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14 <a href=
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</a>
21 <h3>Entries tagged "debian".
</h3>
25 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_find_a_browser_plugin_supporting_a_given_MIME_type.html">How to find a browser plugin supporting a given MIME type
</a>
31 <p>Some times I try to figure out which Iceweasel browser plugin to
32 install to get support for a given MIME type. Thanks to
33 <a href=
"https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MozillaTeam/Plugins">specifications
34 done by Ubuntu
</a> and Mozilla, it is possible to do this in Debian.
35 Unfortunately, not very many packages provide the needed meta
36 information, Anyway, here is a small script to look up all browser
37 plugin packages announcing ther MIME support using this specification:
</p>
43 def pkgs_handling_mimetype(mimetype):
48 version = pkg.candidate
50 version = pkg.installed
53 record = version.record
54 if not record.has_key('Npp-MimeType'):
56 mime_types = record['Npp-MimeType'].split(',')
58 t = t.rstrip().strip()
60 thepkgs.append(pkg.name)
62 mimetype = "audio/ogg"
64 mimetype = sys.argv[
1]
65 print "Browser plugin packages supporting %s:" % mimetype
66 for pkg in pkgs_handling_mimetype(mimetype):
70 <p>It can be used like this to look up a given MIME type:
</p>
73 % ./apt-find-browserplug-for-mimetype
74 Browser plugin packages supporting audio/ogg:
76 % ./apt-find-browserplug-for-mimetype application/x-shockwave-flash
77 Browser plugin packages supporting application/x-shockwave-flash:
82 <p>In Ubuntu this mechanism is combined with support in the browser
83 itself to query for plugins and propose to install the needed
84 packages. It would be great if Debian supported such feature too. Is
85 anyone working on adding it?
</p>
87 <p><strong>Update
2013-
01-
18 14:
20</strong></p>: The Debian BTS
88 request for icweasel support for this feature is
89 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/484010">#
484010</a> from
2008 (and
90 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/698426">#
698426</a> from today). Lack
91 of manpower and wish for a different design is the reason thus feature
92 is not yet in iceweasel from Debian.
</p>
98 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>.
103 <div class=
"padding"></div>
107 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_the_most_supported_MIME_type_in_Debian_.html">What is the most supported MIME type in Debian?
</a>
113 <p>The
<a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/AppStreamDebianProposal">DEP-
11
114 proposal to add AppStream information to the Debian archive
</a>, is a
115 proposal to make it possible for a Desktop application to propose to
116 the user some package to install to gain support for a given MIME
117 type, font, library etc. that is currently missing. With such
118 mechanism in place, it would be possible for the desktop to
119 automatically propose and install leocad if some LDraw file is
120 downloaded by the browser.
</p>
122 <p>To get some idea about the current content of the archive, I decided
123 to write a simple program to extract all .desktop files from the
124 Debian archive and look up the claimed MIME support there. The result
126 <a href=
"http://ftp.skolelinux.org/pub/AppStreamTest">Skolelinux FTP
127 site
</a>. Using the collected information, it become possible to
128 answer the question in the title. Here are the
20 most supported MIME
129 types in Debian stable (Squeeze), testing (Wheezy) and unstable (Sid).
130 The complete list is available from the link above.
</p>
132 <p><strong>Debian Stable:
</strong></p>
136 ----- -----------------------
159 <p><strong>Debian Testing:
</strong></p>
163 ----- -----------------------
186 <p><strong>Debian Unstable:
</strong></p>
190 ----- -----------------------
213 <p>I am told that PackageKit can provide an API to access the kind of
214 information mentioned in DEP-
11. I have not yet had time to look at
215 it, but hope the PackageKit people in Debian are on top of these
218 <p><strong>Update
2013-
01-
16 13:
35</strong>: Updated numbers after
219 discovering a typo in my script.
</p>
225 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>.
230 <div class=
"padding"></div>
234 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_modalias_info_to_find_packages_handling_my_hardware.html">Using modalias info to find packages handling my hardware
</a>
240 <p>Yesterday, I wrote about the
241 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Modalias_strings___a_practical_way_to_map__stuff__to_hardware.html">modalias
242 values provided by the Linux kernel
</a> following my hope for
243 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html">better
244 dongle support in Debian
</a>. Using this knowledge, I have tested how
245 modalias values attached to package names can be used to map packages
246 to hardware. This allow the system to look up and suggest relevant
247 packages when I plug in some new hardware into my machine, and replace
248 discover and discover-data as the database used to map hardware to
251 <p>I create a modaliases file with entries like the following,
252 containing package name, kernel module name (if relevant, otherwise
253 the package name) and globs matching the relevant hardware
257 Package: package-name
258 <br>Modaliases: module(modaliasglob, modaliasglob, modaliasglob)
</p>
261 <p>It is fairly trivial to write code to find the relevant packages
262 for a given modalias value using this file.
</p>
264 <p>An entry like this would suggest the video and picture application
265 cheese for many USB web cameras (interface bus class
0E01):
</p>
269 <br>Modaliases: cheese(usb:v*p*d*dc*dsc*dp*ic0Eisc01ip*)
</p>
272 <p>An entry like this would suggest the pcmciautils package when a
273 CardBus bridge (bus class
0607) PCI device is present:
</p>
277 <br>Modaliases: pcmciautils(pci:v*d*sv*sd*bc06sc07i*)
280 <p>An entry like this would suggest the package colorhug-client when
281 plugging in a ColorHug with USB IDs
04D8:F8DA:
</p>
284 Package: colorhug-client
285 <br>Modaliases: colorhug-client(usb:v04D8pF8DAd*)
</p>
288 <p>I believe the format is compatible with the format of the Packages
289 file in the Debian archive. Ubuntu already uses their Packages file
290 to store their mappings from packages to hardware.
</p>
292 <p>By adding a XB-Modaliases: header in debian/control, any .deb can
293 announce the hardware it support in a way my prototype understand.
294 This allow those publishing packages in an APT source outside the
295 Debian archive as well as those backporting packages to make sure the
296 hardware mapping are included in the package meta information. I've
297 tested such header in the pymissile package, and its modalias mapping
298 is working as it should with my prototype. It even made it to Ubuntu
301 <p>To test if it was possible to look up supported hardware using only
302 the shell tools available in the Debian installer, I wrote a shell
303 implementation of the lookup code. The idea is to create files for
304 each modalias and let the shell do the matching. Please check out and
306 <a href=
"http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/hw-support-lookup?view=co">hw-support-lookup
</a>
307 shell script. It run without any extra dependencies and fetch the
308 hardware mappings from the Debian archive and the subversion
309 repository where I currently work on my prototype.
</p>
311 <p>When I use it on a machine with a yubikey inserted, it suggest to
312 install yubikey-personalization:
</p>
315 % ./hw-support-lookup
316 <br>yubikey-personalization
320 <p>When I run it on my Thinkpad X40 with a PCMCIA/CardBus slot, it
321 propose to install the pcmciautils package:
</p>
324 % ./hw-support-lookup
329 <p>If you know of any hardware-package mapping that should be added to
330 <a href=
"http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/modaliases?view=co">my
331 database
</a>, please tell me about it.
</p>
333 <p>It could be possible to generate several of the mappings between
334 packages and hardware. One source would be to look at packages with
335 kernel modules, ie packages with *.ko files in /lib/modules/, and
336 extract their modalias information. Another would be to look at
337 packages with udev rules, ie packages with files in
338 /lib/udev/rules.d/, and extract their vendor/model information to
339 generate a modalias matching rule. I have not tested any of these to
342 <p>If you want to help implementing a system to let us propose what
343 packages to install when new hardware is plugged into a Debian
344 machine, please send me an email or talk to me on
345 <a href=
"irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-devel">#debian-devel
</a>.
</p>
351 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>.
356 <div class=
"padding"></div>
360 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Modalias_strings___a_practical_way_to_map__stuff__to_hardware.html">Modalias strings - a practical way to map "stuff" to hardware
</a>
366 <p>While looking into how to look up Debian packages based on hardware
367 information, to find the packages that support a given piece of
368 hardware, I refreshed my memory regarding modalias values, and decided
369 to document the details. Here are my findings so far, also available
371 <a href=
"http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/">the
372 Debian Edu subversion repository
</a>:
374 <p><strong>Modalias decoded
</strong></p>
376 <p>This document try to explain what the different types of modalias
377 values stands for. It is in part based on information from
378 <URL:
<a href=
"https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Modalias">https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Modalias
</a> >,
379 <URL:
<a href=
"http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/26132/how-to-assign-usb-driver-to-device">http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/
26132/how-to-assign-usb-driver-to-device
</a> >,
380 <URL:
<a href=
"http://code.metager.de/source/history/linux/stable/scripts/mod/file2alias.c">http://code.metager.de/source/history/linux/stable/scripts/mod/file2alias.c
</a> > and
381 <URL:
<a href=
"http://cvs.savannah.gnu.org/viewvc/dmidecode/dmidecode.c?root=dmidecode&view=markup">http://cvs.savannah.gnu.org/viewvc/dmidecode/dmidecode.c?root=dmidecode&view=markup
</a> >.
383 <p>The modalias entries for a given Linux machine can be found using
384 this shell script:
</p>
387 find /sys -name modalias -print0 | xargs -
0 cat | sort -u
390 <p>The supported modalias globs for a given kernel module can be found
394 % /sbin/modinfo psmouse | grep alias:
395 alias: serio:ty05pr*id*ex*
396 alias: serio:ty01pr*id*ex*
400 <p><strong>PCI subtype
</strong></p>
402 <p>A typical PCI entry can look like this. This is an Intel Host
403 Bridge memory controller:
</p>
406 pci:v00008086d00002770sv00001028sd000001ADbc06sc00i00
409 <p>This represent these values:
</p>
414 sv
00001028 (subvendor)
415 sd
000001AD (subdevice)
421 <p>The vendor/device values are the same values outputted from 'lspci
422 -n' as
8086:
2770. The bus class/subclass is also shown by lspci as
423 0600. The
0600 class is a host bridge. Other useful bus values are
424 0300 (VGA compatible card) and
0200 (Ethernet controller).
</p>
426 <p>Not sure how to figure out the interface value, nor what it
429 <p><strong>USB subtype
</strong></p>
431 <p>Some typical USB entries can look like this. This is an internal
432 USB hub in a laptop:
</p>
435 usb:v1D6Bp0001d0206dc09dsc00dp00ic09isc00ip00
438 <p>Here is the values included in this alias:
</p>
441 v
1D6B (device vendor)
442 p
0001 (device product)
445 dsc
00 (device subclass)
446 dp
00 (device protocol)
447 ic
09 (interface class)
448 isc
00 (interface subclass)
449 ip
00 (interface protocol)
452 <p>The
0900 device class/subclass means hub. Some times the relevant
453 class is in the interface class section. For a simple USB web camera,
454 these alias entries show up:
</p>
457 usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic01isc01ip00
458 <br>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic01isc02ip00
459 <br>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic0Eisc01ip00
460 <br>usb:v0AC8p3420d5000dcEFdsc02dp01ic0Eisc02ip00
463 <p>Interface class
0E01 is video control,
0E02 is video streaming (aka
464 camera),
0101 is audio control device and
0102 is audio streaming (aka
465 microphone). Thus this is a camera with microphone included.
</p>
467 <p><strong>ACPI subtype
</strong></p>
469 <p>The ACPI type is used for several non-PCI/USB stuff. This is an IR
470 receiver in a Thinkpad X40:
</p>
473 acpi:IBM0071:PNP0511:
476 <p>The values between the colons are IDs.
</p>
478 <p><strong>DMI subtype
</strong></p>
480 <p>The DMI table contain lots of information about the computer case
481 and model. This is an entry for a IBM Thinkpad X40, fetched from
482 /sys/devices/virtual/dmi/id/modalias:
</p>
485 dmi:bvnIBM:bvr1UETB6WW(
1.66):bd06/
15/
2005:svnIBM:pn2371H4G:pvrThinkPadX40:rvnIBM:rn2371H4G:rvrNotAvailable:cvnIBM:ct10:cvrNotAvailable:
488 <p>The values present are
</p>
491 bvn IBM (BIOS vendor)
492 bvr
1UETB
6WW(
1.66) (BIOS version)
493 bd
06/
15/
2005 (BIOS date)
494 svn IBM (system vendor)
495 pn
2371H4G (product name)
496 pvr ThinkPadX40 (product version)
497 rvn IBM (board vendor)
498 rn
2371H4G (board name)
499 rvr NotAvailable (board version)
500 cvn IBM (chassis vendor)
502 cvr NotAvailable (chassis version)
505 <p>The chassis type
10 is Notebook. Other interesting values can be
506 found in the dmidecode source:
</p>
510 4 Low Profile Desktop
523 17 Main Server Chassis
526 20 Bus Expansion Chassis
527 21 Peripheral Chassis
529 23 Rack Mount Chassis
538 <p>The chassis type values are not always accurately set in the DMI
539 table. For example my home server is a tower, but the DMI modalias
540 claim it is a desktop.
</p>
542 <p><strong>SerIO subtype
</strong></p>
544 <p>This type is used for PS/
2 mouse plugs. One example is from my
548 serio:ty01pr00id00ex00
551 <p>The values present are
</p>
560 <p>This type is supported by the psmouse driver. I am not sure what
561 the valid values are.
</p>
563 <p><strong>Other subtypes
</strong></p>
565 <p>There are heaps of other modalias subtypes according to
566 file2alias.c. There is the rest of the list from that source: amba,
567 ap, bcma, ccw, css, eisa, hid, i2c, ieee1394, input, ipack, isapnp,
568 mdio, of, parisc, pcmcia, platform, scsi, sdio, spi, ssb, vio, virtio,
569 vmbus, x86cpu and zorro. I did not spend time documenting all of
570 these, as they do not seem relevant for my intended use with mapping
571 hardware to packages when new stuff is inserted during run time.
</p>
573 <p><strong>Looking up kernel modules using modalias values
</strong></p>
575 <p>To check which kernel modules provide support for a given modalias,
576 one can use the following shell script:
</p>
579 for id in $(find /sys -name modalias -print0 | xargs -
0 cat | sort -u); do \
581 /sbin/modprobe --show-depends "$id"|sed 's/^/ /' ; \
585 <p>The output can look like this (only the first few entries as the
586 list is very long on my test machine):
</p>
590 insmod /lib/modules/
2.6.32-
5-
686/kernel/drivers/acpi/ac.ko
592 FATAL: Module acpi:device: not found.
594 insmod /lib/modules/
2.6.32-
5-
686/kernel/drivers/char/nvram.ko
595 insmod /lib/modules/
2.6.32-
5-
686/kernel/drivers/leds/led-class.ko
596 insmod /lib/modules/
2.6.32-
5-
686/kernel/net/rfkill/rfkill.ko
597 insmod /lib/modules/
2.6.32-
5-
686/kernel/drivers/platform/x86/thinkpad_acpi.ko
598 acpi:IBM0071:PNP0511:
599 insmod /lib/modules/
2.6.32-
5-
686/kernel/lib/crc-ccitt.ko
600 insmod /lib/modules/
2.6.32-
5-
686/kernel/net/irda/irda.ko
601 insmod /lib/modules/
2.6.32-
5-
686/kernel/drivers/net/irda/nsc-ircc.ko
605 <p>If you want to help implementing a system to let us propose what
606 packages to install when new hardware is plugged into a Debian
607 machine, please send me an email or talk to me on
608 <a href=
"irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-devel">#debian-devel
</a>.
</p>
610 <p><strong>Update
2013-
01-
15:
</strong> Rewrite "cat $(find ...)" to
611 "find ... -print0 | xargs -
0 cat" to make sure it handle directories
612 in /sys/ with space in them.
</p>
618 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>.
623 <div class=
"padding"></div>
627 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Moved_the_pymissile_Debian_packaging_to_collab_maint.html">Moved the pymissile Debian packaging to collab-maint
</a>
633 <p>As part of my investigation on how to improve the support in Debian
634 for hardware dongles, I dug up my old Mark and Spencer USB Rocket
635 Launcher and updated the Debian package
636 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/pymissile">pymissile
</a> to make
637 sure udev will fix the device permissions when it is plugged in. I
638 also added a "Modaliases" header to test it in the Debian archive and
639 hopefully make the package be proposed by jockey in Ubuntu when a user
640 plug in his rocket launcher. In the process I moved the source to a
641 git repository under collab-maint, to make it easier for any DD to
642 contribute.
<a href=
"http://code.google.com/p/pymissile/">Upstream
</a>
643 is not very active, but the software still work for me even after five
644 years of relative silence. The new git repository is not listed in
645 the uploaded package yet, because I want to test the other changes a
646 bit more before I upload the new version. If you want to check out
647 the new version with a .desktop file included, visit the
648 <a href=
"http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/pymissile.git">gitweb
649 view
</a> or use "
<tt>git clone
650 git://anonscm.debian.org/collab-maint/pymissile.git
</tt>".</p>
656 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/robot
">robot</a>.
661 <div class="padding
"></div>
665 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lets_make_hardware_dongles_easier_to_use_in_Debian.html
">Lets make hardware dongles easier to use in Debian</a>
671 <p>One thing that annoys me with Debian and Linux distributions in
672 general, is that there is a great package management system with the
673 ability to automatically install software packages by downloading them
674 from the distribution mirrors, but no way to get it to automatically
675 install the packages I need to use the hardware I plug into my
676 machine. Even if the package to use it is easily available from the
677 Linux distribution. When I plug in a LEGO Mindstorms NXT, it could
678 suggest to automatically install the python-nxt, nbc and t2n packages
679 I need to talk to it. When I plug in a Yubikey, it could propose the
680 yubikey-personalization package. The information required to do this
681 is available, but no-one have pulled all the pieces together.</p>
683 <p>Some years ago, I proposed to
684 <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/
2010/
05/msg01206.html
">use
685 the discover subsystem to implement this</a>. The idea is fairly
690 <li>Add a desktop entry in /usr/share/autostart/ pointing to a program
691 starting when a user log in.</li>
693 <li>Set this program up to listen for kernel events emitted when new
694 hardware is inserted into the computer.</li>
696 <li>When new hardware is inserted, look up the hardware ID in a
697 database mapping to packages, and take note of any non-installed
700 <li>Show a message to the user proposing to install the discovered
701 package, and make it easy to install it.</li>
705 <p>I am not sure what the best way to implement this is, but my
706 initial idea was to use dbus events to discover new hardware, the
707 discover database to find packages and
708 <a href="http://www.packagekit.org/
">PackageKit</a> to install
711 <p>Yesterday, I found time to try to implement this idea, and the
712 draft package is now checked into
713 <a href="http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-edu/trunk/src/hw-support-handler/
">the
714 Debian Edu subversion repository</a>. In the process, I updated the
715 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/discover-data.html
">discover-data</a>
716 package to map the USB ids of LEGO Mindstorms and Yubikey devices to
717 the relevant packages in Debian, and uploaded a new version
718 2.2013.01.09 to unstable. I also discovered that the current
719 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/discover.html
">discover</a>
720 package in Debian no longer discovered any USB devices, because
721 /proc/bus/usb/devices is no longer present. I ported it to use
722 libusb as a fall back option to get it working. The fixed package
723 version 2.1.2-6 is now in experimental (didn't upload it to unstable
724 because of the freeze).</p>
726 <p>With this prototype in place, I can insert my Yubikey, and get this
727 desktop notification to show up (only once, the first time it is
730 <p align="center
"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/
2013-
01-
09-hw-autoinstall.png
"></p>
732 <p>For this prototype to be really useful, some way to automatically
733 install the proposed packages by pressing the "Please install
734 program(s)" button should to be implemented.
</p>
736 <p>If this idea seem useful to you, and you want to help make it
737 happen, please help me update the discover-data database with mappings
738 from hardware to Debian packages. Check if 'discover-pkginstall -l'
739 list the package you would like to have installed when a given
740 hardware device is inserted into your computer, and report bugs using
741 reportbug if it isn't. Or, if you know of a better way to provide
742 such mapping, please let me know.
</p>
744 <p>This prototype need more work, and there are several questions that
745 should be considered before it is ready for production use. Is dbus
746 the correct way to detect new hardware? At the moment I look for HAL
747 dbus events on the system bus, because that is the events I could see
748 on my Debian Squeeze KDE desktop. Are there better events to use?
749 How should the user be notified? Is the desktop notification
750 mechanism the best option, or should the background daemon raise a
751 popup instead? How should packages be installed? When should they
752 not be installed?
</p>
754 <p>If you want to help getting such feature implemented in Debian,
755 please send me an email. :)
</p>
761 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>.
766 <div class=
"padding"></div>
770 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_IRC_channel_for_LEGO_designers_using_Debian.html">New IRC channel for LEGO designers using Debian
</a>
776 <p>During Christmas, I have worked a bit on the Debian support for
777 <a href=
"http://mindstorms.lego.com/en-us/Default.aspx">LEGO Mindstorm
778 NXT
</a>. My son and I have played a bit with my NXT set, and I
779 discovered I had to build all the tools myself because none were
780 already in Debian Squeeze. If Debian support for LEGO is something
781 you care about, please join me on the IRC channel
782 <a href=
"irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-lego">#debian-lego
</a> (server
783 irc.debian.org). There is a lot that could be done to improve the
784 Debian support for LEGO designers. For example both CAD software
785 and Mindstorm compilers are missing. :)
</p>
787 <p>Update
2012-
01-
03: A
788 <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/LegoDesigners">project page
</a>
789 including links to Lego related packages is now available.
</p>
795 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/robot">robot
</a>.
800 <div class=
"padding"></div>
804 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_backport_bitcoin_qt_version_0_7_2_2_to_Debian_Squeeze.html">How to backport bitcoin-qt version
0.7.2-
2 to Debian Squeeze
</a>
810 <p>Let me start by wishing you all marry Christmas and a happy new
811 year! I hope next year will prove to be a good year.
