and see if Gnome/KDE notices this.</li>
846
847 <li>Is any built in camera working? Test using cheese, and see if a
848 picture from the v4l device show up.</li>
849
850 <li>Is bluetooth working? Use the Gnome/KDE browsing tool to see if
851 any bluetooth devices are discovered. In my office, I normally see a
852 few.</li>
853
854 <li>For laptops, is the SD or Compaq Flash reader working. I have
855 memory modules lying around, and stick them in and see if Gnome/KDE
856 notice this.</li>
857
858 <li>For laptops, is suspend/hibernate working? I'm testing if the
859 special button work, and if the laptop continue to work after
860 resume.</li>
861
862 <li>For laptops, is the extra buttons working, like audio level,
863 adjusting background light, switching on/off external video output,
864 switching on/off wifi, bluetooth, etc? The set of buttons differ from
865 laptop to laptop, so I just write down which are working and which are
866 not.</li>
867
868 <li>Some laptops have smart card readers, finger print readers,
869 acceleration sensors etc. I rarely test these, as I do not know how
870 to quickly test if they are working or not, so I only document their
871 existence.</li>
872
873 </ul>
874
875 <p>By now I suspect you are really curious what the test results are
876 for the HP machines I am testing. I'm not done yet, so I will report
877 the test results later. For now I can report that HP 8100 Elite work
878 fine, and hibernation fail with HP EliteBook 8440p on Ubuntu Lucid,
879 and audio fail on RHEL6. Ubuntu Maverik worked with 8440p. As you
880 can see, I have most machines left to test. One interesting
881 observation is that Ubuntu Lucid has almost twice the frame rate than
882 RHEL6 with glxgears. No idea why.</p>
883
884 </div>
885 <div class="tags">
886
887
888 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
889
890
891 </div>
892 </div>
893 <div class="padding"></div>
894
895 <div class="entry">
896 <div class="title">
897 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Some_thoughts_on_BitCoins.html">Some thoughts on BitCoins</a>
898 </div>
899 <div class="date">
900 11th December 2010
901 </div>
902 <div class="body">
903 <p>As I continue to explore
904 <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">BitCoin</a>, I've starting to wonder
905 what properties the system have, and how it will be affected by laws
906 and regulations here in Norway. Here are some random notes.</p>
907
908 <p>One interesting thing to note is that since the transactions are
909 verified using a peer to peer network, all details about a transaction
910 is known to everyone. This means that if a BitCoin address has been
911 published like I did with mine in my initial post about BitCoin, it is
912 possible for everyone to see how many BitCoins have been transfered to
913 that address. There is even a web service to look at the details for
914 all transactions. There I can see that my address
915 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a>
916 have received 16.06 Bitcoin, the
917 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv8MHqvwst3">1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv8MHqvwst3</a>
918 address of Simon Phipps have received 181.97 BitCoin and the address
919 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt">1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt</A>
920 of EFF have received 2447.38 BitCoins so far. Thank you to each and
921 every one of you that donated bitcoins to support my activity. The
922 fact that anyone can see how much money was transfered to a given
923 address make it more obvious why the BitCoin community recommend to
924 generate and hand out a new address for each transaction. I'm told
925 there is no way to track which addresses belong to a given person or
926 organisation without the person or organisation revealing it
927 themselves, as Simon, EFF and I have done.</p>
928
929 <p>In Norway, and in most other countries, there are laws and
930 regulations limiting how much money one can transfer across the border
931 without declaring it. There are money laundering, tax and accounting
932 laws and regulations I would expect to apply to the use of BitCoin.
933 If the Skolelinux foundation
934 (<a href="http://linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">SLX
935 Debian Labs</a>) were to accept donations in BitCoin in addition to
936 normal bank transfers like EFF is doing, how should this be accounted?
937 Given that it is impossible to know if money can across the border or
938 not, should everything or nothing be declared? What exchange rate
939 should be used when calculating taxes? Would receivers have to pay
940 income tax if the foundation were to pay Skolelinux contributors in
941 BitCoin? I have no idea, but it would be interesting to know.</p>
942
943 <p>For a currency to be useful and successful, it must be trusted and
944 accepted by a lot of users. It must be possible to get easy access to
945 the currency (as a wage or using currency exchanges), and it must be
946 easy to spend it. At the moment BitCoin seem fairly easy to get
947 access to, but there are very few places to spend it. I am not really
948 a regular user of any of the vendor types currently accepting BitCoin,
949 so I wonder when my kind of shop would start accepting BitCoins. I
950 would like to buy electronics, travels and subway tickets, not herbs
951 and books. :) The currency is young, and this will improve over time
952 if it become popular, but I suspect regular banks will start to lobby
953 to get BitCoin declared illegal if it become popular. I'm sure they
954 will claim it is helping fund terrorism and money laundering (which
955 probably would be true, as is any currency in existence), but I
956 believe the problems should be solved elsewhere and not by blaming
957 currencies.</p>
958
959 <p>The process of creating new BitCoins is called mining, and it is
960 CPU intensive process that depend on a bit of luck as well (as one is
961 competing against all the other miners currently spending CPU cycles
962 to see which one get the next lump of cash). The "winner" get 50
963 BitCoin when this happen. Yesterday I came across the obvious way to
964 join forces to increase ones changes of getting at least some coins,
965 by coordinating the work on mining BitCoins across several machines
966 and people, and sharing the result if one is lucky and get the 50
967 BitCoins. Check out
968 <a href="http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/bitcoin-pool/">BitCoin Pool</a>
969 if this sounds interesting. I have not had time to try to set up a
970 machine to participate there yet, but have seen that running on ones
971 own for a few days have not yield any BitCoins througth mining
972 yet.</p>
973
974 <p>Update 2010-12-15: Found an <a
975 href="http://inertia.posterous.com/reply-to-the-underground-economist-why-bitcoi">interesting
976 criticism</a> of bitcoin. Not quite sure how valid it is, but thought
977 it was interesting to read. The arguments presented seem to be
978 equally valid for gold, which was used as a currency for many years.</p>
979
980 </div>
981 <div class="tags">
982
983
984 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
985
986
987 </div>
988 </div>
989 <div class="padding"></div>
990
991 <div class="entry">
992 <div class="title">
993 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Now_accepting_bitcoins___anonymous_and_distributed_p2p_crypto_money.html">Now accepting bitcoins - anonymous and distributed p2p crypto-money</a>
994 </div>
995 <div class="date">
996 10th December 2010
997 </div>
998 <div class="body">
999 <p>With this weeks lawless
1000 <a href="http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/12/06/wikileaks/index.html">governmental
1001 attacks</a> on Wikileak and
1002 <a href="http://www.salon.com/technology/dan_gillmor/2010/12/06/war_on_speech">free
1003 speech</a>, it has become obvious that PayPal, visa and mastercard can
1004 not be trusted to handle money transactions.
1005 A blog post from
1006 <a href="http://webmink.com/2010/12/06/now-accepting-bitcoin/">Simon
1007 Phipps on bitcoin</a> reminded me about a project that a friend of
1008 mine mentioned earlier. I decided to follow Simon's example, and get
1009 involved with <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">BitCoin</a>. I got
1010 some help from my friend to get it all running, and he even handed me
1011 some bitcoins to get started. I even donated a few bitcoins to Simon
1012 for helping me remember BitCoin.</p>
1013
1014 <p>So, what is bitcoins, you probably wonder? It is a digital
1015 crypto-currency, decentralised and handled using peer-to-peer
1016 networks. It allows anonymous transactions and prohibits central
1017 control over the transactions, making it impossible for governments
1018 and companies alike to block donations and other transactions. The
1019 source is free software, and while the key dependency wxWidgets 2.9
1020 for the graphical user interface is missing in Debian, the command
1021 line client builds just fine. Hopefully Jonas
1022 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/578157">will get the package into
1023 Debian</a> soon.</p>
1024
1025 <p>Bitcoins can be converted to other currencies, like USD and EUR.
1026 There are <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/trade">companies accepting
1027 bitcoins</a> when selling services and goods, and there are even
1028 currency "stock" markets where the exchange rate is decided. There
1029 are not many users so far, but the concept seems promising. If you
1030 want to get started and lack a friend with any bitcoins to spare,
1031 you can even get
1032 <a href="https://freebitcoins.appspot.com/">some for free</a> (0.05
1033 bitcoin at the time of writing). Use
1034 <a href="http://www.bitcoinwatch.com/">BitcoinWatch</a> to keep an eye
1035 on the current exchange rates.</p>
1036
1037 <p>As an experiment, I have decided to set up bitcoind on one of my
1038 machines. If you want to support my activity, please send Bitcoin
1039 donations to the address
1040 <b>15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</b>. Thank you!</p>
1041
1042 </div>
1043 <div class="tags">
1044
1045
1046 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
1047
1048
1049 </div>
1050 </div>
1051 <div class="padding"></div>
1052
1053 <div class="entry">
1054 <div class="title">
1055 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_isn_t_Debian_Edu_using_VLC_.html">Why isn't Debian Edu using VLC?</a>
1056 </div>
1057 <div class="date">
1058 27th November 2010
1059 </div>
1060 <div class="body">
1061 <p>In the latest issue of Linux Journal, the readers choices were
1062 presented, and the winner among the multimedia player were VLC.
1063 Personally, I like VLC, and it is my player of choice when I first try
1064 to play a video file or stream. Only if VLC fail will I drag out
1065 gmplayer to see if it can do better. The reason is mostly the failure
1066 model and trust. When VLC fail, it normally pop up a error message
1067 reporting the problem. When mplayer fail, it normally segfault or
1068 just hangs. The latter failure mode drain my trust in the program.<p>
1069
1070 <p>But even if VLC is my player of choice, we have choosen to use
1071 mplayer in <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian
1072 Edu/Skolelinux</a>. The reason is simple. We need a good browser
1073 plugin to play web videos seamlessly, and the VLC browser plugin is
1074 not very good. For example, it lack in-line control buttons, so there
1075 is no way for the user to pause the video. Also, when I
1076 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia">last
1077 tested the browser plugins</a> available in Debian, the VLC plugin
1078 failed on several video pages where mplayer based plugins worked. If
1079 the browser plugin for VLC was as good as the gecko-mediaplayer
1080 package (which uses mplayer), we would switch.</P>
1081
1082 <p>While VLC is a good player, its user interface is slightly
1083 annoying. The most annoying feature is its inconsistent use of
1084 keyboard shortcuts. When the player is in full screen mode, its
1085 shortcuts are different from when it is playing the video in a window.
1086 For example, space only work as pause when in full screen mode. I
1087 wish it had consisten shortcuts and that space also would work when in
1088 window mode. Another nice shortcut in gmplayer is [enter] to restart
1089 the current video. It is very nice when playing short videos from the
1090 web and want to restart it when new people arrive to have a look at
1091 what is going on.</p>
1092
1093 </div>
1094 <div class="tags">
1095
1096
1097 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
1098
1099
1100 </div>
1101 </div>
1102 <div class="padding"></div>
1103
1104 <div class="entry">
1105 <div class="title">
1106 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades_of_the_Gnome_and_KDE_desktop__now_with_apt_get_autoremove.html">Lenny->Squeeze upgrades of the Gnome and KDE desktop, now with apt-get autoremove</a>
1107 </div>
1108 <div class="date">
1109 22nd November 2010
1110 </div>
1111 <div class="body">
1112 <p>Michael Biebl suggested to me on IRC, that I changed my automated
1113 upgrade testing of the
1114 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">Lenny
1115 Gnome and KDE Desktop</a> to do <tt>apt-get autoremove</tt> when using apt-get.
1116 This seem like a very good idea, so I adjusted by test scripts and
1117 can now present the updated result from today:</p>
1118
1119 <p>This is for Gnome:</p>
1120
1121 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
1122
1123 <blockquote><p>
1124 apache2.2-bin
1125 aptdaemon
1126 baobab
1127 binfmt-support
1128 browser-plugin-gnash
1129 cheese-common
1130 cli-common
1131 cups-pk-helper
1132 dmz-cursor-theme
1133 empathy
1134 empathy-common
1135 freedesktop-sound-theme
1136 freeglut3
1137 gconf-defaults-service
1138 gdm-themes
1139 gedit-plugins
1140 geoclue
1141 geoclue-hostip
1142 geoclue-localnet
1143 geoclue-manual
1144 geoclue-yahoo
1145 gnash
1146 gnash-common
1147 gnome
1148 gnome-backgrounds
1149 gnome-cards-data
1150 gnome-codec-install
1151 gnome-core
1152 gnome-desktop-environment
1153 gnome-disk-utility
1154 gnome-screenshot
1155 gnome-search-tool
1156 gnome-session-canberra
1157 gnome-system-log
1158 gnome-themes-extras
1159 gnome-themes-more
1160 gnome-user-share
1161 gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3
1162 gstreamer0.10-tools
1163 gtk2-engines
1164 gtk2-engines-pixbuf
1165 gtk2-engines-smooth
1166 hamster-applet
1167 libapache2-mod-dnssd
1168 libapr1
1169 libaprutil1
1170 libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3
1171 libaprutil1-ldap
1172 libart2.0-cil
1173 libboost-date-time1.42.0
1174 libboost-python1.42.0
1175 libboost-thread1.42.0
1176 libchamplain-0.4-0
1177 libchamplain-gtk-0.4-0
1178 libcheese-gtk18
1179 libclutter-gtk-0.10-0
1180 libcryptui0
1181 libdiscid0
1182 libelf1
1183 libepc-1.0-2
1184 libepc-common
1185 libepc-ui-1.0-2
1186 libfreerdp-plugins-standard
1187 libfreerdp0
1188 libgconf2.0-cil
1189 libgdata-common
1190 libgdata7
1191 libgdu-gtk0
1192 libgee2
1193 libgeoclue0
1194 libgexiv2-0
1195 libgif4
1196 libglade2.0-cil
1197 libglib2.0-cil
1198 libgmime2.4-cil
1199 libgnome-vfs2.0-cil
1200 libgnome2.24-cil
1201 libgnomepanel2.24-cil
1202 libgpod-common
1203 libgpod4
1204 libgtk2.0-cil
1205 libgtkglext1
1206 libgtksourceview2.0-common
1207 libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil
1208 libmono-addins0.2-cil
1209 libmono-cairo2.0-cil
1210 libmono-corlib2.0-cil
1211 libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil
1212 libmono-posix2.0-cil
1213 libmono-security2.0-cil
1214 libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil
1215 libmono-system2.0-cil
1216 libmtp8
1217 libmusicbrainz3-6
1218 libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil
1219 libndesk-dbus1.0-cil
1220 libopal3.6.8
1221 libpolkit-gtk-1-0
1222 libpt2.6.7
1223 libpython2.6
1224 librpm1
1225 librpmio1
1226 libsdl1.2debian
1227 libsrtp0
1228 libssh-4
1229 libtelepathy-farsight0
1230 libtelepathy-glib0
1231 libtidy-0.99-0
1232 media-player-info
1233 mesa-utils
1234 mono-2.0-gac
1235 mono-gac
1236 mono-runtime
1237 nautilus-sendto
1238 nautilus-sendto-empathy
1239 p7zip-full
1240 pkg-config
1241 python-aptdaemon
1242 python-aptdaemon-gtk
1243 python-axiom
1244 python-beautifulsoup
1245 python-bugbuddy
1246 python-clientform
1247 python-coherence
1248 python-configobj
1249 python-crypto
1250 python-cupshelpers
1251 python-elementtree
1252 python-epsilon
1253 python-evolution
1254 python-feedparser
1255 python-gdata
1256 python-gdbm
1257 python-gst0.10
1258 python-gtkglext1
1259 python-gtksourceview2
1260 python-httplib2
1261 python-louie
1262 python-mako
1263 python-markupsafe
1264 python-mechanize
1265 python-nevow
1266 python-notify
1267 python-opengl
1268 python-openssl
1269 python-pam
1270 python-pkg-resources
1271 python-pyasn1
1272 python-pysqlite2
1273 python-rdflib
1274 python-serial
1275 python-tagpy
1276 python-twisted-bin
1277 python-twisted-conch
1278 python-twisted-core
1279 python-twisted-web
1280 python-utidylib
1281 python-webkit
1282 python-xdg
1283 python-zope.interface
1284 remmina
1285 remmina-plugin-data
1286 remmina-plugin-rdp
1287 remmina-plugin-vnc
1288 rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder
1289 rhythmbox-plugins
1290 rpm-common
1291 rpm2cpio
1292 seahorse-plugins
1293 shotwell
1294 software-center
1295 system-config-printer-udev
1296 telepathy-gabble
1297 telepathy-mission-control-5
1298 telepathy-salut
1299 tomboy
1300 totem
1301 totem-coherence
1302 totem-mozilla
1303 totem-plugins
1304 transmission-common
1305 xdg-user-dirs
1306 xdg-user-dirs-gtk
1307 xserver-xephyr
1308 </p></blockquote>
1309
1310 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
1311
1312 <blockquote><p>
1313 cheese
1314 ekiga
1315 eog
1316 epiphany-extensions
1317 evolution-exchange
1318 fast-user-switch-applet
1319 file-roller
1320 gcalctool
1321 gconf-editor
1322 gdm
1323 gedit
1324 gedit-common
1325 gnome-games
1326 gnome-games-data
1327 gnome-nettool
1328 gnome-system-tools
1329 gnome-themes
1330 gnuchess
1331 gucharmap
1332 guile-1.8-libs
1333 libavahi-ui0
1334 libdmx1
1335 libgalago3
1336 libgtk-vnc-1.0-0
1337 libgtksourceview2.0-0
1338 liblircclient0
1339 libsdl1.2debian-alsa
1340 libspeexdsp1
1341 libsvga1
1342 rhythmbox
1343 seahorse
1344 sound-juicer
1345 system-config-printer
1346 totem-common
1347 transmission-gtk
1348 vinagre
1349 vino
1350 </p></blockquote>
1351
1352 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
1353
1354 <blockquote><p>
1355 gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
1356 </p></blockquote>
1357
1358 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
1359
1360 <blockquote><p>
1361 [nothing]
1362 </p></blockquote>
1363
1364 <p>This is for KDE:</p>
1365
1366 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
1367
1368 <blockquote><p>
1369 ksmserver
1370 </p></blockquote>
1371
1372 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
1373
1374 <blockquote><p>
1375 kwin
1376 network-manager-kde
1377 </p></blockquote>
1378
1379 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
1380
1381 <blockquote><p>
1382 arts
1383 dolphin
1384 freespacenotifier
1385 google-gadgets-gst
1386 google-gadgets-xul
1387 kappfinder
1388 kcalc
1389 kcharselect
1390 kde-core
1391 kde-plasma-desktop
1392 kde-standard
1393 kde-window-manager
1394 kdeartwork
1395 kdeartwork-emoticons
1396 kdeartwork-style
1397 kdeartwork-theme-icon
1398 kdebase
1399 kdebase-apps
1400 kdebase-workspace
1401 kdebase-workspace-bin
1402 kdebase-workspace-data
1403 kdeeject
1404 kdelibs
1405 kdeplasma-addons
1406 kdeutils
1407 kdewallpapers
1408 kdf
1409 kfloppy
1410 kgpg
1411 khelpcenter4
1412 kinfocenter
1413 konq-plugins-l10n
1414 konqueror-nsplugins
1415 kscreensaver
1416 kscreensaver-xsavers
1417 ktimer
1418 kwrite
1419 libgle3
1420 libkde4-ruby1.8
1421 libkonq5
1422 libkonq5-templates
1423 libnetpbm10
1424 libplasma-ruby
1425 libplasma-ruby1.8
1426 libqt4-ruby1.8
1427 marble-data
1428 marble-plugins
1429 netpbm
1430 nuvola-icon-theme
1431 plasma-dataengines-workspace
1432 plasma-desktop
1433 plasma-desktopthemes-artwork
1434 plasma-runners-addons
1435 plasma-scriptengine-googlegadgets
1436 plasma-scriptengine-python
1437 plasma-scriptengine-qedje
1438 plasma-scriptengine-ruby
1439 plasma-scriptengine-webkit
1440 plasma-scriptengines
1441 plasma-wallpapers-addons
1442 plasma-widget-folderview
1443 plasma-widget-networkmanagement
1444 ruby
1445 sweeper
1446 update-notifier-kde
1447 xscreensaver-data-extra
1448 xscreensaver-gl
1449 xscreensaver-gl-extra
1450 xscreensaver-screensaver-bsod
1451 </p></blockquote>
1452
1453 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
1454
1455 <blockquote><p>
1456 ark
1457 google-gadgets-common
1458 google-gadgets-qt
1459 htdig
1460 kate
1461 kdebase-bin
1462 kdebase-data
1463 kdepasswd
1464 kfind
1465 klipper
1466 konq-plugins
1467 konqueror
1468 ksysguard
1469 ksysguardd
1470 libarchive1
1471 libcln6
1472 libeet1
1473 libeina-svn-06
1474 libggadget-1.0-0b
1475 libggadget-qt-1.0-0b
1476 libgps19
1477 libkdecorations4
1478 libkephal4
1479 libkonq4
1480 libkonqsidebarplugin4a
1481 libkscreensaver5
1482 libksgrd4
1483 libksignalplotter4
1484 libkunitconversion4
1485 libkwineffects1a
1486 libmarblewidget4
1487 libntrack-qt4-1
1488 libntrack0
1489 libplasma-geolocation-interface4
1490 libplasmaclock4a
1491 libplasmagenericshell4
1492 libprocesscore4a
1493 libprocessui4a
1494 libqalculate5
1495 libqedje0a
1496 libqtruby4shared2
1497 libqzion0a
1498 libruby1.8
1499 libscim8c2a
1500 libsmokekdecore4-3
1501 libsmokekdeui4-3
1502 libsmokekfile3
1503 libsmokekhtml3
1504 libsmokekio3
1505 libsmokeknewstuff2-3
1506 libsmokeknewstuff3-3
1507 libsmokekparts3
1508 libsmokektexteditor3
1509 libsmokekutils3
1510 libsmokenepomuk3
1511 libsmokephonon3
1512 libsmokeplasma3
1513 libsmokeqtcore4-3
1514 libsmokeqtdbus4-3
1515 libsmokeqtgui4-3
1516 libsmokeqtnetwork4-3
1517 libsmokeqtopengl4-3
1518 libsmokeqtscript4-3
1519 libsmokeqtsql4-3
1520 libsmokeqtsvg4-3
1521 libsmokeqttest4-3
1522 libsmokeqtuitools4-3
1523 libsmokeqtwebkit4-3
1524 libsmokeqtxml4-3
1525 libsmokesolid3
1526 libsmokesoprano3
1527 libtaskmanager4a
1528 libtidy-0.99-0
1529 libweather-ion4a
1530 libxklavier16
1531 libxxf86misc1
1532 okteta
1533 oxygencursors
1534 plasma-dataengines-addons
1535 plasma-scriptengine-superkaramba
1536 plasma-widget-lancelot
1537 plasma-widgets-addons
1538 plasma-widgets-workspace
1539 polkit-kde-1
1540 ruby1.8
1541 systemsettings
1542 update-notifier-common
1543 </p></blockquote>
1544
1545 <p>Running apt-get autoremove made the results using apt-get and
1546 aptitude a bit more similar, but there are still quite a lott of
1547 differences. I have no idea what packages should be installed after
1548 the upgrade, but hope those that do can have a look.</p>
1549
1550 </div>
1551 <div class="tags">
1552
1553
1554 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
1555
1556
1557 </div>
1558 </div>
1559 <div class="padding"></div>
1560
1561 <div class="entry">
1562 <div class="title">
1563 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Migrating_Xen_virtual_machines_using_LVM_to_KVM_using_disk_images.html">Migrating Xen virtual machines using LVM to KVM using disk images</a>
1564 </div>
1565 <div class="date">
1566 22nd November 2010
1567 </div>
1568 <div class="body">
1569 <p>Most of the computers in use by the
1570 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu/Skolelinux project</a>
1571 are virtual machines. And they have been Xen machines running on a
1572 fairly old IBM eserver xseries 345 machine, and we wanted to migrate
1573 them to KVM on a newer Dell PowerEdge 2950 host machine. This was a
1574 bit harder that it could have been, because we set up the Xen virtual
1575 machines to get the virtual partitions from LVM, which as far as I
1576 know is not supported by KVM. So to migrate, we had to convert
1577 several LVM logical volumes to partitions on a virtual disk file.</p>
1578
1579 <p>I found
1580 <a href="http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com.au/articles/35011-Six-steps-for-migrating-Xen-virtual-machines-to-KVM">a
1581 nice recipe</a> to do this, and wrote the following script to do the
1582 migration. It uses qemu-img from the qemu package to make the disk
1583 image, parted to partition it, losetup and kpartx to present the disk
1584 image partions as devices, and dd to copy the data. I NFS mounted the
1585 new servers storage area on the old server to do the migration.</p>
1586
1587 <pre>
1588 #!/bin/sh
1589
1590 # Based on
1591 # http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com.au/articles/35011-Six-steps-for-migrating-Xen-virtual-machines-to-KVM
1592
1593 set -e
1594 set -x
1595
1596 if [ -z "$1" ] ; then
1597 echo "Usage: $0 &lt;hostname&gt;"
1598 exit 1
1599 else
1600 host="$1"
1601 fi
1602
1603 if [ ! -e /dev/vg_data/$host-disk ] ; then
1604 echo "error: unable to find LVM volume for $host"
1605 exit 1
1606 fi
1607
1608 # Partitions need to be a bit bigger than the LVM LVs. not sure why.
1609 disksize=$( lvs --units m | grep $host-disk | awk '{sum = sum + $4} END { print int(sum * 1.05) }')
1610 swapsize=$( lvs --units m | grep $host-swap | awk '{sum = sum + $4} END { print int(sum * 1.05) }')
1611 totalsize=$(( ( $disksize + $swapsize ) ))
1612
1613 img=$host.img
1614 #dd if=/dev/zero of=$img bs=1M count=$(( $disksize + $swapsize ))
1615 qemu-img create $img ${totalsize}MMaking room on the Debian Edu/Sqeeze DVD
1616
1617 parted $img mklabel msdos
1618 parted $img mkpart primary linux-swap 0 $disksize
1619 parted $img mkpart primary ext2 $disksize $totalsize
1620 parted $img set 1 boot on
1621
1622 modprobe dm-mod
1623 losetup /dev/loop0 $img
1624 kpartx -a /dev/loop0
1625
1626 dd if=/dev/vg_data/$host-disk of=/dev/mapper/loop0p1 bs=1M
1627 fsck.ext3 -f /dev/mapper/loop0p1 || true
1628 mkswap /dev/mapper/loop0p2
1629
1630 kpartx -d /dev/loop0
1631 losetup -d /dev/loop0
1632 </pre>
1633
1634 <p>The script is perhaps so simple that it is not copyrightable, but
1635 if it is, it is licenced using GPL v2 or later at your discretion.</p>
1636
1637 <p>After doing this, I booted a Debian CD in rescue mode in KVM with
1638 the new disk image attached, installed grub-pc and linux-image-686 and
1639 set up grub to boot from the disk image. After this, the KVM machines
1640 seem to work just fine.</p>
1641
1642 </div>
1643 <div class="tags">
1644
1645
1646 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
1647
1648
1649 </div>
1650 </div>
1651 <div class="padding"></div>
1652
1653 <div class="entry">
1654 <div class="title">
1655 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades__apt_vs_aptitude_with_the_Gnome_and_KDE_desktop.html">Lenny->Squeeze upgrades, apt vs aptitude with the Gnome and KDE desktop</a>
1656 </div>
1657 <div class="date">
1658 20th November 2010
1659 </div>
1660 <div class="body">
1661 <p>I'm still running upgrade testing of the
1662 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">Lenny
1663 Gnome and KDE Desktop</a>, but have not had time to spend on reporting the
1664 status. Here is a short update based on a test I ran 20101118.</p>
1665
1666 <p>I still do not know what a correct migration should look like, so I
1667 report any differences between apt and aptitude and hope someone else
1668 can see if anything should be changed.</p>
1669
1670 <p>This is for Gnome:</p>
1671
1672 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
1673
1674 <blockquote><p>
1675 apache2.2-bin aptdaemon at-spi baobab binfmt-support
1676 browser-plugin-gnash cheese-common cli-common cpp-4.3 cups-pk-helper
1677 dmz-cursor-theme empathy empathy-common finger
1678 freedesktop-sound-theme freeglut3 gconf-defaults-service gdm-themes
1679 gedit-plugins geoclue geoclue-hostip geoclue-localnet geoclue-manual
1680 geoclue-yahoo gnash gnash-common gnome gnome-backgrounds
1681 gnome-cards-data gnome-codec-install gnome-core
1682 gnome-desktop-environment gnome-disk-utility gnome-screenshot
1683 gnome-search-tool gnome-session-canberra gnome-spell
1684 gnome-system-log gnome-themes-extras gnome-themes-more
1685 gnome-user-share gs-common gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3
1686 gstreamer0.10-tools gtk2-engines gtk2-engines-pixbuf
1687 gtk2-engines-smooth hal-info hamster-applet libapache2-mod-dnssd
1688 libapr1 libaprutil1 libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3 libaprutil1-ldap
1689 libart2.0-cil libatspi1.0-0 libboost-date-time1.42.0
1690 libboost-python1.42.0 libboost-thread1.42.0 libchamplain-0.4-0
1691 libchamplain-gtk-0.4-0 libcheese-gtk18 libclutter-gtk-0.10-0
1692 libcryptui0 libcupsys2 libdiscid0 libeel2-data libelf1 libepc-1.0-2
1693 libepc-common libepc-ui-1.0-2 libfreerdp-plugins-standard
1694 libfreerdp0 libgail-common libgconf2.0-cil libgdata-common libgdata7
1695 libgdl-1-common libgdu-gtk0 libgee2 libgeoclue0 libgexiv2-0 libgif4
1696 libglade2.0-cil libglib2.0-cil libgmime2.4-cil libgnome-vfs2.0-cil
1697 libgnome2.24-cil libgnomepanel2.24-cil libgnomeprint2.2-data
1698 libgnomeprintui2.2-common libgnomevfs2-bin libgpod-common libgpod4
1699 libgtk2.0-cil libgtkglext1 libgtksourceview-common
1700 libgtksourceview2.0-common libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil
1701 libmono-addins0.2-cil libmono-cairo2.0-cil libmono-corlib2.0-cil
1702 libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil libmono-posix2.0-cil
1703 libmono-security2.0-cil libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil
1704 libmono-system2.0-cil libmtp8 libmusicbrainz3-6
1705 libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil libndesk-dbus1.0-cil libopal3.6.8
1706 libpolkit-gtk-1-0 libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa
1707 libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libpt2.6.7 libpython2.6 librpm1 librpmio1
1708 libsdl1.2debian libservlet2.4-java libsrtp0 libssh-4
1709 libtelepathy-farsight0 libtelepathy-glib0 libtidy-0.99-0
1710 libxalan2-java libxerces2-java media-player-info mesa-utils
1711 mono-2.0-gac mono-gac mono-runtime nautilus-sendto
1712 nautilus-sendto-empathy openoffice.org-writer2latex
1713 openssl-blacklist p7zip p7zip-full pkg-config python-4suite-xml
1714 python-aptdaemon python-aptdaemon-gtk python-axiom
1715 python-beautifulsoup python-bugbuddy python-clientform
1716 python-coherence python-configobj python-crypto python-cupshelpers
1717 python-cupsutils python-eggtrayicon python-elementtree
1718 python-epsilon python-evolution python-feedparser python-gdata
1719 python-gdbm python-gst0.10 python-gtkglext1 python-gtkmozembed
1720 python-gtksourceview2 python-httplib2 python-louie python-mako
1721 python-markupsafe python-mechanize python-nevow python-notify
1722 python-opengl python-openssl python-pam python-pkg-resources
1723 python-pyasn1 python-pysqlite2 python-rdflib python-serial
1724 python-tagpy python-twisted-bin python-twisted-conch
1725 python-twisted-core python-twisted-web python-utidylib python-webkit
1726 python-xdg python-zope.interface remmina remmina-plugin-data
1727 remmina-plugin-rdp remmina-plugin-vnc rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder
1728 rhythmbox-plugins rpm-common rpm2cpio seahorse-plugins shotwell
1729 software-center svgalibg1 system-config-printer-udev
1730 telepathy-gabble telepathy-mission-control-5 telepathy-salut tomboy
1731 totem totem-coherence totem-mozilla totem-plugins
1732 transmission-common xdg-user-dirs xdg-user-dirs-gtk xserver-xephyr
1733 zip
1734 </p></blockquote>
1735
1736 Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude
1737
1738 <blockquote><p>
1739 arj bluez-utils cheese dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop ekiga eog
1740 epiphany-extensions epiphany-gecko evolution-exchange
1741 fast-user-switch-applet file-roller gcalctool gconf-editor gdm gedit
1742 gedit-common gnome-app-install gnome-games gnome-games-data
1743 gnome-nettool gnome-system-tools gnome-themes gnome-utils
1744 gnome-vfs-obexftp gnome-volume-manager gnuchess gucharmap
1745 guile-1.8-libs hal libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5
1746 libavahi-ui0 libbind9-50 libbluetooth2 libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7
1747 libcucul0 libcurl3 libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdmx1 libdvdread3
1748 libedata-cal1.2-6 libedataserver1.2-9 libeel2-2.20 libepc-1.0-1
1749 libepc-ui-1.0-1 libexchange-storage1.2-3 libfaad0 libgadu3
1750 libgalago3 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libggz2 libggzcore9
1751 libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0 libgnome-desktop-2
1752 libgnome-pilot2 libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomeprint2.2-0
1753 libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtk-vnc-1.0-0
1754 libgtkhtml2-0 libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgtksourceview2.0-0
1755 libgucharmap6 libhesiod0 libicu38 libisccc50 libisccfg50 libiw29
1756 libjaxp1.3-java-gcj libkpathsea4 liblircclient0 libltdl3 liblwres50
1757 libmagick++10 libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmozjs1d libmpfr1ldbl libmtp7
1758 libmysqlclient15off libnautilus-burn4 libneon27 libnm-glib0
1759 libnm-util0 libopal-2.2 libosp5 libparted1.8-10 libpisock9
1760 libpisync1 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3 libpt-1.10.10 libraw1394-8
1761 libsdl1.2debian-alsa libsensors3 libsexy2 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8
1762 libspeexdsp1 libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libsvga1
1763 libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1 libtotem-plparser10 libtrackerclient0
1764 libvoikko1 libxalan2-java-gcj libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12
1765 libxtrap6 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3 mysql-common rhythmbox seahorse
1766 sound-juicer swfdec-gnome system-config-printer totem-common
1767 totem-gstreamer transmission-gtk vinagre vino w3c-dtd-xhtml wodim
1768 </p></blockquote>
1769
1770 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
1771
1772 <blockquote><p>
1773 gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
1774 </p></blockquote>
1775
1776 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
1777
1778 <blockquote><p>
1779 [nothing]
1780 </p></blockquote>
1781
1782 <p>This is for KDE:</p>
1783
1784 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
1785
1786 <blockquote><p>
1787 autopoint bomber bovo cantor cantor-backend-kalgebra cpp-4.3 dcoprss
1788 edict espeak espeak-data eyesapplet fifteenapplet finger gettext
1789 ghostscript-x git gnome-audio gnugo granatier gs-common
1790 gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio indi kaddressbook-plugins kalgebra
1791 kalzium-data kanjidic kapman kate-plugins kblocks kbreakout kbstate
1792 kde-icons-mono kdeaccessibility kdeaddons-kfile-plugins
1793 kdeadmin-kfile-plugins kdeartwork-misc kdeartwork-theme-window
1794 kdeedu kdeedu-data kdeedu-kvtml-data kdegames kdegames-card-data