</p>
813 <p><a href=
"http://www.bitcoin.org/">Bitcoin
</a>, the digital
814 decentralised "currency" that allow people to transfer bitcoins
815 between each other with minimal overhead, is a very interesting
816 experiment. And as I wrote a few days ago, the bitcoin situation in
817 <a href=
"http://www.debian.org/">Debian
</a> is about to improve a bit.
818 The
<a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">new debian source
819 package
</a> (version
0.7.2-
2) was uploaded yesterday, and is waiting
820 in
<a href=
"http://ftp-master.debian.org/new.html">the NEW queue
</A>
821 for one of the ftpmasters to approve the new bitcoin-qt package
824 <p>And thanks to the great work of Jonas and the rest of the bitcoin
825 team in Debian, you can easily test the package in Debian Squeeze
826 using the following steps to get a set of working packages:
</p>
829 git clone git://git.debian.org/git/collab-maint/bitcoin
831 DEB_MAINTAINER_MODE=
1 DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=noupnp fakeroot debian/rules clean
832 DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=noupnp git-buildpackage --git-ignore-new
835 <p>You might have to install some build dependencies as well. The
836 list of commands should give you two packages, bitcoind and
837 bitcoin-qt, ready for use in a Squeeze environment. Note that the
838 client will download the complete set of bitcoin "blocks", which need
839 around
5.6 GiB of data on my machine at the moment. Make sure your
840 ~/.bitcoin/ directory have lots of spare room if you want to download
841 all the blocks. The client will warn if the disk is getting full, so
842 there is not really a problem if you got too little room, but you will
843 not be able to get all the features out of the client.
</p>
845 <p>As usual, if you use bitcoin and want to show your support of my
846 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
847 <b><a href=
"bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a></b>.
</p>
853 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>.
858 <div class=
"padding"></div>
862 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_word_on_bitcoin_support_in_Debian.html">A word on bitcoin support in Debian
</a>
868 <p>It has been a while since I wrote about
869 <a href=
"http://www.bitcoin.org/">bitcoin
</a>, the decentralised
870 peer-to-peer based crypto-currency, and the reason is simply that I
871 have been busy elsewhere. But two days ago, I started looking at the
872 state of
<a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">bitcoin in
873 Debian
</a> again to try to recover my old bitcoin wallet. The package
874 is now maintained by a
875 <a href=
"https://alioth.debian.org/projects/pkg-bitcoin/">team of
876 people
</a>, and the grunt work had already been done by this team. We
877 owe a huge thank you to all these team members. :)
878 But I was sad to discover that the bitcoin client is missing in
879 Wheezy. It is only available in Sid (and an outdated client from
880 backports). The client had several RC bugs registered in BTS blocking
881 it from entering testing. To try to help the team and improve the
882 situation, I spent some time providing patches and triaging the bug
883 reports. I also had a look at the bitcoin package available from Matt
885 <a href=
"https://launchpad.net/~bitcoin/+archive/bitcoin">PPA for
886 Ubuntu
</a>, and moved the useful pieces from that version into the
889 <p>After checking with the main package maintainer Jonas Smedegaard on
890 IRC, I pushed several patches into the collab-maint git repository to
891 improve the package. It now contains fixes for the RC issues (not from
892 me, but fixed by Scott Howard), build rules for a Qt GUI client
893 package, konqueror support for the bitcoin: URI and bash completion
894 setup. As I work on Debian Squeeze, I also created
895 <a href=
"http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-bitcoin-devel/Week-of-Mon-20121217/000041.html">a
896 patch to backport
</a> the latest version. Jonas is going to look at
897 it and try to integrate it into the git repository before uploading a
898 new version to unstable.
900 <p>I would very much like bitcoin to succeed, to get rid of the
901 centralized control currently exercised in the monetary system. I
902 find it completely unacceptable that the USA government is collecting
903 transaction data for almost all international money transfers (most are done in USD and transaction logs shipped to the spooks), and
904 that the major credit card companies can block legal money
905 transactions to Wikileaks. But for bitcoin to succeed, more people
906 need to use bitcoins, and more people need to accept bitcoins when
907 they sell products and services. Improving the bitcoin support in
908 Debian is a small step in the right direction, but not enough.
909 Unfortunately the user experience when browsing the web and wanting to
910 pay with bitcoin is still not very good. The bitcoin: URI is a step
911 in the right direction, but need to work in most or every browser in
912 use. Also the bitcoin-qt client is too heavy to fire up to do a
913 quick transaction. I believe there are other clients available, but
914 have not tested them.
</p>
917 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Now_accepting_bitcoins___anonymous_and_distributed_p2p_crypto_money.html">experiment
918 with bitcoins
</a> showed that at least some of my readers use bitcoin.
919 I received
20.15 BTC so far on the address I provided in my blog two
921 <a href=
"http://blockexplorer.com/address/15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">seen
922 on the blockexplorer service
</a>. Thank you everyone for your
923 donation. The blockexplorer service demonstrates quite well that
924 bitcoin is not quite anonymous and untracked. :) I wonder if the
925 number of users have gone up since then. If you use bitcoin and want
926 to show your support of my activity, please send Bitcoin donations to
927 the same address as last time,
928 <b><a href=
"bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a></b>.
</p>
934 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>.
939 <div class=
"padding"></div>
943 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Git_repository_for_song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html">Git repository for song book for Computer Scientists
</a>
950 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html">mentioned
951 this summer
</a>, I have created a Computer Science song book a few
952 years ago, and today I finally found time to create a public
953 <a href=
"https://gitorious.org/pere-cs-songbook/pere-cs-songbook">Gitorious
954 repository for the project
</a>.
</p>
956 <p>If you want to help out, please clone the source and submit patches
957 to the HTML version. To generate the PDF and PostScript version,
958 please use prince XML, or let me know about a useful free software
959 processor capable of creating a good looking PDF from the HTML.
</p>
961 <p>Want to sing? You can still find the song book in HTML, PDF and
962 PostScript formats at
963 <a href=
"http://www.hungry.com/~pere/cs-songbook/">Petter's Computer
964 Science Songbook
</a>.
</p>
970 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>.
975 <div class=
"padding"></div>
979 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Gratulerer_med_19__rsdagen__Debian_.html">Gratulerer med
19-årsdagen, Debian!
</a>
986 <a href=
"http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120813">Debian-prosjektet
19
987 år
</a>. Jeg har fulgt det de siste
12 årene, og er veldig glad for å kunne
988 si gratulerer med dagen, Debian!
</p>
994 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>.
999 <div class=
"padding"></div>
1003 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Song_book_for_Computer_Scientists.html">Song book for Computer Scientists
</a>
1009 <p>Many years ago, while studying Computer Science at the
1010 <a href=
"http://www.uit.no/">University of Tromsø
</a>, I started
1011 collecting computer related songs for use at parties. The original
1012 version was written in LaTeX, but a few years ago I got help from
1013 Håkon W. Lie, one of the inventors of W3C CSS, to convert it to HTML
1014 while keeping the ability to create a nice book in PDF format. I have
1015 not had time to maintain the book for a while now, and guess I should
1016 put it up on some public version control repository where others can
1017 help me extend and update the book. If anyone is volunteering to help
1018 me with this, send me an email. Also let me know if there are songs
1019 missing in my book.
</p>
1021 <p>I have not mentioned the book on my blog so far, and it occured to
1022 me today that I really should let all my readers share the joys of
1023 singing out load about programming, computers and computer networks.
1024 Especially now that
<a href=
"http://debconf12.debconf.org/">Debconf
1025 12</a> is about to start (and I am not going). Want to sing? Check
1026 out
<a href=
"http://www.hungry.com/~pere/cs-songbook/">Petter's
1027 Computer Science Songbook
</a>.
1033 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>.
1038 <div class=
"padding"></div>
1042 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatically_upgrading_server_firmware_on_Dell_PowerEdge.html">Automatically upgrading server firmware on Dell PowerEdge
</a>
1048 <p>At work we have heaps of servers. I believe the total count is
1049 around
1000 at the moment. To be able to get help from the vendors
1050 when something go wrong, we want to keep the firmware on the servers
1051 up to date. If the firmware isn't the latest and greatest, the
1052 vendors typically refuse to start debugging any problems until the
1053 firmware is upgraded. So before every reboot, we want to upgrade the
1054 firmware, and we would really like everyone handling servers at the
1055 university to do this themselves when they plan to reboot a machine.
1056 For that to happen we at the unix server admin group need to provide
1057 the tools to do so.
</p>
1059 <p>To make firmware upgrading easier, I am working on a script to
1060 fetch and install the latest firmware for the servers we got. Most of
1061 our hardware are from Dell and HP, so I have focused on these servers
1062 so far. This blog post is about the Dell part.
</P>
1064 <p>On the Dell FTP site I was lucky enough to find
1065 <a href=
"ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/catalog/Catalog.xml.gz">an XML file
</a>
1066 with firmware information for all
11th generation servers, listing
1067 which firmware should be used on a given model and where on the FTP
1068 site I can find it. Using a simple perl XML parser I can then
1069 download the shell scripts Dell provides to do firmware upgrades from
1070 within Linux and reboot when all the firmware is primed and ready to
1071 be activated on the first reboot.
</p>
1073 <p>This is the Dell related fragment of the perl code I am working on.
1074 Are there anyone working on similar tools for firmware upgrading all
1075 servers at a site? Please get in touch and lets share resources.
</p>
1081 use File::Temp qw(tempdir);
1083 # Install needed RHEL packages if missing
1085 'XML::Simple' =
> 'perl-XML-Simple',
1087 for my $module (keys %rhelmodules) {
1088 eval "use $module;";
1090 my $pkg = $rhelmodules{$module};
1091 system("yum install -y $pkg");
1092 eval "use $module;";
1096 my $errorsto = 'pere@hungry.com';
1102 sub run_firmware_script {
1103 my ($opts, $script) = @_;
1105 print STDERR "fail: missing script name\n";
1108 print STDERR "Running $script\n\n";
1110 if (
0 == system("sh $script $opts")) { # FIXME correct exit code handling
1111 print STDERR "success: firmware script ran succcessfully\n";
1113 print STDERR "fail: firmware script returned error\n";
1117 sub run_firmware_scripts {
1118 my ($opts, @dirs) = @_;
1119 # Run firmware packages
1120 for my $dir (@dirs) {
1121 print STDERR "info: Running scripts in $dir\n";
1122 opendir(my $dh, $dir) or die "Unable to open directory $dir: $!";
1123 while (my $s = readdir $dh) {
1124 next if $s =~ m/^\.\.?/;
1125 run_firmware_script($opts, "$dir/$s");
1133 print STDERR "info: Downloading $url\n";
1134 system("wget --quiet \"$url\"");
1139 my $product = `dmidecode -s system-product-name`;
1142 if ($product =~ m/PowerEdge/) {
1144 # on RHEL, these pacakges are needed by the firwmare upgrade scripts
1145 system('yum install -y compat-libstdc++-
33.i686 libstdc++.i686 libxml2.i686 procmail');
1147 my $tmpdir = tempdir(
1151 fetch_dell_fw('catalog/Catalog.xml.gz');
1152 system('gunzip Catalog.xml.gz');
1153 my @paths = fetch_dell_fw_list('Catalog.xml');
1154 # -q is quiet, disabling interactivity and reducing console output
1157 for my $url (@paths) {
1158 fetch_dell_fw($url);
1160 run_firmware_scripts($fwopts, $tmpdir);
1162 print STDERR
"error: Unsupported Dell model '$product'.\n";
1163 print STDERR
"error: Please report to $errorsto.\n";
1167 print STDERR
"error: Unsupported Dell model '$product'.\n";
1168 print STDERR
"error: Please report to $errorsto.\n";
1174 my $url =
"ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/$path";
1178 # Using ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/catalog/Catalog.xml.gz, figure out which
1179 # firmware packages to download from Dell. Only work for Linux
1180 # machines and
11th generation Dell servers.
1181 sub fetch_dell_fw_list {
1182 my $filename = shift;
1184 my $product = `dmidecode -s system-product-name`;
1186 my ($mybrand, $mymodel) = split(/\s+/, $product);
1188 print STDERR
"Finding firmware bundles for $mybrand $mymodel\n";
1190 my $xml = XMLin($filename);
1192 for my $bundle (@{$xml-
>{SoftwareBundle}}) {
1193 my $brand = $bundle-
>{TargetSystems}-
>{Brand}-
>{Display}-
>{content};
1194 my $model = $bundle-
>{TargetSystems}-
>{Brand}-
>{Model}-
>{Display}-
>{content};
1196 if ("ARRAY" eq ref $bundle-
>{TargetOSes}-
>{OperatingSystem}) {
1197 $oscode = $bundle-
>{TargetOSes}-
>{OperatingSystem}[
0]-
>{osCode};
1199 $oscode = $bundle-
>{TargetOSes}-
>{OperatingSystem}-
>{osCode};
1201 if ($mybrand eq $brand && $mymodel eq $model && "LIN" eq $oscode)
1203 @paths = map { $_-
>{path} } @{$bundle-
>{Contents}-
>{Package}};
1206 for my $component (@{$xml-
>{SoftwareComponent}}) {
1207 my $componenttype = $component-
>{ComponentType}-
>{value};
1209 # Drop application packages, only firmware and BIOS
1210 next if 'APAC' eq $componenttype;
1212 my $cpath = $component-
>{path};
1213 for my $path (@paths) {
1214 if ($cpath =~ m%/$path$%) {
1215 push(@paths, $cpath);
1223 <p>The code is only tested on RedHat Enterprise Linux, but I suspect
1224 it could work on other platforms with some tweaking. Anyone know a
1225 index like Catalog.xml is available from HP for HP servers? At the
1226 moment I maintain a similar list manually and it is quickly getting
1233 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>.
1238 <div class=
"padding"></div>
1242 <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>
1248 <p>Wouter Verhelst have some
1249 <a href=
"http://grep.be/blog/en/retorts/pere_kubuntu_boot">interesting
1250 comments and opinions
</a> on my blog post on
1251 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_should_start_from__etc_rcS_d__in_Debian____almost_nothing.html">the
1252 need to clean up /etc/rcS.d/ in Debian
</a> and my blog post about
1253 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_missing_in_the_Debian_desktop__or_why_my_parents_use_Kubuntu.html">the
1254 default KDE desktop in Debian
</a>. I only have time to address one
1255 small piece of his comment now, and though it best to address the
1256 misunderstanding he bring forward:
</p>
1259 Currently, a system admin has four options: [...] boot to a
1260 single-user system (by adding 'single' to the kernel command line;
1261 this runs rcS and rc1 scripts)
1264 <p>This make me believe Wouter believe booting into single user mode
1265 and booting into runlevel
1 is the same. I am not surprised he
1266 believe this, because it would make sense and is a quite sensible
1267 thing to believe. But because the boot in Debian is slightly broken,
1268 runlevel
1 do not work properly and it isn't the same as single user
1269 mode. I'll try to explain what is actually happing, but it is a bit
1270 hard to explain.
</p>
1272 <p>Single user mode is defined like this in /etc/inittab:
1273 "
<tt>~~:S:wait:/sbin/sulogin
</tt>". This means the only thing that is
1274 executed in single user mode is sulogin. Single user mode is a boot
1275 state "between
" the runlevels, and when booting into single user mode,
1276 only the scripts in /etc/rcS.d/ are executed before the init process
1277 enters the single user state. When switching to runlevel 1, the state
1278 is in fact not ending in runlevel 1, but it passes through runlevel 1
1279 and end up in the single user mode (see /etc/rc1.d/S03single, which
1280 runs "init -t1 S
" to switch to single user mode at the end of runlevel
1281 1. It is confusing that the 'S' (single user) init mode is not the
1282 mode enabled by /etc/rcS.d/ (which is more like the initial boot
1285 <p>This summary might make it clearer. When booting for the first
1286 time into single user mode, the following commands are executed:
1287 "<tt>/etc/init.d/rc S; /sbin/sulogin
</tt>". When booting into
1288 runlevel 1, the following commands are executed: "<tt>/etc/init.d/rc
1289 S; /etc/init.d/rc
1; /sbin/sulogin
</tt>". A problem show up when
1290 trying to continue after visiting single user mode. Not all services
1291 are started again as they should, causing the machine to end up in an
1292 unpredicatble state. This is why Debian admins recommend rebooting
1293 after visiting single user mode.</p>
1295 <p>A similar problem with runlevel 1 is caused by the amount of
1296 scripts executed from /etc/rcS.d/. When switching from say runlevel 2
1297 to runlevel 1, the services started from /etc/rcS.d/ are not properly
1298 stopped when passing through the scripts in /etc/rc1.d/, and not
1299 started again when switching away from runlevel 1 to the runlevels
1300 2-5. I believe the problem is best fixed by moving all the scripts
1301 out of /etc/rcS.d/ that are not <strong>required</strong> to get a
1302 functioning single user mode during boot.</p>
1304 <p>I have spent several years investigating the Debian boot system,
1305 and discovered this problem a few years ago. I suspect it originates
1306 from when sysvinit was introduced into Debian, a long time ago.</p>
1312 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>.
1317 <div class="padding
"></div>
1321 <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>
1327 <p>In the Debian boot system, several packages include scripts that
1328 are started from /etc/rcS.d/. In fact, there is a bite more of them
1329 than make sense, and this causes a few problems. What kind of
1330 problems, you might ask. There are at least two problems. The first
1331 is that it is not possible to recover a machine after switching to
1332 runlevel 1. One need to actually reboot to get the machine back to
1333 the expected state. The other is that single user boot will sometimes
1334 run into problems because some of the subsystems are activated before
1335 the root login is presented, causing problems when trying to recover a
1336 machine from a problem in that subsystem. A minor additional point is
1337 that moving more scripts out of rcS.d/ and into the other rc#.d/
1338 directories will increase the amount of scripts that can run in
1339 parallel during boot, and thus decrease the boot time.</p>
1341 <p>So, which scripts should start from rcS.d/. In short, only the
1342 scripts that _have_ to execute before the root login prompt is
1343 presented during a single user boot should go there. Everything else
1344 should go into the numeric runlevels. This means things like
1345 lm-sensors, fuse and x11-common should not run from rcS.d, but from
1346 the numeric runlevels. Today in Debian, there are around 115 init.d
1347 scripts that are started from rcS.d/, and most of them should be moved
1348 out. Do your package have one of them? Please help us make single
1349 user and runlevel 1 better by moving it.</p>
1351 <p>Scripts setting up the screen, keyboard, system partitions
1352 etc. should still be started from rcS.d/, but there is for example no
1353 need to have the network enabled before the single user login prompt
1356 <p>As always, things are not so easy to fix as they sound. To keep
1357 Debian systems working while scripts migrate and during upgrades, the
1358 scripts need to be moved from rcS.d/ to rc2.d/ in reverse dependency
1359 order, ie the scripts that nothing in rcS.d/ depend on can be moved,
1360 and the next ones can only be moved when their dependencies have been
1361 moved first. This migration must be done sequentially while we ensure
1362 that the package system upgrade packages in the right order to keep
1363 the system state correct. This will require some coordination when it
1364 comes to network related packages, but most of the packages with
1365 scripts that should migrate do not have anything in rcS.d/ depending
1366 on them. Some packages have already been updated, like the sudo
1367 package, while others are still left to do. I wish I had time to work
1368 on this myself, but real live constrains make it unlikely that I will
1369 find time to push this forward.</p>
1375 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>.
1380 <div class="padding
"></div>
1384 <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>
1390 <p>While at Debconf11, I have several times during discussions
1391 mentioned the issues I believe should be improved in Debian for its
1392 desktop to be useful for more people. The use case for this is my
1393 parents, which are currently running Kubuntu which solve the
1396 <p>I suspect these four missing features are not very hard to
1397 implement. After all, they are present in Ubuntu, so if we wanted to
1398 do this in Debian we would have a source.</p>
1402 <li><strong>Simple GUI based upgrade of packages.</strong> When there
1403 are new packages available for upgrades, a icon in the KDE status bar
1404 indicate this, and clicking on it will activate the simple upgrade
1405 tool to handle it. I have no problem guiding both of my parents
1406 through the process over the phone. If a kernel reboot is required,
1407 this too is indicated by the status bars and the upgrade tool. Last
1408 time I checked, nothing with the same features was working in KDE in
1411 <li><strong>Simple handling of missing Firefox browser
1412 plugins.</strong> When the browser encounter a MIME type it do not
1413 currently have a handler for, it will ask the user if the system
1414 should search for a package that would add support for this MIME type,
1415 and if the user say yes, the APT sources will be searched for packages
1416 advertising the MIME type in their control file (visible in the
1417 Packages file in the APT archive). If one or more packages are found,
1418 it is a simple click of the mouse to add support for the missing mime
1419 type. If the package require the user to accept some non-free
1420 license, this is explained to the user. The entire process make it
1421 more clear to the user why something do not work in the browser, and
1422 make the chances higher for the user to blame the web page authors and
1423 not the browser for any missing features.</li>
1425 <li><strong>Simple handling of missing multimedia codec/format
1426 handlers.</strong> When the media players encounter a format or codec
1427 it is not supporting, a dialog pop up asking the user if the system
1428 should search for a package that would add support for it. This
1429 happen with things like MP3, Windows Media or H.264. The selection
1430 and installation procedure is very similar to the Firefox browser
1431 plugin handling. This is as far as I know implemented using a
1432 gstreamer hook. The end result is that the user easily get access to
1433 the codecs that are present from the APT archives available, while
1434 explaining more on why a given format is unsupported by Ubuntu.</li>
1436 <li><strong>Better browser handling of some MIME types.</strong> When
1437 displaying a text/plain file in my Debian browser, it will propose to
1438 start emacs to show it. If I remember correctly, when doing the same
1439 in Kunbutu it show the file as a text file in the browser. At least I
1440 know Opera will show text files within the browser. I much prefer the
1441 latter behaviour.</li>
1445 <p>There are other nice features as well, like the simplified suite
1446 upgrader, but given that I am the one mostly doing the dist-upgrade,
1447 it do not matter much.</p>
1449 <p>I really hope we could get these features in place for the next
1450 Debian release. It would require the coordinated effort of several
1451 maintainers, but would make the end user experience a lot better.</p>
1457 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>.