1795 kdegames-mahjongg-data kdegraphics-kfile-plugins kdelirc
1796 kdemultimedia-kfile-plugins kdenetwork-kfile-plugins
1797 kdepim-kfile-plugins kdepim-kio-plugins kdessh kdetoys kdewebdev
1798 kdiamond kdnssd kfilereplace kfourinline kgeography-data kigo
1799 killbots kiriki klettres-data kmoon kmrml knewsticker-scripts
1800 kollision kpf krosspython ksirk ksmserver ksquares kstars-data
1801 ksudoku kubrick kweather libasound2-plugins libboost-python1.42.0
1802 libcfitsio3 libconvert-binhex-perl libcrypt-ssleay-perl libdb4.6++
1803 libdjvulibre-text libdotconf1.0 liberror-perl libespeak1
1804 libfinance-quote-perl libgail-common libgsl0ldbl libhtml-parser-perl
1805 libhtml-tableextract-perl libhtml-tagset-perl libhtml-tree-perl
1806 libio-stringy-perl libkdeedu4 libkdegames5 libkiten4 libkpathsea5
1807 libkrossui4 libmailtools-perl libmime-tools-perl
1808 libnews-nntpclient-perl libopenbabel3 libportaudio2 libpulse-browse0
1809 libservlet2.4-java libspeechd2 libtiff-tools libtimedate-perl
1810 libunistring0 liburi-perl libwww-perl libxalan2-java libxerces2-java
1811 lirc luatex marble networkstatus noatun-plugins
1812 openoffice.org-writer2latex palapeli palapeli-data parley
1813 parley-data poster psutils pulseaudio pulseaudio-esound-compat
1814 pulseaudio-module-x11 pulseaudio-utils quanta-data rocs rsync
1815 speech-dispatcher step svgalibg1 texlive-binaries texlive-luatex
1816 ttf-sazanami-gothic
1817 </p></blockquote>
1818
1819 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
1820
1821 <blockquote><p>
1822 amor artsbuilder atlantik atlantikdesigner blinken bluez-utils cvs
1823 dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop imlib-base imlib11 kalzium kanagram kandy
1824 kasteroids katomic kbackgammon kbattleship kblackbox kbounce kbruch
1825 kcron kdat kdemultimedia-kappfinder-data kdeprint kdict kdvi kedit
1826 keduca kenolaba kfax kfaxview kfouleggs kgeography kghostview
1827 kgoldrunner khangman khexedit kiconedit kig kimagemapeditor
1828 kitchensync kiten kjumpingcube klatin klettres klickety klines
1829 klinkstatus kmag kmahjongg kmailcvt kmenuedit kmid kmilo kmines
1830 kmousetool kmouth kmplot knetwalk kodo kolf kommander konquest kooka
1831 kpager kpat kpdf kpercentage kpilot kpoker kpovmodeler krec
1832 kregexpeditor kreversi ksame ksayit kshisen ksig ksim ksirc ksirtet
1833 ksmiletris ksnake ksokoban kspaceduel kstars ksvg ksysv kteatime
1834 ktip ktnef ktouch ktron kttsd ktuberling kturtle ktux kuickshow
1835 kverbos kview kviewshell kvoctrain kwifimanager kwin kwin4 kwordquiz
1836 kworldclock kxsldbg libakode2 libarts1-akode libarts1-audiofile
1837 libarts1-mpeglib libarts1-xine libavahi-compat-libdnssd1
1838 libavahi-core5 libavc1394-0 libbind9-50 libbluetooth2
1839 libboost-python1.34.1 libcucul0 libcurl3 libcvsservice0
1840 libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdjvulibre21 libdvdread3 libfaad0 libfreebob0
1841 libgd2-noxpm libgraphviz4 libgsmme1c2a libgtkhtml2-0 libicu38
1842 libiec61883-0 libindex0 libisccc50 libisccfg50 libiw29
1843 libjaxp1.3-java-gcj libk3b3 libkcal2b libkcddb1 libkdeedu3
1844 libkdegames1 libkdepim1a libkgantt0 libkleopatra1 libkmime2
1845 libkpathsea4 libkpimexchange1 libkpimidentities1 libkscan1
1846 libksieve0 libktnef1 liblockdev1 libltdl3 liblwres50 libmagick10
1847 libmimelib1c2a libmodplug0c2 libmozjs1d libmpcdec3 libmpfr1ldbl
1848 libneon27 libnm-util0 libopensync0 libpisock9 libpoppler-glib3
1849 libpoppler-qt2 libpoppler3 libraw1394-8 librss1 libsensors3
1850 libsmbios2 libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90
1851 libtalloc1 libxalan2-java-gcj libxerces2-java-gcj libxtrap6 lskat
1852 mpeglib network-manager-kde noatun pmount tex-common texlive-base
1853 texlive-common texlive-doc-base texlive-fonts-recommended tidy
1854 ttf-dustin ttf-kochi-gothic ttf-sjfonts
1855 </p></blockquote>
1856
1857 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
1858
1859 <blockquote><p>
1860 dolphin kde-core kde-plasma-desktop kde-standard kde-window-manager
1861 kdeartwork kdebase kdebase-apps kdebase-workspace
1862 kdebase-workspace-bin kdebase-workspace-data kdeutils kscreensaver
1863 kscreensaver-xsavers libgle3 libkonq5 libkonq5-templates libnetpbm10
1864 netpbm plasma-widget-folderview plasma-widget-networkmanagement
1865 xscreensaver-data-extra xscreensaver-gl xscreensaver-gl-extra
1866 xscreensaver-screensaver-bsod
1867 </p></blockquote>
1868
1869 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
1870
1871 <blockquote><p>
1872 kdebase-bin konq-plugins konqueror
1873 </p></blockquote>
1874
1875 </div>
1876 <div class="tags">
1877
1878
1879 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
1880
1881
1882 </div>
1883 </div>
1884 <div class="padding"></div>
1885
1886 <div class="entry">
1887 <div class="title">
1888 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Gnash_buildbot_slave_and_Debian_kfreebsd.html">Gnash buildbot slave and Debian kfreebsd</a>
1889 </div>
1890 <div class="date">
1891 20th November 2010
1892 </div>
1893 <div class="body">
1894 <p>Answering
1895 <a href="http://www.listware.net/201011/gnash-dev/67431-gnash-dev-buildbot-looking-for-slaves.html">the
1896 call from the Gnash project</a> for
1897 <a href="http://www.gnashdev.org:8010">buildbot</a> slaves to test the
1898 current source, I have set up a virtual KVM machine on the Debian
1899 Edu/Skolelinux virtualization host to test the git source on
1900 Debian/Squeeze. I hope this can help the developers in getting new
1901 releases out more often.</p>
1902
1903 <p>As the developers want less main-stream build platforms tested to,
1904 I have considered setting up a <a
1905 href="http://www.debian.org/ports/kfreebsd-gnu/">Debian/kfreebsd</a>
1906 machine as well. I have also considered using the kfreebsd
1907 architecture in Debian as a file server in NUUG to get access to the 5
1908 TB zfs volume we currently use to store DV video. Because of this, I
1909 finally got around to do a test installation of Debian/Squeeze with
1910 kfreebsd. Installation went fairly smooth, thought I noticed some
1911 visual glitches in the cdebconf dialogs (black cursor left on the
1912 screen at random locations). Have not gotten very far with the
1913 testing. Noticed cfdisk did not work, but fdisk did so it was not a
1914 fatal problem. Have to spend some more time on it to see if it is
1915 useful as a file server for NUUG. Will try to find time to set up a
1916 gnash buildbot slave on the Debian Edu/Skolelinux this weekend.</p>
1917
1918 </div>
1919 <div class="tags">
1920
1921
1922 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
1923
1924
1925 </div>
1926 </div>
1927 <div class="padding"></div>
1928
1929 <div class="entry">
1930 <div class="title">
1931 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_in_3D.html">Debian in 3D</a>
1932 </div>
1933 <div class="date">
1934 9th November 2010
1935 </div>
1936 <div class="body">
1937 <p><img src="http://thingiverse-production.s3.amazonaws.com/renders/23/e0/c4/f9/2b/debswagtdose_preview_medium.jpg"></p>
1938
1939 <p>3D printing is just great. I just came across this Debian logo in
1940 3D linked in from
1941 <a href="http://blog.thingiverse.com/2010/11/09/participatory-branding/">the
1942 thingiverse blog</a>.</p>
1943
1944 </div>
1945 <div class="tags">
1946
1947
1948 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/3d-printer">3d-printer</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
1949
1950
1951 </div>
1952 </div>
1953 <div class="padding"></div>
1954
1955 <div class="entry">
1956 <div class="title">
1957 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Software_updates_2010_10_24.html">Software updates 2010-10-24</a>
1958 </div>
1959 <div class="date">
1960 24th October 2010
1961 </div>
1962 <div class="body">
1963 <p>Some updates.</p>
1964
1965 <p>My <a href="http://pledgebank.com/gnash-avm2">gnash pledge</a> to
1966 raise money for the project is going well. The lower limit of 10
1967 signers was reached in 24 hours, and so far 13 people have signed it.
1968 More signers and more funding is most welcome, and I am really curious
1969 how far we can get before the time limit of December 24 is reached.
1970 :)</p>
1971
1972 <p>On the #gnash IRC channel on irc.freenode.net, I was just tipped
1973 about what appear to be a great code coverage tool capable of
1974 generating code coverage stats without any changes to the source code.
1975 It is called
1976 <a href="http://simonkagstrom.github.com/kcov/index.html">kcov</a>,
1977 and can be used using <tt>kcov &lt;directory&gt; &lt;binary&gt;</tt>.
1978 It is missing in Debian, but the git source built just fine in Squeeze
1979 after I installed libelf-dev, libdwarf-dev, pkg-config and
1980 libglib2.0-dev. Failed to build in Lenny, but suspect that is
1981 solvable. I hope kcov make it into Debian soon.</p>
1982
1983 <p>Finally found time to wrap up the release notes for <a
1984 href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2010/10/msg00002.html">a
1985 new alpha release of Debian Edu</a>, and just published the second
1986 alpha test release of the Squeeze based Debian Edu /
1987 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a>
1988 release. Give it a try if you need a complete linux solution for your
1989 school, including central infrastructure server, workstations, thin
1990 client servers and diskless workstations. A nice touch added
1991 yesterday is RDP support on the thin client servers, for windows
1992 clients to get a Linux desktop on request.</p>
1993
1994 </div>
1995 <div class="tags">
1996
1997
1998 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>.
1999
2000
2001 </div>
2002 </div>
2003 <div class="padding"></div>
2004
2005 <div class="entry">
2006 <div class="title">
2007 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Some_notes_on_Flash_in_Debian_and_Debian_Edu.html">Some notes on Flash in Debian and Debian Edu</a>
2008 </div>
2009 <div class="date">
2010 4th September 2010
2011 </div>
2012 <div class="body">
2013 <p>In the <a href="http://popcon.debian.org/unknown/by_vote">Debian
2014 popularity-contest numbers</a>, the adobe-flashplugin package the
2015 second most popular used package that is missing in Debian. The sixth
2016 most popular is flashplayer-mozilla. This is a clear indication that
2017 working flash is important for Debian users. Around 10 percent of the
2018 users submitting data to popcon.debian.org have this package
2019 installed.</p>
2020
2021 <p>In the report written by Lars Risan in August 2008
2022<a href="http://wiki.skolelinux.no/Dokumentasjon/Rapporter?action=AttachFile&do=view&target=Skolelinux_i_bruk_rapport_1.0.pdf">Skolelinux
2023 i bruk – Rapport for Hurum kommune, Universitetet i Agder og
2024 stiftelsen SLX Debian Labs</a>»), one of the most important problems
2025 schools experienced with <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian
2026 Edu/Skolelinux</a> was the lack of working Flash. A lot of educational
2027 web sites require Flash to work, and lacking working Flash support in
2028 the web browser and the problems with installing it was perceived as a
2029 good reason to stay with Windows.</p>
2030
2031 <p>I once saw a funny and sad comment in a web forum, where Linux was
2032 said to be the retarded cousin that did not really understand
2033 everything you told him but could work fairly well. This was a
2034 comment regarding the problems Linux have with proprietary formats and
2035 non-standard web pages, and is sad because it exposes a fairly common
2036 understanding of whose fault it is if web pages that only work in for
2037 example Internet Explorer 6 fail to work on Firefox, and funny because
2038 it explain very well how annoying it is for users when Linux
2039 distributions do not work with the documents they receive or the web
2040 pages they want to visit.</p>
2041
2042 <p>This is part of the reason why I believe it is important for Debian
2043 and Debian Edu to have a well working Flash implementation in the
2044 distribution, to get at least popular sites as Youtube and Google
2045 Video to working out of the box. For Squeeze, Debian have the chance
2046 to include the latest version of Gnash that will make this happen, as
2047 the new release 0.8.8 was published a few weeks ago and is resting in
2048 unstable. The new version work with more sites that version 0.8.7.
2049 The Gnash maintainers have asked for a freeze exception, but the
2050 release team have not had time to reply to it yet. I hope they agree
2051 with me that Flash is important for the Debian desktop users, and thus
2052 accept the new package into Squeeze.</p>
2053
2054 </div>
2055 <div class="tags">
2056
2057
2058 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
2059
2060
2061 </div>
2062 </div>
2063 <div class="padding"></div>
2064
2065 <div class="entry">
2066 <div class="title">
2067 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Circular_package_dependencies_harms_apt_recovery.html">Circular package dependencies harms apt recovery</a>
2068 </div>
2069 <div class="date">
2070 27th July 2010
2071 </div>
2072 <div class="body">
2073 <p>I discovered this while doing
2074 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">automated
2075 testing of upgrades from Debian Lenny to Squeeze</a>. A few packages
2076 in Debian still got circular dependencies, and it is often claimed
2077 that apt and aptitude should be able to handle this just fine, but
2078 some times these dependency loops causes apt to fail.</p>
2079
2080 <p>An example is from todays
2081 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing//test-20100727-lenny-squeeze-kde-aptitude.txt">upgrade
2082 of KDE using aptitude</a>. In it, a bug in kdebase-workspace-data
2083 causes perl-modules to fail to upgrade. The cause is simple. If a
2084 package fail to unpack, then only part of packages with the circular
2085 dependency might end up being unpacked when unpacking aborts, and the
2086 ones already unpacked will fail to configure in the recovery phase
2087 because its dependencies are unavailable.</p>
2088
2089 <p>In this log, the problem manifest itself with this error:</p>
2090
2091 <blockquote><pre>
2092 dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of perl-modules:
2093 perl-modules depends on perl (>= 5.10.1-1); however:
2094 Version of perl on system is 5.10.0-19lenny2.
2095 dpkg: error processing perl-modules (--configure):
2096 dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
2097 </pre></blockquote>
2098
2099 <p>The perl/perl-modules circular dependency is already
2100 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/527917">reported as a bug</a>, and will
2101 hopefully be solved as soon as possible, but it is not the only one,
2102 and each one of these loops in the dependency tree can cause similar
2103 failures. Of course, they only occur when there are bugs in other
2104 packages causing the unpacking to fail, but it is rather nasty when
2105 the failure of one package causes the problem to become worse because
2106 of dependency loops.</p>
2107
2108 <p>Thanks to
2109 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/06/msg00116.html">the
2110 tireless effort by Bill Allombert</a>, the number of circular
2111 dependencies
2112 <a href="http://debian.semistable.com/debgraph.out.html">left in Debian
2113 is dropping</a>, and perhaps it will reach zero one day. :)</p>
2114
2115 <p>Todays testing also exposed a bug in
2116 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/590605">update-notifier</a> and
2117 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/590604">different behaviour</a> between
2118 apt-get and aptitude, the latter possibly caused by some circular
2119 dependency. Reported both to BTS to try to get someone to look at
2120 it.</p>
2121
2122 </div>
2123 <div class="tags">
2124
2125
2126 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
2127
2128
2129 </div>
2130 </div>
2131 <div class="padding"></div>
2132
2133 <div class="entry">
2134 <div class="title">
2135 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_are_they_searching_for___PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_in_LDAP.html">What are they searching for - PowerDNS and ISC DHCP in LDAP</a>
2136 </div>
2137 <div class="date">
2138 17th July 2010
2139 </div>
2140 <div class="body">
2141 <p>This is a
2142 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html">followup</a>
2143 on my
2144 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Idea_for_a_change_to_LDAP_schemas_allowing_DNS_and_DHCP_info_to_be_combined_into_one_object.html">previous
2145 work</a> on
2146 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Combining_PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_LDAP_objects.html">merging
2147 all</a> the computer related LDAP objects in Debian Edu.</p>
2148
2149 <p>As a step to try to see if it possible to merge the DNS and DHCP
2150 LDAP objects, I have had a look at how the packages pdns-backend-ldap
2151 and dhcp3-server-ldap in Debian use the LDAP server. The two
2152 implementations are quite different in how they use LDAP.</p>
2153
2154 To get this information, I started slapd with debugging enabled and
2155 dumped the debug output to a file to get the LDAP searches performed
2156 on a Debian Edu main-server. Here is a summary.
2157
2158 <p><strong>powerdns</strong></p>
2159
2160 <a href="http://www.linuxnetworks.de/doc/index.php/PowerDNS_LDAP_Backend">Clues
2161 on how to</a> set up PowerDNS to use a LDAP backend is available on
2162 the web.
2163
2164 <p>PowerDNS have two modes of operation using LDAP as its backend.
2165 One "strict" mode where the forward and reverse DNS lookups are done
2166 using the same LDAP objects, and a "tree" mode where the forward and
2167 reverse entries are in two different subtrees in LDAP with a structure
2168 based on the DNS names, as in tjener.intern and
2169 2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa.</p>
2170
2171 <p>In tree mode, the server is set up to use a LDAP subtree as its
2172 base, and uses a "base" scoped search for the DNS name by adding
2173 "dc=tjener,dc=intern," to the base with a filter for
2174 "(associateddomain=tjener.intern)" for the forward entry and
2175 "dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa," with a filter for
2176 "(associateddomain=2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa)" for the reverse entry. For
2177 forward entries, it is looking for attributes named dnsttl, arecord,
2178 nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord, ptrrecord, hinforecord, mxrecord,
2179 txtrecord, rprecord, afsdbrecord, keyrecord, aaaarecord, locrecord,
2180 srvrecord, naptrrecord, kxrecord, certrecord, dsrecord, sshfprecord,
2181 ipseckeyrecord, rrsigrecord, nsecrecord, dnskeyrecord, dhcidrecord,
2182 spfrecord and modifytimestamp. For reverse entries it is looking for
2183 the attributes dnsttl, arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord,
2184 ptrrecord, hinforecord, mxrecord, txtrecord, rprecord, aaaarecord,
2185 locrecord, srvrecord, naptrrecord and modifytimestamp. The equivalent
2186 ldapsearch commands could look like this:</p>
2187
2188 <blockquote><pre>
2189 ldapsearch -h ldap \
2190 -b dc=tjener,dc=intern,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no \
2191 -s base -x '(associateddomain=tjener.intern)' dNSTTL aRecord nSRecord \
2192 cNAMERecord sOARecord pTRRecord hInfoRecord mXRecord tXTRecord \
2193 rPRecord aFSDBRecord KeyRecord aAAARecord lOCRecord sRVRecord \
2194 nAPTRRecord kXRecord certRecord dSRecord sSHFPRecord iPSecKeyRecord \
2195 rRSIGRecord nSECRecord dNSKeyRecord dHCIDRecord sPFRecord modifyTimestamp
2196
2197 ldapsearch -h ldap \
2198 -b dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no \
2199 -s base -x '(associateddomain=2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa)'
2200 dnsttl, arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord soarecord ptrrecord \
2201 hinforecord mxrecord txtrecord rprecord aaaarecord locrecord \
2202 srvrecord naptrrecord modifytimestamp
2203 </pre></blockquote>
2204
2205 <p>In Debian Edu/Lenny, the PowerDNS tree mode is used with
2206 ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no as the base, and these are two
2207 example LDAP objects used there. In addition to these objects, the
2208 parent objects all th way up to ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
2209 also exist.</p>
2210
2211 <blockquote><pre>
2212 dn: dc=tjener,dc=intern,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
2213 objectclass: top
2214 objectclass: dnsdomain
2215 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
2216 dc: tjener
2217 arecord: 10.0.2.2
2218 associateddomain: tjener.intern
2219
2220 dn: dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
2221 objectclass: top
2222 objectclass: dnsdomain2
2223 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
2224 dc: 2
2225 ptrrecord: tjener.intern
2226 associateddomain: 2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa
2227 </pre></blockquote>
2228
2229 <p>In strict mode, the server behaves differently. When looking for
2230 forward DNS entries, it is doing a "subtree" scoped search with the
2231 same base as in the tree mode for a object with filter
2232 "(associateddomain=tjener.intern)" and requests the attributes dnsttl,
2233 arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord, ptrrecord, hinforecord,
2234 mxrecord, txtrecord, rprecord, aaaarecord, locrecord, srvrecord,
2235 naptrrecord and modifytimestamp. For reverse entires it also do a
2236 subtree scoped search but this time the filter is "(arecord=10.0.2.2)"
2237 and the requested attributes are associateddomain, dnsttl and
2238 modifytimestamp. In short, in strict mode the objects with ptrrecord
2239 go away, and the arecord attribute in the forward object is used
2240 instead.</p>
2241
2242 <p>The forward and reverse searches can be simulated using ldapsearch
2243 like this:</p>
2244
2245 <blockquote><pre>
2246 ldapsearch -h ldap -b ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no -s sub -x \
2247 '(associateddomain=tjener.intern)' dNSTTL aRecord nSRecord \
2248 cNAMERecord sOARecord pTRRecord hInfoRecord mXRecord tXTRecord \
2249 rPRecord aFSDBRecord KeyRecord aAAARecord lOCRecord sRVRecord \
2250 nAPTRRecord kXRecord certRecord dSRecord sSHFPRecord iPSecKeyRecord \
2251 rRSIGRecord nSECRecord dNSKeyRecord dHCIDRecord sPFRecord modifyTimestamp
2252
2253 ldapsearch -h ldap -b ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no -s sub -x \
2254 '(arecord=10.0.2.2)' associateddomain dnsttl modifytimestamp
2255 </pre></blockquote>
2256
2257 <p>In addition to the forward and reverse searches , there is also a
2258 search for SOA records, which behave similar to the forward and
2259 reverse lookups.</p>
2260
2261 <p>A thing to note with the PowerDNS behaviour is that it do not
2262 specify any objectclass names, and instead look for the attributes it
2263 need to generate a DNS reply. This make it able to work with any
2264 objectclass that provide the needed attributes.</p>
2265
2266 <p>The attributes are normally provided in the cosine (RFC 1274) and
2267 dnsdomain2 schemas. The latter is used for reverse entries like
2268 ptrrecord and recent DNS additions like aaaarecord and srvrecord.</p>
2269
2270 <p>In Debian Edu, we have created DNS objects using the object classes
2271 dcobject (for dc), dnsdomain or dnsdomain2 (structural, for the DNS
2272 attributes) and domainrelatedobject (for associatedDomain). The use
2273 of structural object classes make it impossible to combine these
2274 classes with the object classes used by DHCP.</p>
2275
2276 <p>There are other schemas that could be used too, for example the
2277 dnszone structural object class used by Gosa and bind-sdb for the DNS
2278 attributes combined with the domainrelatedobject object class, but in
2279 this case some unused attributes would have to be included as well
2280 (zonename and relativedomainname).</p>
2281
2282 <p>My proposal for Debian Edu would be to switch PowerDNS to strict
2283 mode and not use any of the existing objectclasses (dnsdomain,
2284 dnsdomain2 and dnszone) when one want to combine the DNS information
2285 with DHCP information, and instead create a auxiliary object class
2286 defined something like this (using the attributes defined for
2287 dnsdomain and dnsdomain2 or dnszone):</p>
2288
2289 <blockquote><pre>
2290 objectclass ( some-oid NAME 'dnsDomainAux'
2291 SUP top
2292 AUXILIARY
2293 MAY ( ARecord $ MDRecord $ MXRecord $ NSRecord $ SOARecord $ CNAMERecord $
2294 DNSTTL $ DNSClass $ PTRRecord $ HINFORecord $ MINFORecord $
2295 TXTRecord $ SIGRecord $ KEYRecord $ AAAARecord $ LOCRecord $
2296 NXTRecord $ SRVRecord $ NAPTRRecord $ KXRecord $ CERTRecord $
2297 A6Record $ DNAMERecord
2298 ))
2299 </pre></blockquote>
2300
2301 <p>This will allow any object to become a DNS entry when combined with
2302 the domainrelatedobject object class, and allow any entity to include
2303 all the attributes PowerDNS wants. I've sent an email to the PowerDNS
2304 developers asking for their view on this schema and if they are
2305 interested in providing such schema with PowerDNS, and I hope my
2306 message will be accepted into their mailing list soon.</p>
2307
2308 <p><strong>ISC dhcp</strong></p>
2309
2310 <p>The DHCP server searches for specific objectclass and requests all
2311 the object attributes, and then uses the attributes it want. This
2312 make it harder to figure out exactly what attributes are used, but
2313 thanks to the working example in Debian Edu I can at least get an idea
2314 what is needed without having to read the source code.</p>
2315
2316 <p>In the DHCP server configuration, the LDAP base to use and the
2317 search filter to use to locate the correct dhcpServer entity is
2318 stored. These are the relevant entries from
2319 /etc/dhcp3/dhcpd.conf:</p>
2320
2321 <blockquote><pre>
2322 ldap-base-dn "dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no";
2323 ldap-dhcp-server-cn "dhcp";
2324 </pre></blockquote>
2325
2326 <p>The DHCP server uses this information to nest all the DHCP
2327 configuration it need. The cn "dhcp" is located using the given LDAP
2328 base and the filter "(&(objectClass=dhcpServer)(cn=dhcp))". The
2329 search result is this entry:</p>
2330
2331 <blockquote><pre>
2332 dn: cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
2333 cn: dhcp
2334 objectClass: top
2335 objectClass: dhcpServer
2336 dhcpServiceDN: cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
2337 </pre></blockquote>
2338
2339 <p>The content of the dhcpServiceDN attribute is next used to locate the
2340 subtree with DHCP configuration. The DHCP configuration subtree base
2341 is located using a base scope search with base "cn=DHCP
2342 Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no" and filter
2343 "(&(objectClass=dhcpService)(|(dhcpPrimaryDN=cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no)(dhcpSecondaryDN=cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no)))".
2344 The search result is this entry:</p>
2345
2346 <blockquote><pre>
2347 dn: cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
2348 cn: DHCP Config
2349 objectClass: top
2350 objectClass: dhcpService
2351 objectClass: dhcpOptions
2352 dhcpPrimaryDN: cn=dhcp, dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
2353 dhcpStatements: ddns-update-style none
2354 dhcpStatements: authoritative
2355 dhcpOption: smtp-server code 69 = array of ip-address
2356 dhcpOption: www-server code 72 = array of ip-address
2357 dhcpOption: wpad-url code 252 = text
2358 </pre></blockquote>
2359
2360 <p>Next, the entire subtree is processed, one level at the time. When
2361 all the DHCP configuration is loaded, it is ready to receive requests.
2362 The subtree in Debian Edu contain objects with object classes
2363 top/dhcpService/dhcpOptions, top/dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions,
2364 top/dhcpSubnet, top/dhcpGroup and top/dhcpHost. These provide options
2365 and information about netmasks, dynamic range etc. Leaving out the
2366 details here because it is not relevant for the focus of my
2367 investigation, which is to see if it is possible to merge dns and dhcp
2368 related computer objects.</p>
2369
2370 <p>When a DHCP request come in, LDAP is searched for the MAC address
2371 of the client (00:00:00:00:00:00 in this example), using a subtree
2372 scoped search with "cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no" as
2373 the base and "(&(objectClass=dhcpHost)(dhcpHWAddress=ethernet
2374 00:00:00:00:00:00))" as the filter. This is what a host object look
2375 like:</p>
2376
2377 <blockquote><pre>
2378 dn: cn=hostname,cn=group1,cn=THINCLIENTS,cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
2379 cn: hostname
2380 objectClass: top
2381 objectClass: dhcpHost
2382 dhcpHWAddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
2383 dhcpStatements: fixed-address hostname
2384 </pre></blockquote>
2385
2386 <p>There is less flexiblity in the way LDAP searches are done here.
2387 The object classes need to have fixed names, and the configuration
2388 need to be stored in a fairly specific LDAP structure. On the
2389 positive side, the invidiual dhcpHost entires can be anywhere without
2390 the DN pointed to by the dhcpServer entries. The latter should make
2391 it possible to group all host entries in a subtree next to the
2392 configuration entries, and this subtree can also be shared with the
2393 DNS server if the schema proposed above is combined with the dhcpHost
2394 structural object class.
2395
2396 <p><strong>Conclusion</strong></p>
2397
2398 <p>The PowerDNS implementation seem to be very flexible when it come
2399 to which LDAP schemas to use. While its "tree" mode is rigid when it
2400 come to the the LDAP structure, the "strict" mode is very flexible,
2401 allowing DNS objects to be stored anywhere under the base cn specified
2402 in the configuration.</p>
2403
2404 <p>The DHCP implementation on the other hand is very inflexible, both
2405 regarding which LDAP schemas to use and which LDAP structure to use.
2406 I guess one could implement ones own schema, as long as the
2407 objectclasses and attributes have the names used, but this do not
2408 really help when the DHCP subtree need to have a fairly fixed
2409 structure.</p>
2410
2411 <p>Based on the observed behaviour, I suspect a LDAP structure like
2412 this might work for Debian Edu:</p>
2413
2414 <blockquote><pre>
2415 ou=services
2416 cn=machine-info (dhcpService) - dhcpServiceDN points here
2417 cn=dhcp (dhcpServer)
2418 cn=dhcp-internal (dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions)
2419 cn=10.0.2.0 (dhcpSubnet)
2420 cn=group1 (dhcpGroup/dhcpOptions)
2421 cn=dhcp-thinclients (dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions)
2422 cn=192.168.0.0 (dhcpSubnet)
2423 cn=group1 (dhcpGroup/dhcpOptions)
2424 ou=machines - PowerDNS base points here
2425 cn=hostname (dhcpHost/domainrelatedobject/dnsDomainAux)
2426 </pre></blockquote>
2427
2428 <P>This is not tested yet. If the DHCP server require the dhcpHost
2429 entries to be in the dhcpGroup subtrees, the entries can be stored
2430 there instead of a common machines subtree, and the PowerDNS base
2431 would have to be moved one level up to the machine-info subtree.</p>
2432
2433 <p>The combined object under the machines subtree would look something
2434 like this:</p>
2435
2436 <blockquote><pre>
2437 dn: dc=hostname,ou=machines,cn=machine-info,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
2438 dc: hostname
2439 objectClass: top
2440 objectClass: dhcpHost
2441 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
2442 objectclass: dnsDomainAux
2443 associateddomain: hostname.intern
2444 arecord: 10.11.12.13
2445 dhcpHWAddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
2446 dhcpStatements: fixed-address hostname.intern
2447 </pre></blockquote>
2448
2449 </p>One could even add the LTSP configuration associated with a given
2450 machine, as long as the required attributes are available in a
2451 auxiliary object class.</p>
2452
2453 </div>
2454 <div class="tags">
2455
2456
2457 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
2458
2459
2460 </div>
2461 </div>
2462 <div class="padding"></div>
2463
2464 <div class="entry">
2465 <div class="title">
2466 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Combining_PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_LDAP_objects.html">Combining PowerDNS and ISC DHCP LDAP objects</a>
2467 </div>
2468 <div class="date">
2469 14th July 2010
2470 </div>
2471 <div class="body">
2472 <p>For a while now, I have wanted to find a way to change the DNS and
2473 DHCP services in Debian Edu to use the same LDAP objects for a given
2474 computer, to avoid the possibility of having a inconsistent state for
2475 a computer in LDAP (as in DHCP but no DNS entry or the other way
2476 around) and make it easier to add computers to LDAP.</p>
2477
2478 <p>I've looked at how powerdns and dhcpd is using LDAP, and using this
2479 information finally found a solution that seem to work.</p>
2480
2481 <p>The old setup required three LDAP objects for a given computer.
2482 One forward DNS entry, one reverse DNS entry and one DHCP entry. If
2483 we switch powerdns to use its strict LDAP method (ldap-method=strict
2484 in pdns-debian-edu.conf), the forward and reverse DNS entries are
2485 merged into one while making it impossible to transfer the reverse map
2486 to a slave DNS server.</p>
2487
2488 <p>If we also replace the object class used to get the DNS related
2489 attributes to one allowing these attributes to be combined with the
2490 dhcphost object class, we can merge the DNS and DHCP entries into one.
2491 I've written such object class in the dnsdomainaux.schema file (need
2492 proper OIDs, but that is a minor issue), and tested the setup. It
2493 seem to work.</p>
2494
2495 <p>With this test setup in place, we can get away with one LDAP object
2496 for both DNS and DHCP, and even the LTSP configuration I suggested in
2497 an earlier email. The combined LDAP object will look something like
2498 this:</p>
2499
2500 <blockquote><pre>
2501 dn: cn=hostname,cn=group1,cn=THINCLIENTS,cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
2502 cn: hostname
2503 objectClass: dhcphost
2504 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
2505 objectclass: dnsdomainaux
2506 associateddomain: hostname.intern
2507 arecord: 10.11.12.13
2508 dhcphwaddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
2509 dhcpstatements: fixed-address hostname
2510 ldapconfigsound: Y
2511 </pre></blockquote>
2512
2513 <p>The DNS server uses the associateddomain and arecord entries, while
2514 the DHCP server uses the dhcphwaddress and dhcpstatements entries
2515 before asking DNS to resolve the fixed-adddress. LTSP will use
2516 dhcphwaddress or associateddomain and the ldapconfig* attributes.</p>
2517
2518 <p>I am not yet sure if I can get the DHCP server to look for its
2519 dhcphost in a different location, to allow us to put the objects
2520 outside the "DHCP Config" subtree, but hope to figure out a way to do
2521 that. If I can't figure out a way to do that, we can still get rid of
2522 the hosts subtree and move all its content into the DHCP Config tree
2523 (which probably should be renamed to be more related to the new
2524 content. I suspect cn=dnsdhcp,ou=services or something like that
2525 might be a good place to put it.</p>
2526
2527 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
2528 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
2529
2530 </div>
2531 <div class="tags">
2532
2533
2534 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
2535
2536
2537 </div>
2538 </div>
2539 <div class="padding"></div>
2540
2541 <div class="entry">
2542 <div class="title">
2543 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Idea_for_storing_LTSP_configuration_in_LDAP.html">Idea for storing LTSP configuration in LDAP</a>
2544 </div>
2545 <div class="date">
2546 11th July 2010
2547 </div>
2548 <div class="body">
2549 <p>Vagrant mentioned on IRC today that ltsp_config now support
2550 sourcing files from /usr/share/ltsp/ltsp_config.d/ on the thin
2551 clients, and that this can be used to fetch configuration from LDAP if
2552 Debian Edu choose to store configuration there.</p>
2553
2554 <p>Armed with this information, I got inspired and wrote a test module
2555 to get configuration from LDAP. The idea is to look up the MAC
2556 address of the client in LDAP, and look for attributes on the form
2557 ltspconfigsetting=value, and use this to export SETTING=value to the
2558 LTSP clients.</p>
2559
2560 <p>The goal is to be able to store the LTSP configuration attributes
2561 in a "computer" LDAP object used by both DNS and DHCP, and thus
2562 allowing us to store all information about a computer in one place.</p>
2563
2564 <p>This is a untested draft implementation, and I welcome feedback on
2565 this approach. A real LDAP schema for the ltspClientAux objectclass
2566 need to be written. Comments, suggestions, etc?</p>
2567
2568 <blockquote><pre>
2569 # Store in /opt/ltsp/$arch/usr/share/ltsp/ltsp_config.d/ldap-config
2570 #
2571 # Fetch LTSP client settings from LDAP based on MAC address
2572 #
2573 # Uses ethernet address as stored in the dhcpHost objectclass using
2574 # the dhcpHWAddress attribute or ethernet address stored in the
2575 # ieee802Device objectclass with the macAddress attribute.
2576 #
2577 # This module is written to be schema agnostic, and only depend on the
2578 # existence of attribute names.
2579 #
2580 # The LTSP configuration variables are saved directly using a
2581 # ltspConfig prefix and uppercasing the rest of the attribute name.
2582 # To set the SERVER variable, set the ltspConfigServer attribute.
2583 #
2584 # Some LDAP schema should be created with all the relevant
2585 # configuration settings. Something like this should work:
2586 #
2587 # objectclass ( 1.1.2.2 NAME 'ltspClientAux'
2588 # SUP top
2589 # AUXILIARY
2590 # MAY ( ltspConfigServer $ ltsConfigSound $ ... )
2591
2592 LDAPSERVER=$(debian-edu-ldapserver)
2593 if [ "$LDAPSERVER" ] ; then
2594 LDAPBASE=$(debian-edu-ldapserver -b)
2595 for MAC in $(LANG=C ifconfig |grep -i hwaddr| awk '{print $5}'|sort -u) ; do
2596 filter="(|(dhcpHWAddress=ethernet $MAC)(macAddress=$MAC))"
2597 ldapsearch -h "$LDAPSERVER" -b "$LDAPBASE" -v -x "$filter" | \
2598 grep '^ltspConfig' | while read attr value ; do
2599 # Remove prefix and convert to upper case
2600 attr=$(echo $attr | sed 's/^ltspConfig//i' | tr a-z A-Z)
2601 # bass value on to clients
2602 eval "$attr=$value; export $attr"
2603 done
2604 done
2605 fi
2606 </pre></blockquote>
2607
2608 <p>I'm not sure this shell construction will work, because I suspect
2609 the while block might end up in a subshell causing the variables set
2610 there to not show up in ltsp-config, but if that is the case I am sure
2611 the code can be restructured to make sure the variables are passed on.