1462 <div class="padding
"></div>
1466 <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>
1472 <p>The Norwegian <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/
">FiksGataMi</A>
1473 site is build on Debian/Squeeze, and this platform was chosen because
1474 I am most familiar with Debian (being a Debian Developer for around 10
1475 years) because it is the latest stable Debian release which should get
1476 security support for a few years.</p>
1478 <p>The web service is written in Perl, and depend on some perl modules
1479 that are missing in Debian at the moment. It would be great if these
1480 modules were added to the Debian archive, allowing anyone to set up
1481 their own <a href="http://www.fixmystreet.com
">FixMyStreet</a> clone
1482 in their own country using only Debian packages. The list of modules
1483 missing in Debian/Squeeze isn't very long, and I hope the perl group
1484 will find time to package the 12 modules Catalyst::Plugin::SmartURI,
1485 Catalyst::Plugin::Unicode::Encoding, Catalyst::View::TT, Devel::Hide,
1486 Sort::Key, Statistics::Distributions, Template::Plugin::Comma,
1487 Template::Plugin::DateTime::Format, Term::Size::Any, Term::Size::Perl,
1488 URI::SmartURI and Web::Scraper to make the maintenance of FixMyStreet
1489 easier in the future.</p>
1491 <p>Thanks to the great tools in Debian, getting the missing modules
1492 installed on my server was a simple call to 'cpan2deb Module::Name'
1493 and 'dpkg -i' to install the resulting package. But this leave me
1494 with the responsibility of tracking security problems, which I really
1495 do not have time for.</p>
1501 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>.
1506 <div class="padding
"></div>
1510 <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>
1516 <p>Here is a small update for my English readers. Most of my blog
1517 posts have been in Norwegian the last few weeks, so here is a short
1518 update in English.</p>
1520 <p>The kids still keep me too busy to get much free software work
1521 done, but I did manage to organise a project to get a Norwegian port
1522 of the British service
1523 <a href="http://www.fixmystreet.com/
">FixMyStreet</a> up and running,
1524 and it has been running for a month now. The entire project has been
1525 organised by me and two others. Around Christmas we gathered sponsors
1526 to fund the development work. In January I drafted a contract with
1527 <a href="http://www.mysociety.org/
">mySociety</a> on what to develop,
1528 and in February the development took place. Most of it involved
1529 converting the source to use GPS coordinates instead of British
1530 easting/northing, and the resulting code should be a lot easier to get
1531 running in any country by now. The Norwegian
1532 <a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/
">FiksGataMi</a> is using
1533 <a href="http://www.openstreetmap.org/
">OpenStreetmap</a> as the map
1534 source and the source for administrative borders in Norway, and
1535 support for this had to be added/fixed.</p>
1537 <p>The Norwegian version went live March 3th, and we spent the weekend
1538 polishing the system before we announced it March 7th. The system is
1539 running on a KVM instance of Debian/Squeeze, and has seen almost 3000
1540 problem reports in a few weeks. Soon we hope to announce the Android
1541 and iPhone versions making it even easier to report problems with the
1542 public infrastructure.</p>
1544 <p>Perhaps something to consider for those of you in countries without
1551 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>.
1556 <div class="padding
"></div>
1560 <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>
1566 <p>The last few days I have looked at ways to track open security
1567 issues here at my work with the University of Oslo. My idea is that
1568 it should be possible to use the information about security issues
1569 available on the Internet, and check our locally
1570 maintained/distributed software against this information. It should
1571 allow us to verify that no known security issues are forgotten. The
1572 CVE database listing vulnerabilities seem like a great central point,
1573 and by using the package lists from Debian mapped to CVEs provided by
1574 the testing security team, I believed it should be possible to figure
1575 out which security holes were present in our free software
1578 <p>After reading up on the topic, it became obvious that the first
1579 building block is to be able to name software packages in a unique and
1580 consistent way across data sources. I considered several ways to do
1581 this, for example coming up with my own naming scheme like using URLs
1582 to project home pages or URLs to the Freshmeat entries, or using some
1583 existing naming scheme. And it seem like I am not the first one to
1584 come across this problem, as MITRE already proposed and implemented a
1585 solution. Enter the <a href="http://cpe.mitre.org/index.html
">Common
1586 Platform Enumeration</a> dictionary, a vocabulary for referring to
1587 software, hardware and other platform components. The CPE ids are
1588 mapped to CVEs in the <a href="http://web.nvd.nist.gov/
">National
1589 Vulnerability Database</a>, allowing me to look up know security
1590 issues for any CPE name. With this in place, all I need to do is to
1591 locate the CPE id for the software packages we use at the university.
1592 This is fairly trivial (I google for 'cve cpe $package' and check the
1593 NVD entry if a CVE for the package exist).</p>
1595 <p>To give you an example. The GNU gzip source package have the CPE
1596 name cpe:/a:gnu:gzip. If the old version 1.3.3 was the package to
1597 check out, one could look up
1598 <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
1599 in NVD</a> and get a list of 6 security holes with public CVE entries.
1600 The most recent one is
1601 <a href="http://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/detail?vulnId=CVE-
2010-
0001">CVE-2010-0001</a>,
1602 and at the bottom of the NVD page for this vulnerability the complete
1603 list of affected versions is provided.</p>
1605 <p>The NVD database of CVEs is also available as a XML dump, allowing
1606 for offline processing of issues. Using this dump, I've written a
1607 small script taking a list of CPEs as input and list all CVEs
1608 affecting the packages represented by these CPEs. One give it CPEs
1609 with version numbers as specified above and get a list of open
1610 security issues out.</p>
1612 <p>Of course for this approach to be useful, the quality of the NVD
1613 information need to be high. For that to happen, I believe as many as
1614 possible need to use and contribute to the NVD database. I notice
1616 <a href="https://www.redhat.com/security/data/metrics/rhsamapcpe.txt
">a
1617 map from CVE to CPE</a>, indicating that they are using the CPE
1618 information. I'm not aware of Debian and Ubuntu doing the same.</p>
1620 <p>To get an idea about the quality for free software, I spent some
1621 time making it possible to compare the CVE database from Debian with
1622 the CVE database in NVD. The result look fairly good, but there are
1623 some inconsistencies in NVD (same software package having several
1624 CPEs), and some inaccuracies (NVD not mentioning buggy packages that
1625 Debian believe are affected by a CVE). Hope to find time to improve
1626 the quality of NVD, but that require being able to get in touch with
1627 someone maintaining it. So far my three emails with questions and
1628 corrections have not seen any reply, but I hope contact can be
1629 established soon.</p>
1631 <p>An interesting application for CPEs is cross platform package
1632 mapping. It would be useful to know which packages in for example
1633 RHEL, OpenSuSe and Mandriva are missing from Debian and Ubuntu, and
1634 this would be trivial if all linux distributions provided CPE entries
1635 for their packages.</p>
1641 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>.
1646 <div class="padding
"></div>
1650 <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>
1657 <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/discover-data
">discover-data</a>
1658 package in Debian, there is a script to report useful information
1659 about the running hardware for use when people report missing
1660 information. One part of this script that I find very useful when
1661 debugging hardware problems, is the part mapping loaded kernel module
1662 to the PCI device it claims. It allow me to quickly see if the kernel
1663 module I expect is driving the hardware I am struggling with. To see
1664 the output, make sure discover-data is installed and run
1665 <tt>/usr/share/bug/discover-data 3>&1</tt>. The relevant output on
1666 one of my machines like this:</p>
1670 10de:03eb i2c_nforce2
1673 10de:03f0 snd_hda_intel
1682 <p>The code in question look like this, slightly modified for
1683 readability and to drop the output to file descriptor 3:</p>
1686 if [ -d /sys/bus/pci/devices/ ] ; then
1687 echo loaded pci modules:
1689 cd /sys/bus/pci/devices/
1690 for address in * ; do
1691 if [ -d "$address/driver/module" ] ; then
1692 module=`cd $address/driver/module ; pwd -P | xargs basename`
1693 if grep -q "^$module " /proc/modules ; then
1694 address=$(echo $address |sed s/
0000://)
1695 id=`lspci -n -s $address | tail -n
1 | awk '{print $
3}'`
1705 <p>Similar code could be used to extract USB device module
1709 if [ -d /sys/bus/usb/devices/ ] ; then
1710 echo loaded usb modules:
1712 cd /sys/bus/usb/devices/
1713 for address in * ; do
1714 if [ -d "$address/driver/module" ] ; then
1715 module=`cd $address/driver/module ; pwd -P | xargs basename`
1716 if grep -q "^$module " /proc/modules ; then
1717 address=$(echo $address |sed s/
0000://)
1718 id=$(lsusb -s $address | tail -n
1 | awk '{print $
6}')
1730 <p>This might perhaps be something to include in other tools as
1737 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>.
1742 <div class=
"padding"></div>
1746 <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>
1752 <p>The last few days I have spent at work here at the
<a
1753 href=
"http://www.uio.no/">University of Oslo
</a> testing if the new
1754 batch of computers will work with Linux. Every year for the last few
1755 years the university have organised shared bid of a few thousand
1756 computers, and this year HP won the bid. Two different desktops and
1757 five different laptops are on the list this year. We in the UNIX
1758 group want to know which one of these computers work well with RHEL
1759 and Ubuntu, the two Linux distributions we currently handle at the
1762 <p>My test method is simple, and I share it here to get feedback and
1763 perhaps inspire others to test hardware as well. To test, I PXE
1764 install the OS version of choice, and log in as my normal user and run
1765 a few applications and plug in selected pieces of hardware. When
1766 something fail, I make a note about this in the test matrix and move
1767 on. If I have some spare time I try to report the bug to the OS
1768 vendor, but as I only have the machines for a short time, I rarely
1769 have the time to do this for all the problems I find.
</p>
1771 <p>Anyway, to get to the point of this post. Here is the simple tests
1772 I perform on a new model.
</p>
1776 <li>Is PXE installation working? I'm testing with RHEL6, Ubuntu Lucid
1777 and Ubuntu Maverik at the moment. If I feel like it, I also test with
1778 RHEL5 and Debian Edu/Squeeze.
</li>
1780 <li>Is X.org working? If the graphical login screen show up after
1781 installation, X.org is working.
</li>
1783 <li>Is hardware accelerated OpenGL working? Running glxgears (in
1784 package mesa-utils on Ubuntu) and writing down the frames per second
1785 reported by the program.
</li>
1787 <li>Is sound working? With Gnome and KDE, a sound is played when
1788 logging in, and if I can hear this the test is successful. If there
1789 are several audio exits on the machine, I try them all and check if
1790 the Gnome/KDE audio mixer can control where to send the sound. I
1791 normally test this by playing
1792 <a href=
"http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20101012-chef/ ">a HTML5
1793 video
</a> in Firefox/Iceweasel.
</li>
1795 <li>Is the USB subsystem working? I test this by plugging in a USB
1796 memory stick and see if Gnome/KDE notices this.
</li>
1798 <li>Is the CD/DVD player working? I test this by inserting any CD/DVD
1799 I have lying around, and see if Gnome/KDE notices this.
</li>
1801 <li>Is any built in camera working? Test using cheese, and see if a
1802 picture from the v4l device show up.
</li>
1804 <li>Is bluetooth working? Use the Gnome/KDE browsing tool to see if
1805 any bluetooth devices are discovered. In my office, I normally see a
1808 <li>For laptops, is the SD or Compaq Flash reader working. I have
1809 memory modules lying around, and stick them in and see if Gnome/KDE
1812 <li>For laptops, is suspend/hibernate working? I'm testing if the
1813 special button work, and if the laptop continue to work after
1816 <li>For laptops, is the extra buttons working, like audio level,
1817 adjusting background light, switching on/off external video output,
1818 switching on/off wifi, bluetooth, etc? The set of buttons differ from
1819 laptop to laptop, so I just write down which are working and which are
1822 <li>Some laptops have smart card readers, finger print readers,
1823 acceleration sensors etc. I rarely test these, as I do not know how
1824 to quickly test if they are working or not, so I only document their
1829 <p>By now I suspect you are really curious what the test results are
1830 for the HP machines I am testing. I'm not done yet, so I will report
1831 the test results later. For now I can report that HP
8100 Elite work
1832 fine, and hibernation fail with HP EliteBook
8440p on Ubuntu Lucid,
1833 and audio fail on RHEL6. Ubuntu Maverik worked with
8440p. As you
1834 can see, I have most machines left to test. One interesting
1835 observation is that Ubuntu Lucid has almost twice the frame rate than
1836 RHEL6 with glxgears. No idea why.
</p>
1842 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>.
1847 <div class=
"padding"></div>
1851 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Some_thoughts_on_BitCoins.html">Some thoughts on BitCoins
</a>
1857 <p>As I continue to explore
1858 <a href=
"http://www.bitcoin.org/">BitCoin
</a>, I've starting to wonder
1859 what properties the system have, and how it will be affected by laws
1860 and regulations here in Norway. Here are some random notes.
</p>
1862 <p>One interesting thing to note is that since the transactions are
1863 verified using a peer to peer network, all details about a transaction
1864 is known to everyone. This means that if a BitCoin address has been
1865 published like I did with mine in my initial post about BitCoin, it is
1866 possible for everyone to see how many BitCoins have been transfered to
1867 that address. There is even a web service to look at the details for
1868 all transactions. There I can see that my address
1869 <a href=
"http://blockexplorer.com/address/15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</a>
1870 have received
16.06 Bitcoin, the
1871 <a href=
"http://blockexplorer.com/address/1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv8MHqvwst3">1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv
8MHqvwst
3</a>
1872 address of Simon Phipps have received
181.97 BitCoin and the address
1873 <a href=
"http://blockexplorer.com/address/1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt">1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt
</A>
1874 of EFF have received
2447.38 BitCoins so far. Thank you to each and
1875 every one of you that donated bitcoins to support my activity. The
1876 fact that anyone can see how much money was transfered to a given
1877 address make it more obvious why the BitCoin community recommend to
1878 generate and hand out a new address for each transaction. I'm told
1879 there is no way to track which addresses belong to a given person or
1880 organisation without the person or organisation revealing it
1881 themselves, as Simon, EFF and I have done.
</p>
1883 <p>In Norway, and in most other countries, there are laws and
1884 regulations limiting how much money one can transfer across the border
1885 without declaring it. There are money laundering, tax and accounting
1886 laws and regulations I would expect to apply to the use of BitCoin.
1887 If the Skolelinux foundation
1888 (
<a href=
"http://linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">SLX
1889 Debian Labs
</a>) were to accept donations in BitCoin in addition to
1890 normal bank transfers like EFF is doing, how should this be accounted?
1891 Given that it is impossible to know if money can cross the border or
1892 not, should everything or nothing be declared? What exchange rate
1893 should be used when calculating taxes? Would receivers have to pay
1894 income tax if the foundation were to pay Skolelinux contributors in
1895 BitCoin? I have no idea, but it would be interesting to know.
</p>
1897 <p>For a currency to be useful and successful, it must be trusted and
1898 accepted by a lot of users. It must be possible to get easy access to
1899 the currency (as a wage or using currency exchanges), and it must be
1900 easy to spend it. At the moment BitCoin seem fairly easy to get
1901 access to, but there are very few places to spend it. I am not really
1902 a regular user of any of the vendor types currently accepting BitCoin,
1903 so I wonder when my kind of shop would start accepting BitCoins. I
1904 would like to buy electronics, travels and subway tickets, not herbs
1905 and books. :) The currency is young, and this will improve over time
1906 if it become popular, but I suspect regular banks will start to lobby
1907 to get BitCoin declared illegal if it become popular. I'm sure they
1908 will claim it is helping fund terrorism and money laundering (which
1909 probably would be true, as is any currency in existence), but I
1910 believe the problems should be solved elsewhere and not by blaming
1913 <p>The process of creating new BitCoins is called mining, and it is
1914 CPU intensive process that depend on a bit of luck as well (as one is
1915 competing against all the other miners currently spending CPU cycles
1916 to see which one get the next lump of cash). The "winner" get
50
1917 BitCoin when this happen. Yesterday I came across the obvious way to
1918 join forces to increase ones changes of getting at least some coins,
1919 by coordinating the work on mining BitCoins across several machines
1920 and people, and sharing the result if one is lucky and get the
50
1922 <a href=
"http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/bitcoin-pool/">BitCoin Pool
</a>
1923 if this sounds interesting. I have not had time to try to set up a
1924 machine to participate there yet, but have seen that running on ones
1925 own for a few days have not yield any BitCoins througth mining
1928 <p>Update
2010-
12-
15: Found an
<a
1929 href=
"http://inertia.posterous.com/reply-to-the-underground-economist-why-bitcoi">interesting
1930 criticism
</a> of bitcoin. Not quite sure how valid it is, but thought
1931 it was interesting to read. The arguments presented seem to be
1932 equally valid for gold, which was used as a currency for many years.
</p>
1938 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>.
1943 <div class=
"padding"></div>
1947 <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>
1953 <p>With this weeks lawless
1954 <a href=
"http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/12/06/wikileaks/index.html">governmental
1955 attacks
</a> on Wikileak and
1956 <a href=
"http://www.salon.com/technology/dan_gillmor/2010/12/06/war_on_speech">free
1957 speech
</a>, it has become obvious that PayPal, visa and mastercard can
1958 not be trusted to handle money transactions.
1960 <a href=
"http://webmink.com/2010/12/06/now-accepting-bitcoin/">Simon
1961 Phipps on bitcoin
</a> reminded me about a project that a friend of
1962 mine mentioned earlier. I decided to follow Simon's example, and get
1963 involved with
<a href=
"http://www.bitcoin.org/">BitCoin
</a>. I got
1964 some help from my friend to get it all running, and he even handed me
1965 some bitcoins to get started. I even donated a few bitcoins to Simon
1966 for helping me remember BitCoin.
</p>
1968 <p>So, what is bitcoins, you probably wonder? It is a digital
1969 crypto-currency, decentralised and handled using peer-to-peer
1970 networks. It allows anonymous transactions and prohibits central
1971 control over the transactions, making it impossible for governments
1972 and companies alike to block donations and other transactions. The
1973 source is free software, and while the key dependency wxWidgets
2.9
1974 for the graphical user interface is missing in Debian, the command
1975 line client builds just fine. Hopefully Jonas
1976 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/578157">will get the package into
1977 Debian
</a> soon.
</p>
1979 <p>Bitcoins can be converted to other currencies, like USD and EUR.
1980 There are
<a href=
"http://www.bitcoin.org/trade">companies accepting
1981 bitcoins
</a> when selling services and goods, and there are even
1982 currency "stock" markets where the exchange rate is decided. There
1983 are not many users so far, but the concept seems promising. If you
1984 want to get started and lack a friend with any bitcoins to spare,
1986 <a href=
"https://freebitcoins.appspot.com/">some for free
</a> (
0.05
1987 bitcoin at the time of writing). Use
1988 <a href=
"http://www.bitcoinwatch.com/">BitcoinWatch
</a> to keep an eye
1989 on the current exchange rates.
</p>
1991 <p>As an experiment, I have decided to set up bitcoind on one of my
1992 machines. If you want to support my activity, please send Bitcoin
1993 donations to the address
1994 <b>15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b
</b>. Thank you!
</p>
2000 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>.
2005 <div class=
"padding"></div>
2009 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Why_isn_t_Debian_Edu_using_VLC_.html">Why isn't Debian Edu using VLC?
</a>
2015 <p>In the latest issue of Linux Journal, the readers choices were
2016 presented, and the winner among the multimedia player were VLC.
2017 Personally, I like VLC, and it is my player of choice when I first try
2018 to play a video file or stream. Only if VLC fail will I drag out
2019 gmplayer to see if it can do better. The reason is mostly the failure
2020 model and trust. When VLC fail, it normally pop up a error message
2021 reporting the problem. When mplayer fail, it normally segfault or
2022 just hangs. The latter failure mode drain my trust in the program.
<p>
2024 <p>But even if VLC is my player of choice, we have choosen to use
2025 mplayer in
<a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian
2026 Edu/Skolelinux
</a>. The reason is simple. We need a good browser
2027 plugin to play web videos seamlessly, and the VLC browser plugin is
2028 not very good. For example, it lack in-line control buttons, so there
2029 is no way for the user to pause the video. Also, when I
2030 <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia">last
2031 tested the browser plugins
</a> available in Debian, the VLC plugin
2032 failed on several video pages where mplayer based plugins worked. If
2033 the browser plugin for VLC was as good as the gecko-mediaplayer
2034 package (which uses mplayer), we would switch.
</P>
2036 <p>While VLC is a good player, its user interface is slightly
2037 annoying. The most annoying feature is its inconsistent use of
2038 keyboard shortcuts. When the player is in full screen mode, its
2039 shortcuts are different from when it is playing the video in a window.
2040 For example, space only work as pause when in full screen mode. I
2041 wish it had consisten shortcuts and that space also would work when in
2042 window mode. Another nice shortcut in gmplayer is [enter] to restart
2043 the current video. It is very nice when playing short videos from the
2044 web and want to restart it when new people arrive to have a look at
2045 what is going on.
</p>
2051 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>.
2056 <div class=
"padding"></div>
2060 <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>
2066 <p>Michael Biebl suggested to me on IRC, that I changed my automated
2067 upgrade testing of the
2068 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">Lenny
2069 Gnome and KDE Desktop
</a> to do
<tt>apt-get autoremove
</tt> when using apt-get.