2612 I expect that can be solved with some testing. :)</p>
2613
2614 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
2615 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
2616
2617 <p>Update 2010-07-17: I am aware of another effort to store LTSP
2618 configuration in LDAP that was created around year 2000 by
2619 <a href="http://www.pcxperience.com/thinclient/documentation/ldap.html">PC
2620 Xperience, Inc., 2000</a>. I found its
2621 <a href="http://people.redhat.com/alikins/ltsp/ldap/">files</a> on a
2622 personal home page over at redhat.com.</p>
2623
2624 </div>
2625 <div class="tags">
2626
2627
2628 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
2629
2630
2631 </div>
2632 </div>
2633 <div class="padding"></div>
2634
2635 <div class="entry">
2636 <div class="title">
2637 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/jXplorer__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">jXplorer, a very nice LDAP GUI</a>
2638 </div>
2639 <div class="date">
2640 9th July 2010
2641 </div>
2642 <div class="body">
2643 <p>Since
2644 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LUMA__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">my
2645 last post</a> about available LDAP tools in Debian, I was told about a
2646 LDAP GUI that is even better than luma. The java application
2647 <a href="http://jxplorer.org/">jXplorer</a> is claimed to be capable of
2648 moving LDAP objects and subtrees using drag-and-drop, and can
2649 authenticate using Kerberos. I have only tested the Kerberos
2650 authentication, but do not have a LDAP setup allowing me to rewrite
2651 LDAP with my test user yet. It is
2652 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/j/jxplorer.html">available in
2653 Debian</a> testing and unstable at the moment. The only problem I
2654 have with it is how it handle errors. If something go wrong, its
2655 non-intuitive behaviour require me to go through some query work list
2656 and remove the failing query. Nothing big, but very annoying.</p>
2657
2658 </div>
2659 <div class="tags">
2660
2661
2662 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
2663
2664
2665 </div>
2666 </div>
2667 <div class="padding"></div>
2668
2669 <div class="entry">
2670 <div class="title">
2671 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades__apt_vs_aptitude_with_the_Gnome_desktop.html">Lenny->Squeeze upgrades, apt vs aptitude with the Gnome desktop</a>
2672 </div>
2673 <div class="date">
2674 3rd July 2010
2675 </div>
2676 <div class="body">
2677 <p>Here is a short update on my <a
2678 href="http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">my
2679 Debian Lenny->Squeeze upgrade testing</a>. Here is a summary of the
2680 difference for Gnome when it is upgraded by apt-get and aptitude. I'm
2681 not reporting the status for KDE, because the upgrade crashes when
2682 aptitude try because of missing conflicts
2683 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584861">#584861</a> and
2684 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/585716">#585716</a>).</p>
2685
2686 <p>At the end of the upgrade test script, dpkg -l is executed to get a
2687 complete list of the installed packages. Based on this I see these
2688 differences when I did a test run today. As usual, I do not really
2689 know what the correct set of packages would be, but thought it best to
2690 publish the difference.</p>
2691
2692 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude</p>
2693
2694 <blockquote><p>
2695 at-spi cpp-4.3 finger gnome-spell gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
2696 libatspi1.0-0 libcupsys2 libeel2-data libgail-common libgdl-1-common
2697 libgnomeprint2.2-data libgnomeprintui2.2-common libgnomevfs2-bin
2698 libgtksourceview-common libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa
2699 libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libservlet2.4-java libxalan2-java
2700 libxerces2-java openoffice.org-writer2latex openssl-blacklist p7zip
2701 python-4suite-xml python-eggtrayicon python-gtkhtml2
2702 python-gtkmozembed svgalibg1 xserver-xephyr zip
2703 </p></blockquote>
2704
2705 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude</p>
2706
2707 <blockquote><p>
2708 bluez-utils dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop epiphany-gecko
2709 gnome-app-install gnome-mount gnome-vfs-obexftp gnome-volume-manager
2710 libao2 libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5 libbind9-50
2711 libbluetooth2 libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7 libcucul0 libcurl3
2712 libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdvdread3 libedata-cal1.2-6 libedataserver1.2-9
2713 libeel2-2.20 libepc-1.0-1 libepc-ui-1.0-1 libexchange-storage1.2-3
2714 libfaad0 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libggz2 libggzcore9
2715 libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0 libgnome-desktop-2
2716 libgnome-pilot2 libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomeprint2.2-0
2717 libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtkhtml2-0
2718 libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgucharmap6 libhesiod0 libicu38 libisccc50
2719 libisccfg50 libiw29 libkpathsea4 libltdl3 liblwres50 libmagick++10
2720 libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmtp7 libmysqlclient15off libnautilus-burn4
2721 libneon27 libnm-glib0 libnm-util0 libopal-2.2 libosp5
2722 libparted1.8-10 libpisock9 libpisync1 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3
2723 libpt-1.10.10 libraw1394-8 libsensors3 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8
2724 libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1
2725 libtotem-plparser10 libtrackerclient0 libvoikko1 libxalan2-java-gcj
2726 libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12 libxtrap6 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3
2727 mysql-common swfdec-gnome totem-gstreamer wodim
2728 </p></blockquote>
2729
2730 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get</p>
2731
2732 <blockquote><p>
2733 gnome gnome-desktop-environment hamster-applet python-gnomeapplet
2734 python-gnomekeyring python-wnck rhythmbox-plugins xorg
2735 xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
2736 xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
2737 xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-video-all
2738 xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark xserver-xorg-video-ati
2739 xserver-xorg-video-chips xserver-xorg-video-cirrus
2740 xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
2741 xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
2742 xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-mach64
2743 xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
2744 xserver-xorg-video-nouveau xserver-xorg-video-nv
2745 xserver-xorg-video-r128 xserver-xorg-video-radeon
2746 xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd xserver-xorg-video-rendition
2747 xserver-xorg-video-s3 xserver-xorg-video-s3virge
2748 xserver-xorg-video-savage xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion
2749 xserver-xorg-video-sis xserver-xorg-video-sisusb
2750 xserver-xorg-video-tdfx xserver-xorg-video-tga
2751 xserver-xorg-video-trident xserver-xorg-video-tseng
2752 xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vmware
2753 xserver-xorg-video-voodoo
2754 </p></blockquote>
2755
2756 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get</p>
2757
2758 <blockquote><p>
2759 deskbar-applet xserver-xorg xserver-xorg-core
2760 xserver-xorg-input-wacom xserver-xorg-video-intel
2761 xserver-xorg-video-openchrome
2762 </p></blockquote>
2763
2764 <p>I was told on IRC that the xorg-xserver package was
2765 <a href="http://git.debian.org/?p=pkg-xorg/xserver/xorg-server.git;a=commit;h=9c8080d06c457932d3bfec021c69ac000aa60120">changed
2766 in git</a> today to try to get apt-get to not remove xorg completely.
2767 No idea when it hits Squeeze, but when it does I hope it will reduce
2768 the difference somewhat.
2769
2770 </div>
2771 <div class="tags">
2772
2773
2774 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
2775
2776
2777 </div>
2778 </div>
2779 <div class="padding"></div>
2780
2781 <div class="entry">
2782 <div class="title">
2783 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LUMA__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">LUMA, a very nice LDAP GUI</a>
2784 </div>
2785 <div class="date">
2786 28th June 2010
2787 </div>
2788 <div class="body">
2789 <p>The last few days I have been looking into the status of the LDAP
2790 directory in Debian Edu, and in the process I started to miss a GUI
2791 tool to browse the LDAP tree. The only one I was able to find in
2792 Debian/Squeeze and Lenny is
2793 <a href="http://luma.sourceforge.net/">LUMA</a>, which has proved to
2794 be a great tool to get a overview of the current LDAP directory
2795 populated by default in Skolelinux. Thanks to it, I have been able to
2796 find empty and obsolete subtrees, misplaced objects and duplicate
2797 objects. It will be installed by default in Debian/Squeeze. If you
2798 are working with LDAP, give it a go. :)</p>
2799
2800 <p>I did notice one problem with it I have not had time to report to
2801 the BTS yet. There is no .desktop file in the package, so the tool do
2802 not show up in the Gnome and KDE menus, but only deep down in in the
2803 Debian submenu in KDE. I hope that can be fixed before Squeeze is
2804 released.</p>
2805
2806 <p>I have not yet been able to get it to modify the tree yet. I would
2807 like to move objects and remove subtrees directly in the GUI, but have
2808 not found a way to do that with LUMA yet. So in the mean time, I use
2809 <a href="http://www.lichteblau.com/ldapvi/">ldapvi</a> for that.</p>
2810
2811 <p>If you have tips on other GUI tools for LDAP that might be useful
2812 in Debian Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
2813
2814 <p>Update 2010-06-29: Ross Reedstrom tipped us about the
2815 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/g/gq.html">gq</a> package as a
2816 useful GUI alternative. It seem like a good tool, but is unmaintained
2817 in Debian and got a RC bug keeping it out of Squeeze. Unless that
2818 changes, it will not be an option for Debian Edu based on Squeeze.</p>
2819
2820 </div>
2821 <div class="tags">
2822
2823
2824 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
2825
2826
2827 </div>
2828 </div>
2829 <div class="padding"></div>
2830
2831 <div class="entry">
2832 <div class="title">
2833 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Idea_for_a_change_to_LDAP_schemas_allowing_DNS_and_DHCP_info_to_be_combined_into_one_object.html">Idea for a change to LDAP schemas allowing DNS and DHCP info to be combined into one object</a>
2834 </div>
2835 <div class="date">
2836 24th June 2010
2837 </div>
2838 <div class="body">
2839 <p>A while back, I
2840 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html">complained
2841 about the fact</a> that it is not possible with the provided schemas
2842 for storing DNS and DHCP information in LDAP to combine the two sets
2843 of information into one LDAP object representing a computer.</p>
2844
2845 <p>In the mean time, I discovered that a simple fix would be to make
2846 the dhcpHost object class auxiliary, to allow it to be combined with
2847 the dNSDomain object class, and thus forming one object for one
2848 computer when storing both DHCP and DNS information in LDAP.</p>
2849
2850 <p>If I understand this correctly, it is not safe to do this change
2851 without also changing the assigned number for the object class, and I
2852 do not know enough about LDAP schema design to do that properly for
2853 Debian Edu.</p>
2854
2855 <p>Anyway, for future reference, this is how I believe we could change
2856 the
2857 <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-dhc-ldap-schema-00">DHCP
2858 schema</a> to solve at least part of the problem with the LDAP schemas
2859 available today from IETF.</p>
2860
2861 <pre>
2862 --- dhcp.schema (revision 65192)
2863 +++ dhcp.schema (working copy)
2864 @@ -376,7 +376,7 @@
2865 objectclass ( 2.16.840.1.113719.1.203.6.6
2866 NAME 'dhcpHost'
2867 DESC 'This represents information about a particular client'
2868 - SUP top
2869 + SUP top AUXILIARY
2870 MUST cn
2871 MAY (dhcpLeaseDN $ dhcpHWAddress $ dhcpOptionsDN $ dhcpStatements $ dhcpComments $ dhcpOption)
2872 X-NDS_CONTAINMENT ('dhcpService' 'dhcpSubnet' 'dhcpGroup') )
2873 </pre>
2874
2875 <p>I very much welcome clues on how to do this properly for Debian
2876 Edu/Squeeze. We provide the DHCP schema in our debian-edu-config
2877 package, and should thus be free to rewrite it as we see fit.</p>
2878
2879 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
2880 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
2881
2882 </div>
2883 <div class="tags">
2884
2885
2886 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
2887
2888
2889 </div>
2890 </div>
2891 <div class="padding"></div>
2892
2893 <div class="entry">
2894 <div class="title">
2895 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Calling_tasksel_like_the_installer__while_still_getting_useful_output.html">Calling tasksel like the installer, while still getting useful output</a>
2896 </div>
2897 <div class="date">
2898 16th June 2010
2899 </div>
2900 <div class="body">
2901 <p>A few times I have had the need to simulate the way tasksel
2902 installs packages during the normal debian-installer run. Until now,
2903 I have ended up letting tasksel do the work, with the annoying problem
2904 of not getting any feedback at all when something fails (like a
2905 conffile question from dpkg or a download that fails), using code like
2906 this:
2907
2908 <blockquote><pre>
2909 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
2910 tasksel --new-install
2911 </pre></blockquote>
2912
2913 This would invoke tasksel, let its automatic task selection pick the
2914 tasks to install, and continue to install the requested tasks without
2915 any output what so ever.
2916
2917 Recently I revisited this problem while working on the automatic
2918 package upgrade testing, because tasksel would some times hang without
2919 any useful feedback, and I want to see what is going on when it
2920 happen. Then it occured to me, I can parse the output from tasksel
2921 when asked to run in test mode, and use that aptitude command line
2922 printed by tasksel then to simulate the tasksel run. I ended up using
2923 code like this:
2924
2925 <blockquote><pre>
2926 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
2927 cmd="$(in_target tasksel -t --new-install | sed 's/debconf-apt-progress -- //')"
2928 $cmd
2929 </pre></blockquote>
2930
2931 <p>The content of $cmd is typically something like "<tt>aptitude -q
2932 --without-recommends -o APT::Install-Recommends=no -y install
2933 ~t^desktop$ ~t^gnome-desktop$ ~t^laptop$ ~pstandard ~prequired
2934 ~pimportant</tt>", which will install the gnome desktop task, the
2935 laptop task and all packages with priority standard , required and
2936 important, just like tasksel would have done it during
2937 installation.</p>
2938
2939 <p>A better approach is probably to extend tasksel to be able to
2940 install packages without using debconf-apt-progress, for use cases
2941 like this.</p>
2942
2943 </div>
2944 <div class="tags">
2945
2946
2947 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
2948
2949
2950 </div>
2951 </div>
2952 <div class="padding"></div>
2953
2954 <div class="entry">
2955 <div class="title">
2956 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lenny__Squeeze_upgrades__removals_by_apt_and_aptitude.html">Lenny->Squeeze upgrades, removals by apt and aptitude</a>
2957 </div>
2958 <div class="date">
2959 13th June 2010
2960 </div>
2961 <div class="body">
2962 <p>My
2963 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">testing
2964 of Debian upgrades</a> from Lenny to Squeeze continues, and I've
2965 finally made the upgrade logs available from
2966 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-upgrade-testing/</a>.
2967 I am now testing dist-upgrade of Gnome and KDE in a chroot using both
2968 apt and aptitude, and found their differences interesting. This time
2969 I will only focus on their removal plans.</p>
2970
2971 <p>After installing a Gnome desktop and the laptop task, apt-get wants
2972 to remove 72 packages when dist-upgrading from Lenny to Squeeze. The
2973 surprising part is that it want to remove xorg and all
2974 xserver-xorg-video* drivers. Clearly not a good choice, but I am not
2975 sure why. When asking aptitude to do the same, it want to remove 129
2976 packages, but most of them are library packages I suspect are no
2977 longer needed. Both of them want to remove bluetooth packages, which
2978 I do not know. Perhaps these bluetooth packages are obsolete?</p>
2979
2980 <p>For KDE, apt-get want to remove 82 packages, among them kdebase
2981 which seem like a bad idea and xorg the same way as with Gnome. Asking
2982 aptitude for the same, it wants to remove 192 packages, none which are
2983 too surprising.</p>
2984
2985 <p>I guess the removal of xorg during upgrades should be investigated
2986 and avoided, and perhaps others as well. Here are the complete list
2987 of planned removals. The complete logs is available from the URL
2988 above. Note if you want to repeat these tests, that the upgrade test
2989 for kde+apt-get hung in the tasksel setup because of dpkg asking
2990 conffile questions. No idea why. I worked around it by using
2991 '<tt>echo >> /proc/<em>pidofdpkg</em>/fd/0</tt>' to tell dpkg to
2992 continue.</p>
2993
2994 <p><b>apt-get gnome 72</b>
2995 <br>bluez-gnome cupsddk-drivers deskbar-applet gnome
2996 gnome-desktop-environment gnome-network-admin gtkhtml3.14
2997 iceweasel-gnome-support libavcodec51 libdatrie0 libgdl-1-0
2998 libgnomekbd2 libgnomekbdui2 libmetacity0 libslab0 libxcb-xlib0
2999 nautilus-cd-burner python-gnome2-desktop python-gnome2-extras
3000 serpentine swfdec-mozilla update-manager xorg xserver-xorg
3001 xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
3002 xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
3003 xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-wacom
3004 xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark
3005 xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-chips
3006 xserver-xorg-video-cirrus xserver-xorg-video-cyrix
3007 xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
3008 xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
3009 xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-imstt
3010 xserver-xorg-video-intel xserver-xorg-video-mach64
3011 xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
3012 xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-nv
3013 xserver-xorg-video-openchrome xserver-xorg-video-r128
3014 xserver-xorg-video-radeon xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd
3015 xserver-xorg-video-rendition xserver-xorg-video-s3
3016 xserver-xorg-video-s3virge xserver-xorg-video-savage
3017 xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion xserver-xorg-video-sis
3018 xserver-xorg-video-sisusb xserver-xorg-video-tdfx
3019 xserver-xorg-video-tga xserver-xorg-video-trident
3020 xserver-xorg-video-tseng xserver-xorg-video-v4l
3021 xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vga
3022 xserver-xorg-video-vmware xserver-xorg-video-voodoo xulrunner-1.9
3023 xulrunner-1.9-gnome-support</p>
3024
3025 <p><b>aptitude gnome 129</b>
3026
3027 <br>bluez-gnome bluez-utils cpp-4.3 cupsddk-drivers dhcdbd
3028 djvulibre-desktop finger gnome-app-install gnome-mount
3029 gnome-network-admin gnome-spell gnome-vfs-obexftp
3030 gnome-volume-manager gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs gtkhtml3.14 libao2
3031 libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5 libavcodec51 libbluetooth2
3032 libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7 libcucul0 libcupsys2 libcurl3 libdatrie0
3033 libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdvdread3 libedataserver1.2-9 libeel2-2.20
3034 libeel2-data libepc-1.0-1 libepc-ui-1.0-1 libfaad0 libgail-common
3035 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libgdl-1-0 libgdl-1-common
3036 libggz2 libggzcore9 libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0
3037 libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomekbd2 libgnomekbdui2 libgnomeprint2.2-0
3038 libgnomeprint2.2-data libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgnomeprintui2.2-common
3039 libgnomevfs2-bin libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtkhtml2-0
3040 libgtksourceview-common libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgucharmap6
3041 libhesiod0 libicu38 libiw29 libkpathsea4 libltdl3 libmagick++10
3042 libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmetacity0 libmtp7 libmysqlclient15off
3043 libnautilus-burn4 libneon27 libnm-glib0 libnm-util0 libopal-2.2
3044 libosp5 libparted1.8-10 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3 libpt-1.10.10
3045 libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libraw1394-8
3046 libsensors3 libslab0 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8 libssh2-1
3047 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1 libtotem-plparser10
3048 libtrackerclient0 libxalan2-java libxalan2-java-gcj libxcb-xlib0
3049 libxerces2-java libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12 libxtrap6
3050 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3 mysql-common nautilus-cd-burner
3051 openoffice.org-writer2latex openssl-blacklist p7zip