2070 This seem like a very good idea, so I adjusted by test scripts and
2071 can now present the updated result from today:
</p>
2073 <p>This is for Gnome:
</p>
2075 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude
</p>
2082 browser-plugin-gnash
2089 freedesktop-sound-theme
2091 gconf-defaults-service
2106 gnome-desktop-environment
2110 gnome-session-canberra
2115 gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3
2121 libapache2-mod-dnssd
2124 libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3
2127 libboost-date-time1.42
.0
2128 libboost-python1.42
.0
2129 libboost-thread1.42
.0
2131 libchamplain-gtk-
0.4-
0
2133 libclutter-gtk-
0.10-
0
2140 libfreerdp-plugins-standard
2155 libgnomepanel2.24-cil
2160 libgtksourceview2.0-common
2161 libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil
2162 libmono-addins0.2-cil
2163 libmono-cairo2.0-cil
2164 libmono-corlib2.0-cil
2165 libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil
2166 libmono-posix2.0-cil
2167 libmono-security2.0-cil
2168 libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil
2169 libmono-system2.0-cil
2172 libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil
2173 libndesk-dbus1.0-cil
2183 libtelepathy-farsight0
2192 nautilus-sendto-empathy
2196 python-aptdaemon-gtk
2198 python-beautifulsoup
2213 python-gtksourceview2
2224 python-pkg-resources
2231 python-twisted-conch
2237 python-zope.interface
2242 rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder
2249 system-config-printer-udev
2251 telepathy-mission-control-
5
2264 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude
</p>
2272 fast-user-switch-applet
2291 libgtksourceview2.0-
0
2293 libsdl1.2debian-alsa
2299 system-config-printer
2306 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get
</p>
2309 gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
2312 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get
</p>
2318 <p>This is for KDE:
</p>
2320 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude
</p>
2326 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude
</p>
2333 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get
</p>
2349 kdeartwork-emoticons
2351 kdeartwork-theme-icon
2355 kdebase-workspace-bin
2356 kdebase-workspace-data
2370 kscreensaver-xsavers
2385 plasma-dataengines-workspace
2387 plasma-desktopthemes-artwork
2388 plasma-runners-addons
2389 plasma-scriptengine-googlegadgets
2390 plasma-scriptengine-python
2391 plasma-scriptengine-qedje
2392 plasma-scriptengine-ruby
2393 plasma-scriptengine-webkit
2394 plasma-scriptengines
2395 plasma-wallpapers-addons
2396 plasma-widget-folderview
2397 plasma-widget-networkmanagement
2401 xscreensaver-data-extra
2403 xscreensaver-gl-extra
2404 xscreensaver-screensaver-bsod
2407 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get
</p>
2411 google-gadgets-common
2429 libggadget-qt-
1.0-
0b
2434 libkonqsidebarplugin4a
2443 libplasma-geolocation-interface4
2445 libplasmagenericshell4
2459 libsmokeknewstuff2-
3
2460 libsmokeknewstuff3-
3
2462 libsmokektexteditor3
2470 libsmokeqtnetwork4-
3
2476 libsmokeqtuitools4-
3
2488 plasma-dataengines-addons
2489 plasma-scriptengine-superkaramba
2490 plasma-widget-lancelot
2491 plasma-widgets-addons
2492 plasma-widgets-workspace
2496 update-notifier-common
2499 <p>Running apt-get autoremove made the results using apt-get and
2500 aptitude a bit more similar, but there are still quite a lott of
2501 differences. I have no idea what packages should be installed after
2502 the upgrade, but hope those that do can have a look.
</p>
2508 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>.
2513 <div class=
"padding"></div>
2517 <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>
2523 <p>Most of the computers in use by the
2524 <a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu/Skolelinux project
</a>
2525 are virtual machines. And they have been Xen machines running on a
2526 fairly old IBM eserver xseries
345 machine, and we wanted to migrate
2527 them to KVM on a newer Dell PowerEdge
2950 host machine. This was a
2528 bit harder that it could have been, because we set up the Xen virtual
2529 machines to get the virtual partitions from LVM, which as far as I
2530 know is not supported by KVM. So to migrate, we had to convert
2531 several LVM logical volumes to partitions on a virtual disk file.
</p>
2534 <a href=
"http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com.au/articles/35011-Six-steps-for-migrating-Xen-virtual-machines-to-KVM">a
2535 nice recipe
</a> to do this, and wrote the following script to do the
2536 migration. It uses qemu-img from the qemu package to make the disk
2537 image, parted to partition it, losetup and kpartx to present the disk
2538 image partions as devices, and dd to copy the data. I NFS mounted the
2539 new servers storage area on the old server to do the migration.
</p>
2545 # http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com.au/articles/
35011-Six-steps-for-migrating-Xen-virtual-machines-to-KVM
2550 if [ -z "$
1" ] ; then
2551 echo "Usage: $
0 <hostname
>"
2557 if [ ! -e /dev/vg_data/$host-disk ] ; then
2558 echo "error: unable to find LVM volume for $host"
2562 # Partitions need to be a bit bigger than the LVM LVs. not sure why.
2563 disksize=$( lvs --units m | grep $host-disk | awk '{sum = sum + $
4} END { print int(sum *
1.05) }')
2564 swapsize=$( lvs --units m | grep $host-swap | awk '{sum = sum + $
4} END { print int(sum *
1.05) }')
2565 totalsize=$(( ( $disksize + $swapsize ) ))
2568 #dd if=/dev/zero of=$img bs=
1M count=$(( $disksize + $swapsize ))
2569 qemu-img create $img ${totalsize}MMaking room on the Debian Edu/Sqeeze DVD
2571 parted $img mklabel msdos
2572 parted $img mkpart primary linux-swap
0 $disksize
2573 parted $img mkpart primary ext2 $disksize $totalsize
2574 parted $img set
1 boot on
2577 losetup /dev/loop0 $img
2578 kpartx -a /dev/loop0
2580 dd if=/dev/vg_data/$host-disk of=/dev/mapper/loop0p1 bs=
1M
2581 fsck.ext3 -f /dev/mapper/loop0p1 || true
2582 mkswap /dev/mapper/loop0p2
2584 kpartx -d /dev/loop0
2585 losetup -d /dev/loop0
2588 <p>The script is perhaps so simple that it is not copyrightable, but
2589 if it is, it is licenced using GPL v2 or later at your discretion.
</p>
2591 <p>After doing this, I booted a Debian CD in rescue mode in KVM with
2592 the new disk image attached, installed grub-pc and linux-image-
686 and
2593 set up grub to boot from the disk image. After this, the KVM machines
2594 seem to work just fine.
</p>
2600 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>.
2605 <div class=
"padding"></div>
2609 <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>
2615 <p>I'm still running upgrade testing of the
2616 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">Lenny
2617 Gnome and KDE Desktop
</a>, but have not had time to spend on reporting the
2618 status. Here is a short update based on a test I ran
20101118.
</p>
2620 <p>I still do not know what a correct migration should look like, so I
2621 report any differences between apt and aptitude and hope someone else
2622 can see if anything should be changed.
</p>
2624 <p>This is for Gnome:
</p>
2626 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude
</p>
2629 apache2.2-bin aptdaemon at-spi baobab binfmt-support
2630 browser-plugin-gnash cheese-common cli-common cpp-
4.3 cups-pk-helper
2631 dmz-cursor-theme empathy empathy-common finger
2632 freedesktop-sound-theme freeglut3 gconf-defaults-service gdm-themes
2633 gedit-plugins geoclue geoclue-hostip geoclue-localnet geoclue-manual
2634 geoclue-yahoo gnash gnash-common gnome gnome-backgrounds
2635 gnome-cards-data gnome-codec-install gnome-core
2636 gnome-desktop-environment gnome-disk-utility gnome-screenshot
2637 gnome-search-tool gnome-session-canberra gnome-spell
2638 gnome-system-log gnome-themes-extras gnome-themes-more
2639 gnome-user-share gs-common gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3
2640 gstreamer0.10-tools gtk2-engines gtk2-engines-pixbuf
2641 gtk2-engines-smooth hal-info hamster-applet libapache2-mod-dnssd
2642 libapr1 libaprutil1 libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3 libaprutil1-ldap
2643 libart2.0-cil libatspi1.0-
0 libboost-date-time1.42
.0
2644 libboost-python1.42
.0 libboost-thread1.42
.0 libchamplain-
0.4-
0
2645 libchamplain-gtk-
0.4-
0 libcheese-gtk18 libclutter-gtk-
0.10-
0
2646 libcryptui0 libcupsys2 libdiscid0 libeel2-data libelf1 libepc-
1.0-
2
2647 libepc-common libepc-ui-
1.0-
2 libfreerdp-plugins-standard
2648 libfreerdp0 libgail-common libgconf2.0-cil libgdata-common libgdata7
2649 libgdl-
1-common libgdu-gtk0 libgee2 libgeoclue0 libgexiv2-
0 libgif4
2650 libglade2.0-cil libglib2.0-cil libgmime2.4-cil libgnome-vfs2.0-cil
2651 libgnome2.24-cil libgnomepanel2.24-cil libgnomeprint2.2-data
2652 libgnomeprintui2.2-common libgnomevfs2-bin libgpod-common libgpod4
2653 libgtk2.0-cil libgtkglext1 libgtksourceview-common
2654 libgtksourceview2.0-common libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil
2655 libmono-addins0.2-cil libmono-cairo2.0-cil libmono-corlib2.0-cil
2656 libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil libmono-posix2.0-cil
2657 libmono-security2.0-cil libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil
2658 libmono-system2.0-cil libmtp8 libmusicbrainz3-
6
2659 libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil libndesk-dbus1.0-cil libopal3.6
.8
2660 libpolkit-gtk-
1-
0 libpt-
1.10.10-plugins-alsa
2661 libpt-
1.10.10-plugins-v4l libpt2.6
.7 libpython2.6 librpm1 librpmio1
2662 libsdl1.2debian libservlet2.4-java libsrtp0 libssh-
4
2663 libtelepathy-farsight0 libtelepathy-glib0 libtidy-
0.99-
0
2664 libxalan2-java libxerces2-java media-player-info mesa-utils
2665 mono-
2.0-gac mono-gac mono-runtime nautilus-sendto
2666 nautilus-sendto-empathy openoffice.org-writer2latex
2667 openssl-blacklist p7zip p7zip-full pkg-config python-
4suite-xml
2668 python-aptdaemon python-aptdaemon-gtk python-axiom
2669 python-beautifulsoup python-bugbuddy python-clientform
2670 python-coherence python-configobj python-crypto python-cupshelpers
2671 python-cupsutils python-eggtrayicon python-elementtree
2672 python-epsilon python-evolution python-feedparser python-gdata
2673 python-gdbm python-gst0.10 python-gtkglext1 python-gtkmozembed
2674 python-gtksourceview2 python-httplib2 python-louie python-mako
2675 python-markupsafe python-mechanize python-nevow python-notify
2676 python-opengl python-openssl python-pam python-pkg-resources
2677 python-pyasn1 python-pysqlite2 python-rdflib python-serial
2678 python-tagpy python-twisted-bin python-twisted-conch
2679 python-twisted-core python-twisted-web python-utidylib python-webkit
2680 python-xdg python-zope.interface remmina remmina-plugin-data
2681 remmina-plugin-rdp remmina-plugin-vnc rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder
2682 rhythmbox-plugins rpm-common rpm2cpio seahorse-plugins shotwell
2683 software-center svgalibg1 system-config-printer-udev
2684 telepathy-gabble telepathy-mission-control-
5 telepathy-salut tomboy
2685 totem totem-coherence totem-mozilla totem-plugins
2686 transmission-common xdg-user-dirs xdg-user-dirs-gtk xserver-xephyr
2690 Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude
2693 arj bluez-utils cheese dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop ekiga eog
2694 epiphany-extensions epiphany-gecko evolution-exchange
2695 fast-user-switch-applet file-roller gcalctool gconf-editor gdm gedit
2696 gedit-common gnome-app-install gnome-games gnome-games-data
2697 gnome-nettool gnome-system-tools gnome-themes gnome-utils
2698 gnome-vfs-obexftp gnome-volume-manager gnuchess gucharmap
2699 guile-
1.8-libs hal libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5
2700 libavahi-ui0 libbind9-
50 libbluetooth2 libcamel1.2-
11 libcdio7
2701 libcucul0 libcurl3 libdirectfb-
1.0-
0 libdmx1 libdvdread3
2702 libedata-cal1.2-
6 libedataserver1.2-
9 libeel2-
2.20 libepc-
1.0-
1
2703 libepc-ui-
1.0-
1 libexchange-storage1.2-
3 libfaad0 libgadu3
2704 libgalago3 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-
3 libgda3-common libggz2 libggzcore9
2705 libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-
0 libgksuui1.0-
1 libgmyth0 libgnome-desktop-
2
2706 libgnome-pilot2 libgnomecups1.0-
1 libgnomeprint2.2-
0
2707 libgnomeprintui2.2-
0 libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtk-vnc-
1.0-
0
2708 libgtkhtml2-
0 libgtksourceview1.0-
0 libgtksourceview2.0-
0
2709 libgucharmap6 libhesiod0 libicu38 libisccc50 libisccfg50 libiw29
2710 libjaxp1.3-java-gcj libkpathsea4 liblircclient0 libltdl3 liblwres50
2711 libmagick++
10 libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmozjs1d libmpfr1ldbl libmtp7
2712 libmysqlclient15off libnautilus-burn4 libneon27 libnm-glib0
2713 libnm-util0 libopal-
2.2 libosp5 libparted1.8-
10 libpisock9
2714 libpisync1 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3 libpt-
1.10.10 libraw1394-
8
2715 libsdl1.2debian-alsa libsensors3 libsexy2 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-
8
2716 libspeexdsp1 libssh2-
1 libsuitesparse-
3.1.0 libsvga1
2717 libswfdec-
0.6-
90 libtalloc1 libtotem-plparser10 libtrackerclient0
2718 libvoikko1 libxalan2-java-gcj libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12
2719 libxtrap6 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3 mysql-common rhythmbox seahorse
2720 sound-juicer swfdec-gnome system-config-printer totem-common
2721 totem-gstreamer transmission-gtk vinagre vino w3c-dtd-xhtml wodim
2724 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get
</p>
2727 gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
2730 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get
</p>
2736 <p>This is for KDE:
</p>
2738 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude
</p>
2741 autopoint bomber bovo cantor cantor-backend-kalgebra cpp-
4.3 dcoprss
2742 edict espeak espeak-data eyesapplet fifteenapplet finger gettext
2743 ghostscript-x git gnome-audio gnugo granatier gs-common
2744 gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio indi kaddressbook-plugins kalgebra
2745 kalzium-data kanjidic kapman kate-plugins kblocks kbreakout kbstate
2746 kde-icons-mono kdeaccessibility kdeaddons-kfile-plugins
2747 kdeadmin-kfile-plugins kdeartwork-misc kdeartwork-theme-window
2748 kdeedu kdeedu-data kdeedu-kvtml-data kdegames kdegames-card-data
2749 kdegames-mahjongg-data kdegraphics-kfile-plugins kdelirc
2750 kdemultimedia-kfile-plugins kdenetwork-kfile-plugins
2751 kdepim-kfile-plugins kdepim-kio-plugins kdessh kdetoys kdewebdev
2752 kdiamond kdnssd kfilereplace kfourinline kgeography-data kigo
2753 killbots kiriki klettres-data kmoon kmrml knewsticker-scripts
2754 kollision kpf krosspython ksirk ksmserver ksquares kstars-data
2755 ksudoku kubrick kweather libasound2-plugins libboost-python1.42
.0
2756 libcfitsio3 libconvert-binhex-perl libcrypt-ssleay-perl libdb4.6++
2757 libdjvulibre-text libdotconf1.0 liberror-perl libespeak1
2758 libfinance-quote-perl libgail-common libgsl0ldbl libhtml-parser-perl
2759 libhtml-tableextract-perl libhtml-tagset-perl libhtml-tree-perl
2760 libio-stringy-perl libkdeedu4 libkdegames5 libkiten4 libkpathsea5
2761 libkrossui4 libmailtools-perl libmime-tools-perl
2762 libnews-nntpclient-perl libopenbabel3 libportaudio2 libpulse-browse0
2763 libservlet2.4-java libspeechd2 libtiff-tools libtimedate-perl
2764 libunistring0 liburi-perl libwww-perl libxalan2-java libxerces2-java
2765 lirc luatex marble networkstatus noatun-plugins
2766 openoffice.org-writer2latex palapeli palapeli-data parley
2767 parley-data poster psutils pulseaudio pulseaudio-esound-compat
2768 pulseaudio-module-x11 pulseaudio-utils quanta-data rocs rsync
2769 speech-dispatcher step svgalibg1 texlive-binaries texlive-luatex
2773 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude
</p>
2776 amor artsbuilder atlantik atlantikdesigner blinken bluez-utils cvs
2777 dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop imlib-base imlib11 kalzium kanagram kandy
2778 kasteroids katomic kbackgammon kbattleship kblackbox kbounce kbruch
2779 kcron kdat kdemultimedia-kappfinder-data kdeprint kdict kdvi kedit
2780 keduca kenolaba kfax kfaxview kfouleggs kgeography kghostview
2781 kgoldrunner khangman khexedit kiconedit kig kimagemapeditor
2782 kitchensync kiten kjumpingcube klatin klettres klickety klines
2783 klinkstatus kmag kmahjongg kmailcvt kmenuedit kmid kmilo kmines
2784 kmousetool kmouth kmplot knetwalk kodo kolf kommander konquest kooka
2785 kpager kpat kpdf kpercentage kpilot kpoker kpovmodeler krec
2786 kregexpeditor kreversi ksame ksayit kshisen ksig ksim ksirc ksirtet
2787 ksmiletris ksnake ksokoban kspaceduel kstars ksvg ksysv kteatime
2788 ktip ktnef ktouch ktron kttsd ktuberling kturtle ktux kuickshow
2789 kverbos kview kviewshell kvoctrain kwifimanager kwin kwin4 kwordquiz
2790 kworldclock kxsldbg libakode2 libarts1-akode libarts1-audiofile
2791 libarts1-mpeglib libarts1-xine libavahi-compat-libdnssd1
2792 libavahi-core5 libavc1394-
0 libbind9-
50 libbluetooth2
2793 libboost-python1.34
.1 libcucul0 libcurl3 libcvsservice0
2794 libdirectfb-
1.0-
0 libdjvulibre21 libdvdread3 libfaad0 libfreebob0
2795 libgd2-noxpm libgraphviz4 libgsmme1c2a libgtkhtml2-
0 libicu38
2796 libiec61883-
0 libindex0 libisccc50 libisccfg50 libiw29
2797 libjaxp1.3-java-gcj libk3b3 libkcal2b libkcddb1 libkdeedu3
2798 libkdegames1 libkdepim1a libkgantt0 libkleopatra1 libkmime2
2799 libkpathsea4 libkpimexchange1 libkpimidentities1 libkscan1
2800 libksieve0 libktnef1 liblockdev1 libltdl3 liblwres50 libmagick10
2801 libmimelib1c2a libmodplug0c2 libmozjs1d libmpcdec3 libmpfr1ldbl
2802 libneon27 libnm-util0 libopensync0 libpisock9 libpoppler-glib3
2803 libpoppler-qt2 libpoppler3 libraw1394-
8 librss1 libsensors3
2804 libsmbios2 libssh2-
1 libsuitesparse-
3.1.0 libswfdec-
0.6-
90
2805 libtalloc1 libxalan2-java-gcj libxerces2-java-gcj libxtrap6 lskat
2806 mpeglib network-manager-kde noatun pmount tex-common texlive-base
2807 texlive-common texlive-doc-base texlive-fonts-recommended tidy
2808 ttf-dustin ttf-kochi-gothic ttf-sjfonts
2811 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get
</p>
2814 dolphin kde-core kde-plasma-desktop kde-standard kde-window-manager
2815 kdeartwork kdebase kdebase-apps kdebase-workspace
2816 kdebase-workspace-bin kdebase-workspace-data kdeutils kscreensaver
2817 kscreensaver-xsavers libgle3 libkonq5 libkonq5-templates libnetpbm10
2818 netpbm plasma-widget-folderview plasma-widget-networkmanagement
2819 xscreensaver-data-extra xscreensaver-gl xscreensaver-gl-extra
2820 xscreensaver-screensaver-bsod
2823 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get
</p>
2826 kdebase-bin konq-plugins konqueror
2833 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>.
2838 <div class=
"padding"></div>
2842 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Gnash_buildbot_slave_and_Debian_kfreebsd.html">Gnash buildbot slave and Debian kfreebsd
</a>
2849 <a href=
"http://www.listware.net/201011/gnash-dev/67431-gnash-dev-buildbot-looking-for-slaves.html">the
2850 call from the Gnash project
</a> for
2851 <a href=
"http://www.gnashdev.org:8010">buildbot
</a> slaves to test the
2852 current source, I have set up a virtual KVM machine on the Debian
2853 Edu/Skolelinux virtualization host to test the git source on
2854 Debian/Squeeze. I hope this can help the developers in getting new
2855 releases out more often.
</p>
2857 <p>As the developers want less main-stream build platforms tested to,
2858 I have considered setting up a
<a
2859 href=
"http://www.debian.org/ports/kfreebsd-gnu/">Debian/kfreebsd
</a>
2860 machine as well. I have also considered using the kfreebsd
2861 architecture in Debian as a file server in NUUG to get access to the
5
2862 TB zfs volume we currently use to store DV video. Because of this, I
2863 finally got around to do a test installation of Debian/Squeeze with
2864 kfreebsd. Installation went fairly smooth, thought I noticed some
2865 visual glitches in the cdebconf dialogs (black cursor left on the
2866 screen at random locations). Have not gotten very far with the
2867 testing. Noticed cfdisk did not work, but fdisk did so it was not a
2868 fatal problem. Have to spend some more time on it to see if it is
2869 useful as a file server for NUUG. Will try to find time to set up a
2870 gnash buildbot slave on the Debian Edu/Skolelinux this weekend.
</p>
2876 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>.
2881 <div class=
"padding"></div>
2885 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_in_3D.html">Debian in
3D
</a>
2891 <p><img src=
"http://thingiverse-production.s3.amazonaws.com/renders/23/e0/c4/f9/2b/debswagtdose_preview_medium.jpg"></p>
2893 <p>3D printing is just great. I just came across this Debian logo in
2895 <a href=
"http://blog.thingiverse.com/2010/11/09/participatory-branding/">the
2896 thingiverse blog
</a>.
</p>
2902 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>.
2907 <div class=
"padding"></div>
2911 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Software_updates_2010_10_24.html">Software updates
2010-
10-
24</a>
2917 <p>Some updates.
</p>
2919 <p>My
<a href=
"http://pledgebank.com/gnash-avm2">gnash pledge
</a> to
2920 raise money for the project is going well. The lower limit of
10
2921 signers was reached in
24 hours, and so far
13 people have signed it.
2922 More signers and more funding is most welcome, and I am really curious
2923 how far we can get before the time limit of December
24 is reached.
2926 <p>On the #gnash IRC channel on irc.freenode.net, I was just tipped
2927 about what appear to be a great code coverage tool capable of
2928 generating code coverage stats without any changes to the source code.
2930 <a href=
"http://simonkagstrom.github.com/kcov/index.html">kcov
</a>,
2931 and can be used using
<tt>kcov
<directory
> <binary
></tt>.
2932 It is missing in Debian, but the git source built just fine in Squeeze
2933 after I installed libelf-dev, libdwarf-dev, pkg-config and
2934 libglib2.0-dev. Failed to build in Lenny, but suspect that is
2935 solvable. I hope kcov make it into Debian soon.
</p>
2937 <p>Finally found time to wrap up the release notes for
<a
2938 href=
"http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2010/10/msg00002.html">a
2939 new alpha release of Debian Edu
</a>, and just published the second
2940 alpha test release of the Squeeze based Debian Edu /
2941 <a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux
</a>
2942 release. Give it a try if you need a complete linux solution for your
2943 school, including central infrastructure server, workstations, thin
2944 client servers and diskless workstations. A nice touch added
2945 yesterday is RDP support on the thin client servers, for windows
2946 clients to get a Linux desktop on request.
</p>
2952 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>.
2957 <div class=
"padding"></div>
2961 <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>
2967 <p>In the
<a href=
"http://popcon.debian.org/unknown/by_vote">Debian
2968 popularity-contest numbers
</a>, the adobe-flashplugin package the
2969 second most popular used package that is missing in Debian. The sixth
2970 most popular is flashplayer-mozilla. This is a clear indication that
2971 working flash is important for Debian users. Around
10 percent of the
2972 users submitting data to popcon.debian.org have this package
2975 <p>In the report written by Lars Risan in August
2008
2976 («
<a href=
"http://wiki.skolelinux.no/Dokumentasjon/Rapporter?action=AttachFile&do=view&target=Skolelinux_i_bruk_rapport_1.0.pdf">Skolelinux
2977 i bruk – Rapport for Hurum kommune, Universitetet i Agder og
2978 stiftelsen SLX Debian Labs
</a>»), one of the most important problems
2979 schools experienced with
<a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian
2980 Edu/Skolelinux
</a> was the lack of working Flash. A lot of educational
2981 web sites require Flash to work, and lacking working Flash support in
2982 the web browser and the problems with installing it was perceived as a
2983 good reason to stay with Windows.
</p>
2985 <p>I once saw a funny and sad comment in a web forum, where Linux was
2986 said to be the retarded cousin that did not really understand
2987 everything you told him but could work fairly well. This was a
2988 comment regarding the problems Linux have with proprietary formats and
2989 non-standard web pages, and is sad because it exposes a fairly common
2990 understanding of whose fault it is if web pages that only work in for
2991 example Internet Explorer
6 fail to work on Firefox, and funny because
2992 it explain very well how annoying it is for users when Linux
2993 distributions do not work with the documents they receive or the web
2994 pages they want to visit.
</p>
2996 <p>This is part of the reason why I believe it is important for Debian
2997 and Debian Edu to have a well working Flash implementation in the
2998 distribution, to get at least popular sites as Youtube and Google
2999 Video to working out of the box. For Squeeze, Debian have the chance
3000 to include the latest version of Gnash that will make this happen, as
3001 the new release
0.8.8 was published a few weeks ago and is resting in
3002 unstable. The new version work with more sites that version
0.8.7.
3003 The Gnash maintainers have asked for a freeze exception, but the
3004 release team have not had time to reply to it yet. I hope they agree
3005 with me that Flash is important for the Debian desktop users, and thus
3006 accept the new package into Squeeze.
</p>
3012 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>.
3017 <div class=
"padding"></div>
3021 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Circular_package_dependencies_harms_apt_recovery.html">Circular package dependencies harms apt recovery
</a>
3027 <p>I discovered this while doing
3028 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html">automated
3029 testing of upgrades from Debian Lenny to Squeeze
</a>. A few packages
3030 in Debian still got circular dependencies, and it is often claimed
3031 that apt and aptitude should be able to handle this just fine, but
3032 some times these dependency loops causes apt to fail.
</p>
3034 <p>An example is from todays
3035 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing//test-20100727-lenny-squeeze-kde-aptitude.txt">upgrade
3036 of KDE using aptitude
</a>. In it, a bug in kdebase-workspace-data
3037 causes perl-modules to fail to upgrade. The cause is simple. If a
3038 package fail to unpack, then only part of packages with the circular
3039 dependency might end up being unpacked when unpacking aborts, and the
3040 ones already unpacked will fail to configure in the recovery phase
3041 because its dependencies are unavailable.
</p>
3043 <p>In this log, the problem manifest itself with this error:
</p>
3046 dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of perl-modules:
3047 perl-modules depends on perl (
>=
5.10.1-
1); however:
3048 Version of perl on system is
5.10.0-
19lenny
2.
3049 dpkg: error processing perl-modules (--configure):
3050 dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
3053 <p>The perl/perl-modules circular dependency is already
3054 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/527917">reported as a bug
</a>, and will
3055 hopefully be solved as soon as possible, but it is not the only one,
3056 and each one of these loops in the dependency tree can cause similar
3057 failures. Of course, they only occur when there are bugs in other
3058 packages causing the unpacking to fail, but it is rather nasty when
3059 the failure of one package causes the problem to become worse because
3060 of dependency loops.
</p>
3063 <a href=
"http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/06/msg00116.html">the
3064 tireless effort by Bill Allombert
</a>, the number of circular
3066 <a href=
"http://debian.semistable.com/debgraph.out.html">left in Debian
3067 is dropping
</a>, and perhaps it will reach zero one day. :)
</p>
3069 <p>Todays testing also exposed a bug in
3070 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/590605">update-notifier
</a> and
3071 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/590604">different behaviour
</a> between
3072 apt-get and aptitude, the latter possibly caused by some circular
3073 dependency. Reported both to BTS to try to get someone to look at
3080 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>.
3085 <div class=
"padding"></div>
3089 <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>
3096 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html">followup
</a>
3098 <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
3100 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Combining_PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_LDAP_objects.html">merging
3101 all
</a> the computer related LDAP objects in Debian Edu.
</p>
3103 <p>As a step to try to see if it possible to merge the DNS and DHCP
3104 LDAP objects, I have had a look at how the packages pdns-backend-ldap
3105 and dhcp3-server-ldap in Debian use the LDAP server. The two
3106 implementations are quite different in how they use LDAP.
</p>
3108 To get this information, I started slapd with debugging enabled and
3109 dumped the debug output to a file to get the LDAP searches performed
3110 on a Debian Edu main-server. Here is a summary.
3112 <p><strong>powerdns
</strong></p>
3114 <a href=
"http://www.linuxnetworks.de/doc/index.php/PowerDNS_LDAP_Backend">Clues
3115 on how to
</a> set up PowerDNS to use a LDAP backend is available on
3118 <p>PowerDNS have two modes of operation using LDAP as its backend.
3119 One "strict" mode where the forward and reverse DNS lookups are done
3120 using the same LDAP objects, and a "tree" mode where the forward and
3121 reverse entries are in two different subtrees in LDAP with a structure
3122 based on the DNS names, as in tjener.intern and
3123 2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa.
</p>
3125 <p>In tree mode, the server is set up to use a LDAP subtree as its
3126 base, and uses a "base" scoped search for the DNS name by adding
3127 "dc=tjener,dc=intern," to the base with a filter for
3128 "(associateddomain=tjener.intern)" for the forward entry and
3129 "dc=
2,dc=
2,dc=
0,dc=
10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa," with a filter for
3130 "(associateddomain=
2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa)" for the reverse entry. For
3131 forward entries, it is looking for attributes named dnsttl, arecord,
3132 nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord, ptrrecord, hinforecord, mxrecord,
3133 txtrecord, rprecord, afsdbrecord, keyrecord, aaaarecord, locrecord,
3134 srvrecord, naptrrecord, kxrecord, certrecord, dsrecord, sshfprecord,
3135 ipseckeyrecord, rrsigrecord, nsecrecord, dnskeyrecord, dhcidrecord,
3136 spfrecord and modifytimestamp. For reverse entries it is looking for
3137 the attributes dnsttl, arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord,
3138 ptrrecord, hinforecord, mxrecord, txtrecord, rprecord, aaaarecord,
3139 locrecord, srvrecord, naptrrecord and modifytimestamp. The equivalent
3140 ldapsearch commands could look like this:
</p>
3143 ldapsearch -h ldap \
3144 -b dc=tjener,dc=intern,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no \
3145 -s base -x '(associateddomain=tjener.intern)' dNSTTL aRecord nSRecord \
3146 cNAMERecord sOARecord pTRRecord hInfoRecord mXRecord tXTRecord \
3147 rPRecord aFSDBRecord KeyRecord aAAARecord lOCRecord sRVRecord \
3148 nAPTRRecord kXRecord certRecord dSRecord sSHFPRecord iPSecKeyRecord \
3149 rRSIGRecord nSECRecord dNSKeyRecord dHCIDRecord sPFRecord modifyTimestamp
3151 ldapsearch -h ldap \
3152 -b dc=
2,dc=
2,dc=
0,dc=
10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no \
3153 -s base -x '(associateddomain=
2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa)'
3154 dnsttl, arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord soarecord ptrrecord \
3155 hinforecord mxrecord txtrecord rprecord aaaarecord locrecord \
3156 srvrecord naptrrecord modifytimestamp
3159 <p>In Debian Edu/Lenny, the PowerDNS tree mode is used with
3160 ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no as the base, and these are two
3161 example LDAP objects used there. In addition to these objects, the
3162 parent objects all th way up to ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
3166 dn: dc=tjener,dc=intern,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
3168 objectclass: dnsdomain
3169 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
3172 associateddomain: tjener.intern
3174 dn: dc=
2,dc=
2,dc=
0,dc=
10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
3176 objectclass: dnsdomain2
3177 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
3179 ptrrecord: tjener.intern
3180 associateddomain:
2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa
3183 <p>In strict mode, the server behaves differently. When looking for
3184 forward DNS entries, it is doing a "subtree" scoped search with the
3185 same base as in the tree mode for a object with filter
3186 "(associateddomain=tjener.intern)" and requests the attributes dnsttl,
3187 arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord, ptrrecord, hinforecord,
3188 mxrecord, txtrecord, rprecord, aaaarecord, locrecord, srvrecord,
3189 naptrrecord and modifytimestamp. For reverse entires it also do a
3190 subtree scoped search but this time the filter is "(arecord=
10.0.2.2)"
3191 and the requested attributes are associateddomain, dnsttl and
3192 modifytimestamp. In short, in strict mode the objects with ptrrecord
3193 go away, and the arecord attribute in the forward object is used
3196 <p>The forward and reverse searches can be simulated using ldapsearch
3200 ldapsearch -h ldap -b ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no -s sub -x \
3201 '(associateddomain=tjener.intern)' dNSTTL aRecord nSRecord \
3202 cNAMERecord sOARecord pTRRecord hInfoRecord mXRecord tXTRecord \
3203 rPRecord aFSDBRecord KeyRecord aAAARecord lOCRecord sRVRecord \
3204 nAPTRRecord kXRecord certRecord dSRecord sSHFPRecord iPSecKeyRecord \
3205 rRSIGRecord nSECRecord dNSKeyRecord dHCIDRecord sPFRecord modifyTimestamp
3207 ldapsearch -h ldap -b ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no -s sub -x \
3208 '(arecord=
10.0.2.2)' associateddomain dnsttl modifytimestamp
3211 <p>In addition to the forward and reverse searches , there is also a
3212 search for SOA records, which behave similar to the forward and
3213 reverse lookups.
</p>
3215 <p>A thing to note with the PowerDNS behaviour is that it do not
3216 specify any objectclass names, and instead look for the attributes it
3217 need to generate a DNS reply. This make it able to work with any
3218 objectclass that provide the needed attributes.
</p>
3220 <p>The attributes are normally provided in the cosine (RFC
1274) and
3221 dnsdomain2 schemas. The latter is used for reverse entries like
3222 ptrrecord and recent DNS additions like aaaarecord and srvrecord.
</p>
3224 <p>In Debian Edu, we have created DNS objects using the object classes
3225 dcobject (for dc), dnsdomain or dnsdomain2 (structural, for the DNS
3226 attributes) and domainrelatedobject (for associatedDomain). The use
3227 of structural object classes make it impossible to combine these
3228 classes with the object classes used by DHCP.
</p>
3230 <p>There are other schemas that could be used too, for example the
3231 dnszone structural object class used by Gosa and bind-sdb for the DNS
3232 attributes combined with the domainrelatedobject object class, but in
3233 this case some unused attributes would have to be included as well
3234 (zonename and relativedomainname).
</p>
3236 <p>My proposal for Debian Edu would be to switch PowerDNS to strict
3237 mode and not use any of the existing objectclasses (dnsdomain,
3238 dnsdomain2 and dnszone) when one want to combine the DNS information
3239 with DHCP information, and instead create a auxiliary object class
3240 defined something like this (using the attributes defined for
3241 dnsdomain and dnsdomain2 or dnszone):
</p>
3244 objectclass ( some-oid NAME 'dnsDomainAux'
3247 MAY ( ARecord $ MDRecord $ MXRecord $ NSRecord $ SOARecord $ CNAMERecord $
3248 DNSTTL $ DNSClass $ PTRRecord $ HINFORecord $ MINFORecord $
3249 TXTRecord $ SIGRecord $ KEYRecord $ AAAARecord $ LOCRecord $
3250 NXTRecord $ SRVRecord $ NAPTRRecord $ KXRecord $ CERTRecord $
3251 A6Record $ DNAMERecord
3255 <p>This will allow any object to become a DNS entry when combined with
3256 the domainrelatedobject object class, and allow any entity to include
3257 all the attributes PowerDNS wants. I've sent an email to the PowerDNS
3258 developers asking for their view on this schema and if they are
3259 interested in providing such schema with PowerDNS, and I hope my
3260 message will be accepted into their mailing list soon.
</p>
3262 <p><strong>ISC dhcp
</strong></p>
3264 <p>The DHCP server searches for specific objectclass and requests all
3265 the object attributes, and then uses the attributes it want. This
3266 make it harder to figure out exactly what attributes are used, but
3267 thanks to the working example in Debian Edu I can at least get an idea
3268 what is needed without having to read the source code.
</p>
3270 <p>In the DHCP server configuration, the LDAP base to use and the
3271 search filter to use to locate the correct dhcpServer entity is
3272 stored. These are the relevant entries from
3273 /etc/dhcp3/dhcpd.conf:
</p>
3276 ldap-base-dn "dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no";
3277 ldap-dhcp-server-cn "dhcp";
3280 <p>The DHCP server uses this information to nest all the DHCP
3281 configuration it need. The cn "dhcp" is located using the given LDAP
3282 base and the filter "(&(objectClass=dhcpServer)(cn=dhcp))". The
3283 search result is this entry:
</p>
3286 dn: cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
3289 objectClass: dhcpServer
3290 dhcpServiceDN: cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
3293 <p>The content of the dhcpServiceDN attribute is next used to locate the
3294 subtree with DHCP configuration. The DHCP configuration subtree base
3295 is located using a base scope search with base "cn=DHCP
3296 Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no" and filter
3297 "(&(objectClass=dhcpService)(|(dhcpPrimaryDN=cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no)(dhcpSecondaryDN=cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no)))".
3298 The search result is this entry:
</p>
3301 dn: cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
3304 objectClass: dhcpService
3305 objectClass: dhcpOptions
3306 dhcpPrimaryDN: cn=dhcp, dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
3307 dhcpStatements: ddns-update-style none
3308 dhcpStatements: authoritative
3309 dhcpOption: smtp-server code
69 = array of ip-address
3310 dhcpOption: www-server code
72 = array of ip-address
3311 dhcpOption: wpad-url code
252 = text
3314 <p>Next, the entire subtree is processed, one level at the time. When
3315 all the DHCP configuration is loaded, it is ready to receive requests.
3316 The subtree in Debian Edu contain objects with object classes
3317 top/dhcpService/dhcpOptions, top/dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions,
3318 top/dhcpSubnet, top/dhcpGroup and top/dhcpHost. These provide options
3319 and information about netmasks, dynamic range etc. Leaving out the
3320 details here because it is not relevant for the focus of my
3321 investigation, which is to see if it is possible to merge dns and dhcp
3322 related computer objects.
</p>
3324 <p>When a DHCP request come in, LDAP is searched for the MAC address
3325 of the client (
00:
00:
00:
00:
00:
00 in this example), using a subtree
3326 scoped search with "cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no" as
3327 the base and "(&(objectClass=dhcpHost)(dhcpHWAddress=ethernet
3328 00:
00:
00:
00:
00:
00))" as the filter. This is what a host object look
3332 dn: cn=hostname,cn=group1,cn=THINCLIENTS,cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
3335 objectClass: dhcpHost
3336 dhcpHWAddress: ethernet
00:
00:
00:
00:
00:
00
3337 dhcpStatements: fixed-address hostname
3340 <p>There is less flexiblity in the way LDAP searches are done here.
3341 The object classes need to have fixed names, and the configuration
3342 need to be stored in a fairly specific LDAP structure. On the
3343 positive side, the invidiual dhcpHost entires can be anywhere without
3344 the DN pointed to by the dhcpServer entries. The latter should make
3345 it possible to group all host entries in a subtree next to the
3346 configuration entries, and this subtree can also be shared with the
3347 DNS server if the schema proposed above is combined with the dhcpHost
3348 structural object class.
3350 <p><strong>Conclusion
</strong></p>
3352 <p>The PowerDNS implementation seem to be very flexible when it come
3353 to which LDAP schemas to use. While its "tree" mode is rigid when it
3354 come to the the LDAP structure, the "strict" mode is very flexible,
3355 allowing DNS objects to be stored anywhere under the base cn specified
3356 in the configuration.
</p>
3358 <p>The DHCP implementation on the other hand is very inflexible, both
3359 regarding which LDAP schemas to use and which LDAP structure to use.
3360 I guess one could implement ones own schema, as long as the
3361 objectclasses and attributes have the names used, but this do not
3362 really help when the DHCP subtree need to have a fairly fixed
3365 <p>Based on the observed behaviour, I suspect a LDAP structure like
3366 this might work for Debian Edu:
</p>
3370 cn=machine-info (dhcpService) - dhcpServiceDN points here
3371 cn=dhcp (dhcpServer)
3372 cn=dhcp-internal (dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions)
3373 cn=
10.0.2.0 (dhcpSubnet)
3374 cn=group1 (dhcpGroup/dhcpOptions)
3375 cn=dhcp-thinclients (dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions)
3376 cn=
192.168.0.0 (dhcpSubnet)
3377 cn=group1 (dhcpGroup/dhcpOptions)
3378 ou=machines - PowerDNS base points here
3379 cn=hostname (dhcpHost/domainrelatedobject/dnsDomainAux)
3382 <P>This is not tested yet. If the DHCP server require the dhcpHost
3383 entries to be in the dhcpGroup subtrees, the entries can be stored
3384 there instead of a common machines subtree, and the PowerDNS base
3385 would have to be moved one level up to the machine-info subtree.
</p>
3387 <p>The combined object under the machines subtree would look something
3391 dn: dc=hostname,ou=machines,cn=machine-info,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
3394 objectClass: dhcpHost
3395 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
3396 objectclass: dnsDomainAux
3397 associateddomain: hostname.intern
3398 arecord:
10.11.12.13
3399 dhcpHWAddress: ethernet
00:
00:
00:
00:
00:
00
3400 dhcpStatements: fixed-address hostname.intern
3403 </p>One could even add the LTSP configuration associated with a given
3404 machine, as long as the required attributes are available in a
3405 auxiliary object class.
</p>
3411 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>.
3416 <div class=
"padding"></div>
3420 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Combining_PowerDNS_and_ISC_DHCP_LDAP_objects.html">Combining PowerDNS and ISC DHCP LDAP objects
</a>
3426 <p>For a while now, I have wanted to find a way to change the DNS and
3427 DHCP services in Debian Edu to use the same LDAP objects for a given
3428 computer, to avoid the possibility of having a inconsistent state for
3429 a computer in LDAP (as in DHCP but no DNS entry or the other way
3430 around) and make it easier to add computers to LDAP.
</p>
3432 <p>I've looked at how powerdns and dhcpd is using LDAP, and using this
3433 information finally found a solution that seem to work.
</p>
3435 <p>The old setup required three LDAP objects for a given computer.
3436 One forward DNS entry, one reverse DNS entry and one DHCP entry. If
3437 we switch powerdns to use its strict LDAP method (ldap-method=strict
3438 in pdns-debian-edu.conf), the forward and reverse DNS entries are
3439 merged into one while making it impossible to transfer the reverse map
3440 to a slave DNS server.
</p>
3442 <p>If we also replace the object class used to get the DNS related
3443 attributes to one allowing these attributes to be combined with the
3444 dhcphost object class, we can merge the DNS and DHCP entries into one.
3445 I've written such object class in the dnsdomainaux.schema file (need
3446 proper OIDs, but that is a minor issue), and tested the setup. It
3449 <p>With this test setup in place, we can get away with one LDAP object
3450 for both DNS and DHCP, and even the LTSP configuration I suggested in
3451 an earlier email. The combined LDAP object will look something like
3455 dn: cn=hostname,cn=group1,cn=THINCLIENTS,cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
3457 objectClass: dhcphost
3458 objectclass: domainrelatedobject
3459 objectclass: dnsdomainaux
3460 associateddomain: hostname.intern
3461 arecord:
10.11.12.13
3462 dhcphwaddress: ethernet
00:
00:
00:
00:
00:
00
3463 dhcpstatements: fixed-address hostname
3467 <p>The DNS server uses the associateddomain and arecord entries, while
3468 the DHCP server uses the dhcphwaddress and dhcpstatements entries
3469 before asking DNS to resolve the fixed-adddress. LTSP will use
3470 dhcphwaddress or associateddomain and the ldapconfig* attributes.