3052 python-4suite-xml python-eggtrayicon python-gnome2-desktop
3053 python-gnome2-extras python-gtkhtml2 python-gtkmozembed
3054 python-numeric python-sexy serpentine svgalibg1 swfdec-gnome
3055 swfdec-mozilla totem-gstreamer update-manager wodim
3056 xserver-xorg-video-cyrix xserver-xorg-video-imstt
3057 xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-v4l xserver-xorg-video-vga
3058 zip</p>
3059
3060 <p><b>apt-get kde 82</b>
3061
3062 <br>cupsddk-drivers karm kaudiocreator kcoloredit kcontrol kde kde-core
3063 kdeaddons kdeartwork kdebase kdebase-bin kdebase-bin-kde3
3064 kdebase-kio-plugins kdesktop kdeutils khelpcenter kicker
3065 kicker-applets knewsticker kolourpaint konq-plugins konqueror korn
3066 kpersonalizer kscreensaver ksplash libavcodec51 libdatrie0 libkiten1
3067 libxcb-xlib0 quanta superkaramba texlive-base-bin xorg xserver-xorg
3068 xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
3069 xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
3070 xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-wacom
3071 xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark
3072 xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-chips
3073 xserver-xorg-video-cirrus xserver-xorg-video-cyrix
3074 xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
3075 xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
3076 xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-imstt
3077 xserver-xorg-video-intel xserver-xorg-video-mach64
3078 xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
3079 xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-nv
3080 xserver-xorg-video-openchrome xserver-xorg-video-r128
3081 xserver-xorg-video-radeon xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd
3082 xserver-xorg-video-rendition xserver-xorg-video-s3
3083 xserver-xorg-video-s3virge xserver-xorg-video-savage
3084 xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion xserver-xorg-video-sis
3085 xserver-xorg-video-sisusb xserver-xorg-video-tdfx
3086 xserver-xorg-video-tga xserver-xorg-video-trident
3087 xserver-xorg-video-tseng xserver-xorg-video-v4l
3088 xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vga
3089 xserver-xorg-video-vmware xserver-xorg-video-voodoo xulrunner-1.9</p>
3090
3091 <p><b>aptitude kde 192</b>
3092 <br>bluez-utils cpp-4.3 cupsddk-drivers cvs dcoprss dhcdbd
3093 djvulibre-desktop dosfstools eyesapplet fifteenapplet finger gettext
3094 ghostscript-x imlib-base imlib11 indi kandy karm kasteroids
3095 kaudiocreator kbackgammon kbstate kcoloredit kcontrol kcron kdat
3096 kdeadmin-kfile-plugins kdeartwork-misc kdeartwork-theme-window
3097 kdebase-bin-kde3 kdebase-kio-plugins kdeedu-data
3098 kdegraphics-kfile-plugins kdelirc kdemultimedia-kappfinder-data
3099 kdemultimedia-kfile-plugins kdenetwork-kfile-plugins
3100 kdepim-kfile-plugins kdepim-kio-plugins kdeprint kdesktop kdessh
3101 kdict kdnssd kdvi kedit keduca kenolaba kfax kfaxview kfouleggs
3102 kghostview khelpcenter khexedit kiconedit kitchensync klatin
3103 klickety kmailcvt kmenuedit kmid kmilo kmoon kmrml kodo kolourpaint
3104 kooka korn kpager kpdf kpercentage kpf kpilot kpoker kpovmodeler
3105 krec kregexpeditor ksayit ksim ksirc ksirtet ksmiletris ksmserver
3106 ksnake ksokoban ksplash ksvg ksysv ktip ktnef kuickshow kverbos
3107 kview kviewshell kvoctrain kwifimanager kwin kwin4 kworldclock
3108 kxsldbg libakode2 libao2 libarts1-akode libarts1-audiofile
3109 libarts1-mpeglib libarts1-xine libavahi-compat-libdnssd1
3110 libavahi-core5 libavc1394-0 libavcodec51 libbluetooth2
3111 libboost-python1.34.1 libcucul0 libcurl3 libcvsservice0 libdatrie0
3112 libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdjvulibre21 libdvdread3 libfaad0 libfreebob0
3113 libgail-common libgd2-noxpm libgraphviz4 libgsmme1c2a libgtkhtml2-0
3114 libicu38 libiec61883-0 libindex0 libiw29 libk3b3 libkcal2b libkcddb1
3115 libkdeedu3 libkdepim1a libkgantt0 libkiten1 libkleopatra1 libkmime2
3116 libkpathsea4 libkpimexchange1 libkpimidentities1 libkscan1
3117 libksieve0 libktnef1 liblockdev1 libltdl3 libmagick10 libmimelib1c2a
3118 libmozjs1d libmpcdec3 libneon27 libnm-util0 libopensync0 libpisock9
3119 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler-qt2 libpoppler3 libraw1394-8 libsmbios2
3120 libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libtalloc1 libtiff-tools
3121 libxalan2-java libxalan2-java-gcj libxcb-xlib0 libxerces2-java
3122 libxerces2-java-gcj libxtrap6 mpeglib networkstatus
3123 openoffice.org-writer2latex pmount poster psutils quanta quanta-data
3124 superkaramba svgalibg1 tex-common texlive-base texlive-base-bin
3125 texlive-common texlive-doc-base texlive-fonts-recommended
3126 xserver-xorg-video-cyrix xserver-xorg-video-imstt
3127 xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-v4l xserver-xorg-video-vga
3128 xulrunner-1.9</p>
3129
3130
3131 </div>
3132 <div class="tags">
3133
3134
3135 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
3136
3137
3138 </div>
3139 </div>
3140 <div class="padding"></div>
3141
3142 <div class="entry">
3143 <div class="title">
3144 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">Automatic upgrade testing from Lenny to Squeeze</a>
3145 </div>
3146 <div class="date">
3147 11th June 2010
3148 </div>
3149 <div class="body">
3150 <p>The last few days I have done some upgrade testing in Debian, to
3151 see if the upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze will go smoothly. A few bugs
3152 have been discovered and reported in the process
3153 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/585410">#585410</a> in nagios3-cgi,
3154 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584879">#584879</a> already fixed in
3155 enscript and <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584861">#584861</a> in
3156 kdebase-workspace-data), and to get a more regular testing going on, I
3157 am working on a script to automate the test.</p>
3158
3159 <p>The idea is to create a Lenny chroot and use tasksel to install a
3160 Gnome or KDE desktop installation inside the chroot before upgrading
3161 it. To ensure no services are started in the chroot, a policy-rc.d
3162 script is inserted. To make sure tasksel believe it is to install a
3163 desktop on a laptop, the tasksel tests are replaced in the chroot
3164 (only acceptable because this is a throw-away chroot).</p>
3165
3166 <p>A naive upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze using aptitude dist-upgrade
3167 currently always fail because udev refuses to upgrade with the kernel
3168 in Lenny, so to avoid that problem the file /etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
3169 is created. The bug report
3170 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/566000">#566000</a> make me suspect
3171 this problem do not trigger in a chroot, but I touch the file anyway
3172 to make sure the upgrade go well. Testing on virtual and real
3173 hardware have failed me because of udev so far, and creating this file
3174 do the trick in such settings anyway. This is a
3175 <a href="http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/debian-26/failed-dist-upgrade-due-to-udev-config_sysfs_deprecated-nonsense-804130/">known
3176 issue</a> and the current udev behaviour is intended by the udev
3177 maintainer because he lack the resources to rewrite udev to keep
3178 working with old kernels or something like that. I really wish the
3179 udev upstream would keep udev backwards compatible, to avoid such
3180 upgrade problem, but given that they fail to do so, I guess
3181 documenting the way out of this mess is the best option we got for
3182 Debian Squeeze.</p>
3183
3184 <p>Anyway, back to the task at hand, testing upgrades. This test
3185 script, which I call <tt>upgrade-test</tt> for now, is doing the
3186 trick:</p>
3187
3188 <blockquote><pre>
3189 #!/bin/sh
3190 set -ex
3191
3192 if [ "$1" ] ; then
3193 desktop=$1
3194 else
3195 desktop=gnome
3196 fi
3197
3198 from=lenny
3199 to=squeeze
3200
3201 exec &lt; /dev/null
3202 unset LANG
3203 mirror=http://ftp.skolelinux.org/debian
3204 tmpdir=chroot-$from-upgrade-$to-$desktop
3205 fuser -mv .
3206 debootstrap $from $tmpdir $mirror
3207 chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
3208 cat > $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d &lt;&lt;EOF
3209 #!/bin/sh
3210 exit 101
3211 EOF
3212 chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d
3213 exit_cleanup() {
3214 umount $tmpdir/proc
3215 }
3216 mount -t proc proc $tmpdir/proc
3217 # Make sure proc is unmounted also on failure
3218 trap exit_cleanup EXIT INT
3219
3220 chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y install debconf-utils
3221
3222 # Make sure tasksel autoselection trigger. It need the test scripts
3223 # to return the correct answers.
3224 echo tasksel tasksel/desktop multiselect $desktop | \
3225 chroot $tmpdir debconf-set-selections
3226
3227 # Include the desktop and laptop task
3228 for test in desktop laptop ; do
3229 echo > $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test &lt;&lt;EOF
3230 #!/bin/sh
3231 exit 2
3232 EOF
3233 chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test
3234 done
3235
3236 DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
3237 DEBIAN_PRIORITY=critical
3238 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND DEBIAN_PRIORITY
3239 chroot $tmpdir tasksel --new-install
3240
3241 echo deb $mirror $to main > $tmpdir/etc/apt/sources.list
3242 chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
3243 touch $tmpdir/etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
3244 chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y dist-upgrade
3245 fuser -mv
3246 </pre></blockquote>
3247
3248 <p>I suspect it would be useful to test upgrades with both apt-get and
3249 with aptitude, but I have not had time to look at how they behave
3250 differently so far. I hope to get a cron job running to do the test
3251 regularly and post the result on the web. The Gnome upgrade currently
3252 work, while the KDE upgrade fail because of the bug in
3253 kdebase-workspace-data</p>
3254
3255 <p>I am not quite sure what kind of extract from the huge upgrade logs
3256 (KDE 167 KiB, Gnome 516 KiB) it make sense to include in this blog
3257 post, so I will refrain from trying. I can report that for Gnome,
3258 aptitude report 760 packages upgraded, 448 newly installed, 129 to
3259 remove and 1 not upgraded and 1024MB need to be downloaded while for
3260 KDE the same numbers are 702 packages upgraded, 507 newly installed,
3261 193 to remove and 0 not upgraded and 1117MB need to be downloaded</p>
3262
3263 <p>I am very happy to notice that the Gnome desktop + laptop upgrade
3264 is able to migrate to dependency based boot sequencing and parallel
3265 booting without a hitch. Was unsure if there were still bugs with
3266 packages failing to clean up their obsolete init.d script during
3267 upgrades, and no such problem seem to affect the Gnome desktop+laptop
3268 packages.</p>
3269
3270 </div>
3271 <div class="tags">
3272
3273
3274 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
3275
3276
3277 </div>
3278 </div>
3279 <div class="padding"></div>
3280
3281 <div class="entry">
3282 <div class="title">
3283 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Upstart_or_sysvinit___as_init_d_scripts_see_it.html">Upstart or sysvinit - as init.d scripts see it</a>
3284 </div>
3285 <div class="date">
3286 6th June 2010
3287 </div>
3288 <div class="body">
3289 <p>If Debian is to migrate to upstart on Linux, I expect some init.d
3290 scripts to migrate (some of) their operations to upstart job while
3291 keeping the init.d for hurd and kfreebsd. The packages with such
3292 needs will need a way to get their init.d scripts to behave
3293 differently when used with sysvinit and with upstart. Because of
3294 this, I had a look at the environment variables set when a init.d
3295 script is running under upstart, and when it is not.</p>
3296
3297 <p>With upstart, I notice these environment variables are set when a
3298 script is started from rcS.d/ (ignoring some irrelevant ones like
3299 COLUMNS):</p>
3300
3301 <blockquote><pre>
3302 DEFAULT_RUNLEVEL=2
3303 previous=N
3304 PREVLEVEL=
3305 RUNLEVEL=
3306 runlevel=S
3307 UPSTART_EVENTS=startup
3308 UPSTART_INSTANCE=
3309 UPSTART_JOB=rc-sysinit
3310 </pre></blockquote>
3311
3312 <p>With sysvinit, these environment variables are set for the same
3313 script.</p>
3314
3315 <blockquote><pre>
3316 INIT_VERSION=sysvinit-2.88
3317 previous=N
3318 PREVLEVEL=N
3319 RUNLEVEL=S
3320 runlevel=S
3321 </pre></blockquote>
3322
3323 <p>The RUNLEVEL and PREVLEVEL environment variables passed on from
3324 sysvinit are not set by upstart. Not sure if it is intentional or not
3325 to not be compatible with sysvinit in this regard.</p>
3326
3327 <p>For scripts needing to behave differently when upstart is used,
3328 looking for the UPSTART_JOB environment variable seem to be a good
3329 choice.</p>
3330
3331 </div>
3332 <div class="tags">
3333
3334
3335 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
3336
3337
3338 </div>
3339 </div>
3340 <div class="padding"></div>
3341
3342 <div class="entry">
3343 <div class="title">
3344 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_manual_for_standards_wars___.html">A manual for standards wars...</a>
3345 </div>
3346 <div class="date">
3347 6th June 2010
3348 </div>
3349 <div class="body">
3350 <p>Via the
3351 <a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/robweir/antic-atom/~3/QzU4RgoAGMg/weekly-links-10.html">blog
3352 of Rob Weir</a> I came across the very interesting essay named
3353 <a href="http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/shapiro/wars.pdf">The Art of
3354 Standards Wars</a> (PDF 25 pages). I recommend it for everyone
3355 following the standards wars of today.</p>
3356
3357 </div>
3358 <div class="tags">
3359
3360
3361 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>.
3362
3363
3364 </div>
3365 </div>
3366 <div class="padding"></div>
3367
3368 <div class="entry">
3369 <div class="title">
3370 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Sitesummary_tip__Listing_computer_hardware_models_used_at_site.html">Sitesummary tip: Listing computer hardware models used at site</a>
3371 </div>
3372 <div class="date">
3373 3rd June 2010
3374 </div>
3375 <div class="body">
3376 <p>When using sitesummary at a site to track machines, it is possible
3377 to get a list of the machine types in use thanks to the DMI
3378 information extracted from each machine. The script to do so is
3379 included in the sitesummary package, and here is example output from
3380 the Skolelinux build servers:</p>
3381
3382 <blockquote><pre>
3383 maintainer:~# /usr/lib/sitesummary/hardware-model-summary
3384 vendor count
3385 Dell Computer Corporation 1
3386 PowerEdge 1750 1
3387 IBM 1
3388 eserver xSeries 345 -[8670M1X]- 1
3389 Intel 2
3390 [no-dmi-info] 3
3391 maintainer:~#
3392 </pre></blockquote>
3393
3394 <p>The quality of the report depend on the quality of the DMI tables
3395 provided in each machine. Here there are Intel machines without model
3396 information listed with Intel as vendor and no model, and virtual Xen
3397 machines listed as [no-dmi-info]. One can add -l as a command line
3398 option to list the individual machines.</p>
3399
3400 <p>A larger list is
3401 <a href="http://narvikskolen.no/sitesummary/">available from the the
3402 city of Narvik</a>, which uses Skolelinux on all their shools and also
3403 provide the basic sitesummary report publicly. In their report there
3404 are ~1400 machines. I know they use both Ubuntu and Skolelinux on
3405 their machines, and as sitesummary is available in both distributions,
3406 it is trivial to get all of them to report to the same central
3407 collector.</p>
3408
3409 </div>
3410 <div class="tags">
3411
3412
3413 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sitesummary">sitesummary</a>.
3414
3415
3416 </div>
3417 </div>
3418 <div class="padding"></div>
3419
3420 <div class="entry">
3421 <div class="title">
3422 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/KDM_fail_at_boot_with_NVidia_cards___and_no_one_try_to_fix_it_.html">KDM fail at boot with NVidia cards - and no one try to fix it?</a>
3423 </div>
3424 <div class="date">
3425 1st June 2010
3426 </div>
3427 <div class="body">
3428 <p>It is strange to watch how a bug in Debian causing KDM to fail to
3429 start at boot when an NVidia video card is used is handled. The
3430 problem seem to be that the nvidia X.org driver uses a long time to
3431 initialize, and this duration is longer than kdm is configured to
3432 wait.</p>
3433
3434 <p>I came across two bugs related to this issue,
3435 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/583312">#583312</a> initially filed
3436 against initscripts and passed on to nvidia-glx when it became obvious
3437 that the nvidia drivers were involved, and
3438 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/524751">#524751</a> initially filed against
3439 kdm and passed on to src:nvidia-graphics-drivers for unknown reasons.</p>
3440
3441 <p>To me, it seem that no-one is interested in actually solving the
3442 problem nvidia video card owners experience and make sure the Debian
3443 distribution work out of the box for these users. The nvidia driver
3444 maintainers expect kdm to be set up to wait longer, while kdm expect
3445 the nvidia driver maintainers to fix the driver to start faster, and
3446 while they wait for each other I guess the users end up switching to a
3447 distribution that work for them. I have no idea what the solution is,
3448 but I am pretty sure that waiting for each other is not it.</p>
3449
3450 <p>I wonder why we end up handling bugs this way.</p>
3451
3452 </div>
3453 <div class="tags">
3454
3455
3456 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
3457
3458
3459 </div>
3460 </div>
3461 <div class="padding"></div>
3462
3463 <div class="entry">
3464 <div class="title">
3465 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Parallellized_boot_seem_to_hold_up_well_in_Debian_testing.html">Parallellized boot seem to hold up well in Debian/testing</a>
3466 </div>
3467 <div class="date">
3468 27th May 2010
3469 </div>
3470 <div class="body">
3471 <p>A few days ago, parallel booting was enabled in Debian/testing.
3472 The feature seem to hold up pretty well, but three fairly serious
3473 issues are known and should be solved:
3474
3475 <p><ul>
3476
3477 <li>The wicd package seen to
3478 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/508289">break NFS mounting</a> and
3479 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/581586">network setup</a> when
3480 parallel booting is enabled. No idea why, but the wicd maintainer
3481 seem to be on the case.</li>
3482
3483 <li>The nvidia X driver seem to
3484 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/583312">have a race condition</a>
3485 triggered more easily when parallel booting is in effect. The
3486 maintainer is on the case.</li>
3487
3488 <li>The sysv-rc package fail to properly enable dependency based boot
3489 sequencing (the shutdown is broken) when old file-rc users
3490 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/575080">try to switch back</a> to
3491 sysv-rc. One way to solve it would be for file-rc to create
3492 /etc/init.d/.legacy-bootordering, and another is to try to make
3493 sysv-rc more robust. Will investigate some more and probably upload a
3494 workaround in sysv-rc to help those trying to move from file-rc to
3495 sysv-rc get a working shutdown.</li>
3496
3497 </ul></p>
3498
3499 <p>All in all not many surprising issues, and all of them seem
3500 solvable before Squeeze is released. In addition to these there are
3501 some packages with bugs in their dependencies and run level settings,
3502 which I expect will be fixed in a reasonable time span.</p>
3503
3504 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
3505 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
3506 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
3507 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
3508
3509 <p>Update: Correct bug number to file-rc issue.</p>
3510
3511 </div>
3512 <div class="tags">
3513
3514
3515 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
3516
3517
3518 </div>
3519 </div>
3520 <div class="padding"></div>
3521
3522 <div class="entry">
3523 <div class="title">
3524 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/More_flexible_firmware_handling_in_debian_installer.html">More flexible firmware handling in debian-installer</a>
3525 </div>
3526 <div class="date">
3527 22nd May 2010
3528 </div>
3529 <div class="body">
3530 <p>After a long break from debian-installer development, I finally
3531 found time today to return to the project. Having to spend less time
3532 working dependency based boot in debian, as it is almost complete now,
3533 definitely helped freeing some time.</p>
3534
3535 <p>A while back, I ran into a problem while working on Debian Edu. We
3536 include some firmware packages on the Debian Edu CDs, those needed to
3537 get disk and network controllers working. Without having these
3538 firmware packages available during installation, it is impossible to
3539 install Debian Edu on the given machine, and because our target group
3540 are non-technical people, asking them to provide firmware packages on
3541 an external medium is a support pain. Initially, I expected it to be
3542 enough to include the firmware packages on the CD to get
3543 debian-installer to find and use them. This proved to be wrong.
3544 Next, I hoped it was enough to symlink the relevant firmware packages
3545 to some useful location on the CD (tried /cdrom/ and
3546 /cdrom/firmware/). This also proved to not work, and at this point I
3547 found time to look at the debian-installer code to figure out what was
3548 going to work.</p>
3549
3550 <p>The firmware loading code is in the hw-detect package, and a closer
3551 look revealed that it would only look for firmware packages outside
3552 the installation media, so the CD was never checked for firmware
3553 packages. It would only check USB sticks, floppies and other
3554 "external" media devices. Today I changed it to also look in the
3555 /cdrom/firmware/ directory on the mounted CD or DVD, which should
3556 solve the problem I ran into with Debian edu. I also changed it to
3557 look in /firmware/, to make sure the installer also find firmware
3558 provided in the initrd when booting the installer via PXE, to allow us
3559 to provide the same feature in the PXE setup included in Debian
3560 Edu.</p>
3561
3562 <p>To make sure firmware deb packages with a license questions are not
3563 activated without asking if the license is accepted, I extended
3564 hw-detect to look for preinst scripts in the firmware packages, and
3565 run these before activating the firmware during installation. The
3566 license question is asked using debconf in the preinst, so this should
3567 solve the issue for the firmware packages I have looked at so far.</p>
3568
3569 <p>If you want to discuss the details of these features, please
3570 contact us on debian-boot@lists.debian.org.</p>
3571
3572 </div>
3573 <div class="tags">
3574
3575
3576 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
3577
3578
3579 </div>
3580 </div>
3581 <div class="padding"></div>
3582
3583 <div class="entry">
3584 <div class="title">
3585 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Parallellized_boot_is_now_the_default_in_Debian_unstable.html">Parallellized boot is now the default in Debian/unstable</a>
3586 </div>
3587 <div class="date">
3588 14th May 2010
3589 </div>
3590 <div class="body">
3591 <p>Since this evening, parallel booting is the default in
3592 Debian/unstable for machines using dependency based boot sequencing.
3593 Apparently the testing of concurrent booting has been wider than
3594 expected, if I am to believe the
3595 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg00122.html">input
3596 on debian-devel@</a>, and I concluded a few days ago to move forward
3597 with the feature this weekend, to give us some time to detect any
3598 remaining problems before Squeeze is frozen. If serious problems are
3599 detected, it is simple to change the default back to sequential boot.
3600 The upload of the new sysvinit package also activate a new upstream
3601 version.</p>
3602
3603 More information about
3604 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
3605 based boot sequencing</a> is available from the Debian wiki. It is
3606 currently possible to disable parallel booting when one run into
3607 problems caused by it, by adding this line to /etc/default/rcS:</p>
3608
3609 <blockquote><pre>
3610 CONCURRENCY=none
3611 </pre></blockquote>
3612
3613 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
3614 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
3615 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
3616 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
3617
3618 </div>
3619 <div class="tags">
3620
3621
3622 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
3623
3624
3625 </div>
3626 </div>
3627 <div class="padding"></div>
3628
3629 <div class="entry">
3630 <div class="title">
3631 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Sitesummary_tip__Listing_MAC_address_of_all_clients.html">Sitesummary tip: Listing MAC address of all clients</a>
3632 </div>
3633 <div class="date">
3634 14th May 2010
3635 </div>
3636 <div class="body">
3637 <p>In the recent Debian Edu versions, the
3638 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/SiteSummary">sitesummary
3639 system</a> is used to keep track of the machines in the school
3640 network. Each machine will automatically report its status to the
3641 central server after boot and once per night. The network setup is
3642 also reported, and using this information it is possible to get the
3643 MAC address of all network interfaces in the machines. This is useful
3644 to update the DHCP configuration.</p>
3645
3646 <p>To give some idea how to use sitesummary, here is a one-liner to
3647 ist all MAC addresses of all machines reporting to sitesummary. Run
3648 this on the collector host:</p>
3649
3650 <blockquote><pre>
3651 perl -MSiteSummary -e 'for_all_hosts(sub { print join(" ", get_macaddresses(shift)), "\n"; });'
3652 </pre></blockquote>
3653
3654 <p>This will list all MAC addresses assosiated with all machine, one
3655 line per machine and with space between the MAC addresses.</p>
3656
3657 <p>To allow system administrators easier job at adding static DHCP
3658 addresses for hosts, it would be possible to extend this to fetch
3659 machine information from sitesummary and update the DHCP and DNS
3660 tables in LDAP using this information. Such tool is unfortunately not
3661 written yet.</p>
3662
3663 </div>
3664 <div class="tags">
3665
3666
3667 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sitesummary">sitesummary</a>.
3668
3669
3670 </div>
3671 </div>
3672 <div class="padding"></div>
3673
3674 <div class="entry">
3675 <div class="title">
3676 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/systemd__an_interesting_alternative_to_upstart.html">systemd, an interesting alternative to upstart</a>
3677 </div>
3678 <div class="date">
3679 13th May 2010
3680 </div>
3681 <div class="body">
3682 <p>The last few days a new boot system called
3683 <a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd">systemd</a>
3684 has been
3685 <a href="http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html">introduced</a>
3686
3687 to the free software world. I have not yet had time to play around
3688 with it, but it seem to be a very interesting alternative to
3689 <a href="http://upstart.ubuntu.com/">upstart</a>, and might prove to be
3690 a good alternative for Debian when we are able to switch to an event
3691 based boot system. Tollef is
3692 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/580814">in the process</a> of getting
3693 systemd into Debian, and I look forward to seeing how well it work. I
3694 like the fact that systemd handles init.d scripts with dependency
3695 information natively, allowing them to run in parallel where upstart
3696 at the moment do not.</p>
3697
3698 <p>Unfortunately do systemd have the same problem as upstart regarding
3699 platform support. It only work on recent Linux kernels, and also need
3700 some new kernel features enabled to function properly. This means
3701 kFreeBSD and Hurd ports of Debian will need a port or a different boot
3702 system. Not sure how that will be handled if systemd proves to be the
3703 way forward.</p>
3704
3705 <p>In the mean time, based on the
3706 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg00122.html">input
3707 on debian-devel@</a> regarding parallel booting in Debian, I have
3708 decided to enable full parallel booting as the default in Debian as
3709 soon as possible (probably this weekend or early next week), to see if
3710 there are any remaining serious bugs in the init.d dependencies. A
3711 new version of the sysvinit package implementing this change is
3712 already in experimental. If all go well, Squeeze will be released
3713 with parallel booting enabled by default.</p>
3714
3715 </div>
3716 <div class="tags">
3717
3718
3719 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
3720
3721
3722 </div>
3723 </div>
3724 <div class="padding"></div>
3725
3726 <div class="entry">
3727 <div class="title">
3728 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Parallellizing_the_boot_in_Debian_Squeeze___ready_for_wider_testing.html">Parallellizing the boot in Debian Squeeze - ready for wider testing</a>
3729 </div>
3730 <div class="date">
3731 6th May 2010
3732 </div>
3733 <div class="body">
3734 <p>These days, the init.d script dependencies in Squeeze are quite
3735 complete, so complete that it is actually possible to run all the
3736 init.d scripts in parallell based on these dependencies. If you want
3737 to test your Squeeze system, make sure
3738 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
3739 based boot sequencing</a> is enabled, and add this line to
3740 /etc/default/rcS:</p>
3741
3742 <blockquote><pre>
3743 CONCURRENCY=makefile
3744 </pre></blockquote>
3745
3746 <p>That is it. It will cause sysv-rc to use the startpar tool to run
3747 scripts in parallel using the dependency information stored in
3748 /etc/init.d/.depend.boot, /etc/init.d/.depend.start and
3749 /etc/init.d/.depend.stop to order the scripts. Startpar is configured
3750 to try to start the kdm and gdm scripts as early as possible, and will
3751 start the facilities required by kdm or gdm as early as possible to
3752 make this happen.</p>
3753
3754 <p>Give it a try, and see if you like the result. If some services
3755 fail to start properly, it is most likely because they have incomplete
3756 init.d script dependencies in their startup script (or some of their
3757 dependent scripts have incomplete dependencies). Report bugs and get
3758 the package maintainers to fix it. :)</p>
3759
3760 <p>Running scripts in parallel could be the default in Debian when we
3761 manage to get the init.d script dependencies complete and correct. I
3762 expect we will get there in Squeeze+1, if we get manage to test and
3763 fix the remaining issues.</p>
3764
3765 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
3766 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
3767 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
3768 list of usertagged bugs related to this</a>.</p>
3769
3770 </div>
3771 <div class="tags">
3772
3773
3774 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
3775
3776
3777 </div>
3778 </div>
3779 <div class="padding"></div>
3780
3781 <div class="entry">
3782 <div class="title">
3783 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_has_switched_to_dependency_based_boot_sequencing.html">Debian has switched to dependency based boot sequencing</a>
3784 </div>
3785 <div class="date">
3786 27th July 2009
3787 </div>
3788 <div class="body">
3789 <p>Since this evening, with the upload of sysvinit version 2.87dsf-2,
3790 and the upload of insserv version 1.12.0-10 yesterday, Debian unstable
3791 have been migrated to using dependency based boot sequencing. This
3792 conclude work me and others have been doing for the last three days.
3793 It feels great to see this finally part of the default Debian
3794 installation. Now we just need to weed out the last few problems that
3795 are bound to show up, to get everything ready for Squeeze.</p>
3796
3797 <p>The next step is migrating /sbin/init from sysvinit to upstart, and
3798 fixing the more fundamental problem of handing the event based
3799 non-predictable kernel in the early boot.</p>
3800
3801 </div>
3802 <div class="tags">
3803
3804
3805 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
3806
3807
3808 </div>
3809 </div>
3810 <div class="padding"></div>
3811
3812 <div class="entry">
3813 <div class="title">
3814 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Taking_over_sysvinit_development.html">Taking over sysvinit development</a>
3815 </div>
3816 <div class="date">
3817 22nd July 2009
3818 </div>
3819 <div class="body">
3820 <p>After several years of frustration with the lack of activity from
3821 the existing sysvinit upstream developer, I decided a few weeks ago to
3822 take over the package and become the new upstream. The number of
3823 patches to track for the Debian package was becoming a burden, and the
3824 lack of synchronization between the distribution made it hard to keep
3825 the package up to date.</p>
3826
3827 <p>On the new sysvinit team is the SuSe maintainer Dr. Werner Fink,
3828 and my Debian co-maintainer Kel Modderman. About 10 days ago, I made
3829 a new upstream tarball with version number 2.87dsf (for Debian, SuSe
3830 and Fedora), based on the patches currently in use in these
3831 distributions. We Debian maintainers plan to move to this tarball as
3832 the new upstream as soon as we find time to do the merge. Since the
3833 new tarball was created, we agreed with Werner at SuSe to make a new
3834 upstream project at <a href="http://savannah.nongnu.org/">Savannah</a>, and continue
3835 development there. The project is registered and currently waiting
3836 for approval by the Savannah administrators, and as soon as it is
3837 approved, we will import the old versions from svn and continue
3838 working on the future release.</p>
3839
3840 <p>It is a bit ironic that this is done now, when some of the involved
3841 distributions are moving to upstart as a syvinit replacement.</p>
3842
3843 </div>
3844 <div class="tags">
3845
3846
3847 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
3848
3849
3850 </div>
3851 </div>
3852 <div class="padding"></div>
3853
3854 <div class="entry">
3855 <div class="title">
3856 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_boots_quicker_and_quicker.html">Debian boots quicker and quicker</a>
3857 </div>
3858 <div class="date">
3859 24th June 2009
3860 </div>
3861 <div class="body">
3862 <p>I spent Monday and tuesday this week in London with a lot of the
3863 people involved in the boot system on Debian and Ubuntu, to see if we
3864 could find more ways to speed up the boot system. This was an Ubuntu
3865 funded
3866 <a href="https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FoundationsTeam/BootPerformance/DebianUbuntuSprint">developer
3867 gathering</a>. It was quite productive. We also discussed the future
3868 of boot systems, and ways to handle the increasing number of boot
3869 issues introduced by the Linux kernel becoming more and more
3870 asynchronous and event base. The Ubuntu approach using udev and
3871 upstart might be a good way forward. Time will show.</p>
3872
3873 <p>Anyway, there are a few ways at the moment to speed up the boot
3874 process in Debian. All of these should be applied to get a quick
3875 boot:</p>
3876
3877 <ul>
3878
3879 <li>Use dash as /bin/sh.</li>
3880
3881 <li>Disable the init.d/hwclock*.sh scripts and make sure the hardware
3882 clock is in UTC.</li>
3883
3884 <li>Install and activate the insserv package to enable
3885 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
3886 based boot sequencing</a>, and enable concurrent booting.</li>
3887
3888 </ul>
3889
3890 These points are based on the Google summer of code work done by
3891 <a href="http://initscripts-ng.alioth.debian.org/soc2006-bootsystem/">Carlos
3892 Villegas</a>.
3893
3894 <p>Support for makefile-style concurrency during boot was uploaded to
3895 unstable yesterday. When we tested it, we were able to cut 6 seconds
3896 from the boot sequence. It depend on very correct dependency
3897 declaration in all init.d scripts, so I expect us to find edge cases
3898 where the dependences in some scripts are slightly wrong when we start
3899 using this.</p>
3900
3901 <p>On our IRC channel for this effort, #pkg-sysvinit, a new idea was
3902 introduced by Raphael Geissert today, one that could affect the
3903 startup speed as well. Instead of starting some scripts concurrently
3904 from rcS.d/ and another set of scripts from rc2.d/, it would be
3905 possible to run a of them in the same process. A quick way to test
3906 this would be to enable insserv and run 'mv /etc/rc2.d/S* /etc/rcS.d/;
3907 insserv'. Will need to test if that work. :)</p>
3908
3909 </div>
3910 <div class="tags">
3911
3912
3913 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
3914
3915
3916 </div>
3917 </div>
3918 <div class="padding"></div>
3919
3920 <div class="entry">
3921 <div class="title">
3922 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/BSAs_p_stander_om_piratkopiering_m_ter_motstand.html">BSAs påstander om piratkopiering møter motstand</a>
3923 </div>
3924 <div class="date">
3925 17th May 2009
3926 </div>
3927 <div class="body">
3928 <p>Hvert år de siste årene har BSA, lobbyfronten til de store
3929 programvareselskapene som Microsoft og Apple, publisert en rapport der
3930 de gjetter på hvor mye piratkopiering påfører i tapte inntekter i
3931 ulike land rundt om i verden. Resultatene er tendensiøse. For noen
3932 dager siden kom
3933 <a href="http://global.bsa.org/globalpiracy2008/studies/globalpiracy2008.pdf">siste
3934 rapport</a>, og det er flere kritiske kommentarer publisert de siste
3935 dagene. Et spesielt interessant kommentar fra Sverige,
3936 <a href="http://www.idg.se/2.1085/1.229795/bsa-hoftade-sverigesiffror">BSA
3937 höftade Sverigesiffror</a>, oppsummeres slik:</p>
3938
3939 <blockquote>
3940 I sin senaste rapport slår BSA fast att 25 procent av all mjukvara i
3941 Sverige är piratkopierad. Det utan att ha pratat med ett enda svenskt
3942 företag. "Man bör nog kanske inte se de här siffrorna som helt
3943 exakta", säger BSAs Sverigechef John Hugosson.
3944 </blockquote>
3945
3946 <p>Mon tro om de er like metodiske når de gjetter på andelen piratkopiering i Norge? To andre kommentarer er <a
3947 href="http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/comment/2242134/bsa-piracy-figures-shot-reality">BSA
3948 piracy figures need a shot of reality</a> og <a
3949 href="http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/3958/125/">Does The WIPO
3950 Copyright Treaty Work?</a></p>
3951
3952 <p>Fant lenkene via <a
3953 href="http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/05/17/1632242">oppslag
3954 på Slashdot</a>.</p>
3955
3956 </div>
3957 <div class="tags">
3958
3959
3960 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bsa">bsa</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fildeling">fildeling</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>.
3961
3962
3963 </div>
3964 </div>
3965 <div class="padding"></div>
3966
3967 <div class="entry">
3968 <div class="title">
3969 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/IDG_mener_linux_i_servermarkedet_vil_vokse_med_21__i_2009.html">IDG mener linux i servermarkedet vil vokse med 21% i 2009</a>
3970 </div>
3971 <div class="date">
3972 7th May 2009
3973 </div>
3974 <div class="body">
3975 <p>Kom over
3976 <a href="http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10216873-16.html">interessante
3977 tall</a> fra IDG om utviklingen av linuxservermarkedet. Fikk meg til
3978 å tenke på antall tjenermaskiner ved Universitetet i Oslo der jeg
3979 jobber til daglig. En rask opptelling forteller meg at vi har 490
3980 (61%) fysiske unix-tjener (mest linux men også noen solaris) og 196
3981 (25%) windowstjenere, samt 112 (14%) virtuelle unix-tjenere. Med den
3982 bakgrunnskunnskapen kan jeg godt tro at IDG er inne på noe.</p>
3983
3984 </div>
3985 <div class="tags">
3986
3987
3988 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
3989
3990
3991 </div>
3992 </div>
3993 <div class="padding"></div>
3994
3995 <div class="entry">
3996 <div class="title">
3997 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Kryptert_harddisk___naturligvis.html">Kryptert harddisk - naturligvis</a>
3998 </div>
3999 <div class="date">
4000 2nd May 2009
4001 </div>
4002 <div class="body">
4003 <p><a href="http://www.dagensit.no/trender/article1658676.ece">Dagens
4004 IT melder</a> at Intel hevder at det er dyrt å miste en datamaskin,
4005 når en tar tap av arbeidstid, fortrolige dokumenter,
4006 personopplysninger og alt annet det innebærer. Det er ingen tvil om
4007 at det er en kostbar affære å miste sin datamaskin, og det er årsaken
4008 til at jeg har kryptert harddisken på både kontormaskinen og min
4009 bærbare. Begge inneholder personopplysninger jeg ikke ønsker skal
4010 komme på avveie, den første informasjon relatert til jobben min ved
4011 Universitetet i Oslo, og den andre relatert til blant annet
4012 foreningsarbeide. Kryptering av diskene gjør at det er lite
4013 sannsynlig at dophoder som kan finne på å rappe maskinene får noe ut
4014 av dem. Maskinene låses automatisk etter noen minutter uten bruk,
4015 og en reboot vil gjøre at de ber om passord før de vil starte opp.