</p>
3472 <p>I am not yet sure if I can get the DHCP server to look for its
3473 dhcphost in a different location, to allow us to put the objects
3474 outside the "DHCP Config" subtree, but hope to figure out a way to do
3475 that. If I can't figure out a way to do that, we can still get rid of
3476 the hosts subtree and move all its content into the DHCP Config tree
3477 (which probably should be renamed to be more related to the new
3478 content. I suspect cn=dnsdhcp,ou=services or something like that
3479 might be a good place to put it.
</p>
3481 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
3482 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.
</p>
3488 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>.
3493 <div class=
"padding"></div>
3497 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Idea_for_storing_LTSP_configuration_in_LDAP.html">Idea for storing LTSP configuration in LDAP
</a>
3503 <p>Vagrant mentioned on IRC today that ltsp_config now support
3504 sourcing files from /usr/share/ltsp/ltsp_config.d/ on the thin
3505 clients, and that this can be used to fetch configuration from LDAP if
3506 Debian Edu choose to store configuration there.
</p>
3508 <p>Armed with this information, I got inspired and wrote a test module
3509 to get configuration from LDAP. The idea is to look up the MAC
3510 address of the client in LDAP, and look for attributes on the form
3511 ltspconfigsetting=value, and use this to export SETTING=value to the
3514 <p>The goal is to be able to store the LTSP configuration attributes
3515 in a "computer" LDAP object used by both DNS and DHCP, and thus
3516 allowing us to store all information about a computer in one place.
</p>
3518 <p>This is a untested draft implementation, and I welcome feedback on
3519 this approach. A real LDAP schema for the ltspClientAux objectclass
3520 need to be written. Comments, suggestions, etc?
</p>
3523 # Store in /opt/ltsp/$arch/usr/share/ltsp/ltsp_config.d/ldap-config
3525 # Fetch LTSP client settings from LDAP based on MAC address
3527 # Uses ethernet address as stored in the dhcpHost objectclass using
3528 # the dhcpHWAddress attribute or ethernet address stored in the
3529 # ieee802Device objectclass with the macAddress attribute.
3531 # This module is written to be schema agnostic, and only depend on the
3532 # existence of attribute names.
3534 # The LTSP configuration variables are saved directly using a
3535 # ltspConfig prefix and uppercasing the rest of the attribute name.
3536 # To set the SERVER variable, set the ltspConfigServer attribute.
3538 # Some LDAP schema should be created with all the relevant
3539 # configuration settings. Something like this should work:
3541 # objectclass (
1.1.2.2 NAME 'ltspClientAux'
3544 # MAY ( ltspConfigServer $ ltsConfigSound $ ... )
3546 LDAPSERVER=$(debian-edu-ldapserver)
3547 if [ "$LDAPSERVER" ] ; then
3548 LDAPBASE=$(debian-edu-ldapserver -b)
3549 for MAC in $(LANG=C ifconfig |grep -i hwaddr| awk '{print $
5}'|sort -u) ; do
3550 filter="(|(dhcpHWAddress=ethernet $MAC)(macAddress=$MAC))"
3551 ldapsearch -h "$LDAPSERVER" -b "$LDAPBASE" -v -x "$filter" | \
3552 grep '^ltspConfig' | while read attr value ; do
3553 # Remove prefix and convert to upper case
3554 attr=$(echo $attr | sed 's/^ltspConfig//i' | tr a-z A-Z)
3555 # bass value on to clients
3556 eval "$attr=$value; export $attr"
3562 <p>I'm not sure this shell construction will work, because I suspect
3563 the while block might end up in a subshell causing the variables set
3564 there to not show up in ltsp-config, but if that is the case I am sure
3565 the code can be restructured to make sure the variables are passed on.
3566 I expect that can be solved with some testing. :)
</p>
3568 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
3569 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.
</p>
3571 <p>Update
2010-
07-
17: I am aware of another effort to store LTSP
3572 configuration in LDAP that was created around year
2000 by
3573 <a href=
"http://www.pcxperience.com/thinclient/documentation/ldap.html">PC
3574 Xperience, Inc.,
2000</a>. I found its
3575 <a href=
"http://people.redhat.com/alikins/ltsp/ldap/">files
</a> on a
3576 personal home page over at redhat.com.
</p>
3582 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>.
3587 <div class=
"padding"></div>
3591 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/jXplorer__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">jXplorer, a very nice LDAP GUI
</a>
3598 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LUMA__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">my
3599 last post
</a> about available LDAP tools in Debian, I was told about a
3600 LDAP GUI that is even better than luma. The java application
3601 <a href=
"http://jxplorer.org/">jXplorer
</a> is claimed to be capable of
3602 moving LDAP objects and subtrees using drag-and-drop, and can
3603 authenticate using Kerberos. I have only tested the Kerberos
3604 authentication, but do not have a LDAP setup allowing me to rewrite
3605 LDAP with my test user yet. It is
3606 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/j/jxplorer.html">available in
3607 Debian
</a> testing and unstable at the moment. The only problem I
3608 have with it is how it handle errors. If something go wrong, its
3609 non-intuitive behaviour require me to go through some query work list
3610 and remove the failing query. Nothing big, but very annoying.
</p>
3616 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>.
3621 <div class=
"padding"></div>
3625 <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>
3631 <p>Here is a short update on my
<a
3632 href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/~pere/debian-upgrade-testing/">my
3633 Debian Lenny-
>Squeeze upgrade testing
</a>. Here is a summary of the
3634 difference for Gnome when it is upgraded by apt-get and aptitude. I'm
3635 not reporting the status for KDE, because the upgrade crashes when
3636 aptitude try because of missing conflicts
3637 (
<a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/584861">#
584861</a> and
3638 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/585716">#
585716</a>).
</p>
3640 <p>At the end of the upgrade test script, dpkg -l is executed to get a
3641 complete list of the installed packages. Based on this I see these
3642 differences when I did a test run today. As usual, I do not really
3643 know what the correct set of packages would be, but thought it best to
3644 publish the difference.
</p>
3646 <p>Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude
</p>
3649 at-spi cpp-
4.3 finger gnome-spell gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs
3650 libatspi1.0-
0 libcupsys2 libeel2-data libgail-common libgdl-
1-common
3651 libgnomeprint2.2-data libgnomeprintui2.2-common libgnomevfs2-bin
3652 libgtksourceview-common libpt-
1.10.10-plugins-alsa
3653 libpt-
1.10.10-plugins-v4l libservlet2.4-java libxalan2-java
3654 libxerces2-java openoffice.org-writer2latex openssl-blacklist p7zip
3655 python-
4suite-xml python-eggtrayicon python-gtkhtml2
3656 python-gtkmozembed svgalibg1 xserver-xephyr zip
3659 <p>Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude
</p>
3662 bluez-utils dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop epiphany-gecko
3663 gnome-app-install gnome-mount gnome-vfs-obexftp gnome-volume-manager
3664 libao2 libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5 libbind9-
50
3665 libbluetooth2 libcamel1.2-
11 libcdio7 libcucul0 libcurl3
3666 libdirectfb-
1.0-
0 libdvdread3 libedata-cal1.2-
6 libedataserver1.2-
9
3667 libeel2-
2.20 libepc-
1.0-
1 libepc-ui-
1.0-
1 libexchange-storage1.2-
3
3668 libfaad0 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-
3 libgda3-common libggz2 libggzcore9
3669 libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-
0 libgksuui1.0-
1 libgmyth0 libgnome-desktop-
2
3670 libgnome-pilot2 libgnomecups1.0-
1 libgnomeprint2.2-
0
3671 libgnomeprintui2.2-
0 libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtkhtml2-
0
3672 libgtksourceview1.0-
0 libgucharmap6 libhesiod0 libicu38 libisccc50
3673 libisccfg50 libiw29 libkpathsea4 libltdl3 liblwres50 libmagick++
10
3674 libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmtp7 libmysqlclient15off libnautilus-burn4
3675 libneon27 libnm-glib0 libnm-util0 libopal-
2.2 libosp5
3676 libparted1.8-
10 libpisock9 libpisync1 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3
3677 libpt-
1.10.10 libraw1394-
8 libsensors3 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-
8
3678 libssh2-
1 libsuitesparse-
3.1.0 libswfdec-
0.6-
90 libtalloc1
3679 libtotem-plparser10 libtrackerclient0 libvoikko1 libxalan2-java-gcj
3680 libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12 libxtrap6 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3
3681 mysql-common swfdec-gnome totem-gstreamer wodim
3684 <p>Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get
</p>
3687 gnome gnome-desktop-environment hamster-applet python-gnomeapplet
3688 python-gnomekeyring python-wnck rhythmbox-plugins xorg
3689 xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
3690 xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
3691 xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-video-all
3692 xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark xserver-xorg-video-ati
3693 xserver-xorg-video-chips xserver-xorg-video-cirrus
3694 xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
3695 xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
3696 xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-mach64
3697 xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
3698 xserver-xorg-video-nouveau xserver-xorg-video-nv
3699 xserver-xorg-video-r128 xserver-xorg-video-radeon
3700 xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd xserver-xorg-video-rendition
3701 xserver-xorg-video-s3 xserver-xorg-video-s3virge
3702 xserver-xorg-video-savage xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion
3703 xserver-xorg-video-sis xserver-xorg-video-sisusb
3704 xserver-xorg-video-tdfx xserver-xorg-video-tga
3705 xserver-xorg-video-trident xserver-xorg-video-tseng
3706 xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vmware
3707 xserver-xorg-video-voodoo
3710 <p>Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get
</p>
3713 deskbar-applet xserver-xorg xserver-xorg-core
3714 xserver-xorg-input-wacom xserver-xorg-video-intel
3715 xserver-xorg-video-openchrome
3718 <p>I was told on IRC that the xorg-xserver package was
3719 <a href=
"http://git.debian.org/?p=pkg-xorg/xserver/xorg-server.git;a=commit;h=9c8080d06c457932d3bfec021c69ac000aa60120">changed
3720 in git
</a> today to try to get apt-get to not remove xorg completely.
3721 No idea when it hits Squeeze, but when it does I hope it will reduce
3722 the difference somewhat.
3728 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>.
3733 <div class=
"padding"></div>
3737 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/LUMA__a_very_nice_LDAP_GUI.html">LUMA, a very nice LDAP GUI
</a>
3743 <p>The last few days I have been looking into the status of the LDAP
3744 directory in Debian Edu, and in the process I started to miss a GUI
3745 tool to browse the LDAP tree. The only one I was able to find in
3746 Debian/Squeeze and Lenny is
3747 <a href=
"http://luma.sourceforge.net/">LUMA
</a>, which has proved to
3748 be a great tool to get a overview of the current LDAP directory
3749 populated by default in Skolelinux. Thanks to it, I have been able to
3750 find empty and obsolete subtrees, misplaced objects and duplicate
3751 objects. It will be installed by default in Debian/Squeeze. If you
3752 are working with LDAP, give it a go. :)
</p>
3754 <p>I did notice one problem with it I have not had time to report to
3755 the BTS yet. There is no .desktop file in the package, so the tool do
3756 not show up in the Gnome and KDE menus, but only deep down in in the
3757 Debian submenu in KDE. I hope that can be fixed before Squeeze is
3760 <p>I have not yet been able to get it to modify the tree yet. I would
3761 like to move objects and remove subtrees directly in the GUI, but have
3762 not found a way to do that with LUMA yet. So in the mean time, I use
3763 <a href=
"http://www.lichteblau.com/ldapvi/">ldapvi
</a> for that.
</p>
3765 <p>If you have tips on other GUI tools for LDAP that might be useful
3766 in Debian Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.
</p>
3768 <p>Update
2010-
06-
29: Ross Reedstrom tipped us about the
3769 <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/g/gq.html">gq
</a> package as a
3770 useful GUI alternative. It seem like a good tool, but is unmaintained
3771 in Debian and got a RC bug keeping it out of Squeeze. Unless that
3772 changes, it will not be an option for Debian Edu based on Squeeze.
</p>
3778 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>.
3783 <div class=
"padding"></div>
3787 <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>
3794 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_for_new__LDAP_schemas_replacing_RFC_2307_.html">complained
3795 about the fact
</a> that it is not possible with the provided schemas
3796 for storing DNS and DHCP information in LDAP to combine the two sets
3797 of information into one LDAP object representing a computer.
</p>
3799 <p>In the mean time, I discovered that a simple fix would be to make
3800 the dhcpHost object class auxiliary, to allow it to be combined with
3801 the dNSDomain object class, and thus forming one object for one
3802 computer when storing both DHCP and DNS information in LDAP.
</p>
3804 <p>If I understand this correctly, it is not safe to do this change
3805 without also changing the assigned number for the object class, and I
3806 do not know enough about LDAP schema design to do that properly for
3809 <p>Anyway, for future reference, this is how I believe we could change
3811 <a href=
"http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-dhc-ldap-schema-00">DHCP
3812 schema
</a> to solve at least part of the problem with the LDAP schemas
3813 available today from IETF.
</p>
3816 --- dhcp.schema (revision
65192)
3817 +++ dhcp.schema (working copy)
3819 objectclass (
2.16.840.1.113719.1.203.6.6
3821 DESC 'This represents information about a particular client'
3825 MAY (dhcpLeaseDN $ dhcpHWAddress $ dhcpOptionsDN $ dhcpStatements $ dhcpComments $ dhcpOption)
3826 X-NDS_CONTAINMENT ('dhcpService' 'dhcpSubnet' 'dhcpGroup') )
3829 <p>I very much welcome clues on how to do this properly for Debian
3830 Edu/Squeeze. We provide the DHCP schema in our debian-edu-config
3831 package, and should thus be free to rewrite it as we see fit.
</p>
3833 <p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
3834 please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.
</p>
3840 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>.
3845 <div class=
"padding"></div>
3849 <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>
3855 <p>A few times I have had the need to simulate the way tasksel
3856 installs packages during the normal debian-installer run. Until now,
3857 I have ended up letting tasksel do the work, with the annoying problem
3858 of not getting any feedback at all when something fails (like a
3859 conffile question from dpkg or a download that fails), using code like
3863 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
3864 tasksel --new-install
3867 This would invoke tasksel, let its automatic task selection pick the
3868 tasks to install, and continue to install the requested tasks without
3869 any output what so ever.
3871 Recently I revisited this problem while working on the automatic
3872 package upgrade testing, because tasksel would some times hang without
3873 any useful feedback, and I want to see what is going on when it
3874 happen. Then it occured to me, I can parse the output from tasksel
3875 when asked to run in test mode, and use that aptitude command line
3876 printed by tasksel then to simulate the tasksel run. I ended up using
3880 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
3881 cmd="$(in_target tasksel -t --new-install | sed 's/debconf-apt-progress -- //')"
3885 <p>The content of $cmd is typically something like "
<tt>aptitude -q
3886 --without-recommends -o APT::Install-Recommends=no -y install
3887 ~t^desktop$ ~t^gnome-desktop$ ~t^laptop$ ~pstandard ~prequired
3888 ~pimportant
</tt>", which will install the gnome desktop task, the
3889 laptop task and all packages with priority standard , required and
3890 important, just like tasksel would have done it during
3893 <p>A better approach is probably to extend tasksel to be able to
3894 install packages without using debconf-apt-progress, for use cases
3901 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>.
3906 <div class="padding
"></div>
3910 <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>
3917 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html
">testing
3918 of Debian upgrades</a> from Lenny to Squeeze continues, and I've
3919 finally made the upgrade logs available from
3920 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-upgrade-testing/
">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-upgrade-testing/</a>.
3921 I am now testing dist-upgrade of Gnome and KDE in a chroot using both
3922 apt and aptitude, and found their differences interesting. This time
3923 I will only focus on their removal plans.</p>
3925 <p>After installing a Gnome desktop and the laptop task, apt-get wants
3926 to remove 72 packages when dist-upgrading from Lenny to Squeeze. The
3927 surprising part is that it want to remove xorg and all
3928 xserver-xorg-video* drivers. Clearly not a good choice, but I am not
3929 sure why. When asking aptitude to do the same, it want to remove 129
3930 packages, but most of them are library packages I suspect are no
3931 longer needed. Both of them want to remove bluetooth packages, which
3932 I do not know. Perhaps these bluetooth packages are obsolete?</p>
3934 <p>For KDE, apt-get want to remove 82 packages, among them kdebase
3935 which seem like a bad idea and xorg the same way as with Gnome. Asking
3936 aptitude for the same, it wants to remove 192 packages, none which are
3939 <p>I guess the removal of xorg during upgrades should be investigated
3940 and avoided, and perhaps others as well. Here are the complete list
3941 of planned removals. The complete logs is available from the URL
3942 above. Note if you want to repeat these tests, that the upgrade test
3943 for kde+apt-get hung in the tasksel setup because of dpkg asking
3944 conffile questions. No idea why. I worked around it by using
3945 '<tt>echo >> /proc/<em>pidofdpkg</em>/fd/0</tt>' to tell dpkg to
3948 <p><b>apt-get gnome 72</b>
3949 <br>bluez-gnome cupsddk-drivers deskbar-applet gnome
3950 gnome-desktop-environment gnome-network-admin gtkhtml3.14
3951 iceweasel-gnome-support libavcodec51 libdatrie0 libgdl-1-0
3952 libgnomekbd2 libgnomekbdui2 libmetacity0 libslab0 libxcb-xlib0
3953 nautilus-cd-burner python-gnome2-desktop python-gnome2-extras
3954 serpentine swfdec-mozilla update-manager xorg xserver-xorg
3955 xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
3956 xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
3957 xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-wacom
3958 xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark
3959 xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-chips
3960 xserver-xorg-video-cirrus xserver-xorg-video-cyrix
3961 xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
3962 xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
3963 xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-imstt
3964 xserver-xorg-video-intel xserver-xorg-video-mach64
3965 xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
3966 xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-nv
3967 xserver-xorg-video-openchrome xserver-xorg-video-r128
3968 xserver-xorg-video-radeon xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd
3969 xserver-xorg-video-rendition xserver-xorg-video-s3
3970 xserver-xorg-video-s3virge xserver-xorg-video-savage
3971 xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion xserver-xorg-video-sis
3972 xserver-xorg-video-sisusb xserver-xorg-video-tdfx
3973 xserver-xorg-video-tga xserver-xorg-video-trident
3974 xserver-xorg-video-tseng xserver-xorg-video-v4l
3975 xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vga
3976 xserver-xorg-video-vmware xserver-xorg-video-voodoo xulrunner-1.9
3977 xulrunner-1.9-gnome-support</p>
3979 <p><b>aptitude gnome 129</b>
3981 <br>bluez-gnome bluez-utils cpp-4.3 cupsddk-drivers dhcdbd
3982 djvulibre-desktop finger gnome-app-install gnome-mount
3983 gnome-network-admin gnome-spell gnome-vfs-obexftp
3984 gnome-volume-manager gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs gtkhtml3.14 libao2
3985 libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5 libavcodec51 libbluetooth2
3986 libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7 libcucul0 libcupsys2 libcurl3 libdatrie0
3987 libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdvdread3 libedataserver1.2-9 libeel2-2.20
3988 libeel2-data libepc-1.0-1 libepc-ui-1.0-1 libfaad0 libgail-common
3989 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libgdl-1-0 libgdl-1-common
3990 libggz2 libggzcore9 libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0
3991 libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomekbd2 libgnomekbdui2 libgnomeprint2.2-0
3992 libgnomeprint2.2-data libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgnomeprintui2.2-common
3993 libgnomevfs2-bin libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtkhtml2-0
3994 libgtksourceview-common libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgucharmap6
3995 libhesiod0 libicu38 libiw29 libkpathsea4 libltdl3 libmagick++10
3996 libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmetacity0 libmtp7 libmysqlclient15off
3997 libnautilus-burn4 libneon27 libnm-glib0 libnm-util0 libopal-2.2
3998 libosp5 libparted1.8-10 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3 libpt-1.10.10
3999 libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libraw1394-8
4000 libsensors3 libslab0 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8 libssh2-1
4001 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1 libtotem-plparser10
4002 libtrackerclient0 libxalan2-java libxalan2-java-gcj libxcb-xlib0
4003 libxerces2-java libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12 libxtrap6
4004 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3 mysql-common nautilus-cd-burner
4005 openoffice.org-writer2latex openssl-blacklist p7zip
4006 python-4suite-xml python-eggtrayicon python-gnome2-desktop
4007 python-gnome2-extras python-gtkhtml2 python-gtkmozembed
4008 python-numeric python-sexy serpentine svgalibg1 swfdec-gnome
4009 swfdec-mozilla totem-gstreamer update-manager wodim
4010 xserver-xorg-video-cyrix xserver-xorg-video-imstt
4011 xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-v4l xserver-xorg-video-vga
4014 <p><b>apt-get kde 82</b>
4016 <br>cupsddk-drivers karm kaudiocreator kcoloredit kcontrol kde kde-core
4017 kdeaddons kdeartwork kdebase kdebase-bin kdebase-bin-kde3
4018 kdebase-kio-plugins kdesktop kdeutils khelpcenter kicker
4019 kicker-applets knewsticker kolourpaint konq-plugins konqueror korn
4020 kpersonalizer kscreensaver ksplash libavcodec51 libdatrie0 libkiten1
4021 libxcb-xlib0 quanta superkaramba texlive-base-bin xorg xserver-xorg
4022 xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev
4023 xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
4024 xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-wacom
4025 xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark
4026 xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-chips
4027 xserver-xorg-video-cirrus xserver-xorg-video-cyrix
4028 xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
4029 xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128
4030 xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-imstt
4031 xserver-xorg-video-intel xserver-xorg-video-mach64
4032 xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic
4033 xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-nv
4034 xserver-xorg-video-openchrome xserver-xorg-video-r128
4035 xserver-xorg-video-radeon xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd
4036 xserver-xorg-video-rendition xserver-xorg-video-s3
4037 xserver-xorg-video-s3virge xserver-xorg-video-savage
4038 xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion xserver-xorg-video-sis
4039 xserver-xorg-video-sisusb xserver-xorg-video-tdfx
4040 xserver-xorg-video-tga xserver-xorg-video-trident
4041 xserver-xorg-video-tseng xserver-xorg-video-v4l
4042 xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vga
4043 xserver-xorg-video-vmware xserver-xorg-video-voodoo xulrunner-1.9</p>
4045 <p><b>aptitude kde 192</b>
4046 <br>bluez-utils cpp-4.3 cupsddk-drivers cvs dcoprss dhcdbd
4047 djvulibre-desktop dosfstools eyesapplet fifteenapplet finger gettext
4048 ghostscript-x imlib-base imlib11 indi kandy karm kasteroids
4049 kaudiocreator kbackgammon kbstate kcoloredit kcontrol kcron kdat
4050 kdeadmin-kfile-plugins kdeartwork-misc kdeartwork-theme-window
4051 kdebase-bin-kde3 kdebase-kio-plugins kdeedu-data
4052 kdegraphics-kfile-plugins kdelirc kdemultimedia-kappfinder-data
4053 kdemultimedia-kfile-plugins kdenetwork-kfile-plugins
4054 kdepim-kfile-plugins kdepim-kio-plugins kdeprint kdesktop kdessh
4055 kdict kdnssd kdvi kedit keduca kenolaba kfax kfaxview kfouleggs
4056 kghostview khelpcenter khexedit kiconedit kitchensync klatin
4057 klickety kmailcvt kmenuedit kmid kmilo kmoon kmrml kodo kolourpaint
4058 kooka korn kpager kpdf kpercentage kpf kpilot kpoker kpovmodeler
4059 krec kregexpeditor ksayit ksim ksirc ksirtet ksmiletris ksmserver
4060 ksnake ksokoban ksplash ksvg ksysv ktip ktnef kuickshow kverbos
4061 kview kviewshell kvoctrain kwifimanager kwin kwin4 kworldclock
4062 kxsldbg libakode2 libao2 libarts1-akode libarts1-audiofile
4063 libarts1-mpeglib libarts1-xine libavahi-compat-libdnssd1
4064 libavahi-core5 libavc1394-0 libavcodec51 libbluetooth2
4065 libboost-python1.34.1 libcucul0 libcurl3 libcvsservice0 libdatrie0
4066 libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdjvulibre21 libdvdread3 libfaad0 libfreebob0
4067 libgail-common libgd2-noxpm libgraphviz4 libgsmme1c2a libgtkhtml2-0
4068 libicu38 libiec61883-0 libindex0 libiw29 libk3b3 libkcal2b libkcddb1
4069 libkdeedu3 libkdepim1a libkgantt0 libkiten1 libkleopatra1 libkmime2
4070 libkpathsea4 libkpimexchange1 libkpimidentities1 libkscan1
4071 libksieve0 libktnef1 liblockdev1 libltdl3 libmagick10 libmimelib1c2a
4072 libmozjs1d libmpcdec3 libneon27 libnm-util0 libopensync0 libpisock9
4073 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler-qt2 libpoppler3 libraw1394-8 libsmbios2
4074 libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libtalloc1 libtiff-tools
4075 libxalan2-java libxalan2-java-gcj libxcb-xlib0 libxerces2-java
4076 libxerces2-java-gcj libxtrap6 mpeglib networkstatus
4077 openoffice.org-writer2latex pmount poster psutils quanta quanta-data
4078 superkaramba svgalibg1 tex-common texlive-base texlive-base-bin
4079 texlive-common texlive-doc-base texlive-fonts-recommended
4080 xserver-xorg-video-cyrix xserver-xorg-video-imstt
4081 xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-v4l xserver-xorg-video-vga
4089 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>.
4094 <div class="padding
"></div>
4098 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html
">Automatic upgrade testing from Lenny to Squeeze</a>
4104 <p>The last few days I have done some upgrade testing in Debian, to
4105 see if the upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze will go smoothly. A few bugs
4106 have been discovered and reported in the process
4107 (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/
585410">#585410</a> in nagios3-cgi,
4108 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/
584879">#584879</a> already fixed in
4109 enscript and <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/
584861">#584861</a> in
4110 kdebase-workspace-data), and to get a more regular testing going on, I
4111 am working on a script to automate the test.</p>
4113 <p>The idea is to create a Lenny chroot and use tasksel to install a
4114 Gnome or KDE desktop installation inside the chroot before upgrading
4115 it. To ensure no services are started in the chroot, a policy-rc.d
4116 script is inserted. To make sure tasksel believe it is to install a
4117 desktop on a laptop, the tasksel tests are replaced in the chroot
4118 (only acceptable because this is a throw-away chroot).</p>
4120 <p>A naive upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze using aptitude dist-upgrade
4121 currently always fail because udev refuses to upgrade with the kernel
4122 in Lenny, so to avoid that problem the file /etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
4123 is created. The bug report
4124 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/
566000">#566000</a> make me suspect
4125 this problem do not trigger in a chroot, but I touch the file anyway
4126 to make sure the upgrade go well. Testing on virtual and real
4127 hardware have failed me because of udev so far, and creating this file
4128 do the trick in such settings anyway. This is a
4129 <a href="http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/debian-
26/failed-dist-upgrade-due-to-udev-config_sysfs_deprecated-nonsense-
804130/
">known
4130 issue</a> and the current udev behaviour is intended by the udev
4131 maintainer because he lack the resources to rewrite udev to keep
4132 working with old kernels or something like that. I really wish the
4133 udev upstream would keep udev backwards compatible, to avoid such
4134 upgrade problem, but given that they fail to do so, I guess
4135 documenting the way out of this mess is the best option we got for
4138 <p>Anyway, back to the task at hand, testing upgrades. This test
4139 script, which I call <tt>upgrade-test</tt> for now, is doing the
4157 mirror=http://ftp.skolelinux.org/debian
4158 tmpdir=chroot-$from-upgrade-$to-$desktop
4160 debootstrap $from $tmpdir $mirror
4161 chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
4162 cat
> $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d
<<EOF
4166 chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d
4170 mount -t proc proc $tmpdir/proc
4171 # Make sure proc is unmounted also on failure
4172 trap exit_cleanup EXIT INT
4174 chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y install debconf-utils
4176 # Make sure tasksel autoselection trigger. It need the test scripts
4177 # to return the correct answers.
4178 echo tasksel tasksel/desktop multiselect $desktop | \
4179 chroot $tmpdir debconf-set-selections
4181 # Include the desktop and laptop task
4182 for test in desktop laptop ; do
4183 echo
> $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test
<<EOF
4187 chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test
4190 DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
4191 DEBIAN_PRIORITY=critical
4192 export DEBIAN_FRONTEND DEBIAN_PRIORITY
4193 chroot $tmpdir tasksel --new-install
4195 echo deb $mirror $to main
> $tmpdir/etc/apt/sources.list
4196 chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
4197 touch $tmpdir/etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
4198 chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y dist-upgrade
4202 <p>I suspect it would be useful to test upgrades with both apt-get and
4203 with aptitude, but I have not had time to look at how they behave
4204 differently so far. I hope to get a cron job running to do the test
4205 regularly and post the result on the web. The Gnome upgrade currently
4206 work, while the KDE upgrade fail because of the bug in
4207 kdebase-workspace-data
</p>
4209 <p>I am not quite sure what kind of extract from the huge upgrade logs
4210 (KDE
167 KiB, Gnome
516 KiB) it make sense to include in this blog
4211 post, so I will refrain from trying. I can report that for Gnome,
4212 aptitude report
760 packages upgraded,
448 newly installed,
129 to
4213 remove and
1 not upgraded and
1024MB need to be downloaded while for
4214 KDE the same numbers are
702 packages upgraded,
507 newly installed,
4215 193 to remove and
0 not upgraded and
1117MB need to be downloaded
</p>
4217 <p>I am very happy to notice that the Gnome desktop + laptop upgrade
4218 is able to migrate to dependency based boot sequencing and parallel
4219 booting without a hitch. Was unsure if there were still bugs with
4220 packages failing to clean up their obsolete init.d script during
4221 upgrades, and no such problem seem to affect the Gnome desktop+laptop
4228 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>.
4233 <div class=
"padding"></div>
4237 <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>
4243 <p>If Debian is to migrate to upstart on Linux, I expect some init.d
4244 scripts to migrate (some of) their operations to upstart job while
4245 keeping the init.d for hurd and kfreebsd. The packages with such
4246 needs will need a way to get their init.d scripts to behave
4247 differently when used with sysvinit and with upstart. Because of
4248 this, I had a look at the environment variables set when a init.d
4249 script is running under upstart, and when it is not.
</p>
4251 <p>With upstart, I notice these environment variables are set when a
4252 script is started from rcS.d/ (ignoring some irrelevant ones like
4261 UPSTART_EVENTS=startup
4263 UPSTART_JOB=rc-sysinit
4266 <p>With sysvinit, these environment variables are set for the same
4270 INIT_VERSION=sysvinit-
2.88
4277 <p>The RUNLEVEL and PREVLEVEL environment variables passed on from
4278 sysvinit are not set by upstart. Not sure if it is intentional or not
4279 to not be compatible with sysvinit in this regard.
</p>
4281 <p>For scripts needing to behave differently when upstart is used,
4282 looking for the UPSTART_JOB environment variable seem to be a good
4289 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>.
4294 <div class=
"padding"></div>
4298 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_manual_for_standards_wars___.html">A manual for standards wars...
</a>
4305 <a href=
"http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/robweir/antic-atom/~3/QzU4RgoAGMg/weekly-links-10.html">blog
4306 of Rob Weir
</a> I came across the very interesting essay named
4307 <a href=
"http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/shapiro/wars.pdf">The Art of
4308 Standards Wars
</a> (PDF
25 pages). I recommend it for everyone
4309 following the standards wars of today.
</p>
4315 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>.
4320 <div class=
"padding"></div>
4324 <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>
4330 <p>When using sitesummary at a site to track machines, it is possible
4331 to get a list of the machine types in use thanks to the DMI
4332 information extracted from each machine. The script to do so is
4333 included in the sitesummary package, and here is example output from
4334 the Skolelinux build servers:
</p>
4337 maintainer:~# /usr/lib/sitesummary/hardware-model-summary
4339 Dell Computer Corporation
1
4342 eserver xSeries
345 -[
8670M1X]-
1
4348 <p>The quality of the report depend on the quality of the DMI tables
4349 provided in each machine. Here there are Intel machines without model
4350 information listed with Intel as vendor and no model, and virtual Xen
4351 machines listed as [no-dmi-info]. One can add -l as a command line
4352 option to list the individual machines.
</p>
4355 <a href=
"http://narvikskolen.no/sitesummary/">available from the the
4356 city of Narvik
</a>, which uses Skolelinux on all their shools and also
4357 provide the basic sitesummary report publicly. In their report there
4358 are ~
1400 machines. I know they use both Ubuntu and Skolelinux on
4359 their machines, and as sitesummary is available in both distributions,
4360 it is trivial to get all of them to report to the same central
4367 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>.
4372 <div class=
"padding"></div>
4376 <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>
4382 <p>It is strange to watch how a bug in Debian causing KDM to fail to
4383 start at boot when an NVidia video card is used is handled. The
4384 problem seem to be that the nvidia X.org driver uses a long time to
4385 initialize, and this duration is longer than kdm is configured to
4388 <p>I came across two bugs related to this issue,
4389 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/583312">#
583312</a> initially filed
4390 against initscripts and passed on to nvidia-glx when it became obvious
4391 that the nvidia drivers were involved, and
4392 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/524751">#
524751</a> initially filed against
4393 kdm and passed on to src:nvidia-graphics-drivers for unknown reasons.
</p>
4395 <p>To me, it seem that no-one is interested in actually solving the
4396 problem nvidia video card owners experience and make sure the Debian
4397 distribution work out of the box for these users. The nvidia driver
4398 maintainers expect kdm to be set up to wait longer, while kdm expect
4399 the nvidia driver maintainers to fix the driver to start faster, and
4400 while they wait for each other I guess the users end up switching to a
4401 distribution that work for them. I have no idea what the solution is,
4402 but I am pretty sure that waiting for each other is not it.
</p>
4404 <p>I wonder why we end up handling bugs this way.
</p>
4410 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>.
4415 <div class=
"padding"></div>
4419 <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>
4425 <p>A few days ago, parallel booting was enabled in Debian/testing.
4426 The feature seem to hold up pretty well, but three fairly serious
4427 issues are known and should be solved:
4431 <li>The wicd package seen to
4432 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/508289">break NFS mounting
</a> and
4433 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/581586">network setup
</a> when
4434 parallel booting is enabled. No idea why, but the wicd maintainer
4435 seem to be on the case.
</li>
4437 <li>The nvidia X driver seem to
4438 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/583312">have a race condition
</a>
4439 triggered more easily when parallel booting is in effect. The
4440 maintainer is on the case.
</li>
4442 <li>The sysv-rc package fail to properly enable dependency based boot
4443 sequencing (the shutdown is broken) when old file-rc users
4444 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/575080">try to switch back
</a> to
4445 sysv-rc. One way to solve it would be for file-rc to create
4446 /etc/init.d/.legacy-bootordering, and another is to try to make
4447 sysv-rc more robust. Will investigate some more and probably upload a
4448 workaround in sysv-rc to help those trying to move from file-rc to
4449 sysv-rc get a working shutdown.
</li>
4453 <p>All in all not many surprising issues, and all of them seem
4454 solvable before Squeeze is released. In addition to these there are
4455 some packages with bugs in their dependencies and run level settings,
4456 which I expect will be fixed in a reasonable time span.
</p>
4458 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
4459 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
4460 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
4461 list of usertagged bugs related to this
</a>.
</p>
4463 <p>Update: Correct bug number to file-rc issue.
</p>
4469 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>.
4474 <div class=
"padding"></div>
4478 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/More_flexible_firmware_handling_in_debian_installer.html">More flexible firmware handling in debian-installer
</a>
4484 <p>After a long break from debian-installer development, I finally
4485 found time today to return to the project. Having to spend less time
4486 working dependency based boot in debian, as it is almost complete now,
4487 definitely helped freeing some time.
</p>
4489 <p>A while back, I ran into a problem while working on Debian Edu. We
4490 include some firmware packages on the Debian Edu CDs, those needed to
4491 get disk and network controllers working. Without having these
4492 firmware packages available during installation, it is impossible to
4493 install Debian Edu on the given machine, and because our target group
4494 are non-technical people, asking them to provide firmware packages on
4495 an external medium is a support pain. Initially, I expected it to be
4496 enough to include the firmware packages on the CD to get
4497 debian-installer to find and use them. This proved to be wrong.
4498 Next, I hoped it was enough to symlink the relevant firmware packages
4499 to some useful location on the CD (tried /cdrom/ and
4500 /cdrom/firmware/). This also proved to not work, and at this point I
4501 found time to look at the debian-installer code to figure out what was
4504 <p>The firmware loading code is in the hw-detect package, and a closer
4505 look revealed that it would only look for firmware packages outside
4506 the installation media, so the CD was never checked for firmware
4507 packages. It would only check USB sticks, floppies and other
4508 "external" media devices. Today I changed it to also look in the
4509 /cdrom/firmware/ directory on the mounted CD or DVD, which should
4510 solve the problem I ran into with Debian edu. I also changed it to
4511 look in /firmware/, to make sure the installer also find firmware
4512 provided in the initrd when booting the installer via PXE, to allow us
4513 to provide the same feature in the PXE setup included in Debian
4516 <p>To make sure firmware deb packages with a license questions are not
4517 activated without asking if the license is accepted, I extended
4518 hw-detect to look for preinst scripts in the firmware packages, and
4519 run these before activating the firmware during installation. The
4520 license question is asked using debconf in the preinst, so this should
4521 solve the issue for the firmware packages I have looked at so far.
</p>
4523 <p>If you want to discuss the details of these features, please
4524 contact us on debian-boot@lists.debian.org.
</p>
4530 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>.
4535 <div class=
"padding"></div>
4539 <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>
4545 <p>Since this evening, parallel booting is the default in
4546 Debian/unstable for machines using dependency based boot sequencing.
4547 Apparently the testing of concurrent booting has been wider than
4548 expected, if I am to believe the
4549 <a href=
"http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg00122.html">input
4550 on debian-devel@
</a>, and I concluded a few days ago to move forward
4551 with the feature this weekend, to give us some time to detect any
4552 remaining problems before Squeeze is frozen. If serious problems are
4553 detected, it is simple to change the default back to sequential boot.
4554 The upload of the new sysvinit package also activate a new upstream
4557 More information about
4558 <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
4559 based boot sequencing
</a> is available from the Debian wiki. It is
4560 currently possible to disable parallel booting when one run into
4561 problems caused by it, by adding this line to /etc/default/rcS:
</p>
4567 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
4568 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
4569 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
4570 list of usertagged bugs related to this
</a>.
</p>
4576 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>.
4581 <div class=
"padding"></div>
4585 <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>
4591 <p>In the recent Debian Edu versions, the
4592 <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/SiteSummary">sitesummary
4593 system
</a> is used to keep track of the machines in the school
4594 network. Each machine will automatically report its status to the
4595 central server after boot and once per night. The network setup is
4596 also reported, and using this information it is possible to get the
4597 MAC address of all network interfaces in the machines. This is useful
4598 to update the DHCP configuration.
</p>
4600 <p>To give some idea how to use sitesummary, here is a one-liner to
4601 ist all MAC addresses of all machines reporting to sitesummary. Run
4602 this on the collector host:
</p>
4605 perl -MSiteSummary -e 'for_all_hosts(sub { print join(" ", get_macaddresses(shift)), "\n"; });'
4608 <p>This will list all MAC addresses assosiated with all machine, one
4609 line per machine and with space between the MAC addresses.
</p>
4611 <p>To allow system administrators easier job at adding static DHCP
4612 addresses for hosts, it would be possible to extend this to fetch
4613 machine information from sitesummary and update the DHCP and DNS
4614 tables in LDAP using this information. Such tool is unfortunately not
4621 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>.
4626 <div class=
"padding"></div>
4630 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/systemd__an_interesting_alternative_to_upstart.html">systemd, an interesting alternative to upstart
</a>
4636 <p>The last few days a new boot system called
4637 <a href=
"http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd">systemd
</a>
4639 <a href=
"http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html">introduced
</a>
4641 to the free software world. I have not yet had time to play around
4642 with it, but it seem to be a very interesting alternative to
4643 <a href=
"http://upstart.ubuntu.com/">upstart
</a>, and might prove to be
4644 a good alternative for Debian when we are able to switch to an event
4645 based boot system. Tollef is
4646 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/580814">in the process
</a> of getting
4647 systemd into Debian, and I look forward to seeing how well it work. I
4648 like the fact that systemd handles init.d scripts with dependency
4649 information natively, allowing them to run in parallel where upstart
4650 at the moment do not.
</p>
4652 <p>Unfortunately do systemd have the same problem as upstart regarding
4653 platform support. It only work on recent Linux kernels, and also need
4654 some new kernel features enabled to function properly. This means
4655 kFreeBSD and Hurd ports of Debian will need a port or a different boot
4656 system. Not sure how that will be handled if systemd proves to be the
4659 <p>In the mean time, based on the
4660 <a href=
"http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/05/msg00122.html">input
4661 on debian-devel@
</a> regarding parallel booting in Debian, I have
4662 decided to enable full parallel booting as the default in Debian as
4663 soon as possible (probably this weekend or early next week), to see if
4664 there are any remaining serious bugs in the init.d dependencies. A
4665 new version of the sysvinit package implementing this change is
4666 already in experimental. If all go well, Squeeze will be released
4667 with parallel booting enabled by default.
</p>
4673 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>.
4678 <div class=
"padding"></div>
4682 <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>
4688 <p>These days, the init.d script dependencies in Squeeze are quite
4689 complete, so complete that it is actually possible to run all the
4690 init.d scripts in parallell based on these dependencies. If you want
4691 to test your Squeeze system, make sure
4692 <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
4693 based boot sequencing
</a> is enabled, and add this line to
4694 /etc/default/rcS:
</p>
4697 CONCURRENCY=makefile
4700 <p>That is it. It will cause sysv-rc to use the startpar tool to run
4701 scripts in parallel using the dependency information stored in
4702 /etc/init.d/.depend.boot, /etc/init.d/.depend.start and
4703 /etc/init.d/.depend.stop to order the scripts. Startpar is configured
4704 to try to start the kdm and gdm scripts as early as possible, and will
4705 start the facilities required by kdm or gdm as early as possible to
4706 make this happen.
</p>
4708 <p>Give it a try, and see if you like the result. If some services
4709 fail to start properly, it is most likely because they have incomplete
4710 init.d script dependencies in their startup script (or some of their
4711 dependent scripts have incomplete dependencies). Report bugs and get
4712 the package maintainers to fix it. :)
</p>
4714 <p>Running scripts in parallel could be the default in Debian when we
4715 manage to get the init.d script dependencies complete and correct. I
4716 expect we will get there in Squeeze+
1, if we get manage to test and
4717 fix the remaining issues.
</p>
4719 <p>If you report any problems with dependencies in init.d scripts to
4720 the BTS, please usertag the report to get it to show up at
4721 <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=initscripts-ng-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org">the
4722 list of usertagged bugs related to this
</a>.
</p>
4728 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>.
4733 <div class=
"padding"></div>
4737 <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>
4743 <p>Since this evening, with the upload of sysvinit version
2.87dsf-
2,
4744 and the upload of insserv version
1.12.0-
10 yesterday, Debian unstable
4745 have been migrated to using dependency based boot sequencing. This
4746 conclude work me and others have been doing for the last three days.
4747 It feels great to see this finally part of the default Debian
4748 installation. Now we just need to weed out the last few problems that
4749 are bound to show up, to get everything ready for Squeeze.