4016 Jeg bruker Debian på begge maskinene, og installasjonssystemet der
4017 gjør det trivielt å sette opp krypterte disker. Jeg har LVM på toppen
4018 av krypterte partisjoner, slik at alt av datapartisjoner er kryptert.
4019 Jeg anbefaler alle å kryptere diskene på sine bærbare. Kostnaden når
4020 det er gjort slik jeg gjør det er minimale, og gevinstene er
4021 betydelige. En bør dog passe på passordet. Hvis det går tapt, må
4022 maskinen reinstalleres og alt er tapt.</p>
4023
4024 <p>Krypteringen vil ikke stoppe kompetente angripere som f.eks. kjøler
4025 ned minnebrikkene før maskinen rebootes med programvare for å hente ut
4026 krypteringsnøklene. Kostnaden med å forsvare seg mot slike angripere
4027 er for min del høyere enn gevinsten. Jeg tror oddsene for at
4028 f.eks. etteretningsorganisasjoner har glede av å titte på mine
4029 maskiner er minimale, og ulempene jeg ville oppnå ved å forsøke å
4030 gjøre det vanskeligere for angripere med kompetanse og ressurser er
4031 betydelige.</p>
4032
4033 </div>
4034 <div class="tags">
4035
4036
4037 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
4038
4039
4040 </div>
4041 </div>
4042 <div class="padding"></div>
4043
4044 <div class="entry">
4045 <div class="title">
4046 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Two_projects_that_have_improved_the_quality_of_free_software_a_lot.html">Two projects that have improved the quality of free software a lot</a>
4047 </div>
4048 <div class="date">
4049 2nd May 2009
4050 </div>
4051 <div class="body">
4052 <p>There are two software projects that have had huge influence on the
4053 quality of free software, and I wanted to mention both in case someone
4054 do not yet know them.</p>
4055
4056 <p>The first one is <a href="http://valgrind.org/">valgrind</a>, a
4057 tool to detect and expose errors in the memory handling of programs.
4058 It is easy to use, all one need to do is to run 'valgrind program',
4059 and it will report any problems on stdout. It is even better if the
4060 program include debug information. With debug information, it is able
4061 to report the source file name and line number where the problem
4062 occurs. It can report things like 'reading past memory block in file
4063 X line N, the memory block was allocated in file Y, line M', and
4064 'using uninitialised value in control logic'. This tool has made it
4065 trivial to investigate reproducible crash bugs in programs, and have
4066 reduced the number of this kind of bugs in free software a lot.
4067
4068 <p>The second one is
4069 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coverity">Coverity</a> which is
4070 a source code checker. It is able to process the source of a program
4071 and find problems in the logic without running the program. It
4072 started out as the Stanford Checker and became well known when it was
4073 used to find bugs in the Linux kernel. It is now a commercial tool
4074 and the company behind it is running
4075 <a href="http://www.scan.coverity.com/">a community service</a> for the
4076 free software community, where a lot of free software projects get
4077 their source checked for free. Several thousand defects have been
4078 found and fixed so far. It can find errors like 'lock L taken in file
4079 X line N is never released if exiting in line M', or 'the code in file
4080 Y lines O to P can never be executed'. The projects included in the
4081 community service project have managed to get rid of a lot of
4082 reliability problems thanks to Coverity.</p>
4083
4084 <p>I believe tools like this, that are able to automatically find
4085 errors in the source, are vital to improve the quality of software and
4086 make sure we can get rid of the crashing and failing software we are
4087 surrounded by today.</p>
4088
4089 </div>
4090 <div class="tags">
4091
4092
4093 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.
4094
4095
4096 </div>
4097 </div>
4098 <div class="padding"></div>
4099
4100 <div class="entry">
4101 <div class="title">
4102 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/No_patch_is_not_better_than_a_useless_patch.html">No patch is not better than a useless patch</a>
4103 </div>
4104 <div class="date">
4105 28th April 2009
4106 </div>
4107 <div class="body">
4108 <p>Julien Blache
4109 <a href="http://blog.technologeek.org/2009/04/12/214">claim that no
4110 patch is better than a useless patch</a>. I completely disagree, as a
4111 patch allow one to discuss a concrete and proposed solution, and also
4112 prove that the issue at hand is important enough for someone to spent
4113 time on fixing it. No patch do not provide any of these positive
4114 properties.</p>
4115
4116 </div>
4117 <div class="tags">
4118
4119
4120 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
4121
4122
4123 </div>
4124 </div>
4125 <div class="padding"></div>
4126
4127 <div class="entry">
4128 <div class="title">
4129 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Standardize_on_protocols_and_formats__not_vendors_and_applications.html">Standardize on protocols and formats, not vendors and applications</a>
4130 </div>
4131 <div class="date">
4132 30th March 2009
4133 </div>
4134 <div class="body">
4135 <p>Where I work at the University of Oslo, one decision stand out as a
4136 very good one to form a long lived computer infrastructure. It is the
4137 simple one, lost by many in todays computer industry: Standardize on
4138 open network protocols and open exchange/storage formats, not applications.
4139 Applications come and go, while protocols and files tend to stay, and
4140 thus one want to make it easy to change application and vendor, while
4141 avoiding conversion costs and locking users to a specific platform or
4142 application.</p>
4143
4144 <p>This approach make it possible to replace the client applications
4145 independently of the server applications. One can even allow users to
4146 use several different applications as long as they handle the selected
4147 protocol and format. In the normal case, only one client application
4148 is recommended and users only get help if they choose to use this
4149 application, but those that want to deviate from the easy path are not
4150 blocked from doing so.</p>
4151
4152 <p>It also allow us to replace the server side without forcing the
4153 users to replace their applications, and thus allow us to select the
4154 best server implementation at any moment, when scale and resouce
4155 requirements change.</p>
4156
4157 <p>I strongly recommend standardizing - on open network protocols and
4158 open formats, but I would never recommend standardizing on a single
4159 application that do not use open network protocol or open formats.</p>
4160
4161 </div>
4162 <div class="tags">
4163
4164
4165 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>.
4166
4167
4168 </div>
4169 </div>
4170 <div class="padding"></div>
4171
4172 <div class="entry">
4173 <div class="title">
4174 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Returning_from_Skolelinux_developer_gathering.html">Returning from Skolelinux developer gathering</a>
4175 </div>
4176 <div class="date">
4177 29th March 2009
4178 </div>
4179 <div class="body">
4180 <p>I'm sitting on the train going home from this weekends Debian
4181 Edu/Skolelinux development gathering. I got a bit done tuning the
4182 desktop, and looked into the dynamic service location protocol
4183 implementation avahi. It look like it could be useful for us. Almost
4184 30 people participated, and I believe it was a great environment to
4185 get to know the Skolelinux system. Walter Bender, involved in the
4186 development of the Sugar educational platform, presented his stuff and
4187 also helped me improve my OLPC installation. He also showed me that
4188 his Turtle Art application can be used in standalone mode, and we
4189 agreed that I would help getting it packaged for Debian. As a
4190 standalone application it would be great for Debian Edu. We also
4191 tried to get the video conferencing working with two OLPCs, but that
4192 proved to be too hard for us. The application seem to need more work
4193 before it is ready for me. I look forward to getting home and relax
4194 now. :)</p>
4195
4196 </div>
4197 <div class="tags">
4198
4199
4200 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
4201
4202
4203 </div>
4204 </div>
4205 <div class="padding"></div>
4206
4207 <div class="entry">
4208 <div class="title">
4209 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html">Time for new LDAP schemas replacing RFC 2307?</a>
4210 </div>
4211 <div class="date">
4212 29th March 2009
4213 </div>
4214 <div class="body">
4215 <p>The state of standardized LDAP schemas on Linux is far from
4216 optimal. There is RFC 2307 documenting one way to store NIS maps in
4217 LDAP, and a modified version of this normally called RFC 2307bis, with
4218 some modifications to be compatible with Active Directory. The RFC
4219 specification handle the content of a lot of system databases, but do
4220 not handle DNS zones and DHCP configuration.</p>
4221
4222 <p>In <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu/Skolelinux</a>,
4223 we would like to store information about users, SMB clients/hosts,
4224 filegroups, netgroups (users and hosts), DHCP and DNS configuration,
4225 and LTSP configuration in LDAP. These objects have a lot in common,
4226 but with the current LDAP schemas it is not possible to have one
4227 object per entity. For example, one need to have at least three LDAP
4228 objects for a given computer, one with the SMB related stuff, one with
4229 DNS information and another with DHCP information. The schemas
4230 provided for DNS and DHCP are impossible to combine into one LDAP
4231 object. In addition, it is impossible to implement quick queries for
4232 netgroup membership, because of the way NIS triples are implemented.
4233 It just do not scale. I believe it is time for a few RFC
4234 specifications to cleam up this mess.</p>
4235
4236 <p>I would like to have one LDAP object representing each computer in
4237 the network, and this object can then keep the SMB (ie host key), DHCP
4238 (mac address/name) and DNS (name/IP address) settings in one place.
4239 It need to be efficently stored to make sure it scale well.</p>
4240
4241 <p>I would also like to have a quick way to map from a user or
4242 computer and to the net group this user or computer is a member.</p>
4243
4244 <p>Active Directory have done a better job than unix heads like myself
4245 in this regard, and the unix side need to catch up. Time to start a
4246 new IETF work group?</p>
4247
4248 </div>
4249 <div class="tags">
4250
4251
4252 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>.
4253
4254
4255 </div>
4256 </div>
4257 <div class="padding"></div>
4258
4259 <div class="entry">
4260 <div class="title">
4261 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Endelig_er_Debian_Lenny_gitt_ut.html">Endelig er Debian Lenny gitt ut</a>
4262 </div>
4263 <div class="date">
4264 15th February 2009
4265 </div>
4266 <div class="body">
4267 <p>Endelig er <a href="http://www.debian.org/">Debian</a>
4268 <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2009/20090214">Lenny</a> gitt ut.
4269 Et langt steg videre for Debian-prosjektet, og en rekke nye
4270 programpakker blir nå tilgjengelig for de av oss som bruker den
4271 stabile utgaven av Debian. Neste steg er nå å få
4272 <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a> /
4273 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/">Debian Edu</a> ferdig
4274 oppdatert for den nye utgaven, slik at en oppdatert versjon kan
4275 slippes løs på skolene. Takk til alle debian-utviklerne som har
4276 gjort dette mulig. Endelig er f.eks. fungerende avhengighetsstyrt
4277 bootsekvens tilgjengelig i stabil utgave, vha pakken
4278 <tt>insserv</tt>.</p>
4279
4280 </div>
4281 <div class="tags">
4282
4283
4284 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk</a>.
4285
4286
4287 </div>
4288 </div>
4289 <div class="padding"></div>
4290
4291 <div class="entry">
4292 <div class="title">
4293 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Devcamp_brought_us_closer_to_the_Lenny_based_Debian_Edu_release.html">Devcamp brought us closer to the Lenny based Debian Edu release</a>
4294 </div>
4295 <div class="date">
4296 7th December 2008
4297 </div>
4298 <div class="body">
4299 <p>This weekend we had a small developer gathering for Debian Edu in
4300 Oslo. Most of Saturday was used for the general assemly for the
4301 member organization, but the rest of the weekend I used to tune the
4302 LTSP installation. LTSP now work out of the box on the 10-network.
4303 Acer Aspire One proved to be a very nice thin client, with both
4304 screen, mouse and keybard in a small box. Was working on getting the
4305 diskless workstation setup configured out of the box, but did not
4306 finish it before the weekend was up.</p>
4307
4308 <p>Did not find time to look at the 4 VGA cards in one box we got from
4309 the Brazilian group, so that will have to wait for the next
4310 development gathering. Would love to have the Debian Edu installer
4311 automatically detect and configure a multiseat setup when it find one
4312 of these cards.</p>
4313
4314 </div>
4315 <div class="tags">
4316
4317
4318 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ltsp">ltsp</a>.
4319
4320
4321 </div>
4322 </div>
4323 <div class="padding"></div>
4324
4325 <div class="entry">
4326 <div class="title">
4327 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_sorry_state_of_multimedia_browser_plugins_in_Debian.html">The sorry state of multimedia browser plugins in Debian</a>
4328 </div>
4329 <div class="date">
4330 25th November 2008
4331 </div>
4332 <div class="body">
4333 <p>Recently I have spent some time evaluating the multimedia browser
4334 plugins available in Debian Lenny, to see which one we should use by
4335 default in Debian Edu. We need an embedded video playing plugin with
4336 control buttons to pause or stop the video, and capable of streaming
4337 all the multimedia content available on the web. The test results and
4338 notes are available on
4339 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia">the
4340 Debian wiki</a>. I was surprised how few of the plugins are able to
4341 fill this need. My personal video player favorite, VLC, has a really
4342 bad plugin which fail on a lot of the test pages. A lot of the MIME
4343 types I would expect to work with any free software player (like
4344 video/ogg), just do not work. And simple formats like the
4345 audio/x-mplegurl format (m3u playlists), just isn't supported by the
4346 totem and vlc plugins. I hope the situation will improve soon. No
4347 wonder sites use the proprietary Adobe flash to play video.</p>
4348
4349 <p>For Lenny, we seem to end up with the mplayer plugin. It seem to
4350 be the only one fitting our needs. :/</p>
4351
4352 </div>
4353 <div class="tags">
4354
4355
4356 Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web</a>.
4357
4358
4359 </div>
4360 </div>
4361 <div class="padding"></div>
4362
4363 <p style="text-align: right;"><a href="debian.rss"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/xml.gif" alt="RSS Feed" width="36" height="14" /></a></p>
4364 <div id="sidebar">
4365
4366
4367
4368 <h2>Archive</h2>
4369 <ul>
4370
4371 <li>2012
4372 <ul>
4373
4374 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/01/">January (7)</a></li>
4375
4376 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/02/">February (10)</a></li>
4377
4378 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/03/">March (17)</a></li>
4379
4380 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/04/">April (12)</a></li>
4381
4382 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/05/">May (12)</a></li>
4383
4384 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/06/">June (20)</a></li>
4385
4386 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/07/">July (17)</a></li>
4387
4388 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/08/">August (4)</a></li>
4389
4390 </ul></li>
4391
4392 <li>2011
4393 <ul>
4394
4395 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/01/">January (16)</a></li>
4396
4397 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/02/">February (6)</a></li>
4398
4399 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/03/">March (6)</a></li>
4400
4401 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/04/">April (7)</a></li>
4402
4403 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/05/">May (3)</a></li>
4404
4405 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/06/">June (2)</a></li>
4406
4407 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/07/">July (7)</a></li>
4408
4409 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/08/">August (6)</a></li>
4410
4411 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/09/">September (4)</a></li>
4412
4413 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/10/">October (2)</a></li>
4414
4415 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/11/">November (3)</a></li>
4416
4417 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/12/">December (1)</a></li>
4418
4419 </ul></li>
4420
4421 <li>2010
4422 <ul>
4423
4424 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/01/">January (2)</a></li>
4425
4426 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/02/">February (1)</a></li>
4427
4428 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/03/">March (3)</a></li>
4429
4430 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/04/">April (3)</a></li>
4431
4432 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/05/">May (9)</a></li>
4433
4434 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/06/">June (14)</a></li>
4435
4436 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/07/">July (12)</a></li>
4437
4438 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/08/">August (13)</a></li>
4439
4440 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/09/">September (7)</a></li>
4441
4442 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/10/">October (9)</a></li>
4443
4444 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/11/">November (13)</a></li>
4445
4446 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/12/">December (12)</a></li>
4447
4448 </ul></li>
4449
4450 <li>2009
4451 <ul>
4452
4453 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/01/">January (8)</a></li>
4454
4455 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/02/">February (8)</a></li>
4456
4457 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/03/">March (12)</a></li>
4458
4459 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/04/">April (10)</a></li>
4460
4461 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/05/">May (9)</a></li>
4462
4463 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/06/">June (3)</a></li>
4464
4465 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/07/">July (4)</a></li>
4466
4467 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/08/">August (3)</a></li>
4468
4469 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/09/">September (1)</a></li>
4470
4471 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/10/">October (2)</a></li>
4472
4473 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/11/">November (3)</a></li>
4474
4475 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/12/">December (3)</a></li>
4476
4477 </ul></li>
4478
4479 <li>2008
4480 <ul>
4481
4482 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2008/11/">November (5)</a></li>
4483
4484 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2008/12/">December (7)</a></li>
4485
4486 </ul></li>
4487
4488 </ul>
4489
4490
4491
4492 <h2>Tags</h2>
4493 <ul>
4494
4495 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/3d-printer">3d-printer (13)</a></li>
4496
4497 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/amiga">amiga (1)</a></li>
4498
4499 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/aros">aros (1)</a></li>
4500
4501 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin (2)</a></li>
4502
4503 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem (12)</a></li>
4504
4505 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bsa">bsa (2)</a></li>
4506
4507 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian (56)</a></li>
4508
4509 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu (111)</a></li>
4510
4511 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/digistan">digistan (9)</a></li>
4512
4513 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook (6)</a></li>
4514
4515 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/drivstoffpriser">drivstoffpriser (4)</a></li>
4516
4517 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english (146)</a></li>
4518
4519 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fiksgatami">fiksgatami (17)</a></li>
4520
4521 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fildeling">fildeling (12)</a></li>
4522
4523 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture (7)</a></li>
4524
4525 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/frikanalen">frikanalen (6)</a></li>
4526
4527 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju (30)</a></li>
4528
4529 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/kart">kart (16)</a></li>
4530
4531 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap (8)</a></li>
4532
4533 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lenker">lenker (4)</a></li>
4534
4535 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ltsp">ltsp (1)</a></li>
4536
4537 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia (22)</a></li>
4538
4539 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk (192)</a></li>
4540
4541 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug (142)</a></li>
4542
4543 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn (4)</a></li>
4544
4545 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/open311">open311 (2)</a></li>
4546
4547 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett (34)</a></li>
4548
4549 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern (48)</a></li>
4550
4551 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/raid">raid (1)</a></li>
4552
4553 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/reprap">reprap (11)</a></li>
4554
4555 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/rfid">rfid (2)</a></li>
4556
4557 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot (4)</a></li>
4558
4559 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/rss">rss (1)</a></li>
4560
4561 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ruter">ruter (4)</a></li>
4562
4563 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/scraperwiki">scraperwiki (2)</a></li>
4564
4565 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet (23)</a></li>
4566
4567 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sitesummary">sitesummary (4)</a></li>
4568
4569 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/skepsis">skepsis (1)</a></li>
4570
4571 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard (36)</a></li>
4572
4573 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stavekontroll">stavekontroll (1)</a></li>
4574
4575 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stortinget">stortinget (4)</a></li>
4576
4577 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance (10)</a></li>
4578
4579 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/valg">valg (6)</a></li>
4580
4581 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video (32)</a></li>
4582
4583 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/vitenskap">vitenskap (1)</a></li>
4584
4585 <li><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web (25)</a></li>
4586
4587 </ul>
4588
4589
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