</p>
4751 <p>The next step is migrating /sbin/init from sysvinit to upstart, and
4752 fixing the more fundamental problem of handing the event based
4753 non-predictable kernel in the early boot.
</p>
4759 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>.
4764 <div class=
"padding"></div>
4768 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Taking_over_sysvinit_development.html">Taking over sysvinit development
</a>
4774 <p>After several years of frustration with the lack of activity from
4775 the existing sysvinit upstream developer, I decided a few weeks ago to
4776 take over the package and become the new upstream. The number of
4777 patches to track for the Debian package was becoming a burden, and the
4778 lack of synchronization between the distribution made it hard to keep
4779 the package up to date.
</p>
4781 <p>On the new sysvinit team is the SuSe maintainer Dr. Werner Fink,
4782 and my Debian co-maintainer Kel Modderman. About
10 days ago, I made
4783 a new upstream tarball with version number
2.87dsf (for Debian, SuSe
4784 and Fedora), based on the patches currently in use in these
4785 distributions. We Debian maintainers plan to move to this tarball as
4786 the new upstream as soon as we find time to do the merge. Since the
4787 new tarball was created, we agreed with Werner at SuSe to make a new
4788 upstream project at
<a href=
"http://savannah.nongnu.org/">Savannah
</a>, and continue
4789 development there. The project is registered and currently waiting
4790 for approval by the Savannah administrators, and as soon as it is
4791 approved, we will import the old versions from svn and continue
4792 working on the future release.
</p>
4794 <p>It is a bit ironic that this is done now, when some of the involved
4795 distributions are moving to upstart as a syvinit replacement.
</p>
4801 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>.
4806 <div class=
"padding"></div>
4810 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_boots_quicker_and_quicker.html">Debian boots quicker and quicker
</a>
4816 <p>I spent Monday and tuesday this week in London with a lot of the
4817 people involved in the boot system on Debian and Ubuntu, to see if we
4818 could find more ways to speed up the boot system. This was an Ubuntu
4820 <a href=
"https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FoundationsTeam/BootPerformance/DebianUbuntuSprint">developer
4821 gathering
</a>. It was quite productive. We also discussed the future
4822 of boot systems, and ways to handle the increasing number of boot
4823 issues introduced by the Linux kernel becoming more and more
4824 asynchronous and event base. The Ubuntu approach using udev and
4825 upstart might be a good way forward. Time will show.
</p>
4827 <p>Anyway, there are a few ways at the moment to speed up the boot
4828 process in Debian. All of these should be applied to get a quick
4833 <li>Use dash as /bin/sh.
</li>
4835 <li>Disable the init.d/hwclock*.sh scripts and make sure the hardware
4836 clock is in UTC.
</li>
4838 <li>Install and activate the insserv package to enable
4839 <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
4840 based boot sequencing
</a>, and enable concurrent booting.
</li>
4844 These points are based on the Google summer of code work done by
4845 <a href=
"http://initscripts-ng.alioth.debian.org/soc2006-bootsystem/">Carlos
4848 <p>Support for makefile-style concurrency during boot was uploaded to
4849 unstable yesterday. When we tested it, we were able to cut
6 seconds
4850 from the boot sequence. It depend on very correct dependency
4851 declaration in all init.d scripts, so I expect us to find edge cases
4852 where the dependences in some scripts are slightly wrong when we start
4855 <p>On our IRC channel for this effort, #pkg-sysvinit, a new idea was
4856 introduced by Raphael Geissert today, one that could affect the
4857 startup speed as well. Instead of starting some scripts concurrently
4858 from rcS.d/ and another set of scripts from rc2.d/, it would be
4859 possible to run a of them in the same process. A quick way to test
4860 this would be to enable insserv and run 'mv /etc/rc2.d/S* /etc/rcS.d/;
4861 insserv'. Will need to test if that work. :)
</p>
4867 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>.
4872 <div class=
"padding"></div>
4876 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/BSAs_p_stander_om_piratkopiering_m_ter_motstand.html">BSAs påstander om piratkopiering møter motstand
</a>
4882 <p>Hvert år de siste årene har BSA, lobbyfronten til de store
4883 programvareselskapene som Microsoft og Apple, publisert en rapport der
4884 de gjetter på hvor mye piratkopiering påfører i tapte inntekter i
4885 ulike land rundt om i verden. Resultatene er tendensiøse. For noen
4887 <a href=
"http://global.bsa.org/globalpiracy2008/studies/globalpiracy2008.pdf">siste
4888 rapport
</a>, og det er flere kritiske kommentarer publisert de siste
4889 dagene. Et spesielt interessant kommentar fra Sverige,
4890 <a href=
"http://www.idg.se/2.1085/1.229795/bsa-hoftade-sverigesiffror">BSA
4891 höftade Sverigesiffror
</a>, oppsummeres slik:
</p>
4894 I sin senaste rapport slår BSA fast att
25 procent av all mjukvara i
4895 Sverige är piratkopierad. Det utan att ha pratat med ett enda svenskt
4896 företag. "Man bör nog kanske inte se de här siffrorna som helt
4897 exakta", säger BSAs Sverigechef John Hugosson.
4900 <p>Mon tro om de er like metodiske når de gjetter på andelen piratkopiering i Norge? To andre kommentarer er
<a
4901 href=
"http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/comment/2242134/bsa-piracy-figures-shot-reality">BSA
4902 piracy figures need a shot of reality
</a> og
<a
4903 href=
"http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/3958/125/">Does The WIPO
4904 Copyright Treaty Work?
</a></p>
4906 <p>Fant lenkene via
<a
4907 href=
"http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/05/17/1632242">oppslag
4908 på Slashdot
</a>.
</p>
4914 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>.
4919 <div class=
"padding"></div>
4923 <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>
4930 <a href=
"http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10216873-16.html">interessante
4931 tall
</a> fra IDG om utviklingen av linuxservermarkedet. Fikk meg til
4932 å tenke på antall tjenermaskiner ved Universitetet i Oslo der jeg
4933 jobber til daglig. En rask opptelling forteller meg at vi har
490
4934 (
61%) fysiske unix-tjener (mest linux men også noen solaris) og
196
4935 (
25%) windowstjenere, samt
112 (
14%) virtuelle unix-tjenere. Med den
4936 bakgrunnskunnskapen kan jeg godt tro at IDG er inne på noe.
</p>
4942 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>.
4947 <div class=
"padding"></div>
4951 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Kryptert_harddisk___naturligvis.html">Kryptert harddisk - naturligvis
</a>
4957 <p><a href=
"http://www.dagensit.no/trender/article1658676.ece">Dagens
4958 IT melder
</a> at Intel hevder at det er dyrt å miste en datamaskin,
4959 når en tar tap av arbeidstid, fortrolige dokumenter,
4960 personopplysninger og alt annet det innebærer. Det er ingen tvil om
4961 at det er en kostbar affære å miste sin datamaskin, og det er årsaken
4962 til at jeg har kryptert harddisken på både kontormaskinen og min
4963 bærbare. Begge inneholder personopplysninger jeg ikke ønsker skal
4964 komme på avveie, den første informasjon relatert til jobben min ved
4965 Universitetet i Oslo, og den andre relatert til blant annet
4966 foreningsarbeide. Kryptering av diskene gjør at det er lite
4967 sannsynlig at dophoder som kan finne på å rappe maskinene får noe ut
4968 av dem. Maskinene låses automatisk etter noen minutter uten bruk,
4969 og en reboot vil gjøre at de ber om passord før de vil starte opp.
4970 Jeg bruker Debian på begge maskinene, og installasjonssystemet der
4971 gjør det trivielt å sette opp krypterte disker. Jeg har LVM på toppen
4972 av krypterte partisjoner, slik at alt av datapartisjoner er kryptert.
4973 Jeg anbefaler alle å kryptere diskene på sine bærbare. Kostnaden når
4974 det er gjort slik jeg gjør det er minimale, og gevinstene er
4975 betydelige. En bør dog passe på passordet. Hvis det går tapt, må
4976 maskinen reinstalleres og alt er tapt.
</p>
4978 <p>Krypteringen vil ikke stoppe kompetente angripere som f.eks. kjøler
4979 ned minnebrikkene før maskinen rebootes med programvare for å hente ut
4980 krypteringsnøklene. Kostnaden med å forsvare seg mot slike angripere
4981 er for min del høyere enn gevinsten. Jeg tror oddsene for at
4982 f.eks. etteretningsorganisasjoner har glede av å titte på mine
4983 maskiner er minimale, og ulempene jeg ville oppnå ved å forsøke å
4984 gjøre det vanskeligere for angripere med kompetanse og ressurser er
4991 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>.
4996 <div class=
"padding"></div>
5000 <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>
5006 <p>There are two software projects that have had huge influence on the
5007 quality of free software, and I wanted to mention both in case someone
5008 do not yet know them.
</p>
5010 <p>The first one is
<a href=
"http://valgrind.org/">valgrind
</a>, a
5011 tool to detect and expose errors in the memory handling of programs.
5012 It is easy to use, all one need to do is to run 'valgrind program',
5013 and it will report any problems on stdout. It is even better if the
5014 program include debug information. With debug information, it is able
5015 to report the source file name and line number where the problem
5016 occurs. It can report things like 'reading past memory block in file
5017 X line N, the memory block was allocated in file Y, line M', and
5018 'using uninitialised value in control logic'. This tool has made it
5019 trivial to investigate reproducible crash bugs in programs, and have
5020 reduced the number of this kind of bugs in free software a lot.
5022 <p>The second one is
5023 <a href=
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coverity">Coverity
</a> which is
5024 a source code checker. It is able to process the source of a program
5025 and find problems in the logic without running the program. It
5026 started out as the Stanford Checker and became well known when it was
5027 used to find bugs in the Linux kernel. It is now a commercial tool
5028 and the company behind it is running
5029 <a href=
"http://www.scan.coverity.com/">a community service
</a> for the
5030 free software community, where a lot of free software projects get
5031 their source checked for free. Several thousand defects have been
5032 found and fixed so far. It can find errors like 'lock L taken in file
5033 X line N is never released if exiting in line M', or 'the code in file
5034 Y lines O to P can never be executed'. The projects included in the
5035 community service project have managed to get rid of a lot of
5036 reliability problems thanks to Coverity.
</p>
5038 <p>I believe tools like this, that are able to automatically find
5039 errors in the source, are vital to improve the quality of software and
5040 make sure we can get rid of the crashing and failing software we are
5041 surrounded by today.
</p>
5047 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>.
5052 <div class=
"padding"></div>
5056 <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>
5063 <a href=
"http://blog.technologeek.org/2009/04/12/214">claim that no
5064 patch is better than a useless patch
</a>. I completely disagree, as a
5065 patch allow one to discuss a concrete and proposed solution, and also
5066 prove that the issue at hand is important enough for someone to spent
5067 time on fixing it. No patch do not provide any of these positive
5074 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>.
5079 <div class=
"padding"></div>
5083 <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>
5089 <p>Where I work at the University of Oslo, one decision stand out as a
5090 very good one to form a long lived computer infrastructure. It is the
5091 simple one, lost by many in todays computer industry: Standardize on
5092 open network protocols and open exchange/storage formats, not applications.
5093 Applications come and go, while protocols and files tend to stay, and
5094 thus one want to make it easy to change application and vendor, while
5095 avoiding conversion costs and locking users to a specific platform or
5098 <p>This approach make it possible to replace the client applications
5099 independently of the server applications. One can even allow users to
5100 use several different applications as long as they handle the selected
5101 protocol and format. In the normal case, only one client application
5102 is recommended and users only get help if they choose to use this
5103 application, but those that want to deviate from the easy path are not
5104 blocked from doing so.
</p>
5106 <p>It also allow us to replace the server side without forcing the
5107 users to replace their applications, and thus allow us to select the
5108 best server implementation at any moment, when scale and resouce
5109 requirements change.
</p>
5111 <p>I strongly recommend standardizing - on open network protocols and
5112 open formats, but I would never recommend standardizing on a single
5113 application that do not use open network protocol or open formats.
</p>
5119 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>.
5124 <div class=
"padding"></div>
5128 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Returning_from_Skolelinux_developer_gathering.html">Returning from Skolelinux developer gathering
</a>
5134 <p>I'm sitting on the train going home from this weekends Debian
5135 Edu/Skolelinux development gathering. I got a bit done tuning the
5136 desktop, and looked into the dynamic service location protocol
5137 implementation avahi. It look like it could be useful for us. Almost
5138 30 people participated, and I believe it was a great environment to
5139 get to know the Skolelinux system. Walter Bender, involved in the
5140 development of the Sugar educational platform, presented his stuff and
5141 also helped me improve my OLPC installation. He also showed me that
5142 his Turtle Art application can be used in standalone mode, and we
5143 agreed that I would help getting it packaged for Debian. As a
5144 standalone application it would be great for Debian Edu. We also
5145 tried to get the video conferencing working with two OLPCs, but that
5146 proved to be too hard for us. The application seem to need more work
5147 before it is ready for me. I look forward to getting home and relax
5154 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>.
5159 <div class=
"padding"></div>
5163 <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>
5169 <p>The state of standardized LDAP schemas on Linux is far from
5170 optimal. There is RFC
2307 documenting one way to store NIS maps in
5171 LDAP, and a modified version of this normally called RFC
2307bis, with
5172 some modifications to be compatible with Active Directory. The RFC
5173 specification handle the content of a lot of system databases, but do
5174 not handle DNS zones and DHCP configuration.
</p>
5176 <p>In
<a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu/Skolelinux
</a>,
5177 we would like to store information about users, SMB clients/hosts,
5178 filegroups, netgroups (users and hosts), DHCP and DNS configuration,
5179 and LTSP configuration in LDAP. These objects have a lot in common,
5180 but with the current LDAP schemas it is not possible to have one
5181 object per entity. For example, one need to have at least three LDAP
5182 objects for a given computer, one with the SMB related stuff, one with
5183 DNS information and another with DHCP information. The schemas
5184 provided for DNS and DHCP are impossible to combine into one LDAP
5185 object. In addition, it is impossible to implement quick queries for
5186 netgroup membership, because of the way NIS triples are implemented.
5187 It just do not scale. I believe it is time for a few RFC
5188 specifications to cleam up this mess.
</p>
5190 <p>I would like to have one LDAP object representing each computer in
5191 the network, and this object can then keep the SMB (ie host key), DHCP
5192 (mac address/name) and DNS (name/IP address) settings in one place.
5193 It need to be efficently stored to make sure it scale well.
</p>
5195 <p>I would also like to have a quick way to map from a user or
5196 computer and to the net group this user or computer is a member.
</p>
5198 <p>Active Directory have done a better job than unix heads like myself
5199 in this regard, and the unix side need to catch up. Time to start a
5200 new IETF work group?
</p>
5206 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>.
5211 <div class=
"padding"></div>
5215 <a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Endelig_er_Debian_Lenny_gitt_ut.html">Endelig er Debian Lenny gitt ut
</a>
5221 <p>Endelig er
<a href=
"http://www.debian.org/">Debian
</a>
5222 <a href=
"http://www.debian.org/News/2009/20090214">Lenny
</a> gitt ut.
5223 Et langt steg videre for Debian-prosjektet, og en rekke nye
5224 programpakker blir nå tilgjengelig for de av oss som bruker den
5225 stabile utgaven av Debian. Neste steg er nå å få
5226 <a href=
"http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux
</a> /
5227 <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/">Debian Edu
</a> ferdig
5228 oppdatert for den nye utgaven, slik at en oppdatert versjon kan
5229 slippes løs på skolene. Takk til alle debian-utviklerne som har
5230 gjort dette mulig. Endelig er f.eks. fungerende avhengighetsstyrt
5231 bootsekvens tilgjengelig i stabil utgave, vha pakken
5232 <tt>insserv
</tt>.
</p>
5238 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>.
5243 <div class=
"padding"></div>
5247 <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>
5253 <p>This weekend we had a small developer gathering for Debian Edu in
5254 Oslo. Most of Saturday was used for the general assemly for the
5255 member organization, but the rest of the weekend I used to tune the
5256 LTSP installation. LTSP now work out of the box on the
10-network.
5257 Acer Aspire One proved to be a very nice thin client, with both
5258 screen, mouse and keybard in a small box. Was working on getting the
5259 diskless workstation setup configured out of the box, but did not
5260 finish it before the weekend was up.
</p>
5262 <p>Did not find time to look at the
4 VGA cards in one box we got from
5263 the Brazilian group, so that will have to wait for the next
5264 development gathering. Would love to have the Debian Edu installer
5265 automatically detect and configure a multiseat setup when it find one
5272 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>.
5277 <div class=
"padding"></div>
5281 <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>
5287 <p>Recently I have spent some time evaluating the multimedia browser
5288 plugins available in Debian Lenny, to see which one we should use by
5289 default in Debian Edu. We need an embedded video playing plugin with
5290 control buttons to pause or stop the video, and capable of streaming
5291 all the multimedia content available on the web. The test results and
5292 notes are available on
5293 <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/BrowserMultimedia">the
5294 Debian wiki
</a>. I was surprised how few of the plugins are able to
5295 fill this need. My personal video player favorite, VLC, has a really
5296 bad plugin which fail on a lot of the test pages. A lot of the MIME
5297 types I would expect to work with any free software player (like
5298 video/ogg), just do not work. And simple formats like the
5299 audio/x-mplegurl format (m3u playlists), just isn't supported by the
5300 totem and vlc plugins. I hope the situation will improve soon. No
5301 wonder sites use the proprietary Adobe flash to play video.
</p>
5303 <p>For Lenny, we seem to end up with the mplayer plugin. It seem to
5304 be the only one fitting our needs. :/
</p>
5310 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>.
5315 <div class=
"padding"></div>
5317 <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>
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8)
</a></li>
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"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/01/">January (
7)
</a></li>
5337 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/02/">February (
10)
</a></li>
5339 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2012/03/">March (
17)
</a></li>
5341 <li><a href=
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12)
</a></li>
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12)
</a></li>
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17)
</a></li>
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6)
</a></li>
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</a></li>
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17)
</a></li>
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10)
</a></li>
5357 <li><a href=
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7)
</a></li>
5364 <li><a href=
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16)
</a></li>
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</a></li>
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2)
</a></li>
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3)
</a></li>
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"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2011/12/">December (
1)
</a></li>
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</a></li>
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</a></li>
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</a></li>
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12)
</a></li>
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13)
</a></li>
5409 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/09/">September (
7)
</a></li>
5411 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/10/">October (
9)
</a></li>
5413 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/11/">November (
13)
</a></li>
5415 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2010/12/">December (
12)
</a></li>
5422 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/01/">January (
8)
</a></li>
5424 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/02/">February (
8)
</a></li>
5426 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/03/">March (
12)
</a></li>
5428 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/04/">April (
10)
</a></li>
5430 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/05/">May (
9)
</a></li>
5432 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/06/">June (
3)
</a></li>
5434 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/07/">July (
4)
</a></li>
5436 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/08/">August (
3)
</a></li>
5438 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/09/">September (
1)
</a></li>
5440 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/10/">October (
2)
</a></li>
5442 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/11/">November (
3)
</a></li>
5444 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2009/12/">December (
3)
</a></li>
5451 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2008/11/">November (
5)
</a></li>
5453 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/archive/2008/12/">December (
7)
</a></li>
5464 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/3d-printer">3d-printer (
13)
</a></li>
5466 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/amiga">amiga (
1)
</a></li>
5468 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/aros">aros (
1)
</a></li>
5470 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bankid">bankid (
4)
</a></li>
5472 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin (
5)
</a></li>
5474 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bootsystem">bootsystem (
12)
</a></li>
5476 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bsa">bsa (
2)
</a></li>
5478 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian (
66)
</a></li>
5480 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu (
118)
</a></li>
5482 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/digistan">digistan (
9)
</a></li>
5484 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/docbook">docbook (
7)
</a></li>
5486 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/drivstoffpriser">drivstoffpriser (
4)
</a></li>
5488 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english (
172)
</a></li>
5490 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fiksgatami">fiksgatami (
21)
</a></li>
5492 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/fildeling">fildeling (
12)
</a></li>
5494 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">freeculture (
10)
</a></li>
5496 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/frikanalen">frikanalen (
9)
</a></li>
5498 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju (
32)
</a></li>
5500 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/kart">kart (
17)
</a></li>
5502 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ldap">ldap (
8)
</a></li>
5504 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/lenker">lenker (
6)
</a></li>
5506 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ltsp">ltsp (
1)
</a></li>
5508 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/multimedia">multimedia (
25)
</a></li>
5510 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/norsk">norsk (
219)
</a></li>
5512 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug (
148)
</a></li>
5514 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/offentlig innsyn">offentlig innsyn (
6)
</a></li>
5516 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/open311">open311 (
2)
</a></li>
5518 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett (
41)
</a></li>
5520 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern (
61)
</a></li>
5522 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/raid">raid (
1)
</a></li>
5524 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/reprap">reprap (
11)
</a></li>
5526 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/rfid">rfid (
2)
</a></li>
5528 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/robot">robot (
6)
</a></li>
5530 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/rss">rss (
1)
</a></li>
5532 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/ruter">ruter (
4)
</a></li>
5534 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/scraperwiki">scraperwiki (
2)
</a></li>
5536 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet (
28)
</a></li>
5538 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sitesummary">sitesummary (
4)
</a></li>
5540 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/skepsis">skepsis (
4)
</a></li>
5542 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard (
39)
</a></li>
5544 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stavekontroll">stavekontroll (
3)
</a></li>
5546 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/stortinget">stortinget (
5)
</a></li>
5548 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/surveillance">surveillance (
12)
</a></li>
5550 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sysadmin">sysadmin (
1)
</a></li>
5552 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/valg">valg (
7)
</a></li>
5554 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/video">video (
35)
</a></li>
5556 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/vitenskap">vitenskap (
4)
</a></li>
5558 <li><a href=
"http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/web">web (
26)
</a></li>
5564 <p style=
"text-align: right">
5565 Created by
<a href=
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